"I don't."
"Then you won't understand the interaction of a fission explosion."
"I don't, no."
"Then there is not a great deal of point in my explaining the material contained in those papers. Anyone here will tell you it was low-grade."
"Have you ever been approached, Dr Bissett?"
"Approached? I beg your pardon. I don't know… "
" Y o u don't need to be a nuclear physicist to know what that means. Have you ever been approached by an outsider, anyone outside the Establishment, for information concerning your work?"
"That's ridiculous."
"Just answer the question. Yes or no?"
Rutherford thought the man was hyperventilating. Straight question. Should be a straight answer…
" N o. "
"If you were to be approached, Dr Bissett, what would be your reaction?"
"That's hypothetical."
"Then hypothesize… "
"I suppose, well, I'd go, you know, I'd go to the Security Officer."
"But you haven't been approached?"
"I have not."
Rutherford watched Bissett's hands. Bissett's hands were moist. He watched Bissett's lips. The tongue was flicking. If he hadn't been from Curzon Street he might have thought there was something to be made of damp hands and dry lips. But he had learned that the very mention of the Security Service frightened perfectly innocent people into irrational anxiety, even outright fear.
" H o w are your personal finances, Doctor Bissett?"
" M y what?"
" Y o u r personal finances." Good grief, the man was an imbecile.
" I work here… "
"I know that. Just answer the question."
" I f you worked here, then you'd understand. We happen to live in the most affluent part of the country… Don't you work for the government, Mr… I didn't catch your name?"
" D o you have an overdraft, Dr Bissett?"
" D o I have an overdraft?"
" Y e s or no…? "
" Y e s, I have an overdraft. Is this the sort of question you. .."
There was a pattern emerging. It didn't matter one way or the other to Rutherford whether Bissett said he had an overdraft or whether he did not. The pattern was more interesting. Every question bred a return question. Not too much to read into it, that the man threw questions back at him, buying him space to think. Interesting. .. He glanced down at his notes. He had the transcript of a telephone call in front of him.
"Were you at home last night, Dr Bissett?"
"Where was I? "
"Were you at home, Dr Bissett."
"When…?"
"Last night."
" N o. "
"Where were You?"
"I worked late."
" T h e Security at the gate will tell me what time you left."
"Then I went out, I wanted a drink."
"What pub did you go to, Dr Bissett?"
"Well, I didn't actually. I thought of going for a drink, but I didn't… "
"What did you do, Dr Bissett?"
"I just drove around for a bit. I stayed in my car."
"Why was that, Dr Bissett?"
He saw the anger. He had the transcript of Bissett's call to his wife, the claim that he was working late, that he would be home late. He already had the log from the Falcon Gate that told him that it was early evening when Bissett had driven through the checkpoint. He saw a lonely and frightened man in front of him, a man who could not count as a friend any one of his colleagues.
"I just wanted to be on my own."
"Wife trouble, Dr Bissett?"
His fists were clenched. For a moment Rutherford thought he might just come over the top of his desk, launch himself. Bissett exploded.
"It's not your bloody business, is it? Get your bloody nose out of my life… Get out at once. Get out of my bloody office."
"Thank you, Dr Bissett, I think that will do for the time being."
He sat at his desk, his head buried in his hands. He squeezed at his temples and he could not rid himself of the pulsing pain.
Desperately and cruelly frightened. The fear was a barb inside him. His door was closed, and it offered no protection from the fear. The sweat ran on his spine, was clammy in his vest. The sickness was in his throat, he could not shed it. When he moved from his desk, he went to the radiator by the window, and he carried the envelope that he had been given in the Great Western Hotel at Paddington station. It was as though the envelope was the sure sign of his guilt He had not opened the envelope, not in the train, nor when he had reached home and climbed the stairs to bed and found Sara already asleep, nor in the morning.
The envelope was his guilt, to open the envelope was to secure that guilt. He could not judge what the man from the Security Service knew. His world, Frederick Bissett's world, was crum-bling. No strings, no commitment tell that to the bloody Security Service. Easy enough to say it, whisky in his hand, flattery in his ears… no strings, no commitment. All around him was the calm, slow, complacent life beat of the Atomic Weapons Establishment, around him and beyond his reach. All he knew was fear and pain and sickness. As far as he could push it, he stuffed the envelope down behind the radiator under the window.
It was the sort of meeting that Barker detested. It was the Whitehall machine at its wretched best. The Deputy Chairman of Joint Intelligence Committee was referee. Barker knew him as the former commander of an armoured division in Germany, brought home with the cut-backs, tidied into an area that he knew nothing of to work through to his pension.
He had Hobbes with him, to make up the numbers.
Martins he had met on a handful of occasions. He knew of the reputation of so-called "Sniper" Martins, that the man was a celebrity at Downing Street. He thought him second-rate. And the meeting shouldn't have been held at Century, it should have been at J.I.C.'s quarters, the annexe to the Cabinet Office. But Barker quickly understood why the meeting was held at Century.
The Deputy Chairman was lunching with the Deputy Director General in the executive suite on Century's nineteenth floor. The Deputy Chairman and the Deputy Director General were distant cousins, had been at school together, and then at Mons Officer Cadet College together. Barker didn't have any cousins who were worth knowing, had been to grammar school, had been rejected for military service because of a right leg shortened in childhood by a polio virus.
The stenographer cleared away the coffee cups. The Deputy Chairman took his place at the head of the long table. Martins eased himself down opposite Barker.
For Barker to start… marvellous. He would start, Martins would follow. They would kick it around. He would do his summary, and then Martins would have the last word.
Hobbes had written the paper that Barker paraphrased. There had been a shooting in Athens, an Iraqi dissident killed, and an Agency man, who was with him, killed too. The killer's driver had shouted the name of "Colt". The shooting in Clapham of an Iraqi whose hand had been in the state airline till. The face of the same killer might have been identified. In both killings the weapon had been a silenced. 22 calibre pistol. This Colt was British, a fugitive from justice, already wanted on a charge of attempted murder. Colt had recently been in Britain, might still be within the jurisdiction. Iraqi involvement clear-cut. Another matter – not connected – but the warning of a prospective Iraqi fishing expedition amongst the staff of the Atomic Weapons Establishment… What to do? When and where to stamp on the Iraqis?"… And the Americans, of course, wish for a result."
A dry smile from "Sniper". Wouldn't have been even the ghost of a smile when Barker had first met the man, before that lunatic escapade in the Beqa'a, no more than a cringing little arse licker he'd been then.
"And that has very little to do with us."
"I merely state the position."
" Y o u don't have enough to go to court."
"That's for the Director of Public Prosecutions."