But I judge now that you have the right to know.
The person you believe to be your father, Commander Robert Lestoq, was a brave and honourable man. He could have led the Insurrection, and later the country, had he lived. I was delighted when he married Heather, my daughter-in-law Flora’s elder sister. My happiness was redoubled when Robert became shipmates with my own son James.
It was when they were away serving together, in the Second Submarine Flotilla stationed at Simons Town, that you were born. James and Flora’s deaths four months later came as a horrific shock. They died, as you already know, with your ‘father’ in the Atlantic Gas explosion in Ebury Street. That you and Heather survived was little short of a miracle. But what Heather came to tell me soon afterwards was almost as much of a shock as the news of the explosion itself.
It was the evening after the joint funerals. We had never really got on because Heather disapproved of my having scrutinised the Aachen Referendum for the Commission. But this was far more important than any of that. She told me that when she and Flora had been pregnant together in South Africa – Azania as they call it now – they had made a pact. It was the sort of pact which only sisters, and close and loving ones at that, could ever make. They had both ordered twins, Heather had asked for boys, Flora one of each.
They pledged that should anything go wrong, they would both leave the Nelsonia General Hospital with babies, whatever happened.
Flora had her twins on 2 January. Five days later Heather produced two stillborn sons. So my daughter-in-law decided to keep the girl and let Heather keep the boy. You. They pledged never to tell the fathers, the children or anyone else. Ever.
It was only possible because the husbands were incommunicado under the Antarctic ice-cap and they themselves were far away from friends and relations in Nelsonia (or Jo’burg as I’ve called it most of my life). They had little trouble in bribing the right Azanian official to provide birth certificates dating yours a week or so later than Cleopatra’s. As cousins, their close D.N.A. connection did not raise any eyebrows back home when they registered for Union citizenship. It worked perfectly.
It was just the sort of selfless, noble act of which Flora was so capable. She was young enough to have more children, whereas Heather was childless, seven years older, and had already miscarried twice. They knew it was her last chance. They vowed always to live near one another, so that Flora would always be able to be more than a normal aunt to you. I believe it could have worked.
It was only after James and Flora were killed with your father – or I should say Robert Lestoq, as of course my own son, James, was your true, biological father – that Heather told me the truth. She was in a very bad way, emotionally, mentally and financially, after the explosion.
I only learnt the truth from her on the condition that I never told you what had happened. Heather was very short of cash – Robert’s life insurance counted for little and his service pension for less. It was also in the days before the Commission subsidised Extended Kinship Groups. I was, for reasons you’ll discover from the enclosed tape, very well off at the time. So I gave your mother an allowance and settled enough on you for an education. Even after private schooling was abolished I never stopped the money, paying for your books, food, clothing and accommodation. I also made you a joint beneficiary of my will. All I asked was to be sent information about you so I could read about my grandson’s progress through life.
Otherwise we have kept far apart. I have now decided to tell you, and therefore possibly the world, the truth. I believe you have a right to know who your father was, and that you have a sister called Cleopatra Tallboys whom I brought up here and who now works in the Political Intelligence Department of Europol. You must decide for yourself whether you wish to contact her or not.
You will discover from the accompanying tape – if you have not found out already, and your tone over the phone last night suggests you might have at least guessed – how my fortune was made. I have followed your career with pride, if at a distance, and have read your articles on the Aachen Referendum which Heather sent me from The Times.
Not a day has gone by without me loathing myself for my treachery. I was dreading the thirtieth anniversary of my betrayal on Wednesday morning, and now I will not have to see it. I’ve booked myself into the Health Service’s ‘Golden Sunset’ Programme at Basingstoke General for 09.00 on Monday morning. I will pay for my crime that way.
Good luck, Horatio – a brave English name by the way, do honour to it – and if you do choose to publish, please do your best to protect poor Jean Dodson. Your loving grandfather,
Michael.
CHAPTER 18
12.25 TUESDAY 4 MAY
Reading in autos had always made Horatio feel nauseous, but never as much as this. He had been orphaned by letter. Posthumously. He felt utterly betrayed, alone, even vaguely suicidal. He doubted Robert Virgil could save him this time.
‘Tell me about the tape, Horatio.’
‘It’s the story of your Jake and Sir Michael; the secret of what they did and … of why they died.’
‘I’ve been thinking. I do want to hear it. I need to know what happened. You do understand?’ He nodded. ‘It’s best if you play it.’
Horatio took his journalist’s pad and pencil from his pocket in order to take down the Admiral’s words in shorthand. As he did so, Cleo’s billet doux fell out. His eyes fell on the third sentence:
‘Last night was wonderful.’
It was a love note. From his own sister. His twin. His mouth went dry and very sour.
He slotted the tape into the auto stereo and heard the opening bars of Beethoven’s Ninth. The Union Anthem. He appreciated the Admiral’s sense of irony. They listened on, but there was no sound of Ratcliffe. He fast-forwarded the tape.
Still only music.
With a sudden panic he wondered whether this was some hateful practical joke? Or had the Admiral, at ninety-one, got the tapes mixed up? His heart pounding hard against his ribcage, Horatio fast-forwarded to almost the end. Still only classical music.
Might it be on the other side? He jabbed the ‘Side Over’ button and then ‘Play’.
More bloody Beethoven. He fast-forwarded and then pushed ‘Play’ again.
Yet more of that symphony he had heard night and noon throughout his life. It had even been piped into the dormitories at his prep school in an attempt to foster Euro-patriotism.
Just as he was about to press ‘Fast-Forward’ again the music suddenly stopped:
Testing, testing. This is Admiral Michael Ratcliffe speaking at eleven-thirty hours on Saturday 1 May 2045. I am about to record my posthumous confession to a crime. Posthumous, because by the time you hear this I will have undergone the Health Commission’s Voluntary Assisted Euthanasia Programme. My crime is so complete in its treachery and grievous in its consequences that I have not the strength of will to face the people whom I have wronged.
The year after my retirement as a senior naval officer I was offered the post of Chief Scrutineer for the South-West Region for the referendum which was about to be held to endorse and ratify the Aachen Treaty of Complete Union, which had been signed there by the Heads of Government of all the various E.U. countries on 1 April 2015.
Having served as Chief Communications Officer (Home Fleet) in my time, and about to take up two non-executive consultancy posts with electronics companies, I knew more about systems than the Commission had obviously bargained for. I imagine they expected some red-faced twit, a dim-witted sailor who looked good on cable but would not really know what was going on. Someone who would certainly not work out what they were up to.
While reviewing the electronic systems on the Wednesday prior to Thursday’s vote, I discovered what I assumed was a simple systems error. The binary electrode which counted the votes at the central terminal for the electoral headquarters of the Region, situated in Salisbury Town Hall, had been inverted, i.e. inserted back to front. This meant that each ‘Yes’ vote wh
en it came in would automatically have registered as a ‘No’ on the Salisbury mainframe, and of course vice-versa. I thought at first it was merely a simple but devastating design fault.
I immediately informed the Chief Computer Engineer, Jacob Dodson, who had been seconded from his job as electronics division regional manager of Racal–Philips for the period of the Referendum. He expressed surprise and concern at the inverted chip and told me he would put the matter right immediately. He had no idea how it could have happened. As it was a straightforward case of switching it about face, the work could be done in a minute. I was quite satisfied.
During the actual voting, which took place, as every schoolboy knows, on Thursday 4 May 2015, I made it my business to check that Dodson had indeed made this easy but vital adjustment. I made my way to the communications room which had been set up in the Mayoral office, unlocked it with a special key of which I believed only Dodson and I had copies, and went inside.
I remember well entering the silent, panelled room and walking over to where the specially designed Referendum computer stood, behind the mayor’s chair against the wall. The electrode had been returned to the correct position all right. But just as I was about to leave I noticed some wiring underneath that I did not remember having seen before. It didn’t take me long to realise that someone had rerouted the charge to a second microchip, almost out of sight of the first, a chip which performed precisely the same function as the original one had, of inverting the votes.
The polls had opened at oh-seven hundred. It was nearly noon. I resolved then and there to declare the vote for the entire Region invalid and institute an urgent police inquiry. My first call was to the man who had appointed me as Scrutineer, David Mackintosh, the then Foreign Secretary and later the first Foreign Commissioner.
Mackintosh sounded shocked and jittery. He begged me to say nothing to anybody and to take no action until he had investigated the matter thoroughly himself. He also ordered me not to touch the electrode but to allow the false, inverted figures to be sent on to London that evening. When I pointed out that I could simply reverse the figures to give the correct result he categorically ordered me on no account to do so. He assured me it would be dealt with officially, immediately and at the highest level. He went on to say that he would be trying to find out whether the same thing had gone on in any other regions. He therefore did not want to prejudice the chances of a successful outcome of the investigation by going public with the news too early. I well recall him saying he wanted to ensure that those responsible for this titanic fraud on the British people would be brought to book.
I suppose that even after a lifetime of obeying orders I should have questioned my superior officer in this, but I did not. Instead I went home that night with a heavy heart, having transmitted to London the as I knew it, inverted, 59 per cent ‘Yes’ to 41 ‘No’ result for the Region. Once received there it was added to the other regional figures and gave, as we all know, the final 52 per cent to 48 per cent national ‘Yes’ vote.
The next morning’s papers were full of the ‘historic decision’. Denmark, Portugal, Greece and Sweden had all had equally close outcomes. I wondered then, as I often do today, whether the same organisation that fixed our result might also have been at work in those countries too. Certainly the Commission had disbursed vast amounts to set up identical mainframes and voting systems in all member states in time for the Referendum. They would therefore presumably only have required the same inverted electrodes in strategic areas to adjust those figures as well.
I’ll never forget that morning, reading articles about how the Ulster Protestants would take to the United Irish Region, whether Wales would benefit from independence and whether the termination of the union with England would leave Scotland a net contributor to or beneficiary of the Union. I had served in the Falklands Campaign in 1982, I’d had friends in the Sheffield. Great Britain, the nation my friends and I had fought for, was disintegrating before my eyes.
On a fraudulent vote.
But for that second electrode in Salisbury Town Hall, Aachen would almost certainly have been thrown out. Had the same thing also gone on in Southern and South-West Central? I didn’t know for sure, but I had my suspicions.
I decided to call Mackintosh again that next morning, to ask about arrangements for the revote. It was while I was actually on the phone trying to reach him that his ‘special advisor’, a self-confident young man in his mid-twenties called Gregory Percival, arrived at my house with someone he introduced as Francis Evans. I thought at the time that this second chap, with his flat nose and cauliflower ears, looked as though he would have been more at home in one of those illegal backstreet boxing matches than the marble corridors of the Foreign Office. I soon found out what he was there for.
I imagined they had called to confer about how to catch the culprits, but I was soon proved very wrong. After a failed attempt to persuade me that the result was ‘all for the best’, Percival argued that should the Referendum decision be overturned, mass unrest would follow. He also pointed out that the alteration in South-West England would not actually change the overall result, and went very quiet when I voiced my concerns about the two other regions. This was of course before I’d heard of the so-called suicide that morning of Jack Minter, the High Court judge who had scrutinised South-West Central.
I told Percival I knew my duty and would carry it out. I’d leave the political implications to others better qualified. I was not interested in hearing the various arcane international relations arguments he was putting forward either. It also had not the slightest effect when he informed me that the Referendum machine had been deconstructed that morning, and therefore no physical evidence survived of my allegations. He said I’d either be dismissed as a crank or written off as an ultra-nationalist. He also informed me that Jacob Dodson would be denying all knowledge of even the first inverted electrode.
He had brought a Report, ostensibly written by me, which confirmed that the Referendum had been conducted freely and fairly in the Region, and he demanded I put my signature to it. He showed me where Dodson had already signed. When I refused, his accomplice took out a knife and placed it up against my neck. His mean little eyes glinted with excitement at the prospect of slitting my throat.
I’d faced physical danger enough in my naval career not to be overly afraid, and I told Percival (untruthfully) that I had already made several copies of my allegations which I had given to a friend to send to various national and international newsagencies should anything at all untoward happen to me over the next few months. Evans was told to put the knife away after that. I now realise that they must have thought that the coincidence of having two Chief Scrutineers dying within hours of the vote would have been too much for even our lapdog media to ignore.
Then Percival took something from his pocket. It was a wedding photograph of my son, James. God knows where he’d got it. He made the most obscene threats about what would happen to my boy and Flora if I continued to refuse to sign. The way the ape Evans grinned at me I was sure he was serious.
So I thought again.
Joan, my wife, had died some years earlier, and the prospect of a lonely old age because of my own obstinacy appalled me. It was to protect James and Flora. Would my sticking to principle deny me the chance to see grandchildren? That thought above all others made me change my mind. Even if I managed to persuade the police to arrest Percival – or even Mackintosh – I could guess the conspiracy was deeper than that. It included the thug Evans and whoever switched the electrode, for a start. How could I be sure some confederate of theirs would not carry out their threat?
I’d never thought myself a greedy man, but I made Percival pay heavily for my silence. I was selling my honour and resolved that it would not come cheap. We came to an arrangement whereby I would win the Euro-Lottery to the tune of five million euros. The condition was that I never left the Union or breathed a word to anyone ever. I agreed to have my passport visas deleted from my I.D.
and I received the money at the end of the year.
After Flora and James died in an Atlantic Gas explosion in London in April 2016 I briefly considered telling the world what had happened. But I’d signed the report, taken the money and felt myself hopelessly compromised. I also now had a baby granddaughter, whom I was bringing up myself. Furthermore, it was in the middle of the Insurrection, as Britain slowly and painfully came to terms with what her loss of sovereignty really meant. It would probably cause even more bloodshed were I to spill the beans. I didn’t want to be responsible for a civil war! So I stayed silent and always have.
Until now. Thirty years have passed. I’m about to die. It’s time to speak.
When Jake Dodson became greedy and told me he was going to try to blackmail them into giving him as much as I had got, I warned him most strongly against it. I even offered to give him some of my own cash – whatever he felt he needed, within reason. He took no notice and died soon afterwards. The release of the name of the lorry-driver – Francis Evans – was, I was certain, a further warning to me. I invited Jake’s widow to come and live in a cottage in the village.
The full implications of my iniquity and cowardice did not really come home to me until some time later. It was when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in April 2025 that I first really appreciated the full ghastly magnitude of what I had allowed to happen. When the Union voted not to oppose it, and the English Commissioners were outvoted on the motion to send a Task Force to liberate them, then I knew I had betrayed my country.
Brussels was ordaining that the islands could not be liberated because of the effect on the Union economy. The German, Belgian and French Commissioners refused to allow the euro to be exposed to the inflationary pressures resulting from the increased expenditure which the recapture of Port Stanley would inevitably involve. They said sovereignty over somewhere so distant from the metropolitan continent was an absurd, outmoded concept, a hangover from the old days of British imperialism. According to them the islands were really only a troublesome historical quirk the Union was best rid of. They were, as it was put at the time, ‘of no strategic or economic interest’ to the U.S.E., so the Commission decided to let the Argentineans keep them. Pro-federationist newsagencies crowed about how at last the five regions which used to make up Great Britain would now perhaps look inwards to their continental future and no longer backwards and outwards towards their oceanic past.
The Aachen Memorandum Page 16