The Edge of Madness

by Michael Dobbs

  Yet Shunin had. He’d not been in the presidential limousine, but instead had been riding alongside Lavrenti in one of the lead cars of the convoy. In recent years those who wished to see the President dead–and there were many–had grown bolder, particularly the Chechens, and there were several small armies of other separatists, too. Shunin’s life was constantly at risk yet he was not a man to cower behind the thick walls of the Kremlin. He refused to hide, so those who were responsible for his security made a habit of trying to throw his pursuers off the scent, disseminating false information about his whereabouts and travel plans, switching his car or his plane at the last minute. In the garage beneath the Kremlin they had placed Shunin in one of the accompanying security vehicles, the one in which his son-in-law was travelling. And it had saved his life.

  It had been a close call. Their black Mercedes SUV still caught the impact of the blast, hit from behind by the remorseless fist of expanding gases and debris that threatened to roll the vehicle over, yet although the tyres screeched and the driver screamed, it remained upright. The support vehicle was armoured, it absorbed the worst of the blow, and the SUV settled back on its wheels, its occupants shaken but unhurt. Soon it was surrounded by a posse of armed presidential guards, each more nervous than the rest, their eyes flooded with alarm and their hands filled with weapons.

  ‘Are you hurt, gospodin, Mr President?’ his bodyguard demanded.

  Shunin’s chest was heaving, he was short of breath, but there was no sign of panic. He reached for his nebulizer, sucked on it, his lungs slowly opening like a butterfly’s wings stretching in the sun. He ran a hand across his head to rearrange the strands of hair that had fallen from grace, and only then did he turn to his bodyguard. ‘It seems it is not yet my time to die, Yuri Anatolyevich, not until the path to Hell is paved with the bones of ten thousand Chechens. We still have some way to go.’

  ‘Thank God!’

  ‘Yes. We may both thank God.’ He touched the crucifix that hung beneath his shirt. ‘But not the man who told them of our plans. He will be begging to swap his life with a catamite from the slums of Africa when we find him.’ He stared intently at the guard, searching for any flicker of guilt. Yuri Anatolyevich had been at his side for many years, and yet the source who had supplied the bombers with the information must also be very close to him. No one was above suspicion. He turned to his son-in-law. ‘And you, Lavrik? Will I yet become a grandfather?’

  Lavrenti’s face was ashen but he nodded slowly. He had given no cry of alarm, there were no tears of relief or shaking. He sat silent, grim, but seemingly in control. A test passed.

  And within seconds they were speeding away from the scene of his would-be assassination, the guard shouting into his radio and prodding a gun at the driver’s ribs, just in case he needed encouragement. Now they travelled at very high speed, forcing other cars off the road as the SUV careened away from the scene until eventually Shunin ordered the driver to pull over. The bodyguard protested but Shunin was a man who made his own rules and, with Yuri Anatolyevich still mouthing protests, he heaved himself out of the car and gazed back towards the scene of the carnage. In the distance noxious, oil-stained smoke spilled from the mouth of the tunnel, billowing high into the humid summer air.

  ‘You’ve beaten them, Papasha,’ Lavrenti muttered grimly.

  ‘Perhaps. But in this game they only need to get lucky once.’

  ‘Please, Mr President, get back into the car,’ the guard interrupted, a bead of sweat sprouting on his brow. ‘We must get you to Zhukovsky.’ It was the military base about twenty-five miles from Moscow, a place of safety in times of trouble when even the Kremlin itself might not be safe. Shunin shook his head.

  ‘No. We continue.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘No stinking sewer rat from Chechnya’s going to change my plans,’ Shunin snapped.

  ‘Mr President,’ the bodyguard repeated, but this time more feebly, ‘the people–they will need to see that you are unhurt.’

  ‘The people can wait,’ Shunin insisted, ‘the fish won’t. Come on, Lavrik, get back in the car.’

  The guard looked at the son-in-law in despair. It was one of those moods he knew he couldn’t deflect. This was wrong, very wrong, Yuri Anatolyevich had standing orders for moments of crisis such as this, and carrying on with a fishing trip didn’t feature in them. So he could disobey his commanding officer, or he could deny his President. Either way, he’d likely end up buried in the brown stuff. Yet Sergei Illich was a man after his own heart. Some twenty years earlier Shunin had been a senior KGB operative, head of section in East Berlin at the time the Wall was being pulled down, when a crowd had tried to storm the local KGB building and ransack its records. Shunin had stood on the steps, solid like a block of granite and armed with nothing more than eyes that could freeze a man’s will, like a rabbit loses his mind in the headlights. The mob had seen him, and faltered.

  ‘Your beloved West is over that way,’ Shunin had declared, pointing a thick finger in the direction of the Wall, ‘not behind these doors!’

  And those East Germans, so conditioned to having their minds made up for them, had turned, and by deflecting them Shunin had saved an entire network of collaborators from being exposed. After that, his rise had been meteoric, and long ago Yuri Anatolyevich had decided he would happily die for this man, and yet, if that were his wish, how much better to go fishing with him. He came to attention, held open the car door, and, with an uncharacteristic screech of tyres, they set off once more.

  Thursday afternoon. Behind Downing Street.

  It had stopped raining. Harry’s steps scrunched across the gravel of Horse Guards Parade as he left Downing Street the way he had arrived, anonymously, by the back door.

  ‘Tell no one,’ the Prime Minister had instructed, ‘not even the birds.’

  ‘That we’re about to go to war? What war, Mark?’

  But D’Arby had shaken his head, wouldn’t say.

  ‘And why me?’

  ‘Because you have background, Harry, and because you have balls. You’ve more experience in the tangled world of security than almost anyone in the country. I shall need to lean on that.’

  True enough. A career in the British army that had included active service not only in the First Gulf War but any number of other, less official wars. Harry had been at the sharp end, and had the scars to show for it. Fifteen years on, his military career had been exchanged for one in Parliament, where he’d become a Minister and a man on the move, one to watch, but Harry always had a stubborn streak that had never endeared him to his superiors. The army had tried to march the individuality out of him, the government had preferred to squeeze it out of him by giving him office, but neither had succeeded. He remained stubbornly his own man, yet it was precisely that bloody-mindedness that had saved the life of the Queen. After that, Harry Jones had been able to do whatever he liked–except, it seemed, spend the afternoon screwing a beautiful lawyer from New York.

  ‘Mark, you’ve got an entire government machine at your disposal. And your Cabinet colleagues. You don’t need me.’

  The Prime Minister had offered a bitter smile. ‘Who could I trust? Tricia Willcocks?’

  Ah, dear Tricia. The most self-centred woman in government. A mouth full of spite and a dress full of ferrets. Harry had crossed swords with her and hadn’t always emerged victorious. ‘A piranha in pantyhose, I grant you, but she happens to be your Foreign Secretary.’

  ‘Precisely. And may her travels be arduous and almost infinite,’ D’Arby sighed. The lack of trust was evidently mutual.

  ‘Then what about the others? Defence? The Home Secretary?’

  ‘I can’t trust them, Harry, not completely, not as much as I need to. Defence would blab to his wife, while our esteemed Home Secretary would go bragging to his diary secretary. He’s sleeping with her, you know. They’d talk, and someone would hear about it. I can’t risk that. No, I’ve thought about this long and hard and I haven’t found any
sleep for three days, but the conclusion is still the same. You’re the only man for the job.’

  ‘And what job is that, exactly?’

  Still D’Arby wouldn’t explain. ‘Not yet,’ he said, ‘not even in here.’

  They had returned from the garden to the Cabinet Room by this point, and D’Arby placed both hands on Harry’s shoulders. ‘I must ask you to trust me, Harry. To be my guide, my support, and perhaps even my conscience.’

  The Prime Minister had smiled reassuringly, but up close Harry thought he could smell fear.

  ‘And be prepared never to tell a soul about any of it,’ the Prime Minister had continued. ‘I must ask you to promise me that.’

  ‘You want me to swear an oath or something?’

  ‘No. I want you to trust me, just as I trust you.’

  Trusted with everything but the truth, it seemed. ‘How do I prepare for this weekend? What do I bring?’

  ‘Nothing more than a change of clothes, my friend. One night, two at the most.’

  Nights in which Harry wanted to be elsewhere, with others–no, just with Gabbi. He’d spent the last couple of years since his divorce screwing around, trying to forget, but for the first time he wanted something more. It seemed he wasn’t going to get it.

  Harry spilled in confusion onto Horse Guards, setting off on foot for his home in Mayfair, stretching out, trying to walk off his concerns. As he crossed the Mall, that broad tree-lined avenue that led up towards Buckingham Palace, he found it decked in flags. Blythe Harrison Edwards, the US President, had arrived for a state visit and the Union flag hung alongside the Stars and Stripes from the flagpoles, damply, like drying shirts. Instinctively his back stiffened, the shoulders went back.

  ‘This isn’t about me, Harry, you understand, it’s for our country’–D’Arby’s last words as Harry had left. Never had he been asked to serve as blindly as this.

  Yet as he sprang out into the Mall, dodging the speeding cars, he remembered that wasn’t quite the truth. Twenty years earlier he had been serving in Northern Ireland. An untidy war, on both sides. It had its rules, of course, and Harry like everyone else in the army was supposed to carry a Yellow Card spelling out the rules of engagement: what he could and couldn’t do; whom he could kill and when the killing was supposed to stop. Queen’s Regulations. But it hadn’t always worked like that. Anyway, Harry was SAS, they had their own rules, the sort that were never written down on paper.

  It had been a good night, up to that point. He’d nabbed a three-man IRA unit half asleep, scratching their crotches in their parked van, weapons neatly stacked behind, and he’d brought the guns back to HQ for the forensics boys to figure out when they’d last been fired and which poor bastard had been on the receiving end, but no one seemed interested in the bloody guns. There was a flap on, something big. And they wanted Harry. In a small back room, squeezed around a table and almost hidden behind a pall of cigarette smoke, he had discovered the Head of Military Intelligence, the Head of the Special Branch and his own commanding officer. When he walked in they all sprang to their feet, as though startled, caught in some guilty act.

  ‘Hello, Harry. We’ve been waiting for you,’ his CO croaked in a voice dried hoarse by nicotine.

  Then his CO took him to one side, another cigarette, this time outside in the car park, and in the dispassionate manner of a mathematician setting out a theorem he had explained how Harry might do a great service for his country. It wasn’t an order, not even a request, for the CO took care to explain that it was a discussion that couldn’t possibly be taking place. ‘Harry–you understand? And if anyone ever asks, I’ll deny it to my dying day. No one must know.’ Then, like Mark D’Arby, the CO asked Harry to trust him. ‘Just as I must trust you, with everything. My career. My honour. With my life.’

  Harry had left by the back door on that occasion, too.

  And that had ended in murder.

  Thursday afternoon. The Balmoral Estate, Aberdeenshire.

  The summer heat had grown oppressive, leaving Scotland simmering like a skillet on the stove. On the moors of Aberdeenshire, life had slowed to a crawl. Red deer hugged the shade of the pines, conserving their energies for the rutting season that still lay ahead, firewatchers in their towers found their eyes growing heavy, while even the plump grouse, in their prime and threatened with imminent annihilation as the days ticked by towards August, had grown lethargic. In every corner, life slowed down, yet Blythe Edwards found it impossible to relax. Give no clues, that’s what the Prime Minister had told her. Be normal, act normal, play normal. But what, Blythe Edwards asked herself, was normal? D’Arby had taken her aside the previous evening during the state banquet at Buckingham Palace and had begun whispering in her ear, words that had tumbled into her already troubled mind and almost overwhelmed it. Troubles never came in single file. As the other guests had seen them talking they had been given a wide berth to allow them a little privacy. If only she could put such distance between herself and what he had told her. No sudden change of plan, he had urged with as much strength as he could muster, let no one take notice. So now, as everything threatened to fall to pieces about her, she sat beside a whispering river that nudged its way down from the heather hills above Balmoral as if she hadn’t a care in the world.

  Next to her sat her host, Elizabeth, Queen of all they surveyed and still a few places besides, while a little further away three generations of royalty stretched out along the bank. This was a place of cool, crystal water much favoured by trout, but today in the heat the fish had made way for family who had turned the rock pool into a swimming hole. This was the House of Windsor, at ease and al fresco, where guests could be entertained in what passed as privacy in royal circles. On such occasions the Queen might pour and a prince might throw a little meat upon the open barbecue, but they could never be alone. Everything had been prepared by others and set out on crisp cotton tablecloths, while retainers hovered discreetly in the shadows of the nearby fishing lodge, waiting for the call to serve. Protection officers stood a little further back, muttering into their sleeves.

  The American President had been looking forward to this weekend at Balmoral Castle, the Queen’s summer retreat. It had been in her schedule for more than a year and she liked Elizabeth, not just as a fellow head of state but as a woman, one with whom she had shared more than most. When Elizabeth had been held hostage in her own Parliament by Waziri gunmen, Blythe’s own son had been there, too, right in the firing line. It had forged a strong personal bond between the two women, but what confronted her now, Blythe reflected, she would have to face on her own.

  She was used to troubles, they went with the job, gave it purpose, excitement even. Politics was no place for those who wanted security and a soft life, with Friday nights spent stretching in front of the fire sorting through piles of letters from admirers. It was tough, even harsh calling, but never had she sensed her chosen path might so suddenly disappear off a cliff. Her life was a mess. She was supposed to be the most powerful mortal on earth, yet here she sat, hiding behind dark glasses, holding a book whose pages hadn’t turned for the best part of an hour. Her scrambled thoughts were distracted by the sound of splashing and childish laughter. She looked up, to discover Elizabeth staring at her, furrows of concern taped across her brow.

  ‘You’ve been very brave,’ Elizabeth said at last. ‘The loss of your mother…’

  ‘Thank you. I can’t say it wasn’t hard. I feel I’ve neglected her these past years.’

  ‘She understood. Trust me.’ Elizabeth offered a reassuring smile but she was leaning forward in her chair, her eyes probing, in concern, just as Abigail used to. With a start Blythe realized that the Queen was even older than her mother.

  ‘And how’s Arnold?’ the Queen asked, her voice tentative, plumbing difficult waters. With a start Blythe realised that she knew.

  ‘Arnie is…’ she sighed. ‘Arnie.’

  ‘I’ve noticed you’ve barely mentioned him. I didn’t wish to pry, but it wou
ld have been rude not to ask. I do so care about you, my dear. I think I know how difficult this must be.’

  Yes, of course she did. Blythe managed a tight nod of gratitude. There was no need for words of explanation; Elizabeth knew, but if a queen could tell, just by looking at her, how soon would it be before others picked up on her sordid family secret? Screw you, Arnie.

  ‘And what with everything else,’ Elizabeth sighed.

  Blythe arched an eyebrow.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know the details of what’s going on this weekend,’ Elizabeth continued. ‘Mr D’Arby suggested it would be better that way, but I know that now, of all times, you might have been spared the burden of personal distractions.’

  ‘I’m not entirely sure myself what Mr D’Arby’s mysteries are about.’

  ‘Whatever they are you’ll deal with them magnificently, that I know. And Arnold can wait. Men can be so stupid. And often so unimportant.’

  Their gentle misandry was interrupted by a sudden commotion. Squeals of excitement echoed along the riverbank as royal grandchildren chased each other. Screaming with excitement, the youngest threw himself into the pool, hoping to find sanctuary from his pursuers, but when he emerged from the water he found himself staring into his monarch’s terrifying eyes. In a moment, in a glance, the heat of July turned to winter. He had splashed her feet.