The House of Cards Complete Trilogy (95 page)

Mackintosh had already decided that Urquhart had lost this morning’s game, and not simply for starting it twenty minutes late. He assumed the Prime Minister wanted to rekindle the relationship, perhaps give him an exclusive insight into the reshuffle in exchange for sympathy. No chance. In Mackintosh’s world of tomorrow, Francis Urquhart didn’t feature. Anyway, where was the courtesy, the deference he expected from a supplicant? Urquhart simply grabbed him by the elbow and hustled him along the corridor.

“Glad you could make it, Jasper. I haven’t got a lot of time, got to dispatch a few of the walking wounded, so I’ll come straight to the point. Why have you directed your muck spreaders into Downing Street?”

“Muck spreaders?”

“Driven by your editors.”

“Prime Minister, they are souls of independent mind. I have given countless undertakings about interfering…”

“They are a bunch of brigands and whatever the state of their minds, you’ve got them firmly by the balls. Their thoughts tend to follow.” Suddenly Urquhart called a halt to the breathless charge down the passageway. He hustled Mackintosh into the alcove by the Henry Moore and looked him directly in the eye. “Why? Why are you writing that it’s time for me to go? What have I done wrong?”

Mackintosh considered, and rejected the option of prevarication. Urquhart wanted it straight. “Nothing. It’s not what you’ve done, it’s what you are. You’re a giant; your shadow falls across the political world and leaves others in the shade. You’ve been a great man, Francis, but it’s time for a change. Let others have a chance to grow.” He smiled gently; he’d put it rather well, he thought. “It’s business, you understand. The business of politics and of newspapers. Nothing personal.”

Urquhart seemed unaffected by the obituary. “I’m obliged to you, Jasper, for being so direct. I’ve always thought we had a relationship that was robust and candid, which could withstand the knocks of changing times.”

“That’s extremely generous of you…” Mackintosh began, but Urquhart was talking straight through him.

“And speaking of the knocks of changing times, I thought it only fair—in equal candor and confidence—to share with you some plans the Treasury is proposing to push forward. Now you know I am not a man of high finance, I leave that to the experts like you. Extraordinary how the nation entrusts the fate of its entire national fortune to politicians like me who can scarcely add up.” He shrugged his shoulders, as though trying to slough off some unwelcome burden. “But as I understand it you’ve undertaken to buy the
Tribune
and are going to pay for it all by issuing a large number of bonds to your friends in the City.”

The newspaper man nodded. This was all public knowledge, a straightforward plan to raise the money by huge borrowings, with the interest payments being set off against his existing company’s profits. Overall his profits would plummet but so would his tax bill, and in effect the Inland Revenue would end up paying for the expansion of the Mackintosh empire, which in a few years’ time would be turned into one of the biggest money spinners in the country. Debt today, paid for by the tax man, in exchange for huge profit tomorrow, paid directly to Mackintosh. Creative accounting and entirely legal. The money men loved it.

“The point is,” the Prime Minister continued, “and this is just between the two of us, as old friends…”

Somewhere inside, at the mention of friendship, Mackintosh felt his muesli move.

“…the Treasury is planning to make a few changes. As from next week. Something about the losses of one company no longer being able to be set off against the profits of another. I don’t profess to understand it, do you?”

Of course Mackintosh understood. So well that he grabbed the wall for support. It was a proposal to slash the canvas of his creative accounting to shreds. With those rules his tax bill would soar and even the dullest underwriter would realize he’d no longer be able to repay the debt. He was already committed to buying the
Tribune
, no way out of it, yet at the slightest hint of a rule change the money men would wash their hands of the whole plan, walk away to their champagne bars and Porsches, leaving him with…

“Ruin. You’d ruin me. I’d lose everything.”

“Really? That would be a pity. But the Treasury button counters are so very keen on this new idea, and who am I to argue with them?”

“You are the bloody Prime Minister!”

“Yes, I am. But, apparently, one not long for this world. On the way out.”

“Oh, God.” Mackintosh’s shoulders had slumped, the tailored suit seeming to hang like sacking. A man reduced. He raised his eyes in search of salvation but all he could find were the long drapes that stood guard beside the tall sash windows of the hallway, colored like claret, or blood. His blood. Time to swallow pride, words, self-respect. He cleared his throat with difficulty. “It seems my editors have badly misjudged you, Prime Minister. You appear to have lost neither your acumen nor your enthusiasm for office. I shall inform them of their error immediately. And I think I can assure you that no editor who holds anything but the highest regard for your many and varied talents will ever work for one of my newspapers.”

For an endless breath Urquhart said nothing. The lips closed, grew thin, like the leathered beak of a snapper turtle, and the eyes ignited with a reptilian malevolence and a desire to do harm that Mackintosh could physically feel. It was the stuff of childish nightmares; he could taste his own fear.

“Good.” At last the lips had moved. “You can find your own way out.” Urquhart had already turned his back and was a step away from the dejected Mackintosh when he spun around for one final word, the features now bathed in a practiced smile.

“By the way, Jasper. You understand, don’t you? All this. It’s business. Nothing personal.”

And he was gone.

Eighteen

The Greeks have a history of heroic failures. No one has yet discerned what their future might be.

It was a night out for the boys. Loud, rumbustious, earthy, scarcely diplomatic, not at all ecclesiastical. Hardly the place one expected to find His Grace the Bishop of Marion and the High Commissioner of the Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. But the Cypriot Bishop was one of the new breed of clerics who sought orthodoxy only in their religion.

“Welcome, most high of high commissioners.” The Bishop, clad in the black of the clerical cassock, spread his arms in greeting and chuckled. As Hugh Martin, the British diplomat, entered, three of the four men who had been sitting alongside the Bishop rose and melted to the sidelines. The fourth, who was as broad as the Bishop was tall, was introduced as his brother, Dimitri.

“I’m delighted you could come and enjoy what, with God’s grace, will be a night of momentous victory for my team,” the Bishop continued, while two girls who said nothing through enormous smiles offered trays of wine and finger food.

“
Your
team, your Grace?” Martin inquired lightheartedly.

“Indeed,” the Bishop responded in his most earnest of tones. “I own the team. In the name of the bishopric, of course. A fine way of extending God’s bounty to the masses, don’t you think?”

On cue the thousands of ardent football supporters packed into Nicosia’s Makarios Stadium erupted into a stamping war cry of delight as twenty-two players filed onto the pitch. The Cyprus Cup Final was about to get under way.

In the corner of the private box high up in the stadium a mobile phone warbled and one of the besuited assistants began muttering into the mouthpiece. Martin looked afresh at the scene. He was new to the posting in the Cypriot capital yet already had heard of the extrovert Theophilos, still only in his forties, who controlled an empire that covered not only hearts and souls, but also pockets—a newspaper, two hotels, several editors, still more politicians, and a vineyard that was arguably the finest on the island. But Martin hadn’t known about the football team. Clearly there was much to learn about this Harvard Business School–educated, well-groomed cleric.

The Englishman was grateful for the whirring fans that spilled the air around the box. Nicosia was one of those capitals that seemed to be in the wrong place, tucked behind the Kyrenia Mountains on the wide plains of Mesaoria, touched by neither rippling sea breeze nor fresh mountain air, where even as early as May the heat and exhaust fumes built to oppressive levels. The Makarios Stadium had become a concrete cauldron nearing the boil, bringing sweat and fanatical passion to the brows of the packed crowd, yet beneath his ankle-length bishop’s robes Theophilos remained cool. Elegantly he dispatched instructions via the assistants who sat behind him, all of whom were introduced as theology teachers yet who, judging by their frequent telephone conversations, were equally at home in the world of Mammon. Only his brother Dimitri, a highly strung man of fidgeting fingers whose tongue ceaselessly explored the corners of his cheeks, sat alongside the Bishop and the High Commissioner; the others remained in a row of chairs behind, except for a single man who neither spoke nor smiled but stood guard beside the door. Martin thought he detected a bulge beneath the armpit, but surely not with a man of the cloth? He decided that the sweet, heavy wine they were drinking must be affecting his imagination.

The game proceeded in dogged fashion, the players weighed down by the heat and the tension of the occasion. Martin offered diplomatic expressions of encouragement but Dimitri’s hand language betrayed his growing impatience, his cracking knuckles and beaten palms speaking for all the Cypriots in the box as, down on the field, nervous stumble piled upon wayward pass and slip. Only the Bishop expressed no reaction, his attentions seemingly concentrated on the shelling of pistachios and the flicking of husks unerringly into a nearby bowl. A dagger pass, sudden opportunity, raised spirits, a waving flag, offside, another stoppage. Then stamping feet. Jeers. Irreverent whistles. From within the plentiful folds of the Bishop’s cassock a finger was raised, like a pink rabbit escaping from an enormous dark burrow.

“Fetch the manager” were the only words spoken; with surprising haste for a man whose spiritual timing was set by an ageless clock, one of the students of theology disappeared through the door.

It was more than fifteen minutes to halftime, yet less than five before there was a rapping at the door and a flushed, tracksuited man was permitted to enter. He immediately bowed low in front of the Bishop. To Martin’s eye, unaccustomed as he was to the ways of the Orthodox, there seemed to be a distinct and deliberate pause before the Bishop’s right hand was extended and the manager’s lips met his ring.

“Costa,” the Bishop addressed the manager as he rose to his feet, “this is God’s team. Yet you permit them to play like old women.”

“My apologies,
Theofiléstate
, Friend of God,” the manager mumbled.

The Bishop’s voice rose as though warning a vast crowd of the perils of brimstone. “God’s work cannot be done without goals, the ground will not open to swallow our opponents. Their left back has the tinning speed of a bulk carrier, put Evriviades against him—get behind him, get goals.”

The manager, scourged, was a picture of dejection.

“There’s a new Mercedes in it for you if we win.”

“Thank you. Thank you,
Aghie
, Saintly One!” He bowed to kiss the ring once more.

“And you’ll be walking to the bus stop if we don’t.”

The manager was dismissed in the manner of a waiter who had spilled the soup.

Martin was careful to conceal his wry amusement. This was a theater piece, although whether put on for his benefit or that of the manager he wasn’t completely sure. He had little interest in football but a growing curiosity in this extraordinary black-garbed apparition who appeared to control the destiny of souls and cup finals as the doorkeeper of hell controls the hopes of desperate sinners. “You take your football seriously,” Martin commented.

The Bishop withdrew a packet of cigarettes from the folds of his cassock; almost as quickly an aide had ignited a small flame thrower and the Bishop disappeared in a fog of blue smoke. Martin wondered if this were a second part of the entertainment and he was about to witness an Ascension. When the cleric’s face reappeared it was split with a smile of mischief.

“My dear Mr. Martin. God inspires. But occasionally a little extra motivation assists with His work.”

“I sincerely hope, your Grace, that I never have cause to find myself in anything other than your favor.”

“You and I shall be the greatest of friends,” he chortled. One of the young girls refilled their glasses; she really was very pretty. Theophilos raised his glass. “Havoc to the foes of God and Cyprus.”

They both drank deep.

“Which reminds me, Mr. Martin. There’s a small matter I wanted to raise with you…”

***

“And there’s another small matter I wanted to raise with you, Max.”

Maxwell Stanbrook thought he truly loved the man. Francis Urquhart stood framed against the windows of the Cabinet Room, gazing out like the admiral of a great armada about to set to sea. Stanbrook had arrived less than twenty minutes before at his office in MAFF, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food, to be told by his agitated private secretary that he was wanted immediately at Downing Street.

“So what is it, Sonia?”

“I don’t know, Minister—no, really I don’t.”

Stanbrook was firmly committed to the proposition that Government was a quiet conspiracy of civil servants who pulled all of the strings and most of the wool, and he took an active and incredulous dislike to those who claimed they didn’t know or suggested there was no alternative. He was notorious throughout Whitehall for throwing—literally hurling—position papers back at civil servants wrapped in a shower of uncivil expletives. The Mobster in the Mafia, as he was known. It was no secret that many in the corridors of power desperately wanted to see his comeuppance; had that time arrived?

A year earlier he’d thought he might have cancer. He remembered how he had walked into the consultant’s office trying to mask his dread, to still the shaking knee, to put a brave face on the prospect of death. Somehow it had been easier than this; the fear of mortal illness was nothing compared to the wretchedness he felt as he had walked into the Cabinet Room. Urquhart was there alone. No pleasantries.