The Bell Ringers (38 page)

‘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.

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 swishing 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.'

‘You don't imagine that GCHQ might have penetrated your little syndicate long ago and is peeling your onions as we speak?'

‘The intended recipient has a code which changes daily and which he acquires from an innocent-looking website. It can be a phrase from any website. If that code is not in place before the message is decrypted by his key, it destroys itself.'

‘Sounds impressive, but they have ways of getting round things. Alice Scudamore told me she had her computer seized. They must have examined it thoroughly.'

‘It made no difference. There was nothing on it.'

‘Why didn't you use encryption to communicate with Hugh Russell?' she asked Eyam.

‘I didn't want to involve him in any kind of cloak and dagger stuff – but I did give him a memory stick which is somewhere in his office, unless they found that too.' He stopped. ‘But we're past that. Poor Hugh.' Then he looked at Swift. ‘Kate has got word that they're going for the election. So that means we're on. She's going to meet Kilmartin and we'll pick her up from there.'

‘Will he be followed?' asked Swift.

‘I don't think so. He's used to this kind of thing.'

‘Right, let's get going then,' he said, pulling a walkie-talkie from his
jacket pocket. He pressed a button twice. A couple of seconds later the radio squawked twice in return. He turned and made off down the track. ‘Freddie will be along in a couple of minutes,' he called over his shoulder.

They went back to the shed to get her bag. Inside Eyam spun round and took her in his arms and kissed her.

‘What's this?' she said, drawing back so she could see his expression.

‘Overdue.'

She reached up and brushed his cheek with her fingertips and kissed him once, her eyes never losing his. ‘Is this part of the charm strategy?'

‘I didn't know I was going to do it,' he said, holding her a little away from him. ‘It just happened.'

‘Yeah, right.' She kissed him again. ‘But I'm glad you did.'

‘If I used you . . .'

‘You did.'

‘It's because I believe in you.'

‘With good reason.'

‘I'm more grateful than I can say. I wonder what Charlie would say.'

‘That's an odd thing, to bring him up now. Charlie? Well, Charlie would be on your side. He was an old-fashioned liberal conservative. He would approve and he's half the reason that I'm doing this. There was so much I regretted after his death.'

‘Yes, I knew that,' he said. Then they kissed more passionately and for much longer. And when they left Eyam's wretched cabin and walked down the grassy track under clouds that looked as if they would fall onto the earth in an avalanche she held his arm, and all the tension between them had gone.

Later, after they had separated, Kate sent Kilmartin a text – Dick's X – for Richard's Cross – +O – the symbol for a church on its side. She knew he would understand, and quarter of an hour after she was left at the covered gateway to the cemetery by Eco Freddie, Kilmartin pulled up in a Citroen hybrid, and ran the twenty yards from the car through the sudden downpour.