Exit Day: Brexit; An Assassin Stalks the Prime Minister

by David Laws

  Fischer, however, was no novice pilot. A burst of revs took the Otter bouncing wildly in a new direction.

  Harry swerved towards it, and at the same time headlights came on at the edge of the airfield and the two police Land Rovers raced towards them. The Otter increased revs and switched direction once more. The Land Rovers drove fast, cutting off the quickest route to the airstrip. The Otter cleared the edge of the trees and the peri-track but still required a clear run for take-off. It changed direction once again, trying to outrun the cars, but the plane wasn’t up to it. Three cars versus one old plane. Two boxed it in, side by side, making it impossible to switch direction once again. One pulled ahead while keeping clear of spinning propeller blade. The result was inevitable. Fischer was headed for nowhere – another line of trees. The plane came to a halt. Police were out, ready to smash their way through the door, but already Fischer was seen to abandon the controls. He was up and wrestling with Erika. Legs and bodies writhed and kicked in the confined space next to the pilot’s seat. She’d cornered him before he could leap free. Her arms were high, holding off his gun.

  The door hatch was locked from the inside. Harry, who could clearly see the struggle taking place through the Otter’s wide side windows, was battling furiously with the handle without success. One of the cops was racing for his car to fetch a wrench. Screams and shouts could be heard above the noise of the motor, now reducing to tickover. Erika was kicking and fighting; elbows, knees, feet. Suddenly the gun went off, the explosion within the confines of the cabin clearly heard from outside, but the bullet had not found its mark. The struggle continued. Fischer had her in a neck-hold using one arm, still trying to bring down his gun arm to where it could do more damage. She was biting, clawing, heaving; pinning him painfully against joystick and control panel.

  Suddenly he jerked, stilled and statuesque. Her elbow had found its mark.

  That’s when three beefy members of the Thames Constabulary succeeded in getting inside the aircraft to put an end to his resistance.

  And the boy walked clear of the plane, not saying a word.

  Chapter 56

  2 hours to go

  It was a strange party that arrived back at Chequers that evening. A mix of triumph, relief, defeat and despair. Erika had her son back – but for how long? A few precious moments, perhaps, then the long, demoralising routine of prison visits would stretch into an unknown and endless future. Fischer, now in handcuffs, did his best to skew the weight of evidence against him by declaring his paternity. He was Stefan’s biological father, he said – much to Harry’s surprise – and as such had not been abducting the boy but protecting him.

  The convoy, originally four vehicles, had grown in size, while the Otter lay abandoned in an obscure corner of the airfield and would remain so. No one would be interested in claiming ownership or admitting culpability.

  This time the police would brook no further delays to their procedures amid a blizzard of statement-taking, a mile of crime-scene tape and the collection of evidence. The star exhibits were the two handguns.

  For Harry there was belated recognition. A short-lived hero status for the man who stopped the assassin. Congratulations and thanks were certainly due. Jake Pinckney called him into the Great Hall to shake his hand. “We’ll have to strike a very special medal for you,” he said with a huge grin.

  Harry glanced quickly around at all the panelled wood, tapestries, porcelain and antiquities on display; at the Rembrandts and Constables adorning the walls. However, the amiable spirit of congratulation was cut short by the belated appearance of the Home Secretary.

  “No medals!” insisted Christopher Tresham. “In fact, nothing at all.”

  “Really?” Jake was nonplussed. “Seems a bit ungracious of you, Tresh.”

  “This business is a great danger. I want no attention focused on this place. We can’t allow this to get out. Close it all down.” He looked aggressively around the group. “Nobody should speak of it, certainly not to the press. I think we’ll issue a D-notice to that effect.”

  “Can’t see why,” said Jake, a man with a journalistic background.

  “It’s for the best,” Tresham insisted. “In the interests of national security and good governance.”

  Harry, frowning at this assertion from a man he loathed, found the Home Secretary’s gaze firmly centred on him.

  “This latest event did not happen. No terrorists. All quiet at Chequers.”

  It was as if this was a message directed at Harry. Something snapped inside him. Perhaps it was the comedown from the high of action. Ire rose in his throat. He’d had enough pussyfooting around, holding back, keeping silent, playing the game, adhering to Patronella’s elongated timetable. Now, with Erika locked up and the PM safe, he no longer felt the need. He couldn’t hold back.

  “Disappointed the PM survived?” This spoken directly to Tresham’s face. “I guess you’re really wishing the assassin had succeeded.”

  Tresham’s animus was unconcealed. “You’re that troublemaker I’ve heard about.”

  “And you’re the Home Secretary who’s been leaking Cabinet secrets to the Europeans.” Harry pointed an accusing finger. “Their secret source. A traitor in our midst.”

  This was met with a long moment of shocked silence. No one in the room knew how to deal with such an accusation.

  Swales was the first to react, ever the willing factotum. “I should remind you, sir, that this is the Home Secretary you’re speaking to.” Said with the kind of reverence reserved for a pope.

  Tresham found his voice. “Swales, have this man arrested. He’s mad, don’t believe a word he says.” He shook his shoulders in a gesture of distaste. “Spreading such poisonous nonsense – he’s mentally deranged.”

  Harry’s temper knew no caution. Far from regret for a hasty outburst the red mist had taken over. “So this is your answer to treachery, is it? A cover-up?”

  Then he found himself forcibly ushered from the room amid a sudden hubbub of voices. Tones of incredulity and shock could be heard through the open door. A rapid passage of officials hurried in and out, but Jake’s voice, as always, carried above the others. Harry caught a snatch: “Now that our PM has been restored to us…”

  This was followed seconds later by Tresham’s injured tone: “Surely, not for one moment…”

  Harry grinned to himself. His bête noire was clearly on the back foot. This seemed to be confirmed by another of Jake’s phrases: “…a clear-the-air session”.

  Then Harry was banished back into the security room with its clutter of rimmed coffee cups and noxious, if illicit, tobacco fumes. He had his old escort, Lucas, for company, but they kept the door open to witness a procession of officials and politicos. Word had gotten out. There were inquisitive stares and hostile glares for Harry, the man who had made such shocking allegations.

  Finally, the big door was closed and the flow ceased. Harry wondered if his threatened arrest was top of the agenda. Was Tresham on the attack? Or on the rack? The silence, after the rowdy confrontation, was uncanny. The corridor was empty, save for a passing forensics officer. The inactivity brought on a feeling of anticlimax, a lowering of tension, almost a sense of emptiness and despondency in Harry, as if he didn’t really care if they did lock him up. The burden of Erika’s duplicity hung heavily on him.

  Some time must have passed before he had another surprise. Patronella stood in the doorway, clutching a briefcase under one arm, looking at him like a schoolmarm disappointed by her star pupil. She said nothing, but the set of those big red lips spoke for her. Then she turned, opened the conference door and was lost to him.

  It was more than an hour later when the big door opened once more. Harry held his breath to see who would emerge. He speculated as to their mood and hoped he would be able to read the tenor of the meeting in their expressions: accusative, secretive, pensive or smiling? Take your pick, a
n inner voice told him.

  First out was Swales, wearing a tortured mask of distaste. Next, several anodyne and forgettable officials, then Tresham. His mouth was compressed into a tiny slit, his brows knitted, eyes radiating venom. As Harry’s cliché-crazy former lover would say, If looks could kill…

  Finally, Patronella. She didn’t ignore him and rush past, as did the others. She loitered wordlessly in the doorway, giving Harry deadpan looks, then left her briefcase in the corridor, as if to shield it from contamination by smoke or sweat. Harry caught sight of the stylishly embossed initials ER on the flap.

  He offered her a chair, but she remained standing. Concern for that smart suit, he thought. What a contrast between this apparently respected participant at the Cabinet table and the scruffy dosser spilling crumbs on the paving stones of the Embankment Gardens.

  He raised a querulous eyebrow and she said, “We put our case.”

  “You had plenty of damning evidence,” Harry said. “An incriminating trail a mile long.”

  “Couldn’t use it all,” she said. “But there was enough.”

  She used the fingers of both hands to count off the items on what Harry regarded as just the opening of the charge sheet against Tresham: his name on the Blue List, photographs of him as a young man at the Stasi spy school, Harry’s snatched evidence of the dead-letter drop at the Clerkenwell store, covert pictures of Tresham planting them, birth certificates revealing the real names of both himself and his sister at school and the children’s home, and a log of complaints from the British negotiator at Brussels on inspired obstruction from the EC team.

  “What about the contents of the Crab?” asked Harry. “And all the material on how the Stasi make their agents promise to keep the faith, the pledges, the denunciations and all that?”

  “All circumstantial, nothing to do with him,” she said. “He even denies the Blue List, says it’s a fake and he has no idea why his name is on it. And a change of name as a child means nothing. All conjectural, all speculative, according to him.”

  “Slippery bastard!”

  “Says the spy school is old hat. A mistake of youth. He’s moved on, all now irrelevant.”

  Harry reddened, anger erupting. “They didn’t buy that, surely? What about the dead-letter drop? He couldn’t wriggle out of that!”

  “No, he was stuck with that one. Finally revealed as the Cabinet leaker.”

  “So? What happens now?”

  There was a pause, as if she knew there might be an explosion. Then she said, “Demoted.”

  “Demoted? You must be joking. He should be in the Tower, swinging at Traitor’s Gate!”

  “Don’t be silly, Harry, we don’t do that any more. In fact, if you’re political, you can do no wrong. Just a slap on the wrist and a little readjustment.”

  Harry stared.

  “No longer Home Sec,” she said. “Now the Minister for Pensions. And he’ll make a comeback. Give him six months – eighteen at most – and he’ll be back in Cabinet. These people look after each other, you should know that. Like the Masons. They live on an ever-moving merry-go-round of different jobs.”

  Harry’s fists were clenched and he felt like punching the wall. “Not if I can help it.”

  Chapter 57

  90 minutes to go

  Patronella walked the length of the corridor before entering a bleak and empty room that had once been a store. A police officer guarded the door. Inside there was nothing remaining but a small table and two chairs. She sat on the one behind the table.

  Fischer was seated on the other, still holding himself, still in pain.

  She opened her briefcase, retrieved a blue folder and began riffling through the pages. Then she looked up.

  “So, Herr Fischer, before the police begin their inquiries, this is your opportunity to lighten the heavy load of retribution that is coming your way.”

  Fischer managed a smile. “For the benefit of your police I shall, of course, declare my paternity of the young boy. That should help my position, I think, and I will say that I was not abducting him but simply acting to protect him. We were all under the cosh of the Kameraden.”

  Patronella sniffed. “And how far that will get you at the Old Bailey remains a moot point… when you appear in the dock together with your girlfriend.”

  Fischer’s confidence was undimmed. He wore an enigmatic expression. “I’m confident you’ll look after my interests, Comrade…”

  She stared back, unblinking. “So, before the police do get hold of you, what are you going to give me? I need to be kept in the picture. Now that you’ve failed in your operation to hit the target, I want to know what Herr Wolf plans to do next.”

  “Oh, I think your little man, the caretaker Prime Minister, is sufficiently scared now to do as he is told, don’t you? I’m sure you can arrange it.”

  Patronella stared back. “We can arrange it?” A querulous tone. “Is that all you can say?” She began putting the file back in the briefcase.

  Fischer’s certainty began to wilt. “I’m sure our interests still coincide.”

  Patronella coughed and snorted. “We shall see,” she said.

  Chapter 58

  1 hour to go

  Harry had been left to sweat some more in the little room, his questions about Erika and next steps unanswered. Finally, however, things took a turn for the better. Patronella was signalling to him from the door. “Come! Drive with me, I need to explain a few things.”

  As soon as they walked to the entrance of the house, her ministerial car crunched across the gravel to the doorstep. “Back to SW8,” she said, climbing in.

  “So soon?” Harry was surprised. “What about the big ceremony tonight?”

  She didn’t answer. Instead, she said, “Get in.” And when the car moved off, heading for the exit, she continued, “At least you’re not wearing a pair of cuffs, although you came pretty close at times.” Then she added the news that an unforeseen consequence of the Blue List being revealed in Cabinet was the departure of one Frederick Rivers.

  “I’ve heard of him,” said Harry.

  “Rivers is head of the Security Service, MI5, reporting directly to the Home Secretary. He’s on the list, he’s Tresham’s man, so he’ll have to go as well. And unlike some, there’ll be no coming back for him.”

  Shocking, Harry suggested, another Burgess and Maclean scandal, but before he could get into his stride on the subject Patronella interrupted him. “There’ll be a price to pay for you too,” she said. “Almost certainly you’ll lose your pilot’s licence.”

  He grimaced, then shrugged. “But I’ve still got my big story,” he said. “I’m going to skewer Tresham. He won’t come back…”

  Something in her expression stalled the words.

  “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, Harry,” she said.

  “Tell me what?”

  “I’m afraid that, from your point of view, there isn’t going to be a big story. They’ve just put out a D-notice on the whole thing.”

  Harry flushed. “That’s just Tresham’s bluster – and he’s not Home Sec any longer.”

  She shook her head. “As you know, a D-notice shuts all the papers and the broadcasters up tight, and it’s in force as from now. And, as you also know, our reach extends to the internet as well.”

  Harry was angry, incredulous at the news blackout. A year ago he would have scoffed, pointing out that voices on the web would bust the secret wide open. Today he knew better. It was amazing how the threat of a twenty-four per cent corporation tax had brought the web giants under control, a new set of algorithms developed to keep them in line.

  He still demanded to know why.

  “There’s a whole lot more to this affair than Tresham’s treachery,” she said. “I’m going to let you in on it – but you can’t use a word.” She gave him a look that sa
id this was beyond dispute. “Tresham’s in the sin bin at Pensions for a while until this all blows over, then he’ll get his reward. Seems he’s been on a European promise. In exchange for all the information he’s leaked and for keeping this country inside the EU, he’s now in line to be the next President of the Union.”

  “Never!”

  She insisted: “He’s built up a fund of gratitude in Brussels for his efforts as a leading Remainer. He’s a committed Eurocentric and he has a high enough profile to be both valuable and attractive to them.”

  Harry sat back. It was like a blow to the stomach. He felt sick and – once again – betrayed. Then he erupted.

  “No, no! This can’t happen. Now that Tresham’s out of the running for the next PM, either Boothroyd will stay on or Jake Pinckney will get it – either way, Britain will walk away from the EU, as per the referendum result. So who cares about Tresham?” He looked hard at Patronella. “Isn’t that right?”

  She grinned. “Watch this space,” she said.

  “Meaning…?”

  “Very shortly there will be another Cabinet meeting and you’ll find that Jake will be quietly eased into oblivion and a new person installed as PM. It won’t be Pinckney, I can assure you of that.”

  “Then who?”

  “Winterton.”

  “The dark horse, the silent Chancellor…”

  “The same.”

  “But what about the Exit Day signing? I thought we were going out of the EU at eleven o’clock. Big show with camera flashlights popping.”

  “Postponed indefinitely.”

  “What?!” Harry took a few moments to get over his surprise, then said, “Some of the papers won’t like that.”

  “They’ll have to get used to it. Accept the new political reality. Everything’s changed, a completely new landscape.”