At last he let go of the Dispatch Box and sank back in his seat. The moment was over. It wasn’t bad but neither had it been great. His fate now lay in the hands of others. Dave Murray, the Leader of the Opposition, was young, new in post and relatively callow, a man not renowned for his skill with the rapier, but he didn’t need it. He’d been handed a battleaxe. No matter how loosely he swung it, he couldn’t fail to find the target. He knew he mustn’t turn this into a party political battle, that wasn’t appropriate, not yet, with tragedy still so fresh in the air. But, as the Prime Minister had said, it was never too early to point the finger of blame and identify those who were responsible.
So he thanked the Prime Minister for recalling Parliament, joined with the Prime Minister in expressing sympathy, was as one with him in denouncing the outrage. ‘I have only one difficulty with the Prime Minister’s position,’ he declared, ‘which is this. He is the Prime Minister, yet he always seems to be the last to know.’ Murray held up his hand to stifle the indignation he knew his words would unleash. ‘Was it the fault of the Prime Minister that he couldn’t be at his desk to deal with this atrocity when it first occurred? No. But surely, in the days since then, he was duty bound to handle it with competence and clarity. The families of the victims deserve nothing less. We deserve nothing less.’
Usher’s supporters began to howl, their jeers blown back by the Opposition benches. Murray threw up both hands, waved them, calmed them, bringing them back to order. He was turning out to be something of an actor. ‘The other day,’ he continued, ‘the Prime Minister declared that there was no bomb. He got his press spokesman to denounce the suggestion. Yet today he tells us it was a bomb – a flying bomb, a missile. At last it seems the Prime Minister has got round to reading the newspapers, too.’
It was outrageous stuff, considering the gravity of the cause, but an election was looming and good taste had never stuffed a ballot box. The noise on all sides was deafening, and this time he didn’t try to stem it. His cheeks were flushed, he was nodding his head like a rabbi at his Wailing Wall, until at last the House fell silent again. That took some time, but they all wanted to hear, wondering how far he dare go.
‘The Prime Minister says that he doesn’t yet know who is responsible, but that he will not rest until they have been identified. That they dare not sleep soundly in their beds tonight. Has the Prime Minister, even once, even for the briefest moment, considered his own responsibility? Will he be able to sleep soundly in his bed tonight?’
And that was it. He had done his job; Usher’s humiliation was complete and made public. The Prime Minister didn’t join in the floodtide of objection that burst around him. He sat in his seat, his face fixed, pretending not to mind. As he gazed around the chamber, his eye settled on the crests that ran along the wall, each one marking a Member of the House who had given his life on active duty. He found himself a little envious. None of them had been slowly strangled to death.
From above, Patricia Vaine looked down upon the Prime Minister’s sea of troubles and discovered something new within herself. She was seated in the private gallery to which, as a senior official of the European Union, she had a right of access, a privilege recently granted throughout all the Parliaments of the EU. She found the atmosphere intoxicating. Information was a weapon, and she controlled it. The sensation was almost sexual, and perhaps even better than that, for the victim was a man she loathed. Usher was a typical English xenophobe, a Wogs-begin-at-Calais sort, a man with his arse stuck in the eighteenth century.
She had begun a game of unexpected consequences, one of which had proved to be Usher’s discomfort. It was right that he should suffer. And, as she sat watching Order Papers being waved like the sails of capsizing boats, she thought it was right that he should suffer a little more.
In fact, he should go, be removed from the scene, like a car that had crashed and was obstructing the middle of a motorway. And she could do that, make sure it happened. She thought about it. She had the power to move history forward. It made her tremble from deep inside, like only a woman can.
‘How was Christmas?’
‘Fine,’ Jemma lied. She’d wanted to be with Harry, was angry he hadn’t made it possible.
‘I missed you,’ he said, and with such conviction that in a breath he blew away all her irritation. She didn’t know how he had spent Christmas, didn’t want to give him the impression that she cared enough to ask but, with those three words from him, her decision to give him a hard time was abandoned. She threw herself on him, and didn’t release him until they were both sweating, naked and spent. Then she fell asleep.
When she woke she found Harry staring into the distance with that other-world look on his face. ‘Where are you, darling?’ It was the first time she had called him that; he didn’t flinch, didn’t even seem to notice.
‘The Prime Minister had a terrible time this afternoon.’
She nestled back into his arm. ‘Did he deserve it?’
‘Probably not.’
‘So how much trouble is he in?’
‘If the election were four days away he’d be dead. But it’s four months.’ A hesitation. ‘He’ll be fine.’
‘And you?’
‘There’s always the cock-up theory, it’s one of the most violent forces known to nature, but I have the good fortune to represent the sixty-fourth safest seat in the country. Losing that would be as likely as . . .’ He stretched for a simile.
‘Losing your innocence?’
He chuckled. ‘Ah, my innocence. Is that why you like me?’
‘I don’t like you, Harry, I love you.’
It had slipped out. And Harry wasn’t laughing any more.
‘Shit, I didn’t mean to say that,’ she muttered hurriedly, biting her knuckle.
His fingers had been lying distractedly on her breast. Now he took her hand and squeezed it gently. ‘Jemma, the next four months are going to be frantic. Election campaigns – they’re like sitting in a bathtub of leeches, wondering where the bastards are going to go for you next.’
‘I see.’
‘Personal life on hold, everything on short notice, liable to cancellation.’
‘Understood,’ she whispered.
‘So . . .’
‘So.’
‘Why not move a few things in. You know, clothes and stuff. In case I have to leave you stranded for a while.’
Shit, he hadn’t meant to say that . . .
There was, of course, still much that needed to be sorted. A relationship couldn’t hang on little more than a couple of coat hangers. So the following morning it was Jemma who sneaked out of bed first and began making coffee in the kitchen. She thought she might surprise him until the newspapers fell with a thump on the doormat. He was barely awake when she came back into the bedroom, bearing a tray piled high with coffee and pancakes, and the newspapers slipping from beneath her arm. He didn’t make a grab for them, but she knew his restraint was only out of politeness. He was a political animal, she mustn’t get in his way, yet she knew she couldn’t allow herself to be left behind, either. Her eyes ran across the front pages as they fluttered onto the duvet. Almost all of them featured the Egyptian connection, and set about trying to inflame it. As she shuffled through them, each headline seemed more provocative than the last.
She chewed at her knuckle once again. ‘I know you’ll only call me a stupid woman, but – tell me, Harry, why would the Egyptians want to shoot down a planeload of kids?’
He stirred, rolled towards her, thumbed his eye to rub the night from it, thumped a pillow into shape. ‘Well, it’s because . . .’ Then he stopped. The reason was so glib, so simple. So blind. The Muslim Brotherhood resented the Americans for any number of reasons – because of their cultural arrogance, their constant interference, for cutting off the aid programmes, banning sporting visits, for their links with Israel. But was any of that, even all of that, enough to get them into the business of mass murder? They were angry, sure, but insane? He sat
up in bed with a jerk that spilled the coffee into the tray. Despite all the angry words, and no matter which way he twisted and turned things over in his mind, he couldn’t see it. Suddenly it made no more sense to him than it did to Jemma.
CHAPTER FIVE
Few things are as certain in life as the fact that Christmas is followed by New Year, and that bugger all happens in between. The Junior Sergeant of the local militia who had made the initial inspection of the burnt-out huts north of Makhachkala had been instructed by his captain to take another look. There had been some confusing nonsense about a request from the Environment Commission in Brussels. It didn’t seem to be that urgent or important, and anyway Anatoly, the Junior Sergeant, had precious little idea who or where Brussels was, or why anyone should be bothering about a mess of scorched paper and melted plastic, so he took his time. Anyway, it was snowing.
When at last he decided he could delay no longer, he drove north along the P215 road, turning off after a few miles short of the village of Sulak along a frost-filled track that threatened to shake the fillings from his teeth. The heater wasn’t working, a problem that might have been connected to the three rusty bullet holes that decorated the bonnet of the Lada, and he had difficulty steering with one hand as he tried to keep the windscreen clear with his other. He followed the track to the point where it petered out just short of the shore, still fifty metres short of the flattened carcasses of the huts. He lit a foul-smelling cigarette, scratched himself, took his time. When at last he wandered over through the fresh fall of snow, he found even less than on his first visit. The bitter winds of winter had scattered much of the cinders and ash, and what little paperwork had survived the original fire would by now be floating somewhere in the Caspian. And, so it seemed to Anatoly, what remained of the wreckage had been systematically ransacked so that nothing remained. Hyenas, he guessed. Human hyenas. But there were plenty of those in these parts.
He stopped to urinate in the fresh snow, but it was too cold even for that. He lit another cigarette, climbed back into the Lada and wearily pointed it back down the track.
COBRA. In a land ruled by acronyms, this was one of the oldest. The Cabinet Office Briefing Room, an underground haven beneath Whitehall where the country’s leaders went to sort out shit. At least, that was the theory, but it wasn’t working.
The Prime Minister knew how badly he’d been beaten up at the Dispatch Box on the previous day, and it was time to reassert his authority. Or so he had planned. He gazed around the briefing table with its computer screens and microphones, the seats filled with senior ministers, defence chiefs and intelligence officers, two very senior policemen, yet not a single eye was engaging him, except for the Justice Secretary who was alleged to keep a notoriously irreverent diary that painted wicked caricatures, every indiscretion, every infidelity, including his own. ‘Who screwed who. And how,’ as he had once explained to an attractive female journalist. Rumour was that he planned to publish it as soon as he left the Cabinet, which was perhaps the only reason he’d been left to hang on in there so long.
‘Well, can you help us hobble through this one?’ Usher asked, glowering through his glasses at the Transport Secretary as he called the meeting to order. She’d returned from Verbier, on sticks, with her ankle in a surgical boot. She didn’t rise to his bait but instead bent over her briefing folder, hiding the resentment in her eyes.
‘Prime Minister, my officials at AAIB are still conducting their investigations, but I have their preliminary report.’
It was a mistake, thought Usher, for her to claim close personal ownership of characters who had sat on their arses all over Christmas and done little but quote EU directives at him.
‘I can confirm that Speedbird 235 was struck by a surface-to-air missile of Russian manufacture, designated . . .’
Even as she read out the words, Usher began to tap the table in impatience. How long would he have to wait until he heard something he hadn’t already read in the bloody Telegraph? Now she was droning on about the missile’s operational ceiling, something else he’d seen in the newspapers.
‘. . . which means it was operating close to its maximum range. This might explain why it failed to explode. It struck the port engine, which immediately disintegrated, throwing parts of both the engine and the missile into the section of the plane containing the hydraulic system . . .’
She tapped the computer screen. Diagram followed photograph as they relived the aircraft’s last moments.
‘Tracking back from the point at which the missile hit and they lost the engine, and using the angle of impact, we can pinpoint with a fair degree of precision the location from where the attack was launched . . .’
Now this was something new. A map of the North Sea appeared on the screen, with British and continental coasts clearly marked.
‘Approximately – there.’ She placed a finger on the screen and a red dot appeared in the vast stretches of water. ‘A ship or boat, of course. Or submarine, I suppose that’s a possibility, but most likely a surface vessel. Probably something as simple as a small fishing boat.’
Usher glowered at the red dot. It was some thirty miles east of the tip of Kent, and not much further from the coasts of France, Belgium and Holland. ‘So it could have come from . . .’
‘Almost anywhere.’
‘But surely we can do better than that. We track every ship or boat on the planet – or at least through the Channel.’
‘We track every transponder,’ the Transport Secretary emphasized. ‘They probably didn’t have one. Or switched it off.’
‘But, but . . .’ He was beginning to splutter with exasperation. ‘Next to the American President’s bathtub the Channel is the most heavily monitored stretch of water in the world.’
‘Yes, that’s true. Up to a point.’
‘Which point?’
She touched the screen again, and a line appeared that stretched from the eastern tip of Kent to France. The red dot hovered tantalizingly – several miles beyond its northern limit.
‘You’re kidding me,’ Usher whispered, incredulous.
No one came to his rescue.
‘You’re trying to tell me that no one noticed a missile strike on a passenger aircraft that killed one hundred and fifteen people!’ His fist pounded the table in frustration. ‘Surely the coastguard—’
‘As you will be aware, Prime Minister, we reorganized the coastguard service three years ago . . .’
Cuts. Bloody cuts. And he was bleeding to death. He looked around the table, caught the eye of the Chief of the Defence Staff, was about to insist that some military radar must have seen something, but didn’t. They’d cut the military to ribbons, too, aircraft carriers that had no aircraft, soldiers who had no boots. Around the room there was silence, except for the scratching of the Home Secretary’s pen.
‘You’d better come along,’ Harry said to Jemma a couple of days after the New Year.
‘Where?’
‘Man with the shaggy dog.’
She didn’t enquire further. If he was willing to include her, she was happy to scrub up or strip off as appropriate. It wasn’t every day that a primary school teacher from Notting Hill got the millionaire treatment. Yet she couldn’t pretend to be anything other than underwhelmed when they arrived at their destination, the Two Chairmen pub in Westminster’s Old Queen Street. It was entirely presentable but scarcely the Ritz. And they stood outside.
They had come to meet Hamish Hague – McDeath. He and Harry had bumped into each other over the years but didn’t know each other well, and the journalist was on his way back to Brussels, short of time, which was why he had suggested this watering hole midway between the Parliament building and the Telegraph office in Victoria Street. And they chose to stand outside because there were too many ears within, wrapping themselves against an erratic breeze as they rested their drinks on a polished brass windowsill.
‘Thanks for sparing the time,’ Harry said. ‘I know how busy you must be.’ br />
‘Pillar to post, and all the way back again,’ the newspaperman said, although his tone remained unhurried. He was not a man to rush.
‘To your Pulitzer,’ Harry continued, taking the head off his beer.
Hamish nodded in gratitude. ‘I don’t expect prizes, but perhaps my expenses won’t be questioned with quite such anal intensity, for a while, at least.’ He sipped at his whisky. ‘But if that’s the reason why you’ve asked me here, Harry, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. I can’t tell you any more than what I’ve been telling the Metropolitan Police and the security services.’
‘Which is?’
‘I have to protect my sources. You know that.’ He gazed across the top of his glass with enquiring eyes. ‘Anyway, what’s your interest in all this?’
‘A hundred and fifteen people died, Hamish.’
‘And there’s not a moment when I can forget it. I’m a grandfather myself and, dear God, I feel for those parents. But if I embarrass my sources I’ll get nothing more, and then the rest of you will get nothing more, either.’
‘So we can expect more,’ Jemma suddenly intervened. Both men turned to stare at her. ‘Oops, sorry. I’m supposed to be the wallflower or something, aren’t I?’ She looked awkward and tried to retreat from the cold breeze inside her overcoat.