The History Book

by Humphrey Hawksley

  The next thing Kat hears is a noise like a tidal roar. Then cracking like gunshots. She’s already moving, but it’s too late. From behind her, the huge window, glass, wood, and plaster, blows across the room.

  FORTY-ONE

  Wednesday, 9:03 a.m., BST

  Air rushes from her lungs. Her face is hot. She feels a sting of broken glass cutting her cheek.

  A fireball rises up from the middle of the room, yellow, orange, and black, catching a vortex, blowing out the window, streaming above her, leaving a shadow of suspended black debris across the gaping hole in the front.

  The mirror falls askew, glass tumbling out of it, and it crashes to the ground. Grachev is facedown on the floor, his right arm twisted around his back. He lifts his head, tries to get up, and collapses back again. Kat’s hand is cut. Blood runs down beside her left eye. Out in the street, a car alarm is blaring insistently.

  She breathes in air like burning paint and crawls toward him through the choking smoke on all fours.

  “Get up!” she screams.

  Flames from a curtain leap toward the sofa and catch. Blood dribbles down to the edge of her lip. She licks it into her mouth, along with plaster grit.

  Grachev rolls himself over. His face is gashed, his left eye closed, his shirt torn to rags. He presses his hand onto the floor. Kat’s hand is under his shoulders, heaving him up.

  He grunts. She wraps his arm around her shoulders. He leans heavily on her and cries out as he puts weight on his right leg. She feels his breath on her cheek. It smells of blood.

  Grachev’s knees buckle. She’s taking all his weight. His eyes have gone gray and cloudy. They roll up into his head, and Kat slaps his face. The heat is up to the ceiling, plaster cracking, chunks falling, hanging by electrical wires, flames licking up the walls.

  Then there are other people in the room. A hand grips Kat’s shoulder, prizing itself between her and Grachev. Grachev drops to the floor, his legs twisted.

  She is being lifted up—a man on either side—she sees fireproof suits, masks. “Stop!” she screams hoarsely, her throat dry with dust. She tries to tear herself away. They’re too strong, and they know where they’re going.

  Kat is suspended inches off the floor, as one of them kicks open the kitchen door. She is bundled out through the back door, down steps to a basement patio, through another door, already open, and then a small apartment, and out into the street behind the building, where it’s calm, no shattered windows, just black smoke spiraling above the rooftops.

  Quietness envelops her. Her ears ring, but all else is silent. She can’t hear the engine noise. She’s lifted onto a paramedics’ stretcher and slid into an ambulance.

  FORTY-TWO

  Wednesday, 12:16 p.m., BST

  A nurse fills in a form on a clipboard and hangs it at the foot of her bed. Kat sees a policeman’s boot in the doorway. It’s a private room, a split-screen TV on mute, and sunlight playing on her bedclothes. Kat’s wearing underwear and a green hospital gown. Her clothes are folded on a chair in the corner.

  Her body aches. Her cuts sting with antiseptic. Her mouth tastes of burning and medicines. After refusing an IV and a tranquilizer, she feigned sleep because she needed to get her thoughts in order.

  Grachev knew who was calling him when his cell phone triggered the bomb. The explosives must have been planted by someone who had access to his apartment.

  Seconds before, Grachev told Kat that they shared a father.

  Does she care? No. Does he care? Yes. But people don’t go hunting around the world for lost half siblings unless they’ve got too much time on their hands or something more is at stake.

  Her dad’s onetime lover, Tiina, heads the Russian RingSet conglomerate. Yulya, Tiina’s daughter, is being groomed to take over RingSet. She’s made sure that her brother, Max, and sister, Lara, have no part in it.

  Yulya knows the identity of the men whom Kat killed outside the Kazakh embassy. Those men had just murdered five diplomats who were unlucky enough to be working a nine-to-five office shift.

  So, if the gunmen attacked at five, at the latest, it would have been ten at night in Britain. The intermission at the concert was at nine. The chances are that Suzy was dead before the attack on the embassy.

  Bill Cage asked Kat to break in at 12:30 on Saturday morning. Suzy and the Kazakh diplomats would have been dead for about seven hours.

  One of the victims, the Kazakh trade secretary, Aliya Raktaeva, was working for Bill Cage. The Kazakh data file that Cage ordered Kat to copy was on her computer.

  But Yulya was right. She could explain away the photograph of her with the pistol. And companies lie about energy reserves all the time. So what’s in the file that’s so important?

  Through half-closed eyes, she sees a shift in the policeman’s boots in the doorway. “An American national, sir,” he says. “The embassy has been informed.”

  An image of Nate Sayer with his documents flits across her mind. She remembers that he wants her back in Washington to face federal homicide charges, that Yulya cut a deal with Sayer to keep the Kazakh file, and that Sayer has the cartridge from the weapon that killed Suzy.

  The door opens wider, and the policeman stands aside. Stephen Cranley, in a civilian pinstripe suit, comes in and closes the door.

  “They tell me you’re bruised but otherwise unhurt.” He’s carrying a plastic bag, which he puts on the end of the bed before he takes a chair from under the window, lifts it to the bedside, and sits down.

  “I bought you some clothes.” He glances at Kat’s clothes on the chair. “They’re torn and have blood on them. I got as close to the originals as I could find.”

  Kat says nothing, glances around, worried about surveillance. As if he reads her mind, Cranley says, “We can talk freely. The cameras and microphones are off. The American embassy has been told you’re too injured to receive visitors. For the moment, you’re safe from Nate Sayer.”

  Kat props herself up in the bed. A pain stabs through her right side. She ignores it. “Max? Is he okay?”

  Cranley nods. “Worse off than you. But you’re both lucky. The explosives were planted under his desk, away from where you were. He’s in good shape, considering. I’ve talked to him. The call that detonated the bomb was from Yulya.”

  “She must have planted it on Monday just before I got to his apartment.” A week ago, Kat would have wondered about a sister trying to kill her brother. Now she finds there’s nothing more to say.

  “Mike and Liz?” she asks.

  “Mike’s angry and aching. Liz is composed and fine. They drove back to London and are still working with me.”

  She stares at Cranley for a long time. His suit is well tailored. He’s wearing a blue shirt with a yellow tie, slightly undone at the top. He is in his sixties. He has authority, but also sadness. Her father was close enough to Cranley to tell him the story about Javier Laja. Not even Nate and Nancy knew that. Cranley knows how her mother died. He deals with Grachev and Sayer. He works with Mike and Liz Luxton. He can turn off surveillance cameras.

  She takes a sip of water, wipes her lips with a tissue, keeps looking at him, and Cranley gives her time.

  “Who the fuck are you?” she says finally.

  FORTY-THREE

  Wednesday, 12:27 p.m., BST

  Cranley steeples his fingers. “I come from the tawdry world of intelligence-gathering. I met John when he was a young lawyer during the trip to Moscow. I was posted to the British embassy. Your father was a political innocent. He believed in visions. I didn’t. When I accused him of being naïve, he countered by saying I was confusing naïveté with curiosity.” He laughs lightly. “We got on straightaway.

  “We never lost contact, but I hadn’t seen him for years. Then suddenly, he flew over to London to see me. We met in Battersea Park in London, freezing cold but safe, because even then, London had more cameras watching its citizens than any other city in the world.

  “After the first London bombings, I had ta
ken up a job at Scotland Yard to help liaison between intelligence services. Later, after the port bombing at Felixstowe, I was posted to the east zone, known as East Anglia. That is why we were able to get you through the checkpoint. I still have some influence there, although probably not much past today.

  “Anyway, when we met, your father asked if I could find out about a summit that had taken place a few years earlier in St. Petersburg. If it was anyone but John, I might have done nothing. But your father’s . . .” Cranley seems to struggle for the right word. “His moral core, I suppose, persuaded me to help. I squeezed people whom I normally would have kept for a rainier day. I found out that the summit was held in secret between the presidents of the United States, China, and Russia. They were together for four hours and twenty minutes; no one else in the room except their interpreters. The topic was long-term energy supplies.

  “There haven’t been any big discoveries of oil since the early 1950s, and nothing really substantive since the 1970s, when the North Sea and Alaska’s North Slope were opened up. The nub of the summit was that China and the United States need energy. Russia has it, but no one knows how much.

  “The Middle East has about twenty percent of known reserves. No single country outside of there has more than about three percent. Russia is thought to have five percent. Central Asia perhaps another five percent. But since Russia’s been backsliding, turning inward, you know, we can’t confirm those figures.”

  Cranley pauses to make sure Kat’s following. She nods for him to proceed.

  “Well, U.S. intelligence discovered that reserves in Russia and the Central Asian countries were ten, fifteen, twenty times more than what had been published. Bottom line: There’s more gas and oil there than anywhere else in the world. So in St. Petersburg, the three leaders made an agreement. The truth about those reserves would remain confidential, which would keep prices high. On the strength of the shared secret, the United States, China, and Russia would carve up the world between them, dividing it into spheres of influence, pretty much like it was during the Cold War, and that’s what will happen on Saturday when the Coalition for Peace and Security becomes an international treaty.”

  Kat swings her legs over the side of the bed, grimaces at the twinge in her side, then walks across to the sink and splashes water on her face. “How did Dad know?” she asks, drying herself with a hand towel.

  “John came to me after he’d been contacted by a contractor working on the Tengiz oil field in Kazakhstan. There had been a spate of fatal accidents, and because American companies were shareholders, the contractor wanted to know if John could take action through the U.S. courts. Before accepting the case, John made inquiries and heard something about St. Petersburg. By the time he accepted the case, the contractor had been killed.”

  Cranley grimaces. “John was like a terrier. He pressed me. He must have pressed others. When he found an injustice, a secret, you couldn’t stop him.”

  “So Dad found out, and they killed him,” says Kat. “And killed Mom, too, for good measure, and now Suzy.”

  To her surprise, a faint, knowing smile dawns on Cranley’s face. “Kat, your father never died in a plane crash,” he says. “He’s still alive.”

  FORTY-FOUR

  Wednesday, 12:35 p.m., BST

  Her ears still ringing from the bomb, Kat’s not sure she’s heard right. Her lips move without a sound coming out.

  “We need your help to keep him alive,” says Cranley.

  But she’s barely listening.

  Still alive.

  How many times has Kat imagined those last moments, the Cessna spiraling out of control, her father fighting to survive?

  Still alive.

  She grips the edge of the sheet. “Go on.”

  “John never got into the Cessna. Someone else flew it, put it into a dive, and parachuted out. The plane blew up on a timed explosion. John was kidnapped. He was taken to Columbus and flown in a chartered Boeing 767 straight to a military airfield in Kazakhstan at a place called Vozrozhdeniye Island. That’s a mouthful, but it means Renaissance or Rebirth Island in Russian. In Cold War times, it was a biological and chemical weapons factory; Kazakhstan was then in the Soviet Union. In preparation for the CPS, Voz Island was declared a Special Economic Zone, with investment and tax concessions. In fact, it’s a prison camp, outsourced on a forty-nine-year lease to RingSet.”

  “Tiina Gracheva,” mutters Kat.

  “Exactly.”

  “Who my dad had an affair with?”

  “Yes. Max said he told you.”

  “But I don’t get it. What’s the point of keeping Dad alive?”

  Cranley shrugs. “Tiina demanded it. From what I understand, Tiina accepted John’s abduction and imprisonment as a necessity to ensure the CPS went ahead, but she refused to sanction his murder. It’s a strangely human decision, but Tiina said that if John were harmed, she’d blow the whistle.”

  “But killing Mom was okay.”

  “It seems so.”

  “And Suzy.”

  Cranley lowers his eyes, doesn’t answer.

  “How’s Dad living, then?” she says, keeping herself measured. “In chains? In a cell? Does he know Mom’s dead?”

  “Suzy was trying to find out,” says Cranley, “but what she uncovered went far beyond your father. She was going to take down the whole rotten system. She compiled a dossier. It contains documents, including the falsification of the reserves, photographs of people actually being murdered, the people who work with Yulya. Suzy found a lot of the evidence in the Media Axis archives. Liz Luxton helped her put it together. She was transmitting it to Aliya Raktaeva in the Kazakh embassy on Friday night when she was killed.”

  “And Raktaeva worked for Bill.”

  “Yes. For the FCA.”

  “Did Suzy know I was FCA?”

  “I don’t know.” Cranley plays it straight, like Cage, trying not to let Kat get worked up.

  “Was it coincidence that Suzy and I were working on the same project?”

  “Your separate skills made it happen. But when you were arrested for hacking, Suzy made sure you came under Cage’s care and not Nate Sayer’s.”

  Kat brings out the clothes from the bag. She tears the labels off as she looks at them, uses it to give her time and hide her expression. She swallows and keeps going.

  “Who’s doing it then? Who kidnapped Dad? Who’s running this rotten system?”

  “It’s in the dossier, which I haven’t seen.”

  “Then how come you’re involved?” snaps Kat. She unfolds the jeans, deciding to dress here and not risk breaking the conversation. She slips them on under her hospital gown. Tight, but fine.

  “Many don’t agree with the CPS,” says Cranley. “It’s more divisive than the Iraq invasion, and its opponents are prepared to go further to stop it. The fight is not only between governments, but also between people within governments.”

  “And that’s you?” says Kat, unfolding a red cotton shirt.

  “Yes.”

  “And Liz and Mike?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Bill Cage?”

  “The whole of the FCA.”

  Kat pauses, reflects for a second. “But not Nate?”

  “Nate follows government orders. He doesn’t question.”

  Kat slips off the gown and doesn’t care that Cranley’s in the room. She puts on the shirt and buttons it. Cranley looks toward the bed, then out the window onto a tidy lawn and garden. Kat goes to the mirror. She hurts, but she’s leaving. She runs a brush through her hair.

  “You said you needed my help.”

  “Yes.” Cranley pushes back the chair. It scrapes on the hospital floor. “Tiina is due here on Saturday. There’ll be a signing ceremony, first with the coalition partners, then with the heads of the corporations. We’ve heard that as soon as that’s done, Tiina will step down, and Yulya will take over RingSet. She’s drawn up a list of prisoners from Voz Island and other camps who are slated for exec
ution. We suspect that John’s on it.”

  Kat’s brush stops. In the mirror she sees Cranley, his back to her, his chin in his hands.

  “Yulya has your copy of Suzy’s dossier,” says Cranley. “The copies you gave Bill Cage self-erased. The only other copy we know of is in Liz’s computer in the edit suite at Media Axis. Liz secured it, but since then, another cordon has been put around it with a new password.”

  Cranley’s bought her a light green windbreaker as well. She shakes it open and slips it over the shirt, then looks back at Cranley. “If you can get me in, I can get it.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  Wednesday, 3:14 p.m., BST

  It’s sixteen minutes before the shift change that Mike Luxton and Kat will use to try to get into Media Axis.

  A window poster in the café where she sits advertises a live question-and-answer show with experts on Project Peace. Through grimy windowpanes she looks across the street to a line snaking around to a gated entrance. Some hold a copy of Christopher North’s pamphlet, reading it as they wait.

  Inside the compound are three high-rise buildings protected by razor-wire fencing, with flags on poles, flying full in the strong wind. One with red etched on blue has Chinese characters— . Next to it, Russian— . Then English—PROJECT PEACE.

  A huge banner is strung across the top of each of the three buildings. On the left, THE COALITION FOR PEACE AND SECURITY. In the middle, . And on the right, .

  On a TV screen in the café, the English soccer captain Gary Spooner, wearing a bright-red sports shirt, holds both hands with thumbs up against the backdrop of a banner with a multinational bank logo on it. A sports news strip schedules matches; quarterfinals Thursday, semifinals Friday, and the final, at Wembley Stadium, on Saturday.

  The second screen shows three men crouched behind an upturned van and fires on a hillside in the distance, with the caption FRESH FIGHTING IN MACEDONIA; ANTITERROR SQUADS DEPLOYED.