Time of Lies Page 15

  That weekend Jules is definitely the worse for wear – who wouldn’t be? – so he gets caught. The gaffer’s having no dealing, least of all from someone who isn’t able to pay the fees, so it’s straight on the phone to the Old Bill. There’s no posh parent to bail him out. He sends me a text message: waiting to be nicked, ha ha what crap, don’t forget the shower tray needs a good clean.

  Jack’s not the sharpest tool in the box but he gets there. ‘Jules just asked you to clean out his stash. He didn’t say anything about burgling the boat.’

  I shrug. ‘I’ve been living on the boat. Do I fancy being done as his accomplice?’

  ‘Instead you’re going to report being burgled.’

  ‘Yeah. In an hour or so, when I get back. Like any good citizen. We’re sweet – we were at the pictures.’

  ‘Did you put the shower tray back?’

  ‘No, on account of it being a burglary, not a visit from Keep Britain Tidy.’

  Jack starts pacing around. ‘Like, they’re burglars and they didn’t take your computer.’

  ‘They’re suppliers. Maybe they’re owed money. They knew what they were looking for.’

  ‘You’ve stuffed him, you know? You’re such a shit, I can’t believe I have you for a brother.’

  ‘I’ve learned to look after myself.’

  ‘You never look after anyone else.’

  We have a tussle outside and then stop. ‘Look at yourself!’ I say. ‘You don’t even know who I’m rabbiting on about. Trust me, he’s got suitcases full of pounds looking after him. And talking about looking after ma, what use were you when it came to skag head? Jackshit by name, Jackshit by nature.’

  It turns out badly for Jules. He’s in jail on remand – imagine how FREUDE goes down there. I go see him and tell him it will only be for a few weeks if that. I keep his spirits up with how my trading is doing: with £3,000 to play with from underneath the shower (it was in cash and Es), my results are starting to add up. But Jules is wilting. Liquidators have seized the car – it was on some under-the-counter finance deal his dad had fixed at the bank. The cops didn’t find too much on him, but there were traces in the car. Plus they’re throwing the book at him for driving without insurance.

  The last time I see Jules is in Belmarsh. He tells me, ‘There’s always a way out,’ but his heart is caught in a bear-trap a long way away from the edge of a dark forest. The forest has been growing for a long time.

  The last time we speak he’s ended up at Chelmsford. I ask if it’s a low security prison. He replies, ‘Essex is a low security prison’. I guess it’s his way of saying that there’s nothing for him outside. I say no-one has come for the boat yet, but we know it’s a matter of time. It’s also a matter of time – just a few weeks – for Jules to work out how to get into the art room after hours and hang himself. Put it down as part of the havoc created by his dad.

  Whom you will have spotted was a banker. Traders play the markets with their own money, but bankers use other people’s, losing over a billion dollars of it in Barings’ case. They think the rest of us will never learn. Maybe one day everyone will get the shock of their life and we will.

  27

  London, Friday 22 May 2020

  Dinner at the Shard needed preparation on all sides. Patrick’s timetable included cover for one of his increasing number of off-the-radar meetings. Kathy imagined him stepping into a time warp – rolling up the collar of his tan raincoat, slipping into the public toilets at Charing Cross station to put on a moustache, before trysting at the quiet members’ bar in the Royal Society of the Arts with the leader of the special forces team. But she didn’t know.

  Kathy had left Zack a note about his light grey suit which she had ironed. Zack had been solicitous and hugely apologetic after Kathy’s explosion at Le Bon Vin, mortified by his childish regurgitation of fancy theories about Cairstine’s ‘hallucinations’.

  In the car with Patrick, Kathy scrolled through the news. The bank CEO arrests were still attracting huge volumes of comment, mostly ecstatic: the Metropolitan police had well and truly brought the ‘perp walk’ across the Atlantic. Half an hour ago a trade union leader had vowed that the families of Broughton, ‘man, woman and child’, would lie in the path of any trucks attempting to remove manufacturing equipment.

  ‘Magnificent. And if they win, they make wings for what?’ was Patrick’s response. ‘Policy everywhere is a total fuck-up. Can nobody think any more?’

  ‘The French consul is in Filton announcing plans to build “the best English grammar school” for families who relocate to Toulouse.’

  Zack was standing outside the podium of the Shard having a vape when Terence dropped her and Patrick off at 8.20pm. With the light grey double-breasted he wore a light blue collarless shirt and a bold blue Los Angeles Dodgers baseball cap (to divert attention from his shaved head). The outfit gelled in an improbable way. Kathy felt under-dressed in her officer daywear; Patrick had changed into a striking Italian suit in white and metallic tones. He was the Shard in miniature, elegant, wealthy and ridiculously clean, the suit’s colours matching the glint in his hair and rising to a commanding peak.

  Watching ‘her two men’ together, Kathy knew that Zack was a decent human being through and through. In the last analysis she had no idea whether Patrick was a decent human being. He got within touching distance, but somehow there was always smoke and mirrors.

  Patrick guided them effortlessly through the first course and mains, ordering unusual wines like a gourmet Riesling by the glass. The restaurant was half way up the Shard, so their bread rolls and extra virgin olive oil sat on a level with the top of the Walkie-Talkie. The restaurant’s tables were close together, so their conversation was laced with generous helpings of a dog-walker’s failings in Milwaukee and a pianist daughter’s triumphs in Shanghai.

  Had Patrick made a mistake with the venue? Of course there was the view, but how would he raise a deeply secret proposal in such cramped surroundings? He would have a plan, Kathy didn’t doubt that for a minute. For the time being Patrick seemed content to chew the fat with Zack in a mates-together, TGIF way. They compared notes on Richard Deshaye films, Patrick’s favourite being A Long Afternoon in Paradise. Still, Zack wasn’t going to say yes to what Patrick had in mind simply because the wine cost £25 a glass.

  Their table was on the east side so not positioned for any sunset. However they had an unimpeded view out towards Canary Wharf and Greenwich. Kathy watched the surface of the Thames being dimpled by the passing of party boats. Even at this hour, the railway lines out of London Bridge writhed with maggots – trains with white tops bearing their cargoes of decay into and out of Britain’s big apple.

  At a certain point Patrick glanced at his watch and pushed his seat back. ‘We’re having dessert upstairs.’

  ***

  The transfer to the Shard’s topmost lift, a metalled and mirrored walk-in wardrobe, took place on the thirty-third floor. Patrick and his guests were welcomed by an assistant manager in a purple jacket, but she made no move to ascend with them. Inside the lift were three buttons: 32, 33 and 68. Kathy’s ears popped. The welcome party on level 68 was different – two Metropolitan police officers with bullet-proof vests and machine-pistols. The visitors climbed the stairs to floor 69. Kathy had never been to the viewing decks at the Shard before, but she grasped immediately that no-one else was there: Patrick had booked a private view. The £25 glasses of wine hadn’t been the show; they had simply been the programme on sale in the foyer. Zack gawped.

  Level 69 provided a wooden-planked viewing platform about twenty yards square. Steel struts painted white enclosed the space inside a four-sided prism of sloping glass three storeys high. The clouds rolled lower, oblivious to the Shard’s impertinent attempt to pierce them. After a few minutes, Patrick led his guests up more stairs to the Sky Deck.

  Kathy emerged on level 72 facing north. The Sky D
eck – cool and spattered with rain in places – was still a decent size. Now the Walkie-Talkie was half her altitude. Above her, sloping panes reached beyond lagged pipes to the skyscraper’s broken apex. At each of the four corners, the missing glass let the weather in.

  On a bar in brushed aluminium, complete with cappuccino machine, sat a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket with three glasses. They would be serving themselves. Apart from the armed police four levels down, Patrick, Zack and Kathy were the only ones present.

  Patrick cracked open the champagne. Quietly they toasted their respective demons. ‘May I let both of you into a childhood secret?’ he continued. ‘Ever since I was six I’ve wanted to be in one of those movies where someone is up against the clock and has to save the world.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘So now, Zack, I have fifty-two minutes to do that. To convince you that Britain needs you. Ordinary people need you. Decency, common sense and respect need you. Maybe the world needs you.’

  Kathy watched Zack smile, trying to brush the words off. She knew Zack. Yes, his ego needed stroking, especially with the way his career had been going. But this couldn’t be an appeal to ego (something Patrick could do falling off a log); her boss was having to go out on a limb, to appeal to something he knew much less well – a decent ordinary man.

  ‘Psychologists warned us that Bob is a dangerously unpredictable man. I think you know that better than any of us. He is part of a mindless politics which has weakened every democracy in the world. That mindlessness is dangerous. Ask him how the government will avert any of the many impending disasters? I have. Bob grins and says, “Britain’s Great. End of”.’

  Zack winced. Patrick continued.

  ‘You know you are watching the rule of law being torn up, tweet by tweet, cheeky grin by cheeky grin. But then you read independent journalism – that’s rare now. Too many fellow citizens send each other streams of lies as well as selfies with cats.

  ‘You helped us role-play what might happen to this country’s security if BG were elected. You helped us wake up. But the scenarios we gave you were too tame.

  ‘Let me stick to what I know – defence. In another couple of weeks, the Prince Regent will ride out on his horse and take the salute on Horse Guards Parade. The pageantry, the monarchy, the horse – it’s a ceremony, one piece among many in our national theatre. A theatre in which we prove to ourselves that Britain is always Britain, that our summer weather is always our summer weather, that our country hasn’t changed and that people, beer and walks in the country are safe.

  ‘But a few days before the parade, ten of our generals, admirals and air marshals will retire early, their mouths stuffed shut with gold. The papers have already been signed. A wave of promotions will be announced, a generation of fresh young names, and our first black brigadier. Annabel Wale will announce a new fleet of sea-skimming boats, equipped with missiles and drones, to protect our coasts from drug-dealers, immigrants and fishing boats from France and Spain. It will all be terribly popular, not least in our shipyards. And the government will open a new shipyard in Wales.

  ‘Among those promoted will be a new Chief of the Defence Staff. My uniformed colleagues are certain it will be Hugo Tremayne. Hugo trains every day like an Olympic athlete. His sport is inventing with intuitive brilliance what his bosses want to hear. He has acclaimed General Wale as a genius: creating the Vigilance and putting it alongside the armed forces has solved at a stroke the Army’s inability to recruit reserves.

  ‘I’ve warned Hugo that if he salivates any more over the prospect of additional gold braid, he will qualify for a submariner’s badge. Besides, he and his uniformed brethren have failed to notice another possibility. Integrating the Vigilance as the fourth armed service means that the person who General Wale may put forward to be CDS might be General Wale.

  ‘Why should you care, Zack, about any of these possibilities? Tonight, with the cloud coming down, we can just about see Greenwich. That’s about five miles. So suppose a single hydrogen bomb exploded right where we’re standing. In 1955, fifteen years before I was born, my predecessors did this calculation for a ten-megaton blast.’

  Patrick pointed in a circle. ‘From Buckingham Palace in the west to the Emirates Stadium, to Canary Wharf, to Clapham Common – within the greater part of what we can see, everyone and everything would be completely devastated. In a second, gone. The heat flash could start anything up to 100,000 fires, covering a radius of sixty miles. That’s Oxford, Brighton, Canterbury and Ipswich.

  ‘Now our altitude is quite low, about one thousand feet. The person with their finger on the trigger would have a choice. An air burst, perhaps at five or six times this height, would maximise blast destruction but minimise ground radioactivity. The fireball doesn’t touch the ground and the radioactivity is vomited into the upper atmosphere, coming down who knows when and who knows where. But with a burst at our altitude or lower, central London would become a crater one mile across and three hundred feet deep, while millions of tons of stones and powder and dust would fall in a lethal plume from here to Amsterdam.

  ‘If that is what one hydrogen bomb can do, each of our Vanguard submarines carries forty. A single Trident missile carries nearly a dozen. So now then, what does it take to order a launch in our well-ordered country, with driving on the left, free healthcare, two-for-one-offers and marching bands?

  ‘An order to launch requires the concurrence of two people – the Prime Minister and the CDS. So it is no exaggeration to say that within two weeks from now, not only will your brother’s finger be on the trigger, but the safeguard envisaged by our system of government will be gone. Our constitution is made out of old hopes and sealing wax. The barbarians have come with oxy-acetylene torches.

  ‘Did Kathy tell you, Zack, that when you are admitted into the world of national intelligence, the experts hammer home the difference between secrets and mysteries. I have been telling you secrets: things which can be found out and known, some of which will be public within two weeks. Secrets can leak, but a mystery cannot. A mystery is something which cannot be known until it is too late. Within Bob, does there lurk the capacity, in certain circumstances, to order a first strike – to unleash Armageddon? That is a mystery. I wonder what you think.’

  ***

  One thought in Kathy’s mind soared like the Shard to a place high above other perceptions. It was a sense of bone marrow coldness when she recognised herself as co-author, perhaps even lead author, of what was happening. She felt distant and apart.

  In part the feeling was trivial. Had the event been hers to organise, she would have provided something non-alcoholic to drink in the eagle’s nest. But since Patrick had organised things himself, the only refreshment to hand was Mumm Cordon Rouge and (no surprise here) she was the designated driver. Patrick would offer them a lift, but she and Zack would need to talk.

  Downstairs she had had one glass of the remarkable Riesling. For the rest of the time she had been on water. She was experiencing two separations at the same time. One was the widening gap between herself, standing on the bank of sobriety, and Patrick and Zack, getting increasingly intoxicated with ideas.

  But the other separation Kathy felt within herself. Someone unfamiliar inside her had made a decisive intervention in Zack’s life – frankly, in her country’s life – and set events in motion which could be tough on Cairstine.

  How had Zack taken the flow of words which Patrick had thrown his way? Over dinner, Zack had been ebullient, relishing the flattery of attention wrapped up in camaraderie. When he had arrived at the viewing gallery she had seen him puff up. Then he had stiffened at Patrick’s portrayal of peril and, reading the winces on Zack’s face, he had flinched from memories of the brother he despised. Well Zack, she thought sardonically for a moment, if that’s what it takes to realise your potential – merely that someone asks you to save the world…

  But none of that paid enough attention to why s
he had married him. In truth, the world did not have so many decent, likeable men. He might be under the cosh of his chosen career, smoking and drinking far too much; but Zack was one of those men. That man could say no, possibly should say no, to Patrick’s request.

  Kathy cut in when the discussion turned to what would happen if Zack said yes, but the chance to impersonate his brother never arose. ‘After six months you pay up and move both of us to Canada anyway.’ This was a decision to leave behind the chessmaster’s board as well as her mother. If she was half as good as Patrick thought, the Royal Navy could not be the only place where she could make something of herself.

  The details of safe houses and clean phones and acting lessons (Patrick referred to them as ‘coaching’’ and ‘masterclasses’) bored her, so her mind wandered from them. Leaving Cairstine would be… tough. But possibly healthy. There had to be appropriate provision, of course. She rejoined the conversation when it turned to financials – how much per month in the safe house, how much at the end, what would be provided in Canada. Plus a meritorious exit package for herself from the Navy.

  Patrick’s words had the splendour of the Niagara river, tugging Zack towards events visible only as a cloud of mist in the distance. Suppose that right now, Zack was close to saying ‘Yes’. Yet back at Walsingham Road, the ordinariness (borrowing Alan’s word) of Zack’s life, his surroundings, his ambitions and his career to date would swarm back into his mind like rats up a drainpipe. Those rats could eat memories of the Shard for breakfast. By the time Zack plugged in the kettle in the morning, his answer might be ‘No’.