I knew James was trying as hard as he could to prevent me talking at length to Gavin, had done everything he could to pair me off with the new First Lady. ‘It’s really important we gel with them properly this time,’ he said to me in the limo from Dulles to our hotel. What he meant by ‘this time’ was unclear.
My first time alone with Gavin was on the morning of the funeral, when James was pre-occupied with interviews and protocol. Through Anushka I enquired as to whether Gavin would like a visitor, the reply came back yes, of course. I made my way to the White House alone, met him in the East Wing where his possessions and Morgan’s were being boxed up, ready for shipment to California. As I walked through the White House I marveled at how plush it was, so unlike Number 10. The Americans never scrimped when it came to things like that, no matter how bad things were in the country outside. Good for them, I thought.
Gavin and I embraced briefly. ‘You look incredible, Ellie.’ He made no secret of looking me up and down. ‘I’m glad your hat doesn’t have one of those horrible shrouds.’
‘Well they’re all the rage, at the moment.’ I couldn’t be sad around Gavin, and suspected that wasn’t what he wanted, anyway. Shortly he sent his personal assistant away on an errand and I asked him whether Morgan would have wanted to be interred at Arlington? ‘I think she’d be pretty pleased with this, yeah,’ he said. ‘I didn’t have any objections, I mean there didn’t seem to be much point carting her all the way back to California.’
‘I don’t know what to say, really,’ The assistant closed the door behind her. ‘Sorry doesn’t quite fit.’
‘Nah, it doesn’t, you’re right.’ He was scratching the side of his temples, staring at all the boxes in front of him. ‘I’ve had it with all this, shall we take a walk?’
He went to open the large French windows and we stepped out into the gardens outside. ‘This is the Jackie Kennedy garden,’ he said. ‘I’ll miss it, I will admit it.’
‘It’s lovely,’ I said, admiring the red snapdragons lining the colonnade.
‘Not my doing, my predecessors all took an interest in the rotation of the flowers. Staffers took all that on when I got here. You know what geeks say a walled garden is? Somewhere online where you can’t escape, so nice you wouldn’t want to ever leave.’
‘There’s one in Downing Street,’ I said, not wanting to be too expansive in case there were microphones in the dahlias. ‘Only that one has barbed wire at the top of the walls.’
Gavin led me out into the middle of the lawn, as far possible from the secret service agent standing in the colonnade. ‘I know we don’t have long,’ We stopped and he spoke quietly. ‘I feel like I killed her, you know?’
‘What?’
‘She cut her wrists,’ his eyes looked straight down. ‘We argued just an hour before. A week ago when we got back from Europe, I told her everything you told me, along with the fragments I remembered. I was surprised when she took it calmly.’
‘Really?’
‘Too calmly.’
‘Did she have any memories of it?
‘She wouldn’t say, she just looked frightened. I haven’t seen her like that in years.’
‘Did you tell her about how I saw her, with the bees?’
‘Only on the third night, the last night, when she came up to the residence.’ He turned slightly away from me. ‘It only took me that long because I was trying to decide, whether or not you were credible. I’m sorry about that, but I hadn’t seen what you saw. And I knew you weren’t well.’
‘That’s okay.’
‘She’d been in the situation room for three hours, and when she came back I asked her if she’d been warned about the air strikes. She said she hadn’t only been aware of them or sanctioned them, she’d urged the Israelis to do them. Nobody knows this, not on the outside.’
‘Not yet.’
His forehead creased. ‘I doubt the new administration would leak it. I told her she was being reckless, that she was endangering everything on a hunch. That was when I told her what you’d seen, the part about the bees. She had to go throw up.’
‘Like Rav did, when he started to remember.’
‘Yeah,’ Gavin’s voice croaked. ‘When she came back from the bathroom she was crying, as in sobbing. I’ve seen her weep before but never cry, in that way.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘I tried to keep her quiet. I held her, the first time I’d done that in years.’
‘So she acknowledged it all?’
‘We lay on her bed for about an hour. She said she remembered it. Then she said it was the Rendering.’ He looked at me. ‘She just repeated that word, over and over. Eventually I got her to calm down a bit, and she said the Rendering had been a secret project. They needed to find a way of torturing people without anyone finding out.’
‘They’ve long been able to do that without leaving a mark,’ I said.
‘Yeah, but the victims still remember, it always comes out, eventually. So they came up with the Rendering. A neural and physical interface. You’ve seen it, I know.’
‘And Morgan knew about it?’
‘That’s just it, Ellie, she said she’d been the one to veto, privately, when she took office. She ordered the research to be destroyed, and said a lot of people in government hated her for it.’
‘I almost could’ve expected her to love that sort of thing. Sorry,’ I added.
‘That’s okay, you didn’t know her that well, but I did.’ His breath came out unevenly through his nose as he looked at me. I’d upset him. ‘She thought if it proliferated, it could destabilise society, turn everyone into zombies.’ He sighed. ‘After that she started to cry again, asking over and over what had she done, what she’d started. She said she’d been a fool. Morgan’s always learned from her mistakes, I’d never heard her talk about herself like that before, ever.’ Gavin was angry, like me. I found it difficult to see past my own anger into his, though.
Gavin went on. ‘She told me she’d resign. I couldn’t believe that, told her that things could be reversed, surely.’ He lowered his voice. ‘I certainly didn’t want the vice president to take over. He’s even worse. She told me she’d think about it, then said she wanted to think in the bath. I turned on the TV, watched the explosions on the news, the people running away covered in blood. I was glad she didn’t see that.’
He was talking more quickly. ‘It was only after half an hour when she seemed quiet in there that I called to her. She didn’t respond, so I tried the door but it was locked on the inside.’ A tear had formed in one of Gavin’s eyes. ‘We had to get secret service to kick it in, that’s when we found her. In the bath, the water red. She’d used my razor.’
I wasn’t surprised Gavin didn’t weep or break down. Had it been me in his shoes with James dead and me leaving Downing Street, I wouldn’t be crying.
Time was short, as ever. I pulled out my phone and showed Gavin the screengrabs I’d taken from James’s files. He read them slowly.
‘They panicked,’ he concluded. ‘They messed up and then they panicked. You ended up somewhere you weren’t supposed to be, so they tried to send you back, but you ended up in Catseye with me.’
I told Gavin about the brain scans they’d performed on me in the hospital, of how James had been asking me about medication and me lying to him. ‘Maybe it was the pills I was taking,’ I said. ‘James never knew I was on them. But why do all this, Gavin. What is Project Tabernacle?’
‘I don’t know. You need to find out the identities of each of these files,’ said Gavin. ‘And it’ll have to be you who does, Ellie. Because I’m out of here in the morning, I’m going back to California, and I’m not looking back. There’s no way I’ll be able to find out anything.’
‘So you’re just going to wash your hands of all this,’ I said.
‘No, I’ll help you, if I can,’ he said. ‘And in a way, it’ll be easier for us to talk to each other once I’m out of here.’
‘But they’ll watch
you, Gavin. They know where you’ve been, they’ll watch you for the rest of your life. What if you have some kind of accident? I wouldn’t put it past them.’
He nodded. ‘You say them, but neither of us knows exactly who you’re talking about. Whoever they are, they’re small.’
‘It has to be military.’
‘Agreed. And transnational. But one thing I’m clear about is this; the Israelis didn’t want any of this. They can’t win the war on their own and they know it. It must’ve been the White House that pumped them up, gave them evidence that the attack on Ben Gurion was orchestrated by the Arab states.’
‘There’s no way I can investigate this. It’s too big.’
‘There’s only one thing you can do, and that’s ask James. You have to discuss this with him. Whatever they’ve done, he knows. He has to know. It’s all there in his phone.’
‘But I don’t have any leverage.’
‘Don’t you, Ellie? You can imagine what they’re going to say, once the funeral’s over. They’ll say a woman wasn’t up to the job.’
‘Would a man do any better? I mean if James…’ I stopped. Like the tumblers in Lottie’s safe, everything clicked into place. Things I’d known, things I’d already wondered about, they were like bits of the combination lock. Gavin had given me the final number.
‘James knows,’ I whispered. ‘He’s in on it.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘Think about it, Gavin. In this… Rendering, Casa Amanhã was connected by the wine cellar to Parliament, and James was definitely there. I found that link out by accident, but James made his way all the way from the Commons to the beach in Naviras.’ I drew in a deep breath. ‘He wasn’t moved there by anyone, because everyone who was moved suddenly, me you, Lottie, afterwards they weren’t young anymore. He made his own way there, because he knew exactly how to get there.’
I shook my head from side to side. I felt giddy; not in the ways I’d felt in the previous days and weeks when I’d felt confused, quite the opposite. The giddiness, the goosebumps, they felt triumphant and horrific at once. ‘You didn’t kill Morgan, Gavin. James did.’
Gavin didn’t speak, so I did. ‘I’m going to worry about you, out there, Gavin.’
‘I know, I’m a lot safer in here.’
‘You think?’
‘No. In fact, I’m not even sure if Morgan killed herself at all, thinking about this now. Maybe they got into the bathroom, somehow.’
‘But who’s they, Gavin?’
‘I don’t know.’
It was the last time we would get to speak to each other during my trip to Washington. I was far from him at the funeral service at the National Cathedral, which was televised around the world. I stood next to James as we watched the coffin being brought down the aisle. James said it was heart-breaking to see, ‘Well, you know who put her there,’ I whispered. He looked at me, shocked, I just kept staring ahead.
There wasn’t really anywhere for Morgan to be buried except Arlington. She lacked a presidential library in California to be interned in, couldn’t go in any old public graveyard, that would’ve been exposed to robbers and vandals. Some of her erstwhile political enemies suggested she just be cremated, quickly disposed of and forgotten like her presidency. I wondered whether her successor would’ve liked that. As the booms from the twenty-one gun salute echoed around the cemetery I stood in silence, staring straight at Gavin. He found me in the crowds and looked at me. Not anguished, not angry, instead his face was demanding. Of me.
‘What did you say to me in the Cathedral?’ James asked me as we were driving to Dulles that evening for our flight back to London.
‘I don’t know what you mean’ I said.
‘Something about who put Morgan in that coffin. I heard you.’
‘I said nothing of the sort. Guilty conscience, perhaps, James?’
‘What the hell’s got into you?’ He was looking directly at me.
‘Oh, I can’t remember, something about the war putting her there.’
I think we travelled on the same aircraft back to London; the same first-class cabin, empty apart from James, me, Rav and some advisers from the Foreign Office and Number 10. After spending the first hour of the flight talking to them James eventually came back to our area, strapped himself in and started reading papers, an hour later he closed his eyes, leaving me to stare out at the moonlit cloudtops.
After half an hour of watching his breathing, of assuring myself he wasn’t just pretending to be out for the count, I slipped off my shoes and got up from my seat. I walked down the aisle. All the political team where shattered and trying to catch some sleep in the hour remaining of the flight. I headed towards the back of the plane, pulling back the curtain just an inch into the galley.
There was a special branch officer sitting on the jumpseat, not asleep but relaxed. He nodded slightly, but didn’t ask if I needed anything. I slipped back quietly into the cabin and padded along to the next aisle, pulling back the curtain and peering through to where the press were all seated. I could see Liz Brickman awake, her face illuminated by the glow of her computer screen. I looked down the rows of seats, counting them, working out the number she was sitting in. Then I turned around and slipped back into the first class cabin, finding an empty seat on the left-hand side, picking up the handset in the armrest and punching in the seat number.
She answered quietly. ‘Yes?’
‘It’s Ellie Weeks,’ I pressed the handset to my mouth, trying to align the pitch of my voice with the engines. ‘I’ve something I want to you to see, but I can’t come down and you certainly can’t come up.’
‘Go on.’
‘It can’t be emailed. I want to send it to you from my phone now, if you let me discover yours?’
‘I can do that.’
‘Passcode 0603,’ I said, before replacing the handset. Shortly our phones connected and I exchanged two files, the first two photos I’d taken of James’s screen. When they finally transferred I waited a moment, then called her seat-phone again.
‘Well this is unusual.’ I could tell Liz was trying not to smile to herself.
‘I want to give it to you. The story.’
‘Okay,’ she hesitated. Maybe she thought I was a prank call by one of the other hacks on the plane. I imagined her eyes darting. ‘What’s it about?’
‘I’m going to show you, soon. You know the country code for Portugal?’
‘Not offhand, no.’ Clearly she thought I’d taken leave of my senses.
‘One day soon, you’re going to get a call, it’ll be a number from there. When you do, I need you to go to a place called Naviras. It’s two hundred kilometres south of Lisbon, on the coast. There’s a house there called Casa Amanhã. When the time comes, be there. I’ll give you the story.’
Thirty minutes before landing I went to the bathroom again, this time right at the front of the plane but still on the opposite side from James. When I’d finished preparing myself for the cameras I opened the door to find Rav standing there. He’d pulled the curtain across so nobody behind us could see. ‘What’s new?’ he said.
‘The place we were, the thing that made us think we were dead, it’s called the Rendering,’ I whispered. ‘Morgan told Gavin about it, the night she killed herself.’
‘She did what?’
I tried to explain everything Gavin had told me, but only got half-way through when a flight attendant pulled back the curtain, saying politely that the area we were standing in needed to be kept clear. ‘He must know,’ was all I said to Rav before returning to my seat, cocking my head towards my husband.
James was awake but hadn’t noticed I’d been talking to Rav because he was facing backwards, as he always liked to. But he still looked up from his papers suspiciously as I sat down and buckled up. ‘You’ve been up and down. I think we need to have a chat, maybe? But not now.’
‘I agree,’ I replied, feeling the pull of gravity as the plane’s engines changed rhythm and the n
ose began to tilt downward. ‘Perhaps we can start with why you had Lottie and Luis killed? If they really are dead, that is.’
His eyes flew open. It was satisfying to see. ‘What the fuck?’
‘It’s fine,’ I said, lightly. ‘I can actually understand why you had to do it. I can see the rationale.’ The seatbelt sign came on. ‘But one day people will find out, James. Nothing stays a secret forever. Even if it takes a hundred years, people will know one day, what you did.’
I watched his adam’s apple start to pulse, his upper lip curling. ‘Not here, L. Please.’
‘Or else?’ I stared casually at my fingernails, keeping my voice low. ‘Will you have me killed, as well? Some kind of horrific accident, perhaps?’
‘I will talk to you about this later,’ he leaned forward as far as his seatbelt would allow. ‘Later today, I promise. But you have to know this,’ he hissed. ‘I did not kill Lottie, and I didn’t kill Luis. Whatever else you might think of me, I’m not a murderer.’
‘Oh, okay. So you’re merely an adulterer,’ I shot back, still talking quietly. It was gratifying to watch him unravel, stuck in his seat and unable to evade me. Pinned down in every sense for the first time in his adult life, I thought, before realising it wasn’t the first time. I’d seen that look on his face before in the Rendering, just before the cliffs in Naviras Bay had collapsed.
James was pulling the strangest face. He clenched his lips together so tightly they curved upwards into something resembling a smile. Maybe he saw everything in front of him teetering. He wasn’t looking directly at me; I watched his eyes narrow just slightly as he quickly tried to war-game his way out.
Weeks in Naviras Page 32