Keep Calm

by Mike Binder

  “Yes, I believe it is. I should think it’s an idea whose time has come.”

  “I guess you could label me sitting on top of the fence on this one. All I have really is a strong desire that it’s a majority vote. There will be unending repercussions, I’m sure.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty. It’s a course change fraught with peril. But one we believe needs to be taken.”

  “It would cause massive change. You’ll need it to be a resounding decision of the electorate to leave the union. I would hate to have it feel as if it had the fabric of a backroom deal by big business or any other collective or pressure group. It has to clearly be the people speaking. I’m sure of that much.”

  “Yes, of course, Your Majesty. I’m in lockstep with you on that.”

  He looked across at her now for what seemed to be the longest time.

  He can see through me, Georgia thought to herself. He’s staring right into my soul. Knows all. No. That couldn’t be. He’s just a man. He’s the king but, in the end, just a man. Dear God, why is this all so unnerving?

  After a pause, the king broke the silence.

  “You’ll have the weight of the world on your shoulders, won’t you?” he asked with complete empathy, a knowing kind of compassion.

  “I’m sure it comes with the title, sir, but, yes. I can feel it already, to be honest.”

  “You’ll take it in drips and drops. It will become part of you, the weight. You’ll learn to live with it.” He took another quiet breath. “I’ll be saying my prayers for you.”

  “Thank you, Your Highness.”

  “Thank you, Miss Turnbull. A pleasure to see you again.” He stood. She quickly followed. They faced each other. The meeting was over. She started to panic. Do I walk backward now all the way to the door? It’s an incredible length. Not sure that I’ll be able to do that without tripping or doing something silly. Damn, why can’t I figure this out?

  The king smiled, almost as if he were in fact reading her mind. He nodded his head, turned, and walked toward the rear hallway leading to his residence. Georgia waited for what seemed like a season for him to cross and leave the endless room, then turned and scurried out as quickly as possible.

  * * *

  “I’VE JUST ACCEPTED an invitation from His Majesty the king to form a government.” Georgia was speaking to the British public through the press, outside Number 10. It was early morning and a pleasant sun favored her face as she read a short statement on the priorities of her new government, number one of course being to bring to justice the persons responsible for the bombing that had taken place there. To the great dismay of the assembled journalists, she finished her statement, took no questions, and briskly strode back through the black door behind her, away from their glare.

  Several days had passed since Georgia had taken a pill. She felt better, yet in moments alone, when darker thoughts consumed her, she’d find herself fending off an impulse to run to her flat and reunite with her helpers. She had so far resisted and had been free of the little beasts for almost seventy-two hours. With all that there was to be done, she needed to have as clear a head as possible. She was aware that unless she pushed through the storm of the inevitable withdrawal, the clarity she was longing for would never reappear.

  She had a light breakfast with Holmby, the deputy PM, Arnold Haddon, the minister for the cabinet office, and the very pregnant Lucy Barnathanson, the cabinet secretary, in the den adjacent to her office—Roland’s office. There was little doubt that she would have the numbers in Parliament. She would bring a vote in and have the backing of her party. She would indeed form a government. Georgia Turnbull was going to be the prime minister. It was done, set down in stone. All that was left to do was lead—lead and breathe.

  She had hoped to avoid making any cabinet changes at such an early point, but the cabinet secretary sensed that many felt that a reshuffle was due—in particular, Burnlee had made clear his desire to leave the home secretary post and take up Treasury as the new chancellor of the exchequer. There was also talk of unrest at Justice, Health, Work and Pensions, and Energy and Climate. Georgia begged Lucy and Haddon to postpone all that they could, at least for the time being.

  The requests would likely be granted. There would be much goodwill toward Georgia now, not only in her own party but with the Tories and the Lib Dems, and even UKIP as well. This was still crisis time they were in: the new PM needed backing and would get it. Everyone was on the same page. Hopefully.

  * * *

  IT WAS BEFORE the cabinet meeting, while Burnlee was bending her ear on how he needed to help her by taking over at Treasury, that Jack Early let Georgia know how desperately Inspector Steel was trying to get ahold of her. She had insisted the matter was urgent. Georgia took a breath. Simply the thought of Steel was enough for her to lose her calm. How had it happened? After a lifetime of not letting anyone into her center, this young woman had climbed the gate and gotten in. Even a simple flash of a thought of her made Georgia’s head go a little light with too much oxygen.

  She wouldn’t see her today, though. She didn’t have the strength, not without the help she couldn’t let herself reach for. She had the cabinet meeting, the address at Parliament, and sit-downs with the BBC, ITV, and then Sky News, plus a dinner planned with her father. Steel would make her heart race at too fast a clip today; she couldn’t take the chance. Early pressed again, not aware of how loaded his inquiry was.

  “Should I schedule her to come by once you’ve returned from Parliament? She says it’s most important. I assume she has news on the investigation. We need to stay at the front of her trail, ahead of the pack. Didn’t you say that, ma’am?”

  “Yes, I know. But I can’t. Not today. I just can’t. Do you hear me? Have her see Darling. Let her convey whatever she has to him. Tell her I’m fine with it.”

  “Yes, of course, ma’am. I’ll tell her.”

  Georgia made her way over the finely woven rug runners down to her initial cabinet meeting as prime minister to be, something she had waited for her entire adult life, yet David Heaton, her own gnawing ambition, those “damn pills,” and, yes, even Davina Steel had all conspired to take any sense of joy from the moment or the victory. Everything she had ever wanted had come true, yet here she was, deeply demoralized and dispirited. The historic hallways of 10 Downing Street all seemed to be bouncing around a cackling form of laughter, one wall to another. The joke was entirely on her.

  TATUM ■ 2

  Adam, Kate, and both of the kids dyed their hair. Kate cut Trudy’s short—short and dark, a look she kind of liked. It was the only time the teenager had smiled in days. Billy went blond, basically white. He looked almost albino, like a spy in a James Bond movie, and elicited just as rare a laugh from them all. Adam shaved his head and began growth on a goatee. For a moment it was as if they were prepping for a costume party, putting on disguises to go out into the world and have some fun. Then for each of them, a wave of truth would waft over the hotel room and they’d remember what it was that they were dressing up for.

  The dye and the haircutting accessories had been on Adam’s list. Clothes, souvenirs, and maps were accoutrements to make them look like three tourists heading home to New York. Kate had gone online and bought three plane tickets. She had checked every item off the list. She had been a good wife, agreeing to help her husband with everything he asked of her, and yet she constantly consulted her watch, she could barely endure the minutes and hours before their departure time. Before she could fly away from him.

  Adam watched the clock for a different reason. He needed to steady himself to say good-bye. He knew this send-off would be different, knew that it was more than probable that he would never see any of them again—at least not as a free citizen. He was in tune enough with Kate, even in light of all that had gone on between them, that he felt what she was feeling—that she was spent. The last three years had taken everything out of her as far as he was concerned, as far as “they” were concerned. He knew it was
over and his heart was broken. He didn’t have the words or the will to try to change her mind. All he wanted now was to get the kids and her to safety.

  Sometimes at night, as he lay alone in the mildewing hotel room with her in the room next door, bunched in with the kids, he’d think of the early days when he won her heart in Ann Arbor. He remembered how full she made each moment, with her beaming smile and syrupy laugh. He’d flashback on how much he used to love to make love to her, how happy he was to come home to his lady in Royal Oak after a night on patrol in Ann Arbor. It was all a distant world away now. The memories were ashes, remnants of a house fire, flames he himself had started and events had taken and stoked to a blaze. He had lost Kate and Billy and Trudy, lost them in the fire.

  * * *

  BEFORE THEY LEFT, before he put them in a taxi to Heathrow, he wanted to speak with them all. Especially the kids. He wanted to try to explain to them what had happened. He wanted them to have some sense of who he was in the light of who he’d become. He sat the kids down in the rickety desk chairs in the room he slept in.

  “I want you both to know that I love you. I love you so, so much.”

  “Why can’t you just come with us, Daddy?” Little Billy wanted to comprehend it all but he didn’t. “Why can’t we all just go home together? Why is it so important to for you to see Georgie Turnstile?” Trudy rolled her eyes, but knew enough not to make a sarcastic remark. “Let’s go see Poppa and make him come with us to Chicago, please?”

  Kate felt a strong pang of guilt at her inability to tell her boy what had happened to his grandfather. She turned away and steadied her jaw as Adam responded.

  “I have to make things right, Billy. I can’t run away. You three are all that I care about. I have to set things straight, Billy. If I don’t, we’ll all be hiding, running forever.” Kate knew he was about to choke up a good ten words before he did. She knew Adam rarely let his emotions get to him or overcome him, but she saw it coming on like a lonely car’s headlights floating forward on a darkened road.

  “I have to clear my name—our name. Okay, Billy?” His son nodded. He wrapped himself around Adam’s shoulder and announced that he was never letting go. Adam started sobbing but bucked up, stayed the course with his explanation.

  “Some people have made everyone think that I did something that I didn’t do. They’ve used the fact that I had made a mistake once before, so it was easy for them to make people believe that I had done it again, but I didn’t. Powerful people. Do you see? They’ve done some very, very bad things and they have to answer for them. I have to make sure they do. All of them. Then I can come home, home to you.”

  Out of nowhere his eyes erupted with a rain of pain. A steady wash of fear and anger buckled him farther to the floor at his son’s feet. Kate’s eyes caught the same storm. She couldn’t help herself. In that moment, she knew she wasn’t free. She wanted to be harder, tougher than she was, but it wasn’t so. She was still his wife. It wasn’t going to be as easy as she thought. She hadn’t in fact emotionally emancipated herself from him.

  She wandered alone into the other room and collapsed onto the broken, doughy mattress. There was no one else left in her life but Adam, everyone else was gone now, and though she hated him for that, against everything she was feeling, everything that made sense to her about her life, she couldn’t abandon him—not now, not here. It was over—she was more and more sure of it every day—but she also knew it wasn’t how she would be able to let it end. She didn’t have it in her to leave Adam alone in London.

  She picked herself up and went back into the other room. She spoke low, with a steady surety.

  “We’re staying.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me, Adam. We’re staying. Here. We’ll wait. We’ll all leave together.”

  “No, no, Kate. No. You can’t.” The kids were relieved. Billy held on to his father even tighter, locked his arms around his legs with all his might.

  “Please, Kate, don’t do this.” Billy reached up and put his hand on his father’s mouth, his eyes flushed red with an overdose of youthful anguish.

  “Yes, Daddy, yes! We are staying. I’m staying with you.” Trudy fell to her knees, grabbed Adam by the waist, and locked her arms around him in another bout of tears. Adam looked over the crumpled kids to his weary wife.

  “I can’t let you stay, Kate.”

  “You don’t have a choice.” It was obvious she was set on her newest course.

  They would stick firm, live there in the hotel room, and help him. She and his two children would support him in any way that they could. If she didn’t, if he met any form of danger—was arrested or, worse, killed—her children would never forgive her and she herself would live with nothing but unbearable guilt. Her only path was laid out clearly. She had no other road to take. She would dig in and fight, and in the fight maybe, just maybe, she would find some way back to Adam.

  STEEL ■ 2

  Steel kept herself busy in the time since Edwina’s funeral, kept to herself and nursed her wounds. She still hadn’t said anything to Major Darling about her sense of Georgia. She couldn’t even think about it, let alone talk about it. She would lie awake at night and pray that she was wrong. She would go over it all again and again, looking for the ludicrous in all of her assumptions. She didn’t find them, though. She still saw the puzzle piece as a perfect fit, and it only made her shattered heart bleed with a need for retribution.

  * * *

  SHE WENT UP and into the woods at Dorrington again. She took photos and ran as many forensic exercises as she could, but the forest had been swabbed clean. The scenes of Edwina’s and Andrew’s murders had both been meticulously lifted and relocated to a property two miles south, restaged as a drug arrest gone bad. It had been the work of experts, experts, Steel assumed, that she had been working alongside for the last six years. These were people she knew and trusted, who were now putting their talents to work for the sake of conspiracy and corruption.

  She walked the now peaceful woods and pondered how common all that must be. She was new, as green as the saplings vying for light beneath the great oaks. Did the world really work this way, the way cynics and conspiracy theorists always claimed it did? Was subterfuge the order of the day, even at the highest levels? Maybe she wasn’t as adept at discerning the big picture as she was at the little ones. Maybe she had an eye for the pebbles and the sand, yet the faraway horizon never came into focus.

  The wind whipped around as she went back to her patrol car. Her intuition was failing her. She couldn’t remember when she had ever doubted herself as deeply as she did now. What else had she been this wrong about? How could she have found herself to be in love with someone so duplicitous?

  * * *

  HER PARENTS BOTH knew something was seriously wrong. Her mother had been in a panicked state since Davina came home a week earlier with her arms and body bandaged and stitched. Davina slept later and talked even less than she normally did. Her shoulders seemed to droop with each and every step. Sheena stayed quiet when she could. She pried carefully when she couldn’t. Davina of course denied that anything was wrong, but it was no use: Sheena felt the pain she was carrying.

  Steel’s heart was broken in the common way that a young woman’s heart breaks and bleeds, but this was different. This was something from the movies and from spy novels, something greatly uncommon. Every time she turned on the television the news was in some way or other lashed directly to her own personal plight, her own private pain. It was all “Georgia” all the time, and when it wasn’t “Georgia” it was “Adam Tatum.”

  Had she been used? Was it all to keep her close, to know what she knew, what Darling knew? How much had she said? How much had she spilled out into that late-night intimate call? She wanted to retrace every bit of the conversation, but it hurt too much to go back over it or any of the other interactions they had had.

  She called Georgia a third time. She didn’t want to make the call. She wanted to be
standing on much firmer ground than this, but she dialed, held her breath, and waited as her mobile rang with a nauseating buzz. Georgia answered. Her voice, soft and throaty, comforted Steel, comforted and frightened her.

  “I want to see you. I’ve been trying to call. I’ve left messages.”

  “I know, love. I want to see you, too. It’s been such a thunderstorm these last few days. You must know that.”

  “You’re the prime minister now. That feels so strange. It all feels so different.” There was silence. Georgia waited for a powerful current of emotion to settle back down. Steel could almost feel it through the phone.

  “I want to see you, Georgia, so badly. I have so much to tell you. There’s so much that we need to talk about. I just need … you.” Once again a word had jumped from her mouth like a fish from a bucket back into the ocean, never to be seen again. She wished she hadn’t said it that way, casting herself as so weak.

  “I need to see you as well, Davina. I do. It’s just that we’re in high drama here right now, do you see? Every hour is key, every minute spoken for.”

  “What about now? Can I see you now? Can I come to see you, please?” She was one beat short of begging, but she didn’t care. She had a need and a purpose and was desperate to fulfill them both. Georgia knew it wouldn’t work to bring Steel to Downing Street—into the hot light cascading over her every move. She promised her a quick answer, hung up, called Early, woke him in the middle of the night, and against every bit of her better judgment had him come round and drive her to Bloomsbury.

  * * *

  THEY WALKED SILENTLY through the foggy streets. Early walking just behind them, while Stacey Rimple, the MI5 guard whom Early had insisted on bringing along, stayed back in his car outside Steel’s parents’ flat. Georgia hadn’t wanted Rimple along, but Early had prevailed upon her that her world had now changed and that caution was needed, even in moments like this, when it was being thrown to the wind. Georgia had her scarf over her head, once again covering her face. She wore her old ratty wool jacket, which made her look a true chemist’s daughter out for a windy night stroll with a young female friend.