Keep Calm (2 page)

She normally enjoyed public speaking, got a quiet kick out of the limelight, whether she was addressing the press, the annual party convention, the G20, the Trades Union Congress, or even when she took prime minister's questions at Commons for Lassiter. She reveled in it when she had a point of view, when she argued ways into or out of an issue. In those moments, on the stage or at the podium, she thought of herself proudly as a conviction politician, a soldier with a cause, and it lifted her above anything as petty as stage fright.

The press platform was placed out in front of the Whitehall gate on the far side of the security booths. Downing Street was shut down tight until it was made sure there weren't additional bombs still to go off. The press camped along the front sidewalk and the lip of the driveway. Georgia, Early, and Munroe came up Whitehall in the army SUV and tucked in right behind the platform. As she disembarked from the SUV she thought that maybe she would do without the cane. It obviously spoke of infirmity, an image she wasn't the least bit eager to put forward. In the end she decided she needed it, and the fallout if she couldn't make it, if she needed to be walked back in after, would have been much worse than people seeing her with the cane she'd already been married to for almost two years.

She hobbled out slowly, facing the overflowing crowd of cameras, reporters, sound technicians, and segment producers. It was the biggest gathering of its kind she had ever witnessed at Downing Street or, for that matter, anywhere else. She did her best to settle at the portable podium and meet the crowd out on the avenue there with a brave resolute stance.

“Good evening. As you may already know, we have had a most cowardly act visited upon our house. We are all in a state of shock, to say the least. Our hearts and minds are steadfastly alongside Roland Lassiter and his brave family today. Our prime minister, our friend, our leader, has suffered greatly … yet I am pleased to say that though he may be slightly weary from the events of today, his gentle smile and his renowned faculties are all intact and will soon be ready to once again be put to service by us all.”

Her speech went on, giving details where she could, in as plainly personal a way as she felt comfortable. She reminded herself that she was there to calm. She tried desperately not to show the fear and the dread she felt, so she spoke clearly, looking into each of the different cameras, hoping not to transmit the doubt she was choking on.

It was the final line of her statement that both she and Munroe knew would get the largest share of ink, would stir the most emotion: a bellicose warning, wrapped in her sharp Scottish accent—a shot across the bow to the perpetrators of the act.

“In short time, as the dust settles, we will piece together the events of this dark day and then, with the warm light of a clear morning, we will come for you, we will find you, and I promise, on behalf of our United Kingdom, there will be hell to pay.”

Her statement read, she turned and burrowed her way back inside the SUV. As the press shouted a barrage of questions to her, she ignored them all. She just kept moving into the truck where once inside she slumped into her seat, settled her body in, and then, as they pulled away from view, quickly and energetically, she began to weep.

 

BEFORE THE BOMBING
■
1

The best thing about living in Wilmette, Illinois, was how easily Adam Tatum could get to the train station and then to downtown Chicago to his office at Heaton Global Investments, or HGI as it was known in the eleven nations where it had offices. This job, the first he'd ever held that had required him to wear a jacket and tie, still baffled him. How he had gotten it, what they saw in him, what he was supposed to do, and if he was going to be any good at it were still unanswered questions, even after he'd been there for eight months. The only things that made any sense to him were the forty-minute train ride into Chicago and the moments every morning when Kate, his wife, and Trudy and Billy, his two children, all dropped him off at the little redbrick Wilmette train station.

They had previously lived in Michigan before being uprooted by this new job. He had been born and raised in Michigan. He and Kate had met in Ann Arbor when she was a student at the University of Michigan. The gods had somehow sent her to him from London. He was a first-year member of the Ann Arbor police force, three years older than her, nice-looking, quick-witted, and charismatic. He was a cop; he started as a patrolman and had gone on to quickly climb the ranks of the police department and had been made detective in record time. He had spent his life overcoming every obstacle en route to every single thing he wanted to achieve.

In truth, he never really loved being a cop. He became one because his father and his father's five brothers were either cops or reps for the policemen's union. He had floated along in the wake of his family, happy to just do what had been done, to excel in the arena that Tatums had always excelled in—until he met Kate. Kate changed everything.

She was in Michigan studying art and running away from either someone in Britain or Britain in general. She was an answer to a dream he hadn't remembered having, a prayer that had been granted before it had even been solicited. They dated, fell in love, started a family, and built a life—a life that just two years earlier he had stupidly done his best to smash against the rocks.

*   *   *

HE KISSED HIS
wife and kids good-bye and settled into a seat on the second level of the aging passenger train. He watched as Kate's Jeep Wagoneer tucked into the morning traffic going out of Wilmette Village, into a line of nice cars driven by all the other moms who looked like they'd been pulled straight out of the background of one of those old John Hughes films: all pretty and relatively thin with bobbing hair and brightly colored Banana Republic wool sweaters, smiling wearily in the morning light as they dutifully dropped their husbands at the train station.

Not Kate. She was no background character. She was the exception. She had star billing in whatever it was she did. She was one of a kind, his Kate: blond, buxom, and sturdy; British to the tee; a stunner; thirty-seven years old, with bold blue eyes and hardened opinions that could bend solid steel.

Adam's sight was locked onto her and the Jeep as the train pulled away, the village traffic letting up at the same time. They drove along side by side, just for a moment, until the road forked off. She didn't feel him staring; she was too busy arguing with Trudy, their perpetually heartbroken sixteen-year-old, to notice her husband watching her lovingly and longingly from the second story of the old Amtrak runner. She couldn't see the want in his eyes, the desperate wish he was making that he could somehow will it all to be better for them, to somehow make her understand that the hell he'd put them through these last two years was truly over.

As the train barreled south and the quiet commuters read their papers, watched their iPads, and sipped their travel cups, he thought again about his job, toiling away at the biggest financial services company on the planet, just one of the many things he'd said yes to Kate about during these last tumultuous two years. He would do anything to make things right. Even take a job in a city and a state in which he knew no one, and in a business which he knew nothing about. Every day he put on the pants, jacket, and tie, boarded the train, went downtown to Heaton Global Investments off the Dearborn Street Bridge, and tried like hell to fit in and to learn—all for Kate and the kids.

In actuality he wasn't doing badly. Not for a neophyte. Not for someone who had never sold a thing in his life. Least of all institutional retirement packages. He'd had a lot of jobs; aside from being a cop, he'd done construction, even been a set carpenter in a movie studio in Pontiac, Michigan, a few years back. He'd done a lot, but he knew nothing about setting up annuities for group retirements and saving plans. This was all a foreign language to Adam, but he was doing it, showing up every day and sometimes, some of those days, people even said he had something of a knack for it.

Kate had gotten him the job. Not Kate actually, but Kate's father, Gordon. Gordon Thompson, who, at least in Adam's mind, never liked Adam and never forgave him for brainwashing his daughter and settling her permanently in Michigan. In America. Yet with all the alleged animosity, it was Gordon, the distant father-in-law, who, after Adam had had his troubles, once they seemed to have finally ended, when he had no work, no idea what to do next, called from thousands of miles away, coming to the rescue with a job at Heaton Global Investments.

Gordon Thompson had been alone in London after the death of his wife from cancer thirty years before. He missed his only child with a hunger that, at least from the other side of the ocean, had made him seem bitter. Kate's father wasn't one to travel. He had left England only once as a young man, when in the service in the Far East. Kate and Adam had only gone to see him three times in the eighteen years since they were married. Gordon and Kate spoke regularly, even talked over Skype, but the decades and the distance had done their damage. Over the years the two of them had grown into something more or less resembling strangers. Gordon's heart was broken.

Two men, Gordon and Adam, each with a deep, endless, aching supply of love for Kate, both did what they could for her. Gordon stuck his neck out and approached his childhood friend and current boss Sir David Heaton, the British billionaire CEO of Heaton Global Investments, and got his ne'er-do-well son-in-law a job; and Adam showed up every morning in an unfamiliar suit, week after week, trying desperately to make sense of a new set of obstacles. Both of them doing it all for Kate.

Kate, who dropped the kids off, picked them up, got the dry cleaning, did the shopping and the laundry and paid the bills as she wondered if it had all slipped away. If she could ever feel like she once felt before. If she could ever laugh and play and coo and pet with her big bear of a handsome husband whom she once thought the very sun rose and set upon. She took the dog for a walk every morning when the kids were at school and every day, like clockwork, she wondered whether she'd ever get over the three months he spent in jail, the charges he faced that could have had him in a federal prison for over twenty years, the shame he brought to his family. Would she ever excuse him for doing something as stupid as he'd done, for putting all of what they'd built and held holy at such silly risk?

She blamed him for everything: for losing their home in Royal Oak, for her friends abandoning her during his incarceration, for the emotional roller coaster on which he had taken their two children. She even found the moral high ground to blame him for the hours she spent staring at photos of Richard Lyle, her high school boyfriend, on Facebook. She blamed him for the afternoons wasted ruminating over Richard and the life she could have had, for combing over his posts, for marveling about what great shape he was in all these years later. It was even Adam's fault she'd been desperate enough to send several messages to Richard's Facebook account. This was all emotional weight that he had dropped onto her when he shattered their lives almost two years ago.

So yes, Adam went off to his strange new job every day on the old clanging commuter train, but the real learning curve belonged to Kate: figuring out from nine to five, day after day, how to get to the next chapter of their story; how to forgive; how to let go; how to get herself home to Adam.

*   *   *

ADAM MADE HIS
way down the back hallway of the tenth story of the HGI building. It was a big, modern, metal-and-mirror thing that had been designed and built during the last raging bull market and plopped down onto the river along West Wacker Drive, facing north. The building never seemed to blend in with the other Chicago skyscrapers and it more or less sat there, away from the pack, its own towering entity.

As he ambled through the gauntlet of offices, more than one of the secretaries gave him a sweet smile. He was a regular fixture around the floor by then, and was well liked. The younger women saw him as cute, humble, fun to look at, and safe. He was a married man who knew how to smile and maybe flirt friendly, but not one to send out any signals other than that he headed home every night to Kate and the kids.

Retirement Services had the whole tenth floor, and Adam was headed toward the office of his boss, the head of the Chicago unit, Barry Saffron. Saffron, an ambitious forty-four-year-old transplant to Illinois from Boston's Back Bay and a lifer in the financial services world, had had Adam plopped into his lap ten months earlier in the same way that the Chicago River had landed the HGI building. Needless to say, Saffron wasn't the least bit happy when he got the call from Betty Roytan in the London office.

“Shit, I get it, Betty. This comes from the big man himself, but why Chicago? Send the little fucker to New York or to Dallas! I got way too much on my hands as it is.”

“I don't understand it, either, love. This is very out of character for Sir David,” replied the very dry and very British Roytan, who headed the London Pensions Package office. “All I can tell you is this young fellow's wife is the daughter of one of Sir David's security men, who also just happens to be one of his best boyhood mates. Give it your best. That's what I would do had Sir David sent me a handful. Give it my all.”

With that the phone went dead, she was gone, and Barry was stuck with a new man who for some reason was handed a damn good job and a fat starting salary with absolutely no experience. Zero. Nothing.

When he got to his boss's office, Adam could see that Saffron was not in anything close to a good mood. Saffron waved him in and told him to close the door. Adam did as he was told and sat down in the contemporary leather black greeter chair. The office was stunning. No expense had been spared in interior design and furniture—modern, crisp, and clean. There were three large flat-screen TVs on two different walls so that Saffron could watch sports, world news, and business news, all simultaneously.