The Edge of Madness

by Michael Dobbs

  ‘Sorry, Grammy,’ he whimpered.

  ‘You must always remember who you are,’ she said softly but in mild rebuke. ‘Otherwise I shall get your grandfather to read you a bedtime story.’

  ‘Oh, no, Grammy, I’d have nightmares for weeks!’ the young culprit exclaimed, giggling, his spirits recovered, waving in gratitude before disappearing once more beneath the water.

  Elizabeth turned to her guest. ‘It seems that perhaps husbands do have their uses, after all.’

  It was intended as tender humour, but Blythe’s defences were so transparent that it barged straight through and hurt. Tears gathered behind the glasses, waiting to attack. Focus, Blythe, for God’s sake focus! No time for this, not now with the world threatened by chaos. There were fires to fight, huge, earth-cracking fires, and it was going to take more than a few tears to put them out. But that was tomorrow. For now she picked up her book, cracked its spine, and pretended to carry on reading.

  Late Thursday afternoon. Sheremetyevo Airport, Russia.

  Despite Shunin’s reassurances, they weren’t going fishing after all. As his car hit the outskirts of Sheremetyevo, he gave instructions to proceed not to the main public terminal but to a scruffier and older outlying terminal that was normally reserved for military traffic.

  ‘What’s going on, Papasha?’ Lavrenti asked, confused.

  Shunin gave him nothing but a cold, prohibitive stare. Yuri Anatolyevich, too, was agitated, but did as he was instructed, diverting the SUV through a military checkpoint where ambling guards were shocked to attention, their legs snapping like steel traps, cigarettes cast aside, eyes swivelling in anxiety. It was only a minute before the presidential vehicle was pulling up in a distant part of the airport, nestling beside a gangly four-engined plane dressed in dull military colours whose wings seemed to stretch awkwardly like those of a young crane. Lavrenti had been expecting Rossiya-1, the presidential jet, a luxurious Ilyushin airliner kitted out in soft leather and silk-lined walls with gold plate plastered everywhere, even in the shower, but this craft looked as if it would struggle to provide a cup of coffee or a place to wash his face. It had propellers. It was a Tupolev Tu-95, commonly known as a Bear, the workhorse of the Russian strategic air command, and it came with no guard of honour, no evident security, not even a maintenance crew. Standing alone at the bottom of the steps was Shunin’s own personal pilot, who offered a crisp salute.

  ‘Greetings, Boris Abramovitch. Is everything prepared?’

  ‘Over a few broken bodies, Mr President.’

  ‘So long as they were broken quietly.’

  The pilot nodded.

  A few steps behind, Shunin’s guard was fidgeting in uncertainty as he stood beside the driver. ‘Gospodin, Mr President–what are my instructions? Forgive me, but how am I to explain this?’

  The question brought Shunin to a halt. He had his back to the guard. For a moment, he hung his head, as though considering his response. When at last he turned, his voice was quiet, little more than a dry wheeze. ‘You don’t.’

  ‘Gospodin?’

  ‘There has already been too much gossip about my travel plans.’

  Yuri Anatolyevich stiffened in alarm. He’d been with Shunin too long, he knew his moods, how quick they were to turn. He made no sound, offered no protest, but his eyes widened in accusation. He looked into his President’s mirthless face and an absurd thought suddenly struck him. In all the time he had served Shunin he had never once seen him smile. Why? Why didn’t the bastard ever smile? It was as if everything in his life came down to business, nothing was ever personal, no loyalty to anything, or to anyone but Russia.

  Yuri Anatolyevich realized he was going to die, without understanding why and without ever truly knowing Shunin even after all those years. He could have lived to a hundred without figuring the man out, and he would very much like to have lived to a hundred, or at least to his next birthday, but Shunin was holding a pistol on him and…For the briefest of moments, Yuri Anatolyevich thought he saw a flicker on the other man’s face. He actually smiled!

  Two sharp retorts echoed across the tarmac, and they were gone, first the guard, then the driver. Two bodies crumpled on the tarmac, stains spreading across their chests.

  ‘Holy Mother!’ breathed Lavrenti. ‘What the hell did they do?’

  ‘They died for the Fatherland,’ Shunin replied, touching the crucifix beneath his shirt before kissing the tips of his fingers. ‘Now get on board. We have no time to waste.’

  The son-in-law had no intention of arguing. With one last look at the welling blood, he did precisely as he was told.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Thursday evening. Buckinghamshire.

  Harry drove himself to Chequers. There wasn’t much traffic that time of the evening, it took him less than an hour. The storm front had passed but it was still stifling so he put the top down on his Audi coupé and let the air slap his cheeks, hoping it might blow away his concerns. The country roads of Buckinghamshire unwound before him through the Chiltern hills and he had to struggle to keep his speed down to sixty. He’d been taught to drive by his father on the roads that lead back into the hills from the coastline of the south of France. Their first lesson had been in a three-litre 1924 Bentley with a thundering leather strap around its bonnet–completely over the top, of course, but then his father was always that way. ‘Any idle bloody gendarme stops us, Harry, and they’ll be wanting a ride rather than issuing a ticket,’ his father had told him. For additional insurance against the censure of the forces of law and order they’d also taken along his father’s latest mistress with skirts that blew up around her waist. Mad bugger, his father. Now, with his old man’s laughter ringing in his ears and the village of Speen disappearing in his rear-view mirror, Harry put his foot down.

  Chequers was a sixteenth-century country house of red bricks and towering Tudor chimneys that a hundred years earlier had been presented to the nation as a country retreat for its Prime Ministers, a place for them to relax, although in recent years they rarely did. Harry had neither pass nor written invitation, but when he arrived at the police reception point at the edge of the estate he was halted only briefly before being waved through. As he drew up in the courtyard of the ancient house, D’Arby was waiting at the front door. The Audi came to a halt on the gravel and, as Harry levered himself from his seat, the Prime Minister advanced to take his hand. The scent of lavender clung to the evening air, fresh mown grass too; from somewhere nearby Harry could hear the gentle chugging of a motor mower. He stretched to retrieve his overnight case from the back seat.

  ‘No, leave it, Harry. You’re not staying.’

  ‘What? I’ve just driven all the way out…’

  ‘I should have said we’re not staying. You and I have more miles to cover tonight.’

  ‘Mark, I’ve got to say you’re confusing me. And whatever help it is you want from me, I can’t give it if I don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to be doing.’

  ‘Come. Walk with me.’ D’Arby took his guest to the side of the house and through a wrought-iron gate until they came to a walled garden on the south side. It contained the most dazzling array of roses, long stems of colour that were reaching up to catch the light of the slowing sun. D’Arby led them to the middle point of the garden, through the spreading avenues of low box hedges, as though advancing to the centre of a bullseye. ‘You know, Harry, there might be satellites up there right now gazing down on us.’ He spread his arms and gave a hollow laugh.

  ‘Seen. But not heard,’ Harry concluded.

  ‘It’s important right now that the world believes I’m tucked up here at Chequers.’

  For the moment Harry held back from asking why. The other man was in no hurry.

  ‘You see this rose?’ the Prime Minister said, taking a long stem between two fingers. ‘Floribunda “Marcus D’Arby”. They named a bloody rose after me, Harry. Beautiful, isn’t it?’

  D’Arby cupped it in his hands and Harry bent to smell it.<
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  ‘As you see it has no fragrance,’ D’Arby pronounced in disappointment. ‘All show, no substance. A politician’s rose. And prone to early wilt, I’m afraid.’ He was mocking himself.

  Harry straightened up. He hadn’t smelt a damn thing, apart from a dash of whisky on D’Arby’s breath. ‘I know bugger-all about roses.’

  ‘Really? But you’re a man of so many talents,’ the Prime Minister said. Suddenly he crushed the rose in his fist and let the mash of petals fall to the ground. ‘OK, not roses, then. So tell me, Harry, what you know about that Boeing crash at Heathrow a few years ago–the 777 on its way back from China.’

  ‘The one that lost all its thrust just before landing?’

  ‘That’s right. A miracle that everyone on board walked away from it, but…’

  ‘Something about the fuel-control systems, wasn’t it? I seem to remember they thought it might be any number of things–bird strike, computer failure, pilot error, fuel contamination. But in the end they found some sort of glitch in the control systems.’

  ‘Yes. That’s what they said.’

  ‘You’re telling me—’

  ‘They had to come up with something, Harry. We couldn’t simply explain that the thing just dropped out of the sky for no reason.’

  ‘There’s always a reason, Mark.’

  ‘Most surely, but we never found it. And I say “we” because it ended up on my desk. There was nowhere else for it to go.’ He led them to an old lichen-covered bench where they sat facing out over the garden to the hills beyond before he picked up his story. ‘Yet those control systems were double-and even triple-banked. Fail-safe, or so it was thought. The boffins tore that plane apart, Harry, piece by piece, every nut, every bolt, every rivet, every bit of flap and fuel pipe in her.’ He cursed softly and slowly, and D’Arby didn’t usually swear. He lit another of his cigarettes. ‘Then they stuck her all back together. They spent more than a year at it. And you know what? At the end of all their prodding and poking, they couldn’t find a damn thing wrong with her.’

  In the distance, two armed policemen were on patrol, Heckler & Kochs in the crook of their arms and a dog at their heels.

  ‘If it wasn’t hardware that brought that plane down, it had to be a software screw-up. These things happen, of course.’ D’Arby blew smoke into the light air where it scattered and disappeared. ‘I remember once writing a speech for the party conference–typed it up myself. A fine piece of work it was, too. Spent bloody days on it. Something to be proud of, I thought. So then I pressed the save button and the whole thing simply vanished, like a wife’s lover when he hears a key in the lock.’

  ‘No, like the lover, it doesn’t vanish, it simply scatters,’ Harry countered. ‘You simply need to know where to look for it. You find it lurking in some corner–in the closet or behind a curtain, if you like. Some firms make a fortune out of retrieving lost data.’

  ‘Correct. Top-of-the-class stuff, Harry. And on the 777 we employed the best. Ran all the software, stood it on its head, turned it inside out, and you know what? It checked out perfectly. Which means…’ He ground out his cigarette on the arm of the bench. ‘If someone did tamper with the software, they made such a good job of it they left not a trace.’

  ‘The perfect crime?’

  ‘Far worse than that. These last couple of years, particularly these past few months, there’ve been any number of foul-ups in computer-controlled systems that no one can explain–not just in Britain, elsewhere too, but here more than anywhere. They don’t simply crash, they start giving out the wrong signals, coughing up false information, and the world goes haywire. It’s like being lost in a forest at the dead of night, stumbling through the dark with bear traps on every side. We’ve come this close to disaster’–he pinched his thumb and forefinger together–‘and it’s getting worse. The attacks are more frequent. We’ve managed to hide some of it, even allowed ourselves to be blamed for incompetence. Better that than the truth. Someone out there is hitting us, hitting us hard, and knows a damn sight more about some of our vital systems than we do.’

  ‘Not just hackers?’

  ‘It’s all been too consistent, too well coordinated. Anyway, hackers brag about their conquests; no one’s claiming credit for this.’ D’Arby looked towards the embers of the sun, his eyes squinting into the distance. ‘And I believe it’s about to get very much worse. Up to this point the bastards have been playing with us, flexing their muscles, trying out their skills and testing our defences. No outright disasters, not yet, but that’s all about to change. You see, it’s not just a perfect crime, Harry, it’s the perfect war. It’s about to start, and we are intended as its first victim.’ He shivered, despite the evening warmth.

  ‘But who, Mark? Who’s behind it?’

  ‘China,’ he whispered, so softly that even the sparrows couldn’t hear. ‘The yellow tide. And it’s about to swamp us.’

  Thursday evening. Balmoral.

  The route from the river back to Balmoral took them past the estate’s cricket pitch, on which the local village team was playing. Shouts of triumph rose as another wicket tumbled, followed by polite applause for the victim. So very un-American, Blythe thought. Her mom would never have approved of the game, she’d been a baseball girl, through and through, a Red Sox fan, raw, unambiguous, who liked things no better than when the benches emptied and the entire squad got stuck into the opposition. Showed team spirit, she said. Only last year, at a reception in the White House, she’d piled into the pompous figure of the baseball commissioner and told him to check out a proposed rule change with his father, if he had one. Damn, she missed her mother.

  When they arrived back at Balmoral they tumbled in through the entrance hall with its jumble of fishing rods, hats and umbrellas stuffed into old barrels, just like any old country house, so it seemed, although the illusion didn’t last long. Jeans and dungarees might be the order of the day, much as it was at Camp David, yet by evening things grew more formal. Dinner jackets and evening dress were required, and there were servants in a livery of long blue jackets and red waistcoats. This might be where the royal family put aside their crowns and codpieces and let their collective hair down, but evidently some traditions were worth clinging to. Perhaps those traditions included her bathroom, which was across the corridor from the rest of her suite and where the hot water seemed to be taking a detour via the village. She took a whisky while she waited.

  An hour later, freshly bathed and dressed in something long and turquoise, she joined the throng as they assembled for dinner. Martinis in the drawing room first, stiff ones, mixed by an equerry. Franklin Roosevelt’s favourite tipple and also, evidently, Elizabeth’s. Blythe began to feel she might regret the whisky. As the Prince accompanied her into the dining room she passed a mirror, freckled with age inside an ornate Victorian frame. Her reflection stared back at her, somehow older than she had expected. Was that why Arnie had got his hooks into the tart? Was she past her best? No, don’t buckle, Blythe, don’t stop believing! The Harrisons were fighting folk–Indian-fighters in the old days–and she was the third member of her family to make it to the White House. It wasn’t in their makeup to go down without a fight, but as the first of their Presidents, William Henry, had discovered when chasing Indians, you had to pick your battle, and right now she felt as though she were surrounded by hostiles and down to her last couple of bullets. She prayed she’d be able to save one for Arnie.

  That got her thinking yet again about how the world would remember her. As the third Harrison? As the first woman President? Perhaps even as a great one? Or simply as a wife who had stumbled over her responsibilities, dragged down by sex and gossip and trapped in the same tar pit as the Clintons? Right now, she realized, the jury was out and her reputation was hanging not so much by a thread as from a pouting lobbyist’s bra strap. She stopped and scolded herself. She was getting herself hopelessly distracted.

  Once more it was Elizabeth who came to her rescue, appearing at her side. �
�Now, my dear, how are you?’

  ‘Fine,’ Blythe replied, trying to recover her wits. ‘Thinking Chinese thoughts.’

  The Queen’s eyes widened in surprise.

  ‘Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese strategist. He once said that if you wait long enough by the river, the bodies of your enemies will float past.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Heavens, we sat there all afternoon. No sign of Arnie.’

  There, a joke. A slip of humour. Perhaps she’d survive, after all.

  ‘You know, you should take up fishing, like me,’ Elizabeth replied, smiling conspiratorially. ‘It will increase your chances.’

  Blythe couldn’t resist a smile. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I am old, my grandchildren think I’m practically pharaonic, but my memories are fresh. I still remember what it was like for me, all too vividly.’ Suddenly, unexpectedly, she took Blythe’s arm, woman to woman. ‘I’ll teach you to tie a trout fly,’ she continued, ‘it will help to pass the time down by the river, while you’re waiting.’

  ‘Just so long as you don’t teach me the rules of cricket.’

  ‘But they are so very simple. You must do what my own mother taught me. You wear a hat with a hideously large brim to hide your eyes, so you can nap. And make sure that whatever you are drinking is extremely well chilled.’

  The two women sat down and the others followed, twenty of them in all, an array of royals and presidential advisers. From a little further along the table, Warren Holt, Blythe’s chief of staff, was nodding at her in relief. Dear and faithful Warren, who’d been with her from the start and who knew her every mood, and so knew how she’d been feeling. Now he glanced sceptically at the paintings on the wall–dark oils of wild-eyed stags with bloodied haunches being pursued by snarling dogs and Scotsmen. A little like an election campaign, she thought, not that the Windsors had to worry.