Old Enemies (5 page)

‘Sorry to keep you waiting, Prime Minister,’ Harry said.

‘No, nothing formal, Harry. That’s why I chose here, rather than the Cabinet Room. No record. One of those meetings that never really took place, eh? Drink?’ He waved a hand in the direction of a small collection of decanters and glass tumblers on a side table.

‘No thanks, Iain. Just got off a plane. I never drink until I’m over the jet lag.’

The Prime Minister resumed his seat above the radiator while Harry perched on the arm of a sofa. ‘You’ve been in the States.’

‘Guilty.’

‘Doing your impression of Marc Antony.’

Harry’s brow wrinkled in confusion.

‘Friends, Romans, countrymen – lend me your ears?’ Campbell smiled wearily. ‘No, not a very good joke. Best I could do at short notice without a speechwriter. You’ll have to forgive me.’

‘Perhaps you’re right. A new ear. It’s an inexcusable vanity, of course. I’ll probably get laughed out of my seat by my electors,’ Harry said.

Campbell nodded thoughtfully. ‘But not by the President. I understand you made quite a hit with our Mr Munroe.’

The Prime Minister was clearly well informed. Harry said nothing; he wasn’t sure where this one was going.

‘Harry, something I must ask you to treat in the strictest confidence.’ He didn’t wait for a reply. ‘We’ve managed to screw things up pretty sensationally with the Americans – you know, after the god-awful mess we left behind between us in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Gulf, come to that, and all the blame we threw at them during the election. Somehow seemed like the right thing to do at the time.’ He stared at Harry. ‘No, not you, I know, but me, and too many others.’

Harry sniffed the guilt and the rare acknowledgement of error. No wonder the Prime Minister didn’t want an official record of this.

‘We went too far, Harry. We pissed in their pockets and now it’s payback time. We need to renew our nuclear deterrent, which we lease from the Americans, and . . .’ He curled over, head down, his hands clasped beneath his chin as though in prayer. ‘They want to rape us, Harry. Make us pay full whack. Every dollar and dime it costs them, and a whole lot more on top for the tip.’ He shook his head. ‘And we haven’t got it. Can’t afford it. We’ll have to throw in our hand. And Britain without a nuclear deterrent, without a seat at the big boys’ table, will be no more than another hard-up off-shore under-achieving end-of-terrace island. Not even a junior partner any longer, just junk heap.’ He lowered his hands and straightened up once more. ‘You talk to Mr Munroe about any of this?’

Harry shook his head.

‘But you did talk.’

‘Over dinner. About all sorts of things.’

‘And your chum Charley Ebinger. Damn it, you have a lot of private clout in Washington, Harry.’

‘Am I being accused of something?’

Campbell’s tired blue eyes held him for a moment. ‘No. But if you think you can smell just the tiniest hint of jealousy, you’re absolutely right.’ The Prime Minister went back to looking out into the night, searching for something. ‘You’re one of those aggravating sods, Harry, who never flies in line with the other geese. Always off doing your own thing.’

‘Got a thing about geese that fly in a straight line. They’re usually the first to get their tail feathers shot away.’

‘As the rest of us are discovering,’ Campbell responded ruefully. He turned once again to face Harry. ‘Help us. Help your country. I want you to use that influence you have to get us a second chance in Washington, Harry. Stick back all the pieces on Humpty.’

‘But how?’

‘Archie Logan is ill. You may have noticed him a little off form recently.’

Logan, the Foreign Secretary, had produced a remarkably stumbling display at the despatch box recently, but most had put it down to exhaustion after two sleepless nights of haggling in Brussels.

‘He wants to retire at Christmas, give me plenty of time to find a replacement. That replacement is you, Harry, if you’ll take it. I very much want you to. After my own job it’s about the most important post in the country right now.’

‘I’ve already got a job, Iain – a Member of Parliament.’

‘Yes, and along the way you’ve also managed to pick up more honours and medals than any man in the country. Christ, you even get a personalized Christmas card from the Queen and for all I know a blow-job from every female senator in Washington. Don’t give me this “I’m only a humble backbencher” crap.’ His tone was a little mean; he was hurting. ‘Hell, I’m sorry, Harry, I—’ He broke off and pinched the bridge of his nose as he struggled to recover his composure. ‘If this doesn’t work out, it’s not just me who’s finished. It’s all of us. Britain. Cut adrift and sinking. The Falklands will go, then Gibraltar, and soon everything else. Before you know it we’ll end up pawning the Crown Jewels.’ He stared into Harry’s eyes, trying to fathom the other man’s thoughts, where the current was headed.

The moment was broken by a disturbance near at hand; the Prime Minister was running late for his next engagement.

‘I want you at the heart of this. On your terms. Absolutely anything you want, Harry,’ Campbell repeated. ‘Think about it, will you? Please.’

‘I will.’

‘That’s great. But don’t take too long, eh? I need this particular stable cleansed by Christmas. Before Santa arrives with his sodding reindeer and covers the place in even more muck.’

They had been forced to put together their plan with haste, yet so far it was working. Flying conditions were excellent as they emerged from the heights of the Alps and into the foothills, passing north of the ancient stone-cutting town of Domodossola and briefly re-entering Swiss airspace, all the while remaining invisible to air traffic control. They’d had to gamble on how much fuel there would be in the helicopter but it was working out. They needed another twenty minutes in the air and the pilot reckoned he could squeeze that out – just. He sat with a map on his knees, checking their route, watching the readouts from the fuel gauge as they headed for their destination at 125 knots.

The small Italian resort of Gravedona with its red-tiled roofs and intimate squares lies on the shore of Lake Como, less than ten miles from the Swiss border. Between the town and the border, where the land rises towards the Alps, is a reservoir, hemmed in by dense fir trees and sloping sides, difficult territory for a helicopter, but the site had three attributes that were essential for their purpose. It was isolated. It was unmanned. And it had a service road.

An SUV flashed its lights in instruction as the helicopter came into view. The pilot offered up a prayer of gratitude that the visibility was excellent and he wasn’t having to make this approach in total darkness. The landing area next to the reservoir was tight, on a noticeable slope, covered in snow and hemmed in by trees. Branches went flying, shredded to twigs by the blades as the pilot edged forward, keeping just ahead of the blizzard of snow thrown up by his downwash and threatening to blind him. The incline made it all the more difficult, forcing him to land across it with his left skid down the slope, keeping the blades turning until he was sure the craft wasn’t going to start slipping, or settling so deep in the snow that the bloody thing might tip up.

Ruari sat watching as the snow and pieces of thrashed fir tree were swept around, wishing he had a plan, but his head ached furiously from his injuries. Both eyes had swelled up, although the prodigious flow of blood had stopped and was now congealing in his lap. He felt relief as the thunder of the engines began to wane, and another man, the driver of the vehicle, signalled that he should get out. The driver had a gun, too, but Ruari was hurting too much to give a damn. He stumbled, they dragged him roughly to his feet, then dumped him beneath a tree a little way from the helicopter. As he stared at the new man, trying to focus on this most recent face with its thinning red hair and ears that seemed sewn flat against his skull, he felt a scratch on his upper arm and before he knew any more was drifting away. He didn’t see them bring the SUV behind the helicopter and push the aircraft down the slope towards the reservoir. It didn’t take much. The machine had its gearbox beneath the rotor blades, which gave it a high centre of gravity, and with a little nudging from the bull bars of the SUV it was soon toppling over onto its side. The blades bent as they hit the snow, then snapped, the helicopter groaned, resisted, and began lurching down towards the side of the reservoir. There was ice on the surface but it was nowhere near thick enough to withstand a ton and a half of helicopter. The craft slipped a little more, the last few feet, then, with a stiff, almost courtly bow, toppled over and struck the ice, sinking in seconds and leaving nothing but a dark, jagged hole that would soon be frozen over.

The dead pilot was still inside, strapped in his seat.

They bundled the unconscious Ruari into the back of the vehicle and hid him beneath blankets, and only a few minutes after landing they were underway. No one yet knew that the boy, or the helicopter, was missing. The alarm wasn’t raised until night had fallen, but by then they had reached their destination, a further three hundred miles away and almost in another country.

Campbell turned from Harry to discover Mary Mischon, the keeper of the Downing Street diary, standing in the doorway. He glanced at his watch and let out a sound of extreme weariness. ‘Remind me,’ he sighed.

‘Reception downstairs. Pillared Room.’

‘Do I have to?’

‘Not if you don’t mind upsetting around three hundred of the most important businessmen in the country, about two hundred and fifty of whom have been identified as potential party donors.’

He pulled a face. ‘Sometimes, Mary, I don’t like you.’

‘I’ll resign in the morning. In the meantime . . .’ She held the door open wider.

Slowly, as though considerably older than his fifty years, Iain Campbell levered himself up from his warm, comfortable seat, and as he did so he seemed to go through a profound change. He shook himself, like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, forcing strength back to his limbs, ironing out the creases and putting on his public face. When he had finished, he held out a hand. ‘Come on, Harry. Join me. It’ll be a good crowd, let’s say hello to the heavy hitters.’

‘I’m scarcely dressed for such an occasion,’ Harry replied, still in the loose clothes he’d flown in. He didn’t even have a proper collar, let alone a tie.

‘It’s a reception, not a bloody funeral. Anyway, you’re Harry Jones. You get away with murder.’

There was no mistaking the edge in Campbell’s humour. He had been flying in a straight line, and up front, for so long that he had no more tail feathers left, seemed to have forgotten how to relax. And from somewhere deep inside, beyond where the Prime Minister’s flattery had penetrated, Harry heard an alarm bell ringing – join the flock once again and he might end up just like this. He’d spent time as a minister before, had once been a man rising rapidly through the ranks until his own ideas got in the way. More scars. But he couldn’t deny he was intrigued by the Prime Minister’s proposal, and in the circumstances it would be churlish to turn down his invitation. Anyway, the delays at Heathrow had wiped out his other plans for the evening. He nodded his acceptance.

Campbell led the way with a remarkably jaunty step down the stairs to the Pillared Room, the largest reception room in Downing Street, which sported a huge crystal chandelier at its centre and Regency gilt sofas at its edge. It was on this spot that the bald-headed fascist Benito Mussolini had been entertained before the war, where during the war the windows and ceilings had been blasted into fragments, and where afterwards Winston Churchill had suffered a major stroke that was to snatch away all the glories of victory and to be the beginning of the end for him. This was also where other moist-eyed departing Prime Ministers had taken hurried farewells from their staffs at those inevitable moments of defeat and departure, yet for now at least the room filled with chatter and good humour as Campbell made his entrance, smiling, shaking hands, grabbing elbows, picking pockets, whispering in ears and dispensing humour, even drinks. ‘An orange juice for Mr Jones,’ he instructed one of the staff. ‘No vodka in it. My wife’s already marked the bottle.’ He began working the room, never lingering yet making everyone feel special, and somewhere in the crowd his wife was doing much the same. Everyone had to get a piece of him, even vicariously. An eminent banker had been hovering and now she pounced, but Campbell didn’t listen to her for long – the woman was notoriously even-handed, gave politicians of every colour a hard time and no money, and soon the Prime Minister had grabbed Harry’s arm once more, using him as an excuse to strike out in another direction until he spied what he thought was a safe harbour.

‘Harry, I’m sure you know J.J. Breslin. Impress him, will you? We need him!’ And with that, he was already gone.

It was at that instant Harry knew he had made a terrible mistake in being here. He didn’t care for crowds, found them claustrophobic, and he was tired, jet-lagged, distracted. That was how he came to be caught unawares. He found himself extending a hand and, as he did so, as he felt his palm and met his eye, the clamour that had taken hold of the rest of the room somehow disappeared.