Time of Lies Page 3

  By the time the aircraft reaches the runway, I’ve pieced the story together: Bob Grant has attacked ‘hardworking families’! The leading bunch of clowns farts in the nation’s face! The airport connection wasn’t up to streaming any video, but there’s some live stuff of Bob that the Future Tories are so pant-wettingly happy about, they are pushing it from every hireable server onto every digital device in the British Isles.

  I’m giddy, light-headed, happy beyond belief at the thought that BG’s balloon is about to burst. Don’t even think what this piece of off-white south-east London trash, someone who left school with a knife more times than he ever left with homework, might do with Britain’s 160 hydrogen bombs if he got his sticky mitts on them. If I know my Bob, he’d set one off just to prove that he had the balls to do it.

  In the early micro-seconds of a hydrogen bomb explosion – at Big Bang diddley squat, so to speak – there is the briefest of races. The first child of the explosion is a hole in the sky and an ascending chandelier of air-on-fire. But for a moment, the light from hell fluctuates as the second child of the explosion, a shock wave of exploding energy, overtakes the first.

  There’s another race which has been going on rather longer. Bob and I haven’t spoken for more than twelve years. His shaved head is a bullet-proof reason for my curls. He is the second wave to my first. Born fourteen months after me, he overtook me a long, long time ago. Bob Grant is my younger brother, and I loathe him.

  5

  London, Monday 20 April 2020

  From March until December Kathy’s morning commute took her across the Thames on foot. She used the footbridge from Waterloo to Charing Cross. The upstream crossing gave her a view of the Houses of Parliament half a mile away. Her own workplace with the flags of the three armed services was closer still.

  To be honest, the Ministry of Defence Main Building was a mausoleum. When Kathy had joined the Navy the idea that one day she would work here would have been ridiculous. Twice she had been runner-up for a fleet navigation prize, but navigation was about real things precisely observed; keeping her head above water in a stagnant sea of words was something else. She had expected to hate her present job, and some days she did; but choosing to walk to work in a way which put the Main Building’s stone squatness in the centre of her view hinted differently.

  As private secretary to Patrick Smath, Kathy’s job was to make the permanent civilian head of the Ministry of Defence look good. ‘Permanent’ – he wasn’t a here today, gone tomorrow politician. Smooth-faced graduates from Oxford and Cambridge lusted after roles like hers where reputations could be polished and noticed. They also told each other that Patrick liked a bit of uniformed skirt on the side.

  At one level the job was that of a glorified PA and bag-carrier. She scanned the great man’s in-box, dispatching anything which didn’t need his attention and summarising what did. She was the hamburger-helper making Patrick go further. Kathy gave instructions to deliver what Patrick would want before he knew himself; he bounced ideas off her; and she wrote half of the ‘personal’ notes he sent to his political masters, his opposite numbers in other departments and the military top brass. If a shiny twenty-five-year-old graduate had got the job, they would have humble-bragged about it seven days a week.

  But Kathy didn’t humble-brag. What inspired her was working hard, having a respected role within a worthwhile team and doing something for her country.

  On this Monday morning Kathy’s river panorama was disturbed by a piece of democracy in action. Labour 4 You had moored a barge with a giant screen in front of the Houses of Parliament. The floating display worked its way through photographs of the party’s forty-six Parliamentary candidates in their constituencies with a dynamic graphic of the party’s strap-line: ‘Britain 4.0’. Labour 4 You was relentlessly future-focused. 4.0 meant The-Third-Way-But-Better. Surveying the wreckage left by Corbyn, how selflessly Lord Mandelson had accepted the call of history to resign his peerage and stand for prime minister.

  For Labour’s larger rump, LKGB (Labour for a Kinder, Gentler Britain), the future was simply that part of the past which hadn’t ossified yet. To them Britain 4.0 was the mark of Beelzebub, yet another sneer at the clause in the party’s historic constitution on which Blair had smeared the faeces of ‘the many, not the few’. Since hardly any voters remembered what clause four had been, Corbyn had attack dogs who pointed out that 4.0 predicted well Labour 4 You’s likely number of seats in the new Parliament.

  Electoral meltdown was the dish of the day being served up in the dining rooms of all the older parties, including the United Kingdom Independence Party. UKIP’s electricity had been stolen by BG and wired up to organisational discipline and youth appeal. What was left resembled a night out in a golf club for time-share salesmen.

  ***

  Kathy’s office block, the Kafka Central of British bureaucracy, was an eight-storey stone toaster with three pop-up slots: slightly larger slices of architectural toast towards the north (Horse Guards Avenue, where Kathy entered); slightly smaller towards the south. Here the main government drag was defended from the river and all other imaginable enemies by committees of the greatest sophistication. For example, if the Thames flooded, Whitehall would function unperturbed – it hoped – thanks to untiring ant-teams within this building such as WTF-WTF-WTF, whose report was now on Patrick’s desk. The Ministry of Defence bred acronyms like a mangrove swamp.

  In fact, the report was on Kathy’s desk. She had to figure out whether any of the thirty thousand words (maps and tables not included) produced by WTF3 – the Whitehall Task Force Weather Threat Forecast sub-group on Wide Thames Flooding – deserved her master’s attention.

  Appropriately, the Main Building’s construction had been delayed by two world wars. The anthill had arrived in the 1950s, built to designs already forty years old. Since then its journey in public esteem had been downwards.

  Fifteen years ago modernisation had arrived. Private finance had eviscerated four miles of corridors and enclosed offices while leaving the squat façade intact. Blairism went beyond impregnating taxpayers with debt, it impregnated public servants with new minds. Now the destruction of Britain’s enemies was planned by Kathy and her three thousand colleagues using the same pastel sofas, open-plan areas, Post-It notes and designer chairs as those on which Marks & Spencer planned Britain’s lingerie.

  Frankly, a lingerie team could have made better use of the pair of gargantuan stone breasts visible from Kathy’s window. Two giant nudes, reclining on three-storey plinths, had been commissioned to watch the Ministry’s entrance. Any good reason for this had been lost in the 1950s along with hat-wearing. The breasts now did what they could to repel those terrorists with strict dress codes.

  Kathy’s phone emitted two green flashes. She passed the message to Patrick. ‘The deputy secretary of state wants us now, not this afternoon.’

  Patrick Smath swung his legs off the desk. Lanky and energetic, Patrick had eyes the colour of aluminium, cirrus eyebrows and the hair of a celebrity scientist. ‘I thought he was supposed to be at the dentist?’

  ‘Indeed, sir.’ The day she had asked Patrick how often he wanted to be ‘sirred’, the answer had come back in a flash. ‘Sparingly. Unobtrusively. Attentively. Like ground pepper in a classy restaurant.’

  Kathy followed Patrick into the ministerial zone, carrying four copies of the classified slide pack the minister wanted. After the first week she had settled on Navy 3A rig in the office: around politicians she felt more comfortable in a white shirt, black tie and lieutenant-commander’s shoulder slides. In this building her rank was no great shakes but it reminded some politicians to give her the protections of the Geneva Convention.

  Deputy Secretary of State for Defence Roger Hartington had a ministerial office with a desk, a meeting table and parallel sofas. ‘Deputy secretary of state’ was a self-invented fiction, but so what? None of his ministerial colleague
s (his boss included) had felt contesting it would be worth the resulting personal gossip leaked to the media. Hartington was rumoured, not least by Hartington, to head the promotion list for Cabinet in the unlikely event that the Future Conservatives came top in the electoral slugfest.

  On one sofa arm perched a bird with three ear-rings in his left ear, awaiting carrion – Hartington’s special adviser.

  ‘How was the dentist, Minister?’ enquired Patrick. ‘He left you able to speak?’

  ‘Yes – I am sorry if that disappoints.’ A self-satisfied chuckle escaped Hartington’s blubbery lips. ‘In fact I had to can the dentist – pressing matters, which is why we need to meet now. The security of our country calls. Besides, I find pain is much more blessed to give than to receive.’

  The first ten minutes were taken up with a skirmish about the Polish defence minister. He wanted television cameras to cover his arrival to view Britannia’s shiny new aircraft-carrier, the Queen Elizabeth. Of course Hartington had put him up to it. The real objective was election news coverage for Hartington himself welcoming the visitor on board the Royal Navy’s flagship. BG were hammering the Future Tories on re-armament. Still, the Poles were reputed to be about to order three River class patrol boats which would be built on the Clyde.

  The protagonists stared at each other for thirty seconds before Patrick acquiesced. ‘I will authorise the visit, subject to the approval of the Cabinet Secretary. You and the Polish minister will have vetted, non-political scripts. Stick to them, or no broadcasting.’

  ‘Good,’ said Hartington. ‘Now talk to me about drones. We keep hearing rumours that BG have got hundreds of the things. You’ve been fobbing me off for weeks.’

  The special adviser looked up. ‘You’ve been obstructing the minister.’

  ‘Bollocks! Far from obstructing, I asked my private secretary Kathy McGinnis to prepare the report personally. She has now done so.’

  ***

  Kathy handed over her slides. There were two parts – first the story, then the numbers.

  Drone policy was a mess and enforcement was worse. Enthusiasts could and did pepper the sky with hundreds of mechanical gnats, giving the middle finger to the Civil Aviation Authority’s rules. Public bureaucracy had not ignored this insult – on the contrary, several drone-related versions of What The Fuck 3 had sprung into life. The costs and benefits of different drone policies had been quantified, business cases had been made, the ‘drone community’ and other stakeholders consulted and regulations drafted by the yard. These regulations could be deployed the minute someone actually took a decision on what was to be achieved (finessing her words was not Kathy’s style). The special adviser scowled, but she thought Hartington smiled.

  The draft regulations ranged from aero-device registration and the fitting of identification devices and lights to pilot licensing, insurance, public liability, taxes and recycling, as well as powers of interdiction in instances of aerial emergency. Fine legal words had been crafted by artisans; but they were also words prepared in just one country. While Brexit meant Britain no longer needed to wait for Europe, drone costs could not come down until different countries had got their act together. In other words, drones were an entirely typical international policy snafu – situation normal, all fucked up.

  Two forces had the potential to break this logjam, Kathy noted, although neither had yet done so. A tragic accident involving a commercial airliner; despite some enthusiastic attempts this had not yet happened. Or the ravenous desire of a handful of global companies with cash-heavy balance sheets and recurrent technological wet dreams. Who would be the first and biggest to have drones delivering to your garden, collecting from your balcony, watching your home in Spain or your kids walking home from school…or perhaps your partner leaving the office…

  The net result: the British authorities hadn’t a clue about ‘nerd drones’ – one-offs bought off the shelf at Maplins by males who would have been better employed inserting their rechargeable batteries into vacuum cleaners. Manufacturers’ records suggested that there could be tens of thousands of them, but most had an endurance of 20 minutes or less. One study suggested fewer than eight per cent remained flyable six months after purchase.

  However, intelligence about commercial fleets was another matter. With drone law in such a mess, companies and other large organisations were terrified of legal risks. Fewer than fifty drones flown by large organisations were licensed to enter built up areas.

  Hartington’s spine had been straightening as Kathy spoke. Now, at last, to the heart of the matter. By definition, this figure included any BG drones. Kathy pointed out that none of the claimed sightings of BG drones had survived close investigation. It suited BG to spew futuristic techno-babble about flying black triangles with silent electrostatic propulsion, solar cell longevity and extended dwell times. But frankly? BG’s drones had as much evidential backup as the rest of BG’s claims, which was none. The proliferation of black triangles with sides one metre long in the background of individual YouTube clips was pure games-playing piss.

  The minister was delighted to hear it. Even before she had finished, Kathy could see his attack dog turning his mind to how this assessment could be leaked to the media – which was why she had hand-delivered her slides in hard copy only, and now stood to take the copies back. Patrick beamed.

  Kathy thought her work was done but Hartington had something unexpected up his sleeve. ‘I’d like to detain Lieutenant-Commander McGinnis on a personal matter,’ he explained, showing the other two the door. The adviser’s eyes narrowed. Patrick’s did the opposite. Kathy’s cheeks went pale and stiffened like a starched shirt.

  6

  London, Monday 20 April 2020 (2)

  Kathy promised Hartington not to say anything but she spilled the beans straight away to Patrick when Terence drove them to the Athenaeum – the first time Patrick had taken Kathy to his club. Embarrassingly for the Cabinet-ready Future Tory, Hartington’s sixteen-year-old by his first wife had joined BG’s youth wing – the Vigilance.

  ‘Now it makes sense,’ said Patrick. Hartington had wanted to talk to Kathy because she knew about drones.

  Hartington had shown Kathy a photo-booth shot of his son. His hair was gelled but off the collar. His sweater was immediately recognisable, the black crew neck with a red and white lion at the top of each arm. Out of shot Andrew would have been wearing a red belt, black jeans and black trainers or boots. The Vigilance accepted members from fifteen.

  Every high street now featured a former charity shop with blacked-out windows, computer screens and a couple of older members on ‘guard duty’. The movement had been extraordinarily successful, reaching 50,000 members, mostly, but not entirely, young men, in less than nine months. The pull was earning pocket money learning to remote fly drones in practice sites in Nevada. Unlimited square miles of nowhere to crash in and dawn arriving just after lunch, British time, made the Vigilance an adolescent paradise.

  Hartington’s ex had become worried. ‘Andrew has spent most weekends with the Vigilance over the past six months,’ Hartington explained. ‘He’s been promoted to lead a section. They’re training for a big event. That’s what made his mother get in touch. She’d prefer it if Andrew was outdoors more, and she doesn’t see much of his friends. But they’re safe, they’re under supervision, they don’t have wild parties. The thing is, Andrew’s started cutting school. You’re in charge of the country, my ex says. What are the Vigilance really doing?’

  ‘What did you tell him?’ Patrick asked.

  ‘That it’s got bugger all to do with daylight hours. It just looks like square miles of nowhere because that’s cheap as chips for the geeks to make on computer screens. It’s not flying, just gaming, but BG have thrown a really clever wrap around it. Their blacked-out stores are the old internet cafés done up differently.’

  ‘It’s a smart wrap.’

  There was s
ilence for a minute. Kathy changed the subject. ‘At least you’re shot of the lawyers.’

  ‘Amen and hallelujah.’ Patrick had been going through a divorce. He had spared Kathy the details, but for three months legal telephone conferences had sprouted in his diary like tumours – blink and there was another. He always emerged from them in a foul mood.

  Terence dropped them ten minutes’ walk from Buckingham Palace and St James’s Park, beneath the gold statue of Athena. ‘Taking her to celebrate the decree absolute,’ was the gossip shared between those envious of Kathy’s job. That thought never entered Kathy’s mind. Her job was to focus on what was occupying Patrick’s mind, which was as clear as a supertanker bearing down on a dinghy in the middle of the Channel: deep alarm about the General Election. And if he was snogging anyone, Kathy imagined that she would be some kind of film starlet with a sideline in rocket science. If she existed, Patrick had been smart enough to keep her name out of the media as well as out of his official diary.

  The Athenaeum was like an ornamental pond full of Establishment carp: a meticulously regulated environment for breeding the British ruling class. Kathy had no clue what to expect, beyond something posh. Perhaps a pageboy would rush forward. That was her experience of the luxury hotel near her workplace – the Corinthia. The Corinthia and the Athenaeum sounded like peas in a pod.

  Despite admitting women members since 2002, to enter the club’s swing doors with confidence required something which Kathy did not possess. She had not gone to any of the relevant schools, unlike Patrick who was a Jesus man (Jesus was his Cambridge college). In these schools the keys to an elevated kind of Britishness hung on racks – racks which had had names on them for centuries. If you attended one of these establishments, becoming either famous or grateful was obligatory. Both was nice.

  Inside there was no rushing forward; there was no rushing at all. Members crossed the marble floor of the pillared hall to hang their own coats and those of their guests. In most places Kathy felt secure in her ‘middleness’ – not old, but not a pipsqueak; not beautiful, but equally not ugly; no clever-clogs but far from stupid. Yet in the Athenaeum ordinariness felt risky. Her naval uniform remained her trusty shield, but had she missed a small ladder in her tights? Might gauche averageness leak out and stain the red ochre mosaic?