Keep Calm

by Mike Binder

  “We need to talk now, you and I, Georgia. We are both in this together and in fact need each other more than ever before. I want to be sure our middle legs are tied tightly and we’re running in proper sync. It’s imperative. We have to be in lockstep. You and I. Understood?”

  “I understand that you’re saying that I need to listen to whatever you have planned. I’m getting that loud and clear.”

  “Why are you being like this? What will being combative award you? Nothing really. Not at this point.” He sat down in the couch across from where she was standing, stirred his tea, and waited for her to sit. She did.

  “David, that bomb was never supposed to go off. It was supposed to be a ‘dud,’ just enough to unnerve Roland, nothing more. To play on his already shattered state. Wasn’t that your original pitch on this whole idea?” Heaton started to answer. She didn’t give him the chance.

  “You have lied to me, deceived me, and committed a horrible crime. You put someone I dearly love on the brink of death and through an awful amount of pain. I can never forgive you. I can never trust you. You realize this?” Heaton nodded and agreed with everything she had said.

  “Very good. As usual, you’ve laid out your point of view clearly—always one of your strong points.” She shook her head; his confidence was insufferable.

  “I’m sorry, Georgia. In the end, it was felt that a ‘dud’ wouldn’t have been enough to frighten Roland to retire. I know you thought it would suffice, thought he was on edge, looking for a reason to pack it in, but you were alone in that assessment. I do agree that the amount of explosive was overdone. I truly had no interest in inflicting that kind of damage on Roland, the whole thing just got out of hand, but with that said, we are here, he is alive and will recover, and now you have a job to do as far as the path we’ve all chosen.”

  She stood and paced the room. She hadn’t been using her cane these last few days, a by-product, she thought, of so many things: the adrenaline, the pills, Steel. Steel—God, how hard it was sometimes to think of Steel. How badly she wanted to walk out of this room away from this billionaire buffoon and find herself a quiet nook to call Steel and hear her soft flutter of a voice.

  “I want us to have a clear plan now, Georgia. You’re going to get what you want. You’re going to be the PM. The party will kneel at your feet, but you’ll need to make good on the referendum. It won’t be able to wait. We don’t want Strasbourg to go into conference and make amendments that would give the Libs a good reason to balk or, worse, sue for more leverage. We want this done now—in weeks, not months. I need your commitment.”

  She looked up at the portrait of Margaret Thatcher, then over to one of David Lloyd George as a wave of shame bolted through her body. How had it come to this? How had this slick-suited, silver-tongued reprobate gotten one over on her? Surely she was brighter than this. It was the pills, she thought. He never would have played her this way had she not been under their command.

  “You will lead forward as planned. There is no choice.”

  “Don’t talk to me that way, David. I am not going to become your servant. It won’t happen, do you hear me? If you think you’ll run Downing Street with me as a puppet, it will not happen!” She was shouting now. “You tell whoever it is alongside you, these faceless men, that I will not be your marionette! I will resign office first. Step down. Leave you with nothing. I promise you this!” Heaton gave her a beat to calm. He knew she would. She always did.

  He got up, came over, and put his arm on her shoulder. She wanted to shake it off, pull away from his touch, but didn’t.

  “It won’t come to that, Georgie, I promise. You aren’t to be anyone’s water carrier. It’s just about the referendum. That’s all anyone’s going to get churned up about. Rest assured.” She turned and looked him in the eye.

  “I’m very scared, David, truly frightened, for all of us.”

  “Good. You should be. There’s plenty to be frightened about.” He leaned farther in, kissed her cheek, and made his exit.

  TATUM ■ 1

  The Tatums paid cash for a week in advance on two rooms in a broken-down hotel in Earls Court. Kate had gone in alone and rented the rooms from an old Chinese woman who had no interest in who or what would be in them, only focusing on the cash. A television on the wall blasted a Ping-Pong tournament with Chinese lettering scrolling along on the bottom of the screen. The newspapers on the desk behind her were all copies of the People’s Daily, in Chinese as well. It seemed to Kate that this may well be the one place in Britain that didn’t have images of her husband strewn from wall to wall.

  They had driven into London, arrived as the sun set, and then dropped off Adam in an alley not far from the hotel. Billy stayed with Adam as Kate and Trudy dumped the car at Canary Wharf, then took a taxi back to Earls Court. Adam was still pale and needed medical attention, but, thankfully, his bleeding had stopped. Kate had improvised a bandage out of Trudy’s scarf, binding the wound on his thigh, which seemed to be the worst of his injuries. Kate ran into a Boots pharmacy along the way and bought bandages and supplies. It was everything she could do to keep moving, stay with the job at hand, not think too much about anything—about her father, about Richard, about a bomb in the prime minister’s office, or about her husband being the most wanted man in Britain, maybe even the world.

  Once it was dark and they were certain of a path free of CCTV cameras that would record Adam on the way from the alley to the hotel, she and the kids helped him across and inside, past the old woman who was on the phone arguing with someone in Chinese, then into the elevator up to their floor.

  A musty yellow film covered almost everything in the two adjoining rooms. The water in the bathroom sink even had a yellowish tint. The mattresses were hard as boards and the blankets old and tattered at the ends. The rooms smelled dank and wet, like the floor of a bus station phone booth. The window shades were also aged and frayed. Nothing in either room was less than forty years old: appliances, furniture, bedding, or literature.

  Adam passed out on the bed as soon as they were inside. Kate and Trudy washed his wounds while he slept. Kate did her best to close up anything she could and to disinfect what she couldn’t. Billy sat on a creaky chair and cried in the way one whimpered after having cried so much that nothing was left but gentle shivering. In the middle of the night, as Kate slept with the kids in the other room, Adam woke and turned on the television, the volume low. He watched the news. The Adam Tatum show. There was wall-to-wall chatter and clatter on what seemed like every channel about “the American.” Several panels of pundits used the occasion to reiterate long-standing claims about America’s dark part in everything currently going wrong with the world. This “Adam Tatum” had opened up the conversation once again about what could and couldn’t be done to stop America and its reckless behavior in all facets of modern life.

  Later the BBC ran a program about Georgia Turnbull and the government, hypothesizing on who would align with whom once Lassiter was officially out—a quarter hour of talking heads finally not talking about Adam. It was almost refreshing.

  On the subject of Georgia Turnbull, the experts were in agreement, and all surmised that she would be the next prime minister. Adam stewed while watching, wrapped in musty blankets in a room that felt like one stop before the curb. He sulked and steamed, mumbled and muttered to himself as he tried to fix his mind on an idea, a plan, a way to stop her, bring her down, clear his name.

  Then he saw Jack Early. It was during a piece on the life of Georgia Turnbull. Early was briefly mentioned—her private secretary. There was footage of Georgia now, Early always at her side. One of the panelists, a British comedian, was even showing slow-motion footage of Early from a few years earlier standing behind Georgia while she made a speech, picking at his nose. Another splotch of video showed the man falling as he got out of her car as she arrived at the hospital to visit Roland the day after the blast. The panel made a quick barrage of jokes, then moved on to her various cabinet members
, trying to determine who would back her bid and who would turn and run.

  Adam wasn’t interested in moving on, though. He was fixed on Jack Early. He knew him. They had met. This was the man who had handed him the heavy replacement dossier that day at Number 10. It had been eleven days, eleven long days, but the memory was clear. This Early character, this skinny clown of a man—he was in on it. He had given Adam the bomb. He forced himself to sit up straight. This Jack Early—he was the key.

  * * *

  LATER, KATE HELPED him shower. Talk was clipped, conversation sparse. He used his weakness as a wall, a reason not to say too much. He handed her one of several lists he had made while lying in bed.

  “We need these items.” He tossed over an envelope that Gordon had given him. It was filled with cash, passports, and driver’s licenses.

  “I need these supplies.” Her eyes trained on his every move now, her voice broken and stilted.

  “What about my father? When are you going to—” He cut her off, sadly snipping the words as they left her mouth.

  “He’s gone. I’m sorry, Kate. Heaton’s men. They killed him. I’m so sorry.” She took it in, said nothing. She just nodded and stared at him. She fought the tears and wiped away each new barrage before they could flow into a steady stream. He sensed it wouldn’t be long and the dam would explode. She’d crumple in pain, double over in agony. He didn’t have the time to wait.

  “You and the kids are leaving. Once you get me those supplies, you’re going to make some changes in your appearances and use those passports and fly out of the country. My brothers will take care of you in Ann Arbor until I can get home.” She buckled into a ball and collapsed. He rubbed her back and held her as she sobbed. But she moved away from him, making it clear that she didn’t want him touching her. He backed off and let the sorrow take hold of her.

  After a beat she looked up from her tears and faced Adam, her eyes swollen and puffy.

  “He was going to come to Chicago with us. Near us. He wanted a new life.”

  “I’m sorry, Kate. I’m so, so sorry.”

  Fifteen minutes later she took Trudy and left to go find the items on the list. They caught a taxi over to Oxford Street. Kate wanted to talk, wanted to tell Trudy what was happening, but she couldn’t find the words to tell her that her grandfather was dead or that they were going home, so she said nothing.

  She didn’t want to fight; she knew that neither Trudy nor Billy would want to leave Adam. Kate did, though. She was good and ready to go home, ready to be done with it all, to be done with Adam.

  STEEL ■ 1

  The New Testament Church of God in the Wood Green area of North London hosted the funerals of both Andrew Tavish and Edwina Wells, Andrew’s in the late morning and Edwina’s just an hour or so after. They were work friends, not a lot more, but their brutal murders in the woods of Dorrington had brought them closer together in death than either of them ever imagined they’d be.

  Steel watched from the middle of the church as Edwina’s sister gave a passionate and humorous, tear-splashed speech about her older sister and best friend. Steel’s gut ached with bitter pain, not the sting from the bite wounds but the angry pang of knowing that these deaths were to be forever shrouded in lies. The morning papers had all told the same story, the one reported by the Met and the local authorities in Tewkesbury.

  The two investigators were killed by drug runners, possibly Turkish. It was an arrest gone bad, a tragedy in the line of duty that had taken place in the woods a mile south of the closest home. There was no mention of Dorrington.

  There was no reference to Gordon Thompson or of Harris or Dorman. All three of them had been airbrushed away in the cold morning Tewkesbury air. Steel pounded the desktops of Darling and the others, but this was to be the official story. It was from higher up than Major Darling could reach. With his mind, as well as Steel’s, still bent on seeing Heaton swing for this whole sad wrinkle of sanity, Darling wanted Heaton and whoever it was Heaton was trotting and plotting with to think that they had indeed dotted all of their i’s and crossed all of their t’s.

  Steel needed to believe in someone, and she did in fact trust in Darling, so in the end she went along with the cocked-up story. She sat there now in the bosom of an aching extended family as they wailed and moaned, sneezed and sniffled over the tragic loss of sweet, sweet Edwina Wells. Steel didn’t have a tear to shed; her mind was too busy with dark thoughts of revenge and retribution.

  * * *

  SHE TOOK THE Piccadilly line, reasonably quiet on a Sunday afternoon, from Wood Green down to Russell Square, which was walking distance to her parents’ flat in Bloomsbury. Several of the passengers were reading the morning papers with cover stories on Georgia and what was universally now seen as her inevitable rise to the prime minister’s office. Lassiter had all but made official his inability or desire to return to office when he healed from the bombing, which had occurred two weeks earlier. The world was ready to move on, Steel thought. The Downing Street bombing was just another media story now—an unsolved riddle, a nagging ache that the public inherently knew would be solved eventually—but the anger and the fear had somewhat subsided, and what had been just a few days earlier on a high flame on a front burner was now replaced with the taunting question of what normal would be like, what face tomorrow would flash. According to all of the papers staring across at her, it was the face of Georgia Turnbull.

  She wanted to call Georgia so badly. She wanted so deeply to soothe Georgia’s nerves and, even more, wanted to tenderly kiss away her doubts.

  Then, as Russell Square became the next stop, another thought flashed across the young inspector’s mind, a thought that had been there before, one that she hadn’t wanted to pick up and place, a puzzle piece that she wasn’t ready to find a hole to snap into. What if Georgia was involved? Someone was, someone very high up. To have made the connections, managed the coercions that were enlisted in dressing over and stitching up the murders of Wells and Tavish, someone had to have powerful strings available for Heaton to pull. Who stood the most to garner from all this? Who could have had the inside track it would have taken to place a bomb to set off a conspiracy from this high up? Who had profited the most from Roland Lassiter’s fall? The answer was clear: the woman on the cover of the Sunday magazine, the heir apparent.

  Steel slowly picked the puzzle piece up in her mind. She tried not to remember how sweet and cool Georgia’s breath felt wrapped inside of a soft quick kiss as she twirled the notion around in her mind. When the Tube came to a stop at Russell Square, she sat there numb as passengers hobbled off and new ones shuffled in. The only two things that didn’t move were the photo of Georgia Turnbull and Steel herself.

  She stayed frozen into place as the train left the station, replacing it with a sea of blackness and rail clatter. The final piece fit perfectly on all sides. All the little puzzle-type knobs and bobbles slipped into the adjoining space with ease. It was a flawless landing, a perfect placement. How could she not have seen this before? She’d been blinded by infatuation. That was the only excuse. All of her powers, all of her talent, all of her instincts had been easily felled by a simple schoolgirl’s crush.

  Heaton had had inside help at Number 10 and, like everything else Sir David had in his life, it was the best there was to have. His partner in all of this would be the new prime minister. You couldn’t do any better than that. Numb and slapped senseless with an obvious truth, breathlessly taken with a sharp reality, Steel didn’t move as much as a muscle until the Tube finally pulled into Holborn, where she disembarked and headed home in her very own self-contained fog.

  TURNBULL ■ 2

  Her Jaguar and a follow car pulled into the side gate of Buckingham Palace. Upstairs, outside on the landing to the regal drawing room, Andrew McCullough, the king’s valet, held ground at the large wooden door while Georgia waited patiently to be given the sign that the king would be ready to see her, ready to ask her the question the press and the pundits we
re all asking: would she be able to form a government?

  Once inside, she nodded to the king, did a slight bow at the door, and was summoned into the seemingly never-ending room with the ornately coved ceilings and the silk-lined walls. She made her away across. They were alone in the room. He held out his hand. She took it, suddenly not sure if she should bow again. Do I bow only at the door, or here across from him? Do I kiss his hand? I know it’s all different when it’s a private meeting at the palace, but I forget exactly what I should do. Damn this all. Why don’t I have this all down?

  For some reason she couldn’t settle on what to do, so she bowed slightly again. Awkwardly, she thought. The king seemed fine with the response and invited her to have a seat on the couch across from him.

  “How are you holding up, Miss Turnbull? These can’t be easy times.”

  “No, Your Majesty, they are not.”

  “I have sent a note to the prime minister. My heartfelt thoughts on news he would be leaving public life. It’s a loss.”

  “Yes it is, sir. A horrible loss.”

  “I guess it’s all to you then, now. Can you form a government?” He was wasting no time. There was no small talk to be had. That was it, the big question. She had always imagined there was more to say in private meetings with the monarch, little wisps of truth to be shared, wisdom passed on, but it wasn’t to be. He wanted an answer to the query the constitution forced him to put forward, and nothing more.

  “I believe that, yes, I can, sir, form a government. That will be my task.”

  “Yesterday’s dispatch box had a summary to me of your objectives. I’ve looked them over and feel that all of them are sound. They not only carry on Roland’s work well but will give the people a good sense of continuity. I do have concerns on the referendum, Miss Turnbull. I can see that it’s going to be a high priority of your government. Is that true?”