The Bell Ringers (29 page)

‘Yessss. I suppose he may be a little irritated because he doesn't like being boxed in.'

‘How's he boxed in? He is one of the most powerful men on earth. He doesn't look boxed in to me.'

‘Put it this way – he's now got all three major parties wanting to scrutinise his business empire in Britain.'

‘You threatened him with an inquiry – Jesus!'

‘I said it was on the political agenda and that being the case we obviously might have to respond to what was being said by the two Opposition parties. That was all. I didn't threaten him.'

‘That was a threat, if you don't mind me saying so,' said Cannon. ‘And what can you possibly gain from it?'

Temple worked his jaw as though chewing on this. ‘Well, he knows that he hasn't got time to run to the other side and anyway it is the one thing the Opposition parties agree upon, so they are unlikely to go back on their word to gain his support at this stage. There's nowhere for him to go.'

‘I hope you're right.'

‘I am. If all three parties are threatening him it will affect his share price and Bryant cares a lot more about that than politics – or when I choose to hold an election.'

‘Or losing to Eden White?'

‘That too.' He looked up at the picture of Cromwell. ‘The Great Lord Protector – an odd title to choose, don't you think? Prime minister, first minister, president – none of these occurred to him. Yet I see what he meant. That is exactly what you feel leading the country: an acute desire to protect the people. I admire Cromwell more than most of the men who have occupied this house, you know.'

‘Really?' said Cannon. ‘Standing there in that armour and sash like
the Black Prince, he looks more royal than the king that the Parliamentarians beheaded.'

‘The armour is symbolic, Philip. They'd given up wearing full armour in battle by that time because of firearms. It's a symbol of his readiness to defend and protect the Commonwealth.'

Ten minutes later they were striding with three protection officers up the hill to Cymbeline's Castle, an ancient earthwork not far from Chequers. From the summit there was a good view of the local village and the parish church, but no sooner had they got there than Temple set off southwards across the rolling grassland.

Cannon hurried to catch him up. ‘Will you tell me exactly when you are going to call the election?'

‘Certainly Philip – on Tuesday March 26th. The election will be held a month later on April 24th. That will give us about four and a half weeks of campaigning.'

‘Then I'll go back to London tonight, if you don't mind. There's going to be a lot to do.'

‘Not quite yet, if you don't mind,' he said firmly. ‘We've got one or two more meetings and I want to show you something over there.'

A few hundred yards on they reached two large, round tanks, one covered and the other open to the air – the water supply for Chequers. Around the open tank several men in protective gear were sampling the water. A Range Rover was parked nearby, from which appeared Harry Tombs, the prime minister's
de facto
personal photographer, who was always on hand at Chequers. Temple started putting on one of the suits worn by the men and then made his way to the edge of the open reservoir.

‘When President Nixon visited Edward Heath in the seventies,' he said, peering into the water, ‘the Secret Service tested the water supply. They were right. Did you know that as of this morning, we've got six more reservoirs affected by TRA?'

‘Yes, I read that.'

‘That's ten in all – and they have only just begun checking. We may have a very large problem on our hands. So we'll get some pictures taken and you can distribute them this evening.'

‘Is that wise?' asked Cannon out of earshot of the others. ‘It looks like
you're stoking a crisis and that may not be the wisest thing to do with an election in five or six weeks' time. And this tank hasn't got a trace of red algae – or has it?'

‘No, but you're missing the point. This will show that I'm taking the crisis seriously. We all have to.' He lowered a plastic visor from the safety helmet. ‘Remember Cromwell's armour. This is symbolic, Philip, symbolic of my protective role.'

A few moments after the postman left, Nock appeared carrying a toolbox and an engine in a sling.

‘So you've got your first post – word soon gets about the place is occupied.'

‘Right,' she said, looking down. ‘What's that?'

‘The pump for your water supply, which needs some attention: I'll use the workbench out the back if that's OK.'

She sat at the table and smoked, wondering about Nock. Presently she took out the unmarked envelope and looked at the contents. There were two sheets of unsigned paper. One warned that everything she did or said at the cottage was likely to be monitored and that on no account should she send an email or make a call that she wasn't happy to be seen or heard by a third party.

On the second sheet there was a map reference, which she went to look up on Eyam's Ordnance Survey map of the area. The spot was several miles to the north-west of Dove Valley. The instructions told her to come alone at any time over the weekend, tell no one where she was going and avoid being followed, which would mean leaving under cover of darkness. Beneath it was typed a sentence: ‘Leave from that which is named for the Silures and walk back through time to those that remember the Ordivices.'

The code – or in her opinion a damned silly riddle – had something of Eyam about it, and it was only that which made her contemplate deciphering it and following its instructions.

‘Who or what are the Silures and Ordovices?' she asked Nock when he appeared with the motor.

He blinked at her. ‘I think they are Celtic tribes of Wales. One lived in the north, the other in the south. But don't take my word for it. I only know about them because their names were given to rock groups. I did a little basic geology as an undergrad.'

‘Rock groups,' she said and thought of the run of geology volumes beneath the shelf where she'd found
The Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor.
She found
Geology of the Marches
and returned to the garden bench. The book was peppered with Eyam's notes – summaries of what he had read, together with the dates that he had explored different parts of a landscape that had begun life 500 million years ago, sixty degrees south of the equator. The story of its migration north to collide with the landmass that now forms Scotland interested her, but she found nothing to decode the sentence. At length she laid the book aside and made sandwiches, which they ate with a couple of bottles of beer at the end of the garden. Even at this distance from the house their conversation was murmured.

‘You fix the pump?'

‘Yep.'

‘It must be nice to be so practical.'

‘Well, I can't figure all this out,' he said.

‘You mean Hugh Russell's death. How much did David tell you about his own problems?'

‘Not much, but I knew it got serious before he left. He just went out of range, if you know what I mean.'

‘I am struggling with some of it myself.' She stopped and looked into his tranquil blue eyes. ‘You're not hiding anything from me, Sean, are you?'

‘I don't think so,' he said, holding the beer bottle to his lips.

There was silence between them. She lifted her face to the sun and closed her eyes. Eyam was right. Nock wasn't kosher.

‘I believe he came close to telling me something but never got round to it,' he said eventually. ‘I wish he had now. It would explain things – why he went off without saying goodbye. To tell the truth I was a bit hurt.'

‘I know the feeling,' she nodded.

‘But you understand more than I do?'

She shrugged.

‘That's cool with me,' he said with an odd, agonised expression. ‘Don't tell me. I came out here for a life of peace.'

‘I wasn't going to. What were you doing before, Sean?'

‘I was a researcher with the Earth Science and Engineering Department at Imperial in London – dam structures and stuff – then I got sick of London and there was some trouble with the police and I ended up here.' He swept his hand across the view of the valley. ‘You can have a good life here if you don't mind the quiet.'

‘Possibly,' she said. ‘Look, I've got to be going.'

‘You want company?'

‘No thanks.'

‘And you won't tell me where you're going?'

‘Nope.'

‘Well, stick to the back roads and you should be all right. You've got my number?'

‘Yes, I'll be fine,' she replied, moving to the car and thinking about Hugh Russell leaving a few days before.

The day was slipping away from Philip Cannon. It was now clear to him that he would not get back to London until late that night or even the next morning. Temple expected him to attend two more meetings and a dinner.

The first of these took place in the Great Parlour conference room and went under the heading of a scientific briefing, in effect an unminuted meeting of the Security Council without – unsurprisingly – Admiral Piper. A procession of scientists wearing casual clothes gave their views on TRA. It soon became obvious that those who suggested the problem was not the threat to public health claimed in the tabloids, or that it could be handled with less hysteria, were not as welcome as those armed with theories about the likely cause of the algae and its means of spreading. These were treated to an intense cross-examination by the prime minister, who had mastered a little of the science of harmful algae blooms and several times used the word
anatoxin
, which he unnecessarily explained was a compound that caused convulsions – a kind of neurological meltdown and respiratory paralysis. The latest data
was that fifteen reservoirs and lakes were now affected; the algae seemed to be able to travel hundreds of miles and leap over the quarantine lines that had been set up.

Adam Hopcraft, the government chief scientific officer, listened with aloof interest, his hands thrust into the pockets of a lightweight cardigan worn under his jacket. He made notes, he nodded at his colleagues' opinions and he sucked air through his teeth with only the mildest disdain while gazing up at the plaster frieze of hawthorn trees. For a full hour he kept his own counsel. Then Temple turned to him. ‘Well, what do you make of it now, Adam? Can you really deny that we have a crisis on our hands? One that threatens to engulf the entire water supply of the country?'

‘I agree that it seems alarming, prime minister, and I must say I have been impressed with the contributions made so far. The point remains that, while we may not yet be able to contain the algae, we can deal with it effectively with ultrafine filtration. We have flown scores of these plants from the United States. More are on order and we believe that we can cope.'

‘I wish I could have your confidence,' said Temple, turning away.

‘And there is another point,' persisted Hopcraft. ‘At this stage I do not think it's wise to ignore where this thing has come from. I suggest we consider two possibilities. The first is that the algae has been with us for longer than we appreciate; that it has bloomed with the rising temperatures of spring, having spread unnoticed through the course of last year and maybe even before that. There are four thousand species of marine red algae; algae spores can travel great distances on the wind.'

‘None of that makes any difference to the nature of the threat,' said Temple. ‘We are where we are. We have to respond to give the public confidence.'

‘Quite so, prime minister, but it may be wise to allow for the possibility that this algae has not spread through any malign agency, but is either the result of climate change and global travel – a combination of the two perhaps – or has been released by accident from one of our own environmental laboratories. Such algae are being studied at the Marine Environmental Research Station at Ashmere Holt and also by the biological weapons people at the MoD.'

‘As I understand it, Adam, the genome is different to anything we've seen before.'

‘Well, that is true, prime minister and . . .'

Temple turned to Christine Shoemaker. ‘Would you sketch out the analysis you've been doing in the past couple of days?' She began speaking immediately so that few heard Hopcraft add that organisms adapt and evolve, and that this freshwater red algae might be a variant of an algae being studied at the Ashmere Holt lab.

Shoemaker, in black trousers and an olive-green jacket, and a new hairstyle that Cannon thought made her look like a cosmetics saleswoman, took them through a list of questions, her head arcing through 180 degrees to engage those sitting at the end of the conference table. First, was it possible for a group to infect the water supply with samples of algae? The answer to this was most certainly yes. Reservoirs in Britain were easily accessible. Second, had this kind of attack been considered by terror groups? Yes, there was a lot of evidence to say that at least two groups under surveillance had researched the possibility of harming the water supply. Third, was it within the capability of such groups to mount an attack? Yes, she reported that MI5's scientific officers had concluded that once samples had been obtained and possibly modified it would take nothing more than a good-sized garden pond for the algae to multiply in sufficient quantities.

‘Is work being done to connect the occurrence of TRA with the movements of any of the individuals you are watching?' asked Temple.

‘I was going to touch on that, prime minister,' she said crisply, ‘but you will appreciate the security aspects of this matter.'

He squeezed his eyes together with understanding.

‘But we may expect some arrests over the next few days under terror legislation,' she added, ‘which will allow us to thoroughly examine premises in the Midlands area that may be the source of this attack. But I do emphasise to those present the highly sensitive nature of this information: nothing of the police operation should pass from this room.'