The Edge of Madness

by Michael Dobbs

  D’Arby stared, speechless for the moment, twisting in turmoil.

  ‘You’re no killer, Mark, just a politician in a hurry. Too much of a hurry.’

  D’Arby gasped, as though he had been slapped. ‘No one has to know about this, Harry. No one need be any the wiser.’

  ‘That’s precisely what I’m proposing should happen. When you resign.’

  ‘For pity’s sake, you know sacrifices sometimes have to be made. It gets tough out there. You get your hands dirty.’ He was waving an arm, punching the air, his voice rising in indignation. ‘I was working to save my country this weekend, so don’t come snivelling to me about spilt milk.’

  ‘Blythe’s mother,’ Harry said softly, ‘was a little more than spilt milk.’

  ‘She was an elderly lady who was going to die soon anyway. Don’t you realize that? She was on her way out!’

  ‘And you decided to play God.’

  ‘No, I decided to be a leader! Doing what was necessary for my country, even if it was a little messy.’ His emotion had propelled him to his feet; he was standing over Harry now, looking down on him, contemptuous. ‘And I thought you’d understand, you of all people. I know enough about you, Harry, to know that you’ve got blood not just under your fingernails but most of the way up to your armpits. Got yourself a reputation for always cutting corners, you have. So don’t you dare go judging me, Harry Jones. Climb down from your pulpit before they drag you out and stone you as a stinking hypocrite.’

  ‘Using a hospital ward as a battlefield?’ Harry shook his head.

  ‘Everywhere’s a battlefield nowadays.’ D’Arby cast his arms wide, as though appealing to some vast but invisible audience. ‘War isn’t fought with rulebooks any more, the bombers, the terrorists, the Chinese, the Islamists–they’re not gentlemen. They don’t stop and invite you to tea before they blow your fucking brains out. It’s not a world I like, Harry, but it’s the one I’m forced to live in and it’s the only one we’ve got.’

  ‘Mark, even when you’re in the gutter you have the option of looking up at the stars.’

  ‘Until someone slits your throat!’

  ‘Or screws around with your insulin pump.’

  In the distance a steward approached with a tray of tea but D’Arby waved her angrily away. He was breathing heavily with the desperation of his argument, forced to struggle in order to control himself. He knew it was no good trying to bully Harry into submission, he had to find another route.

  ‘What is it you want, Harry? Tell me, for God’s sake. You can have anything–anything.’

  Harry took his time before replying. ‘I want you out, Mark. Resigned, retired hurt, rained on, ruined–however you want to put it. But I want it now. Right this minute.’

  The Prime Minister spun round, turning his back on Harry, struggling to protect himself from the other man’s words, trying to hide the alarm that was gouging at his face. ‘Why, Harry? Pity’s sake, why?’

  ‘Because you involved me, and I don’t go round making war on innocent old ladies.’

  A knee buckled and the Prime Minister fell back onto the bench. ‘Give me a chance, Harry. Please.’

  ‘But I am. I’m giving you the chance to walk away with your head high and your reputation intact, rather than being dragged out and thrown to the pack of drooling dogs that’s waiting right outside your door.’

  ‘Jump or be pushed? What sort of choice is that?’

  ‘About as good as I had last night at the top of the castle.’

  ‘Harry, there must be some other way…’ Yet suddenly D’Arby knew it was useless. His life was over, destroyed by one small mistake and this man he thought was a friend. His face twisted to contempt, and the words were spat out with such force that they sprayed into Harry’s face. ‘You stinking hypocrite! You sit there with your pathetic conscience, moralizing over me, when your entire piss-miserable life should be plagued by ghosts!’

  Harry wiped his face, yet he found it more difficult to get rid of the Prime Minister’s accusation. There was too much truth in what D’Arby had said. Harry had spent these last few years running from bed to bed, from alibi to excuse, always moving on, never looking back, afraid that his conscience might catch up with him, that if ever he stood still and spent too many nights on his own he might end up with no one apart from Michael Burnside and the others. That’s what he’d been afraid of. Yet Burnside had been different from Blythe’s dear old mother. He’d deserved it. A court might not come to that conclusion, but justice wasn’t only blind, it sometimes lost its sense of smell and couldn’t tell a rose from a rotten fish.

  It was when he saw the cloud of doubt passing across Harry’s face that D’Arby decided it was worth one last try. ‘Do you believe in redemption, Harry?’

  Harry looked up. He could sense another impassioned plea coming on, but he was past playing D’Arby’s games. He’d been doing that all weekend and it had got him shot and half burned and nearly killed when he should have been in the arms of a beautiful woman from Manhattan. He’d had enough.

  ‘Do I believe in redemption? I hope so, for my own sake. But I find it easier to believe in things like…’ He sighed, bone-weary. ‘Oh, I dunno. Breakfast in bed. It’s a much more straightforward concept.’

  ‘You bastard,’ D’Arby hissed, realizing the other man wasn’t going to play any more.

  ‘We dig our own graves, Mark, I think that’s what you said.’

  ‘And I’ll spend the rest of my days making sure they bury you in yours.’

  This wasn’t getting anywhere. ‘Go to hell, Mark. Just write your letter first.’

  Harry was exhausted. He clutched his arm and closed his eyes, his wearied mind stumbling through the thickets of what had happened, and what might have been. Eventually it collided with images of Gabbi. It kept doing that, he realized. He wanted to be with her, and not here, to haul his conscience along with him and see if the three of them could spend time together. In the background he could hear D’Arby’s footsteps dragging across the flagstones like an army in retreat. Harry wondered what the time was, whether he could get his arm fixed and clean himself up, give her a call, find a lift back to London. Sleep for a week, preferably in her bed. See how much he might grow to like it. That would have its risks, of course, but for the moment it seemed a marginally less dangerous proposition than many of the others he’d run into during the last couple of days. The sun was trying to prise his lids apart. He opened them, glanced around, searching. Damn, what had he done with his mobile phone?

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  A couple of years ago my wife discovered an unexpected entry on her credit card statement. Apparently she had suddenly started gambling on the Internet. My heart gave a momentary flutter, but fortunately she was quickly able to establish that this enthusiastic yet sensationally unsuccessful gambler wasn’t her. Someone had stolen her details and broken in to her account. And since the card was brand new and had only been used twice before its misappropriation, it was going to be pretty easy for the police to identify the culprit.

  Or so we thought. But, alas, we were given many reasons why we couldn’t point the finger of blame. Once you step into the cyber world, the police officer explained, nothing is as simple as it seems.

  Shortly after that the media began reporting how individuals and organisations within many countries, and particularly within China, were targeting commercial concerns in the West, trying to steal their secrets and raid their vaults. ‘M15 ALERT ON CHINA’S CYBERSPACE SPY THREAT–300 BUSINESS LEADERS TOLD OF ELECTRONIC ATTACK–CHINESE ARMY TARGETS CRITISH BUSINESS SECRETS’, The Times front page roared. Fascinating and alarming stuff, but if they can do that with Barclays Bank and BT plc, I reasoned that they might be attempting to do much the same with United Kingdom plc. I began to ask questions, and was startled with what I found.

  It’s not just teenage computer geeks and criminal gangs that are involved. Cyber sabotage has spread to the very highest levels. A war is going on out there
, being fought very quietly, but with huge intensity. And every one of us is in the firing line. The defence forces of many nations are involved, and none more so than the People’s Republic of China. The potential for creating chaos and inflicting damage is enormous, and almost limitless. I was scarcely reassured when a senior politician told me he had listened in committee to much of ‘this cyber stuff’, as he called it, only for him to regard it as no more than an attempt by various security agencies to grab bigger budgets. He rather reminded me of the Duke of Wellington, who confidently predicted that steam trains would never catch on because they would frighten the horses.

  Anyway, it all seemed a pretty good starting point for a novel. So my thanks in the first place must go to Scott Borg, the Director and Chief Economist of the US Cyber Consequences Unit who is also a Senior Research Fellow at my old graduate school, the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy in Massachusetts. He, in turn, introduced me to Professor Brian Collins, another expert in the field of cyber warfare. I have merely dipped my toe into a vast sea on which these two wise men are master navigators, and I have also taken dramatic license with much of what they have told me, although in all truth it seems difficult to exaggerate the potential for cyber skulduggery. I can only hope that I have done Scott and Brian justice in what I have written.

  Dr Chris Greef is another expert who has helped me on all sorts of technical detail. I hope he can forgive me for dragging him from his beloved garden on so many occasions and even interrupting his treks across England.

  Old friends from previous books have once again come to my rescue. Jane Chalmers has guided me through the perils of air traffic control, as she did with The Lords’ Day, and Justin Priestley has once again helped me with all those things that one of my kids calls ‘the bomby bits’. As always, Daniel Caitlin-Brittan at the BBC has offered great encouragement, and he put me in contact with his colleague Robin Mortby. Between them they helped me illustrate the perils of Sammi Shah.

  Former classmates of mine from the Fletcher School have played their part. Retired Rear Admiral James Stark of the US Navy has been very patient in answering my questions about the grounding of warships, although I hasten to add that his knowledge is entirely theoretical and he has never grounded any ship, least of all in Iranian waters, although in our school days I remember we sank a large number of beers. My Fletcher soul mate, Andrei Vandoros, has most generously lent me his broad shoulders on which to lean while I scurried to London in pursuit of my researches.

  Other old friends and comrades have been equally generous. Gerry Malone has been there to answer my questions about matters Scottish, Tony Insall has guided me through the complexities of Chinese culture, while Tom and Svetlana Hickerson have done the same, and invaluably so, with my musings on Russia–although in all cases the personalities and politics described in this book are entirely my own invention. David Perry, a fellow parent at Chafyn Grove School in Salisbury, has helped me with matters aeronautical. I thank them all.

  There are five more friends to whom I want to offer a special vote of gratitude. One is Dame Norma Major, who spent many years living at Chequers and as a result wrote a book about the house that is not only authoritative but simply beautiful. Her book never fails to spark ideas.

  Linda Harrison Edwards is a wonderful American lady who bought for charity the name of one of the characters in my last book, The Lords’ Day. She asked that I name a character after her delightful daughter, Blythe, and I took her name for the US President. I am delighted she has been able to make a return in the sequel.

  As for Harry Jones, I rarely try to picture what he would do, think or say without reference to Ian Patterson or David Foster, who know more about him than I will ever be able to imagine.

  And finally, as I write these words from the heart of the Wiltshire countryside, I want to thank Elizabeth Everill. A few years ago, she and her husband John not only sold us their house when they retired to Betty’s native Scotland, but they have remained in touch, and she has been my inspiration for the legend of the Lady of Lorne. Rachel (my wife and editor-in-chief), the four boys and Bill the cat send her our warmest wishes.

  Michael Dobbs

  Wylye, July 2008

  www.michaeldobbs.com