‘Especially when you give me this confession of Ratcliffe’s. It’s the greatest coup in a generation of the armed struggle. And this time it’ll lead to something. This Royal visit gives us the best opportunity for a popular insurrection since the Twenties.’ Her excitement was tangible. He tried to imagine what it must be like to spend a lifetime working and waiting for something, and then find it about to happen after so many false dawns. Maybe falling in love would feel something like this.
‘If we can show the people they were betrayed we could get just the spark we need. Look at those riots in Halifax and Leeds last week. All directed against Commission targets. The Union Jack was everywhere. People were singing the tribal songs; they knew the words to ‘White Cliffs of Dover’, ‘We’ll Meet Again’, even ‘There’ll Always Be An England’ It’s coming south fast. Both Tenth May Army Council and the E.R.M. Steering Committee believe the time’s come to act. A general strike will be called for Monday week if the rally goes well on Saturday. So you see, things can happen. That’s why we need your information now.’
Horatio made his mind up. He would bloody well make history rather than just write it. He thought of Jean’s admonition to him. Faltering, but heartfelt:
‘Really, as well, when you come to think of it, it’s your duty to Britain.’
‘The Admiral gave me a memorandum in which he explained that he was bribed to keep quiet about how the Aachen Referendum was fixed to provide a “Yes’”vote.’ A flash of pure triumph crossed her face.
‘Yes! I knew it! I knew it! I’ve always known it! Who else knows about this?’
‘You. Me. Jean Dodson, the Admiral’s housekeeper did, but she’s dead. And Cleopatra Tallboys.’
‘My niece Cleopatra? How on earth did she find out?’
‘I told her today.’
‘You told her! Horatio, what are you talking about?’
‘She’s promised to try to obtain a conviction against Gregory Percival. I was to call her’ – he checked his watch – ‘to arrange a place to meet and hand over the Memorandum.’ Heather Lestoq gave a hollow, mirthless laugh.
‘That bitch is the most dedicated Euro-fanatic in the entire P.I.D. She’s their liaison officer with the B.-B.B. special ops and Signals Intelligence Unit, for God’s sake. How could you not have known that? She’ll be using you to get hold of the tape solely in order to destroy it.’ A tone of disdain, almost contempt, entered her voice. ‘And afterwards probably you, too. You must have been able to see that! Just because you’ve been to bed with her it doesn’t mean that you have to go and do everything she says.’
How did she know about that?
‘My poor darling.’ She shot a sympathetic, motherly glance over to him. Once again his world started to reel. Then she walked over and hugged him. Horatio started to cry. ‘And did she tell you she loved you for your mind? And did she say she preferred you to the what do you call them – Hunky-Regulars? I expect she also said she’d broken up with that maniac husband of hers, didn’t she?’
He nodded violently. He was starting to shake. ‘I hope you’re all right. We’ve lost operatives to P.I.D. stooges with serum-resistant H.I.V. You were protected?’ He nodded again, the tears flowing freely down both cheeks now. His massive bulk was shivering violently as the full extent of Cleo’s treachery sank in.
She’d come over to him at the party. Accessed his pager. Kissed him in the power cut. Taken him to bed. Doubtless she’d been under orders from Percival or someone to find out what he’d got on Ratcliffe. She’d read Riley’s thesis. Of course she was informed about the Entente attack – she was in on it. The scheming, manipulative bint knew she was irresistible. She’d doubtless been laughing at him all the time. Tallboys was probably being treated to another video to put beside his Leila collection.
After mother and son had had what both believed to be enough silent communion, Heather said, ‘Pull yourself together now darling, and listen carefully. For some time now Cleopatra Tallboys has been deputy head of the counter-terrorist desk at P.I.D. with specific responsibility for infiltrating Tenth May. She’s dangerous, she’s very clever and she uses her sexuality like her friends used that laser, though I need hardly tell you that. She’s a fanatic. Now, you must tell me exactly what happened. Did you meet her, as if by accident, after the first of your Times articles came out?
He was blubbing openly now, wiping his dripping nose on the handkerchief Jean had already ruined. He nodded his head violently, like a sulking child.
‘Where?’
‘Marty’s May Day party.’
‘Marty? Your friend from school?’
‘Yes, and Oxford. Marty Frobisher. He works with her.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘Missing.’
‘This is even more serious than I thought. We believe him to be JACOBITE, our spy in P.I.D. It’d be a disaster for the movement if Cleo’s blown him.’
‘Cleo told me not to trust him or call him.’
Heather was thinking hard. Horatio continued, ‘Her husband was round at his flat the other day. He answered Marty’s phone.
Heather sighed. ‘I’d better report this now.’
‘What can I do?’
‘How far will you go?’ Apart from putting her in any danger, Horatio resolved to do anything for his mother.
‘Just name it.’
She did.
CHAPTER 23
14.24 WEDNESDAY 5 MAY
Horatio got straight through to Cleo at the office.
‘What’s the story?’
‘It’s good news. They’re interested. Very. But as we suspected, they can only really act when they have the original document.’ He smiled to himself. He could have scripted this. He particularly liked the ‘we’. ‘What is it, a sort of signed confession?’
‘Yes, it’s a document with various supporting papers – quite bulky really.’ That ought to help throw her.
‘Whereabouts?’
‘I’ve told you, somewhere safe.’
A short pause. ‘Good. Now, I’ve got you total immunity from any prosecution if you get it to me. Not to my bosses, though. To me. You’ve got it in writing, signed by “E”himself. Big people are coming over from Brussels for this. They’re laying great store on the possibility of nailing our man. The operation has to be conducted in the strictest secrecy.’
‘You sound very tied up in it, for someone who’s off the case.’
He clicked off, just before the forty seconds were up. He called again. She didn’t comment. If she was disappointed it didn’t show.
‘He was my grandfather, remember. The getaway car tried to get you too. Don’t you feel tied up in it?’
For the only time in that conversation he told the truth. ‘Of course I do. Any more on the auto?’
‘No, no. Apparently Marty had been looking into it already. They’d got some satellite shots of where it was stolen, but the Ibworth disc disappeared on the day he was sacked.’
‘Curiouser and curiouser.’ (Well done Marty). ‘Where is he?’
‘We don’t know. Our people are trying to track him down.’
I bet they are! Horatio mouthed to his mother, who was listening in beside him.
‘What was the number plate again?’ asked Cleo.
‘I didn’t get a chance to see it. It was a grey grade 2 petrol.’
‘I’ll get Satellite and Traffic Location onto it again. Stay there.’ He was put on hold. Beethoven’s Ninth. No way would he fall for that. He hung up, waited a minute, then rang back.
‘What do we do now?’
‘Meet me in the same place as before at twenty hundred. I’ll bring the immunity certificate. You bring the Memorandum.’
‘No. I wound up being followed last time I met you there.’
‘Were you?’ She sounded genuinely surprised. Either she was an accomplished actress or this was more complex than he thought. The next thing Cleo said was almost to herself: ‘Perhaps they’re onto me as well now. What happ
ened?’
‘I’ll tell you when I see you.’
‘Where and when?’
‘I can’t make today. Or tomorrow. There are things I need to tie up. How about eleven-thirty Saturday? Somewhere outside London.’
‘I’ll just check.’ She put him on hold. That bloody Beethoven again. He clicked off, waited another minute and called back.
‘Ten hundred’s better for me. Outside London’s impossible though. There’s the big nat rally taking place in Hyde Park at eleven and I need to be around the central video monitor to identify ringleaders and generally keep an eye on it.’ She was so plausible, he couldn’t help being impressed.
‘A rally? I thought the Commission banned that sort of thing years ago. Unless it was a spontaneous demonstration of the people’s love for the European ideal.’
She laughed that full, ready, trust me I’m-really-one-of-you laughs which he had fallen for so easily only days before. ‘William Windsor’s making a speech commemorating the centenary of V.E. Day: the end of the Second Nationalist War. You must have read about it. We’re expecting pretty much every E.R.M. sympathiser to be there in person, or at least watching it on cable.’
‘You mean to say you can tell who’s watching which channel?’
‘The appliance of science, Horatio. Now, where should we meet? It needs to be somewhere central.’
Damn. Their first plan – to keep her well away from the rally – had failed.
‘Commission Square? By the Santer statue at ten-thirty?’
‘Fine. Yes. I like the irony. Hello? Horatio? Traffic have come back. A grey grade 2 petrol, licence W55 DCCE, was stolen in the early hours of Sunday morning from Reigate in Surrey. Belonged to a dentist apparently. Not much to go on there, I’m afraid. Satellite stuff takes longer, but we’re onto it.’
‘Has the auto been found yet?’
‘No.’
‘Interesting.’
‘Horatio?’
‘Yes?’
‘You do still mean the lovely things you said about me the other night? I couldn’t bear it if you were feeling differently towards me now, because of all this. Especially when I’m doing so much to try to help you.’
‘Of course I do. I’m crazy about you. As I will show you in person very soon.’ He clicked off with a few seconds to spare and smiled at his mother.
Part one of Plan A was in place.
CHAPTER 24
16.00 FRIDAY 7 MAY
The previous forty-eight hours had been wretched. Waiting in the house, unable so much as to open a window, Horatio had been in turns bored and scared. Dehydrated food for every meal hadn’t helped. It might have been true what the Mayor of London had said about people in the North going hungry, but why should he have to come out in sympathy?
Riley had been round twice to check he was all right. They’d had a good talk, mostly about politics. He’d joined the movement through conviction, that much was clear. But even the freedom fighter had begun to get on Horatio’s nerves by Thursday night, and he’d welcomed the power cut that had thrust the house into darkness. It gave Horatio an excuse for an early night, as well as Riley good cover to leave. The growing unrest in the capital had led to rumours of the 22.00 curfew being reinstated for the first time since the Nat Subversion era.
On his second visit Riley brought disturbing news. The operative they had sent to the F.R.O. to steal Percival’s note in the Treasury file 444/56432 had now not been heard of for thirty-six hours. Neither had their attempts to track down Kylie-Terèse Masterman come to anything. EuroNet revealed that His Honour Justice Minter had been found hanged in his study at lunchtime on 5 May 2015, the day after the Referendum. He had left no suicide note, just his Report declaring the previous night’s vote to have been ‘free and fair’. It would be worth subjecting that signature to some graphology tests one day, thought Horatio.
Neither had the E.R.M.’s attempts to track down Oliver Keegan on Horatio’s behalf come to anything. No one at the A.F.T.A. Embassy knew anything about him and the school had not seen him since the day of the test. The poor child might not even have been told. Horatio was in anguish; he desperately wanted to do something, but couldn’t see even how to start. Once again, he felt helpless and pathetic.
Riley hadn’t had the foresight to bring Horatio anything to read, so he was left with the Siberian tundra of daytime cable. If this was infotainment, they could keep it. The E.B.C. news channels told him, as he’d been expecting, that the Information Commission had officially connected him with Leila, ‘OXFORD DON IN ULTRA-NAT PLOT’ yelled the Nine O’Clock News. Predictably, the authorities were trying to blacken his name in advance of any revelations he might be about to make concerning Ratcliffe. That, too, was only to be expected. The twin murders and the Entente outrage were being linked in the public mind with nat secessionism, however illogical that seemed.
No one on the news shows he watched asked the obvious question: why should the E.R.M. want to destroy their idol, their number one political pin-up? Of all times to try to attack the Bridge, why should they choose the one when their King was crossing? No one could rally Free Britain like her ancestral monarch. Yet the question wasn’t asked.
The warnings he had given Hibbert and Weaning about the Entente Bridge, suitably edited by the E.B.C., certainly sounded damning. ‘Tell him there’s going to be an assassination attempt on the King in ten minutes’ time,’ he’d said to Hibbert. He should have used another form of words, but he’d been panicky and it was an emergency.
For the hundredth time that week, Horatio thought how unsuited he was for this kind of thing. Perhaps his mother had been right. If he was still alive when this was over, and if he was able to resume his academic career, he would return to his books, manuscripts, All Souls seat, reassuringly unthreatening documents and, best of all, Room 132 of his favourite library. He pined for the Bodleian.
He also pined for Cleo. The fact that the attraction had been as intellectual as it was physical – genuinely, not in the way he’d always told dim girls it was – made her treachery even harder to bear. Would he ever find someone like her? Yet she had probably been only laughing at his jokes and sleeping with him for information and to protect Percival. Their relationship didn’t count. It was yet one more humiliation in his seemingly doomed quest for affection. He reddened at the memory of her flashing her breasts over the I.H.R. vid-phone at the Institute. The slut. Horatio willingly gave himself over to further bouts of coruscating, masochistic self-laceration.
This would harden him, he thought, for tomorrow morning. How unbelievably close he had come to telling Cleo where the tape was! What sixth sense had kept it back? Then he remembered that it was not any sense at all, just a resolve not to put her in unnecessary danger. The same resolve had led him to refuse his mother’s pleas to pick up the tape. He had not even told her where it was. He would do it himself. It fitted in perfectly with his escape plan.
As well as the E.B.C. and NewsChannel 17, Horatio watched other cable channels to kill time. But if infotainment was bad, the edutainment channels were worse. CultureChannel 66 particularly exasperated him. It wasn’t so much the rot they talked – he took that for granted – so much as the accents and slang. The snob in him was revolted by the presenter’s flat, nasal, monotone Estuary-Grunge. Horatio had always thought of snobbery as a mild moral good. To take pleasure from someone else’s lineage, wealth, status or intelligence was, he believed, the exact inverse of envy, which he considered by far the most disgusting (and vulgar) of the deadly sins. Horatio felt pure anger when the presenter came out with sentences like ‘grunge groupthink won’t dis the splutterpunk genre’, and the guests on the show would then nod learnedly at this great insight into modern literature. He switched over.
The programme on EcoChannel 104 consisted of a ten-minute rant against ‘the barbaric Christian custom of so-called “decorating” the corpse of a tree, a beautiful plant which has been kidnapped and murdered for a so-called semi-religious rite. H
ow about showing some peace and goodwill towards all living things this Christmas? Think Green.’ And it was only the beginning of May! He switched again.
Horatio had never taken any interest whatever in sport, but he found it fascinating to compare the records won by athletes in the Steroid Olympics in Beijing with the Drug-Free Games in Kabul on TrackChannel 10. The sprinter from Kyrgyzstan, for example, had been able to smash the 7.125-second record for the hundred metres on an amazing concoction of muscle-enhancers, leaving the poor old drug-free runner from KwaZulu almost ambling in at 7.962. It wouldn’t be long, Horatio guessed, before the Kyrgyz’s shiny round face was adorning pill-packs all over the Union.
Horatio videoed both 100-metre dashes. While he was watching the runner in slow motion he noticed something strange. He though he saw a bluish flash hit the screen for a microsecond. He rewound and played the tape once more. It happened again. So he rewound and played the tape once more. It happened again. So he rewound a third time. At the slowest possible speed he replayed the tape, frame by individual frame. The sprinter would be taking a stride forwards, centimetre by centimetre on the screen, then suddenly for one frame he vanished altogether. He was replaced by a navy blue screen with the twelve gold stars of the Union. On the very next frame, a millisecond later in real viewing time, the runner returned to the screen again.
S.S.A. was back!
Subliminal Suggestion Advertising had been banned by the Commission in a controversial test case a few years before when the company Brain Inducer had tried to market a programme to help people stop biting their fingernails. Companies had hitherto been allowed to sell subliminal aids to combat arthritis, smoking, headaches, impotence, warts, indigestion, and so on, but they’d suddenly been stopped after the Brain Inducer court decision. Horatio now knew why. Brussels had its own product to push. S.S.A. was suppressed on the grounds that it gave consumers no choice. Horatio realised that the hypocritical nargs in the Commission were now using it themselves to promote Euro-nationalism.
The Aachen Memorandum Page 21