The Prime Minister left his aides at the top of the blue carpeted stairwell that spiralled down to Number Ten’s basement. He wasn’t happy to be called away at such short notice for this security briefing when he should have been locked in emergency consultations with his Chancellor and various Treasury staff discussing the developing financial storm clouds that were brewing up alarmingly quickly.
The general public were still enjoying an extended economic boom, but this had begun to overheat as early as last year, and now a crash seemed imminent. The stock markets, too, remained blissfully unaware and were simply serving to fan the flames by inflating asset prices still further. Save for a few doom-monger pundits, only a small select number of government officials knew the full scale of the crisis. Soon there would be leaks, and once the more savvy within The City put two and two together they’d start shorting the life out of equities. Then the whole house of cards would come crashing down. The Prime Minister felt panicked by this. They’d all blame him. And they’d all be right, he thought.
‘Prime Minister.’
‘Sir James.’
Pleasantries over, the Prime Minister and Sir James Hampton-Staines, the most senior civil servant in the land, awaited the opening of the large metal blast door ahead.
Sir James was even more senior than the Cabinet Secretary and yet he never got mentioned by the press; a secretive shadowy figure he somehow managed to stay hidden below the radar. The Prime Minister was secretly jealous of this fact and had almost forgotten what it was like to go about one’s business without being scrutinized ferociously. At anytime he could be felled by some controversy or other, something he himself would have no inkling of, and yet he’d have to be the fall guy. God, how naïve he was in the early days to think he had power. This man standing next to him really did have power and he’d been wielding it in and around Whitehall for decades it seemed. Civil servants and politicians feared him, but based on reputation alone, apparently, as Sir James never directly bullied or threatened. He just existed – like a bad smell in a cake shop. The silence of the press could only mean that the proprietors were similarly wary, and probably without ever having met him.
Face to face he lived up to this scary image: Tall, thin, serious, observant. You felt he missed nothing. Those bloody eyes, too big for his head, and irises so black you couldn’t tell where they stopped and the pupils began. Thankfully he tended to wear shaded spectacles most of the time so you rarely got a clear view of them.
There was a loud buzz and the huge steel blast door leisurely swung open. Sir James politely indicated that the Prime Minister should step through first.
The two men walked for some time along a long echoing corridor that branched off to the left and right a few times. They were no longer under Number Ten but, presumably, somewhere deep underneath the Foreign Office, or some other Whitehall building.
The loud sound of their footsteps gave a dramatic air to the bland setting but the Prime Minister had walked these corridors many times before. He wondered what this briefing could be about; if it weren’t for the looming financial crisis he might be interested, though all past briefings had been frightfully dull. Come to think of it: so dull he couldn’t recall a single detail from any of them. Christ, he needed to pay more attention to these things, but, as always, his preoccupation was with saving his political neck, and so his attention invariably tended to focus on press and parliament, just about to the exclusion of everything else – including family.
They arrived at another closed steel door and Sir James leaned forwards to enter in a key-code. The door opened and the two men entered an office complex full of men and women at computer consoles. The place was busy, but there was no conversation at all.
The PM was ushered to a desk in this area and he sat down, still distracted by his worries. Thankfully his mind went blank as the insectoid thing sat down opposite him.
***