by E. M. DAVEY
As Sir Mark stood dumbfounded, a man with a shaved head and ripped T-shirt joined her. His face looked oddly familiar. Coyly, innocently, like a man glancing at text messages full of sweet nothings from his wife, the diplomat sought images on his mobile. And good heavens, it was him: Jake Wolsey, the very reporter who’d eloped with Frobisher. A sensational development, a matter of national security, no less. He needed to inform MI6. But not before attempting a little espionage of his own.
The mandarin sauntered to the bar. He ordered a single gin and tonic with one cube of ice. He sipped it within earshot of the pair, The Times tucked under one arm, like a pastiche of an eavesdropper. Wolsey was doing the talking, and Sir Mark began to hear words.
“… get hold of restricted documents?”
In the mirror behind the bar, he lip-read Frobisher’s reply: Yes, then what documents? – a circle with a glimpse of tongue for the ‘ocu’, flash of teeth at the end. The treachery was plain as a memorandum in his minister’s red box.
Wolsey leaned in closer, and Sir Mark heard the following, baffling sentence: “Anything concerning Lord Palmerston that’s classified top secret.”
Palmerston? Palmerston?
Yet Frobisher did not guffaw. Instead she said something he couldn’t hear, offered a prim handshake and they departed.
Sir Mark had to move fast. He would tell MI6 everything, of course. But not before he had requested these documents, if such things existed. As the Foreign Secretary was technically C’s boss, there was no breach of protocol here – Sir Mark was merely doing his duty, expediting the speedy delivery of relevant files to those who might need them. But this course of action had the distinct bonus that the department might inveigle itself once more into a most intriguing case.
He had fallen into Jenny’s trap.
*
If the evil is certain, a wise statesman will, if he can, prevent it. The cure may be simple and inexpensive.
Whatever cure against Gladstone’s machinations Palmerston had cooked up to ‘insure systematically’, it wasn’t to be found at the British Library. Anything that went beyond obscure allusion would still be classified top secret, held close by the Foreign Office or MI6. What, then, should be the tweezer to extract classified documents from the fortified morass of the British state archives? Step forward Sir Mark Hellier KBE, well-intentioned but territorial, altogether unsuited to the vicissitudes of spy-craft. And with her insider knowledge of the Foreign Office and a contact there from her MI6 days to obtain both the minister’s engagements plus those of his top civil servant, Jenny had formulated her plan. When they left Walkers of Whitehall, it was in search of a beautician. She needed to become Jamila Ahmed once again.
67
Armed only with outrageous bluff, they were about to enter the second-most secure ministry, stroll through concentric rings of security and penetrate its very heart. An eye of the needle within the eye of the needle. Only then might they discover if Sir Mark had taken their bait; if their fishing expedition had been successful at all.
King Charles Street was quiet at 7 pm. A few tourists clustered beneath the bombastic figure of Clive of India: a bounder by modern standards, but few had done more for the Empire. Scaffolding masked part of the Foreign Office, a van parked nearby.
Bonsers, est 1963. Experienced in historic roofing and joinery repairs.
A pleasant security guard manned reception.
“Dr Robin Matthews from Warwick University,” said Jake. “I’ve got an appointment with the press office.”
He had telephoned requesting to inspect the famous Goetze murals adorning the interior of the ministry for a forthcoming book. The press officer, a failed journalist turned lazy, told him to “pop the request in an email” so he could forward the request with a click and forget about it rather than bother taking notes. But that put them in a quandary – an email from a personal account would look suspicious. In the end Jenny set up an account with the address ‘[email protected]’. The extra ‘c’ was the giveaway, but naturally the highly-paid press officer hadn’t noticed. They hoped.
Julian Waverly was a slapdash figure with curly hair, two-day stubble and a worn woolly jumper. He was starting a night shift in the press office, hence the lack of suit. Jake considered the dullness of gaze, the indolent handshake. If this guy was leading them into captivity, he was doing it well. They passed through an X-Ray machine and Waverley ushered them across a courtyard into the main building. This had serious grandeur: antique furniture and chandeliers, lavish ceilings and portraits of forgotten imperialists. Through one door Jake glimpsed life-sized paintings of Wellington and Lord Nelson, the old rivals glaring at each other across a room, Foreign Office humour. But the straitened public sector was visible too, in the acrylic carpets, the temporary doors made of plywood, panes of security glass with crosshatched wire inside, a trace of the NHS amongst walnut and gilt.
“I’d show you the Locarno Rooms,” Waverley said. “A few decent paintings in there. But there’s a function on tonight.”
“Oh?” said Jenny, though she already knew.
“A retirement do for the ambassador to Argentina. Not the easiest posting,” he added with a weak smile.
They were led to the innermost sanctum of the Foreign Office, the holy of holies. A staircase swept up towards a blue dome sheathed in signs of the zodiac and symbols of British imperium. It led to a long gallery in reds and purples, off which was arrayed the private secretary’s office, the special advisers’ office and finally the Foreign Secretary’s room. Goetze’s murals pronounced the might of a Great Power; to Jake’s right was the painting Parr had stood before on the day she was summoned to Number 10.
Beneath Britannia, a scroll proclaimed:
Mistress of the seas
She sends her sons into distant lands
But Jake wasn’t looking at it.
He was looking at the mural above the Foreign Secretary’s door.
A more sinister apparition, this; redolent of secrecy and enigma. The male figure was clad in a hooded robe of blue, like Augustus once wore, like that found in the baggage train of Napoleon after Waterloo. He held a scroll, which unfurled down the wall. But the scroll was blank and he held a finger to his lips. Above his head, a second scroll bore a single word.
Silence.
Jake was transfixed. The reds and maroons had taken on the aspect of gore; he had the sensation of being a tiny blood cell within some oversized heart, an organ that constricted around him and crushed him with wealth that seemed suddenly grotesque. Obtained by trickery, by force and black magic. For this was the heart of a body with brains and arms – and fists. The British State, once at the centre of a spider’s web whose strands stretched from the orient to wildest Africa. As neurones in the brain connect; as the invisible fronds of the Network commune across the vastness of space.
*
“Is the Foreign Secretary in there?” asked Jenny.
“Oh, probably,” Waverley waved a hand, affecting indifference at proximity to power. “Most evenings he spends a couple of hours working through the red boxes before he goes home. Have you seen enough of the murals?”
Jake laughed. “Gosh, no. I need at least a few hours. My thesis is on the symbolism of …”
“A few hours?” Waverley interjected. “Sorry, no – I’m a busy man. And I can’t just leave you here by yourself.”
“Excuse me,” said Jenny, “but your wages are paid with our taxes. We own these paintings.”
Waverley stared at the uppity Brummie in her ludicrous sunglasses.
“Oh all right,” he sighed, looking at his watch. “It’s coming up to half seven. I’ll give you two hours, then you really will have to go.”
As Jake and Jenny went through the motions of inspecting the artwork the press officer fiddled with his mobile, releasing the occasional harrumph. Half an hour went by. Then it was an hour. Jake glanced at the Foreign Secretary’s door. Not a sound had come from within. They had sixty m
inutes left to get inside.
“Is this the ambassador’s waiting room?” asked Jenny, nodding at the next door along.
“Yup,” said Waverley. “I call it the naughty room.”
“Can I look inside?”
Another sigh – it was as if all the disappointments in the press officer’s life had to be periodically vented through his mouth. “Come on, then.”
He stepped inside. Jenny followed and closed the door, leaving Jake in the corridor.
“Hey,” snapped Waverley. “I told you, I can’t just leave him there. It’s a high security building, you’re my responsibility.”
Together they inspected the Enigma machine, cooed at the view across towards the Admiralty, peered out onto Downing Street. It was 8.40 pm when they returned to the murals; fifty minutes left. Ten more minutes slipped by. Abruptly the Foreign Secretary’s door opened and out stumbled the minister. Nigel Edmonds had spent the day being harangued by Berlin, Paris, Washington and Beijing, and he didn’t even glance at Waverley, who’d snapped to attention. He pattered off in the direction of the Locarno Rooms, clearing his throat and adjusting a tie. They had one leaving speech’s length to get inside his office.
“I need to pray,” said Jenny.
Waverley was fiddling with his phone again. “What?”
“I need to pray,” she repeated. “Where’s your prayer room?”
“I’m not sure we’ve got one.”
“You’re joking. This is a public building. You’ve got to have a prayer room.”
Waverley looked flustered. “I … I really don’t think we do, madam.”
“Anywhere will do, then. Any room facing east.”
The press officer’s head flapped uselessly from left to right.
“East is that way,” Jenny snapped, pointing down the corridor.
“Errr,” said Waverly. “Errr …”
“Otherwise I’ll miss adhan. Call to prayer,” she added, as if addressing a dunce.
The man looked petrified. “Ok, let’s go. I’ll find you an empty office.”
They began walking, but after a few paces Waverley halted. “You have to come too, mate,” he told Jake. “How many times do I have to tell you?”
“Are you crazy?” Jenny snapped. “He’s male. That would be haram. Are you even aware of diversity?”
It was more than the civil servant’s job was worth to have that sort of complaint made. Guilty or not, these things stuck. He raised his hands in surrender.
“Don’t go anywhere,” he shouted like a drowning man as Jenny frogmarched him down the corridor.
Jake knocked on the Foreign Secretary’s door. Nobody answered and he stepped inside.
As Jenny knew, the door to the Minister of State’s room is habitually left unlocked, with no additional security measures. The only Foreign Secretaries in recent times to use a computer were David Miliband and Philip Hammond (Beckett, Straw and Hague refused to touch one) and no files are stored there; it is essentially a glorified meeting room, somewhere the minister can work without distractions. The only confidential documents ever present are those in the …
Red boxes.
Three of them awaited him on the Foreign Secretary’s desk, charmingly scuffed and bashed. The middle one was open and papers had been extracted. Jake strode across the room, dizzy with unreality. This was madder than anything he had attempted in his journalistic career by some distance. He photographed the pile and began working through it. The dispatches were from all over the world, each with a handwritten précis from the private secretary. A memo on escalating gang violence in El Salvador. Something about a missing backpacker in Nepal. Jake finished the pile and returned it to its original state, using the photograph as a guide. There were more double takes as he worked through the second box. A CIA man in Washington with a British grandfather had a gambling problem. The President of Venezuela, publicly recalcitrant, was making confidential overtures to Britain. This was interesting stuff, and Jake was hit by another head-rush at the enormity of the act.
I am rifling through the papers of a serving Foreign Secretary.
But everything had been written that day, and he felt a sickly desperation as he opened the third box.
On the top of the pile was a very old document.
A pale blue stamp described the contents as most secret.
It was a receipt, dated 1865 and detailing £10,000 for the Royal Geographical Society so it might pursue ‘agreed additional activities’ while searching for the source of the Nile. And it was authorised by Palmerston.
Jake replaced the memo, closed the box and walked out of the room. His eyes were drawn to Britannia.
She sends her sons into distant lands.
68
Damien di Angelo was gazing towards the City of London from Waterloo Bridge when he became aware of a presence beside him.
“I’m looking for my daughter.” A Louisiana drawl. “She has a shaved head. Have you seen her?”
“There was a woman here by that description about twenty minutes ago. But she went away.”
“You must be Damien. I’m Arnold Deissler.”
Di Angelo turned to face him. About fifty, tall but stooped, even more skeletal than he. Yet Deissler’s forearms were a tangle of veins, crevices dividing up the extensor muscles: they were the limbs of a man who did a hundred press ups each morning. He wore black loafers with two tassels on each which di Angelo found rather vulgar.
Deissler stared past St Paul’s. “One, two, three …” his counting diminished to a whisper “… fifteen, sixteen, seventeen …” Deissler’s eyes were like almonds, set at a slight angle on his seed-shaped face. “… twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven cranes,” he finished. “This city’s going up. Must be doing something right here, Brexit or no Brexit.”
“Where are Wolsey and Frobisher?” asked di Angelo.
“I’ll know soon.”
A mud-lark ambled out onto the spit of sand beneath the South Bank and both men turned, leaning on the railings to face Westminster.
“The mother of Parliaments,” said Deissler. “And yet for the international clout it has nowadays, we might as well be looking at the Forum of ancient Rome.”
“Or those guys.” Di Angelo nodded at Cleopatra’s Needle and Deissler laughed dryly.
“It was taken to Alexandria by Augustus, and the Brits got hold of it during the Napoleonic Wars.” The teeth in Deissler’s lower jaw were pointed, like those of a guppy. “These darn civilisations have been toppling each other for as long as history.”
“So let’s make sure that domino doesn’t get back up again,” said di Angelo, staring at the Palace of Westminster.
Deissler chuckled. “I just wouldn’t have believed it. We’ve got Putin in Russia. We’ve got Iran still building a bomb, no matter what anyone says. And which country makes a bid for global domination? The damn Brits. I mean come on, you’re kidding me, right!?”
The bark of a motorbike carried across the water.
“Someone’s having fun,” said di Angelo.
Deissler’s head cocked to one side. “Just so you know, it’s been decided we’ve got nothing more to gain by following Wolsey.”
“If you say so.”
“You ok with that?”
“’Course I’m ok with it, man.”
A gay couple walked past, one black, the other South Asian. They weren’t touching, but there was that closeness between them, the one-inch gap that said so much.
“What does freedom mean to you, Damien?”
“It means the world to me,” said di Angelo, surprised at the vehemence in his own voice.
You just carry on doing your bit for freedom and goodness, son. That’s all we ask.
The couple’s hands had found each other. In New York nobody would have batted an eyelid, but di Angelo would not have recommended it in the projects of Baltimore.
“I know what you’re thinking,” said Deissler.
Either he was observant or it was
in di Angelo’s file. Or probably both.
“But the British gave up defending the torch of freedom a long time ago,” he continued. “And there’s nobody else who can be trusted with it but us.”
Di Angelo nodded slowly.
“Waterloo,” said Deissler, gripping the railings with both hands. “A bridge named after a battle. Kinda ironic, don’t you think?”
“True-say. But the coalition which defeated Napoleon that day gave Europe a century of peace.”
“That’s it, man!” His eyes twinkled. “You got it. Now, I do believe their Chinatown’s not too far that way. Let’s go get something to eat.”
69
“How did you know it would be there?” said Jake.
Jenny studied the workmen on King Charles Street, civil servants smoking outside the Treasury. “Call it a hunch.”
Armed police loitered too, and Jake felt a fresh kick of adrenaline. Then again, there were always armed police in Whitehall.
“Richard Burton,” he said as they marched towards Big Ben. “The explorer. It has to be him.”
But Jenny had eyes only for the ragged band of protesters at Parliament Square, Stop the War banners denouncing the last night’s Nigeria vote. Tourists posed beneath Churchill, flashing victory signs; nobody bothered with Palmerston.
A helicopter hung overhead, as if suspended in fluid. Then again, there were always helicopters over SW1.
“If Burton was tied up with the Book of Thunder, it explains two great unanswered questions of Victorian exploration,” said Jake as they crossed Westminster Bridge.