The Ambassador (31 page)

‘Yes. But there used to be a saying that all’s fair in love and war. Have you not heard it? The fact that a man I admire is in love with you immediately puts you into a favoured category with me. And your self-discipline and your profound sense of duty, let alone your remarkable intelligence, have heightened my … interest, dear lady.’

‘Lord. What it is to be wanted. You’d better call me Lisa.’ Winston’s earlier advice came back to her. She squeezed Marius’s arm. Inside, something shrugged: she would let fate take a hand from here on.

Ahead Strether checked his watch. They had been marching briskly for some fifteen minutes – that meant at least a kilometre. He had lost count of the paces some while back. The path had begun to meander slightly uphill. Then the lights ahead showed that another
tunnel was about to cross theirs.

They were at a crossroads.

The trio stood uncertainly, their breath heavy in the chill air. Strether could see nothing but was absolutely sure they were being observed; he could imagine the heated discussion that was going on, as it became clear to those who were scrutinising them that they were three, not two, and one was a woman. If Lisa was identifiable – say, from her vidphone signal – they would have ascertained that she was a high-ranking official from Porton Down, and was not on the guest list.

Down the tunnel to their left, a red light winked, once. They took that as a signal and turned towards it.

‘Whoever these maniacs are, they are well protected,’ Strether muttered. ‘If they were attacked by this route they could pick off assailants one by one.’

‘And I’ve not the least doubt we are under surveillance the whole way,’ Marius agreed. ‘Easy to do in tunnels like this. I’ve seen no escape hatches, have you?’ His companions shook their heads. Lisa moved closer to the Prince, her fear genuine. ‘It is a bit claustrophobic,’ she whispered. Her voice echoed down the chambers. ‘I hope we get to where we’re going soon.’

In the most fraternal of gestures, the Prince took her hand. Finding her fingers cold he tucked her hand with his into the pocket of his jacket, and kept it there.

Ten minutes later the tunnel began to narrow until eventually it was no longer possible to walk abreast. Strether found he had to bend his head to get under pipes slung from the ceiling. In single file they trudged on until another crossroads loomed.

‘Bloody hell,’ muttered Strether, blowing on his hands. ‘How much further is it? What are these tunnels for anyway? They’re not sewers. There’s no smell.’

‘Communications of some kind. Or they could have been purpose-built. Or the builders simply found old tunnels and decided to re-use them.’ Marius’s lack of his usual certainty revealed that he was guessing. In the half-light his face was drained and pinched. ‘Our instructions are to keep going: they’ll let us in when they’re ready.’

‘For Chrissake, I don’t like this at all,’ was Strether’s blunt reply. ‘Not what I was expecting when I accepted the President’s commission. I thought my toughest challenge was going to be the weight I put on at official dinners.’

Lisa froze. ‘What’s that? Shut up, Bill, for a minute.’ The Prince closed up to her and put an arm around her shoulders. She motioned angrily at both men to be quiet. The roof seemed to press down on them as if it were alive. The three moved together like animals seeking comfort. Then Lisa grabbed the Prince’s coat. Her eyes widened in alarm.

‘Listen. Behind us. My God. There’s somebody else in the tunnel. Oh, Christ, we’re being followed.’

At first Strether could hear nothing. Then he held his breath to still his thumping heart. A faint footfall could just be heard from the blackness behind them. Not boots, not a crisp or military crunch, but a sound more sinister, in soft-soled shoes, someone who did not expect to be detected, or did not care, some distance behind them.

‘Keep going,’ Marius hissed. ‘Let’s get a move on.’ They began to run, covering ground almost faster than the light switches could keep up with them so that they had to stumble forward into the murk. The Prince led now, with Lisa on his heels and the
Ambassador heavily bringing up the rear, his breath rasping, mouth wide open. Into Strether’s mind came the remnants of unarmed combat he had learned in his youth. He wished crazily that he had thought to carry a weapon.

‘Marius – did you bring – anything?’ he panted. Lisa tripped and let out a little scream. Behind them the feet had also broken into a trot and seemed to be gaining on them. Marius picked up Lisa without a word and did not reply.

The tunnel suddenly twisted to the left and ended. The three cannoned into a blank wall.

‘Holy Moses,’ Strether gasped. He scrabbled for a handkerchief and wiped his forehead and flecked lips. ‘What happened? Did we take a wrong turn? Where the fuck are we supposed to be?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ Marius muttered. ‘I am heartily sorry I got you into this. Get behind me.’

They cowered grim-faced, their backs to the wall, and turned to confront whatever was loping steadily towards them. Strether could feel Lisa shaking with terror. He took in the Prince’s profile, its aristocratic jawline set, the brown hair lank, the forehead beaded with perspiration, the eyes wide and impenetrable. Then he glanced down, and realised that Marius had had more information than he had ever admitted.

In the Prince’s hand, half hidden in his garments, was the metallic glint of a gun.

The air-conditioning had broken down again. An elderly fan clattered in a corner, its head moving this way and that like a questing dog. On his desk the folders had to be held down by a paperweight, a piece of granite containing a fossilised tooth. The sweat ran down the groove of his back in a steady trickle. Colonel Thompson picked up the fossil and examined it dully for a moment. Perhaps one day, millennia from now, some genetically refined creature would do the same. Only the tooth in question might be one of
homo sapiens
– might be one of his own.

The fan turned malevolently towards him and the papers fluttered. Cursing, he jammed the rock on top, then clasped his hands together in a resolute refusal to set to work.

A return to London was not what he had anticipated or wanted. He could not deny that, in both geographic and career terms, the frontier posting was a dead end. The barracks were diabolical. The intricacies of commanding a mixed bag of Caucasians, Sicilians, Germans and Balts – even if their officers were the pick of the bunch – tried his patience and drove the auto-translator into a frenzy.

But it was soldiering. The enemy was in sight – if not to the naked eye (though occasionally a plane or helicopter hove into view, or puffs of smoke on the distant horizon confirmed a firing exercise) then definitely in the vicinity. Every screen in his control room proved their existence. Their movements were tracked by satellite; their emissions were analysed by gas spectrometer, their state of readiness pinpointed by infra-red sensors from a hundred kilometres away. He knew at what temperature their engines ran at idle and at peak performance. He knew the mixture of fuels, and that they relied on the cheapest form of diesel – proof of their backwardness. He knew they ate without fail at eighteen hundred hours. That regimentation had surprised him, till he realised that alarm bells should ring only if the pattern altered.

And it was the right enemy. The Chinese were not merely a different civilisation: they were the challengers. Given what he knew of their character, as demonstrated daily on his monitors, Mike Thompson had no doubt they were the main danger to the peace and security of the Union, a real and menacing threat to the way of life he and his fellow citizens enjoyed. Given half a chance, their brooding presence could switch to belligerence; were the Union to abandon these dismal steppes in Central Asia, the enemy would not hesitate to step in within a few days.

This was no idle fancy. It had happened where defences had been weak. In Japan, for example. The pacific nature of those people, the unwillingness of their flabby parliament to stand up to the aggressor, and the preoccupation of its government with the appeasement insisted on by commercial interests, had made the wealthiest islands in the world a sitting target. The military action had taken six days; resistance had been brutally suppressed. Now, the Japanese lived in uneasy co-operation with their overlord occupier, and hoped they might be allowed to go on making money without interference or penal taxation. It was not freedom as he understood it. Neither had there been objections in China itself. From what any outside observer could judge, the celebrations over their country’s ‘victory’ had been genuine. Human nature didn’t change much. If his job on the frontier, therefore, was to warn the Chinese not to contemplate similar moves westward, then he was willing to do it.

He wished the Union would take a firmer stance in other parts of the world. It was a mistake, in his opinion, to ignore Africa. True, much of the equatorial region had become uninhabitable as daily temperatures soared. The Sahara desert was twenty times its size of a century before and now stretched from Ghana to Kenya, coast to coast. But the Magreb, the Mediterranean coastal strip, was an important manufacturing region, where German and Dutch business exploited cheap local labour forces and the lack of Union regulations on fire, health, safety, working hours and the like. The south had become an empire in its own right, an important market for Union exports, though its standard of living was still well below that of its richer allies. Yet whenever he visited either of these regions – or South America – the airport lounges were full of sober-suited Chinese with attaché cases and raincoats over their arms. Hotel lobbies had signs in Chinese, and many of the staff were conversant with the language – enough anyway to say, ‘Have a nice day,’ in Cantonese, Mandarin or whatever they guessed to be appropriate. The invasion could come by blazing guns from those tanks lined up ten minutes away. Or it could come insidiously, through shareholdings and soft loans and debt-management, through smiling handshakes in the smoky air of closed boardrooms. There was more than one way to win a war.

Here, at least, he was in the front line and performing daily a task he justified with no qualms. He could kill the enemy if he had to; he could give the order to open fire, and would not hesitate. Naturally he would do his utmost to avoid any spat, for it would cause an incident with international repercussions. Thompson’s maturity and tact were useful assets in this eternally tense theatre. He was aware of sniggering gossip about his faith, but among the military a rudimentary pattern of belief was not uncommon and not a handicap. Here, he was trusted.

London was another matter entirely. His instructions had been skimpy, which meant that something was afoot. The Colonel might have been bred as a simple soldier hut he was nobody’s fool. He sighed and scratched his arm where a bug had bitten.

Civil unrest
. The phrase had leaped out of the terse communiqué. He and his unit, crack troops, were required to return to the regional capital and to prepare themselves for potential conflict. That could mean shooting people, and not Chinese. Yet he was in no position to refuse.

With an oath of savage impotence he banged his fist down on the papers. Several loose sheets fell away. The Colonel put his forearm on the table and deliberately swept the lot off the desk. The fossil fell to the stone floor and rolled away.

Thompson rose and contemplated the mess as the fan blew the documents about. That had been a pointless gesture which would irritate his adjutant. It did not make him feel much better either. He rummaged about for the fossil. The stone had cracked open: the mammoth tooth, forty million years old, which had survived intact long after the annihilation of its species, now lay broken in pieces in his hand. 

The safest place to talk. That was normal. But whether it was because the hiss and opacity of the steam made visual surveillance virtually impossible, or because a fellow could hardly carry a concealed recording device when he was mother-naked, Sir Lyndon Everidge had never quite worked out. He was, however, certain that the sauna at the London Forum Club
was not his idea of a pleasant spot. Especially not when his companion was the Permanent Secretary, whose desiccated frame seemed to relish the richly-enveloping heat. For Sir Lyndon it was a crude form of torture.

‘This had better be good, Robin,’ he muttered. He could feel his blood pressure rising, the arteries pulsing in his temples.

‘It is. We are close to our goal.’ Sir Robin Butler-Armstrong folded his thin arms with an air of satisfaction.

‘And that is – ?’

‘Oh, prosperity and contentment throughout the realm, of course. Permanently.’

‘You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know.’

‘My dear fellow. Don’t get so aerated. The three-point plan. We are making great strides.’

‘I’m listening.’ Sir Lyndon slumped soggily into his towels.

‘First, the economy. We are now in a position where four per cent growth per year can be confidently predicted for the foreseeable future. With productivity gains, that should mean five to ten per cent wage increases are easily affordable. You can announce it whenever you like, my dear chap. A substantial hike in the standard of living. Just in time for the election, too.’

The silvery hairs glistened on Sir Robin’s chest. Nothing sagged on the trim torso; Everidge suspected the man had had a body tuck to remove excess abdomen skin, a common problem in older men. The way the scrotum hung, so tidily, suggested some delicate cosmetic surgery in that area also.

‘Second, enhancement. My dream – so dear to my heart! – of a sustainable gap between the upper castes and the rest is now under way. The first children are at advanced foetus stage.’

The Prime Minister brightened. ‘That I do know about. My younger daughter married that bloke Dainty from the Home Office and they’ve put in for one. Due next spring.’

‘The Director of Porton Down is doing an admirable job. He assures me everything is going splendidly. No hold-ups whatsoever.’

‘I’ll believe that when I see it.’ The Prime Minister reached for a hand-towel and wiped his pounding brow. ‘He’s not as interested in the acceleration project as I’d like. He can’t see its importance. And his expenses are something chronic. I don’t trust that bugger further than I could throw him. He’d swear everything in the scientific garden was rosy even when it was throwing up man-eating monsters.’

‘You have no cause to say that,’ was the frosty response. ‘Of all the advances benefiting the Union, the enhancement programme is by far the most effective. And the best controlled.’

‘I suppose that’s so,’ Sir Lyndon conceded. ‘The fact that it’s in our hands makes me more comfortable. But the day can’t be far off when Mr Murdoch Junior acquires the technology and sets up his own facilities. Or our pal Maxwell Packer. He’s been demanding legal amendments to make cross-patents possible. Then he could sell the output round the world. More profitable than news-making and sports, any day.’

‘He won’t. He can’t. The computer programmes have a self-destruct built in. We’ve dealt with that.’

The Prime Minister, more aware of the machinations of commercial minds than the civil servant – whom he privately regarded as living in a world too esoteric for his own good – wanted to say, ‘Balls!’ but decided against it. He was already at an acute disadvantage and preferred the conversation to end as soon as possible. Instead he shifted his blotchy thighs and said gloomily, ‘Go on. How’s the third bit of the great plan going, then?’

‘Third? Your allusion to our news media brings me to the elimination of dissent. It is so rare, but it does happen – cranks and idealists who assume they can perform better than you, the elected representatives, and us, the selected elite. As you are aware, violence has flared up again in London and other regional capitals, though the news has been satisfactorily – ah – filtered. Our friends are proving their worth.’

The Prime Minister wanted to riposte that he didn’t trust them either, but thought better of it.