“Don’t go coy on me now, O Gypsy.”
“She’s going to get a very raw deal out of this one.”
“It’s them or me.”
“I know.”
“Are you still on my side?”
In answer, she crossed slowly to him and kissed him passionately, forcing her body up against his and her tongue into his mouth. Within seconds his hands were fondling, bruising. She knew his instincts were angry, animal. Roughly he bent her forward across his desk, sweeping his pen tray and telephone to one side and knocking over a framed photograph of his wife. Her skirt was lifted over her back and he was at her, tearing at her underwear, forcing himself inside, kneading the flesh of her buttocks with such intensity that she winced at the bite of his nails. She was prostrate across the desk, her nose and cheek forced flat into the leather top. And she remembered. As a young girl of perhaps thirteen she had taken a short cut through the back alleys of Dorchester on her way to the cinema and there had come face-to-face with a woman, bent low across the hood of a car. She was black, with bright crimson lips and gaudy eyes that were hard, impatient, bored. The man behind her was fat and white and had sworn at Sally, foul, disgusting words, but he had not stopped. The memory crowded back in all its chilling clarity, as Urquhart’s nails dug ever more deeply into her skin and her face was pressed painfully into the scattering of photographs across the desktop. She felt like crying, not in ecstasy but in pain and degradation. Instead, she simply bit her lip.
Forty-One
The concept of a hereditary monarchy is a little like a bottle of fine champagne that has been left open far too long.
Mycroft found him on the moors above Balmoral, where he often went when troubled and wanting to be alone, even in the middle of winter with snow on the ground and an easterly wind that had found nothing to obstruct or deflect it since it had gathered strength in the shadows of the Urals two thousand miles away. There were ageless spirits up there, he had once said, which lurked in the crannies of the granite outcrops and sang as they ran with the wind through the rough heather, long after the deer had sought the shelter of lower pastures. The King had seen him coming, but had not offered any greeting.
“I had no choice. We had no choice.”
“We? Since when was I consulted?” The regal tone betrayed a sense of insult and personal hurt. The anger—or was it solely the wind?—brought a bucolic flush to his cheeks and his words came slowly. “I would have stuck by you.”
“You think I didn’t realize that?” It was Mycroft’s turn for exasperation. “That’s why I had to take the decision out of your hands. It’s time to start following your head rather than your heart.”
“You have committed no offense, David, broken no law.”
“Since when did such things matter? I would have become a monumental distraction. Instead of listening to you they would have been snickering behind their hands at me. You’ve taken such personal risks to carry your message across without interference and I would simply have gotten in the way, another excuse for them to sidetrack and confuse. Don’t you see? I didn’t resign in spite of you. I resigned because of you.” He paused, searching the mists that clung to the moorland around them and burying himself deeper inside the borrowed ski jacket. “And, of course, there’s someone else. I had to think of him, too. Protect him.”
“I feel almost jealous.”
“That I could love two men in such different ways I never thought possible.” Mycroft’s hand reached out to touch the other man on the arm, an unforgivable action between man and Monarch, but the words and the freezing wind seemed to have stripped the formality away.
“What’s his name?”
“Kenny.”
“He will always be welcome. With you. At the Palace.”
The King placed his hand to cover that of Mycroft, who lowered his head, weighed down by gratitude and emotion.
“Ours was a very private matter, not something for headlines and the baying of hounds, of having his private life turned inside out,” Mycroft explained.
“Such plants rarely grow when showered in innuendo and the manure of publicity.”
“I’m very much afraid this may all have been too much for him. But thank you.”
The wind sighed through the heather, a low, mournful sound as the light began to fade, like demons of the night come to reclaim their land.
“It has all been such an unhappy accident, David.”
“Funny, but I feel almost relieved, released. No regrets. But no accident, either.”
“Meaning?”
“I’m not a great believer in coincidence. It was timed to detract from your tour, meant to damage you as much as me.”
“By whom?”
“By whoever had a motive to get at you. And by whoever had the opportunity. By someone who knows the Member for Dagenham and who has the resources to track down a private phone number.”
“It would require someone who could sink very low.”
“The lowest. And he will continue his pursuit of you, have no doubts. There will be more.”
“Then I hope I can find your courage.”
“You already have. All you need is the courage to face up to yourself, that’s what you said. To play the man—your own words. Facing up to others holds fewer torments, believe me. But I think you already know that.”
“I shall need your advice, David, more than ever if, as you say, it is all to get worse.”
Slowly at first, then with gathering force, drops of cold-hardened rain began to fall across the two lonely figures. Darkness was encroaching fast.
“Then the best advice I have for you, sir, is for us to get off this bloody moor before we both freeze to death and save Francis Urquhart the bother.”
Forty-Two
Let them sniff coke.
February: The Second Week
It took less than a second for the phone to be answered in the foreign currency dealing room at one of the City’s leading finance houses which squatted alongside the Thames, in a site near to where the Great Fire that had destroyed half of London more than three centuries earlier had started. It wouldn’t take another fire to ruin the City again, they joked, just another Japanese takeover.
The phones never took long to be answered. The difference between disaster and success could often be measured in seconds, and the chief currency dealer couldn’t afford to be caught napping by either the markets or any of the seventeen other currency dealers, all of whom envied his job and the commissions that went with it. He dragged his thoughts away from the ruinously fashionable forty-foot cruiser he had just agreed to purchase to concentrate on the voice at the end of the phone. It was not, however, a deal, but an inquiry from one of his many press contacts.
“Heard any rumors about some scandal at the Palace, Jim?”
“What rumors?”
“Oh, nothing very specific. Simply a buzz that there’s something brewing that is just about to blow the Royal Yacht out of the water.” He didn’t see the dealer wince. “My editor’s asking us all to check around, bit of a dragnet, really. But something’s smelling pretty ripe.”
The dealer’s eyes flashed up to his screen yet again, checking the mixture of red, black, and yellow figures. Sterling seemed to be fine; all the attention today was on the ruble following news of a fresh outbreak of food riots in Moscow. A cripplingly severe winter seemed to have frozen both the capacity of its leaders and the nerve of its foreign exchanges. The dealer rubbed his eyes to make sure; his eyes ached from the constant strain, yet he didn’t dare wear his prescription glasses in the office. His position was all about maintaining confidence and at thirty-seven he couldn’t afford the slightest sign of age or physical decline; there were too many waiting eagerly to push him off his seat.
“Heard nothing this end, Pete. There’s no activity in the markets.”
�
�I can tell you, the flies are definitely beginning to buzz at this end.”
“Maybe it’s just another load of Royal bullshit being spread about the Royal parks.”
“Yeah, maybe,” responded the journalist, sounding unconvinced. “Let me know if you hear anything, will you?”
The dealer punched the button to disconnect the line and returned to massaging his eyeballs while trying to figure out how he was going to stretch his already crippling mortgage to cover his latest material indulgence. He was dreaming of naked girls covered in smiles and coconut oil and laid out across fiberglass reinforced with Kevlar when the phone rang again. It was a client who had heard similar rumors and who wanted to know whether to make a quick switch into dollars or yen. More flies. And as the dealer looked once again at the screen, the sterling figures began to flash red. A fall. Not much of one, only a few pips, but it was another hint.
Could he afford to ignore them? Hell, he was getting too old for this; maybe he should pack it all in and spend a year sailing around the Caribbean before getting himself a proper job. But not yet, not before he had made one last big hit, to cover the boat and the bloody mortgage. He tuned in his aching brain to the box that connected him to the brokers and their constant dangling of buy and sell prices, pressing the button that put him through.
“Cable?” he inquired. It was dealers’ kvetch for the price of sterling, harking back to the days when the two great financial empires of London and New York were connected only by unquenchable avarice and a submarine cable.
“Twenty, twenty-five. Five by ten,” came the crackling response. Even in this age of space travel they still couldn’t fix the lines connecting them with the brokers’ rooms less than a sparrow’s fart away. Or were his ears going, too?
He sighed. In for a penny, in for five million. “Yours. Five.”
The selling had begun.
***
The door to the editor’s office had been slammed shut. It wouldn’t make any difference; everybody in the building would hear about it within minutes. The deputy, news, and picture editors stood around the chief editor’s desk in a formation that gave the impression of Sioux circling a wagon train, but he wasn’t giving up without a fight.
“I’m not holding the front page for this. They’re disgusting. An invasion of privacy.”
“They’re news,” responded his deputy through clenched teeth.
“You know the proprietor’s breakfast rule.”
“Nothing on the front page that would offend two old ladies reading the paper over breakfast,” the editor countered.
“That’s why there’s no one other than old women who read our paper nowadays!”
The editor wanted to shove the words straight back down his pushy deputy’s throat, but since they were precisely those he had used in his increasingly frequent rows with the aging proprietor, he couldn’t. He stared once again at the two plate-sized photographs that had already been cropped in red pencil to concentrate the attention away from extraneous features such as the bed, the disarranged pillows and entangled legs, and onto the body and face of the Princess.
“We can’t. It’s simply obscene.”
Without a word the picture editor leaned across the desk and, with red pencil and ruler, drew two neat lines cutting both photographs just above the nipple. What was left had all been seen before in countless beach photographs of the Princess, but it made no fundamental difference; the expression on her face, the arched back, and the tongue in her ear told the whole story.
“What does the Palace have to say?” the editor inquired wearily.
“Sweet bugger all. Since Mycroft publicly deflowered himself they’re in something of a mess.”
“First Mycroft, now this…” The editor shook his head, conscious that he would be hounded off the society dinner circuit if these went out under his name. He found another burst of resistance. “Look, this isn’t the bloody French Revolution. I will not be the one to drag the Royal Family to the guillotine.”
“There’s a real public issue here,” the news editor interjected, somewhat more quietly than the deputy.
“The King involves himself in all sorts of matters, stirring up political controversy, while quite clearly he is ignoring what’s going on under his own palace roof. He’s supposed to be the personal embodiment of the nation’s morality, not running a knocking shop. He’s turned out to have more blind eyes than Nelson.”
The editor lowered his head. Sterling had already dipped nearly two cents on the rumors; it was inflicting real harm.
“No one’s asking you to lead a revolution, just keep step with the others.” The deputy took up the cudgels once more. “These piccies are all over town. By morning we might be the only paper not carrying them.”
“I disagree. I don’t give a damn about the foreign rags. This is a British affair. Every editor in this town knows the consequences of using these photos. No one’s going to rush, not in British newspapers. No.” He braced his shoulders with patriotic pride and shook his head in determined fashion. “We are not going to use them unless we know for certain that someone else has. It may be throwing away a scoop, but it’s the kind of scoop I don’t want etched on my gravestone.”
The deputy was about to make some comment that the accountants were already chiseling the circulation figures on his gravestone when the door burst open and the gossip columnist rushed in. He was too excited and breathless to make any sense, his words wrapping themselves in impenetrable knots, until in exasperation he threw his hands in the air and made a dive for the TV remote control on the editor’s desk. He punched the button to call up one of the satellite news channels. It was German-owned, run out of Luxembourg, and had a footprint that covered half of Europe, including most of Southern England. As the screen came to life they were greeted with the images of an ecstatic Princess Charlotte, nipples and all. Without a further word the deputy grabbed the pictures and rushed off to save the front page.
***
“Oh, I like this, Mortima. I like this a lot.”
It was after one in the morning, the early editions had arrived, and Mortima with them. He seemed not to mind, chuckling as he glanced through the reports.
“‘This morning the King stands accused of dereliction of duty,’” Urquhart read out from the pages of The Times. “‘In pursuit of personal popularity and his own political scruples he has laid open not only himself but the institution of the Monarchy to frontal attack. The politicians and press lords who have jumped on his bandwagon in the last few weeks have revealed themselves as opportunistic and unprincipled. It has taken courage to stand firm for constitutional principle, to remind the nation that the Monarch should be neither showbiz nor social conscience, but an impartial and politically uninvolved head of state. Francis Urquhart has shown that courage; he is to be applauded.’” Urquhart chuckled again. “Yes, I do like that. But then I should, my dear. I wrote most of it myself.”
“I prefer Today,” Mortima responded. “‘An end to Royal tittle and tattle. It’s time for them all to belt up and button up!’”
“‘Crackpot King,’” Urquhart announced, reading from another. “‘HRH should have an urgent word in the Princess’s ear, even if he has to jump to the front of the queue to do so…’”
Mortima was in fits of laughter. She had just picked up the Sun with its blaring headline: “King of Cock-Up.” “Oh, my dear.” She struggled to respond through convulsions of mirth. “You really have won this battle.”
He grew suddenly serious, as though someone had thrown a switch. “Mortima, I’ve scarcely even started to fight.” He picked up the phone, an operator answered. “See if the Chancellor of the Exchequer is still in the land of the living,” he instructed, replacing the phone very carefully. It rang less than half a minute later.
“How are you, Francis?” a weary and just-woken voice inquired down the line.
> “Well, and about to get considerably better. Listen carefully. We have a particularly difficult crisis on our hands that has already set the doves fluttering in the dovecote. We need to take action before they all fly away for good. I believe sterling is about to take yet another precipitous fall. In the circumstances it would be uncivil and unworthy if we were to ask our friends in Brunei to hold on any longer. It would place an important international alliance at risk. You are to call the Sultan’s officials and suggest they sell their three billion pound tranche immediately.”
“Christ Almighty, Francis, that will do for the currency completely.” There was not a trace of tiredness now.
“The markets must have their way. It is a matter of great misfortune that the consequences will strike terror into the hearts of ordinary voters as they see the pound plummet and their mortgage rates about to soar. It will be an even greater misfortune that the whole debacle will be blamed on the King’s conscience and those who support him.”
There was silence on the end of the phone.
“I make myself clear?”
“Absolutely,” came the quiet answer.
Urquhart looked attentively at the receiver before softly replacing it. Mortima was looking at him with unconcealed admiration.
“We must all make sacrifices in battle, Mortima.” He placed the tips of his fingers to the point of his nose. Unconsciously he was beginning to mimic the King in some of his mannerisms, Mortima thought. “I’m not quite sure how to put this delicately,” he continued, “so perhaps I shall have to crave your understanding and be blunt. It does not pay to fight a battle from within glass houses. It would be helpful if you would stop taking such an ardent interest in Italian arias. Your newfound operatic interests could be so easily…misconstrued. It might confuse the troops.”
Mortima, who had been sipping a glass of wine, replaced the glass gently on the table.
“Government drivers are such a gossipy bunch,” he added, as if by way of explanation and excuse.
The House of Cards Complete Trilogy Page 56
