The Edge of Madness

by Michael Dobbs

  As they resumed their seats, D’Arby glanced across at Harry, holding his eye, as though claiming victory.

  ‘I need another drink,’ Shunin announced, heading towards the decanter. ‘Anybody else?’

  ‘Yes, I’ll join you,’ D’Arby declared, ‘although whether to celebrate or drown the pain, I scarcely know.’

  But Harry did.

  ‘You going to join us, Mr Jones?’ Shunin asked as he splashed whisky into crystal tumblers.

  ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll pass. I promised to say good-night to Nipper, if you’ll excuse me.’

  D’Arby looked at him across the room, his expression almost contemptuous. ‘Take just as long as you want, Harry. I think we can manage without you.’

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Saturday, 9.03 p.m. Castle Lorne.

  ‘Hello, I thought you’d forgotten,’ Nipper exclaimed in delight as Harry’s head appeared round his door.

  ‘A promise is a promise, Nipper.’

  After his long climb to the room at the top of the castle, Harry found the boy in bed, wrapped up within the folds of his saltire, his grandmother sitting in a chair beside him. He was reading a story to her while his bedside lamp cast its light across a timeless fragment of childhood made up of pillows and stories and hot cocoa–the sort of thing that had never been part of Harry’s life. His father had always been in too much of a rush for that. There had been many other things offered in compensation, of course, like foreign holidays and fast cars and still faster women, even for Harry as a sixteen-year-old, but never any cocoa or bedtime stories. Now, for Harry, they seemed beyond price.

  ‘Is it OK, Mrs MacDougall?’ He asked.

  ‘Of course it is,’ Nipper shouted, too impatient to wait for his grandmother’s blessing. ‘I’ll read you a story, too’

  ‘Away wi’ you, young man, it’s the end of the day, and Mr Jones here has much to be getting on with.’

  ‘But Harry is my friend,’ the child protested in a slow persistent voice. ‘And Daddy’s away.’

  ‘You’ll be straining your eyes,’ she insisted.

  ‘Then Harry can read to me.’ Nipper turned his attention back to his guest. ‘Do you read stories to your children, Harry?’

  ‘I don’t have any, Nipper. One day, perhaps.’

  ‘Then I’ll let you practise on me if you’d like.’

  ‘Enough, Nipper,’ Mrs MacDougall objected, reaching out to take his hand and grab back his attention, ‘no more prying into Mr Jones’s personal life.’ But Nipper’s face was a picture of expectation and turned directly upon Harry.

  ‘Perhaps, instead of me reading you a story, you should tell one to me,’ Harry suggested. ‘That’s the way it was always done in the past, not from books but from memory, around the campfire when the day was done. You must have a favourite.’

  ‘It’s about the Lady of Lorne,’ Nipper replied, accepting the challenge. ‘But it’s a very sad tale.’

  ‘Then I’d guess it has something to do with the English,’ Harry sighed.

  ‘Oh, you know it already?’

  His grandmother couldn’t restrain a chuckle. ‘If you’ll not take offence, Mr Jones, I’ll be leaving the two of you to it. I have preparations in the kitchen to attend to.’ She bent to accept a kiss from Nipper. ‘You tell him just the one story, mind, Nipper, no more, and then it’s lights out.’ She left them, smiling.

  Nipper gave several bounces of approval, already brimming with his adventure, while Harry accepted his invitation to perch on the end of his bed in the half-light.

  ‘In ancient times, in the days before the Bruce, there was a terrible battle,’ the boy began. ‘The Lord of Lorne was slain and his only son taken prisoner.’ The language was a little archaic, clearly handed down on evenings before the hearth until Nipper could recite it by heart. ‘The English arrived at the gates of the castle, but the Lady of Lorne had barred the door and refused them entry. She said no Englishman would ever enter the castle while she was alive. So they dragged her son before the door and told her that if she failed to surrender the castle and all that lay within it, including herself, her son would be put to the sword.’ A cloud passed over his young face as he choreographed the story with dramatic gestures, his sword hand flying out from his pyjamas towards the young lord’s chest. ‘So she made the English promise before God and heaven that if they had the castle and all that was within, they would set her son free. And the oath was given.’

  ‘I’m delighted to hear it.’

  ‘But it was an English oath, Mr Jones.’

  ‘Suddenly I feel very close to my Welsh roots,’ Harry muttered.

  ‘The Lady of Lorne knew she could not trust them. So she begged for a few minutes to say goodbye to all the things that she had loved and held dear, and disappeared from sight, but as the English waited outside, they began to see smoke coming from within the castle. The Lady of Lorne had set it afire, with herself inside. Oh, how the English tried to batter down the door, but it was too strong for them. They could only stand back and watch as the fire took hold and worked its way up. And then, as the very top of the castle was consumed by the flames, they saw the Lady standing on the ramparts, dressed in her finest gown, the one in which she had married her slain Lord. And as the tongues of fire licked at its hem, the English saw her cast herself off from the rooftop towards the rocks below.’ Nipper’s young voice was full of pride and defiance as he recounted lines that had been handed down through generations. ‘She fell towards the raging brine and the English jeered her fate, but as the foul breath left their bodies they saw our Lady change into a beautiful white seagull and soar away to freedom. So they got their castle, or what was left of it, nothing but smouldering ruins. But they said it was a place of evil and magic, so they ran from here even more quickly than they had arrived, and never came back.’

  ‘That’s a wonderful tale, Nipper. But the son? Did he survive?’ Harry asked.

  ‘Of course, otherwise I wouldn’t be here!’ Nipper laughed at the naivety of the question. ‘But the English said that because they hadn’t got their castle intact, the Scots wouldn’t get their Lord intact. So they gouged out his eyes.’

  ‘They can be terrible people, some of them,’ Harry agreed.

  ‘But it had a fine ending, Harry. The new Lord spent the rest of his life rebuilding this castle in memory of his mother. He laid many of the stones himself.’

  ‘But he was blind…’

  ‘The seagulls guided him, called out to him, told him where each stone should be put. It was his mother, really.’

  ‘This truly is a magical place, Nipper.’

  ‘I knew you’d understand, Harry. That’s why I want to fly. Like the seagulls.’

  Damn, he liked this kid, so much it almost hurt. For some reason he couldn’t quite define spending time with Nipper had made Harry question who he was, and where his life was heading. He was, or had been, so many things. A brilliant student, a superbly trained soldier, a skilled politician. Yes, he was playing at being a Lothario, too, for the moment, at least, but right now, sitting on the end of Nipper’s bed, he realized there was an entirely unexplored part of him that very much wanted to be just an everyda guy reading stories to his kids–kids he hoped would be as full of mischief and character as Nipper. But for that he felt he rather needed a wife, and he was already two strikes down on that score. Life’s a bitch–well, Mel most certainly had been. But Julia, his first wife, had been killed in an accident when she was pregnant. A little after that Michael Burnside had crossed his path. He often wondered whether the two deaths had been connected, and how much of himself he’d left back along the way.

  ‘Great story, Nipper.’

  ‘And every word of it true.’

  ‘Thanks for sharing it with me. Let’s hope those wicked English don’t come battering on your door again, eh?’

  ‘Impossible! No one will ever destroy Castle Lorne,’ not while we have the dirk, Nipper replied, with a conviction that only the inn
ocence of youth would bear. The boy scuttled out of his bed to take one final look at his precious heirloom. ‘It will keep us safe. It’s well known in these parts.’

  ‘I’m very glad to hear it.’

  But, of course, it was no more than a myth.

  Saturday, 9.43 p.m. British Summer Time; 4.43 a.m. in the Room of Many Miracles, Shanjing.

  So great was their concentration and so compelling their task that Fu Zhang had scarcely noticed they had worked through the night. Now, as dawn broke, the tide of adrenalin that had kept him afloat was beginning to run into the sands. Fu envied the youthful resilience of those who still toiled around him. He rubbed the exhaustion around his eyes. During the night he had grown ever more confused by what was before him, streams of computer code and Western alphabets that danced across the screen and left him giddy, yet he wouldn’t weaken, wouldn’t admit to his middle age while these young men and women still had the energy to finish their task. Onward! Onward! This was a day of conquest, one that would be marked down and taught to young children many generations in the future. Great-Uncle Fu, they would call him, the man who helped forge the Chinese miracle.

  His dreaming was interrupted by the phone on Li Changchun’s desk. The director picked it up, nodding as he listened. He turned to Fu.

  ‘It appears a detachment of soldiers has arrived outside, Minister, to secure the facility.’

  ‘Excellent! Now we can be certain of no interruptions,’ Fu warbled. The army sent to support him. It made him feel all the more a warrior. And perhaps they might include the troops who had so brazenly mocked him earlier. Now they would realize who he was. He would take great joy watching them melt in humiliation and fear. Then he would deal with them, every wretched one of them. Today was a day of reckoning, on all sides. For Fu life didn’t get any better than this.

  Saturday, 10.12 p.m. Castle Lorne.

  They sat at the dining table as the three of them talked, and planned, and plotted, in the manner of a great conspiracy, with only candles and shadows for witness. They didn’t debate specific military targets, that would be for the planners on their staffs, but they discussed the political targets, the big beasts of the diplomatic jungle who would need to be brought on board–the functionaries of the United Nations, the flunkies in the European Union, the Indians and Japanese, those in Taiwan, and any of the non-aligned nations who might be browbeaten or bribed. It could be done, they felt sure, if they acted quickly. And together.

  That was how they would kick their own systems into subservience, they decided. The National Security Council, the Joint Chiefs, the intelligence agencies, the Cabinets, the Congress.

  ‘In hours, not days,’ D’Arby emphasized.

  ‘On television. National addresses, all three leaders,’ Washington argued. ‘In their own capitals yet side by side, not just on screen but in tone and manner and purpose. Swamp the doubters.’

  ‘But first the military,’ Shunin insisted. ‘Not even in my country will they launch an attack on the say-so of just one man, not any more. I am Shunin, not Stalin. The first hours must be spent with them. They will start by not understanding, and soon they will turn to worrying. But they will come with us, when they see all three of us.’

  ‘There must be no gloating,’ D’Arby instructed. ‘No claims of victory over the Chinese. We must say we are doing this for the Chinese, in their interests as well as ours. Extend the hand of friendship.’

  ‘Even after we’ve broken every one of their fingers,’ Shunin muttered, but he did not disagree.

  It might not prove to be so simple, they all understood that. It might mean a new Cold War, a world divided, white against yellow, but once the dice were thrown they must let them roll.

  Shunin appeared to be slumbering over his glass, relaxed now that the decision had been taken. D’Arby allowed himself a final nightcap, in celebration and also in order to anaesthetize himself. It had been bloody work. He was halfway through the glass when Shunin, without otherwise stirring, opened one eye and began to talk. ‘And we shall stand side by side on all the other matters, of course.’

  Suddenly D’Arby was alert, his politician’s instinct sensing a Russian flanking movement. He wished he’d not had that final whisky. ‘What matters did you have in mind, Sergei?’

  The chin rose slowly from the chest, both eyes now open, as bright as ever, like a ferret’s, hungry, avaricious. ‘The tub of sewage that is Chechnya.’

  D’Arby couldn’t restrain his irritation. He’d thought they’d come to a conclusion, now the bastard seemed intent on still more haggling. ‘You know we have no intention of interfering in Russian affairs, Sergei.’

  ‘But you do!’ Shunin protested. ‘Every time in recent years when I have tried to clean up the Chechens’ act for them, your so-called human-rights groups have started whining. Demonstrations, petitions, uttering so many kinds of anti-Russian slanders…’

  ‘You know we don’t control them, Sergei.’

  ‘You could ignore them. Stop pandering to them.’

  ‘We don’t do that.’

  ‘I can name seventy Members of Parliament from your own party who have signed or marched or otherwise incited them.’

  ‘In a Parliamentary democracy—’

  ‘They tried to kill me, Mark, even on my way here.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘A car bomb. But I had switched cars. If they had succeeded, everything you have talked about here would have been to no purpose. They are your enemies as well as mine, Mark.’

  ‘It’s just that—’

  Shunin’s glass came down on the table with a crack, cutting right across the Prime Minister. His voice, when he spoke, emerged quietly, yet had the force of a gale that had blown a path all the way from Siberia. ‘We are allies. Or we are not.’

  There was no mistaking Shunin’s demand. He wanted a free hand. D’Arby had only a half-formed idea of where Chechnya was–tucked away somewhere near the Caucasus, wasn’t it? A distant land of which he knew little and, in all honesty, cared less. He glanced towards Washington; together their eyes flickered in submission.

  ‘Whatever you do, just try to make it quick and keep it away from the cameras, Sergei.’

  The Russian raised his glass in salute. ‘And intelligence, of course. Whatever intelligence you both have on the enemies of Russia, I expect you to share it with us.’

  ‘What enemies, Sergei?’

  ‘I shall give you a list.’

  D’Arby knew the list would be long. They weren’t going to get away with simply turning a blind eye. With Shunin, nothing was simple.

  And while they made their preparations in the dining room, Harry crept silently from the room at the top of the castle where, at last, Nipper had fallen asleep. Outside he could hear the sound of a rushing wind, and the old windowpanes rattled in their frames. The moon peered between muscling clouds, glancing off waves that had begun to rise and turn the causeway into a deceptive silver highway. It would be one of those nights when the castle would need its thick walls. Memories came back to Harry of a time when he was a boy, younger even than Nipper, looking out of another window on a storm-tossed night, waiting for his father to come home. His parents had had the most heart-tearing of rows and Harry wanted his father to return and put all the pieces back together again. But his father never did come back, no matter how long he waited. Afterwards Harry promised himself that never again would he wait for life to come to him but instead he’d chase it down and kick it until it surrendered. Perhaps that’s why he’d spent so much of his life on his own; no one else seemed capable of keeping pace.

  A squall threw itself against the window once again, causing tiny rivers of rain to slip down the panes like a flood of tears. Damn, it was one of those nights when he wanted so very much to be home, yet even as the desire came to him he wasn’t entirely sure where home was. He wanted that sorted, and soon, but for the moment anywhere would do so long as it was away from this place with its dirty trades and bloody
conceits. He wished he’d never come.

  The panes rattled in their frames once more. That’s when Harry thought, from somewhere behind him, he could hear a door being gently opened.

  Saturday, 11.48 p.m. Castle Lorne.

  The man crept through the house in stockinged feet, the noise of his passing drowned by the wind and the rumble of the heavy sea. Down the stairs, through the hallway, past the dining room, struggling to get his bearings in the dark, until he reached the kitchen.

  It took him only moments to locate the oil line, plastic-coated 10mm copper piping, that ran round the skirting board until it ended in a brass elbow joint beside the Aga ovens. He knelt down and wrenched at it, once, twice, three times.

  Castle Lorne was large and relatively inaccessible, not the sort of place you wanted to get stuck without fuel, which was why Alan MacDougall had decided to install one of the larger types of oil tank that would provide a safety margin in case of difficulty with supply. It worked with a simple gravity feed, no fancy mechanics, just old Isaac Newton. Ater the third tug at the fuel line, and using nothing more than the power of gravity, thousands of litres of heating oil began spewing out across the stone floor.

  The man retreated as the oil advanced. He struck a match, threw it into the spreading pool, a little tumbling arc of flame that flickered through the darkness, but it spluttered and died as soon as it hit the oil. So did the next three matches. Heating oil wasn’t explosive like petrol, it needed much more persuasion, but the man had foreseen this, had come prepared. He disappeared from the kitchen, returning two minutes later with a plastic container, which he emptied across the floor. Now the intoxicating smell of petrol began to mix with the sweeter scent of the heating oil.

  He stood behind the door when he lit the next match. It was a sensible precaution, because when he threw it into the kitchen the petrol vapour ignited explosively and a fireball flashed straight past him and into the hallway. It was followed in close order by a tide of flame that surged across the kitchen floor, and was soon beyond.