Keep Calm

by Mike Binder

  “Listen, Richard, I have to ask you not to call anyone. Not to tell anyone where we are. In fact, I need your cell phone.”

  “You do? What for?”

  “I need to hold on to it, to make sure you don’t call out, or worse, that someone uses it to track you here. I promise you that’s a reality. Please give it to me.” He bore down on Richard with his eyes, refusing to avert his stare, his hand out. Richard gave in with a shrug, handed him the phone, and watched in shock, keeping his temper in check as Adam took out the chip in the back.

  “I’m sorry, Richard. I have to protect my family. I can’t afford to make a mistake right now.”

  Richard nodded. It was obvious that he and Adam weren’t going to be best pals, which probably made sense seeing as how Richard had long-term plans to win Kate back. His mind was quietly racing. Maybe this Adam was in fact a nutter. Maybe he was guilty, was involved in this blowup thing at Number 10. Even if he wasn’t, it seemed like a good chance he was going to take the fall, and a better one that he’d spend a long block of time alone in a jail cell. Richard’s plan was shaping up: Be nice. Help out. Let events unfold. Sit by Kate’s side as a family friend through the ordeal, and when she’s alone and the tear ducts are empty, after the trial and hoopla, she’d come back to her Richard. That was the plan. Just be the good man.

  “Another glass of wine, Adam?”

  “I don’t think so. Thank you, though.” He looked back at Richard again.

  “Do you have a weapon? We may get visitors. Not soon, but if we stay here, I’m gonna need something.”

  Richard went to a closet, opened it, and pulled out a shotgun and a box of shells and showed them both to Adam.

  “My father’s. He was a hunter. I’ve never shot it once. I don’t believe in guns.” Adam didn’t respond. There wasn’t time to have a gun control debate.

  “He has a pistol up there, too, on the shelf somewhere. Again, I’ve never had much use for it all.” Richard put the gun and the shotgun shells away just as Kate came back from the yard. Adam went to his wife.

  “How’s Billy?”

  “Better for now. He’s playing on the mill, distracted.”

  “He doesn’t want to believe your father’s in with them, does he? Doesn’t believe he had a hand in it all?”

  “He’s eight. He’s finally connected with an old man he’s been longing to know, someone he thought he’d lost forever. Now he’s losing him again. He doesn’t believe in anything other than that. For what it’s worth, Adam, he doesn’t think you’re a criminal. He believes you. He’s just terrified to be going through it all … again.” He understood clearly that she was talking about herself as well. She now turned her gaze back to Richard Lyle and his tattered shirt and bloody side.

  “Do you need me to look at that wound?”

  “I’m not sure. I think I need some help with it. Maybe some supplies. There’s a pharmacy in the city center. In Tunbridge Wells. I could go and get some stuff. It seems like we may be here for—”

  Adam cut him off, “I’ll go. I’ll go now, before it gets too dark.”

  What he wanted to say was before it gets too hot, but he didn’t want to alarm Richard and Kate. He figured he had another small window. It had been four or five hours since the bomb went off. It wouldn’t be long before his face would be plastered all over the media. Could be hours. Could be a day or so. Not a lot more. He wanted to take advantage of this last chance to go out. Get some time alone, time to process all that had happened.

  He took Richard’s antique Volvo into the village for supplies, just in case they were already on the lookout for his rental car. There was no telling how quickly Heaton would throw him under the bus. His sense was that “Sir Dickhead” would let it play out awhile. Let the detectives on the case come to it naturally. Then play shocked and dismayed.

  * * *

  THE VILLAGE, ABOUT twenty minutes south of the mill house, was a typical English country borough, on the big side of a small town. The high street had a row of fashionable shops and the congestion had a minorleague scent of London traffic to it. It was bigger than Adam had expected. There was more foot traffic than he had hoped. He put on a painter’s cap that he found in the Volvo and went into the pharmacy.

  After getting everything on Kate’s list from the pharmacy, he walked the streets looking for a grocery. He gave a quick scan to the late afternoon Evening Standard, which had news of the bombing but, thankfully, no mention of any suspects.

  He passed an old pub, looked in through the leaded windows and saw a small crowd glued to the television in much the same way that the two groups had hovered around it back at the hotel lobby bars in London. He went inside, happily noticed that no one paid him any attention, pulled his cap down, and sat in a booth at the back to watch the news on the flat-screen TV mounted on the front wall.

  Georgia Turnbull, the woman from the conference who had sat across the table from him, had just come out of an SUV on Whitehall outside of the main gate to the Downing Street complex and walked straight into a churning sea of pandemonium and confusion. She began speaking at a podium surrounded by a horde of insatiable microphones and flashing cameras. As she spoke, the network showed pictures in a separate box of Roland Lassiter and her over the course of their lives as politicians.

  To Adam, she seemed in shock—displaced, disoriented, much different than the powerfully assured figure she had cut earlier that afternoon. She spoke slowly, her voice somewhat deeper, as if she were trying to exude control and calm. Yet Adam, not knowing her in the slightest, didn’t see that at all. To him she appeared on the verge of tears as she tried to speak sweetly of the wounded prime minister.

  The locals in the pub hung on every word. For the hearty group, some of them already several pints in, it was the first statement from the government since the bombing and, needless to say, attention was paid. The crowd continued to grow. Word on the street had obviously spread. The people in the pub looked as stunned as the chancellor. Roland Lassiter was undoubtedly a beloved politician, but this was beyond even that. Britain had been attacked at the masthead. This was a personal blow.

  Adam couldn’t help but wonder how this crowd would react if they knew the bomber himself was seated just behind them in the booth by the back wall. He envisioned the patriotically fueled beating he would take. The final line of Ms. Turnbull’s speech did little to calm his fear of the coming reprisals. She looked straight into the camera, and, for the first time now, looked dead certain of her words.

  “In short time, as the dust settles, we will piece together the events of this dark day, and then, with the warm light of a clear morning, we will come for you, we will find you, and I promise, on behalf of our United Kingdom, there will be hell to pay.”

  Some people in the pub were even crying. Even the ones who weren’t had mist in their eyes. Some cheered; others bandied about conspiracy theories. Everyone seemed to be a pundit—a pub full of half-drunken experts on international terrorism, pontificating on how the government should right this wrong, who was to blame, and how much firepower to use. Adam picked up his shopping bags and headed off to find the grocery store.

  * * *

  TRUDY AND BILLY were both asleep in an upstairs bedroom. Neither had had a full night’s rest since they had left Chicago. Kate checked on them. Even though it was early, they both were out. She sat on the edge of the bed and lightly stroked Trudy’s hair. Kate understood the agony of a young heart. She wanted to somehow take Trudy’s pain away, but all she had to trade it with was more misery.

  She left the bedroom and made her way down the hall past the master. She looked in and saw Richard in the shower, naked. He didn’t see her watching as he stepped out and wrapped a towel around his waist. As she turned away she saw the size of the knife wound on his stomach and saw him grimace as he stepped to the tile floor. She went to him. He allowed her to inspect the wound.

  “I’m gonna be fine. Don’t you worry.”

  The towel conven
iently dropped to the floor. He stood there proudly, as he always did, loving to show off the bells and whistles of his manhood. Oddly, she wasn’t the least bit embarrassed, though she shut the bathroom door in case one of the kids woke up.

  She took a hand towel, dried the wound, and looked closely again. He would be okay. It needed dressing, though. Without thinking about it, she began softly drying his chest while looking worryingly at his injury. She looked farther down and saw Richard’s erection.

  He gazed into her eyes now and grinned a devilish half smile that only a former lover could deliver. She thought for a second how nice it would be to hide in something so carnal, so base, so “wrong.” She wanted to reach down and take him in her hand, stroke him, and have him take her, whisk her away to a place free from fear, even if it were only for a few moments. She considered whether to use the escape route, whether to lash out at Adam in this way, whether to fall into a moment and let Richard have her right there in the bathroom, or not. She saw his reflection in the bathroom mirror, a want and a need smoldering so strong she even thought for a second it was he that was steaming up the glass.

  She dropped slowly toward her knees, looked up past his penis to his eyes, which were as wide and ready as she had ever seen them, even when he was twenty years younger and the game between them was still new. Their views locked on each other. He looked down longingly, she up fondly, both wondering if this moment here, these naked seconds, would open a door to a past that both of them privately owned together.

  She broke from his gaze, picked up the towel, stood up, wrapped it carefully around his waist, then left the bathroom in search of supplies for his wound.

  * * *

  AT HEATON’S MANSION, on Palace Gardens Mews off Kensington Gardens, it was a somber, foggy night. The security detail, tense with news of the explosion, was on high alert, along with all of London.

  Heaton and Gordon were in the kitchen. Sir David was making himself a sandwich. He had let the cooks and the kitchen staff go home early and was having a good time making himself a bit of a feast in the giant server’s kitchen. He was more than a tad tipsy, having had one too many at the Connaught after the conference. Now, with the house almost empty, he would have a nice meal, smoke another cigar, and watch the news coming from Downing Street. It was a perfect plan until Gordon barged in and demanded a face-to-face.

  “It was supposed to be a ‘nothing bomb’! Isn’t that what you said? A ‘dud’? To scare the PM? To send him over the edge? That’s what you told me! That’s a far cry from the truth, David.” Gordon was hot, as worked up as David had seen him since they were kids.

  “You need to calm down, Thompson. You’re getting yourself lathered over nothing.” He cut his sandwich, set one half on a plate, and slid it over the polished, stainless-steel countertop. Gordon looked at it and pushed it away. Heaton saw the burn, the black of Gordon’s glare, knew this wasn’t another time he could just push his old sheepdog of a friend down the road and have him fetch a stick. He wasn’t going to be petted and rolled over.

  “Yes. Okay, Gordon, yes, it was supposed to be a dud bomb. Just scare the piss out of Lassiter. Jangle his already beaten nerves. It was supposed to be a nothing incident—”

  Gordon cut him off, his voice raised, his own nerves now good and “jangled.” “I don’t care what it was supposed to be! I care what it was! This boy could be looking at murder now. We all could be looking at murder, David.”

  “If I didn’t know you so well, I’d take that as a threat.”

  “It’s not a threat. It’s a reality. This is a mess.”

  “I’m well aware. Trust me. There’s an aspect of this that has gotten out of hand. You are spot on. But you have no idea how big this is, how far back it reaches, how much of it is out of my purview.”

  “That doesn’t concern me. What concerns me is that you’ve brought my family into this.”

  “No. You brought your family into it, not me. I didn’t even know they were coming over with Tatum until you’d gone ahead and made it happen. You went around my back on your own and had your daughter and the kids come along as well. I never would have okayed that, Gordon, let’s remember that. It was a serious mistake.”

  “I did that because I trusted you, that what you told me was the truth: that we were going to use him to fix a ‘bookkeeping snafu,’ that at the very worst he’d do a couple of years, and they’d make out ‘like royalty.’ You know damn well I would have had no part of something on this level.”

  “But you knew about the bomb before today, Gordon, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I did. But by then it was too late, and what you told me, even last night, was that no one would be hurt and that he would be protected. If Lassiter dies, if this thing truly does erupt, you won’t be able to protect him.”

  Heaton took a sip of a drink he had poured. “Your daughter and your grandchildren will be safe and well taken care of. I’ve given you my word.”

  “And what about Adam? What’s the plan there?” Gordon didn’t need an answer. He knew full well what the plan was. He knew there was no way that anyone involved in all of this could afford to let Adam live through this whole damn cock-up.

  “Honestly, I don’t yet know what the plan is. I’m not moving the pieces around the board at this point.”

  “Bullshit, David. Just come out and say it, damn it. Look me in the eye. They’re going to kill him. That’s the plan, isn’t it? He takes the fall, and Lassiter dies or resigns?”

  Heaton just stared back at him. He gave him the body language that read he was tired of pretending they were equals. Gordon pressed on.

  “This is about Europe, isn’t it? The referendum. Just come out with it.”

  “Yes, Gordon. It’s about Europe. Europe and so much more.” He finished his half of the sandwich and began cleaning up after himself. “It’s about saving this country, okay? This isn’t a bunch of kill-happy thrill seekers enjoying the job at hand. This is all in service of an important turn. You can trust that.”

  “I don’t trust anything. This is about my family.”

  “I have promised that they will be fine. Your family will not be hurt. You need to find them, like we planned.”

  “So Adam can be sacrificed?”

  “When things settle down, sooner rather than later, your daughter and the kids will be flown quietly out of the UK. She has a policy from the company that covers him when he’s traveling abroad in case of an accident. We’ll honor it to the letter, and she’ll be well looked after.”

  “And he’ll be dead?”

  Heaton chuckled, rolled his cigar in his hand and smelled it.

  “Are you wearing a wire, Gordon?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then why do you need everything spelled out for you?”

  “We’re talking about my son-in-law.”

  “Whom you can’t stand. Who embarrassed the hell out of his wife. Remember? You were all for this when he was just going to do a small turn in prison, weren’t you? When he’d have been destroyed and she’d be back here in London? Now that it’s worse than that, you’ve found your line in the sand. Is that what you’re telling me? Because I’m sorry, the game has changed. The stakes have been raised and you are seated at the table, Gordon, whether you like it or not. You don’t get to pull back. You don’t get to just cash in and walk away, not now. Neither of us does.” He finished putting everything back in place and gave Gordon a moment to resign himself to the circumstances.

  “You were on the phone with the former boyfriend two hours ago. Your mobile to his mobile. He’s with them. He has your granddaughter. Where are they?”

  Gordon was stunned. The tentacles these people had were as long-reaching and quick to react as he feared. The resources Heaton was dealing with were infinite.

  “We’re all-in here, Gordon. Deep. Do not even think about going wobbly. It’s nowhere near close to smart.” Gordon finally nodded. He knew Heaton was right. He had no choice.

  �
��Royal Tunbridge Wells. His family has got a mill house on the Pillgar Riverway, about ten miles east.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Somewhere on the Derry Road … Kate and the kids. They need to be golden.”

  “Yes. Good. Golden. That’s a boy. You have my word. Stay firm, Gordon. It’s all going to work out.”

  ON THE HUNT ■ 5

  As Georgia billowed through the back halls of Number 11 into Number 10 with a dust cloud of assistants and secretaries, on her way from an education meeting into the Cabinet Room to be brought once again up to running speed on the investigation, she saw an elderly man sitting in the waiting area. The image froze her to the spot. It was her father.

  Harry Turnbull was seventy-eight, as nice, sweet, and calm of an old gentleman as could be. Georgia and her father mutually adored each other. The walls of his chemist shop were papered with stories and magazine photos in a shrine to her career. Her mother had died when she was only six, her father having never remarried. He busied his life raising his three children, Georgia and her two brothers, running his shop in Finchley, playing with his grandchildren, watching sports with his pals, going to church every Sunday, and religiously smoking one cheap cigar every single day. He wasn’t one to ever bother his busy daughter. He never needed a favor, never wanted in or around any of the canyons of power and glory that his daughter regularly played in. He had never once in all her career ever dropped by unannounced.

  The fact that he was there at Number 10, obviously waiting for her, could only be more bad news. She could see Jack Early and his team of blondes hovering over him, getting him a coffee, obviously trying to let him know how busy the acting PM was. She went straight over to her father. They’d only talked once in the last few days: the night of the bombing she had called to let him and the family know she was okay. Her father spoke only of his pain for Roland and his family. He wanted to know if he could help in any way. That was Harry, to a tee.

  “Daddy, how are you?”

  “I’m well, love. I need to see you.”