Whispers of Betrayal (19 page)

When first they had gathered, they had done so as a matter of honour. Now the conspirators met in a mood of anger. Anger becomes conspiracy, and they now knew that
conspirators
were what they were. Earwick had left them in no doubt of the fact during his statement to the House.

‘A conspiracy not just against the elected government,’ he had thundered, ‘but against the people, and our capital city.
A conspiracy against democracy itself
.’

The time of mischief when they had worn toy helmets and played games with the Bendalls’ loo seemed to be from another age.

Earwick had attacked. He had abused.

‘These are not people of principle but parasites, Mr Speaker. Men of malice. Nothing less than wreckers …’

Earwick had distorted.

‘… whose objective is to inflict misery and chaos upon thousands of innocent Londoners.’

He had gone on to belittle them.

‘We are dealing here with a conspiracy of spite … extremists whose overriding objective is as simple as it is selfish – to create chaos and confusion. Bully boys who target the innocent for their own narrow ends.’

Then he had impugned their honour.

‘These are extremists, nothing less. They may claim to be working in the public interest but, in truth, they are working in no one’s interest other than their own …’

And finally he had threatened.

‘Lawlessness cannot be allowed to rule our streets, Mr Speaker. Lives are at risk in these attacks. By polluting our water supplies, by disrupting emergency services – our ambulances and our firemen, not to mention the police – they attack the people themselves. And so I feel entitled, indeed duty bound, to use every means at our disposal to protect the public and prevent further outrages. While the House will understand if I do not give full details of the security measures I am implementing, let me give the assurance that they will be rigorous and comprehensive …’

The threat was left vague, but vivid. There were mad dogs roaming the capital. The implication was clear. Like mad dogs, they would have to be put down.

‘Seems we may have upset Mr Earwick. Pity. Such a nice man.’

‘A true gentleman.’

‘Ferret turd, more like.’

‘Upgraded security everywhere.’

‘You’re right. All too bloody obvious. Trafalgar Square. The Circus. Outside Parliament and at Hyde Park Corner. All over the shop. Mr Earwick seems not to trust us.’

‘They were checking the rubbish bins every twenty minutes outside Harrods. Dammit all, they think we’re fucking bombers.’

‘I
am
a fucking bomber,’ McKenzie insisted.

‘Then we are done for!’

Half jest, half in deadly earnest.

‘So what do we do? It’s sort of a point of no return. Could get messy from here on in. Anybody want out?’

Amadeus had to pose the question. The matter had changed, grown beyond what any of them had envisaged. No longer could this be a simple matter of apology; Earwick had made that abundantly clear. It had become a battle of wills, of implacable positions and inflexible egos. War is never simply an affair of violence but of achieving a set of objectives, and now those objectives had shifted. Bendall wouldn’t change, so … So he had to be changed. Overwhelmed. Forced to climb down in the face of adversity, before they themselves were caught and overwhelmed. It was one or the other. The risks, of course, were mighty, but in a matter of honour the burden of doing nothing far outweighed the perils of failure.

The others also understood this. They had been naïve to believe there could be any sort of victory through simply muddying the Prime Ministerial waters, but this was a very different kind of foe from any they had previously fought. Yet in facing adversity, each of them had found opportunity.

For Scully it was the opportunity to rebuild himself and, in his different way, for Payne to rebuild himself too, and renew his fortunes. They barely considered the risks. Amadeus had given them both something to cling to, and drowning men don’t ask too many questions.

McKenzie saw it as a matter of principle. Bendall was both preacher and poacher and McKenzie, as a Highlander, had been bred to distrust both. He thought Bendall the worst of his kind, a man who would sacrifice any principle or position for his own advantage. That made him no different from any of the petty warlords who had scattered land mines and left a trail of shattered lives across so many innocent communities. In McKenzie’s eyes, it scarcely mattered that Bendall hadn’t started any wars; he hadn’t done a damned thing to prevent any either. He’d even slashed the British contribution to the land-mine clearance programme in Cambodia. Typically, the cut had been announced by means of a Written Answer put out on a Friday in late July, as if it were just some other parliamentary game. That same day the Scot had watched a seven-year-old girl and her small brother walk hand-in-hand into a rice field near Kompong. They were searching for butterflies. After the explosion he’d found himself
covered in UFCs. Unidentifiable Fragments of Child.

Mary’s motivations were both simpler and yet immensely more complicated. For her, this wasn’t just a battle against Bendall but against all those men throughout her life who had stripped her of everything – her childhood, her hopes, her career, her value as a woman. Bendall symbolized that bloody male arrogance that had torn her life to shreds time and again. Now she had the chance to fight back. It involved risk, of course, but there was always a price to pay, and it was nothing compared to the price she had paid repeatedly at the hands of people like Bendall. And Gittings. Both of whom were now so close at hand, and so vulnerable. When she thought of Gittings, the question of giving up never entered her head.

Amadeus’s question hung in the air. Mary was the first to respond.

‘What, throw in my hand and go back to mastitis and mud?’

‘And just when I was beginning to ha’ fun? Hell, no.’

‘You too, Skulls?’

The RSM seemed to stretch his battered body, to grow taller. He was standing on one foot, his right boot no longer touching the ground. ‘When the other bastard starts to squeal, usually means you got ‘im by the balls. Not the time to stop squeezing, if you ask me.’

Payne was nodding in agreement.

‘Which seems to leave us with only one wee question.’

‘What’s that, Andy?’

‘Where do we squeeze ’em next?’

For the next two and a half hours, over burgers and beer, Amadeus explained in meticulous and carefully prepared detail how they were going to make Bendall squirm, then scream, then cough up his guts.

And how, by and by, they were going to bring themselves to the edge of disaster.

Goodfellowe had slept fitfully and risen with a nervous stomach. The full English breakfast he had prescribed for himself at Mr Chou’s hadn’t helped, either. It blew his diet, made him flatulent and only increased his feeling of unease. Anyway, his old friend Chou, a near-neighbour on Gerrard Street, couldn’t cook a full English to save his last remaining gold tooth. How on earth did he scramble eggs so that they actually bounced, not only off the plate but inside the stomach? Goodfellowe knew from the first mouthful that it was an awful idea but all the while Chou had stood over him, beaming and hopping from foot to foot like a nervous parent, forcing Goodfellowe to eat out of politeness. And to suffer.

Yet as the day grew older, Goodfellowe began to realize that his problems weren’t dietary. By late afternoon he found himself in the Chamber, occupying a place at the far end from the Speaker’s Chair and on the very highest bench, which gave him a view over the entire leather-shod assembly. For all its faults it was to him still a fine place, a place of beauty and awesome history, at times a place of wisdom yet at other moments a place of masterly confusion and indecision, stalked by ghosts and by greatness and by fools. To be part of this place had always been his dream, but as he watched the proceedings he began to realize that it wasn’t enough.

For what was gripping him inside was not indigestion but ambition. The Chief Whip’s words had kept returning to him, that one day, this Chamber could be
his
Chamber.

It was a reckless desire, of course, but not impossible. All Prime Ministers are ultimately put to the sword, and what would happen when the mob came to kick down Bendall’s door? What if … What
if
it came down to a choice between him and, say, Earwick and Vertue?
Il Buono, il Brutto, il Cattivo
. To stand any chance in
such a contest would require commitment and endless endeavour, not all of it wholesome. Spending more time around the corridors and in the well-polished corners, embracing lobby correspondents, gossiping, whispering in their ears, following the whisper with his tongue. Ugly business, but you couldn’t work your way to the top by leaving the place strewn with virgins.

The bike would have to go, of course. Yet on second thoughts he might be able to make the bike a selling point. Not so much a rusting piece of scrap as a symbol of sincerity and independence. Like Harold Wilson’s pipe, or Ronald Reagan’s jelly beans. The Pedalling Premier! Trouble was, all his grand visions of sincerity and independence were contradicted by what was taking place in the Chamber directly in front of him. Earwick was posturing at the Despatch Box like a brawler propping up the bar, throwing threats in every direction. So what if the Prime Minister had been made to look ridiculous? That’s what politics were about, but Earwick was making it sound like the onset of the French Revolution. Goodfellowe couldn’t shake from his mind the thought that the whole thing was faintly absurd.

In the quieter corners of Westminster he found others who, out of earshot of the Whips, admitted to having enjoyed the spectacle of Bendall drowning in front of the Surf Summit cameras, who thought that those responsible deserved not so much a guillotine as an award for comic entertainment. Sure, they had stuffed up the centre of London, but so had the Mayor and the Minister for Transport on a daily basis. Was Earwick going to throw them in a tumbrel, too? There was fine sport to be had in mocking Earwick – but for the moment the sport was pursued only gently, for Earwick was Today’s Man. Best not call his bluff, they argued. Wait until tomorrow.

A drowning Prime Minister. A Home Secretary who was one wheel short of an undercarriage. This was the team Goodfellowe had signed up with. No wonder he felt such a sense of unease.

He tried to work it out during the hour he spent in the Tea Room, but couldn’t. So he followed that with a serious session out on the Terrace and a button-straining dinner in the Members’ Dining Room, after which there was yet another session on the Terrace before the final vote.

It was at this point he began to realize there was a fundamental
flaw in his plans to claim his place in the history books as the Pedalling Prime Minister. For no matter how hard he struggled and concentrated and swore, he found it was impossible for him to ride his bloody bike. Not when he was completely legless.

‘We could always wait for one who’s grown up. More your age, perhaps.’

‘Do something useful for a change, Freddie. Turn into a lamppost or get in another round.’

Mary rocked back on her uneven stool and squirmed. She didn’t like this place, the Ring o’ Bells, a smoke-and-soiled-varnish pub that was hidden down a little passage off Camden High Street. It had nothing to recommend it, other than the location. Even the beer was foul. It had too much head and tasted of Rotherhithe, and reminded Mary of her father. For almost an hour she’d been sitting at a sticky-topped table, exchanging stilted conversation with Payne, and waiting – for what, she wasn’t entirely sure, but as it drew closer to six their patience was rewarded. The pub had begun to fill with drinkers, a good number of whom were employees from the Telecoms Technical and Engineering Centre located less than a hundred yards down the road. They worked in an environment designed for computers with air conditioning that was bone dry, which all helped build up a scorching thirst by the end of the day. The Ring o’ Bells was the nearest watering hole.

She watched the young man for twenty minutes. He seemed a likely prospect. His conversation identified him as a Telecoms software engineer, while his bright yellow socks featuring Butt-Head on one ankle and Beavis on the other suggested the lack of any woman in his life.

‘Christ, he’s even got an anorak,’ Payne sniggered.

‘Be a good boy and go play with yourself, Freddie,’ she whispered, rising to her feet.

Anorak Man had gone to the bar to refill his glass and she squeezed in beside him, close enough to demand his attention and for him to feel her presence through the sleeve of his jacket. Startled, he turned, and his eyes began to flicker in embarrassment, dancing across her chest like a ride of the Valkyries until, with
an act of willpower that made his jaw crack, at last he found her face.

‘Hi,’ he croaked while his mind raced through any number of memory banks in search of something appropriate to say. ‘Er, can I buy you a drink?’

‘I was just getting one in for my friend.’

‘Oh, sorry,’ he apologized, diving into his glass as if an Old Bailey jury had just pronounced him guilty of multiple molestation.

‘No problem,’ Mary reassured. She paused before adding: ‘He’s going in a minute.’

Anorak Man brightened, sensing a reprieve.

‘You could always buy me a drink when he’s gone …’

Ten minutes later they were sitting side by side, elbows propped on the sticky-top table, within twenty they were into the world of geeks and gigabytes, and it took only another couple of pints before he was laying in front of her all the wondrous possibilities of cyber communities and 3-D graphic accelerators. Mary had been fortunate in her choice. Anorak Man turned out to be Roy, whose fascination with computer programming was matched only by his passion for science fiction films and photography. A creature, if not of the night, then certainly of many darkened rooms – and of Chingford, where he had a modest flat to which she was soon invited after expressing an innocent interest in learning how to go active on the Internet.

Payne was waiting for them outside the pub as they left. He’d spent three tours tracking active service units through the rat runs of Ulster. He smiled. Following a flapping anorak was going to be as simple as sin.

Above all else, Elizabeth was a practical woman. She had sat all afternoon and well into the evening in her small and windowless office at The Kremlin, waiting for an asteroid to strike and relieve her of any responsibility for sorting out her problems, but after the sun had set and the sky turned to darkness there was still no sign of any ball of fire hurtling from the heavens, so she had done what any practical woman would do in the circumstances.

She panicked.

Ignoring the fact that the restaurant had less than a fifty per cent
cover that evening – and what did a few hundred pounds matter when she was in the steam bath for tens of thousands? – she opened a bottle of Irish Cream and got drunk.

She hated Irish Cream, that sickeningly sweet confection of coffee and Irish alcoholic ineptitude, but in the first place she simply wanted to get drunk and in the second, she felt she needed a little punishment. Punishment for the past and the present, and perhaps for what she might yet do. She also drank it because it cheered her up – an inconsistent attitude, perhaps, but why should a practical woman bother with consistency? The Irish Cream cheered her because it reminded her of a time when she was younger and had a refined taste for adventure, and of an evening spent in the company of a hotel mini-bar liberally stocked with the stuff. There had also been a young companion. Couldn’t remember his name, but it was never going to be a long-term relationship, not with a teenage backpacker from Palo Alto.

Nor, it appeared, with Vladimir Houdoliy.

There was some small consolation in the fact that at least the uncertainty had been stripped away. She had at last heard from Vladimir that morning, not directly but
via
the People’s Bank of Odessa. A Mr V. Voroshilov of the bank’s legal department had written on paper so thin it was almost transparent to inform her that she could have neither the wine nor her money. The ownership of the wine, it seemed, was the subject of a vigorous dispute between Mr Houdoliy, the local community council for the city of Odessa (who regarded the wine as some sort of treasure trove) and the administrator of the health board (who had run the palace as a mental home for more than two decades). So convoluted had the wrangle become that there was even talk of an elderly Romanov putting in a claim on the basis that the bottles with the double-headed eagle had undoubtedly been stolen from the Tsar’s personal cellars at Massandra.

Since ownership of the wine was in question, it could not be released. Moreover, since her money had been deposited in legal payment for the wine, that could not be released either, until the Ukrainian justice system had decided who was the legitimate owner of the wine, and who was due the money. Mr Voroshilov regretted, but she would understand that the bank’s hands were tied, and since
the dispute covered property rights that went back into the mists of time, he could give no indication as to how long the legal fog might take to dissipate. Indeed, he could give nothing but his most sincere regrets.

‘May your mistress be diseased and your wife forever vengeful, Mr Voroshilov,’ she mumbled, raising her glass in toast.

It made her feel a little better, the cursing and the bottle, but it still didn’t wipe away the fact that she was now the dollar equivalent of seventy thousand pounds in a hole.

So what was a practical girl to do? She’d already done the panicking bit and was now bored with the indulgence. She didn’t do tears and smashing of fragile china, not without an audience at least. Which left only friends. A Rolodex of names and telephone numbers stood on her desk, a brief history of her entire time. The contacts, entanglements and adventures of her adult life, the good and also the bad. Once she had kept shoeboxes full of mementoes – letters, cards, trinkets, the menu of an enchanting dinner or the keepsake of an enchanted night. An odd cufflink. A pressed rose. Memories that were tied up in her boxes and under her control, to be brought out and relished, then locked away before they could cause any complications – until her sad, insecure husband had found them and, in a hail of accusation during one of their final tumultuous rows, had burned the lot. But not the Rolodex and its contact numbers. Almost casually she flicked her way through, turning it in the manner of a lottery wheel, dancing from one memory to another and relying on fortune to dictate what number might come up next.

Suddenly it had stopped and was screaming at her. A name from the past.
That
name. A name that could make light of her current problems with one swish of his Mont Blanc pen. Oh, but a name that would undoubtedly make for new problems. A business proposition, that’s all it would be, she argued with herself. So what if it entailed taking a few risks? Her whole life was at stake and it’s what any practical woman would do.

Then she thought about the risks and argued with herself some more. It took another glass of Irish Cream before she was finally convinced. Only then did she pick up the phone.

The apartment in Chingford was pretty much as Mary had expected, untainted by any trace of feminine influence. Abandoned laundry had spread across the furniture like a rainforest intent on reclaiming lost lands. The spider plant propped on the windowsill had already shrivelled in fright.

Geek City.

But twenty-three-year-old kids weren’t notoriously tidy – for twenty-three years was what Roy admitted to being, and a kid is what Mary (at some damage to her own sense of eternal youth) regarded him as. He had a self-deprecating sense of humour and, beneath the anorak and unironed T-shirt, a lean and muscular body. There were weights lurking in a corner, running shoes by the door. He scurried around clearing up cereal bowls and magazines. Soon she could hear him scrabbling in his bathroom cabinet. He emerged reeking of aftershave.

She couldn’t resist a wry smile of amusement. He made her feel almost matronly.

‘Used too much, haven’t I?’ he confessed, melting a little in misery. He proceeded to cover his confusion by rushing round the room and removing several drying shirts from the backs of chairs. ‘Bet you wouldn’t know it, but I’m not used to bringing women back here.’