Free CONDITION BLACK by Gerald Seymour Page B

calls. They met whenever she had a free evening and he had a free evening, and it wasn't often. It was even rarer that they could share a weekend in the villages round Orvieto.
    They spent their evenings together in a trattoria on the square beside the Ponte Milvio or down in Trastevere, before a couple of hours at his place, or half a night at her apartment. They each said that it suited them, that kind of relationship. He wrote, 'Jo honey, will you pick up the goddam phone? It's me, your friend, and I need to hear your voice. Where are you? Maybe you're in London. Will look more closely at all the girls in future. Just in case.'
    One for his mother. His mother had married Herbie Mason just three years after his father had been killed. They ran a hardware store and diner in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, serving the hikers and campers up on the Appalach-ian trail. He rarely heard from his mother, but he rang her each Christmas morning, wherever he was, and on her birthday, and he sent her maybe a dozen postcards a year.
    One for his grandparents. They were his mother's people, they had an old weathered brick house close to the harbour moorings at Annapolis, Maryland. He was fond of them both. A bit correct for a small boy, a little formal, but they had been his proxy parents for school terms after his father's death, and after his mother had taken off with Herbie. Good people. They had never once criticised his mother's behaviour in their grandson's hearing. School terms in Annapolis, and holidays in the White Mountains, it could have been a lot worse. His grandfather was retired Navy, action in the Pacific and off Korea, where he had his own command.
    If his father had lived he would now have been in his sixtieth year. Every time that he wrote postcards to his mother and to his grandparents memories of his father revived. Memories of a man going overseas in his best uniform. Memories of a man coming home for burial, with full military honours . . . Such a very long time ago.
    He had once heard an Englishman say that what he knew of nuclear physics could be written on the back of a blackcurrant.
    It was an expression that still gave him pleasure and he would have used it to describe his own limited grasp of the subject, but it would have been wasted on the sparrow-sized man across the big desk from him. The Colonel had swiftly appreciated that if he needed to describe Dr Tariq's sense of humour the backside of a blackcurrant was all he needed, and to spare.
    Soldiering was what the Colonel understood. As a young paratrooper he had fought in the north against the Kurdish rebels. It was where his reputation had been forged. It was his battalion's heroic defence of their positions on the Basra to Baghdad road, when the rats from Iran had swarmed in their thousands from the marshlands, that had given him his present renown. He had commanded a unit of the Presidential Guard which provided close escort to the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council. When the traitor scum, the creatures of the Al Daawa al Islamiya, last tried to assinate the Chairman, six of the Guard had been killed, the Colonel had taken a bullet to the stomach, but the Chairman had survived untouched. Rewards followed. The rewards of the Chairman could be generous. But the Colonel had seen to it that his name did not go forward for promotion. He could learn from the fate of those who had climbed too high. He would never be a rival, he would remain the loyal servant of the Chairman. Now he directed a section of the Military Intelligence unit concerned with the security of the state from threats outside its boundaries.
    Dr Tariq told him of the death of Professor Khan, of the defection of the two French engineers, and of the Italian laboratory engineers, of a letter bomb that had been received, correctly addressed, to the same complex, to the very building alongside the one in which he now sat. He was told of Dr Tariq's passage throughout the offices