The Bell Ringers (46 page)

‘He's enjoying himself,' remarked Eyam. ‘It's interesting that nobody is asking where this thing came from. They have the best scientific advice available. I know most of the people involved. They should have got to the bottom of it by now.'

‘It's bloody convenient that he's taken these powers just as you're about to go public. I wonder if they've cooked up all this stuff about toxic algae.'

He considered this and pressed the TV remote. ‘No, Temple's an opportunist and a gambler – he's just using it.'

She leaned forward from her chair so that her face was just a few feet away from Eyam's. ‘But the point is,
idiot
, it's going to be doubly difficult for you to get into the House of Commons if they've got police and armed soldiers guarding the buildings.'

‘I'll make my arrangements tomorrow. Freddie will have some ideas. I have one or two.'

‘You put an awful lot of faith in that man: where did you find him?'

‘He found us. Fredde is a gangster of decidedly liberal hue. A member
of his family had been misidentified by the system, or was at any rate being persecuted in the usual way, and he started to look into it and eventually got in touch with Tony Swift. A lot of people out there are very angry now that they understand what's been going on.'

‘They know?'

‘Oh, they know all right. They've just been keeping quiet.'

‘So your project has become an open secret.'

‘A closely guarded secret among hundreds of people.' He smiled and her heart turned over.

‘You do look better,' she said.

‘I feel it. I can't imagine what's in those pills.'

‘Raw opium, I suspect.' She slid from her chair and leaned against the sofa where Eyam was lying. ‘I want to talk about what you're going to do tomorrow.'

‘Disappear,' he said. ‘We shouldn't be together. If they arrest me you can go ahead with Kilmartin in Parliament.'

‘You want to be found slumped on a park bench again?'

‘If they don't find me I'll be there on the day,' he said. They both turned their heads to the window that was being pounded by rain. An explosion of lightning right overhead made her jump.

‘Jesus! I think that must have hit the church spire.' She went to the window, looked out, then turned to face him. ‘I've got this feeling I'm missing something, David. What's the deep truth about you?'

‘Ah, you called me David.'

‘Don't get cocky – in my mind you're still
Eyam
– the object of my eternal scorn.'

He grimaced. ‘Generous.'

‘I'm serious. There's something you haven't told me. You're so good at avoiding the subject.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Something essential.' Her hands rested on the windowsill. She launched herself forward and walked a few paces to stand over him. ‘You were at the centre of things before you took over the JIC; you must have known about this system. It would be impossible for all that money to be hidden without you knowing about it.'

‘Oh, they're very ingenious at manipulating accounts.'

‘When someone is concealing something from me I've noticed that they pick me up on the detail of a question. Forget the particular, what about the general? Did you know, or not?'

‘I knew about DEEP TRUTH from the outset, yes.'

‘So why didn't you stop it, or go public earlier? Why did you allow Mary MacCullum go to jail?'

‘I didn't allow her to go to jail. I did nothing to encourage her.'

‘Were you part of the planning?'

‘I was embroiled, yes, tangentially.'

‘You can't be tangentially embroiled.'

‘Look, I was part of the decision-making process. At the very beginning I wrote something on the bottom of a memo and then forgot about it. Of course it wasn't called SPINDRIFT or DEEP TRUTH then. It was simply presented as a rationalisation of all data collection systems. You've no idea how fast you have to react in that position, or the number of papers you read. Day after day of crisis, policy made on the hoof, a hundred different briefs to master. There's no time to think. One day blurs into the next. You remember nothing.'

‘But the idea of spying on everyone in the country – that's not a crisis decision. It's a long-term project to give the state power over the people. From ASCAMS to DEEP TRUTH is one fluid movement. You're not dumb. You understood where the process would end.' She folded her arms, but catching sight of a disciplinarian image in the mirror, let them drop and hooked her thumbs in the pockets of her trousers. ‘You know what pisses me off? When you came to New York and lectured me about the pointlessness of corporate litigation you were actually involved in the planning of DEEP TRUTH.'

‘By then I was trying to think what to do. There was just one memo, which I had forgotten about. I didn't even make the connection at first.'

‘And you, the great liberator, the slayer of the database state! So when did you fall victim to your conscience?'

‘I didn't,' he said, raising his head. He leaned forward, blew into his cupped hands then rubbed them. ‘The story is very simple and it involves Tony Swift – Ed Fellowes, as you knew him originally. He asked for a meeting when I inherited the job from Sir Christopher Holmes, and he told me categorically that the head of the JIC had been
killed because of his opposition to DEEP TRUTH and his plans to go public on it. He showed me the evidence that the inquest had been fixed and I didn't believe it. But he didn't give up. He came back with more proof and won me round. He didn't tell me much about his circumstances, but it was obvious he'd left London and government and found himself another job.

‘What I didn't know was that he had gone underground and invented identities for himself before, as he put it, the door slammed shut with the merger of all databases under the Transformational Government project. It was an act of defiance, as much as anything else, because he didn't believe the state had the right to define or
manage
his identity. Tony was single and had neither close relations nor ambition to hinder him. That new identity was how he ended up in High Castle as the underpaid drudge of the coroner's court. He worked himself into the town and listened and watched, and began to see how he could fight SPINDRIFT. He became a member of Civic Watch and the local community tension-monitoring groups which are really the ears of government, made friends and mapped the networks of local informers. He was the perfect undercover agent because he was working for himself, reported to no one, and possessed an unwavering allegiance to his cause. He was also the finest actor I've ever met. He inhabited every molecule of the lonely and disappointed figure of Tony Swift, so much so that I still think of Ed Fellowes and Tony Swift as different people.'

‘But why did he need you?'

‘These things don't start out as a plan, but as it worked out he built an organisation of good people.'

‘You mean Diana Kidd and her Bell Ringers?'

‘Can you just shut the hell up for a moment, Sis?' he said fiercely. ‘And why don't you relax and sit down?' She perched on the arm of the chair opposite him and rested one foot on a low coffee table. Eyam continued. ‘Tony's organisation was rather bigger than you imagine. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of Bell Ringers. To these people he was known as Eclipse. He chose that as his code name because he believed that the darkness would lift eventually. He was philosophically an optimist. Very few people knew who Eclipse was.'

‘Where did you fit in?'

‘I was the evidence – I knew how to get it and organise it. I knew how everything fitted together: the money, the policy, the people behind it and the implementation.'

‘So why did you go and shoot your mouth off at the Intelligence and Security Committee?'

‘We didn't start out with a plan. Mary MacCullum's information was leaked not to me, but to Sidney Hale at the ISC. He came to me privately. That was the moment that I decided to put it into the very confined public domain of Westminster village and try to start a debate. Tony was behind the leak. Mary was in touch with him from an early stage, but she never told him about her sister. Mary was an early Bell Ringer and contributed to one of his sites. Eventually she made contact with him. Through her trial and imprisonment she protected him. Never said a word.'

‘So after all that you arrive in High Castle with your hoard of documents and start planning with Tony Swift. It seems all a bit amateurish.'

‘I had acquired most of what we needed by the second appearance at the ISC. It was merely an exercise to establish the existence of DEEP TRUTH. The reaction that followed took us by surprise. So we had to play things cool and wait. If I had gone public then I would have faced prosecution under the Official Secrets Act and received a term in jail. Nothing would have come out. The issue would have been buried. We decided then to wait until an election.'

‘You still could be sent to jail.'

‘The threat seems rather theoretical now,' he said, glancing at her.

‘Why did they start watching you in the country after Temple had agreed to leave you alone?'

‘Something I did, maybe. We had no idea what it was, a phone call, a tip-off, a piece of local intelligence. Who knows? By that time we had put everything in place and I had been diagnosed with Hodgkin's, and things didn't look too good. Then I discovered what they had put on my computer. You know the rest.'

‘So Swift had the idea of faking your death?'

‘Yes, though my father came up with the same solution. I talked to
him a lot in the weeks before he died. He was very adept with money and made most of the arrangements for me.'

‘Yeah, I wondered why he hadn't left you anything.'

‘That's because he'd already made it over to me.'

‘Was there a lot of money?'

‘Yes, that's how I paid for everything. There still is and it will all come to you eventually, Sis – my only living relation.' He grinned.

‘I'm beginning to think that I liked you better when you were dead,' she said, also smiling. ‘Oh, God, this is such an appalling mess, Eyam.'

‘Actually, it isn't. We have this one opportunity. Everything is right. One way or another, all that information will be pitched into the general election and Temple and Eden White will be exposed. Let the people decide.'

‘That's what worries me.' Her gaze travelled around the soulless sitting room with its empty glass cabinet and dreadful oil studies of ballet dancers, no doubt bought in bulk to decorate what was described as an ‘executive haven'. ‘God, I wish you had let me love you, Eyam,' she said as her eyes came to rest on him.

He flinched, then his fingers, which were formed in a lattice bowl under his chin, opened in submission. ‘We may disagree on the details of that statement, particularly the word let, but what does it matter now? Here we sit, “one another's best''. That's true, isn't it?'

‘“Our hands firmly cemented with a fast balm.”'

‘Well remembered, Sis.'

‘I should do – you were obsessed with John Donne. You said you were sure that he walked in New College cloisters, although I seem to remember he was at another college.'

‘Hertford when it was called Hart Hall.'

‘And you used to recite his poems from that bench on the green instead of reading economics papers.'

‘God, what a poseur!'

‘No, you were brilliant and beautiful and a little bit conceited.'

‘Come here, Sis,' he said.

She stood. ‘I will if you never call me Sister again.'

‘Done.'

‘Never?'

‘Never.' He patted the cushion beside him.

She moved over to him and he sank back on the sofa with his emaciated grin spreading with expectation and a kind of curiosity. She sat down on the edge and turned to look at him, nervous or inexplicably shy – she didn't know which – and he laid a hand on her shoulder, then his splayed fingers ran up through her hair. She sighed and let her head fall forward, luxuriating to his touch. ‘Can you do this?'

‘Take you to bed? Yes, of course I can.'

‘I didn't mean that. I meant are you able to get through the next couple of days on those drugs? Have you got the strength?'

‘Yes, I feel pretty good at the moment. My old self.'

‘Your old self?' she said, her eyes closing. ‘No, your old self is gone: you're different. Perhaps we did bury part of you at that funeral. You're a lot less pompous and not quite so pleased with yourself.' For a minute or two he stroked her head. His fingers strayed to her ears and neck and travelled across her face, lightly tracing the line of her eyebrows and nose. When she could bear it no longer, she twisted round and seized hold of his face with both hands and kissed him, at first lightly then with an animal need that she had hardly known was there. His hands moved up to her shoulders. She straddled him and he pulled her weight down on him and murmured her name, relishing its novelty. She tried to remember what it had been like during those few days and nights in his college rooms, but all the memories which she'd kept in such good repair seemed to have been suddenly erased, like a dream on waking, and now she wondered whether it had been fantasy. She stopped kissing him, pulled back and gazed down at him. ‘We have done this before, haven't we? I mean, I didn't imagine it all?'

He moved his hands to her ribcage and gripped her just beneath her breasts. ‘Yes, and I remember it very well, and you talked all the time.'

‘No, that was some other lover of yours.'

‘No, it was you: you didn't stop talking – day and night on and on and on.'

‘God, I'm sorry. I was probably so thrilled that I was in bed with you that I couldn't shut up.'

Eyam grunted sceptically then put his hand up to her cheek. ‘You are loved,' he said.