Keep Calm

by Mike Binder

  “When? Now? Right now?”

  Kate understood, maybe more than Adam did. As he quickly dressed, she helped him pick a tie. The kids were fast asleep. He made her promise that they could pick up right where they had left off when he returned. She made a solemn, if comical, oath and kissed him good-bye at the door as he hustled down the six flights of stairs.

  Gordon was waiting in the lobby. With a nod, he motioned Adam to join Heaton and several other HGI employees who were jammed into two Mercedes limos. Gordon escorted Adam to the limo containing Sir David. The French woman, the mother of Trudy’s future husband, was in the car as well. There was a stocky redheaded man nestled into the front passenger seat. Adam recognized him and the tall thin bald man in the back of the limo as the two men watching from the bar at the Connaught the night before.

  The whole group had dinner in a private room at Nobu, just off Berkeley Square. Heaton toasted “the deal.” They talked shop, discussing the figures around managing the pension packages of the entire British civil service’s employees—staggering figures. Adam just listened. He knew enough of what they were saying to know that he had no idea what it all entailed, so he shut up and ate sushi.

  With the herd thinned to more or less just men, they ended up at Annabel’s, a trendy nightclub on the opposite side of the square for a long session of drinking, more business talk, and another toast from Heaton, this time custom-tailored toward Adam. Adam wasn’t going to drink but Heaton of course insisted, so there wasn’t too much of a fight.

  Later, when the talk moved on to sports and movies and women and war, Adam was the center of attention, amusing Heaton with his easy style of banter, making him laugh and at one point even choking Heaton up with a story of his first sexual adventure as a boy in Michigan, with a twenty-year-old babysitter.

  The group was later culled to just Heaton, Adam, two HGI men—one from France and the other from Texas—and, of course, Harris and Peet, the two ever-present bodyguards. They all drove in one limo to St. John’s Wood and pulled up to a large, Victorian-era mansion that sat on the backside of Primrose Hill. Adam wasn’t sure where they were going, but the others were all happy to follow the energetic Sir David into the house. Adam, now feeling zero pain, happily, almost giddily, took up the rear.

  Inside there was a party going on. The house was warm and familial, decorated with a subtle, cozy, pedigreed style. It was a catered affair with waiters and waitresses taking and bringing drink orders and hors d’oeuvres. A round of cocktails was brought over. Several men were talking to what Adam finally, woozily, noticed were some of the best-looking women he had ever seen—seriously beautiful women from all walks of the world: Asian, Russian, Indian, and even just good old-fashioned, well-dressed British beauties, one stunner after the other. It was actually, he thought, a bit of a freak show: these women were all so perfect.

  There was some dancing in a large room off the main hall. A gorgeous Jamaican woman was mixing records, and the room pulsated with elegantly sexual energy. A buxom, tiny blonde with an adorable pageboy haircut dragged Adam, at that point truly inebriated, onto the dance floor.

  A short time later, Heaton had rounded two of the best-looking of the group, a brunette and the blonde whom Adam had earlier been dancing with, away from the party and headed up toward the staircase at the center of the house. He motioned for Adam to follow. Adam hesitated, but Peet quietly urged him to follow along. Adam finally realized at that moment that he was at one of the highest-end whorehouses on planet Earth. A combination of being drunk out of his mind and basically a naive guy from Michigan caused his ability to assess the situation to take a while. He wised up by the time he and Heaton and the two women had reached the top of the stairs. He hustled up to Heaton and caught him right before he went into a bedroom with the brunette.

  “Wait, David, hold up. Hold up. I need to speak with you. Wait.” Adam grabbed Heaton’s arm and pulled him aside. He talked low in a drunken whisper as Peet watched from the bottom of the hall.

  “I can’t do this, David. I can’t. It’s not me. I’m married. I mean, the one I’m with—not with, but that I’d be with—she’s unbelievable, but I can’t. Okay? I can’t. I can’t do this. Trust me, I appreciate it, but it’s not me. I’m not that guy. I have other problems. Sadly, I’m too in love with my wife. I have to get out of here.”

  He took a deep breath while waiting for Heaton to comprehend the situation he’d put Adam into. He was also hoping to take a beat and stop the floor from spinning underneath him. Heaton went into his room with his brunette, as planned. He looked back at Adam before he shut the door and gave him a snarky, yet friendly, conspiratorial smile.

  “Something tells me you’re a man that knows how to get himself out of a fix, Tatum. I’ll leave it to you to sort this one out.” With that he was gone. Adam was on his own.

  The blonde tugged his arm with a jerk and pulled him across the hall, opened the door to a candlelit bedroom laid out with fluffy shag carpeting and a plush queen-size bed with thousand-count Egyptian sheets and a quilt, already turned down. There was a bottle of champagne on ice on the sideboard, and an old Duke Ellington album was playing on a Bose stereo system, Piano in the Foreground. Before he could get a word out of his mouth, the blonde shut the door, with only the two of them in, the rest of the world out. She gently pinned Adam against the wall.

  The soft piano tinkled, the candles flickered, and the rose petals on the bureau gave the room an aromatically erotic lilt. She rubbed her cute little nose against his, giggled, then stepped back and let him look at her in the fractured light. Expertly, she let him have a moment to reflect on the fact that she was all his, that it was just the two of them alone with Duke Ellington and that big playpen of a bed behind her.

  With another expert turn she unsnapped her skirt and stood there in a pair of soft white panties. She did a cute spin and served up another perfectly adorable giggle. Adam thought that she looked like a young Lady Diana if Lady Diana had been a high-end call girl. He had always had a thing for Lady Diana. It was probably one of the reasons he fell so hard for a British girl.

  He was drunk, good and drunk. That could even be his excuse. But he didn’t take it. He fought himself, fought the silky shine coming off of her bare thighs.

  “I can’t do this. Just so you know. There’s no way.”

  She laughed. “There’s always a way.”

  She pulled her top off. She was built perfectly, with two ample, natural breasts, and a tiny toned and tanned little bottom. She came over and kissed him. Her lips were moist and clean, wet with an inviting liquid lightness. Her breath smelled like honey. He lost himself in the kiss. It seemed to go on and on, the two of them almost floating there in the darkened room. Finally, he pushed away and tried to get his mind to come to a stop; he tried to bring some sanity to the moment.

  He just stared at her. Words weren’t coming to his mouth. He was drunk, he knew it, but something else was overpowering him. She came close. He tried to push her away again as she unbuttoned his pants. She wouldn’t take no for an answer. He saw a white light and he angrily pushed her away yet again. Hard.

  She fell back, landed on the bed, and did a cute backward somersault to the middle of the bed that let him know she thought the force he had used was in the service of foreplay. It didn’t faze her a bit. She maybe even wanted a little more from that column. She motioned him over with a sneaky forefinger, seductively. It was time.

  He burrowed his back into the wall behind him, tried to catch his breath, tried to form words and an escape plan, but it didn’t work. His breath wasn’t to be caught. His mind and his senses weren’t playing along.

  * * *

  WHEN HE WOKE up, there was a dizzying amount of energy in the room. Two of the other girls, the one whom Heaton was with and another from downstairs, were on the bed trying to wake the little blonde up. She was limp and disheveled, lying flat on her back, draped across the bed like a used bath towel. Blood was coming out of her mouth an
d her nose as they tried desperately to wake her. Her face was swollen and bruised; the sheets were red and black: it looked like the back room of a butcher’s market.

  Men in suits thundered in. Adam struggled to get to his feet as he noticed his hands and shirt also covered in blood, his knuckles swollen and sore, the skin scraped up as if he’d been hitting the side of a wall somewhere. The men in suits rustled him to a stand. He tried to speak, but the same inability he’d been struck with before was back, only worse. It was as if he were under the influence of some drug that had shut down his motor nerves. He’d never had alcohol affect him like this.

  The men in suits pulled him from the room, manhandling him as much as they could. They were mad and obviously doing everything they could not to kill him right then and there. He tried to explain that he had no idea what had happened, but once again his faculties failed him.

  The last thing he saw as he left the room was the two women unsuccessfully begging the broken, battered, formerly beautiful blonde on the bed to speak to them. He started yelling for Heaton but was told with a kick that Heaton had left hours ago. The last thing he remembered as he was forcefully dragged and dropped down the long stairwell through the now-empty party house was someone saying that the police were already on their way.

  The other thing he remembered was the bald bodyguard Peet, standing quietly, watching the whole thing go down with a slight grin on his face.

  * * *

  WHEN HE WOKE next, several hours later, he was in a jail cell—a steel gray, cold cell. An older, balding, scared little man, maybe sixty-five, in a woman’s dress, with fist-blotched lipstick on his face, was sitting on the bench across from him, clutching a small sequined handbag to his chest, a long flowing brunette wig on the seat beside him.

  For the longest time Adam said nothing. He finally sat up. Every muscle in his body was on fire.

  “Where am I? Do you know where this is?”

  The broken little man answered with an accent straight out of Oliver Twist. “West End Central Police Station is where you is. Savile Row. They been in and out of here all morning, waiting for you to wake up.”

  “Why am I here? Do you have any idea? Did they say anything?”

  The artful dodger of a drag queen responded ever so carefully, not wanting to elicit a violent reaction.

  “All’s I know is that I heard them talking about you. About you beating on a young lady. Beat her an inch from the end of her life, they says. Says you busted up her fireman’s hose.”

  He was talking in rhyming slang, “fireman’s hose” meaning “nose.” Adam had no idea what he was saying, but the soiled little man in the sinfully out-of-season dress was letting loose now, enjoying the role he had as the bearer of bad news.

  “Had all kinds of suits and hats come round in here for a butcher’s hook of you. Heard ’em says they want to make you pay up good, too, guv. Say they wants to put you in the box, put you away for a long, long time.”

  Adam leaned back against an unforgiving wall. Here it was, for some unknown, unexplained, unfathomable reason, all happening again. A different town, different country, different circumstances, and a new set of colloquialisms, yet somehow he was back at square one. Back inside a prison cell.

  Only one thought came into his broken, frazzled mind. “Kate.” It was painfully obvious, he thought; there was no way Kate wouldn’t leave him this time. The truth just sat there, plain as the tip on his fireman’s hose.

  AFTER ■ 3

  Davina Steel sat at a table in the front of the family’s breakfast/lunch whistle-stop. Her father was diligently preparing the next day’s supply of tuna, chicken, turkey, and egg salad; her mother was cleaning the remains of the afternoon rush. The little café on Vernon Place, right across from Bloomsbury Square, had several office buildings, small colleges, and even the British Museum within spitting distance. Foot traffic was a constant. As a child, Steel would gaze out the window just as she was doing now, looking and observing. She’d noticed things, noticed people, training her mind to find little details, to suss out differences, day after day, to watch for patterns, to see who people were, what they were doing, and why. It helped. It took her mind off her life and the fact that she was at work ten hours a day on the weekends, even as an eleven-year-old child.

  Today was different. Today she sat, looking out the window, trying to figure out who would go to the trouble of planting a bomb inside 10 Downing Street.

  She wanted to know as badly as when, as a teenager, she puzzled over why a Pakistani-born cabdriver she observed out the shop window every day for four months had to spend so much time consulting his map. Why? Didn’t he have “the knowledge”? Didn’t he take the test like all the other cabbies? Didn’t he know the streets like the back of his hand? Why was he always so lost? It bothered her, angered her, so she watched and made notes, followed him once, watched him and another cabbie both trying, almost comically, to figure out a simple London map. She petitioned the Information Ministry for copies of both applications of their licenses and found out that they and three other Pakistani nationals had all applied for their taxi permits the very same day, all five with cashier’s checks from the very same bank, purchased by the very same foreign bank’s overseas desk.

  Further watching and digging brought her to the facts that she had already guessed: none of them took the intensive two-year test that was required. The same civil servant in the Ministry of Transportation had signed off on all of them on the very same morning. Somehow they had skirted the system. Why? Who had gone to the trouble to get five men taxi licenses? Why didn’t they take the same two-year tests that the other cabbies did?

  Those on duty the morning the precocious sixteen-year-old Steel marched into the lobby of Scotland Yard with the layman’s evidence of a plot to use five London taxis as bombs at the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee were, as they liked to say, “gobsmacked.” She was quickly ushered around to MI5’s antiterrorism desk. The inspectors and the detectives were beside themselves when the young prodigy laid out, with simplicity and detail, the precise particulars of the plot. They were further dumbstruck when it turned out to be true and arrests were eventually made. “Thank God she’s on our side” was a common refrain, and before long preparations were made, with her parents’ consent, to put the young virtuoso into special university classes on forensic examination and crime scene analysis as soon as possible.

  The cars, buses, tour coaches, and museum-visiting pedestrians floated by the little Bloomsbury sandwich shop window on what seemed to be a continuous loop. Steel sat with her ever-present pad of paper and made out lists. It had been twenty-four hours now since the bomb had ripped into the prime minister’s midsection. She expected more test results on the blast’s residue by the early evening. Since the meeting in the Cabinet Room, she had been combing security camera trails and visitor logs. The home secretary was correct: they had nothing, which was not alarming for a crime this fresh. This was big, though. She wanted to be ahead of the ball. She wanted to be ready when some inevitable group took credit or threatened more violence. She wanted to be poised to have SO15 and Darling and the thirty full-time investigators on her team at her disposal ready to pounce.

  She wanted to will herself the answer to who had done this. Desperately wanted to win this one. She wanted to make Georgia Turnbull proud. Her mother didn’t like Georgia. There was something about the powerful chancellor she didn’t trust. Her mother didn’t trust any women, especially rich ones—rich ones and politicians. She didn’t trust Londoners, either. She wouldn’t listen when Steel tried to tell her that Georgia was Scottish. From Glasgow. It didn’t matter. Mother didn’t care for her, which most likely made Steel look up to her even more.

  * * *

  THE FIRST THING Steel did the following morning was to go up to North London to have a meal with a friend who worked at the Finsbury Park Mosque. Aviala Farouk was a nice-looking if slightly chubby twenty-eight-year-old Jordanian exile whom she had met three years ear
lier while working a case involving jihadists who were blackmailing employees of the mosque, forcing them to let traveling jihadists stay in their homes. Aviala was brave, emphatically nonviolent, pro-Western, honest, and dependable. He also had a noticeable crush on Steel. Aviala knew the minute she called why she wanted to see him.

  They met at Harput Best Kebab, a small kebab and burger grill nestled by a rusty train overpass on Seven Sisters Road, steps from the Underground station. He had arrived with his hair still wet at ten thirty. She assumed by the harried way he ordered and drank his coffee that it was the first of the day. From what she knew of Aviala, he wasn’t a late sleeper. She wondered if the hurried shower and the need for caffeine meant that he had had a sleepless night. Wondered if something in particular had caused it.

  “You want to discuss the bombing at Number 10. Am I right, Davina?”

  She nodded as she unwrapped a kebab she thought looked completely unappetizing.

  “I knew they would put you on this incident. Knew you would be investigating.”

  “Why do you say that, Aviala?”

  “Because they are going to blame it on Islamists no matter who has done it, and you are the best there is at tracking down jihadist activity in London.”

  She smiled and assumed he was once again overblowing her importance, a trait common to all of her dealings with him since their first case together, the underground terrorists’ lodgings, was written up extensively in the Telegraph. Sometimes he would talk about her as if she were some kind of a superhero. She chalked it up to his crush, a crush that would remain forever unrequited, not only because Steel didn’t see Aviala that way but also because in past conversations his observations about his parents led her to believe that they would never allow him to date a non-Muslim.

  “Were they Islamists, Aviala? Is the attack on Lassiter related to any of these groups?”