CHAPTER FORTY FIVE
"Jeez, you guys must have been shit scared of the Russkies."
White was by now thoroughly sick of the US President. He'd kept up a string of inane remarks for at least five minutes now, along the lines of 'call this a bunker, ours are much bigger' etc. Some of the words he hadn't even recognised as belonging to the English language but he was sure most Americans had the same problem with their 'leader'. It was so obvious that the vice president should take over he couldn't help wondering why that hadn't already happened. How did this fuckwit ever get a second term? That was democracy, the least worst system.
They finally arrived in the meeting room.
After some pathetic and embarrassing argument about who was going to sit in which seat, proceedings finally got underway.
"The situation is this," said the Prime Minister. "We currently have ten CIA agents, including the director, in custody, along with a number of corpses. For some time they have been infiltrating our country and continuing a global campaign of destroying certain types of scientific establishments. In this endeavour they have collaborated with several Iranian insurgents and some former IRA terrorists. Finally, they tried to blow up me, my foreign secretary and the head of our foremost terrorist agency."
The president listened to all of this with an expression which suggested that someone was reading him the menu in a restaurant. White couldn't believe it but he was gazing about like a child and almost grinning.
"Well well, this is certainly a pickle," he said. "This room is quite big."
The vice president shifted uncomfortably.
"Is he a piss head or something?" wondered White. "He seems to have some sort of attention deficit thing going on."
The vice president took over the discussion, allowing a modicum of sensible progress. He again stated that they had found convincing evidence of a CIA plot to assassinate the prime minister and blame it on the president, thus killing two birds with one stone. He also said that it was an agent directly answerable to Winters who had tried to kill the president at the airport.
"We are pressing for Winters to be charged with treason, among other things. I understand that you have your own issues to sort out with him but I think it's better all round that he meets with a swift death sentence rather than languishing in an English jail for forty years."
"We would not raise any objection to that," said the Prime Minister.
"Which leaves us with the thorny issue of all these agents of ours."
"Who currently are languishing in our jail, or the morgue," said White.
"Precisely. Domestically it will be tricky but I think we could just about swing it for the survivors to be tried here - after all they have not, so far as we know, committed any crimes on American soil."
"No," said the Prime Minister, "but they have committed crimes in several other countries. I've already had some strong representations from Sudan, Egypt, Libya, Spain and Germany for them to be extradited for trial in their own countries. The logistics of that are mind boggling but we have to come up with some kind of compromise to appease all those other countries."
"Send in the guards," said the president.
The vice president once again twitched awkwardly.
The Memory Man: T14 Book 1 Page 45