Suddenly he brightened. He was a fool. Why did he need to worry about his wallet when he had in his pocket a promise that he was soon to be kicked up to the Cabinet? That was worth money, hard cash, and a considerable amount of it, about another sixty thousand above his backbencher’s salary. Come to think of it, more than he’d ever earned in his life. He’d soon be able to afford both Paris and Florence and a hell of a lot more beside, just as soon as the Prime Minister had seen off these irritating Army types.
However, he had to admit that today wasn’t proving to be one of the better days in the campaign. True to its editor’s promise, the morning’s Telegraph had shouted from the top of its front page that the Government had been caught in a lie. Bendall had stretched the truth so tight that the elastic had burst. He wasn’t fighting eco-freaks but former soldiers, Britain’s best and bravest, and suddenly the morality of the situation was no longer so simple. Slowly but perceptibly, the sands on which the pillars of public opinion rest had begun to shift. What yesterday had been termed ‘outrages’ were now referred to simply as ‘attacks’, and Bendall was seen to be fighting not so much for freedom as for himself. The conspirators had an identity, too. ‘Captain Beaky’ was excellent headline fodder and there wasn’t a single newspaper in the land who could resist it.
It all sounded a shade too comic, almost comfortable. So the Prime Minister grew ever more impatient and Earwick sought the opinions of others – a sure sign he was in difficulties and wanting to spread the responsibility, although he had come to one solid conclusion, that whoever else might be included in the ranks of the enemy, the editor of the Daily Telegraph was going to be right up there on the list. Earwick told COBRA so in terms that were remarkably colourful for a Home Secretary. At the point where he suggested that the editor was a national menace and they should bug all his phones, the Police Commissioner went puce. There’d be hell to pay if they were caught bugging an editor. So what? Couldn’t they bug a bloody telephone without getting caught? What had the capital’s police force come to?
The discussion was beginning to get undignified and more than a little unconstitutional when it was interrupted by a commotion from the door. A dishevelled figure burst in, pursued by a protesting security guard who continued in a state of considerable agitation until the Prime Minister waved him away. After all, it wasn’t every day that the Downing Street press secretary kicked down his door looking as though he’d run all the way from Hyde Park pursued by a pack of Chelsea supporters. It had to be more than a bad set of inflation figures. It was.
‘They’ve stuffed up the phones,’ the press secretary, Arnold Jumpers, almost choked. He was experiencing considerable difficulty coordinating his need to take in great gulps of air with his need to speak. ‘Everything in central London. All the 0207 numbers. It’s chaos out there.’
‘They’ve cut off our phones?’ Earwick gasped, incredulous.
‘Oh, more than that, Home Secretary, much more than that.’ Bendall let out a slow moan of understanding. ‘They’ve just cut off our balls.’
In fact, Bendall had it wrong. They had cut off no one’s telephones. The press secretary’s description had been the more accurate one, if technically a little obscure. The telephones had simply been ‘stuffed up’.
All around the centre of London, whenever an 0207 number was dialled, the telephone system chose at least one random digit. The result – constant wrong numbers. From eleven o’clock that morning London had begun to buzz like a nest of dyspeptic hornets. Pick up a phone and the only thing you’d get for sure was chaos.
It was an adaptation of a hacker software program originating in Texas that Mary had pulled from the Internet and that had played the crucial role in a scam inflicted upon one of the more popular TV evangelists during his annual fund-raising drive. As followers phoned to make their credit-card pledges, every second call had been diverted to a different number where their pledge was taken by computer and transmitted to a different bank account. It couldn’t last, of course, not for more than a few days, but by the time the authorities had caught up with the operation both the perpetrator and the profit, running into several millions, had been lodged out of harm’s way in the Cayman Islands.
The matter hadn’t been allowed to rest there. Under pressure from the evangelist who explained that he believed in an eye for an eye and brimstone heaped upon the bitch who had cheated him, the police had proceeded to arrest the perpetrator’s husband on a flimsy charge of conspiracy, hoping to lure the wife out of hiding. Instead, out of spite, she had shoved the software on the Internet, making it freely available to everyone and anyone. Ouch. The American telephone companies had been forced to move quickly in order to ensure that Elijah, as the software programme was called, could never be resurrected, but it seemed that their British counterparts had been far less agile. It had taken Mary many days and most of her nights to adapt the Elijah programme, but at the end of it she had been able to talk to the computer that ran the Telecoms regional management centre responsible for central London and persuade it to divert calls, not to a specific number, but simply at random. Anywhere would do, so long as it was wrong. Of course, in normal circumstances such problems would have been overridden by the central network management centre at Oswestry, but these weren’t normal circumstances. Mary had fixed Oswestry too.
As COBRA broke up in confusion the capital’s streets began to echo with the sound of numbers dialled and redialled in vain. Truly essential services on freephone numbers – police, ambulance, fire, gas leaks and so forth – weren’t affected, and Mary had spent a full afternoon of painstaking programming to ensure that all hospitals, doctors’ surgeries and other medical facilities listed in the Yellow Pages were passed over by the plague. Yet in a modern city, communications are as important as water, more important than roads. Cut off from its communications, a modern city begins slowly to die. And with it begins to die the authority of those who govern it.
TWELVE
If there was any humour to be found in any of this chaos, it sailed far above the head of Arnold Jumpers, the Prime Minister’s press spokesman, upon whose shoulders had fallen the responsibility for mounting the first line of defence. Since there was little point in denying the situation was anything other than a calamity, he had decided upon a diversionary attack and accordingly had prepared a draft statement which blamed the mess not only on the conspirators but also the telephone company, the Daily Telegraph and even the Government’s political opponents, accusing them of multiple if ill-defined crimes. There seemed little other option. It was all very well the Prime Minister ordering him into the breach once more, but in order to fill it he would need to round up as many bodies as he could find, and no one else had any sensible advice to offer. They were all too busy shouting down telephones at strangers.
He had shown his draft to the Prime Minister, who pierced him with a look that Jumpers suspected might have been tinged with gin. ‘Bring me some answers, Arnold,’ Bendall had barked, ‘then maybe I’ll take some questions. Until then, you do it!’
So Jumpers had called together the lobby correspondents. He had tried to summon them by telephone but he was merely mortal, not a miracle worker, and feeling more mortal by the moment. The Government Telephone Network which embraced official Westminster was not part of the 0207 fiasco but in this hour of adversity had come to resemble an overloaded refugee convoy and was going nowhere. Jumpers had been reduced to sending a runner off to the Houses of Parliament to bring the journalists hotfoot to Downing Street.
They had, indeed, arrived hotfoot, gathering outside the basement entrance to the press lobby at the appointed time, but the door remained firmly closed. Jumpers kept them waiting – they assumed out of arrogance or an attempt to show them that he was master in his own kingdom, but in truth because he was making last-minute alterations to his draft in a state of rising panic. So the members of the lobby sat on the low wall outside the basement door, beside which some joker had placed the rat traps that were
supposed to keep Downing Street free of vermin, and they had smoked and speculated and grown impatient. And waited some more. Finally the door had creaked open and a breathless junior press secretary had offered mumbled apologies before ushering them in.
The press briefing room itself was claustrophobic, decorated in battleship grey and provided with inadequate services and small windows set high in one end wall. It was a little like a prison. In Jumpers’s opinion it was precisely what they deserved.
‘Morning, Woolly,’ the Telegraph’s correspondent called across as the official press spokesman entered the room. ‘What’s the line today, then?’
How he hated his nickname. How he hated the correspondent and the newspaper, and what it had done to him.
Being the press spokesman at Downing Street is a little like being a lump of prime meat on a butcher’s bench. So long as it’s there on the bench, in pristine condition, the passing dogs will gaze upon it with a mixture of reticence and respect, but should it fall into the gutter both reticence and respect are immediately cast aside and the dogs compete to tear it to pieces. Jumpers had thrown himself into the gutter with his lies about the attacks; now the teeth were bared and he would be shown no more mercy than a string of yesterday’s sausages.
‘Good morning,’ he began, trying to affect a pretence of normality. He clutched the sides of his podium for comfort. The podium was new, something he’d introduced to give briefings a greater air of formality, make it seem a little like the White House. It also gave him something to hide behind. ‘Nothing on the record at the moment, if you don’t mind. Nothing for direct quotation. Only background.’
‘Why’s that, Woolly?’
‘Because we don’t yet know …’ – he had to struggle to avoid saying ‘what the bloody hell’s going on’ and instead retreated to ‘the full circumstances of this situation.’
‘Hasn’t stopped you before.’
Jumpers licked his dry lips and softly muttered a phrase he’d seen spray-painted onto a wall in Kilburn. ‘No one should underestimate the seriousness of this situation. This is nothing less than an attempt to cripple life in London. You’ll have seen the impact on the Stock Exchange …’
‘Falling like a nun’s knickers on bath night,’ someone cracked.
Jumpers ignored it. ‘Business has all but ground to a halt. But you’ll appreciate it goes much deeper than that.’
‘I hear there may be rumblings on some of the inner-city estates. Rumours about barricades going up. Gangs of youths steaming through the high street. That true, Woolly?’
Jumpers had no idea, it was all happening too fast for him to stay abreast. ‘What I can confirm is that it will be ordinary people who will suffer most from this outrage. Think what is likely to happen after dark. Remember that many burglar alarms and security systems use an 0207 number, a number that is no longer of any use. We are talking here about a potential catastrophe …’
‘Talking of potential catastrophes, Woolly,’ – there was an ill-concealed snigger from several of those in the room – ‘who are we blaming today? That is, assuming we can dispense with the nonsense that this is an attack by the paramilitary wing of the World Wildlife Fund?’
Jumpers felt his chance had come. He glanced down at his briefing paper with its list of accused in order to refresh both his memory and his morale, yet before he could begin he was interrupted yet again. It was that turd from the Telegraph once more.
‘You know who’s going to get the blame, don’t you, Woolly? Even if they find that Captain Beaky has robbed a bank and screwed his sister. You know who they’re going to blame?’
Jumpers paused. He had the feeling of something cruel and canine brushing up against his leg. The pack was about to pounce. ‘What do you mean?’
‘They’re going to blame you, Woolly. Not you personally, of course; they don’t know who you are. But your boss. Hissing Sid. The Prime Minister. That’s who they’ll go for.’
From a distance, across the rooftops and chimneys of Whitehall, came the sound of Big Ben striking the hour. One o’clock. Feeding time.
‘That’s absurd …’
‘You see, your boss, Mr Bendall, has been fiddling with the truth. To put no finer point on it, he lied. Now, we know our lords and masters like to mess about with the truth at times, but what we don’t expect is for them to get caught quite so blatantly. Trousers down, arse in the air and everything on full public display. So they’re going to kick his butt and say that if he hadn’t lied, this might not have happened. That’s what they’ll say.’ At least, that’s what his newspaper was going to say and, as Jumpers knew, sometimes the public are so easily led. It was the moment for him to step in, to take control of the situation.
‘Let’s be clear about this. What we are facing is nothing less than a full-scale terrorist situation. It’s electronic terrorism. Not even the IRA was able to bring London grinding to a halt like this. No avenue is going to remain unexplored and no stone unturned in our efforts to stamp down on these outrages.’ It was going better now; they were all busy scribbling down his clichés. You couldn’t have too many clichés, not in his job. Get them stuffed into the first four paragraphs of any news report and his job was almost done. But this one needed something more. It needed someone to blame …
‘So we have ordered Telecoms to work flat out until they have isolated the fault and corrected their computer, regardless of the expense. We are going to ensure that they have their systems back on line at the earliest possible moment. Then we can start discussions as to how they managed to let something like this happen and to see if there are any grounds for compensation …’ Good, very good. Blame clearly implied without any direct attribution. Time for the personal touch. His Master’s Voice.
‘The Prime Minister doesn’t underestimate the seriousness of this situation. He’s working on it right now in the Cabinet Room. Let’s not beat about the bush. Phrases like “Goering” and “Luftwaffe” spring to mind. It’s worse in many respects, because the Luftwaffe only hit a small proportion of buildings not the whole capital and – SWEET MARY AND JOSEPH WILL YOU SWITCH OFF THAT BLOODY PHONE!’
Jumpers almost lost it. Ever since he had started his counterattack that bitch-in-heat from the Press Association had been fiddling with her earpiece and her mobile phone, distracting him, not listening to him, and he’d just about had enough.
‘No it’s not,’ she responded without a trace of remorse.
‘No it’s not what?’ Arnold bit back.
‘No, it’s not worse than the Luftwaffe,’ she replied, one hand on her earpiece and the other held high to still Jumpers’s agitation. ‘They’re playing with you, Arnold. The phones are back on. At the stroke of one, my office is telling me. The computer corrected itself and … the land lines are now working.’ She paused to examine the press spokesman. ‘Why, Arnold, you should be happy. It’s all over.’
The Press Secretary knew it wasn’t all over. Something was going on at the level of his trouser leg. Maybe the dogs weren’t pulling him apart, not for the moment at least, but something unpleasant was happening nonetheless. He had the distinct impression he was being pissed on.
The dismay felt by Arnold Jumpers crept from Downing Street through the streets and alleyways of Westminster like a Dickensian fog until it reached as far as The Kremlin. The day had started badly for Elizabeth. She had been forced to sack two of her staff, an under-chef and a waiter. It was time for cutbacks, even though she knew she was cutting back on the things that made The Kremlin special. Needs must. Then the fog of chaos closed in until it had all but cut off The Kremlin and wiped out the lunchtime bookings. Her profit margin for the entire week lost at a single stroke. At this rate she knew she would be closed in weeks unless something turned up.
‘So how far would you go?’
At this point, Goodfellowe is still lying on top of her. One day, maybe, she’ll get some feeling back in her legs.
‘How far what?’ he replies. ‘What are we talkin
g about here? Group sex? Chandeliers?’
‘No, you fool. At least, not right this minute. I’m talking about things like your job. Mr Squeaky Clean gets hold of the Ministerial inkpot once more. Doesn’t that mean you have to get your hands dirty?’
‘Does politics have to be a dirty game?’
‘The more relevant question is whether it can ever be clean. Tell me you didn’t lie for your country when you were Foreign Minister.’
‘That was different. That’s called diplomacy.’
‘And you expect me to believe you when you tell me you’ve suddenly fallen in love with your Prime Minister and all his works?’
‘That bit’s called collective Ministerial responsibility.’
She wriggles and hooks her legs behind his, pulling him into her, her tongue exploring his ear. He emits a low groan that sounds like a protest, but isn’t.
‘Tell me, Goodfellowe, would you screw for your country, too?’
‘How could I refuse, if she looked like you?’
She takes the sides of his head in both hands and forces it up from her body so that she is looking directly into his eyes. ‘Seriously. Say there were … I don’t know, say a female journalist. Drop-dead gorgeous, legs up to heaven. And she had something – apart from the bloody obvious – that you wanted.’
‘Like what?’
‘Something vital. Some piece of information, some pillow talk that was essential. Or perhaps she had a story on you, or a close friend, that you wanted to bury beneath the bedsheets. Would you do it?’
‘Does a one-legged duck swim in circles?’
‘Depends how aroused he is.’
‘How should I express it? To lay down one’s life for one’s country is a noble thing, but to lay down one’s virtue seems to have altogether more amusing possibilities.’