Friday mid-afternoon. Castle Lorne.
They sat motionless, buried in their own thoughts. D’Arby hung his head in despair. ‘Not so soon, not so
soon
,’ they heard him whisper.
‘The reporter mentioned other embassies,’ Blythe Edwards said, her voice grim.
‘We need to find these things out,’ Shunin added. ‘There is a telephone here?’
‘Most certainly,’ Flora replied.
‘Then, if I may, Mrs MacDougall, I would like to use it to call my embassy,’ he said, for the first time deploying impeccable manners.
‘We can’t,’ D’Arby said, looking up.
‘But we must,’ Shunin countered.
The American President nodded her support. ‘We have to know what’s going on.’
‘Think about it. Just think!’ D’Arby demanded, growing animated. ‘You know the Chinese. They’ve got the capacity to scan the skies for key words that will alert
them to any significant calls. One false word–just one–and it will give them our location.’ He wasn’t looking directly at anyone but focusing his attention on a silver napkin ring that he was twirling between his fingers. ‘Look, you know what they can do, because that’s what we’ve all been doing, too. We’ve got listening stations around the globe and up in space, ransacking private communications for incriminating language. That’s how you Americans have been able to wrap up so many al-Qa’eda cells,’ he said to Blythe, ‘and you to dig out so many Chechens,’ he continued, turning to the Russian. ‘We all listen out for our enemies. And we have to assume that Mao’s men are listening out for us.’
‘Even so,’ Blythe responded, ‘we have to take the risk. We can’t do this blind.’
‘No, you don’t understand,’ D’Arby said, looking up at last. ‘You can’t telephone. Not from here.’
‘But why not?’
‘Because…’ He paused, seemingly unwilling to finish his explanation. As he fumbled with his thoughts the napkin ring, too, escaped from his clutches and began to roll across the wooden tabletop. They all watched, hypnotized, as it slowly moved towards the edge and, with what seemed like its last breath, fell to the floor where it rattled around noisily on its rim until it finally fell silent.
The ensuing silence was broken by D’Arby, his voice subdued. ‘Because,’ he said, ‘I’ve had the line cut.’
A chorus of protest began pouring forth from all sides.
‘It was the right thing to do at the time,’ he insisted, awkward but defiant. He glared at his accusers. ‘Security in silence, that’s what we all agreed.’
An argument erupted and was about to grow bitter when a new voice could be heard. It was Flora MacDougall. ‘You might have done the courtesy of telling me, Prime Minister. I would have understood.’ She was very formal, her sense of personal violation clear. This was her home, one the MacDougalls had defended for six hundred years, often with their lives. It brought the others to a halt.
D’Arby screwed up his face, and his courage. ‘Flora, I apologize.’
‘You didn’t trust us. Any of us,’ Shunin accused.
‘I felt we shouldn’t take the risk of being discovered by accident and kick-starting the whole thing.’
‘But it’s already started!’ the Russian snapped.
‘I wasn’t to know.’
‘You brought us here to solve the problems of the world,’ Shunin said, acid in his voice, ‘yet we can’t even order pizza.’
The colour drained from D’Arby’s face, and with it his control of the moment. He had called this summit, made the arrangements, set its goalposts, but the game was no longer his. Instinctively, the Russian reached to snatch the advantage. ‘Where may we find a phone, Mrs MacDougall?’
‘We passed through a small place a short while before we got here,’ Lavrenti chipped in, ‘a few miles back along the coast road.’
‘That’ll be Sullapool,’ Flora said, still sniffing in disdain.
‘It has phones?’ Shunin asked.
‘And a church, if you’ll be needing it.’
‘Lavrik, you will go, find one of those phones. See what the hell’s going on.’
‘It’s still a risk,’ D’Arby said, trying to make up the ground he had forfeited.
‘I fear, Prime Minister, that the world has suddenly begun to overflow with risk,’ Shunin replied dully.
‘Then we must be careful. Use public phones. Ambiguous language,’ Blythe added.
Konev rose to do his master’s bidding.
‘Marcus, you go, too,’ Blythe instructed.
His face grew petulant, offended at being given an order. ‘If I must. I’ll call Warren.’
‘No, that’s too direct. Just in case they’re listening.’
‘The embassy, then?’
‘Call Ed Schumacher at CNN in London. He’ll know what’s going on an hour before it happens, and long before anyone at the embassy on a summer weekend.’
‘Suppose I’d better drive,’ Harry offered. It was the first time he had spoken during the entire lunch.
‘Ah, Mr Jones,’ Shunin replied, ‘I’d wondered why you were here.’ There was no apparent humour in the remark. D’Arby was down, so now his lieutenant could be lashed.
The alliance hadn’t even made it through lunchtime.
Friday mid-afternoon. Sullapool.
The road to Sullapool was narrow, winding, steep and uncomfortably hot. There was no breeze to disturb the heather that cloaked the hills, no relief from the humidity that seemed to bear down on this part of the coast. Harry’s head still felt as though it were stuffed with polystyrene bubbles; the last thing he needed was to spend more time in the front seat of the old Range Rover, whose gearbox complained on the gradients and whose windows squeaked in protest as they were wound down. Yet slowly, the sea air began to revive him.
The journey had started inauspiciously. Washington had almost raced to claim the rear seat; he’d grown fed up with watching Shunin take control and would be damned before he would allow the son-in-law to do the same. He’d been made to feel like a messenger boy, running errands while the grown-ups relaxed and reflected on what had transpired. He knew the President herself couldn’t be found wandering around the town and there was no other choice but for him to go, yet even so he felt affronted. He was being treated like an errand boy, and something deep in his background made him resent it. He slumped in the rear seat and sulked while Konev climbed up in front beside Harry.
The ribbon of road before them was rumpled. The ground at this point rose steeply from the firth, and for a while the road clung to the sides of the hills before
making a dash to a notch in the brow. At this highest point on the road they passed a small, dilapidated stone shelter, which Harry thought might in earlier days have served as a lookout for the farmers and fishermen who by night would have turned their hand to a little lucrative smuggling. The spot gave a fine view across the firth to the islands beyond, where the sea shimmered in the heat, disturbed only by battalions of seagulls, squabbling as they hunted for food. Beyond the shelter the road tumbled precariously towards the small town they could see some five miles in the distance. There was no sign of life along the road itself.
‘God, this is bleak,’ Washington muttered from the back seat.
He should try it in the middle of winter, Harry thought. He had. It had been twenty years since the SAS troop he’d been leading had been dropped a little further up the coast at dusk one short January day. Their mission was to test the defences of the country’s main nuclear submarine base at Faslane that lay sixty tortuous miles to the south. They’d marched through these hills for three snow-driven days and as many frostbitten nights before they’d reached the base, only to find that an army of peaceniks had arrived before them and Faslane was buttoned up as tight as a nun’s knickers. So instead of trying to go over or under the wire, they’d walked through the front gate early one morning disguised as a painting and decorating crew.
Once inside they’d nabbed the base commander in his home while he was concentrating on his kippers. His wife had still been in her nightdress and curlers. Mission accomplished. Oh, but there had been hell to pay. Apparently Harry hadn’t played by the rules–yes, apparently there were rules about how you were supposed to break into the place, so a week later Harry had taken his troop back to these hills and done it all over again.
‘Bleak? It has its own beauty,’ Harry said, responding to the American’s jibe. ‘People become very attached to it. The clans in this part have been slaughtering each other for centuries over its control.’
‘Why would they bother?’
‘Perhaps for no more than the privilege of being able to be the first to spit upon the English.’
‘Pointless savagery.’
‘Oh, no, you’ll find the true savages in Glasgow. The East End, around Rugby Street. You need a police escort to get in, although why anyone would bother I’ve never figured out.’
Washington realized Harry was sending him up, and fell back to irritated silence. This man knew how to sulk, Harry thought.
Shafts of evening sun were squeezing between the clouds gathering to the west as they came to the outskirts of Sullapool. It was a community of no more than a few hundred souls who teased a modest living from hill farming and the sea. On its outskirts lay the ruins of
an abandoned slate quarry. The houses were small, neat, almost entirely single-storey affairs that appeared to be ducking their heads beneath a levelling winter wind. Most had whitewashed walls and postage-stamp gardens. The town was scattered across a spit of land that projected into the firth from the surrounding hills, with a small but stout harbour at its far end where several fishing boats were tied up. This was where Mrs MacDougall had said they would find one public telephone; another was located outside the old church.
‘Here we are,’ Harry said as he drew up beside the church. The street was empty, not a soul in sight. ‘You’ll be bothered by nothing but the midges.’
Washington, still insisting on pre-eminence in the pecking order, moved quickly to claim squatter’s rights in the red phone box, closing the door against them. It appeared warped, he had to force it closed with his foot. Seconds later, he was wrenching it open once more. He stuck his head out. ‘I haven’t used one of these things before,’ he said peevishly.
So many degrees, so many accolades, so many bumps on that burnished skull of his, yet still he couldn’t work out how to get a dial tone. ‘A system built only for savages, of course,’ Harry quipped as he showed the American what to do, building a little tower of coins beside the receiver in case he should need them. He made sure Washington had his dial tone, then left the rest to him.
He backed out of the phone box, made a point of closing the door carefully, then retreated to the car to give the American space to make his call. That’s when Harry noticed the Russian was missing.
Harry swore, coarsely and with passion. Konev was nowhere to be seen. The street was narrow, in one direction leading up towards the old slate quarry and in the other down to the harbour. Paths and alleyways led off in all directions. The bloody man could be anywhere. Harry swore again, but it didn’t make him feel any better. There was little point in trying to chase after the Russian, he had no clue which direction to take, and it would mean abandoning the American, who was locked in the depths of his telephone conversation, his head lowered and his shoulders hunched. Anyway, Konev had presumably disappeared by choice and Harry wasn’t his jailer, although right now he felt like applying for the post. He stood in the middle of what felt like nowhere, wondering, as Shunin had, what the hell he was doing here.
It was some time and several coins later before Washington finished his call. He emerged from the phone box, his brow creased in agricultural furrows beneath his shining pate.
‘Lavrenti’s gone,’ Harry said.
‘Eaten by locals?’
‘We’ve got to find him.’
‘We have to get back,’ the American corrected.
‘Not without the Russian.’
Washington shrugged in indifference. ‘He wanders off, that’s his funeral. You may have picked up on the fact that there are considerably more important things at stake here than a clown from the Kremlin. I need to get back.’
‘Then you walk.’
Washington’s eyes grew bright, like pebbles in the surf, washed with impatience. ‘What sort of security are you?’
‘Crap, evidently.’
‘How many times can you Brits screw up? Losing your empire is one thing but losing your telephone, then losing your guests, that’s an entirely different order of incompetence. When are you going to realize that this isn’t your show any longer, never was? Just get me back to the castle so the grown-ups can get on with it.’
‘We stay.’
They stood their ground, neither giving quarter. Raucous seagulls circled overhead and squabble over perching rights on the roof of the Range Rover. The two men were still contesting the issue when the Russian reappeared, walking back up the hill from the direction of the harbour, flapping away at the accompanying midges.
‘Where have you been, Mr Konev?’ Harry asked, trying to shake the irritation out of his voice.
The Russian affected to look puzzled by the question, shrugging his shoulders. ‘Is there a problem?’
‘I wouldn’t want you to get into any difficulty.’
‘No difficulty. I just went down to the harbour to use the other phone. Thank you for your concern, but we Russians don’t need babysitters, Mr Jones.’
Lavrenti offered him a smile. Harry looked into the Russian’s eyes, saw them dancing in agitation. It reminded him of a calculating machine working out the odds. He knew the man was lying.
Late Friday evening. The Room of Many Miracles, Shanjing.
The room was filled with remorseless concentration–heads bowed, keys tapping, faces lit by the glow of the screens, voices that earlier had been loud and youthful now fallen to whispers as energies were focused on the task in front of them. Fu Zhang was sweating, little pearls of perspiration strung beneath his hairline. ‘Why is nothing happening?’ he asked.
‘The deadlines have been brought forward, Minister. We were given no warning. We need a little more time.’
‘How much time?’ Fu snapped.
‘This is not something that can be over in a minute, or even a day,’ Li Changchun persisted. He sighed; he didn’t care for this man with lips like wriggling worms who had descended from Beijing to turn their plans upside down. It was the blind leading the quietly brilliant. And Fu didn’t show respect. Computer programmers were often gifted souls but, simply because
they seemed at times to have pulled their clothing straight from the bottom of a dirty laundry basket, they were regarded by the likes of Fu as alien life forms.