The Lords' Day (retail) (19 page)

8.25 p.m.

The will to survive is extraordinary and at times overwhelming, capable of fashioning some form of normality even out of the darkest hour. Inside the House of Lords the hostages
were beginning to prepare for the long night that lay ahead. They were confined to a small part of the chamber so there was little room, but they found comfort on each other’s shoulders and
in each other’s arms. It wasn’t the first time many of them had fallen asleep on these benches.

Harry had made another food run – not just sandwiches this time but salads and hot soup. The captors frisked him once more, not only on the way in but again on his way out, even though he
was still dressed only in his underwear. They, at least, weren’t relaxing. They knew that it was in the night, during the small hours when a man has to fight to keep his wits, that any
attempt to snatch back the hostages was most likely to occur. They would be prepared.

As Harry walked back towards the small post office, pushing his trolley before him, he found the adrenalin that had been sustaining him draining away with every step. His legs were heavy, the
cold tiles were now attacking his feet, he felt exhausted, and he knew he was afraid. Sometimes people assumed that brave men feel no fear; it is only because they are afraid that they are
brave.

It was as he was climbing wearily into his clothes that his phone fell from the pocket of his trousers. It had been switched off these past hours and only now, out of habit, did he switch it
back on. It was an unthinking gesture for immediately it started whining in protest; dozens of unanswered voicemails and texts had been left over the preceding nine hours. With a low sigh he
stabbed a finger in the direction of the power button, intending to switch it off, but before he could do so it rang yet again.

‘Harry, old chum, where the fuck have you been?’

He recognised the crisp voice immediately. Jimmy Sopwith-Dane – known as ‘Sloppy’ to everyone who served with him – had been a fellow officer from the Life Guards before
being invalided out and heading for fresh pastures in the City. Sloppy had become a public relations adviser, a damnably successful one in a career that was carried along on a combination of
upper-class charm, personal loyalty and exceptional, if usually hidden, dedication. Eventually, it had brought him the post of Director of Communications at the Financial Services Authority, the
body that acted as the financial policeman within the City of London. The job was serious, which only served to enhance his eccentricities, but the Edwardian accent and studied foppishness hid a
selflessness that had once taken a bullet for Harry in the bandit country of Armagh. That bullet, in his knee, had ended his military career; in Harry’s view, that allowed Sloppy the right to
limp his way around Harry’s world with total freedom.

‘Forgive me, Sloppy, got a bucketful to take care of.’

‘Too busy crying in your Cristal, I suppose.’ Harry could hear Sloppy was in a bar, and he sounded as if he’d been there some time. ‘Just wondering how much you got hit
for this afternoon.’

‘Hit for what? I don’t understand.’

‘Where you been hiding? Don’t you know? Stock Exchange forced to close early. Brokers practically throwing themselves from windows. Squillions knocked off the value of everything,
including Harry Jones, I assume. That’s why I’ve been trying to call you. It’s been horrible out there, old chum. Slaughter of the innocents.’

‘Been a bit tied up,’ Harry mumbled, thinking he could hear a champagne cork popping in the background. That would be Sloppy, going down with masts at full sail.

‘This bloody siege’s turned the world on its head. Been worried about you. Thank God you didn’t get caught up in it.’

‘I rather have. I’m the man in the white suit.’

‘Christ, was that you? Didn’t recognise you in long shot. Or in your underwear.’

‘Yes, perhaps I should sack my tailor.’

‘Please, old chum, take care of yourself. Don’t go playing the hero.’

‘In for a penny, in for a pound.’

‘Too bloody right. Talking of which—’

‘Look, Sloppy, I’ll have to go.’ Harry tried to interrupt, but his old friend was not to be so easily deflected.

‘It’s going to take a while before the old ship rights herself at this end, Harry. ’Twixt you and me, this afternoon wiped out three years of carefully regulated larceny
amongst my little hoard of stocks and shares. Crying shame. But you, you lucky bugger, with all those inside connections of yours, if you happen to know how and when this little skirmish is going
to end, you’ll make a tidy bloody fortune.’

‘Run that one by me again, Sloppy.’

‘Intelligence and surprise, my old mucker, same old game. Forewarned and forearmed. Just like the night we raided that IRA council meeting – you remember? Caught those Fenian buggers
in bed with each other’s daughters. Remember how we laughed afterwards? So there were those this afternoon who got caught with their pants down waving their willies, while some other lucky
sod’s had it away with the daughters and by now is probably in the Cayman Islands.’

‘Er, who, Sloppy?’ Harry asked, fighting his confusion.

‘Who? I dunno. I don’t mean anyone in particular. Talking figuratively, old chap.’ The sound of a woman’s laughter came down the phone.

‘But if someone had known about it, Sloppy . . . Look, put that bloody glass down and concentrate. Could you find out if anyone did make a killing? A real stinker of one? And if so,
who?’

‘Don’t worry yourself, dear boy, these capers usually come out in the wash somewhere. That’s what we do at the FSA. Run it all through our little computers and see if
anyone’s had more luck than they really deserve. Then we pursue them all the way back to whichever little sand castle they’re using as a hidey-hole. Bloody Lone Ranger, that’s
me.’

‘How long does that all take?’

‘What?’

‘How long before you pick up the patterns?’

‘Weeks. Months, even. Depends.’

‘But we don’t have time for that, Sloppy!’ Suddenly, the adrenalin was pumping again, making Harry’s head hurt. ‘Look, it’s chaos at this end, but we need to
know if anyone’s got his hand in the pot and we need it now.’

‘No way, the shop’s all shut up.’

‘Listen, and listen good, old chum. We need to know if anybody has been betting on this siege – if they knew about it in advance. And every hour, every minute longer that takes, puts
lives at risk.’

‘It’s not the way we do things, Harry,’ he complained.

‘Sloppy, this may be the most important thing I’ve ever asked you to do.’

The other man said nothing for a moment. He rubbed his mangled knee; Jones was always a pain in some part of his anatomy, but it meant that life was never dull and that’s what made him
such a damned fine friend. When Sloppy came back on the line, his voice was entirely sober. ‘Can’t promise. Can only try. Put a few ferrets down. Do my best.’

‘That’s always been good enough for me.’

‘You’re a total shit, Harry Jones. Always spoiling my fun. I was looking forward to drowning my sorrows this evening, others were depending on me.’ A burble of feminine
disappointment gushed down the phone. ‘Be back in touch. Soonest. But you’ll owe me for this one. Dinner, my call, somewhere disgracefully expensive with a magnum of Yquem thrown in.
The 2001.’

‘It’s yours. Thanks, Sloppy.’

It was a long shot, but so was everything at this stage. Harry stabbed at his phone, about to turn the thing off before it started its protests once more, when his eye caught the call list and
he froze. ‘Oh, Christ – please, no,’ he swore. ‘No!’ Then he fled from the room.

Despite the road blocks and the chaos around Trafalgar Square, he made it to the Ivy in the back of a commandeered police car by 8.47 p.m. There was no sign of Melanie anywhere
in the panelled dining room. His heart was thumping and, despite all his years of training, he was hyperventilating.

Melanie, he was told, had arrived a statutory twelve minutes late. She’d been in a health spa all afternoon to prepare herself for this meeting and had somehow contrived to miss most of
the chaos that had spread across London during the afternoon. Reluctantly she had ordered a glass of Chablis to keep herself amused and had made it stretch for twenty-one minutes before she had got
up and left. And, no, there wasn’t a message for him.

Her phone was switched off. Harry tried it twice, then borrowed the restaurant phone in case she was blocking his number, but wherever she was, she wasn’t answering.

Harry stumbled from the restaurant into the night. The police car was waiting. It had been put at his disposal by Tibbetts, who had insisted he needed to know where Harry was and be able to get
him back within five minutes, but Harry didn’t want to go back. He instructed the driver to take him to his old home, in a mews tucked away behind Berkeley Square. When they arrived he
pounded on the door, but she wasn’t there, either.

He had little problem with the concepts of duty and sacrifice, that’s what his life had been bent around all these years, serving others, fighting for them, with so much that was personal
and private pushed to one side, sometimes almost forgotten. And yet . . . duty wasn’t enough, of course it wasn’t. The concept was inspiring, for decades Hollywood had made films about
it, but the reality . . . well, right this moment the reality was about as inspiring as a bit of old celluloid left too close to the fire. He sat on the doorstep of his old home, his arms hugging
his knees, leaning against the railings, knowing that something inside was curling up and dying.

Yet in the midst of all his misery, Harry knew there was more dying to be done, and he also knew that how much of it, and who, might just be down to him. Some would die, of that he was sure, yet
some lives might be saved, important lives. What could be more important than that? But who would save his unborn child? Sure, Queen and country needed him, and so did that tiny, unnamed being
growing inside his wife. Harry had so much experience of life, yet so little knowledge of family, and perhaps that was why he’d made such a mess of things. Being a novice didn’t stop
him wanting to try.

9.03 p.m.

Delta Force. The winged avengers. America’s equivalent of the SAS. And from its temporary base in Ramstein in Germany where it was training with elite troops of other NATO
nations, the A squadron of Delta Force was on the move.

Its pedigree didn’t stretch back as far as the SAS. Too short on experience, too long on hair and too big on balls, that’s what their British counterparts said. Delta men suited
themselves – quite literally, dressing in whatever took their fancy. They also chose what weapons to carry and which tactics to employ. You were as likely to meet a Delta man with a
week’s growth of beard kitted out in hockey helmet and hiking boots as you were to discover a politician offering an excuse. Delta was different, unorthodox, and had often made a name for
itself for all the wrong reasons. Their first major engagement had been in 1980 when they had attempted to spring the American embassy hostages being held in Teheran. Operation Eagle Claw, it was
called, and it turned into a fiasco. Eight US servicemen were killed without Delta Force ever engaging the enemy. They also left behind a long list of CIA contacts operating in the country. Total
fuck-ups didn’t come any bigger than that. For an organisation that was supposed to operate in the shadows it was a humiliation almost beyond redemption, its failure illuminated for the
entire world by the burning wreckage of US helicopters scattered across the Iranian desert. The reputation of Delta Force never fully recovered. After that, its successes would be recounted in
whispers while its failures were turned into disaster movies. That was the price of leading with an unshaven chin.

And now they were heading for Britain.

Tricia was still at the Cabinet table. The room was dressed in shadows; she sat in a pool of light cast by a solitary table lamp, with Robert Paine’s words still ringing
in her ears, drowning out her attempts to concentrate. It wasn’t that she had personally approved the financial and educational support given to Masood, any more than she’d overseen the
security arrangements for the State Opening, but it was her backside on the seat and her signature at the bottom of the paper. About the only certainty she could find in this onrushing disaster was
that afterwards there would be a hunt for scapegoats which would show no mercy. The media would dress in robes that would do credit to the Inquisition and demand that someone be hauled to the
scaffold as an example of public retribution so terrifying that it would ensure such negligence would never again be tolerated. And there was no denying it, her neck fitted neatly into the
noose.

She shivered. It was cold in here, in Downing Street – or was it merely her hormones playing up again? She remembered Margaret Thatcher once saying that she didn’t have time for the
menopause, she just got on with things. Tricia Willcocks insisted she was built of similarly stern stuff but, dammit, she was freezing. And so alone. It amazed her she could be sitting here at the
very centre of power and yet feel so isolated. They were shunning her, the civil servants, the advisers, the lackeys, the short-dicks who were so eager to share in the spoils and so adept at
distancing themselves from disaster. She was left with nothing but the mute insolence of the television screen flickering in the corner. These bloody men – oh, she’d played them all her
life, taking advantage of their insensitivity, their inflexibility, their insatiable egos, even their lusts, ridden them like horses to the whip, and now they were waiting to exact their revenge.
Even Colin. She couldn’t prove it, not yet, but her instinct told her he was having an affair, in some tart’s arms right now, this evening, even while she faced disaster. She
didn’t mind so terribly about his infidelity; after all, she’d scarcely been a spectacular example of devotion herself, but these things always had a habit of ending in a fight and she
wasn’t in much of a position to take him on right now, not as she had with her previous husbands. Colin was a lawyer, a particularly successful one, with friends in all sorts of low places,
and she was a public figure with so much to lose. Once they had hanged her for incompetence he would take delight in burning what was left of the carcass if it reached a fight in the divorce
courts. And she wasn’t as young or as attractive as she once was. It wasn’t just the circulation, it was the moods and the fading hair and the sense that her life was changing. She
might not be able to rebuild it. Suddenly the ghosts of all forsaken women were whispering in her ear, insinuating, mocking, like witches on the heath.