The Lords' Day (retail)

by Michael Dobbs

  With less than ten seconds to go, he gave the instruction. They began broadcasting once more.

  As the large screens in the chamber flickered back into life, Masood smiled once more. He had won another victory. ‘Excellent. You see, Prime Minister, it wasn’t so difficult after all.’

  ‘What else is it you want?’ Eaton demanded impatiently, desperately trying to regain a little of the initiative.

  ‘What else? Ah, yes. I want Mrs Willcocks.’ He looked around the chamber. ‘I would like Mrs Tricia Willcocks to step forward, please.’

  12.07 p.m.

  Until two years ago Harry had been the minister at the Home Office, one of the senior briefs in charge of police and security matters. It was a role only one step away from the Cabinet itself, until he had dared to disagree with his Secretary of State in public. The Secretary had made a particularly woolly speech embracing multiculturalism and the melting pot; the following day, in an unscripted and uncharacteristically unguarded moment, Harry had responded that the quickest way for a nation to lose its will to live was to lose its roots. Just like an army needed to know what it was fighting for, he said, so a nation needed to know what it stood for. He followed up by suggesting that you couldn’t build paradise on platitudes. Harry was the sort of man who always followed up. Stripped of the coded language used in Westminster, it was like throwing a bucket of ice water over his boss. That was unwise. Nobody could accuse Harry of being unfit for purpose, but it was made clear to him that he was no longer wanted on voyage, so before they made it official and asked him to creep out the back door, Harry had stridden out of the front door and quit. Melanie had been upset; she enjoyed the glamour of being a Minister’s wife, the invitations, the attention, the coverage she’d begun to get in the Tatler, and the annual trips to Davos. The Mail on Sunday had even asked if she’d like to write an occasional travel column. She’d been too busy at the time to accept, but it was flattering to be asked – except they didn’t ask any more, not since Harry had jumped ship. Perhaps that was where it had started to go wrong, he sometimes thought. She did so love the spotlight, sought it out, like a moth, or an exotic dancer. Yet his ministerial experience had left Harry with many things – an understanding of how the system worked, and a list of names and telephone numbers that was still able to open many doors, friends who were still at the heart of things. Now he used that knowledge. Harry had to report what he had seen, and he knew just the man.

  ‘The Ops Room,’ he demanded when the switchboard at Scotland Yard answered. ‘Give me Gold.’ They hadn’t wanted to put him through at first, until he had explained who he was, and where he was calling from.

  The Operations Room at Scotland Yard is the heart of their security control system, and Gold is the officer who is its head. Gold, in the person of Commander Mike Tibbetts, a twenty-three-year veteran of the force, was at that moment in his office struggling to cover his dismay as he looked out over an open-plan Ops Room that was wallowing in bewilderment, like a dismasted ketch. They were barely a few hundred yards from the action in the Lords, but they might have been on the other side of the moon for all they knew of what was happening there.

  ‘Harry, long time – too long,’ the policeman muttered, dispensing with the niceties, his voice tight as a piano string. ‘What the hell’s going on?’

  ‘I’m in a corridor. Just along from the chamber. There are eight of them, so far as I can tell.’

  ‘Eight, you say? We’ve only just got television pictures back and we’re still counting.’

  ‘All male, mostly young and fit. These are trained men, Mike.’

  ‘A diplomat amongst them, so it seems.’

  ‘Sent abroad to die for his country. So what are we doing about it?’

  There was a well-rehearsed procedure for any siege – isolate, contain, evacuate and negotiate, in the words of the manual – but no matter how well rehearsed it might be, somehow Tibbetts feared this situation might be stretching the jargon to its breaking point. ‘SO-15’s up and running, CO-19 stood to,’ the policeman said, referring to the counter-terrorist command and the armed response unit of the Metropolitan Police. ‘They’re ready to go. We’re pushing the security cordon further back, establishing a stronghold.’ He sighed, one of those deep outpourings of frustration that sound like a death knell on a career. ‘We’re still checking the rest of the parliament building for stragglers and explosives. But mostly it’s clear, people couldn’t wait to get out. You must get out yourself.’

  ‘In good time, Mike. What about the Boys? Are they in the mix?’

  The Boys. The Special Air Service. The most finely honed unit in the British Army, based at Hereford, from where they were called upon to do the dirtiest jobs in the world. They had a reputation for ferocity, adaptability and, when necessary, brutal success. Who Dares Wins. It had been Harry’s last active posting before they’d sent him to count paperclips.

  ‘No, not yet,’ the policeman responded, revealing his reluctance. So long as this was a police show, he was in charge; once the SAS boys got involved, things had a habit of growing messy. ‘There’s still a view here that these are guys who have just got lucky and might want little more than the publicity.’

  ‘Mike, these bastards are well trained and extremely well tooled. Kalashnikov assault rifles. Machine pistols. Best there is. You can’t buy that sort of thing on the Portobello Road. They’re the full Monty. I beg you, don’t underestimate them.’

  ‘So who in God’s name are they?’ the policeman cried out softly in exasperation. ‘Arabs? Islamists? Al Qaeda? What bloody hole have they crawled out from?’

  Harry leaned his forehead against the deep wood panelling of the corridor trying to round up his drifting thoughts. ‘Not so much a hole as a complex of caves, I suspect. Somewhere in the mountains of the North West Frontier. They’ll be Pashtun, Baluchi, something like that, not the rag-tag mob of the Islamic international brigade – from what I’ve seen of these guys, close up, they’re remarkably similar. Same physiognomy. I’ve seen something like that before . . .’ He began rhythmically banging his forehead, like a drumbeat calling his struggling thoughts to order, but they shuffled along at their own pace for a while; memories of his briefings on active service in Iraq, fragments from his researches in the clandestine corridors of Oxford. Suddenly they had all lined up together. ‘Mike, I think I may have got it! I know who these bastards are. And if I’m right, I can guess what they want.’

  Yet from the end of the phone there was no sound of enthusiasm, not even of enquiry, only an exquisitely painful silence. It was a few moments before the other man spoke. The piano string in his voice seemed to have broken. ‘Harry, get over here. Now. You’re right, these guys mean business. And I think we’re going to need you.’ Then he cut the link. He didn’t even give Harry the chance to tell him what he knew.

  12.12 p.m.

  Inside the chamber, Eaton had been confused by the attacker’s request. ‘She’s not here. Tricia Willcocks isn’t here,’ the Prime Minister said.

  ‘I find that difficult to believe,’ the young terrorist responded, looking carefully round the chamber.

  ‘She’s indisposed. Ill.’ At last he had one over the bloody man, although the consolation was small.

  ‘Ah. A pity. She has quite a reputation. I was hoping to meet her. So which other members of the Cabinet are absent?’

  ‘I have one in China on a trade mission, another is attending the funeral of her father.’ Eaton cast around him. ‘Other than that, I believe we are all here.’

  ‘Then I would like another female member of the Cabinet to come forward, please . . .’ He put his hand to his temple, reaching for his mental list, hesitating over the name. ‘Mrs . . . Antrobus. The Education Secretary. Am I right?’

  ‘Why do you want her?’

  He spoke slowly, as though talking to a dullard. ‘I want to put her on television. Make her famous. But I can’t see her, where is she?’ he demanded, his eyes probing along the benches.
‘I want you to point her out.’

  ‘I’ll not hand anyone over to bloody men like—’

  He was interrupted by a voice that came from a seat behind him. ‘That’s all right, Prime Minister.’ Marjie Antrobus stood, a tall, willowy blonde who had Norwegian blood in her somewhere. ‘No point in hiding.’ And she was right. There were only five women in his Cabinet, one was at a crematorium and another still in bed. That left only three.

  ‘Ah, Mrs Antrobus. Please come and join me here on the steps.’

  Slowly, delicately, being careful to take her time, for she wasn’t a woman to be rushed, Marjie Antrobus picked her way along the row in which she was seated and made her way forward. She was the youngest woman in the Cabinet, with three children of school age, one of them still at nursery. That had seemed to Eaton to be as good a claim as any for being appointed Education Secretary and she had justified his choice, proving both popular and resolute. Not often you could find a Minister who could catch the fantasies of male colleagues yet still do the mother thing. She stepped forward. Her blue eyes held more curiosity than fear as she stood beside the young man.

  And that was where he shot her, right between her blue eyes, on the steps of the throne.

  Four

  12.23 p.m.

  Tricia Willcocks came back from a dark pool of oblivion to discover that her head was still throbbing like a drum. Only slowly did she realise that it wasn’t as simple as a migraine; at the very limits of her consciousness, out beyond the pain, someone was pounding on her front door. She tried to ignore it, to burrow into her pillows and slip back into comforting oblivion, but the noise was insistent. Whoever it was had no intention of being denied. With curses tumbling from her lips, she pulled aside her bedclothes and slipped into her robe. Shouts came from the front door, calling her by name, demanding her presence. She didn’t recognise the voice, male, aggressive, and very strident. She decided it would be prudent not to open the door but to speak to them from behind it and give them a piece of her bloody mind, and she was standing by the panic button and about to let forth when the door seemed to dissolve into splinters and come crashing from its hinges. Standing in the blinding sunlight on her doorstep were shadows that, through her pain, she slowly realised were men in visored helmets, boots and body armour with the most extra ordinary array of weapons, every one of which was pointed at her.

  ‘Oh, fuck,’ she said. Then she fainted.

  12.25 p.m.

  Scotland Yard is a monument to the Sixties. The architectural fashion of the time had been for drab concrete mausoleums, and unsurprisingly the Operations Room within it was low-ceilinged and dreary, crammed with old-fashioned communications consoles on the desks and portable fans to push around the stale air. The Ops Room was supposed to be replaced by new hi-tech premises in Lambeth – it had been promised for several years – but still they were stuck here amidst dinginess that reminded Harry of the control room on one of those Soviet-era submarines that had been left rusting in Sebastopol harbour. He arrived from the Lords still a little breathless; he’d run all the way. He accepted a mug of the institutional coffee as he and Mike Tibbetts gazed at the large video wall, watching events relayed by a dozen cameras from vital points around Westminster.

  ‘Now we see if your theories stand up,’ the policeman muttered.

  ‘You have any doubts – after that?’ Harry pointed to one of the screens where the body of Marjie Antrobus lay draped across the steps in front of the throne.

  Slowly, sorrowfully, the policeman shook his head.

  There is a special quality to the silence that follows an outrage, when no breath is drawn and the world misses a beat. It’s like a tear in the curtain of time, where incredulity smothers the first sparks of understanding. But it doesn’t last long, particularly in the City of London. The market traders who sat at their desks couldn’t hear the echo of the gunshot that killed the Education Secretary, but no sooner had it died away than a strange fever began to spread across the trading floors. These floors were often the size of football pitches on to which were packed hundreds of young, edgy men and women. A sound began somewhere – no one could tell from precisely what point – and suddenly heads were up, like meerkats sniffing for danger. The noise level began to grow and spread, suddenly the screens that dominated every desk began to flash with red alarms, the open lines that linked them directly to brokers began to scream in unison, and in a single breath it seemed as if everyone was on their feet shouting into several telephones at once, selling equities, derivatives, money market instruments, and sterling, trying to find shelter from the storm. This wasn’t yet 9/11, but it might develop into that; indeed, there was already the suspicion that it might be something worse. Soon the markets were tumbling downhill like an avalanche, sweeping everyone before it.

  In newsrooms, too, they weren’t waiting. The press began a rush to speculation that would grow increasingly lurid with the hours. After all, what was the point in a newspaper reporting news when the BBC had already carried it live and in devastating colour? Almost immediately the speculation was mixed with condemnation, not just of the attackers but also of those who had made their assault possible. The police, the security services and, of course, the politicians. Particularly the politicians, except for Marjie Antrobus, of course, who was already well on her way to sainthood in the view of her obituarists.

  Across the country, word spread like leaves scattered by an autumn wind. Housewives watching television called husbands, who spoke to secretaries, who telephoned boyfriends and mothers. Workers returned from the john or sandwich shop to spread the news around the shop floor. Television screens in supermarkets, high streets, pubs, front parlours, main railway stations, even betting shops, were tuned to one programme. Across the country, lunch engagements and business appointments were cancelled, hair dressers were kept waiting, taxis failed to arrive, congestion in city centres began to grow as drivers missed lights or stopped to listen. It was like an eclipse of the sun. An entire nation stood still, in darkness, waiting.

  12.28 p.m.

  Masood, still standing over the body of his victim, waved his weapon above his head. ‘I hope I have your attention. You will listen, very carefully.’

  He looked directly at Eaton, who tried his best to return the stare but it wasn’t easy. Inside him a million conflicting emotions were tumbling over each other; fear, shock, astonishment, cruel incomprehension, the overwhelming desire to crawl away and hide. Yet he, of all people, was supposed to rise above adversity and somehow find a resolution. The attention of those around him was fixed on the young gunmen yet, at the same time, the Prime Minister knew they were also looking at him, expectantly, demanding that he do something. Without even realising what he was doing, he rose in his seat.

  ‘Why? Why?’ he demanded, breathless with emotion, pointing at the body. ‘She was nothing but an innocent woman.’

  ‘This is a world of many martyrs, Prime Minister. The graveyards of my homeland are full of them. Put there by your bombers and your guns, at your instruction.’

  ‘Which is your homeland? What are we talking about? Iraq? Afghanistan? Pakistan?’

  ‘Yes, all those. And many others. Wherever the British government and their American allies have meddled and murdered, all such places we regard as our homeland.’

  ‘But what had she got to do with any of this?’

  ‘She was part of it. Part of your rotten system, your democracy’ – he made it sound like a curse – ‘that has spread terror throughout my people.’

  ‘She was innocent,’ the Prime Minister insisted, his voice bubbling with grief.

  ‘Oh, come, Mr Eaton, let’s not debate your warped sense of innocence, nor your ideas of freedom and liberation that have piled the bodies of my people higher than the surrounding hills. Why waste time? You have only twenty-four hours left.’

  ‘I . . . don’t understand.’

  *

  In the Ops Room at New Scotland Yard, Harry stiffened. He knew
what was coming.

  ‘Daud Gul,’ he heard the gunman say. ‘Release him. Within twenty-four hours. By noon tomorrow.’

  ‘So, you were right, Harry,’ Tibbetts said softly. ‘Hit it right on the bloody nail.’

  ‘I so wish I wasn’t,’ Harry replied.

  ‘You see, I am a reasonable man,’ Masood was continuing. ‘I make no impossible demand. I even give you time to make your arrangements. More time than your bombers gave my parents and brothers and sisters, Mr Eaton. I want to do a deal. You have my leader. And I have you. We can arrange a swap, a fair exchange. You release him within twenty-four hours.’

  ‘Or?’

  ‘Or? Isn’t it clear? Release him, or the hostages here will start to die. Perhaps you, Mr Eaton. Or perhaps your Queen. Perhaps everyone here. We shall see. Inshallah.’

  ‘We don’t deal with terrorists!’

  ‘But in my country, you are the terrorists.’

  ‘Ridiculous!’

  ‘Have you forgotten your own history? You sent in your troops to teach us to fight the Russians, then the Taliban, and after that you came looking for bin Laden. And after you arrived, your enemies sent in their killers, too. We asked for none of this, yet because of you, and all the others, we became targets. And when your plans to wipe out all your enemies didn’t work, when you found it too hot on the ground, you sent us your bombers, you and your American friends. And in the sights of the bombers, every village became an al-Qaeda stronghold, every roof a Taliban hideout. And you devastated my land, Mr Eaton.’

  ‘We have never deliberately attacked civilians, but in war, mistakes are sometimes made. It’s a messy business.’

  ‘And you are soon to find out just how messy it can be.’

  ‘We only ever wanted to get rid of the Islamics and the fanatics; they are your real enemy.’

  ‘We would have been content to deal with them by ourselves, in our own way, as we have always done. We know how to deal with invaders and intruders. But you sent in the bombers.’