had been omitted.
He copied into his notebook all that his interpreter dictated.
Harry and the contact walking and talking in 28th October Street.
No traffic. Twenty-eight minutes to nine o'clock in the morning.
The silver grey Opel Rekord pulling onto the grass verge, braking 20 yards away. No description of the driver. A fair-haired man getting out of the passenger seat, front. A shout from the fair-haired man. The targets turning. The fair-haired man opens fire.
Pistol plus silencer. The contact hit. Harry blundering into the field of fire. The second shout, the driver's shout, 'Colt'. The car turning in the road, getting the hell out. Harry dead, and the contact dead when the first police and ambulance crew had arrived…
He left his desk as bare as he had found it.
He took a taxi to the Embassy.
He had to wait for fifteen minutes before he was admitted to the Agency's annexe.
Erlich told the Station Chief what he had. He was seeking to trade information, and he was going to be disappointed.
' I 'm not opening up our file to you, Bill. It's nothing personal…'
' And it's not co-operation.'
'It's the facts of life. I give you a file, it goes into your system.
You nail a guy, weeks ahead, months, and my file is evidence.
My file gets to be prosecution material. Any asshole who wants it gets to read my file.'
' Is that final?'
' As I said, it's nothing personal.'
Erlich stood. He had the cigar butt in the plastic sachet in his pocket. He had not spoken of the cigar butt to the Station Chief. ..
'Bill, look at it our way, do me that favour. Harry Lawrence was your friend and I appreciate that, but Harry Lawrence was not the target. An Iraqi was the target, and it's your assessment and it's mine. We are in deep stuff, real deep. We have a big mission down in Iraq, during the war we did all we damn well could to make certain those boys didn't go under to the Ayatollah's shit-pushers. We gave them A. W. A. C. S. material, we put up satellites just for them. The enemy of Iran is our friend, got me?
But we keep our hands dirty, we stay in touch with the regime's enemies. We don't make any noise about that…'
'Investigating a murder is making a noise?'
'You've a job to do, O. K., but don't make waves.'
'I want to know the identity of a man, I want to reach him, I want to put him in handcuffs and read him a charge of First Degree murder.'
'Beautiful.'
'With or without help.'
'Brilliant. You're a detective, you don't mix easily in diplo-macy, neither does hustling for commendations… You go on like this and you'll find yourself short of help.'
'With respect, what I'm after is a result.'
Erlich walked out. Didn't even bother to close the door behind him. He walked straight through the outer office and out past the security gate and the Marine guard.
He headed for the main building, and the area of the basement where secure matter could be despatched back home.
As she filled in the forms for him, the girl in Despatch, big and black and at last a friendly face, told him she was from Mississippi, and sure as hell she hated Greeks, Athens, moussaka and retsina. In front of him, she sealed the cigar butt in the plastic sachet into a small tin box and then into the padded envelope. The package was addressed to the Laboratory Division of F. B. I. H.Q. Erlich, like every other Fed, had plenty to grumble about in the running of the Bureau, but the Laboratory was the best.
' You okay, Mr Erlich?'
He'd slept poorly. He hadn't eaten breakfast. The coffee at Counter-Terrorism was ditch water, and he had been poleaxed twice. He should have been at the airport last evening to see Elsa Lawrence and her children off and the casket. For Erlich not much was allowed to get in the way of a job and he supposed that was why he had been sent.
She said she would get him some coffee, proper coffee, coffee from home.
While she was making the coffee, boiling her kettle, he glanced across at her Herald Tribune. He saw the Rome dateline. He read the name of the hotel, and the name of the street. He had been in that street two weeks earlier. He read of the death of the Pakistani nuclear scientist last seen in the company of… no leads… The coffee she brought him was great, kept him alive.
All through the morning there had been detonations and gunfire. Of course there had to be detonations, and of course there had to be shooting practice, but Monday morning was hardly the appropriate time. On any other morning, Bissett would have been able to live with the thudding blast of the explosives and with the crisp rattle of sub-machine gun and pistol fire. But not that morning, not on the morning that the envelope marked Personal and Confidential had lain unopened in his briefcase.
He had spent two hours in his room, at his console. By 10.30 he had gone down the full length of the corridor that ran past his office and he had then spent two and a half hours in H3's laboratory. He had achieved next to nothing in his own room, and in the laboratory he had been the victim of Reuben God Almighty Boll's sarcasm.
So that every technician and every junior could hear him, Boll had enquired just how much longer before his present project would be completed, how much later than it was already.
Lunch hour, and quite suddenly, when it didn't matter, it was perfectly quiet. Boll would be in the Directors' dining room, Basil would have gone to see his cronies in A area, Wayne would have gone out with those as young and limited as himself to the Hind's Head in the village, Carol would be in the canteen wittering with the other Clerical Assistants and her husband.
He had drunk his coffee. He had brushed the crumbs from his desk top into his wastebasket. He screwed the top, that served as a mug, back onto his flask. He was determined not to rush himself. He had deliberately not used his home address.
He replaced the plastic sandwich box in his briefcase, and took out the envelope. He checked that his door was closed. He tore open the envelope. A fearful mess of it, he made, because his hands were trembling.
There was the letter heading. Imperial Chemical Industries.
'Dr Frederick Bissett, B. Sc. (Leeds), A. W. E., Aldermaston, Berkshire.'
He didn't look to the end of the letter first. He exercised his self-control. He began at the first line. He held the paper in both hands and he saw the paper waver in front of his spectacles.
Dear Doctor Bissett,
Thank you for sending your application for employ ment, dated October 19th. I do understand that because of the nature of your current employment your C.V. has remained narrower than would otherwise have been expected.. .
Idiot. Of course his C.V. was narrow. He had worked for twelve-years on matters covered by the Official Secrets Act, of which, obviously, he was a signatory.
… However, I understand from your application that you have been concerned in your A. W. E. work with the areas of Fiuid Dynamics and Plasma Physics, but with the necessary somewhat restricted interpretation…
How in heaven's name could his interpretation be other than restricted? His work was concerned with the interplay reactions at the moment of implosion. The effect of micro-second synchronised detonation of chemical explosive onto beryllium, then onto uranium 238, then onto uranium 235, then onto weapons-grade plutonium 239, and then onto the innermost pit and the core of tritium/deuterium. In the innermost pit, if the work of the scientists in the H area had been successful, it would be assumed that a nuclear explosion would generate a heat in the core of tritium/deuterium of one hundred million degrees Centigrade.
So, yes, it was somewhat restricted. .. Sadly, it has been our experience in the past that the most specialised work carried out at the Atomic Weapons Establishment leads scientists into a cul-de-sac of research that has little, or no, relevance to science as practised in civilian life…
