by Henry Porter
Then came the moment of decision when it was suggested – again by Ortelius – that the government was missing an opportunity; people’s lives could be vastly improved if the state could know everything about them, could anticipate their needs and mediate between agencies they dealt with. The state was cast in the role of the hyper-efficient and concerned servant; there were many advantages to a system that would automatically patrol benefit fraud, winkle out illegal immigrants or people who were paying too little tax. Much was made of the beneficial ‘outcomes’ – the increase in ‘social capital’ and ‘community cohesion’, and ‘friendship networks between the poor’. Yet it was obvious that paper proposed a power grab, using software that was already in development by White’s companies. The system would know everything about everyone and make judgements about supposed illegality, anti-social behaviour or the inconsistencies between, say, declared income and expenditure, and automatically initiate action through hundreds of different agencies.
She found an email from the Home Office legal department to the Cabinet Strategy Office pointing out the significant threat that the system would represent. The author raised questions about privacy, natural justice and accountability. The email had been printed out and bore Derek Glenny’s scrawl and signature. ‘No need for primary legislation,’ he wrote. ‘Refer all future queries to the Office of Social Intelligence. From now on this issue is classified.’
The decision had been taken to draw a line under the deliberation and go ahead with DEEP TRUTH. To all those involved in the discussion the government pretended that the project had been abandoned. DEEP TRUTH went underground but not all traces were eliminated. Kilmartin found pages from the annual accounts of the ministries concerned with Justice, Education and Work and Pensions, and several agencies: police, customs and revenue. Each one had made large payments to the Office of Social Intelligence – which amounted in one year to £1.8 billion. But much larger amounts were paid out from the secret money allotted to MI5, MI6 and GCHQ.
‘That ties in with payments to Eden White’s companies amounting to at least one point eight billion for one financial year,’ Kate said, waving a piece of paper, but without looking up. ‘I wonder how many of these people are on his pay.’
‘There is a sheet of bank account numbers somewhere,’ said Kilmartin, propping his glasses on his forehead. ‘Yes, here it is: Shoemaker, Glenny, Temple and several other names are listed as having bank accounts.’
‘Jesus, they were hiding the expenditure from the public accounts committee while taking backhanders. It’s unbelievable. But you know, we’ve got nothing here that ties DEEP TRUTH to Temple and White personally.’
‘Maybe those documents were with Tony Swift and the other fellow.’
‘No, Eyam would have said.’
At eleven Evan Thomas arrived, carrying a large canvas holdall from which he produced four further packages that had accumulated with the security guard at the Montagu Place entrance of the museum in the past couple of hours. He’d found one in the street propped against the door. Kate did a quick calculation. ‘That means all the packages are accounted for.’
Thomas began laying out his equipment on the table in the alcove furthest from the entrance. Kilmartin and Kate tore at the envelopes and began to read. Almost immediately she let out a yelp. ‘This is an internal review of the first operation of a system known simply by a numeric code, which shows that it has an estimated failure rate of seven per cent. That would mean millions of people were wrongly identified, wrongly targeted and punished,’ she said. ‘By the government’s own admission their bloody machine is out of control. People have lost their homes, been prosecuted, raided, had their property seized, their children removed by social services. It’s harassment and persecution on a vast scale and no one knows how to stop it. The trouble is that there is no mention of DEEP TRUTH, just the numeric code.’ She read out the number 455729328 and looked up: Kilmartin was holding a single sheet of paper in a plastic cover between his thumb and forefinger. ‘What’s that?’ she asked.
‘John Temple’s signature on the bottom of a document that sanctions the purchase and secret installation of software in every government computer: the system is referred to by the same code and we have a date three years ago. We need to know what this bloody number stands for.’ He looked in a leather folder and produced a copy of an email from Dawn Gruppo and started to write.
Kate examined a final bundle, which concerned Sir Christopher Holmes – two letters addressed to John Temple and headed For Your Eyes Only. Both raised constitutional concerns about the level of surveillance and intervention. In Holmes’s view, the extent of SPINDRIFT operations, as he called them, could not be justified in a democracy. He asked the prime minister to review the policy twice and in the second letter made an open threat to go public, saying that his duty as a citizen far outweighed the interests of the government, which in this case he believed were thoroughly misguided and wrong. He would, of course, resign his position before doing so.
‘Then two weeks later he and his wife die in a fire at his country home,’ said Kate out loud.
Kilmartin grunted.
‘The suppressed pathologist’s report is here,’ she continued, ‘and it makes clear that they were probably dead before the fire was started. There is also an email to someone at Ortelius, alerting them to the risk posed by the head of the JIC.’ She dropped the paper. ‘We’ve got pretty much all we need, though nothing that nails Eden White.’
They re-read everything, then began to work out an exact order. Using all the tables in the central aisle of the room, they laid out the documents in a line and moved from the first to the last, walking through the case that Eyam had built against the government. Kate observed that it was no different from putting a bundle of documents together for trial. Evan Thomas followed behind them measuring the papers. When they decided on the final order, he put on a pair of white cloth gloves, stacked the papers like a deck of cards, squared them off and pressed them together. ‘It’s going to be very bulky and the pages aren’t going to be very well aligned,’ he said. ‘We really need two volumes, but we don’t have time.’
‘Aha,’ Kilmartin exclaimed suddenly. ‘It’s simple; the number spells out DEEP TRUTH. If you go through the alphabet repeatedly giving the letters a numeric value from one to nine until you reach the end, you get the code.’ He scribbled on a piece of paper. ‘That’s what they call it. Sometimes they simply refer to it just by its initials – four-two, or DT, as in the Gruppo email to Shoemaker.’
‘That’s great!’ said Kate. ‘Draw out the grid neatly and we’ll include it in the evidence.’
Evan Thomas set about making book covers and a spine of canvas and rigid cardboard, which was cut with surgical precision. He glued the papers into the spine with a gum that he said would just about hold for the next day, having added strips of card to the documents in plastic covers so that they could be held into the spine also. Then he closed the covers and put the book in a small press, screwing down the plate with many grimaces and sighs.
They watched in a tired fascination as he cut out a piece of dark red leather for the cover and began to pummel and distress it with fine-grain sandpaper. He measured and cut two lengths of ‘Cockerell’ marbled paper – the combed pattern, which he said was appropriate for the Houses of Parliament. ‘Right, we’ll wait a little for the gum to dry and then we can get to work on the cover.’
Kilmartin took out and unwrapped sandwiches from his bag and they sat down.
‘It could just work,’ said Kate.
‘Course it will. In these days when no one can think without consulting a screen or imagining anything happening without it being available on the web, the one thing that no one will suspect is a book done out in Cockerell pattern and old Moroccan calf skin.’
‘Goat skin,’ said Thomas.
Kilmartin sprang up and went to a drawer. ‘I want to show you something interesting,’ he said. ‘It tells you how important l
ibraries are.’
He returned with a tray, placed it on the table in front of them and picked up a tablet, which he held up to her face. ‘This is known as the planisphere and it was made by an Assyrian scribe in 700 BC. It is a copy of the night notebook of a Sumerian astronomer from June 3123 BC. We even know the day – June twenty-ninth.’ He held the tablet up to them. ‘It is a note of the night sky for that evening and it records the presence of a very large object in the sky.’
‘A meteor?’ said Thomas, who had wandered over.
‘Actually, an asteroid that smashed into the Alps, near a place called Köfels in Austria; although there was plenty of evidence of the asteroid, geologists could never explain the absence of a crater. The answer lay in this remarkable tablet, which records the angle of the asteroid’s approach. It was so acute that no crater was made. It clipped the top of a mountain called Gamskogel, exploded and became a fireball before it reached its impact point at Köfels a few miles away. This tablet gives the trajectory of the object in relation to the stars that night, which is consistent with the event in Austria to an error better than one degree. Here was the answer everyone was looking for. Not bad for a little clay tablet.’
‘Where are you going with this?’ asked Kate.
Kilmartin replaced the tablet in the drawer. ‘Nowhere, but I suppose you could say I was wondering what will remain after Eyam’s dossier becomes public. We know it’s explosive – the question is whether it makes a lasting impact, something that people readily understand and recall.’
‘What do you think?’
‘It could go either way. The publicity surrounding David Eyam today and the manhunt that’s going on may drown out everything he has to say. If that happens, we are all going to face a very difficult time – you, me, the Bell Ringers and of course Eyam.’
‘Will your contact on the committee still go ahead after all this publicity?’
He thought for a moment. ‘She’ll have to be persuaded, but she’s a tough old bird: if she’s made up her mind on something she won’t brook any opposition.’ He paused and looked at Kate steadily; his eyes were warm but firm. ‘One course is for you to appear in front of the committee and present the evidence yourself. Talk them through the story.’
She started shaking her head. ‘I know nothing. I have been in the country less than a month.’
‘You underestimate yourself. Besides, I think the Joint Committee on Human Rights will warm to you. You have an air of integrity. Eyam may be arrested, or not be able to get through the security, or be too ill to make it: you are the one who is going to have to pick up this ball and run with it. An awful lot of people are going to depend on you . . . me included.’
‘We may not even get a hearing,’ she said. ‘If Temple calls an election, the committee stops work; all parliamentary privilege ends for the duration. Then what the hell do we do?’
‘There’s a long way to go before that. Now, if you don’t mind I am going to get a little rest.’
They both dozed in their chairs – Kilmartin sitting straight as though about to be electrocuted, Kate bent forwards resting on her crossed arms – while Evan Thomas worked on the cover, inside and out, gluing down the Cockerell paper, stamping the goat skin with blows of a small mallet, running over the skin – back, front and spine – with little wheels that left regular indented patterns, buffing here, rubbing with pumice stone there, picking at it with an awl, laying a thin border of gold leaf on the front and back, then clipping four Victorian brass right-angles to the cover’s four outside corners.
When Kate woke at six he asked her to go up to the gallery and bring back the oldest volumes she could find. Using a soft watercolour brush he swept the dust from the tops of the books onto the dossier and spread it out evenly. Then he laid the book on the table. On the cover he had stamped the words in a dull gold leaf, Librum Magnum, House of Commons Library. And at the bottom he had printed in small capitals SUM. FECIT – I Am. He Made This. Or more sensibly, Eyam Made This.
Dawn broke. The museum stirred. The noise of cleaners and floor-polishing machines and doors being unlocked came to their ears. Kilmartin and Thomas packed up their things in the quiet of the Arched Room. The dossier was wrapped in brown paper and placed in Kilmartin’s shopping bag. At eight thirty the curator of the Middle East department, an old friend of Kilmartin’s, appeared, and said that someone was waiting for him at the Montagu Place entrance.
Ten minutes later a woman appeared in a raincoat. Kilmartin did not introduce her, other than saying she would be the courier.
He handed the shopping bag to her. ‘You’ve got your pass and the letter from the House of Commons librarian?’
‘Don’t fuss, Peter,’ she said.
‘And you know what to do once you’re there.’
‘I am to go to Committee Room Five and I will meet this lady here, who I presume is Kate Lockhart.’ She smiled.
‘And if she is not there?’
‘I’ll wait outside the Committee Room, or in the lavatory just down the corridor.’
‘Or call me on this,’ said Kate, writing a number down.
‘And I expect to be there too,’ said Kilmartin. ‘I have an appointment with Beatrice Somers.’
The woman left with the shopping bag. Then they thanked Evan Thomas for his skill and hard work and each left the haven of the Arched Room to take their chances on the streets of a capital which on that morning was decidedly not itself.
31
The Committee
Cannon pulled the pile of newspapers towards him with little appetite and shuffled the titles, glancing at each front page. All captured Eyam’s descent from the highest councils in the land to criminality and paedophilia by juxtaposing an image of him emerging with the prime minister from the British Mission to the United Nations in New York with a still from the faked tourists’ film from Colombia, in which he looked particularly seedy. PM’s Spy Chief in Child Porn Scandal was typical of the headlines. But this gleeful certainty was not maintained on the inside pages. All the newspapers asked why Eyam would return to Britain to face jail when he had fooled the authorities so comprehensively. There was no mention of his illness, but one of Maclean’s papers had published a diagram that linked the murder of Hugh Russell, the death of the coroner’s clerk in a car accident and the unexplained CCTV footage of the men running from Hugh Russell’s offices in High Castle. In the middle of the layout was a shot of Eyam’s friend Kate Lockhart, taken as she was driven into High Castle Police Station. The press was asking simple, logical questions that had no obvious answers.
Cannon pushed the newspapers away. It occurred to him that an odd silence had descended in Downing Street, which now he came to think about it only affected him. There were no emails in his inbox and none of his phones had rung since he had got in at six forty-five a.m. Not one call. It was unprecedented. Even George Lyme had only mumbled a good morning before leaving the room – rather guiltily, Cannon thought – to be on hand for the breakfast meeting between Temple and the president of the European council. He phoned Gruppo but was told she was away from her desk. If he had been placed in some kind of quarantine, which now seemed certain, Kilmartin could forget any hope of his being able to delay the prime minister’s departure to Buckingham Palace to announce the election.
When Lyme returned he called out, ‘What’s up, George?’
‘The usual,’ Lyme replied without looking at him.
‘Oh, come on, George, I’m not an idiot: it’s like I’ve got bubonic plague. My government cell phone has gone dead. No calls are being put through to me.’
Lyme came over to him. ‘You’re out of bounds; that’s all I know. They think you were responsible for telling the police to release that woman from Hotel Papa yesterday. Temple’s hopping mad: he’s put me in charge. Someone was meant to tell you . . . I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be,’ said Cannon, straightening in his chair and reaching for his cup of coffee.
‘Did you tell the p
olice to release her?’
‘Yes, George.’
‘Are you crazy?’
‘No. There are hundreds of people being detained under the emergency powers in Hotel Papa. The Civil Contingencies Act was used as a publicity gimmick and as a means of stopping Eyam, and those are not good reasons for tearing up people’s constitutional rights.’
He looked up at Lyme. Ambition had overwhelmed any embarrassment Lyme might have felt. ‘I am staying out of this, Philip. I don’t want to know about any of your dealings with Kilmartin. Temple is on to him, you know. They think he’s been part of this from the start. They know you’ve been speaking to each other.’
‘Gruppo said that?’
He nodded.
‘So, she’s looking after you. Don’t worry, I won’t say anything about you delivering a note to Kilmartin for me.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Or anything about the document you gave me yesterday. But in return I want to know where Temple is in the next hour or so. I want you to tell me what’s going on.’
‘Dawn says he’s going to leave for the palace in about two and a half hours – at ten thirty.’
‘Where’s he going to be until then? Tell me what he’s doing after the European president.’
Lyme shrugged. ‘I can find out.’
Cannon looked fondly at his deputy. ‘Be careful, George: this job is shit. You may think you’ve hit the big time but you won’t be able to trust any of them – not even your new lover. They’ll make you do all their lying for them, then dump on you. By the way, has she told you what their plans are for me?’
Lyme was silent.
‘Spit it out.’
‘She was saying something about a formal interview to see whether you’ve broken the law or abused your position, that sort of thing. A full security interview.’
‘Is that what they think?’ he said, stretching into the air above. ‘Now go off and find out where Temple is for me.’
