Whispers of betrayal tg-3

by Michael Dobbs

  – =OO=OOO=OO-= 'Hannibal report ready, over.'

  Hannibal. Mary's idea. Seems to sum it up rather well. A JCB for an elephant.

  'Hannibal ready, over.'

  The JCB is approaching, queuing patiently in the traffic, Amadeus at the wheel, dressed in luminous workman's jacket. Mary is on lookout, mounted on a Suzuki motorcycle, loitering inconspicuously by the central pavement of the Square. She is wearing a helmet, he a hard hat, both have goggles. No chance of being recognized, no matter how many times the CCTV video will be replayed. They also wear short-range walkie-talkies. Forty pounds off the shelf from Tandy's, and modified in under five minutes by Mary to provide a secure frequency. Nothing complicated, a screwdriver job.

  The lights change, the heart pumps, the traffic flows. The red buses and delivery trucks and taxis edge forward, all doing their own thing. No one pays much attention to the lemon-coloured JCB in their midst, nudging alongside them, coughing a small cloud of half-burnt fuel.

  She takes a last look round, and a deep, lung-stretching breath. Keep the voice down, don't let the anxiety show. Then: 'Stand by – Stand by – Stand by! Hannibal is go!'

  'We are go,' Amadeus breathes into his lapel mike. With a slip of the clutch, the earth-mover skips forward.

  – =OO=OOO=OO-= At the same moment Scully and Payne, a few hundred yards away in Piccadilly Circus, are levering open the first of three control boxes. The doors to the boxes have been loosened under cover of darkness and swirling crowds the night before, and now it's the task of only moments to complete the job with a crowbar. They, too, are hidden beneath hard hats and protective jackets. Those who bother to take any notice assume they are official workmen, perhaps cleaning off the thick layers of fly postings.

  – =OO=OOO=OO-= Amadeus has lowered the mechanical grab while waiting at the traffic lights. He now has a battering ram. A bit like cleaning up in Bosnia.

  He'd been leading a convoy of ambulances and food trucks, trying to get through to the isolated communities of Muslims near Srebrenica that were being slowly sliced to pieces by the Serbs. Or had they been Croats? Couldn't remember any more. What he did remember was the burning barricade of trams and old tractors they'd managed to drag across the narrow highway. Everything covered in thick, foul-tasting smoke that scoured the throat. Sniper fire ringing off the metalwork of the Warrior. They'd already got his corporal, a 7.62mm bullet through his groin that meant, as the surgeons told him later, he'd never need a vasectomy. Hell, but wasn't that the price of humanitarian aid? The convoy had to get through. So the Muslims, or Croats, or Serbs, could live to fight another day.

  The JCB slows fractionally as it approaches the kerb. Don't hit it too hard, you'll lose control. A taxi horn blares in protest as the JCB swerves to get into position – Move! I'm bigger than you are, and in even more of a hurry… – but there is little danger of a collision. Everyone knows that JCBs are driven by mad Irish Micks. You keep your distance. Amadeus moves on. The slightest hesitation – Abort? Abort? Abort? – as the JCB clambers up the kerb. A dab of the clutch. A shove on the accelerator. Another belch of diesel smoke.

  Other vehicles are beginning to slow now. A twitch on the wheel – Almost…! – and Amadeus is lined up exactly as he wants.

  The first box is dead centre, the grab at precisely the right height. Like a knife about to hack through a soft-boiled egg.

  – =OO=OOO=OO-= They are forced to choose a different approach to screw up the lights at Piccadilly Circus. The control boxes are scattered at different points around the Circus, and mostly tucked away behind metal crowd control barriers. Impossible to eliminate quickly with a JCB. This one has to be a hand job. So it's a quick drenching of the internal wiring with battery acid, then a sprint across the road to the next.

  Not all the control points are going to be taken out, they have decided, three will be enough. For if Trafalgar Square is the heart of London's traffic, Piccadilly Circus is its prostate, and chaos spreads like cancer.

  – =OO=OOO=OO-= The first box in the Square goes down with a cry of strangled metal and a whoop of joy. In the fraction of a second before the power cable snaps, the wiring suffers a violent short-circuit and throws up a cloud of acrid smoke. But already this box has clattered into the next. They are, after all, designed to crumple on impact in the event of an accident. One after the other the skittles topple, their cries of complaint growing ever more fierce as the grab slices into them and they fall beneath the wheels. At the fourth box, Amadeus is forced to back up a couple of feet in order to regain momentum. Then it's gone, and the fifth, too.

  Trafalgar Square has lost its central nervous system, and London its heart.

  – =OO=OOO=OO-= Mrs Annabelle Whapshot from Wandsworth was able to tell the police first-hand some of what followed. She'd been making her way to Selfridges in Oxford Street before going for lunch with friends at Le Palais du Jardin in Covent Garden. Normally she would have taken the Underground, but she had begun to suspect her husband, an advertising executive, of having an affair with his secretary. As a result she had resolved upon a little shopping therapy. No way would she get all those parcels onto the Tube, so she'd taken the car and was driving around Trafalgar Square oblivious to the confusion that was already beginning to erupt when, as she later related in the colourful style of a former amateur dramatist, it seemed as though an enormous yellow dragon had jumped out in front of her, coming to an abrupt halt, blocking the road, belching smoke and fire, like something out of an episode of Power Rangers (an effect greatly enhanced by a disembowelled power cable that was smouldering fiercely beneath one of the JCB's wheels).

  At this point a taxi rammed into the back of Mrs Whapshot's car causing extensive damage, a fact that gave her relatively little annoyance since the car was her husband's, his favourite Porsche Boxter. She'd been trying to find the courage to trash it for weeks.

  Mrs Whapshot's description of what happened next was fragmentary, since she was suffering from the effects of minor whiplash and was able to add very little to what the police could determine from the surveillance cameras. She told them that the man who suddenly appeared in front of her was wrapped up like the invisible man. She could tell nothing more of him behind the goggles, scarf and hard hat, except that he was smiling at her. She suspected he might have crystal blue eyes but, as she freely admitted to the police inspector, that may have been only feminine instinct and a little wishful thinking. At this point a motorcycle appeared, onto which he jumped and rapidly disappeared, but not before he had offered her the crispest of military salutes. Not an American salute, like John Wayne, all soft and sloppy, but crisp, longest-way-up, shortest-route-down, entirely British. Like Alec Guinness in that film about the bridge. And all less than fifty seconds since he had entered the Square.

  – =OO=OOO=OO-= An ambitious stone's throw away, beneath the shadow of Eros's wings, a similar story was being enacted. The CCTV surveillance was more intensive here, a consequence of the long history of vandalism inflicted upon the famous statue, but their greater number did nothing to improve the quality. They saw little more than two men, identities smothered in hats and dark glasses, running like hares between the control boxes. An average of eight seconds in front of each.

  Then off into Glasshouse Street, which leads directly into the heart of Soho, with its maze of alleyways. From time to time it seems as if the whole of London hides within Soho's clubs and clip joints and exotic watering holes. It's a place to hide an army, let alone two men.

  Payne and McKenzie disappeared down Glasshouse Street and into the warren of back doubles that lay beyond, laughing even as they ran. They were followed at a discreet distance by the slow-footed Scully who, like Mary, had been acting as lookout astride another motorcycle.

  It was over for them, although for Bendall, the affair was just beginning.

  – =OO=OOO=OO-= Pity poor Bendall.

  The Prime Minister emerged from the Moviemax just as Amadeus and his JCB were bouncing into Trafalgar Square. He di
dn't know it yet, but already his day was shot to hell.

  When Amadeus slammed on the brakes of the JCB and ripped out the ignition, he also ripped out the heart of the capital. In the minutes that followed, paralysis began to spread and overwhelm its other parts. Major traffic intersections slowed, stiffened, then died. Oxford Circus. Hyde Park Corner. Tottenham Court Road. Frustrated traffic wardens were soon raising their hands in surrender. As the paralysis reached the Aldwych and Parliament Square, it turned south and crossed the river. Soon Waterloo surrendered. The Swedish Prime Minister might as well have been waiting for Godot.

  It didn't take long before Bendall knew something was amiss. There were two routes to Waterloo from Leicester Square, one across Waterloo Bridge, the other across the bridge at Westminster. His Special Branch officer McGivens – poor, much abused McGivens – had chosen to use Westminster Bridge since this route offered more avenues of escape, more alternatives in case of slow traffic. But the traffic hadn't slowed, it had rolled over and died. As the car tried to skirt Trafalgar Square they discovered that rigor mortis had set in. Even though McGivens had jumped out and was hammering on the windows of the cars that pressed in on either side, he only succeeded in carving a path a few feet further into the graveyard. And they could no longer turn back.

  For five minutes the car didn't budge. The schedule allowed for a maximum delay of twenty. Bendall sat behind the inch-thick windows of the armoured Daimler and fretted.

  Another five minutes passed.

  Then he shouted at McGivens.

  At this point, defying all McGivens's frantic protestations, he jumped out of the car to see for himself. Hoping to clear a path, like Moses. It made no difference, of course. Not even standing in the middle of Trafalgar Square, waving his arms in all directions and screaming his head off made any difference. He could have all the alternative routes in the world, but nothing was going to move, not anywhere, not for hours.

  Bendall might have taken the Underground to Waterloo, but as Trafalgar Square began to die all nearby stations were closed as a routine security precaution. He might even have walked; it would have taken him no more than forty minutes. Some of the day might have been saved. Perhaps the Swedish Prime Minister might have been persuaded to accompany him on the Eurostar to Brussels, enabling them to make up a little of the lost time, even to start satisfying rumours that they had joined the Chunnel Club. But as soon as Bendall was out of the car he realized the news cameras that should have been capturing his triumph were, instead, recording his humiliation. By noon the whole world would be pissing on his day.

  The Art of Anticipation only works if you can deliver what you have so lavishly promised. And he couldn't.

  So he didn't walk to Waterloo. Instead he stomped the four hundred yards back home to Downing Street.

  EIGHT

  During her relatively short life Mary Wetherell had been forced to surmount many obstacles. Her father, the lack of education, her dismissal from the Army and, more recently, her marriage. A story that was not the stuff of heroism, simply of survival. She'd always followed an uncomplicated code in dealing with these circumstances. Never look back. Fight the next war, not the last.

  Of the many names on her long list of confrontations, Colonel Abel Gittings was in no way the most significant. OK, so he had screwed up her career and with it her life-plan, he had humiliated her and been at least partly responsible for the vulnerability that pushed her into a disastrous marriage. If she thought about it, he'd been the cause of much of the misery in her recent life. Yet she tried not to think about it. She'd been able, by and large, to put him behind her. Exmoor was a long way from Blandford, and in her world of fractured emotions she'd decided not to waste any more time on Gittings. Out of sight, out of mind.

  Trouble was, she was no longer in Exmoor. She was in London. She had spent much of the last few days on reconnaissance in and around Whitehall. And in the very middle of Whitehall stood the vast milk-white Portland stone edifice of the Ministry of Defence, within which was located a Planning Staff and on which, on secondment, was Gittings.

  She hadn't wanted it to happen, had tried to ignore it. She didn't even like to think of his name, usually referring to him only as the 'Black Bastard', but his proximity had begun to prey upon her mind. Memories – and pain – began to seep back. The worm began to turn once more. Up to that point she'd had a job in hand and she would allow nothing to distract her from that, but now it was over. She and the others had dumped the gear and the bikes at various points around Soho, out of sight of any CCTV cameras, and wandered into the day, unrecognized and untouched. They'd agreed to meet later for dinner at the Army amp; Navy Club, and in the meantime went their own ways – Amadeus to the sauna, Payne to his club, McKenzie to God-knows-where. They all found their own separate ways of dealing with their anxiety and dispersing the adrenaline.

  Wherever her clothes touched her skin, Mary found herself damp with that strange mixture of fear and exhilaration she so missed from her days in the Army. It was no use going back to that claustrophobic room in the boarding house with its nagging phone, anything but that. The day was bright and inviting, with a cooling breeze, so she took a river boat – one of the few modes of transport still functioning in central London – to Kew Gardens, where she sat and ate apples with her back against the bole of a giant cedar and listened to the sound of its branches whispering to the breeze. For a while it was as though she had been transported to a different planet, far from the shadows of her life, and by late afternoon she felt thoroughly refreshed. On the return journey she stood in the prow of the boat, the wind on her cheeks and tugging at her hair. She imagined she hadn't a care in the world.

  Then the boat drew in to dock at Charing Cross. Alongside the Ministry of Defence. And Gittings.

  He was like a rash across her body, creeping up on her, and the more she thought about it, the more her skin crawled. Without any clear idea of what she was doing, she found herself loitering opposite one of the two main entrances to the Ministry, waiting.

  Scratching. Burning.

  Like a moth around a flame.

  She watched as in growing numbers the MOD staff scattered down the steps beneath the towering limestone columns and headed off into what remained of the day. No idle bantering tonight, no suggestions of a casual drink in the Duke of Clarence or the club. This evening every man, woman and transvestite in the place had only one purpose, that of getting back home. The battle ahead was guaranteed to be a nightmare.

  Somehow it had all become very personal for Mary. Bendall was their target, but she had never met him. Yet she had met Gittings, had felt his hands all over her, molesting, abusing her, and suddenly she wanted to make sure he suffered, too, and to suffer more, much more, than most. If she could screw up the whole of central London, how much easier must it be to screw up just one wretched and unsuspecting excuse for a man?

  She wanted to hurt him. Compensation for some of the hurt he had caused her. Retribution. How she would find her revenge she was not yet certain, but the lure of his presence nearby became irresistible. She couldn't draw herself away. She waited, and watched, for nearly two hours as staff descended the steps and went on their way.

  The Black Bastard was not among them.

  – =OO=OOO=OO-= Yet he was there. She knew he was there, she could feel it.

  The following morning she telephoned the Ministry of Defence and asked for Colonel Abel Gittings. The switchboard put her through to an extension where a woman answered the phone. Mary asked for Gittings once again, and in turn was asked who was calling. He was there all right. She rang off.

  That afternoon she loitered beside a bus stop in Parliament Street from where she could see the other, south-facing entrance to the MoD.

  So many things might have happened to alter what took place next. He might have worked late, been lost in the crowd, or even been away on a course, but Creation is full of those unplanned and seemingly insignificant turning points that nudge a life f
rom its path and send it hurtling down an embankment.

  There he was, striding from the entrance. A touch greyer, in a civilian pin-striped suit, a briefcase rather than a swagger stick swinging from his grip, but unmistakably Gittings. The sight of him inflamed her. She didn't understand what she was doing; she only knew that it was right. Like a moth singeing its wings.

  He set off at parade pace. Mary followed.

  Every part of her relationship with him had been the cause of disaster for her, yet still she was drawn. It seemed so easy. He appeared to be enjoying the exercise and at times she was forced to scamper to keep pace. He didn't look back. Mary was able to pursue him all the way to Pimlico, a brisk twenty minutes, to a stucco-fronted building on St George's Square that had been converted into small apartments and pieds-a-terre, ideal for men like Gittings who worked in town and only saw their wives at weekends. He didn't always sleep there. Over the next few evenings Mary found herself watching from across the square, and following. She rejected any suggestion of obsession, telling herself that it was more fun than either idleness or television soaps, particularly when her pursuit led her across the river to a small terraced house in Clapham where he spent two of the next three nights in the company of a considerably younger and ridiculously unsuitable woman.

  Like any moth, Mary thought she had found the gates of Heaven.

  – =OO=OOO=OO-= Bendall was examining his belly in the bath. Last time he'd looked there'd been some sort of muscle tone, a pressure beneath the skin that spoke of vigour rather than institutional dining and the third Scotch. Now the belly button had disappeared, had become nothing more than a void, an interstellar wormhole into which many of his manly dreams had been dragged and disappeared. It spoke not so much of fleeting youth but youth that had already disappeared around the corner and scarpered.

  He had arrived back at Downing Street, overheated with humiliation, and had brushed aside all the entreaties of his private secretaries in his dash for the bathroom. He needed to cool down, hide. But he couldn't hide from his belly. It told him that the image he had so carefully crafted, the appeal of freshness and vitality that had swept him to power, was way past its sell-by date. Trade Descriptions time.