‘How is it with her?’ Flora asked.
‘Miranda? She’s grieving. She lost her son. She wasted ten years looking for him.’
‘That doesn’t answer my question.’
‘I thought I loved her. No …’ he corrected himself. ‘I did love her. I really did. With all my heart. For a while I didn’t have to think about you or Sarah, any of that bad stuff from my past. I thought it would be enough. But it wasn’t.’
‘And now?’
‘We live in a kind of limbo,’ Jonah told her. ‘We’re both waiting for something to happen.’
‘And now you’re back in the game.’
‘Am I?’
‘You know you are. I’ll leave it to Beech to explain.’
‘How is it with him?’
‘He’s a good man and a principled man.’
‘And that doesn’t answer my question …’
They heard a car pull into the yard and its door slam.
‘That’s him. He’ll want to take you out on the hill.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Does he really think that I don’t know what this is all about?’
‘What is it about?’
She was suddenly angry. ‘It’s about you and Nor, and my crazy father, and the hothead Americans and our supine government and the ridiculous idea that you can meddle overseas and not have to face the consequences.’
Jonah and Andy stood side by side on the cliffs on the north side of the island, looking down on the crescent of beach that served as a landing strip stretching away to the north-east, and beyond it the island of South Uist. They had hiked across the hills in silence. They knew how to be quiet together. Jonah attributed it to shared marches across the knife-edge ridges of Afghanistan in the heyday of the Guides.
‘Flora’s happy to see you,’ Beech told him.
‘You have a beautiful son and a beautiful wife. You’re very lucky.’
‘And I don’t intend to lose them.’
Jonah sighed. ‘What is it, Beech?’
‘I had a call from Alex.’
‘I’m done with Alex,’ Jonah said. He wanted to say –
I’m free of his blackmail.
But he was squeamish about saying such things aloud. And it wasn’t true.
‘It’s about Nor. Something you need to know.’
‘I haven’t seen Nor since 2003,’ Jonah told him. Not since Nor had disappeared into northern Iraq with the diamonds and Jonah was dispatched to Kuwait in disgrace. ‘I’m no longer in contact with him.’
‘Listen to me,’ Beech said. ‘You can’t hide from this one, it’s serious. Nor has confessed to everything. He’s posted a video on the Internet. He made a full confession of his crimes, including the death of Kiernan and the Department’s part in covering it up.’
Jonah rubbed his face. ‘Shit.’
‘Worse than shit. The Americans are incandescent with rage. They want scapegoats. Monteith has been suspended. Fisher-King from MI6 has taken control of the investigation. He’s put an inquisitor from MI5 in charge of the Department. They’re going through all the files.’
‘What would Five want with the Department?’
‘That’s not all that’s in the video. Nor has sworn revenge, starting with a spectacular infrastructure attack on London.’
‘Shit.’
‘Alex told me to warn you. You’re not safe any more. None of us are. Christ, I don’t need this, Jonah. I don’t want to lose my family.’
‘You’ll be OK,’ Jonah said, in an attempt to reassure him.
‘Don’t be so bloody stupid,’ Beech snapped. ‘You know what happened. You killed a CIA agent. You think anybody is going to give a damn that I had an attack of conscience and walked away. We’re tainted goods. Given the chance, they’ll tear us limb from limb.’
‘Monteith will protect us.’
‘Do you really believe that?’
Jonah breathed out heavily. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Why would Nor come out of hiding now?’ Beech demanded. ‘Nothing for a few years and now suddenly he blows the whole thing wide open. Why?’
‘I don’t know,’ Jonah said.
‘You know that they suspect you of being in league with him.’
‘Do they?’
‘You were so close for so long. Nor was your joe.’
‘That doesn’t make me complicit,’ Jonah said. ‘Did Alex say anything else?’
‘He wants you to go and see him,’ Beech replied. ‘He says that he needs to talk to you urgently.’
‘Do you think I should?’ Jonah asked.
‘I don’t know. I don’t trust him any more than you do. I just want to live a peaceful life. I thought that you’d know what to do.’
But Jonah didn’t know what to do. He thought that he’d revoked any responsibility for the safety of others. ‘You want me to talk to him, don’t you?’
‘I want to be sure that my family is safe. I don’t want to be caught up in this. Do you hear me? You need to sort this mess out.’
‘I hear you,’ Jonah replied.
‘We shouldn’t have gone back into Afghanistan,’ Beech insisted.
‘There’s nothing we can do about it now.’
There was a pause.
‘Alex told me that you had a chance to kill Nor in the Sahara in 2002; he said that you let him go.’
‘I’m not an assassin. What would you have done?’
‘You need to leave in the morning,’ Beech told him.
The house was silent. Beech and Flora had gone to bed. Nor’s hollowed-out face stared at him out of the tube and beside it the title:
A spy’s confession
The Koran commands you to speak the truth, even if it be against your own selves (
more
)
Jonah clicked on the link and the clip played.
‘I swear to God,’ Nor said, speaking out of the tube, ‘the greatest tide that ever was remembered in England …’
Afterwards he sat in Beech’s chair, with his head tipped back, staring at the ceiling. He thought,
What are you playing at Nor?
What caused you to make such a public declaration? Was the penitent’s desire for confession or is it that someone paid you to do it? Or was it, as seemed most likely, the thirst for the public spectacle of revenge that compelled you? After all, he thought, revenge was nothing if it was not public. There was something else that bothered him. Why single out the British when there was an opportunity to ridicule the Americans too? Why not pour scorn on the neocon Winthrop, the hidden programme Eschatos and the millenarian Pastor Bob? Why not trumpet the ease with which you defrauded them of the diamonds? He wanted to ask the actor’s question: what’s your motivation? Most of all he wanted to ask: who’s standing at your shoulder? Who lit your touchpaper?
The phone rang at 2 a.m. Beech was called to a domestic incident in Castlebay. Jonah was lying awake in the next room. He listened to the muffled sound of Beech getting dressed through the wall, the clomp of his policeman’s boots on the landing and finally his Land Rover starting up, and driving off down the lane.
Flora came to him soon after, slipping soundlessly into his room and under the bed covers. She huddled naked against him, her head pressed against his shoulder, her whole body shaking with anger or remorse, he wasn’t sure which. He lifted her face to his and she closed her eyes and inhaled, and he felt her eyelashes brush his cheek. Then she pressed her mouth hungrily to his – kissing her felt like dissolving …
She reached for his penis and he ran his hand up her side and cupped a breast, brushing the nipple between the fork of his fingers. Then he rolled over on to her and her legs parted and she steered him inside her; he plunged deep inside her, and his other hand moved down her back and between the groove of her buttocks, lifting her upwards. They slid back and forth on a film of sweat and it felt as if they were riding a wave, that there were no longer two bodies, but one single sensation building towards a climax. The savagery of his desire overwhelmed him: he came with his face in a violent grimace and she yelled: ‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck …!’
August 2005
This time they met at Woolwich Reach, on the concrete apron at the entrance to the Thames Barrier visitors’ centre. Alex was leaning against a picnic table outside the café, wearing a day-glo vest marked
ENVIRONMENT AGENCY
. The burnished-steel hoods of the barrier’s concrete piers stretched across the muddy swirl of the Thames before them. A row of flags carrying the Environment Agency emblem rattled on flagpoles on the freshly seeded grass banks beside the control room. From where they were standing, looking west, you could see the Millennium Dome and beyond it the towers of Canary Wharf.
‘Next to fire, water remains the greatest threat to the city.’ Alex told him, jabbing an unlit cigarette at him. ‘December 1663 – three years before the Great Fire – a storm surge in the North Sea carried a massive tidal wave down the Thames and flooded Whitehall. It swept away the government.’
He paused to light the cigarette, cupping his palms to shield his lighter flame.
‘I’ve heard your vulnerable city riff before,’ Jonah reminded him. He had little patience to hear it again.
Alex inhaled and waved the cigarette in his face. ‘But have you been listening? London has always been vulnerable to flooding. Fourteen people died in the Thames flood of 1928, and three hundred and seven died in 1953. One hundred and sixty thousand acres of farmland were flooded. All it takes is a combination of two things: a storm surge and a spring tide. A storm surge generated by low pressure in the Atlantic Ocean tracks eastwards past the north of Scotland and is then driven into the shallow waters of the North Sea, where a giant wave is formed. From there it’s funnelled into the Thames Estuary. You couple that with a spring tide on a moonless night and, all of a sudden, more than a million East Enders are rushing for the high ground. And that won’t be pretty, mate.’
‘We’re British. We’ll form a queue. Anyway, isn’t that why we’ve got the Barrier?’
‘It may not be up to the task,’ Alex explained. ‘In 1990, the number of barrier closures was one or two a year. In 2003 the Barrier was raised on fourteen consecutive tides.’
‘Why?’
‘Global warming and something called post-glacial rebound, which means that the south of England is tilting downwards like a badly made table.’ Alex dropped his cigarette and ground the stub into the concrete. ‘A Thames Barrier flood defence closure is triggered when a combination of high tides in the North Sea and high river flows at Teddington weir indicate that water levels will rise more than five metres in central London. Control usually has nine hours’ warning; any less and we’re waist deep in water – five hundred thousand houses, four hundred schools, sixteen hospitals and eight power stations, and all of it fucked. One and a half million people at risk. The estimated cost of a flood that overwhelms the Barrier is somewhere in the region of thirteen billion quid. They’re making a film about it. Robert Carlyle – you know, Begbie from
Trainspotting
– but with a terrible cockney accent. He plays the engineer who has to raise the gates again after terrorists have stormed the control room. Terrible tosh, really. My people are working on it in an advisory capacity.’
‘You think that it’s a credible scenario?’
Alex gave him an incredulous look. ‘Disabling the Barrier on a high tide? Are you stupid? Of course it’s fucking credible. Nor’s made a threat. He’s a resourceful chap. People are taking him at his word. They’re going to raise the threat level to critical. That means mobilisation of the emergency services and the armed forces, or at least what we can find at the back of the cupboard given that most of them are in Iraq or Afghanistan.’ Alex sprang up from the table and strode to the edge of the grass bank leading to the water, as if expecting some sudden activity to follow on from his words. ‘Ideally, that means the cavalry in tanks on the Barrier, SAS boys from Hereford camped out in the control room, marine commandos in ribs escorting shipping in the estuary, a cordon of navy divers on the immediate approaches, roadblocks, helicopters, underwater netting, maybe even a submarine. Come to think of it the submarine is probably the one thing you can count on. That’s just to try and prevent it happening …’
Alex paused and gave him a significant look. Jonah dutifully fed him his cue. ‘And if it happens?’
Alex ran a hand through his hair. ‘Cobra is drafting a contingency plan for the flood relief effort and is discussing a full national disaster preparedness exercise. And nothing about it is easy. A flood on this scale will rip the heart out of the government. The emergency services won’t fare much better. Scotland Yard is in the flood zone so their special operations room will have to decamp to Hendon. The Fire Brigade will have to abandon Lambeth, and besides, fire engines can’t operate in water above exhaust level and they’ve only got two boats. The ambulance service is in worse nick. Their control centres are in Waterloo and Bow, both in the flood zone. Ambulances can’t operate in water of any depth. Hospitals will lose power and sanitation. The police will retain overall command but they will require substantial support from the army in rescue and repair operations. Under normal circumstances that assistance would be forthcoming, but given the constraints currently on the army new thinking is required, and for this reason a significant role is envisioned for the private sector. We’re talking about the establishment and maintenance of camps for the internally displaced, a guard force for first-aid points, morgues, et cetera, as well as the provision of close protection to workers re-establishing electricity and sewerage. On top of that a general capacity to secure neighbourhoods and confront criminals with lethal force.’
‘You’re talking about armed civilians on the streets of London?’
‘Armed professionals,’ Alex corrected him. ‘The day-to-day burden of defending society is now too big for the state to handle alone.’
There was something about the idea of it that struck Jonah as deeply wrong. ‘This isn’t America,’ he protested.
‘It’s Blair’s Britain, mate, get used to it.’
‘And I suppose that you’ve secured yourself the contract?’
‘This is bigger than any British firm. We’ve had to take on American partners.’
‘You’re serious?’
‘Let me put it this way, negotiations are at an advanced stage with a major US security contractor for the provision of manpower and services in the event of a catastrophic flood.’