"Morning, Dr Bissett."
Wayne was lighting his first cigarette. He was the most recent recruit into H 3, and only had a Lower Second from Aston.
"Morning."
Reuben Boll was unwrapping the first of the boiled sweets he bought each morning in Tadley. The door to his office was always open. He was the Superintendent, Grade 6. He was the man in charge of H 3, and he spoke with his emigre parents' guttural Central European accent although he had been born in Ipswich, and he had been in H area for 26 years.
"Morning, Frederick."
Basil Curtis slammed the door behind him. He had been there since ever. Basil shrugged out of his dufflecoat. The dufflcoat would have been the one he had worn when he first came to work at the Establishment. There were no Civil Service retirement regulations applicable to Basil. The stitching of the rent in his corduroy trousers was his own work, the runs in his pullover were his cat's.
Bissett thought him the most brilliant man he had ever met.
"Morning, Bissett."
They were the first in. There would be others on the clerical staff who were always late, always pleading that the school bus hadn't turned up, or that their dog had to be walked. And others on the scientific level who would claim the excuse of a school run, or taking the wife to Surgery. Bissett was never late.
He went down the corridor that led off the central area. Third on the right. He unlocked the door with the key that was on his chain. His routine was invariable. Each morning he first switched on the power for his terminal. Then he took his sandwich box and his thermos of coffee from his briefcase. They went onto the shelf behind his chair, between the photographs of Sara and of the two boys. Then he went to his wall safe, opened it with the second key on the ring attached by a chain to his trouser belt, and took out his papers.
His Personal Air Sampler, the size of a small matchbox, hanging by a cord from his neck, banged on the desk top. It always banged on the desk top, each morning, before he remembered to tuck it below his tie.
Carol knocked, came in before he was able to tell her to. Her husband was a lathe operator in B area. She always said she could have done a better job running the place than the Director or his boss, Controller Establishment Research and Nuclear.
"This got delivered here, Dr Bissett."
The envelope was marked Personal and Confidential.
As at Los Alamos and Chelyabinsk and Ripault and Lanzhou, the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston is a workplace governed by secrecy.
Behind the grey wire, beyond the uniformed guards with their sub-machine guns and automatic pistols and attack dogs, 5000 people daily go about their work, to research, design, test and finally manufacture an independent source of nuclear weapons.
Much of the work moving from the A. W. E. consoles and design tables and laboratories and workshops is considered, by the few who so jealously guard their knowledge, as information too sensitive to be transmitted to any but those in the topmost reaches of government. Infinitely too sensitive to be shared, even in the most vague terms, with the general public, for whom the nuclear shield remains the ultimate defence.
Nine tenths of the work done here would be known to the scientists and engineers at Los Alamos and Chelyabinsk and Ripault and Lanzhou. But Los Alamos and Chelyabinsk and Ripault and Lanzhou and Aldermaston form the club with the greatest exclusivity yet devised. No helping hand will be offered to newcomers. The door is closed to new members, and the membership protects itself against what it calls Proliferation with wire, guns, attack dogs, certainly, but above all with a suffocating cloak of secrecy.
It was noon.
He had arrived at the forward brigade post three hours earlier.
His car was mud-splattered, parked amongst the jeeps and armoured personnel carriers, a hundred yards from the helicopter pad. He was Dr Tariq. Dr Tariq had never liked the featureless flatland of the Fao peninsula before the war. After seven years as a battlefield it was now an unearthly, hellish landscape. Around the excavated brigade post were gun positions, and trench patterns, and mud. As a scientist, Dr Tariq despised the waste and confusion of the place. His back was to the waterway. He had no wish to look out over the Shatt al-Arab, the narrow glistening strip that divided his country from the Islamic Republic of Iran, He did not care to look beyond the semi-sunken hulks of the bombed merchantmen towards the clear flames rising from the refinery tower of Abadan He waited. He paced close to his car.
As far as he could see back up the Basra road were the headless date palms, lopped by the shrapnel.
As soon as he had received news of the death of Professor Khan he had requested a meeting with the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, at the Chairman's earliest convenience. As Director of the Atomic Energy Commission, Dr Tariq was familiar with the dark undercurrents of Iraq's body politic. He knew of the coup attempt of seven weeks earlier and he had heard the rumour that nine Air Force officers had been put to death. It did not surprise him at all that the Chairman's answer should come, hand-delivered, to his villa at four o'clock in the morning, and that the rendezvous would be away from Baghdad. He knew that the routine and itinerary of the Chairman were a closely guarded secret. Dr Tariq would not have said that he liked the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, but he admired him. Nothing was possible, not any movement, without the clearance of the Chairman. He admired in particular the durability of the man, and his capacity to absorb succinctly presented detail, and his ability for work. So he awaited his summons without impatience.
Dr Tariq had rehearsed what he wished to say. When, eventually, he was admitted to the presence of the Chairman he would have perhaps fifteen minutes to explain himself. It was well known amongst that elite of which he was a part that the Chairman detested news of crisis. But the killing of Professor Khan, no doubt at the hands of Zionist agents, and a letter bomb to one of his scientists at Tuwaithah, that was crisis and had to be confronted. The defection of foreign personnel from his programme, that too was crisis. Like every man who had direct contact with the Chairman, Dr Tariq had a most sincere fear of his master.
He knew of the disappearances, the torturings, the hangings. He had been told that the Chairman had with a handgun shot dead a general who had dared to argue with his strategy during the dark days of the war. So he had prepared his words with care.
The officer approached him.
Dr Tariq, five foot two inches in height, thin as a willow wand, stood erect. He raised his arms, to permit the officer to frisk him.
Then, without fuss, Dr Tariq opened his briefcase for inspection.
He followed the officer, stepping through the churned mud, towards the concrete steps down into the brigade post, and the presence of the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council.
Not yet past the lunch hour, and Erlich had had his first argument of the day.
It could have been the second, but he had swallowed his pride when they had shown him the room that was allocated him. It was scarcely a box. Just a table and a chair and a telephone that wouldn't be secure, and the room was two floors and the length of a ministry corridor away from the Operations Co-ordination Centre of the Counter-Terrorism section at police headquarters. He had accepted that. What he would not accept was the refusal to make available to him, face to face, the eyewitness. It was not suitable that he should meet the eyewitness, he had been told. He didn't know how much of his fury had been translated by the interpreter.
The guys who had been up at Lockerbie, after Pan Am 103, working alongside the British police, they didn't know how lucky they'd been. .. Same language, same culture, same team…