Keep Calm (23 page)

“Give me your phone. I have to call your father. He has to go to Paddington and meet that train.” She stepped out of the car and closed the door so that Billy wouldn't hear her.

“We can't call my father. I don't trust him. I never want to speak to him again.”

“I'm not sure we have a choice. That train will be in Paddington in eight minutes. If we lose her, I don't know what the next move is. I'd call Beauregard, but it'd take too long to get him over there. Your father may have resources: some friends, ex-cops, someone. It's his granddaughter, for Christ's sake.”

She just stared at him, her phone in her hands, not sure if she wanted to give it to him. She thought about something for a long beat, another option. She wondered if it was the right move and realized she didn't have a choice. She started dialing.

“Who are you calling?”

“Richard Lyle. He lives a block from Paddington station. I was there this afternoon.”

Adam couldn't believe what he was hearing. It was like a punch to a gut that had already spent the day taking incoming shots.

“Great, so while I was knee deep in this shit that you coaxed me into, you were sneaking around with your old boyfriend? At his apartment?”

“No, I was innocently seeing an old friend.” She turned to him with icy eyes. “I was having a tea. You were blowing up Number 10. Please don't even think to lecture me about how I spent my afternoon.”

Luckily for her, Richard picked up his phone before they could take the useless banter any further. She deftly told Richard their predicament without going into too much detail. She told him he needed to go over to Paddington immediately and intercept Trudy. She told him it was an emergency, to not let anyone else talk to her or persuade him to do anything but put her right back on the very next express train. He was more than happy to help. He could hear the stress in her voice. He didn't need to know too much, only that he now had the chance to play the hero for Kate. He had the chance to see her again. He was in.

“Thank you so much, Richard. You're a doll. But please, go this instant. Yes? Thank you.” Adam motioned for her to cover the phone.

“Should we text him a photo of her?” She took it as a good idea. She ran it by Richard and waited for a reply. She was nodding.

“Okay, sweetie, then just go. Go fast and call me once you have her. Thank you so, so, much.” She hung up and turned back to Adam.

“He says not to bother, says he knows what she looks like from her photos on Facebook.” Adam just threw his hands up. He walked away mumbling something about Facebook being the worst thing ever invented.

 

ON THE HUNT
■
3

Georgia had a whale of a nightmare. Roland had died, succumbed to the wounds of the bomb blast. The entire city was in mourning. There was no one in the streets. The television stations had all signed off. The king gave a statement and then Buckingham Palace went dark in quiet remembrance. Numbers 10 and 11 were empty. Everyone had gone home to their families. Georgia was alone.

She walked out onto Whitehall, naked—not a stitch of clothing. It didn't matter, though; no one was around. Maybe there was the occasional odd, old woman, crying on a bench. An empty bus rolled by, but the driver didn't look at her. She walked toward Parliament, her wild hair the only thing covering any part of her body. When she turned the corner into Parliament Square, she saw it was filled with people—filled with everyone she had ever known: her parents, her childhood friends, cousins, even David Templeton, her first boyfriend. They were all in the candlelit early morning square, mourning over photos, posters, and drawings of Roland Lassiter.

She quickly stepped back into a nook in the base of a building—they hadn't seen her yet. She was suddenly embarrassed to be so blatantly naked. A car pulled up across the way, an old Bentley in beautiful shape. The passenger door opened, and it was Roland driving. He looked perfect. He had a Cheshire cat's grin on his face. He waved her over. She quickly crossed the street and jumped into the Bentley and drove off.

They tooled through the empty streets, laughing and telling old stories, the windows down, the warm air blowing in as he took the Mall past the Palace and Constitution Hill up toward Hyde Park Corner. She wasn't the least bit bothered to be undressed in front of him; it was just happiness and laughter, juvenile notions, and odd remembrances. Music was playing from ages ago: Wham!, Mick Hucknall, Annie Lennox. He soared into Hyde Park, which was as free of people as if it were still the king's private hunting ground. He took the car up onto the walkway to the Serpentine. He asked her if she remembered that they came there early on the morning when they won the first general, when they stayed up all night talking about truly being able to change the world.

She remembered, she told him she did, and now she was dressed, dressed from that night, and then she was dressed in the suit she wore the morning they crashed into the sea together, and it was ripped and covered in her blood, and now he wasn't laughing—he was angry and intent on driving the Bentley into the Serpentine. He picked up speed. She begged him to stop. He wasn't having it. They drove into the empty pond and the car sank, sank as if it were a cold blue ocean they were sinking into, not a slimy pond, and then she was unclothed again and he was laughing once more, wildly alive and happy as they both drowned together.

She woke up uneventfully—not a jolt up, not even immediately. She just woke up, covered in a light night sweat. The dream could have been hours earlier, but she remembered it perfectly. She still smelled the stewy leather of the Bentley. She sat up. She needed more pills.

The bottle was empty.

*   *   *

JACK EARLY LIVED
south of the Thames just below Croydon with his wife of twenty years, his two young daughters, and his fifteen-year-old son. It was a small three-bedroom home. He'd been Georgia's private secretary for almost eight years. He knew her as well as anyone, which meant that he didn't know her well. It was a nice-paying job—nothing extravagant, but the benefits were solid and he mostly enjoyed being part of “Team Turnbull.”

It wasn't his first job at Number 10. He had been a “garden girl” for ten months before she took him on. The “garden girls” were the steno pool that typed up the speeches and documents that went out of 10 and 11 in a steady stream. Their warren of offices overlooked the back garden. The sobriquet dated as far back as Churchill's day and stuck through the years, regardless of gender. Jack almost lost his job there once. He stood up to Gordon Brown, who had pushed aside a young typist in a fit of rage and took over the job at hand himself. It was the manner in which the PM spoke to the young woman that got under Early's skin, and he had said so. Gordon Brown looked up at him as he typed, considering going off on the lanky young civil servant, the way a bear may consider eating a broken deer he'd found by the side of the river, but he grunted and thought better of it and went back to the computer terminal he had commandeered. Early's job was saved, only to be lost a year later in a cutback.

He returned again in another year, tucked deep behind the coattails of the new chancellor of the exchequer, the very protective Georgia Turnbull. He took the job seriously, even if he did make a bit of a clown of himself from time to time, falling, tripping, and constantly saying the wrong thing. The fact was that she needed him. She needed someone watching over her at all times, someone to have her back. He was that someone and was proud of it, even if he had to do things he wasn't sure were right. His job was to keep Georgia running. Georgia in turn would keep the trains, the clocks, and the banks flush and on time. He had to wrangle just her, and for his money he had the better end of the stick.

He sped into London from Croydon at four a.m. on a chilly Wednesday morning. He usually took the bus when he came in later, but this run was an hour or so earlier than normal. The streets were barren, he'd made almost every light, and so the ten-mile trip in to Number 11 that could sometimes take ninety minutes took only fifteen. He pulled around the back of the Horse Guards to the little-known rear entrance of Downing Street, used his key card at the rear security shack, drove his Ford Focus up to the lip of the garden, and stepped out into the cold morning air. It smelled of dry sand and horse manure. There was the usual fog in the air, so it remained rather dark despite the hour. He was going to light a smoke as he waited for Georgia, who, according to their time-tested drill, would wait for the most recent pass of the night guard on the back lawn, then sneak quietly out the rear door onto the Horse Guards Plaza. She had called him eighteen minutes ago. He had woken from a deep sleep, stumbled out of bed, and gotten here, but he was sure, knowing her as well as he did, that he had a good-size wait on his hands, so he prepared a hand-rolled cigarette.

The smoke never happened. She stepped from the shadow of an old elm tree. She had been waiting for him—maybe a first. She wore an oversize scarf that covered her hair, a large pair of sunglasses, a heavy brown wool overcoat, and an odd pair of boots that she hadn't bothered to buckle up. She looked homeless, or at least hospital bound—nothing like the powerhouse she was. She had her walking cane with her again, something she hadn't used much these last few days, he realized.

“Put the cigarette out. We don't have the time. I want to beat the traffic.”

He nodded. “Yes, ma'am.”

She made a face and got into the passenger seat. She didn't wait for him to come around and open the door. She was in a hurry.

They raced through the deserted streets, north now, up the hill past Holloway, past the gray streets of East Finchley and into Finchley proper. Thanks to the early hour, the trip took only twenty minutes from Whitehall. The only other vehicles on the road were by and large delivery trucks and vans. The traffic lights once again seemed to be on their side and they made good time, which made Early happy. He never felt right about taking Georgia on these little excursions, skirting security and protocol. He knew that he could lose his job for it. He also knew he could lose it for saying no, so he took the option that left Georgia as happy as it was possible to have her.

They pulled onto High Street, rolled past the Turnbull Pharmacy—her father's place—drove up to the end of the block, and circled back around through the alley. Early pulled as close to the back door as he could get and kept the car running while she got out and fumbled for her key. Neither said a word to the other. They had already made this trip several times in the last year or so. Lately they were spaced closer and closer together. He wondered, as he watched her sneak in the back door of the shuttered chemist, if he should speak to her, sit her down, talk about seeking help of some kind. The idea seemed like a disaster as soon as he had it. He promised himself to not consider it again.

*   *   *

GEORGIA HAD WORKED
in her father's store as a teen. She worked in the musty shop alongside him all through school. He'd opened it when they first moved down from Glasgow in the late seventies, when she was just a year old. She knew the alarm code, knew which tiles creaked and which didn't. She didn't need to turn on a light; she made her way behind the counter and into the shelves of medicines and medical equipment. The work light on her father's spot at the counter was always left on: part superstition, part security. It was the eternal beam, a small tubular beacon of shielded light cutting through the blackness that led her way back to the shelf she needed, to the little bottle of help that she pulled down off the top rack and placed in her pocket.

In this moment on each previous trip, she always considered taking a second bottle in order to make it easier on Early, so that they didn't have to sneak back as often. She never did, though. One, because her mind always fooled her, told her she didn't need them because she was about to quit and was ready to kick this dreadful need. Two, and more important, was the inventory process she knew the shop had, the rigorous pill count that one of the young employees would do once a fortnight.

One bottle gone would constitute a refill order. Two would demand that a pill audit list be cross-checked with past sales and then against current sales slips, which was the one thing she never wanted to trigger: the cross-check. She feared her father more than she feared the press, the party, the Tories, or the voters. “Dad” was the one thing she never wanted to go up against, never wanted to sully, embarrass, anger, or provoke. She loved her father profoundly, loved how proud she had made him all these years. She lived for his encouragement and support. These trips were launched against every fiber of her being; the very thought of letting him down in any way was horrid to her, so she never took more than one bottle.

This morning, though, she thought about a second bottle. The events at hand had weakened her. The odd thoughts swarming her mind, awake or asleep. Steel. Her lips. Her eyes. The way she looked, talked, laughed, and listened. The tough, cute, stern little inspector. Steel and Roland. Life and death. The Party. Power. Roland. The responsibility she would now have. The opposition. Europe. Taxes. Donald Stanhope. David Heaton. The
Mirror.
The
Telegraph.
The
Sun
. So many things were on her mind at all times these days. It never stopped, never slowed down. Even asleep she was tortured.

This morning was a morning for a second bottle. This was a different time. It had to be worth the risk. She stepped back to the shelf, reached up, grabbed another bottle, put it with the first one in her jacket pocket, and briskly left the shop.

 

ON THE RUN
■
4

The Great Western Railway Paddington Band was performing on the main concourse of the cavernous Victorian-era rail station. The band of older men and women, brass and woodwind players, performed on most Friday nights, and when they did, they trumpeted their special version of old-time joy throughout the congested rail terminal. The station was packed with travelers. The express from Heathrow was just settling into one of the glorious train sheds first built in the 1860s. Trudy Tatum was the first passenger off.