So, he had known about Arnie and his little pneumatic distraction, and kept it from her. Damn him. She was angry now, too.
They had a fine row, raised voices, home truths, the lot, standing toe to toe, and he gave back as good as he got because he was in pain, called her hormonal and absurd, which was half true, and gave voice to his suspicions about an affair with Marcus Washington, which made her burst into scornful laughter, and even while she was shouting back at him she could see the claws of confusion scratching at his face and wondered what she had done to deserve so forthright and faithful a friend as Warren.
‘You’re not going, not without security, not without the nuclear codes!’ he stormed, pounding his fists in exasperation.
She took his hand, slowly unwrapped his fingers, one by one, and held them, not like a president but as an old and very dear friend. ‘Warren, I’m not able to tell you what I am about to do, only that it may turn out to be the most important thing I’ve ever done in my life. I have to disappear, until Sunday, and you’re the only one I can trust with that secret, as I trust you with my life. Always have.’
‘You’re worrying the heck out of me, Blythe,’ he said, his anger seeping away through her fingers.
‘I want you to explain to the others that I’m unwell. And I’m going to give you an envelope which you will open only in an emergency. Inside you will find a telephone number and an address, that will be the only way to contact me for the next two days. You’re to use it only in the most extreme of circumstances.’
‘Define that.’
‘War. Or some similar crisis. Nothing less. In all other matters, for the next forty-eight hours, you’ll have to be the President of the United States, acting in my name.’
‘From a bedroom in Balmoral?’
She held his eyes, and nodded.
‘They’ll lynch us from the White House flagpole if ever they find out.’
‘Which is why that must never happen–and why you are the only one I can ask to do this.’
‘What do I tell Arnie if he calls?’
‘He won’t. And I guess you understand why.’ She had grown distant once more.
He flushed with guilt.
‘How long have you known?’ she asked.
‘Too long. I was waiting for the right time to tell you, but…Heck, there never was a right time.’
‘Don’t ever do that to me again, Warren, not ever, do you hear?’ She was presidential once more, her eyes flecked with resentment, and he retreated.
‘I apologize.’ His shoulders sagged in defeat.
‘Not that in Arnie’s case there will ever be an “again”, not so far as I am concerned.’ She sighed. ‘Time to move on.’
‘Is it as easy as that?’
‘No. But I have to try.’
‘I wish I could help.’
‘You can. Right now.’
‘But…what about the nuclear codes?’ he asked once again, back on the job. ‘And your personal security?’
‘We can’t avoid taking a few risks,’ she said. ‘Call me, and I can be back inside the hour.’ She waved away his protests. ‘Oh, I know that’s not enough, not how it should be, but it’s the best I can do. And as for my own security, that’ll have to rely on the fact that no one, apart from you, will know I’ve gone. Hell, there’s more danger of my being shot by a prince out on the estate.’
‘It’s not the hunting season yet.’
‘It is where I’m going.’
‘Blythe, you’re scaring me.’
‘One other thing. I want you to rustle up the Vice-President, the Secretaries of State and Defence, the Joint Chiefs and the members of the National Security Council–all the usual suspects. But don’t go through their offices, I want you to get hold of them personally. Invite them to a drink with me at the White House for as soon as I get back. Just in case.’
‘Of what?’
‘Make it sound casual,’ she continued, ignoring his question. ‘Don’t get them clucking around like old hens.’
‘Jesus H. Christ, that sounds like a War Cabinet.’
Her silence was intense.
‘You’re meeting with a whole tribe of Congressmen Monday evening. Rearranged from your mother’s funeral. I’ll have to put them off again.’
‘Not Monday, Warren. Sunday. The moment I step off the plane.’
His lips were working with so many unasked questions. ‘You know you can trust me,’ he said.
‘And I do.’
‘But not as much as Marcus Washington, apparently.’
‘You’re missing the point.’
‘I surely am.’
It was at that moment he made up his mind. He stood looking at her, examining her for any sign of fever or distraction, anything to explain what she was doing. Then he stiffened. ‘I’d better go. They’re expecting me downstairs with a report on your condition.’
‘Tell them it’s fragile, not fatal.’
He turned at the door, reluctant to leave. ‘Will you tell me about it, when it’s all over?’
‘If I can.’
It wasn’t the answer he wanted. He slammed the door on his way out.
Midnight, Thursday. M6 motorway.
They were making good time. Harry had been driving almost three hours and they were approaching Stoke. The rhythm of the wheels on the roadway had a hypnotic effect; beside him, D’Arby had been drifting into bouts of silence–or was it sleep?–before suddenly snapping back from whatever world he’d been visiting in order to start once more on his tale. They were making progress on that front, too.
‘But what I don’t understand is why us?’ Harry pressed as D’Arby stirred once more. ‘What the hell’s driving Mao to take it out on Britain?’
For some while there was no answer, until Harry thought the other man might have fallen asleep once more in the darkness. Eventually, D’Arby shifted in his seat.
‘Why us?’ he whispered. ‘Well, pick any number of reasons. Because of all the many countries that over the last couple of centuries have humiliated and hacked away at China, we are as guilty as any. Because of the Opium Wars, because we got millions of Chinese addicted to the stuff as a deliberate act of policy, because we stole Hong Kong, because we sent gunboats and General Gordon to blast the balls off them, because we surrounded Beijing and looted their Summer Palace. And because everywhere we went we placed less value on a Chinese life than we did on our pet dogs. Because…’
‘I think I get your point.’
‘The Chinese have never forgotten, never forgiven. You remember Charlton Heston saving those brave imperialists from the Boxers in–what was the ridiculous film called?–Fifty-Five Days in Peking? For some reason they didn’t make the sequel, the one that came after the siege was lifted when European troops went on a rampage and raped and massacred fifty thousand Chinese civilians. That was part of our story, too. Not a pretty one.’
‘I suspect you’re going to tell me that’s the bit the Chinese teach in their schools.’
‘But there’s an even more powerful reason, the simplest reason of all. It’s because they can. They can bring us to our knees within days, and no one else’ll lift a finger to stop them, unless I can persuade them otherwise.’
A police car with its blue lights flashing raced past them. Harry checked his speed, it wasn’t the time for them to be pulled over and questioned, with names and details being flashed across the police radio. It went against the grain but he eased back, just a touch.
‘We have friends, allies even,’ Harry pressed, not certain that he’d got to the nub of the matter.
‘Hah! You mean our friends in Europe?’ D’Arby couldn’t hide his scorn. ‘They might send an auctioneer or two to help prepare for the biggest fire sale in history. United Kingdom plc, on the block, and everyone with a dollar or a euro in his pocket on the last flight out of Heathrow.’
He took out a cigarette but Harry told him not to. ‘Don’t be in such a hurry to kill yourself, Mark. Wait until we sto
p.’
D’Arby sighed and crumpled the cigarette, letting it fall to the floor. ‘And there’s Taiwan, too, that other offshore island. A lot like us. We’re the dry run.’
‘OK, next it’s Taiwan. So what the hell we doing on the road to Scotland?’
D’Arby smiled grimly. ‘We’re going to meet an old friend of yours. And perhaps someone who might just become a new one, although I have my doubts. We’re going to spend the weekend with the two most powerful people in the world, Blythe Edwards and Sergei Shunin.’
Harry spluttered in astonishment, struggling to keep the car on line.
D’Arby chuckled drily, enjoying his moment of surprise. ‘But not a whisper, Harry, there mustn’t be. That’s vital. Our security lies in absolute silence. So no telephones, no messages, no tracker devices, no satellite links. Trust no one except those directly involved. We’re all taking this risk, Harry, because the stakes are so high. The Chinese want nothing less than to obliterate us. We have the weekend to stop them.’
‘And we’re going to do it with a beaten-up Range Rover about to run out of diesel.’ He flicked on the indicator and began to pull over towards a service area looming in the distance.
‘Two presidents and a prime minister, Harry. Think about it. It’s happened before. Together, we can achieve almost anything. Otherwise we’ll be picked off one by one.’
‘As your nominated bag carrier I’m delighted your bag is so modest.’
‘No, Harry,’ D’Arby protested, ‘I told you, you’re the only man for the job. I want you to back me up, to use your connections with Blythe Edwards, help me break down the barriers with Shunin. You’re his type of man, I’m sure. I told you, there’s no other man I’d rather have with me right now.’
Somehow Harry didn’t quite see it, couldn’t get the sceptical buzz out of his mind, but there was no time for further questions. They were pulling up beside the fuel pump.
‘Use cash,’ D’Arby instructed. ‘Don’t want our credit cards leaving a trail all the way up north, do we?’ But his wallet remained in his pocket.
‘Sandwich? Soft drink? Something for the weekend, sir?’ Soldier’s humour.
‘I’ll take a leak. But not here. Somewhere a little darker where we can’t be recognized.’
‘Don’t know about you, Mark, I’m usually recognized by my face, not any other part of my anatomy.’
‘Harry, from what I hear, that’s no longer true.’
Harry filled up the tank, feeling very slightly used–even abused. He paid for the fuel from his own deep pocket and walked back to the car, expecting D’Arby to take some of the strain of driving, but discovered him soundly asleep. With a sigh and a pinch of his own cheeks, Harry turned the key and began driving once more.
As he turned out of the service area back onto the motorway, squinting through tired eyes and chastising himself for not picking up a coffee, he thought about what D’Arby had said. Russia, America and Britain ganging up against the common enemy. Yes, D’Arby was right, it had happened once before. They’d called it World War Two.
Friday morning. A road leading out of Beijing.
Fly! Fly! Fu Zhang urged his driver onwards. No time to waste, for enemies were lurking everywhere, even in Mao Yanming’s own bedroom. They had dealt with her, but she was not alone, there would be others, always there were others. Even as Wu Xiaoling lay beside Mao, her poisonous heart had been elsewhere, with the British. Now it was their turn to suffer.
The timing was propitious, Mao had argued. The first day of the first weekend of the eighth month–the month when the red-faced British were always caught off their guard, snoring in the sun. And after that it would be the turn of others, those who stood in Mao’s way, who conspired against him closer to home. Even in Beijing. The capital was a long way from Gansu, where Mao and Fu had first begun their journey together, days when their formal schooling had been ripped to rats’ tails by the abomination of the Cultural Revolution, when they had spent three years of their young lives counting the grains of sand in the Manchurian desert for the purposes of their ‘re-education’. Yes, Beijing was an exceedingly long way from Gansu, and even though it was the capital it could never be their home. It was a place of suspicions and disloyalties, Wu Xiaoling had proved that. So Mao had sent him on his way, to cast his spells in what Mao called his Room of Many Miracles. Mao had instructed him to tell no one, trust no one. Consider nothing safe unless it is locked up here, he had said, tapping his temple with his index finger, but Fu knew that even inside someone’s head, secrets could still be unpicked, given time and the right tools. They’d been in too much of a hurry with Wu, too keen to take their retribution and perhaps a little anxious not to allow her to drag Mao himself into her shame, and they had needed more time with the ambassador–the man was proving stubborn. But they had no more time, not if Wu had talked too much and told the British of their plans, and not if those home-grown barbarians in the People’s Liberation Army had found out about them, either. So fly! Fly! There wasn’t a moment to lose!
Early hours, Friday. The Scottish border.
Almost five. The sky to the east was beginning to lose its mystery, softening at its edges. They’d crossed into Scotland but to Harry the border had been just another road sign trying to drag his wearied eyes from the unwinding highway. During his time with the SAS at Hereford he’d been trained for moments like this, when the body simply wants to give way, so desperate to sleep that the pain of staying awake is far, far worse than a kick in the balls. He’d been taught to cope, of course, but that had been twenty years ago. An hour earlier he’d been forced to pull over, afraid that he was losing it, and while D’Arby continued to snore obliviously Harry had catnapped for ten minutes–no longer, not enough for him to fall deeply asleep, just a short break to dampen the fire in his eyes, as he’d learned on sentry duty, but the long turns of this anonymous night had sapped his strength and were once again squatting on top of his eyelids, trying to force them to close. This had become, as so often in his life, a battle with himself.
Beside him, D’Arby stirred, then started, sitting up abruptly as though some inner alarm had pierced him into consciousness. ‘What time is it?’ he demanded, still befuddled, trying to focus.
‘Near five.’
‘Bugger–stop! We need a telephone. God, a public telephone, Harry.’ He began gesticulating in anxiety.
‘But I thought you said—’
‘A land line. A risk we have to take.’
They pulled off the motorway but it took them the best part of a quarter of an hour before they found one of the old red metal boxes, stuck at the edge of a small farming community. Public phones were yet another of the endangered species in D’Arby’s Britain, and this example appeared to be on the very edge of extinction. It was unkempt, the glass dirty and cracked, the light inside flickering intermittently. While Harry relieved himself in the bushes and washed his face in the cool air, the Prime Minister stood fumbling with coins and punching in a number. His conversation drifted through the broken pane.
‘What do you have for me?’ D’Arby snapped, not bothering with introductions.
Away back in London, in an office within the Privy Council building very close to Downing Street, the duty clerk began his report. He was a retired diplomat, from the spooky end of the business, who filled some of his spare time and supplemented his pension with turns as a night-watchman guarding government business. He had the experience to know what was important, and the maturity not to flap and wake everyone up in the middle of the night without proper cause, yet this night, although he had a cot available, he hadn’t slept a wink. He began his report in the calm, matter-of-fact manner, while in a muddy lane somewhere near the Scottish border the Prime Minister began to show increasing exasperation, chewing at his lower lip and slowly screwing his knuckle into the wall of the telephone box.
‘What–nothing?’ D’Arby growled, but as he listened, the bark grew subdued. ‘Then try them again, right now. Ins
ist! Badger the bastards! I’ll call you back in five minutes.’
He replaced the phone but didn’t move. He stood in the box, like a prisoner in the dock awaiting sentence, staring at the wall, breathing heavily, the bulb flickering above his silvered head. He called back in four, too impatient to wait longer. He said nothing, just listened. As Harry watched him, he thought he saw the Prime Minister flinch.
Then he swore. Again, and again, and yet again, and with every curse he smashed the receiver of the telephone against the wall until he was exhausted, leaving the mutilated receiver swinging pathetically from its gibbet. It took him a while to recover. Eventually D’Arby lifted his head and braced himself, taking a deep breath before he turned and left the telephone box. Harry could see the turmoil in his eyes.
‘Been trying to get hold of the Chinese government,’ the Prime Minister said, struggling to regain his calm. ‘Suggested I might fly there to talk to Mao himself, face to face, man-to-man stuff, you know what I mean. Hoping he might see the human side. I thought it might be a way out of this mess. Asked for an answer by five–noon their time, just about now…’ He flapped his hand as though trying to fend off despair, then sucked in a lungful of cool night air, trying to restore his spirits, but it sounded like a sob. ‘Anyway, duty clerk’s been waiting all night–heard nothing–so I got him to call the Chinese ambassador on his direct line.’
D’Arby clearly had no appetite for finishing his story. The lips moved, but for a moment the words failed him. Then: ‘There was no reply, Harry. He wouldn’t even pick up the phone.’
‘Then I think we have their answer, Mark.’
Stiffly, reluctantly, D’Arby nodded in agreement. ‘But there’s more. Our ambassador.’
‘Wes Lake?’
‘He’s gone missing.’
‘Missing? But he can’t. Ambassadors don’t simply go miss—’
‘He went off on a short break a few days ago. Apparently he never made it. His car’s been found at the railway station, his gear still inside, his mobile phone, too. He could be anywhere.’ He paused. ‘Or nowhere.’
The Edge of Madness Page 9
