'My orders are crystal clear. Get back to my desk and bring you with me. It's probably not worth saying I'm sorry.'
He might as well have gone to Mombasa. He didn't think that he would see Jo again, and it had been for nothing. his virtuous stuff about duty. What did she think? That he could drop everything and head for the African sunshine? He might as well leave tonight before they threw the book at him. Probably Ruane had a transcript of Major Tuck's observations on his desk even now, with an acid memo from Mr Barker about the great astonishment of Her Majesty's Government that Mr Erlich should be armed with a Smith and Wesson rather than the regulation- issue kitchen knife.
'We should have checked the car.'
'We should have stayed in the office and moved paper round, what every other bastard does.'
Erlich said, 'If he'd been there, I'd have shot him.'
'Can you be ready to leave in ten minutes?'
'I'll be ready.'
They came in turn to see the Swede in a small room in the heart of the Embassy building. There were no windows and the walls were reinforced, sound-proofed. He had drunk five glasses of fresh orange juice.
The first to see him had been the Information Attache, who swept up all loose strands of the Embassy's work, and he had gone away to deliver his report. There was a military policeman outside the door. The military policeman, on the Diplomatic List, was the Ambassador's driver, and he carried a Browning automatic pistol in a shoulder holster under his blazer jacket.
After the Information Attache, the Swede was interviewed briefly by t he Assistant Military Attache, and then again left alone. From the Ambassador's first floor windows, the deployment of militia and plainclothes men from the Department of Public Security was clearly visible.
Next in line was the Charge, the Ambassador's deputy. The Swede was not to know that while he sat with the Charge a telephone call had been received from the Foreign Ministry demanding the immediate expulsion from the protection of diplomatic premises of a dangerous foreign criminal. The Charge left him, and the Military Policeman give him some English newspapers and offered him the choice of tea or coffee. There was some difficulty with the supply of the fresh oranges. The Swede gratefully accepted tea. Sometimes he heard muffled talk in the corridor outside, but it was too distorted for him to understand.
The fourth man who came was different.
He was athletically thin. He had the old-fashioned razored moustache trim on his upper lip, and he wore rumpled jeans and a loose knit cardigan and a check shirt without a tie. The fourth man was what he had waited for. The Swede stood.
' Y o u don't need my name, and I don't need yours, the Station Officer said. 'Best you come with me, my office is quiet, and there's a tape recorder.'
'Good night, Carol.' She looked up. Her console was already under its plastic sheet, and she was filing.
'Good night, Dr Bissett… and thanks for the ten pounds, that was great… are you coming in first in the morning, or going straight to that meeting?'
' E r, I'll decide tomorrow. Good night, then '
He had left his office as he had always left it. He had left behind the photograph of Sara and the photograph ol Adam and Frank. He carried in his briefcase only his empty sandwich box and his empty vacuum flask..
He drove away from the H area.
He passed Basil, pedalling into the wind along Third Avenue.
He passed the towering outline of the building that was A90.
He passed Wayne, waiting at the bus stop for the transport to the main gate and the coach park, and he remembered that he had heard Wayne say that his Mini had gearbox trouble.
He passed the signposts to the A area, the plutonium factory, where in the morning there was to be a meeting in A45/3 of Senior Principal Scientific Officers and Senior Principal Engineering Officers. He passed Carol's husband, the lathe operator, hurrying towards the canteen area and the bar where he would have managed three pints before his better half dragged him out and home. He passed the mole-hill mounds that were the testing and manufacturing areas for the chemists who worked with explosives.
Bissett came to the falcon Gate. He showed his identity card, he was waved through. He braked at the junction with the Burghfield Common to Kingsclere road. He waited for the traffic to allow him to enter the flow… and further on turned left into Mulfords Hill.
The end of a normal day.
The tape recorder was switched off.
For a few moments, in silence, the Station Officer continued his scrawled longhand precis of what he had heard.
'Thank you… Perhaps you wouldn't mind just waiting in here for a little while… oh, and don't go near the windows.'
He let himself out of his office. He told the military policeman that no one, not even the Ambassador, was to go through that door without his permission. He waited long enough to see the military policeman draw his automatic pistol from his shoulder holster and hold it behind his buttocks.
The Station Officer walked swiftly down the corridor, down the stairs, down into the basement to the Embassy's communications area.
'You're not serious…?'
'It's my chance.'
'You can't possibly expect me to take you seriously.'
'Can't you just once listen…?'
It had started downstairs. Bissett had begun it in the kitchen.
He had followed Sara into the kitchen, left the children in front of the television, and he had put his arms round Sara's waist as she had been stirring the soup on the hob, and he had told her.
Too late to wonder if there might have been a better time. It could have been after the party at those awful friends of hers, or when he had first gone to London, or after the meeting in Stratfield Mortimer, or last night. Could have been any of them, but it hadn't been, it had been in the kitchen with the digital clock throwing up the numbers, telling him that the minutes were rushing away from them.
It had started in the kitchen. It had gone on through the hallway, where the boys could hear her, and up the stairs, and into their bedroom.
She could have listened to him.
She could have been quiet at least, and supportive.
She could have let him finish his explanation.
Too much to ask for…
'Even by your standards it is pretty fucking stupid.'
' T h e boys will hear you… '
'Don't you involve my boys.'
'They're my sons, too, Sara.'
'They won't want to know you. Nobody'll want to know you, you silly little man… '
She had been his wife for twelve years. They didn't row, they didn't argue. When there was friction between them, then each in their own way sulked and withdrew inside a barricaded shell.
Never voices raised, because the children would hear. She had never abused him like this before, never.
'I have the opportunity to better myself. I am going to head a department. It's the equivalent, really, of a chair at a major university.'
'Oh, I get it.' She laughed out loud. There was her shrill laughter beating around his ears. 'It's your vanity… '
'It's for you, don't you see that? It's for you and our children.'
'Count us out, it's your ego trip, you go on your bloody own.'
He tried to touch her. She recoiled.
'There will be a lovely house for you, a good school for the boys
… '
'God, you are dim… What am I? I am the wife of a traitor.
