Time of Lies

by Douglas Board

  That’s some display, fella. Now catch mine.

  51

  London, Monday 22 June 2020 (two weeks earlier)

  I catch the Tube from Temple to Embankment, one stop, and walk the rest, flanked by four Vigilance six-footers in scarlet capes. Ahead of me a BBC crew is reversing up Whitehall Place and there’s a Shock News drone. I’ve just given a statement on the first day of the bank chief executives’ trial. The trial proper won’t start for eighteen months – lawyers will be next up against the wall if I get my way! – but finally they’re in the dock. BG’s popularity is sky high and my confidence bucket is brimming over.

  And so to my ACERBIC briefing. Patrick greets me inside MOD Main Building, once I have stepped onto one of the weight-sensitive glass cylinders – very ‘beam me up Scotty’. Inside there is a smattering of applause from younger staff; last week Annabel Wale signed the contract to build Dreadnoughts five and six. The way the maintenance cycle works, two extra submarines will near enough double our strategic punch – Britain’s Great, end of!

  We pass armed Marines and sink into the building’s bowels. To my surprise Patrick doesn’t head for the PINDAR blast-proof complex. Instead we trek miles of corridor, stopping eventually at a door marked B3G70. Patrick and the Marine escorting us produce separate keys for separate locks.

  What a letdown – it’s an empty broom cupboard with a walk-in safe on the far wall, layered in dust which makes me sneeze. Leaving the Marine outside Patrick locks the corridor door from the inside, before spinning the dial on the safe to and fro. I notice the safe door has an eye-piece. What lies inside isn’t a safe but another broom cupboard with walls of buttermilk-coloured brick. One has a corkboard with curling Polaroid photographs. Two boot sale chairs bracket a scuffed wooden table. To my left is a wooden locker. Once I’ve stopped sneezing, Patrick bolts the safe door from the inside. Behind a small ceiling grille a cheap plastic fan starts up.

  ‘Welcome, Prime Minister, to the ACERBIC briefing room. Do take a look at the photographs – it won’t take more than a minute for me to set up.’ Patrick takes out another key and bends down to the locker.

  So, look at the photographs or count the flies waiting to be autopsied in the ceiling light? Each is a Polaroid head-shot pinned to the corkboard with a drawing pin. They’re jumbled but there’s some chronological sequence. Some pictures are faded and curled while the most recent, almost damp, is Jennifer’s. Shima’s portrait must be about two years ago, Patrick’s slightly older. It makes sense – everyone is photographed soon after starting their job.

  Right in the centre is a fresh-faced John Major. All the prime ministers since Major are here, pegged before too many wrinkles set in. Blair glows. I recognise the Cabinet Secretaries of the same period. I’ve now accounted for more than one-third of the faces. Add in the Chiefs of the Defence Staff, some suited, some in uniform, and all the Permanent Secretaries of the MOD, and that leaves perhaps half a dozen other individuals I can’t guess, including a few youngsters. Shima and I will be the only ones showing a splash of brown in our skin colour. Four of the photographs have black dots stuck to one corner.

  I realise all the photographs have been taken in this room. The wall on my right appears first in white, then fades and at some point turns buttermilk.

  Patrick uses a handkerchief to wipe the lens of the boxy Polaroid 600 which he has removed from the locker. It looks like a museum piece. The locker contains cartridges and batteries.

  ‘Please,’ he says.

  I move to the wall. The camera flashes and extrudes a moist picture after thirty seconds. Patrick peels the backing off and pins it to the corkboard.

  ‘Welcome to ACERBIC. It may not be the cheeriest club in the world but it may well be the most exclusive. Everyone who has ever been party to this secret is pictured here. What you hear you will take to your grave, as four already have.’

  ‘Ah,’ I say. ‘The black spot – Treasure Island with Polaroids.’

  Two knocks, faint because of the thickness of the safe door, come from the other side. Someone has been admitted to the broom cupboard without our hearing. Shima Patterson steps inside – in a trouser suit, inevitably. One of her pin-stripe reliables.

  ‘Prime Minister.’ She looks at me and nods. ‘Patrick. Please don’t let me interrupt.’

  Patrick eyeballs me with a brief grin. ‘Point one. When the atomic bomb was born, the United States chose not to share its know-how with any other country. Congress legislated to ensure this. So the United Kingdom had to develop its own bombs and warheads which, after a few ups and downs, we did.

  ‘Point two. British submarine deterrence dates from 1968. Since then we have paid for American missiles but designed, installed and serviced our own warheads. Built at Aldermaston, stored at Coulport, all that.’

  ‘Point three. Trident missiles went into service in Vanguard-class Royal Navy submarines twenty-six years ago, in 1994. Trident was a different generation of technology from its predecessor, Polaris. Instead of one, two or three warheads per missile, Trident carried up to twelve. Multiple, independently-targeted warheads was the response to better anti-missile defences. Potential aggressors had to be convinced that however good their defences, sufficient warheads would get through to turn them into toast. Without that, we would have no deterrent against an anti-ballistic missile-equipped power: game over.

  ‘In any case the Americans were upgrading their missiles. They would hardly keep a Polaris museum going just for us. Besides, we couldn’t have afforded it.

  ‘Pre-Trident our last effort on warheads was Chevaline. We dropped from three to two warheads on a Polaris missile to squeeze in a cluster of chaff – decoys. If that sounds gloriously British and unconvincing, that’s because it was. The truth was, we’d invited ourselves into a poker game for boys and girls with much bigger pockets. Trident was bad news for us – a huge increase in the stakes.

  ‘The middle week of September 1992 was not John Major’s best. The pound dropped like a stone. But my predecessor Chris France had worse news for him. Our warhead programme had been going badly: now we chalked up an outright fail. The computational, scientific and engineering problems of fitting twelve independently-targetable warheads onto an American missile which we couldn’t reconfigure had defeated us. Of course we could have succeeded if we had had the kind of money which the Americans threw at it. But we didn’t: we were a medium-sized power trying for historical and sentimental reasons to play in the premier league.

  ‘Need we discuss the history of excruciating British defence technology embarrassments? Taking just the ones we’ve owned up to, there’s the Blue Streak missile, the Tigerfish torpedo, the Nimrod aircraft, the SA80 rifle, would you believe the Nimrod aircraft again, the type 45 destroyer – our eyes have always been bigger than our stomachs.’

  It makes complete sense, but my chair rocks uneasily. How many times before has it done that? I realise I can count them on the wall.

  Patrick continues, ‘Major had been Chancellor of the Exchequer. He realised immediately that we could not match the American spend. Three options remained. First, to ask the Yanks for much, much more help than they were giving already. They would say no. American Presidents have never wavered: if Britain wants to play, it has to make its own warheads. To ask for help would disclose our vulnerability and ask them to breach their own law and international law. Besides, for what? A deterrent as British and “independent” as Hawaii?

  ‘The second option was to tell the British public that at the end of Polaris, we would no longer maintain a strategic missile deterrent. But Trident had been announced by Thatcher as early as 1980. To fail to live up to her legacy in this respect would have been political suicide. The “bastard” wing of Major’s party was after him anyway. New submarines, too large and slow for any other purpose, had been built. Billions had been spent because the Iron Lady had spoken. She couldn’t unspeak.

 
; ‘Which left the third option: ACERBIC.’ Patrick leans back in his own flimsy chair and eyes me like a chef examining a squid.

  ***

  Patrick’s grin returns. Shima smiles too, which annoys the hell out of me: it’s the humiliation of our country we’re talking about.

  ‘To bluff?’ I venture. ‘To build the submarines, pay the Americans for the missiles, maintain the patrols, spend a fucking fortune – knowing the warheads are duds?’

  ‘Duds is a little harsh. They’re complex miracles of British engineering, fissile material and all that, perfectly capable of causing a very nasty accident indeed. Or being detonated one at a time in a test. But as independently-targetable warheads riding on Trident missiles, yes, duds.

  ‘But you’re right, eureka: sorry about the pantomime with the last resort letters, but in truth the warheads were never going to be detonated anyway. Michael Quinlan, the permanent secretary before Chris France, conceptualised ACERBIC and thought it all through. He was the cleverest nuclear strategist this country has ever had. He retired with the slim hope that at the eleventh hour, the technology would come right and ACERBIC would stay locked in its safe. But it didn’t.’

  I look at the pictures of Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron and onwards. Liars all, but this? ‘And the Dreadnought programme, which we’ve expanded to six boats? Ninety billion quid to carry blanks?’

  Patrick coughs. ‘The first time you hear it, it is a bit disorienting. But your mind will sort it all out soon enough.’ He points at the pictures. ‘Every one of us remembers our first time here, just as you will. And you’ll come round to seeing why it’s the right thing to do – as they did. The only thing to do.’

  ‘But the waste!’ I bang the table. Blood attempts to burst from a vein in my temple.

  ‘You see, there is no waste. The programme is rigorously managed and very efficient. To date – BG’s commitment to six submarines apart – Britain’s hasn’t spent a penny more than necessary to have a continuous, credible at-sea deterrent. Think about it: if the warhead clusters did work, our marginal costs would have been slightly higher. And we’ve got exactly what we’ve paid for: it’s continuous, it’s at sea and it deters. Everyone believes in it. A little odd to call it a lie, when for all practical purposes it’s true. We’re just punching above our weight, like we usually do.’

  ‘It can’t work,’ I protest. ‘There must be hundreds of scientists and engineers working on the warheads at Aldermaston. Their photos aren’t here.’

  ‘No need,’ Patrick replies. ‘Think Formula One. A car races off the track and into the pit. Highly trained technical hands swarm over it. Each engineer makes their own precise contribution. The car races out of the pit. It’s the same at Aldermaston, but with need-to-know in spades. The worker ants don’t have the big picture and don’t expect to have it.

  ‘At the big picture level, all we have to do is shift a decimal point in the computer simulations of how well the warhead clusters work, from a nine per cent chance of success to ninety per cent. In any case, Chevaline gave credibility to the idea of planned decoys – the idea that a proportion of our warheads are intentionally duds. We’ve popularised that a bit, especially as our younger generation scientists were less happy about potentially killing millions of people. It’s a variation of the one blank bullet in a firing squad’s rifles. If the order to fire will never come, all the bullets can be blanks.’

  ‘This isn’t even Suez or Dunkirk – it’s worse.’ I turn to Shima. ‘And you’re here to gloat?’

  ‘Hardly, Prime Minister,’ she says. ‘I’m here to make sure you understand…’ – she purses her lips – ‘fully understand, that our country’s security hangs on ACERBIC’s security. So none of us talk about the content of ACERBIC, write about it, or even think about it, except in this room. To do any of those things, come here. It’s a fragile thread which keeps sixty-seven million people safe. Am I clear?’

  I’ve been keelhauled. The room’s floor and walls are moving. I stare at the pictures again, grasping at straws. ‘There are no Defence Secretaries here.’

  Patrick’s grin is really under my skin. It’s yet another of the ways he brags that the ruling class have been everywhere before – seen it, got the T-shirt and returned the garment under warranty with flaws identified. ‘At the political level, only the Prime Minister is ACERBIC-indoctrinated. As you know, the Prime Minister and the Chief of the Defence Staff constitute the nuclear command authority.’

  He scrapes his chair along the floor and fishes keys out of his jacket pocket, gesturing towards the unreal world from which we have come. ‘Shall we?’

  52

  Eton, Monday 6 July 2020

  Behind the naked buttocks a row of oak and birch, and a sycamore in a garden; behind the sycamore a house in shadow; behind the house exploding orchid petals of pink, with pistils of sunlight landing on Dutchman’s playing fields. Dutchman’s and Agar’s Plough alone comprise more than twenty of Eton’s playing fields. I shift on my collapsible golf stool and swig coffee from a flask. It’s just gone five thirty in the morning.

  The man is naked, shivering on mown grass, his head face down towards the west. As the planet’s rotation propels him feet-first towards the sun, he sees between blades of grass the school he attended for six years. Rope from a ship’s chandler tethers his wrists and ankles to pegs. On his left buttock ‘Britain’s Great! End of!’ has been written in purple lipstick. The bleeding from his left earlobe, now augmented with a single diamanté ring, has stopped. An hour ago he writhed and pissed himself.

  ‘I’m not sure who you bought your coup from, Patrick, but you might want to take it back,’ I comment. ‘Your after-action police protection was a shocker.’ The police officers parked outside Patrick’s house hadn’t noticed a night-time drone skimming the tarmac to arrive underneath them, releasing a gas. ‘Still, sevoflurane isn’t the kind of vile shit you used on me. The binding and gagging had to be on the generous side but they’ll be up and about stopping black teenagers again in no time.’

  ‘Dawn. So what’s going to happen?’

  ‘Angela Deil, with a news camera.’

  ‘Spinning some cock and bull story about how you were drugged and hypnotised will be a waste of time. You may not have noticed but your current reputation stinks.’

  ‘Please think of your bodacious coup with Zack as the Yorkshire pudding in our meal: beside it is beef which has hung and matured in the dark for twenty-six years. Its incredible flavour is about to become a worldwide phenomenon. Don’t bite your lip so hard, Patrick, you’ve bled enough already.’

  A column of ants climbs up Patrick’s right shoulder. A ping on my phone says Angela is maybe ten minutes away. A grasshopper tires of blades and lands on the curls of Patrick’s hair. Most grasshoppers are vegetarian, but to this one the column of its insect kin looks like lunch on the go.

  ‘So, the black dots in the ACERBIC room.’ I slop water from a plastic bottle over Patrick’s nose and lips. He sucks in what he can.

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘How young they were. I mean, some of the generals were well old when they were snapped, but they still haven’t kicked the bucket. They do say being a senior officer is like living in Switzerland; it’s particularly good for your health.’

  ‘The adjutant I knew died of a particularly aggressive cancer.’

  ‘Why did you have any youngsters in on the secret? Of course, to shift the decimal point – far too inky work for all the gold braid pinned to that wall. But then being young and junior and all that, they’re not quite as trustworthy, are they, as the ruling class? No peerages or knighthoods to lose. Not quite enough skin in the game. They risk succumbing to the sweet smell of cash. So a risk, but one which you managed. You might call it cancer – I’ll call it a life-shortening dose of being junior.’

  ‘Bob, we have to keep ACERBIC safe to keep Britain safe.’

>   ‘I make you wrong on that.’

  ‘Good God, you’ll leave us defenceless!’

  ‘Good God yourself! Conservatives, Labour, you lot – you left the country defenceless for twenty-six years! Instead you’ve lied and lied again to the man in the street about his own defence. We didn’t count enough to be told the truth.’

  ‘Everything was done in the man in the street’s best interest.’

  ‘Looking through your ruling class telescope, you knew it was OK to deceive our enemies. In that telescope the ordinary people were not so different from enemies.’

  ‘That’s a lie.’

  ‘Not a word I’d use if I were you. And I have to put the world straight on Brussels, don’t I? Brussels was never at risk.’

  ‘You’re going to claim that because of ACERBIC?’

  ‘ACERBIC is a fact.’

  ‘Which I’ll deny, obviously. Your drug-addled brain has invented a delusional children’s story.’

  ‘Patrick, you can do so much better than that! And you will. Let’s have a go together, shall we?’ I fold my chin towards my chest and furrow my brow deeply.

  I step back and fling my arms wide. ‘Got it! There is a dark secret called ACERBIC, but it’s not twenty-six years old; it’s only about six weeks old. After the election all you had to do was find a disused broom cupboard, stick a few locks on doors and get the props department to mock up the pictures. You were confident I’d fall for it –after all, I’m a fool, aren’t I? You needed to shock me, to throw me badly into doing something frightening so that the other parties would form a coalition. But what-ho, it’s only a disused broom cupboard. Nothing to worry about, our submarines can still wipe out our enemies 24/7.’ I squint at Patrick. ‘How am I doing? I fancy putting fifty quid on it, don’t you?’

  ***

  Xenon headlights race towards us out of the west. Angela has abandoned Eton’s winding lanes to drive straight towards my phone signal over the college’s fields. Is this the field where Jules watched me play? Patrick will have played here many times.