They stepped through the loose coil of a watering hose. They came up the side of the house, along a narrow path. He was at Rutherford's shoulder, as if it were important to him to be close to the Englishman. They were at the corner of the house. He thought that the front light's bulb, the light above the front door, must have blown, because the front door was in darkness. There was a small car parked near to the door, but it was outside the crescent beam thrown by the skylight above the door. And across the lawn beyond the gravel there was a narrow shaft of light where it pierced poorly drawn curtains upstairs.
'Upstairs…?'
'Where his mother is.'
Rutherford turned the door knob. The door eased a fraction of an inch. Rutherford was looking at him. It was his choice.
There was the dead weight of the Smith and Wesson in his hand.
He could go inside fast, he could leave Rutherford to handle the dog, he could finish it. Rutherford was waiting on him. His choice, because he had the weapon. He could feel the shake in his hands and the hard panted breathing in his lungs. He knew his breathing was too hard, too fast. He held his breath, on his terms and in his time he let the breath hiss from his lips. That was what they taught on the StressFire course. That was what they taught when the student was going into Condition Black.
One more time. Hard in… and wait… slowly out. Then he drove his shoulder into Rutherford. He push- punched the front door open.
He was on his way.
He was going.
He was committed to shooting Colt, to killing Colt.
Across the hallway, the bloody great animal seemed to fly at him off the wall. Erlich ducked, the loose carpet scudded from under his feet. There was the moment he stumbled. He caught at the end of the bannister rail for his balance. He was on the bottom step of the staircase. Behind him he heard the first barked shout of the dog, from the kitchen. He went fast up the stairs, stamping his feet for speed. He could see the blood pool in the rain where Harry Lawrence had fallen. He pulled himself with his free hand on the bannister round the corner hallway up the stairs. He could see the pale and hollow cheeks of Harry Lawrence on the stretcher in the Athens mortuary. He hit thetop of the staircase. There was the door ajar, with the light behind it, ahead of him. The dog was making pandemonium, blocked at the bottom of the stairs by Rutherford.
He went in fast and crouched and turning
'Safety' off. Isosceles stance. Finger hooked beside thr trigger guard. His arms were out to their limit, hr, body was bent forward, slight angle. His legs were loose, not locked, so he could turn right, turn left. His eyeline was over the sights He saw the man beside the window. He saw the woman sitting in the chair beside the bed. He saw the woman frail shape, eyes shut, lying propped by pillows on the bed
Holy God…
Christ, no…
He saw the man, Major Tuck, guest at the Reform Club, father of Colt, stare at him, unable in shock to speak He saw the woman, dressed like a nurse, rising from her chair, and her fury had bitten at the plumpness of her face.
'Who are you?' The snarl of the woman's voice.
'Where's Colt?'
'I'll have you know there's a patient in this house.'
'Colt came, his car.'
'Nonsense… Put that ridiculous thing down. It's my car, and I came alone.'
Holy God, Christ, no… He saw that the woman in the bed was conscious, gazing at him in horror, perhaps in disappointment, her mouth fallen open, her eyes searching past him. He eased the hammer of the Smith and Wesson down. His thumb flicked the Safety upwards.
'Where you come from, don't you have any respect for the sick? Go at once, and go quietly.'
He didn't apologise. He had nothing to say. He turned and he went out through the door. He closed the door behind him. He came back down the stairs, stepping carefully in the wet mud footprints of his ascent. He thought he might faint. He steadied himself on the bannister rail. Rutherford was at the bottom of the stairs with a walking stick clamped into the back of the mouth of the dog and holding tight at the animal's collar.
Erlich walked past him out through the front door into the howling night.
That it was his last night in his own country had not at all disturbed him.
He had taken Bissett back to his train, his arm hugging his shoulders. Bissett had slurred his thanks. He had stood by the train's window until it had gathered speed, and he had seen that Bissett's eyes had followed him as far as it was possible to see him. He had gone back to the room in the Great Western Hotel, and he had taken a glass of mineral water with the men from the Embassy, and they had made their plans for the following day.
They couldn't do without him, Colt thought, but it was obviously as much as they could tolerate, having to work with him. His association with the Colonel bewildered them even as it discomfited them.
The house was dark when he came back. He had gone up the stairs to his room as quietly as when he had climbed the stairs in Bissett's house, and he did not think that he had wakened the couple and their baby.
It was his last night in England, and he had not cared to think that thought. He had tried to free himself from the thought of his mother and her bedroom that had become a sickroom, and from the thought of his father and the long, cold days of his vigil, and from the thought of Fran and her freedom and her love and her big dog and her snaring wires. Colt had torn the thoughts from his mind because they were danger to him.
His country was his mother and his father and his Fran, but he had turned his back on them. It would have weakened him if he had told Fran that he was hers, that he would come back, by Christ, some time, to his Fran. Might have told her, but he would have to have told himself first and he couldn't sap himself with such a thought.
Colt slept. The hard outline of the Ruger pistol under his pillow did not trouble his sleep.
At daybreak, the Swede drove the fast straight road that cut across the rich land between the great waterways of the Euphrates and the Tigris. Behind him was modern Iraq, the Atomic Energy Commission headquarters at Tuwaithah and the sprawl of the aL-Qaqa military industrial complex further south near al-Hillah where the rocket fuel was manufactured that would launch the Condor intermediate-range missile. And behind him was the ancient site of Babylon, where a thousand Sudanese labourers had worked all weathers for three years to recreate the citadel of Nebuchadnezzar.
It was an hour's run, the journey to Baghdad.
He saw the first giant-sized portraits of the smiling Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, and the streets were choked by the early traffic. His routine was that he went first to the coffee shop of the Ishtar Sheraton, to leave his car there for the kids to clean before he walked across the Jumhuriyah Bridge.
He ignored his usual route into the city, along Fourteenth July Street. He turned left onto Imam Musa, into the slow crawl amongst the lorries and the cars that pushed towards Al Kadhim Street, and the new Post Office.
He waved his identity card at the Ministry policeman, he was gestured on.
Bissett drove through the Falcon Gate at the normal time, the same cars around him that were there every morning. It was what they had said to him, a normal day, his last day.
But already he was the stranger. He drove down Third Avenue, seeing F and B areas as a stranger would, and the great grey box building that housed the laser equipment and then the four high-rise chimneys and then the bulk of the A area and then the colossus that was A90.
He no longer belonged.
Today he did not care whether A90 would come into service two years late or three years late. It did not matter to him whether the fourth Trident submarine were cancelled, whether the new cruise-launched missile to replace the WE-177 bomb ever reached development and manufacture.
He saw the H3 building as a stranger would have seen it. It was no longer his place of work, no longer his second home.
If it had not been for the confidence he felt in the young man, then he would never have dared, he told himself, to come back, to play this last act, as a normal day. He showed his identity card again. He carried his raincoat and his briefcase, with his sandwiches and his thermos, into H3. He smiled at Carol, he nodded to Wayne,
