The Bell Ringers

by Henry Porter

  Cannon stopped and looked over the wall at the four protection officers with automatic weapons, who discreetly shadowed the prime minister’s movements in the open ground beyond the garden, then glanced back at John Temple and Eden White, who had paused at the centre of the parterre to listen to Mermagen. White glanced towards the main group, underlining what Cannon had noticed at lunch: Eden White had a weakness for celebrities and particularly the petite dark-haired girl who had made it big in Hollywood on the back of an art house movie.

  The tour of the garden was a signal that the lunch party was over and soon the guests were departing. The prime minister beckoned Cannon. Inside, the garden girls and other members of staff were packing up and carrying laptops and files through the house to the cars parked at the rear of the building that would take them back to Downing Street.

  Cannon followed Temple and White – but not Mermagen, who was somehow shed by White along the way – to the Long Gallery. As they arrived, a large Aerospatiale helicopter in burgundy livery and carrying White’s corporate logo – a version of the Eye of Horus – landed on the ground to the north of the house and disgorged three men.

  Temple sat on one of two sofas facing each other and gazed intently at the blue and white chintz pattern, while waiting for the noise of the helicopter’s engine to subside. Cannon looked out of the window at the light on the trees against the black clouds in the north and remembered the skies of his boyhood in the Yorkshire Dales.

  ‘Do you play croquet, Eden?’ asked Temple.

  White shook his head.

  ‘We should play more croquet at Chequers this summer. It nurtures the strategic instinct. You know that Harold Wilson dreamed up the idea of a Commonwealth peace mission in Vietnam while playing croquet here?’

  ‘It doesn’t say a lot for the game,’ said White. ‘Wilson was a clown.’

  ‘Came from France,’ said Temple.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Croquet. It was originally called jeu de mail. The Irish made it into the game we know; the Scots made golf out of it.’

  ‘I don’t play that either,’ said White.

  ‘You see that bastard Maclean has been talking to the Leader of the Opposition?’ continued Temple, but in the same idling tone he had used about croquet. ‘Met with him in London last night, though he said he was going to China.’

  ‘He’s pathetic,’ said White. ‘He can’t take his support to the other side now. And the Opposition can’t go back on their word to reduce his influence in British national life. They are both in a bind. Call the election. He’ll live with it.’

  ‘What do you think, Philip?’

  ‘Maclean has been around a lot longer than any of us. There aren’t too many governments that get the better of this guy. He’s a snake. Business is always first with him. He could make some kind of concession to the Opposition parties that placates them but saves most of his interests, and then in exchange give them his backing. You’re seven points ahead in the polls and rising, but he could turn that around with a campaign against you.’

  ‘Maclean’s not going to do that,’ said White softly. ‘Look at it logically, John. The only reason Maclean is angry with you is because he thinks you have a better chance of winning in six months’ time, and that’s obviously because he wants you to win and needs you to win. If he goes against you, you’ll still win. And where does that leave Maclean? I guarantee he’s thought of that.’

  ‘I hope you’re right,’ said Temple.

  ‘But you can stop all this debate by calling the election immediately.’

  ‘You mean next week?’

  ‘Why not?’ said White. ‘It would forestall the other problem.’

  Which other problem, wondered Cannon – Eyam or red algae?

  Temple turned to him. ‘Philip?’

  ‘In principle there’s no reason why you shouldn’t go next week. The Easter holiday will fall earlier in the campaign, which will mean it won’t start properly until afterwards.’

  ‘A good thing,’ said White.

  ‘The manifesto can go to press this week,’ Cannon continued. ‘The advertising slots are booked, the websites geared up. Financially it won’t make any difference. The party is as ready as it ever will be. And finally there has been no really adverse reaction to the revelation in Maclean’s papers this morning that you were considering a spring election. People are resigned and seem to want to get it over with.’

  ‘You’re right. Have you got a diary?’ asked Temple. ‘Remind me of the dates.’

  Cannon pulled out his phone and caressed the screen. ‘You were thinking of April the twenty-fifth; if you call it this week you can hold the election on the eighteenth.’

  ‘The eighteenth it is, then. I will go to the palace on Wednesday.’

  ‘You have a meeting with the president of the European Commission that morning,’ said Cannon.

  ‘Then I’ll see HM at midday,’ said Temple. ‘But I want to retain the element of surprise. This information must be kept completely restricted.’

  There was a sound at the end of the Long Gallery. ‘Are we disturbing you, prime minister?’ It was Jamie Ferris and the two men he’d brought with him in White’s helicopter.

  ‘No, come along and join us,’ Temple called out without turning round.

  Ferris arrived at the pair of sofas with the men, whom he did not introduce. They wore business suits and conservative ties. The larger of the two had a thin white plaster covering an injury on his cheek. ‘I felt I should bring you up to speed in person on developments concerning David Eyam, sir.’

  ‘Yes – we were expecting you.’

  ‘We know he’s here in Britain.’

  ‘Has he been sighted?’

  ‘Not as yet, but the money trail has led back to the UK. One of the accounts in the Dutch Antilles transferred half a million dollars to the account held in the name of Pirus Engineering on Friday. The company had connections to Eyam’s late father.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘GCHQ picked up two calls from the Milford Haven area a week or so ago. Both were made from a point a few miles off the coast. We have checked with Customs and the Coast Guards and now believe Eyam was put ashore by a tender to the private yacht Picardy Rose, which set out from Barfleur in Normandy two days before.’

  ‘I see,’ said Temple. ‘Has he contacted anyone?’

  ‘The first call was made to a cell phone in the High Castle area.’

  ‘To this woman you have been watching?’

  ‘No, we know her number. It was someone else.’

  ‘But she is his friend – the same person Peter Kilmartin is making contact with.’

  ‘That’s right, Kate Lockhart.’

  ‘And she is his main contact?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t say that by any means. We know that communications between them have been infrequent over the last two years. We have learned that she failed to reply to several of his emails before he even left government. There appears to have been some kind of falling out. However, he did leave his property and a considerable sum to her in his will, which would seem to indicate that she is an integral part of his plans. He phoned her after he had faked the explosion in Colombia. A call shows up in her American phone records. The Americans have let us hear it.’

  ‘Still, it is difficult to read her part in all this,’ said White almost inaudibly. ‘Mermagen knows her and has been in touch with her. I hope to see her next week.’

  ‘Really, is there anyone Mermagen doesn’t know?’ asked Temple.

  ‘They were all at Oxford together,’ said White.

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The Oxford Plotters,’ said Temple. ‘And there’s also that mathematician who was about to get something in the Birthday Honours. He is at Oxford also.’

  ‘Yes, Professor Darsh Darshan,’ said Ferris. ‘He’s being watched. They are a very talented group of people. Kate Lockhart was in SIS, which suggests she is capable of
a high degree of deception.’ He paused. ‘And there is one other.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Temple.

  ‘His name is Edward Fellowes, star history graduate and university actor who left Oxford for a short service commission in the army and then went to the Foreign Office.’

  ‘I haven’t heard the name.’

  ‘No, sir. It seems that using the name Tony Swift he inhabited the more humble role of the clerk in the coroner’s court in High Castle. He is a few years older than the others. He met Eyam again at the FCO.’

  ‘Good lord, so he was responsible for fixing the inquest. This is evidently a very well-planned conspiracy.’

  ‘Indeed.’ Ferris waited for a second then said: ‘The Security Service says it’s a matter of time before Eyam is tracked down, prime minister. They are concentrating on the area where he lived because he is known to have many associates there. These individuals are all being observed also.’

  ‘I understood the network is thought to be quite large,’ said White.

  ‘We’re not sure,’ said Ferris. ‘MI5 have a lot of catching up to do since the discovery forty-eight hours ago that Eyam was alive. Christine Shoemaker’s team is working round the clock on it.’

  ‘I am certain this means that Eyam seeks to affect the outcome of a legitimate electoral process,’ said Temple, ‘which as prime minister I cannot allow.’

  ‘But he can’t possibly know that you plan to call an election,’ objected Cannon.

  ‘True, but I am concerned that we don’t have a proper understanding of his group of supporters, what he plans or the means available to him.’

  ‘Oh, I think we have a pretty good idea of what he will try to do, John,’ said White. ‘As to the means open to them, well we can make a guess. He has the media and the internet, but it will be possible to make a very strong case that his accusations are the ravings of a desperate and vindictive paedophile. And he has Parliament. If you call the election next week, Parliament will be dissolved and all parliamentary privilege ends, so there is no hope of him gaining protection for his allegations.’

  ‘Then he can be arrested and charged,’ said Cannon, ‘at which point you close him down.’

  ‘What about the police?’ asked Temple. ‘Have they been informed?’

  ‘Not yet, prime minister,’ replied Ferris. ‘There is a question of . . . how shall I put it – strategy? – which we three were discussing earlier.’ The men beside him nodded. ‘There are several options.’

  White looked at Temple. ‘These are operational matters, surely, John. You don’t have to be concerned with the details. Leave it to Christine and Jamie. Jamie will keep an eye on everything and let us know of the important developments.’

  Cannon coughed.

  ‘Yes, Philip,’ said Temple.

  ‘If the police are brought in on this now, Eyam can be discredited immediately. They simply announce they are searching for a paedophile on the run who has faked his own death.’

  ‘In due course that will be the decision reached, I am sure, but meantime we ought to leave it to the experts, Philip. We have an election to think about.’ He looked up. ‘Thank you, Jamie. That will be all.’ Ferris and his two associates, whom Cannon now regarded as extremely sinister, made their way to the end of the Long Gallery in step, causing the floorboards to protest.

  Cannon had the sense of being brushed off like a small child, but he knew exactly what had passed. You can’t kill a man who’s already dead, Ferris had said. That was what they planned because there would be no risk of a hearing in which he would be free to tell his story in the privileged conditions of the court. Ferris and his men intended to get to Eyam before the law did, and the implications of that were enormous for Philip Cannon. It was unthinkable that such an act was being plotted at the heart of government, yet this was what he had been witness to, even though the operational details had been glossed over. And there was something else that had struck him during the conversations about Eyam over the weekend, but especially listening to Temple and White in the last few minutes. At no stage had anyone declared that what Eyam had to say was untrue. That explained why they were so worried. David Eyam had returned from the dead to tell the truth.

  He had a sudden desperate desire to take Temple by the shoulders and shake him. This was not the man he’d signed up to work for. Instead he said simply: ‘You know that even if Eyam is out of the way you still have a problem with the group. We have no idea how many there are, or what they know.’

  ‘You are quite right to point that out, Philip,’ said Temple evenly. ‘But you are forgetting that we have a developing national crisis with the spread of TRA.’

  ‘Which MI5 assert may be the work of terrorists,’ said White on cue.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Cannon. ‘I thought we were talking about Eyam’s friends.’

  ‘The Civil Contingencies Act 2004 grants the government a very wide range of powers in times of emergency,’ said White.

  Cannon felt himself swallow. ‘You are going to call an election and then invoke the Civil Contingencies Act?’

  ‘The other way round,’ said Temple. ‘The act will be invoked to deal with TRA tomorrow when I will make a statement on TV, then we’ll follow that with the election announcement on Wednesday. It is important to leave a day between the two to let it all sink in.’

  ‘God! Won’t that seem rather extreme – panicky even?’

  ‘No, more like the smack of firm government,’ said White. ‘By the end of the week the public will understand that John Temple is a prime minister who is prepared to deal with a crisis expeditiously at the same time as guaranteeing the democratic process in difficult times. It is the perfect strategy because Maclean can’t oppose it.’

  ‘You must have been playing croquet, Eden,’ said Temple, springing to his feet.

  24

  Evensong

  Kate had no idea why she suddenly called him David, when he finished his account and lay back. ‘Are you sure you can do all this, David?’ she said, then corrected herself to his great amusement. ‘I mean, you don’t look really up to it, Eyam.’

  ‘We’re not going to have to wait very long,’ he said. ‘I feel sure he’s going to take the plunge this week.’

  ‘But he won’t if he knows you’re in Britain. He will want to get you out of the way first.’

  ‘No, he’s a gambler, Sis, though he doesn’t look like it. He’ll bet that his people can take me first.’ He stood. ‘You know what I’d like to do – let’s take a walk.’

  ‘If you’re up to it.’

  He picked up the stick and went through the door. Outside, vast black clouds had assembled in the north although the sun still lit the land around them. ‘This is my favourite time of year at the Dove. I’m glad I got back for spring.’

  ‘It’s so unlike you,’ she said. ‘You never seemed to notice these things before.’

  ‘I wish I had.’ He pointed vaguely at his chest. ‘This has made everything much sharper and much sweeter.’

  ‘Darsh said you had a breakdown.’

  ‘Not quite, but I was unravelling. I didn’t know how rough it was going to be to be thrown out, but the running sorted it all out. Burned off the toxins, so to speak.’

  ‘But you knew you were going to be pushed.’

  ‘True, but being ejected from the charmed circle after so many years is hard – nobody wanted to know what I thought any longer.’

  ‘Ahhh! Poor Eyam. Nobody listening to his wisdom.’

  He grinned ruefully. ‘It was pathetic but there it is.’

  ‘There’s something I don’t understand. You must have known about this system a long time ago, way before you appeared at the Intelligence and Security Committee the first time. You were right in the middle of it all – a trusted intimate of White’s and the prime minister’s. You had to know.’

  He stopped. ‘Well, yes . . . ah look, here’s Tony.’

  Tony Swift was making his way up the track swishin
g at the grass with a branch.

  ‘Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn,’ she said, folding her arms. ‘Dem two boys gonna take down dat big bad ole ger’nment.’ She turned to him. ‘You had to know about all this stuff, Eyam.’

  ‘General surveillance did increase in the slump because of fears of large-scale demonstrations and then there was an enormous spurt in the run up to the Olympics – that we all knew. But the installation of DEEP TRUTH was a different matter.’

  ‘So you found him,’ Swift called out.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And how’s the reunion going?’

  ‘It would be better if bloody Eyam here wasn’t dodging my questions. But it is good to see him alive . . . I suppose.’ She stopped. ‘So now you’re both here let me ask you about your organisation. How many people are involved?’

  Swift glanced at Eyam, who nodded. ‘All told about a thousand “Bell Ringers” – about twenty-five in the inner circle.’

  ‘How long have they known about David?’

  ‘Most of the inner circle have been told – the others don’t.’

  ‘How the hell do you communicate? We know they’re watching the group in High Castle.’

  ‘A procedure known as onion routing invented by a guy called David Chaum at Berkeley nearly thirty years ago. It’s old but it serves our purposes. There are also means of signing on a website with zero-knowledge proof which the professor would be better able to explain for you.’

  ‘Darsh! Of course, I should have guessed. Stick with the onion routing. How’s it work?’

  ‘Onion routing is a procedure by which you send a message to David that you have encrypted with a series of public keys belonging to randomly selected intermediaries. This creates many layers of encryption. The message is passed through these intermediaries, though they have no means of being able to read it. They simply decrypt the outer layer and pass it on until it eventually arrives at David with the core of the onion exposed. He applies his key and reads your message. All over the country there are people who offer their service to the syndicate. They don’t know who you are and you sure as hell don’t know who they are. It makes it impossible for the government to know what’s going on.’