Whispers of Betrayal

by Michael Dobbs

  Rosenstein raised his head, took in Mickey and did as he was bidden, squeezing his early-obese frame through the throng. ‘Charmed,’ he said, looking deep and drunken into Mickey’s eyes.

  ‘Trust me, you wouldn’t be,’ Justin replied.

  ‘Trust you? I suppose I could always give it a try.’

  ‘Look, Rosie, cut through the shit and tell me. Did you get raped when the water shares fell out of bed the other day?’

  ‘Me, raped? Didn’t even come close. No, not me.’ Rosenstein’s alcoholic eyes gazed once more into Mickey’s but couldn’t focus properly, so drifted slowly down to her chest, where they roamed, then rested. ‘Got a little tickle, though.’

  ‘Which means what, exactly?’ Mickey asked.

  ‘Which means we may be halfway there, darling,’ the former love of her life replied.

  THIRTEEN

  The meeting of COBRA had started badly, and was about to get worse. The Cabinet Secretary had begun by reporting on the findings of TAG, the Threat Assessment Group made up of representatives from the security services. The findings didn’t put it in so many words, but the scribble on the Prime Minister’s blotter summed it up succinctly.

  No bloody clue.

  Water. Transport. The Government’s paging system. Telephones. What next?

  The TAG team had sat long and deliberated, but they had so little on which to base any solid conclusion. All they knew was that the Government, not so many years ago, had spent several small fortunes honing the abilities of the conspirators to find imaginative ways of bringing cities like Moscow and Baghdad grinding to a halt. So what chance had London? The TAG team found itself plagiarizing its own earlier work, suggesting that the conspirators might copy the IRA who had mounted an attack on London’s electricity substations, or food terrorists who had poisoned supermarket supplies, or the lone mad blackmailer who had threatened to flood the London Underground. No one could be sure what might happen next, they had so little to go on. All they knew was that unlike either the IRA, the food terrorists or the mad blackmailer, these conspirators had succeeded in remaining entirely undetected. What was even worse to Bendall’s mind, their identification with humorous cartoon characters was beginning to stick in the public consciousness. ‘Beaky’ made for neat, sharp headlines, and that bloody record was being played on the radio again. Even the BBC was at it. As long as they stuck to making fools of the Government, there was a distinct danger of the conspirators gaining cult status.

  When Goodfellowe slipped into his seat in COBRA a full ten minutes after everyone else, failing miserably in his attempt to do so unobtrusively, Bendall was not amused. The Prime Minister felt isolated and in need of an opportunity to show he was still in charge of proceedings. In short, he needed a victim, and latecomers always provide an ideal target. It was possible that Goodfellowe had an excuse, of course. Perhaps his bike had a puncture or he’d lost his bus ticket, but whatever the reason it wasn’t going to be enough. Bendall decided he was going to make an example of Goodfellowe.

  Maybe it was going to be a bit like World War I, Bendall thought. Perhaps this one wasn’t going to be over by Christmas, either. With every passing day the mood of his security advisers was becoming more bleak and their explanations less digestible. They’d be talking about the long haul and heavy pounding next. He needed fresh impetus, to introduce a little terror to stiffen the backbone, and for that he needed a bloody sacrifice. Stir up a little fear, inflict a little violence. To encourage the others. Yes, Goodfellowe would do, and do nicely.

  The Police Commissioner was in the middle of giving his report in which he was ticking off a long list of completed actions and proposed new initiatives when Bendall interrupted.

  ‘Yes, yes, yes, Commissioner, but perhaps we can all save time if I direct you to one simple question. What hard evidence have you managed to find?’

  The Commissioner studied the nail on his thumb. ‘We have to accept that it’s early days yet, Prime Minister, and –’

  ‘Anyone?’ Bendall interrupted once more, testily. ‘Security services? SIS? What’s your budget this year – more than a billion? What do you do with it, apart from buying curtains and restocking the drinks cabinet, eh? And what about you boys at Defence? Or GCHQ?’ He glanced around the table at each in turn.

  Silence.

  ‘I’ve given you everything. Anything you asked for. We’ve got bills for overtime running into millions, we’ve raised security on every public building in the country, we’ve interviewed thousands of suspects, done wiretaps, a bit of burglary too, and for all I know we’re coshing the Roman Catholic Cardinal to see if he’s heard anything in the confessional. I’ve got the Attorney General on my back telling me we’ve pushed things to the very limit of the law, but it’s what you asked for so I gave it to you. And what have I got in return …?’

  More silence, broken only by the rustling of grown men trying to shrink.

  Suddenly Bendall’s fists banged down on the table, sending the papers scattering like grouse in August. ‘Give me strength. Doesn’t anyone in this room have a clue?’

  Much more silence. Very serious silence. Then a sound, innocuous, almost apologetic, of Goodfellowe clearing his throat. It had an effect similar to the rivet of a submarine popping at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. Without further effort, he had everyone’s attention.

  ‘Prime Minister, I’d like to apologize for being a little late …’

  Inside, Bendall smiled grimly. The turkey had walked into the abattoir.

  ‘… but it was the matter of a few phone enquiries which I think might help our discussions.’

  ‘Help is a rare commodity around this table.’

  ‘Since we can’t establish their identities and we have little clue as to their intentions, I’ve been wondering about something else. Their motives. Now, on the surface they claim to be military men with an agenda which is almost political –’

  ‘Excruciatingly bloody political when it’s aimed at me.’

  ‘Well, precisely. But I’ve been considering the possibility there might be another motive.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Money.’

  ‘What – ransom? Blackmail?’

  ‘More in the line of a killing on the Stock Exchange. There would be a lot of money to be made out of water and telephone shares if you knew that the attacks were about to take place. And who would know that – other than the attackers themselves?’

  Chairs were being pushed back from the briefing table and necks twisted round as everyone strained to get a good sight of Goodfellowe.

  ‘So I made enquiries of a market maker in water shares – there’s only a handful of them.’

  ‘What about telephone shares?’ Bendall interrupted yet again.

  ‘A huge market, too many market makers there for me to check on my own. But water’s almost pocket-sized by comparison. So I asked if anyone had enjoyed a little windfall.’ He paused to enjoy the effect before continuing. ‘One investor did, indeed, seem to have a remarkable stroke of luck. He took out some put options only two days before the attack on Downing Street. Betting that the shares would crash.’

  Oh, but he had ’em now. None of them dared breathe. He kept them waiting. Eventually the Prime Minister, softly but very insistently, prompted him.

  ‘And …?’

  ‘He walked off with about three hundred thousand. And because of the timeframe involved, he didn’t have to put up a single penny himself. A very astute man. Reasonably restrained, too. Three hundred thousand’s not a lot in this context. He could’ve made millions.’

  ‘Then why didn’t he?’

  ‘Maybe he thought that would be a little too obvious. Or, more likely, because no one would have accepted such an enormous gamble from him. It seems he’s not a regular investor on the Stock Exchange. The put option was placed through a small broker near Cheapside, a one-room operation above Boots the Chemists, would you believe? We’re not talking high finance here, Prime Ministe
r.’

  Justin had been awesome. Having squeezed the name of the broker-above-Boots from the rat-arsed Rosenstein, he had then seduced the broker with a tale about how he himself was going to start making a market in water shares. Brokers know only one tactic for dealing with a market maker, that of adopting a position of complete and unrestrained wantonness. The fellow had crawled all over him with offers of drinks and dinner followed by an extended evening of lap dancing. The confidential details of one very lucky small investor seemed so trivial in comparison with their new-found friendship, particularly after the first couple of bottles. The Chinese walls that secured secrecy in the City had been undermined and toppled by the constant pounding of a tide of alcohol and greed. By the early hours of the following morning an exhausted Justin had been left in the condition of a sailor who had only narrowly survived a shipwreck, and not for the first time Goodfellowe wondered what it must be like to be pussy-whipped by Mickey.

  Now Bendall was gesturing vigorously in Goodfellowe’s direction. ‘Tom, what are you doing sitting in the corner? Come and sit by me. So that they can all see.’

  ‘Them’ and ‘us’ already, Goodfellowe noted.

  ‘So, let me get this straight, Tom. This man, a complete stranger to the stock market, places a bet that water shares will take a pounding. And he does this less than forty-eight hours before the attack on my bathroom?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And walks off with …’

  ‘Three hundred thousand. Give or take a little loose change.’

  ‘And does this remarkably astute investor have a name?’

  ‘Oh yes, Prime Minister. He has a name. It’s Payne. The Honourable Freddie Payne, to be precise. It appears that before he became a player on the Stock Exchange he was a Major in the Guards. The Grenadiers. We kicked him out two years ago.’

  Bendall is shouting.

  ‘No! No, I will not have it! Enough!’

  ‘But, Prime Minister,’ the Commissioner tries for one last time. He’s showing courage, everyone else has given up. ‘If Payne is our man, he must have accomplices. Let us give him a little rope. Let him lead us to the others.’

  ‘And give you the slip? Run rings around you? Like he’s been doing ever since this whole fiasco started? Not any more!’ Bendall rises from his chair to indicate the meeting is about to be adjourned. ‘I want him picked up within the hour, and I want him broken. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve had to stand up in Parliament and defend you against accusations of police brutality, so now I want you to start living up to your reputation. Squeeze the bastard, squeeze him dry. I want him, then I want the rest of ’em. I want action, not argument.’ And if I sound strident, almost desperate, it’s because that’s precisely what I am. A Prime Minister who can’t safeguard his own capital city will soon be no Prime Minister at all. The authority and awe that come with this office have been leaking away like water through a ruptured dyke, but now I have something – someone – to throw into the breach. So I want the entire ungrateful world to know that we’ve got one of them, that these creatures aren’t a bunch of quaint comic characters but instead are grasping bastards who have been lining their own pockets, and I want them to know all this because it will tell every single one of them that I, Jonathan Bendall, am back in business. Understand?

  ‘And Tom? Good work. I’m glad there’s someone I can count on.’

  There is a general shuffling of papers, and glances of envy tinged with relief are cast in the direction of Goodfellowe. Slowly, stiffly, they depart.

  No one seems to have noticed how very, very quiet Earwick has been.

  It has been a day of triumph, to be followed – or so Goodfellowe hopes – by a night of conquest.

  But Elizabeth has cried off. Short-staffed at the restaurant, she says, she will have to fill in. One of those things.

  When he telephones to say goodnight, she isn’t there. Hasn’t been there all evening, according to Maribelle.

  Perhaps she has changed her plans, or wanted a quiet night on her own, to worry. A silly white lie. One of those things. Unnecessary, he thinks.

  That night his bed feels unusually cold.

  The following morning brimmed with optimism, but Bendall wasn’t to get the headlines he wanted.

  Neither was Earwick.

  ‘DIPWICK!’ screamed the Sun, straining to cram the huge typeface onto its front page. The rest of the media tumbled in its wake like lemmings over a cliff, although some preferred not to dwell on the more graphic details.

  Earwick’s House of Commons researcher, he of the e-mail, was called Ernest. Ernest was like many parliamentary researchers, youthful, bright-eyed, exceptionally eager. He was unusual although not unique in that he was also deeply and, in the eyes of many, beautifully black, which had caused the Sun to ensure that his image on the front page was in colour, since monochrome photos tend to wash out the features on black faces.

  editor@the-sun.co.uk still had no idea by what mixture of alchemy or electronic artistry he was getting copies of the Home Secretary’s e-mail messages flashed onto his screen, but through frantic hours of analysis Brett Eatwell and his staff had resolved that these messages were indisputably genuine. These included the communications about his forthcoming speech to the annual general meeting of the Lancashire Women’s Institute, the reminder for Ernest to pick up his shirts from the laundry in Horseferry Road, and the request for Ernest to ‘check local newspaper archives – make absolutely certain, no messing on this one,’ that the Fred Whittles who had just been appointed to the Opposition Front Bench as Spokesman for Home Affairs and apple pie and other worthy sorts of thing was the one and the same Fred Whittles who, according to shadowy Home Office sources, had been sentenced to community service for a minor assault on a policeman outside a Bristol nightclub. It had been the occasion of his eighteenth birthday.

  Trouble was, there was also the e-mail that Earwick had sent on the afternoon the telephones had run amuck, an unfortunate e-mail by any standards, in which he had requested that Ernest get his ‘beautiful black bum over to my place in twenty’. The full text now occupied a considerable part of the front page. What space remained was devoted to a photograph. Under a caption describing it as ‘the moment of madness’, it showed Ernest entering the front door of the Home Secretary’s stucco-fronted house in Pimlico. It was a rather fuzzy picture, since the hastily summoned photographer had arrived only seconds before Ernest himself and scarcely had time to take off his lens cap. The photograph on page five, however, was much sharper, showing Ernest leaving fifty-five minutes later, with the ghostlike face of Earwick staring after him from behind the curtains. (There was also more material on pages four, five, six, seven, twelve and thirteen, with further sensational revelations promised in the next day’s edition.)

  Little wonder he’d found it difficult to concentrate during COBRA.

  It isn’t, of course, a crime to be a homosexual and to conduct one’s relationships in private, even if you are Home Secretary, but if you are to escape without embarrassment from such relationships then you have to choose partners less brittle than Ernest, who had cracked and blubbed at the first sign of a reporter, and then agreed to hand over his story, illustrated with original copies of handwritten letters, photographs and excruciatingly personal memorabilia, in return for twenty thousand pounds and a club-class ticket to Florida.

  Did the nation care that the third most powerful man in government, behind the security of his own front door, went by the sobriquet of Lady Lydia? That he bought his underwear from Agent Provocateur in darkest Soho and mailed his undeveloped films for processing to a photographic shop in Chelmsford which advertised its confidential services in the classified pages of Boyz magazine? Or that last New Year he had thrown a dinner party by candlelight at his hideaway in France during which the ever-artistic Ernest had played the piano wearing nothing but a chorister’s ruff? None of this was necessarily life-threatening in a modern and liberated country, given a little careful
media management, but what rearranged all the furniture and finally threw it overboard were the notes in which Earwick compared Ernest’s manhood to the size of the Prime Minister’s ego, suggesting it was over-inflated and forever on display.

  Stupid, of course, to have written in those terms, but middle-aged men under the influence of alcohol and pink poppers tend to do such silly things.

  Later that morning the Home Secretary’s private secretary telephoned with his apologies, but Mr Earwick would be unable to attend Cabinet. He was too busy writing his letter of resignation.

  Outside Number Ten, the gaggle of correspondents gathered before television cameras and tried to extract comments from those arriving for the meeting of the Cabinet, but failed. They didn’t get any smiles, either. However, a consensus did emerge amongst the waiting media. It was their unanimous view that, with two Home Secretaries down inside a month, Bendall’s administration seemed suddenly to have the sense of direction of a supermarket trolley.

  At the Cabinet meeting the Lord Chancellor insisted on delivering a statement. He was an old personal friend of the Prime Minister, well intentioned but with two considerable defects. He was incredibly dour – ‘the personality of a computer screen with the screensaver switched off,’ as one columnist had put it. He also possessed even less imagination than a screensaver, a characteristic which, up to now, had protected him from the many vagaries of politics. But his friend was hurting. He wanted to help. So he had hijacked proceedings by insisting on delivering a statement – ‘on behalf of all your colleagues and friends around this table, Prime Minister’ – that was unusually extravagant in support of Bendall and extolled the many virtuous qualities of his leadership in these troubled times. ‘We wish you to know that without either reservation or hesitation, Prime Minister, we support you one hundred per cent.’

  The rest of his colleagues banged the table in a show of unanimity.