The Lords' Day (retail) (12 page)

‘OK, Harry, you win,’ he sighed eventually. ‘I’ll call in the Boys.’

12.43 p.m.

A transformation had taken hold of Tricia Willcocks. She had come round from her stupor to discover that the hooded attackers who had blasted their way into her house were
officers of the Metropolitan Police. For a while she flapped around like a pigeon with a broken wing, unable to concentrate, not understanding. She hadn’t seen the siege, knew nothing of it,
and even when they told her she didn’t believe it. Not until someone turned the television on.

‘Don’t you understand, Mrs Willcocks?’ a policeman was shouting at her, trying to barge his way past the incomprehension. ‘You’re in charge.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes, you.’

‘But why me?’

‘Because you’re the only one left.’

She sat on her sofa, head in hands, hair like a besom broom, her robe pulled tight for modesty. She seemed in another world.

‘You know what this means?’ a policeman turned to his colleague in despair.

He was answered with a dull shake of the head.

‘Means we go for the first substitute. The Industry Minister. Little plonker.’

Then her head was up. ‘Oh, no you don’t! I’m in charge of this so you do as I tell you. Give me five minutes to put on some clothes. Then we start sorting out this mess of
yours.’ Already she was on her feet and running for the stairs, but halfway up she paused and turned. ‘And while you’re waiting, get someone to fix my bloody door.
Idiots!’

Diego Garcia. A coral island stuck about as close to the middle of the Indian Ocean as one could care to get, more than a thousand miles from the nearest land mass. It’s
covered in tropical vegetation that goes largely untended since the inhabitants were forcibly moved out. Its average height is four feet and north to south it’s only fifteen miles long, a
good chunk of which is taken up by a runway that runs for more than two miles. This is a US runway, for although the island belongs to the British, in 1966 they leased the place to the Americans.
Since then it has become one of the most important – and most remote – strategic military bases in the world. Its main non-human population are warrior crabs and coconut rats. And it
rains a lot.

Diego Garcia is a temporary home to around two thousand US military personnel plus many more support staff. There are also usually forty Brits based there, too, mostly Royal Navy and Royal
Marines, to fly the flag and remind the world that, despite all appearances, the place is technically British.

It’s a little like St Helena, that other ocean island, where Napoleon had been sent into exile. A million miles from anywhere. Escape impossible.

And that is where they had sent Daud Gul.

1.25 p.m.

She had insisted on sitting in the Prime Minister’s chair, the only one around the Cabinet table with arms. The private secretary had tried to dissuade her –
‘it might not look seemly, Home Secretary’ – but she’d asserted that it would be unseemly to sit anywhere else. After all, she was in charge and
they
needed to know
it. Who
they
might be was left undefined, but the implication was that its definition ran far wider than simply the gunmen.

They began to assemble in the Cabinet Room like penguins sheltering from an Arctic gale, looking downtrodden, settling in corners, waiting quietly for the rest to arrive: the representatives
from the security services, the armed forces, with appropriate deputies and secretaries in tow, and accompanying them the most senior Ministers left in post at Foreign & Commonwealth, Defence,
Transport and Health, the latter in case of a chemical or biological attack. Some brought with them slim files, others merely their wits, and they sat around the coffin-shaped table muttering in
low tones. Outside the sun was shining in a clear sky, a wonderful day for a walk in the park. If only.

The last to arrive was Tibbetts. Harry was with him.

‘Good afternoon, Home Secretary.’ Harry offered a wan smile. It was the first time they had spoken in two years, since Harry had carved her speech on multiculturalism to the
bone.

‘Who brought him in?’

‘I did, Home Secretary,’ Tibbetts began. ‘Mr Jones has a wealth of experience that has already proved invaluable.’

She glowered, clearly unconvinced. She cast her eye around the table – all men, every one of them. Condescending bastards. All thinking they were superior, belittling her because she was a
woman. Well, enough of that. There had been a time when she’d been forced to play their game, but that was in the past. She’d stood on the doorstep of ambition long enough, now it was
time to join the feast.

‘I think we’d better start with a situation report,’ she said.

Through the thickness of the reinforced window glass, Tibbetts could see a seagull soaring above the parade ground of Horse Guards, playing lazily in the cross winds, lifting, soaring free, and
at that moment he would have swapped everything he had with that one bird. Perhaps in another life . . . He cleared his throat and began his tale, of how the parliament building had been evacuated,
and how all those inside were now sequestered in the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre for debriefing and exclusion as suspects.

‘I hear the BBC is screaming blue murder,’ she interrupted. ‘Apparently their entire presentation team was in the palace, and now you’re holding them. They want them
back.’

Tibbetts scratched his heads in irritation. ‘I think even the BBC might realise that there are other priorities right now than television. They can wait their turn.’

‘Really? Can you seriously think that wise, Commander? To antagonise the media right from the start? This is a battle for hearts and minds as much as anything else.’

‘I thought it was a battle for the lives of the most important group of hostages the world has ever seen,’ Tibbetts replied, a little too starchily.

‘Precisely. History will be our judge. And for better or worse, history is usually written by the media. So I’m sure you’ll consider releasing them. Very promptly.’

And she had won the first battle. It was a purely symbolic victory, for in truth she didn’t give a stuff about any of the BBC crowd, but it was important that she show those around her how
she liked to work. So Tibbetts sighed, and carried on with his report. Of how he had stood to the armed police units of CO-19 and put on stand-by the SAS, who were en route from their base at
Credenhill, near Hereford, along with the Special Boat Service, who, within the hour, would be patrolling the Thames in the stretches beside the parliament buildings. Helicopter surveillance was
already in the air, and they had pushed back the security cordon to establish a stronghold around the Palace of Westminster.

‘A case of the horse having bolted, surely,’ she muttered loudly to no one in particular. ‘Or, rather, kicked his way in,’ she added, muddling the metaphor.

It had started. The recriminations. The blame game. Tibbetts was going to need his broad shoulders to accommodate the collection of knives that were likely to be buried in him, up to the
hilt.

‘Anyway, who are these particular horses?’ she asked.

‘All of us around this table are digging to find out what we can about the High Commissioner, of course, but if you don’t mind, Home Secretary, I’d like Mr Jones to take this
one. I think he has some ideas that are well worth listening to.’

Her eyebrows arched; Harry took that as his invitation.

‘There’s a range of mountains on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan that is home to some of the most ferocious warrior tribes in the world,’ he began.
‘It’s where many of the al-Qaeda leaders have been hiding out for years, or so we think. The tribes in these mountains go by a host of different names – Pashtun, Baluchi and so
on, all stuff out of the Kipling legends, tales of the North West Frontier and Shangri-la – but the bunch I think we’re looking for are the Mehsuds – the most fearsome of the lot.
They live in an area called Waziristan. It’s never been conquered or controlled, not even by the Soviets when they tried, and least of all by the local authorities.’

‘It must surely have been part of the British Empire,’ she suggested.

‘And when our first units went in to do battle with them in the eighteenth century, only one man came back alive.’

‘So what makes you think they have decided to come down from the hills and invade Westminster? Why couldn’t they be al-Qaeda or some of the other Islamics?’

‘I saw one of these men up very close, almost eye to eye. It’s the way they present themselves. Long Semitic noses and hair that’s surprisingly straight – not wavy, like
many of the Pakistanis and some of the other tribes, for instance, certainly not crinkled like Arabs. They also traditionally part it down the middle.’ They all stared for confirmation at the
television screen, on mute, standing in the corner.

‘The Leader of the Opposition parts his hair in the middle,’ she said, but Harry ignored the political insight and continued.

‘It’s not just the one thing – I saw several little signs, perhaps insignificant in themselves. Like his teeth are green. They use a type of chewing tobacco – I think
they call it
nasvar
or something like that’ – the man from MI6 was nodding – ‘that leaves deep stains.’

‘You were close enough to see his teeth? And you didn’t think to do something about him? I thought you had a particularly . . .’ she stretched for the right words –
‘complicated background in violence.’

‘Even if I had succeeded in taking out one, that would still have left seven – and your guess is as good as mine about how they might have reacted. These people are remorseless, hold
to Mosaic law.’

Her eyebrow levitated again.

‘An eye for an eye,’ he explained.

‘You seem remarkably well informed.’ Somehow it didn’t sound like praise.

He didn’t explain that he had written a thesis on Islamic terrorist networks for his MLitt at Oxford after he had walked out of the SAS. That had been another stroke of independence that
had brassed off his superiors – they’d had plans to send him elsewhere. He could see he was having the same effect on the Home Secretary.

‘And I suspect that if we dig into the background of Daud Gul, we will find a blood line leading straight back to the caves of Waziristan.’

The MI6 man was nodding again, more vigorously.

‘An eye for an eye,’ Harry repeated.

‘Well, perhaps his ancestry might be of interest to academics, but for the moment we’ve rather more pressing matters on our hands.’ And, as the portrait of Robert Walpole gazed
down from above the fireplace, she led the conversation away from Harry. Soon the man from MI5 was suggesting that Masood must have studied in this country. His accent, his command of the language,
was all too good to have come from some correspondence course, wasn’t it? Computers located in the darkest places within the government system were already scrabbling to find a match for
everything they knew and could see of him.

‘So why, why’ – Willcocks was stabbing her finger into the tablecloth – ‘did he call for me? What have I done to merit that?’

Her inference was clear. It was because she was a player, a figure of significance in the global battle against the forces of darkness. Wasn’t it?

The enquiry hung in the air, surrounded by silence. Then, eventually, Harry.

‘It’s because you’re a woman.’

‘What?’

‘The murder of Marjie Antrobus was about as cold and calculated as you can get. Planned – but not personal. Someone was going to die, no matter what, and it was going to be a woman.
I think they wanted to show us right from the start that they would kill a woman. Any woman.’ He let the idea sit with them for a moment. ‘Yes, perhaps even a queen.’

As the thought began to unhinge the confidence of everyone in the room, a side door to the Cabinet room opened and the private secretary’s head appeared. ‘The President of the United
States wonders whether you would be free to take a call in five minutes, Home Secretary.’

She took a breath; it seemed to raise her height an inch or two, then she turned to the men at the table. ‘I think we’re finished here for the moment. You all know what you should be
doing. Please make sure you do it – and rather more efficiently than seems to have been the case to date.’

‘In the meantime, what is the answer about releasing Daud Gul?’ the man from Five asked.

‘We play for time.’

‘And not agree to release him?’

‘Of course not.’

Yet they all thought they caught the echo of doubt.

As the others filed out, she called to Tibbetts. ‘A quick word, Commander.’

When the door was closed, he was left standing; she didn’t invite him to sit.

‘Get rid of Harry Jones.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I don’t want him here.’

‘But—’

‘He’s not a team player.’

‘I’m not sure I agree.’

‘Doesn’t desperately matter whether you’re sure or not. You’re scarcely in much of a position to argue the point.’

‘I think—’

Her eyes lit up with passion. ‘What you think, and did, and failed to do, Commander, will no doubt be listened to in considerable detail by the commission of inquiry once this fuck-up is
over. But in the meantime, from this point, I would be grateful if you would do as I ask. Do I make myself clear?’ She offered a smile as she said it, but it didn’t reach quite as far
as her eyes.

He walked out without replying.

2.05 p.m.

Lunchtime. And in the House of Peers, despite the extraordinary succession of shocks that had been delivered to their systems, the needs of normal life were beginning to
reassert themselves. They were growing hungry, and thirsty, and, in the case of Celia Blessing, distinctly uncomfortable. It happens, to elderly ladies with bladders.

‘What do we do, Archie?’

‘We wait, and sit patiently.’

‘But I can’t. Don’t you see, I simply can’t.’

Masood and the others had been busy. A chair had been placed behind the throne, on which sat the gunman wearing the explosive jacket. It also became clear what sort of device this was, not one
operated by remote control, by any signal that might be blocked, nor by a push-button that might not be reached, but by the simple means of a pull cord. It was rather like that on a parachute. The
cord had a ring at its end, and that ring was always either around the wrist of the jacket’s wearer or attached directly to the throne. This would ensure that if he were shot or taken by
surprise his flailing arm would detonate the device. The same thing would happen if he were blown off his chair or if he were even to fall asleep. So simple. Killing a queen had never been
easier.