She thought of him going out into the dusk, going through her front door, stumbling after Colt, the humiliation of her rejection.
'… We can put you in direct contact with the police there.. .'
' N o. '
' S o that you speak to Frederick, and urge him to surrender… '
' No. '
' We want him out of there, Mrs Bissett, away from the potential crossfire.'
'I said, no.'
She stared at the window set in the kitchen door, at the raindrops dancing on it like a curtain in the wind.
The Security Officer said, 'With a bitch like you for a wife, it's no wonder the poor devil wanted out.'
His hand was on the door latch.
He had the Smith and Wesson tight in his hand, barrel against his ear.
Past Flight or Fight, way beyond that.
Erlich would fight…
As he raised the latch he heard the first shimmer of the grating of the metal pieces.
No more caution.
His hip barged into the unfastened door.
The light spilled into his face, and he was moving.
Erlich came into the back bar, and he cannoned off a table, glasses flying, smashing, and he tripped on a chair, and he stumbled, and all the time he was in motion. It was Condition Black. He saw the table peel away towards the fireplace, and the chair career towards the bar counter. He saw the line of upended bottles with optics on their necks, the mounted fox's head with its teeth bared, and the half-finished glasses on the other tables and the ashtrays full. All the time moving until he reached the solid protection of the jukebox. He was crouched down. He was at Isosceles stance, and he pivoted his upper body behind the aiming position of his revolver in Turret One.
He saw the man from the airport on his knees, dark curly hair, his eyeline caught him, thick-rimmed heavy spectacles, dismissed him. He quartered the back bar… No sign of Colt… Shit…
The adrenalin draining from him. All the push, drive, impetus of belting his way into the back bar, safety off, index finger inside the trigger guard, and he did not find Colt.
He yelled, 'Where is Colt?'
The man seemed frozen in the position of tying his shoe-laces.
He was met by the empty, terrified stare of the man, and the silence trimmed his shout.
He gazed down at the man over the V-sight and foresight of the revolver, and he could see that there was the increasing shake of his locked fists. Keyed up to go in, and he had lost the brilliance of surprise and his nerves caught at him and the barrel cavorted in the grip of his hands.
'Where the fuck is he?'
He saw the man's head turn. He saw the man look back towards the counter, and beyond the counter was the gape of the open door that led to the staircase and darkness. He could see the first steps of the staircase. The man's head swung back, as if he knew he had been caught out.
Erlich eased himself up from behind the cover of the jukebox.
He was panting… One thing to open the door and charge into the back bar, another thing to go walkabout up a staircase into darkness… He rocked again on his feet. His decision. Quantico teaching said that an agent should never, alone, follow a man up a staircase, and never, ever, into an unlit staircase.
He was on the line, he was alone.
'Good God,' Basil Curtis was bemused. ' You quite astonish me.
The Security Officer invited himself into the bedsitting room.
There was a strong smell of cat. He looked around him. More books than he had ever seen in such a room, three walls of them, from floor to ceiling and piles of them elsewhere. And a cat litter-tray in one corner. Quite extraordinary to the Security Officer that Curtis, famously the best brain at A. W. E., paid more, certainly, than anyone else there, should choose to live in a single man's quarters in the Boundary Hall accommodation.
' H e was going to Iraq, it's cut and dried.'
He saw that Curtis had covered, with the newspaper he had been reading in bed, a half-written letter on his desk. The cat emerged from the wardrobe and observed the Security Officer with distaste. Curtis stood in his striped flannel pyjamas, holding a mug of cocoa.
'I wouldn't have believed it… but, of course, I didn't know him well.'
He could see a pink hot-water bottle peeping from under the back-turned bedclothes.
The Security Officer said, 'I am beginning to understand why Bissett ran.'
'I think that we should allow events to run their course, away from view. I don't want anything public, Mr Barker. I only want a message sent in private to that regime of blood. My advice, go home, get a solid night's sleep.'
'Very good, Prime Minister.'
'Good night, Mr Barker.'
Too old and too tired to wrestle through the night with the new world of the Rutherfords and the Erlichs, the Colts and the Frederick Bissetts. He would have one more word with Hobbes at the Pig and Whistle to let him know that both he and the Prime Minister required a total blanket over the outcome, tell him to push the goggling bystanders back another 200 yards, confiscate any cameras etc etc. As to the outcome, it scarcely troubled him to consider it. There was not a lot he could do to influence the outcome now. These sieges had a habit of going on for half a day, minimum.
Hobbes could, by God, earn a spur here after his craven performance at Century. Yes, he would go to bed and be ready to pick up the pieces in the morning. With Tuck's boy and the lunatic Erlich in the frame, there would, by God, be pieces.
Later, he would leave through the basement tunnel, he would walk out via the doors of the Cabinet Office. He would wait on the wide Whitehall pavement for a cruising taxi. And he would wonder if Penny Rutherford slept, whether she had taken the pill that the Curzon Street doctor would have left her. And he would wonder – if Erlich got the better of Tuck's boy – if he could persuade Ruane to send him away, right away, before Rutherford's funeral.
He could walk out through the back door and put his gun back in his holster, and he could tell the guys from the Special Weapons unit that there was no way Bill Erlich was going to do the right thing by his friend if it meant climbing a staircase into darkness.
His decision.
He could shift his ass up the stairs and search till he found the bastard, and hit down each door, and belt open each cupboard, and kick over each bed, until he found the mother.
He wasn't as good as when he had come in. It was going away from him, ebbing with each of the slow seconds as the time slipped by him. His eyes had never left the staircase. All the time he had expected to see the barrel that was the integral silencer and the fast-coming bulk shape of Colt behind it.
He started to move. The man was in front of him.
There was the raised hatch that cut off the barman's place from his customers. His route would be through the hatch and behind the counter and onto the bottom step of the staircase.
All the time watching the opening to the staircase…
He heard the crash of the breaking glass.
Erlich half swivelled.
The man had stood, and he had a glass in his hand with the drinking rim broken, and the man stood across Erlich's path and the broken glass was his weapon.
'Put that down.'
'You're not going up.'
'Get out of my way.'
'Not going up.'
The sound of their voices… Erlich thought Colt would be at the top of the staircase. It was goddam crazy.
