The Lords' Day (retail)

by Michael Dobbs

  On the screen they could see him waving instructions to the gunman standing over Harry. Harry’s head was twisted; he was trying to look at Masood, his face cruelly twisted, even as he was being forced lower and lower. His head had almost touched the floor when Tibbetts snatched the phone from the negotiator’s hand.

  ‘This is Commander Michael Tibbetts,’ he said, trying to keep his voice measured. ‘I am the police officer in charge of this operation. The tanks and the helicopter are there at my instruction.’

  ‘Get rid of them, commander.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Then he dies!’

  ‘No! Listen to me. Do you have any idea what’s going on outside the parliament buildings?’

  There was a slight hesitation before Masood came back: ‘Suppose you tell me.’

  ‘Can I suggest your colleague lowers his gun. It would make it much easier to talk.’

  ‘I’m making the decisions around here right now, commander, and frankly I have no intention of making things at all easy for you. He dies in five seconds, so I suggest you get on with what you have to say.’

  ‘You have to know that thousands – literally thousands of people – are trying to get as close to the siege as possible. You know what people are like. We’ve pushed them back but they’re still on the streets, on the bridges, on the tops of buildings, anywhere they can find a place to gawk. They want to see what we’re up to – and what you are up to.’

  At last there was silence on the other end of the phone as the other man listened.

  ‘This is the only story in the country and it seems everybody wants a piece of it. Even as you and I are speaking the pictures from inside the chamber are being seen around the globe. The whole world’s tuning into this. Millions. Watching you. I’m told it’s the biggest television audience in history.’ It was a lie, he had been told no such thing, but he suspected it might be true and he reckoned that was what the other man wanted to hear.

  ‘So why the tanks and helicopters?’ Masood demanded.

  ‘The last thing I want is some idiotic journalist or drunken vigilante trying to get in on the act. You are serious men and I need to be able to treat you in a serious manner; we can both do without a circus right on the doorstep.’

  ‘I see. It seems that at last you are being serious. Excellent. So when will you release Daud Gul?’

  ‘I’m not here to offer any deals, Masood, that’s for my political masters, but so long as I’m in charge you have my word that this situation is going to be handled properly. That’s why I need a helicopter watching from above and, yes, a couple of light tanks on Parliament Square to show those outside we’re not going to put up with any nonsense. Look at it this way, they’re here to allow you and me to get on with what we have to do.’

  Tibbetts waited for a response but none came. He looked up at the screen; Harry was now bent completely double, under great pressure, his head pressing on the floor.

  ‘Come on, Masood, the show is for those outside, not for you. What do you think I’m going to do, break down the door of the House of Lords with a tank and start shelling you?’

  The phone connection went dead. Tibbetts turned to the screen, filled with apprehension. For a few seconds the scene was frozen, then Masood slowly lowered his hand and the gun was removed from the back of Harry’s head. Tibbetts slumped into a chair, exhausted but at the same time exhilarated. What could never have been achieved by threats, he had gained instead by a little flattery. These men were human, after all. It meant they were fallible. For the first time since the siege had begun twelve hours earlier, Tibbetts felt a flicker of hope. He wiped his palms; they left a trail of sweat across the front of his shirt.

  Seven

  12.00 midnight.

  FROM SOMEWHERE NEARBY A CHURCH clock struck the hour.

  ‘I really should go home,’ Melanie said.

  ‘Why?’

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘The husband?’

  She considered the question before shaking her head. ‘I gave him one last chance – a chance he’d asked for. And he blew it.’ She shivered, even though the room was warm. ‘Left me like a gooseberry. At the Ivy, of all places. I felt such a fool.’

  ‘Where did he get to?’

  ‘Who knows?’ Almost as an afterthought she’d scanned the list of names in the Standard of those caught up in the siege, but he wasn’t there. It left her both relieved and intensely irritated. ‘He’s always off doing things for other people and I seem to come way down his list. I’m just an afterthought.’

  ‘Sounds serious.’

  ‘Sounds over.’ There, she’d said it, not just to herself but to someone else. Somehow it made it more real.

  ‘You mean that?’

  Once more she considered the question, before whispering: ‘Yes. Yes, I do.’

  ‘In which case . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s not a lot of reason for you to go home.’

  Suddenly he was laying siege to her nipple once more.

  ‘What, again?’ she laughed.

  ‘Oh, yes, please. Again . . .’

  12.32 a.m.

  If Melanie hadn’t been on her back but instead standing by the window of the hotel overlooking Hyde Park, she might have noticed the arrival of two USAF MH53Js. These helicopters, the largest and most powerful in the world, had twin turbo-shaft engines which kicked out more than four thousand shaft horsepower each and drove rotor blades that were seventy-two-foot long. The downdraft these monsters created was immense, hurling leaves, twigs and all sorts of ungathered rubbish high into the night air across the park. Long before the rotors had stopped turning, the men of Delta Force’s A Squadron were fanning out across the low grass, establishing a perimeter while others began unloading their vehicles and heavier equipment. They’d brought a variety of weapons with them, an assortment of Armalites with Heckler & Kochs, and even a few grenade launchers – they hadn’t known what to expect, but neither had the British. There was no opposition, no one to contest their right to use the banks of the Serpentine as a marshalling area. The nearby park police station had long since closed for the evening, and the troops in the Wellington Barracks overlooking the southern aspect of the park were mostly engaged elsewhere. After all, the attention of the British was still focused on Heathrow; they were only slowly beginning to realise that the military plane, obstinately stuck at the far side of the airfield and refusing to respond to instructions, was a decoy, a little game played almost for the sake of it, to distract attention from the other C-130 that had flown on what was listed as a training exercise to the USAF base at Mildenhall in Suffolk. That was where Delta Force had switched to the helicopters before heading straight to Hyde Park.

  Inevitably there was a no-fly zone in force above the capital but for the last ten miles they had flown very low and very slow, below the radar horizon, and with so much other military movement on the streets and in the air, two further helicopters succeeded in raising no alarms, despite the noise along their flight path. Their coming had been witnessed by little more than a couple of stray dogs, who watched in bemusement before turning tail and running.

  12.58 a.m. (7.58 p.m. Eastern Standard Time)

  President Edwards gazed out of the window of the Oval Office as if she were trying to get a full view of the action, even though it was taking place more than three and a half thousand miles away. She stood for some time, imagining, calculating, listening, trying to recreate in her mind the laughter of William-Henry and his friends as they had taken over a corridor for football practice or tried out their barber-shop harmonies in the Cross Hall. Wonderful echo, the Cross Hall. And suddenly she feared that an echo of her son was all she might be left with.

  She was brought back from her private terrors by her cat, Psycho, winding his tail around her legs. Come to think of it even the cat reminded her of her son; William-Henry had given it to her as a gift on her first day in the White House and had insisted on naming
it in his usual playful manner – ‘after the Vice President,’ he had said. And he hadn’t been far wrong there.

  She turned to face those in the room, not the Vice President but her Defense Secretary, the Secretary of State, and her National Security Adviser. They, too, were standing, uneasy, not feeling comfortable enough to sit.

  ‘You know, gentlemen, even this desk is British,’ she said, leaning on the large partner’s desk that stood before the windows. ‘A present from Queen Victoria, apparently, made from the timbers of one of their ships. It got stuck in the Arctic ice and we had to rescue it for them.’

  ‘Seems to have become something of a habit over the years,’ her diminutive National Security Adviser suggested, his tone typically brash and a little mean.

  ‘They’ve been on the ground more than five minutes now, Madam President,’ the Defense Secretary said. ‘And all’s quiet so far.’

  ‘What did you expect, cheerleaders?’

  ‘I expect the British to cave in,’ he replied. ‘The most they might do is send one of their marching bands to try and blow Delta Force off the park with a chorus of bugles.’

  ‘Don’t underestimate them. Their military is formidable.’

  ‘But not this fifth-round draft choice they’ve got squatting in Downing Street right now.’

  ‘She’s a woman. You never know what to expect from them.’ She said it without a hint of a smile. ‘What are we going to tell the world?’

  ‘We’ve got no problem justifying it, Madam President,’ the security adviser assured her. ‘We can drag in any number of treaty obligations, the right of self-defense, cite whole volumes of law.’

  ‘We’re permitted to gatecrash their party by law?’

  ‘We’ll find one. We own the law.’

  ‘No, I think you’re wrong there. That attitude led us into the swamps of Iraq and Afghanistan. Law doesn’t grow out of the barrel of a gun.’

  ‘It did in the first President Harrison’s time.’

  ‘The world’s moved on a little since then, I hope.’

  ‘Are you . . . having doubts, Madam President?’ the Secretary of State asked tentatively, his long face more doleful than usual.

  ‘Of course.’ She ran her finger along the rich imperial carving of the desk. ‘This is the most difficult day I’ve had.’

  The Secretary of State, his hands in his pocket, squeezed his balls. He was sixty-eight years old and was feeling dog-tired, yet needed all his wits about him for what he had to say. ‘I would be failing in my duty if I didn’t warn you, Madam President, of the price of failure. Whatever the grey nature of international law, this is one of those enterprises that in political terms has to be successful. Without that, the consequences would be dire. You’d be left fighting for your political life.’

  ‘I understand. But I think fighting for my son’s life is more important.’

  ‘If you have doubts, Madam President, then please voice them now. We’re very close to the point of no return.’

  She looked up, her face drawn. ‘Oh, I think we’re well past that, don’t you?’

  1.07 a.m.

  Tricia Willcocks decided that the time had come to join those who had gathered in Trafalgar Square. Her mind was made up when she heard that Frances Eaton, still distraught but dealing rather better with her plight, had suggested she might do much the same thing. In such circumstances two is not company and Tricia felt it only right that she should get there first.

  They tried to stop her, of course. Her protection officers were against it on security grounds, but she told them that this was an hour of national peril shared by all the people and she felt it appropriate to spend a little while empathising. That was the word she used. The protection officer wasn’t entirely sure he understood the implications of it, but in the face of her unwavering insistence he had little choice but to back down.

  Officials at Number Ten were also opposed. Having been reluctant to allow her to sit in the Prime Minister’s chair, they now seemed keen to keep her there. What if something happened, if she were needed urgently, they argued? But there was little to do at this hour except to wait, and Trafalgar Square was only one minute away by car. If she were needed, it would take her no longer to be with them than if she were in the ladies’ room.

  Her car brought her to the crowd barriers at the top of Whitehall where it entered the Square, and as she stepped out she caught her breath. At the dullest of times the square has a peculiar imperial magnificence with its column and lions and fountains, yet this evening it was as she had never seen it. On every ledge, in every corner, on steps, on plinths, around fountains and across every foot of pavement, people had come together in fear and in hope. Many prayed, some sang – not the jingoistic songs of Victorian times but softer songs of the Sixties, the quiet but insistent tones of the civil rights movement. ‘We shall overcome,’ they sang, and there was John Lennon to follow. Candles flickered defiantly in the cold night air. There was no traffic, the roads were impassable, flooded with people, and those who had squeezed into the square would long remember the stillness and simplicity of the moment.

  She joined in, chatting quietly, stooping to console, helping to light a few more candles, even providing a shoulder for a young girl to weep on. She didn’t stay long, only a few minutes, but long enough to symbolise a nation come together in its hour of need, and for the photographers to capture the images that she knew would make the morning news.

  1.23 a.m.

  A tramp found the body. It was lying face down beneath bushes along the towpath. It was a large man, not tall but stocky and overweight, almost bloated; that fact, and the cheap cider he’d been drinking, made it difficult for the tramp to roll the body out from beneath the spiky branches of the bush. It soon became clear that someone had got there first; there was no wallet to be found in any of the pockets, no mobile phone, and the only reason they seemed to have left the wristwatch was because its face was smashed. Yet that appeared to have been a mistake, for some tattered memory dredged up from his former life suggested to the tramp that the watch was one of the fashionable and hugely expensive kinds. The shoes were well crafted, too, and about the right size. Since the body had no further use for them, for a moment the tramp thought about an exchange deal. He took another swig from his bottle of cider and asked the body outright: ‘You don’t mind, do yer?’, and since the body raised no objection he set about organising a swap. The overcoat would come in useful, too, and the soft cashmere scarf, although he drew the line at the trousers. After all, he had no idea who this man was. The tramp was drunk and old, and his calloused fingers didn’t work as well as they might, but it wasn’t long before the deal had been consummated and he had become one of the most exotically tailored tramps in the whole of London. He had another drink to celebrate.

  It was these clothes that drew him to the attention of the local constabulary a few streets away and a little while later, and it was the stench of cheap drink that got him arrested. He was toothless and foul-mouthed, so no one took the slightest notice of his protestations about how he could help them solve a major crime. They just threw him in a cell to wait while he sobered up.

  And that was why Bulgakov, the cardinal of the conspiracy, lay in the shadows with his secrets for a little while longer.

  1.43 a.m.

  ‘I can’t let you go back in there again,’ Tibbetts said.

  For the past hour Harry had been sitting in the corner of the operations area in New Scotland Yard, sipping coffee, keeping his own counsel. Now he looked up with a cold, concentrated look in his eye. ‘Mike, you can’t stop me.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘He was a whisker away from pulling that trigger, Mike – I could feel it. You know what that’s like?’

  ‘Glad to say I never got quite that close.’

  ‘Like falling off a horse. You get right back on and give the bastard a bloody good kicking.’

  ‘You’ve done enough.’

  ‘You saved my life in the
re, Mike.’

  ‘And you still have sympathy with them?’

  ‘I understand them – and even better now. They will kill again, of that I’m sure. So we know our enemy just a little better.’

  ‘And fear him even more. All the greater reason for not sending you back in there.’

  Harry toyed with his Styrofoam cup, breaking little pieces off the rim and flicking them towards a wastebasket. He missed consistently. ‘There’s something important in all this, Mike. It’s not simply that you can’t order some other poor sod to take my place and risk getting his balls blown off, not if he’s got wife, family, the works – and Masood will be supremely suspicious of any new faces. It’s . . .’ He hesitated. ‘It’s about us as a country, a culture. Our self-respect. I’ve got to go back in there to show that we won’t be cowed, that we’re not running for cover simply because someone waves a gun at us. Hell, if I run, everyone in there will know it. What message will that send to them? That we’ve abandoned them, put our own safety before theirs, left them – quite literally – for dead?’ He waved his finger at the screen. ‘It could all fall apart in there, Mike, you know that. Those hostages aren’t battle-trained troops but frightened men and women who came out today to do nothing but celebrate what this country stands for. And right now we have to remind them what that is, and what they might be dying for.’ He crushed what remained of his plastic cup in a fist and hurled it towards the bin. It hit dead centre. ‘I know patriotism is an old-fashioned concept, but it’s part of what helps make us who we are. British. Men and women who believe in freedom and fair play – and silly things like crowns and Christmas and even a little cricket if it’s not raining too hard. We may not do any of it very well any longer but we are still Britons who come from a long line of bloody-minded men who laid down their lives so that we could close our front door and tell the rest of the world to go fuck themselves when we’ve a mind to. Now, our friend Masood just kicked down that door. I can understand him as much as I want, but if we let him get away with it we lose not only what made this country great but also what makes it British. We have to get those hostages out, not just for who they are but for what they represent. They die – and we’ll look back on this as the day our country died with them.’