7.40pm. Friday, 10th November
North picked up one of the silver trays of champagne flutes from the kitchen counter and pushed his way through the swing door at the same time as a young waiter burst back into the kitchen. “It’s carnage,” he said, pushing his floppy blond hair out of his eyes and dropping the empty tray on to the counter with a clatter.
“Isn’t it always,” North said.
The reception crackled with the self-conscious energy of international power and personal ambition pulled tight together in the same room – its only release a frenetic hum of conversation and chink of crystal.
North kept up links with every official catering company operating in London. His security clearance and impeccable silver service credentials proved useful more times than he could count. This evening at the reception of the G8 heads of state, he replaced a 25-year-old Australian actor-come-waiter who rang in sick. “Sick” and £5,000 wealthier than when North met up with him an hour before. Everyone was happy – the Australian happy to help “the Metropolitan Police” with their man in the kitchen, the catering company with their ever-reliable first reserve who had rung in so opportunely, and most of all, North himself.
Above the guests in evening suits and designer gowns, above the brass chandeliers with their curling arms and electric candles, the Rubens ceiling glowed, the Divine Right of Kings ignored by one and all in favour of frantic politicking, discreet influence-trading and outrageous gossip. The bas relief columns along the walls were uplit in red, white and blue as North, wearing the politest of smiles, ignored the reaching hands as he dipped and swerved, his head reeling from the expensive scents and the poly-glot babble, in search of his target.
Lucien Tarn didn’t so much as glance at the waiter in the white tuxedo as he took hold of the long-stemmed glass of Veuve Clicquot. North had come up to the group from behind and found his way blocked by the throng. An arm reached out. Another. Trapping him. A discussion among the powerful about money, a discussion among rich people about power. Tarn nodding as the grey-bearded man next to him held forth on Government debt spiralling out of control. The smell of cigar smoke. The journey in the Bentley.
Affable laughter at some joke, and North stepped backwards and away. The elite didn’t see those that served because they didn’t need to. Glasses filled. Glasses re-filled. He was invisible. North let the crowds fold around and carry him away.
Tarn was here. In the same room. It wasn’t the original plan. Should he take him instead? Catch him and finish this? But Tarn was already on the move, steadily, through the crowds. Weaving and travelling further away. At the doorway he turned, his razor-sharp focus slicing through the churning moving throng and his eyes locked with North’s, the slightest smile. He knew. Had known as his darling boy stood sentry serving him while considering his death. Untouchable. Untouched. Predator not prey. North cursed as the door closed behind the judge, and the nearest party-goer looked at him askance before forgetting he existed. There’d be another day for Tarn. They both knew it. He looked around the crowds. But it wasn’t happening twice.
Ripples spread outwards from the US President. From around each head of state surrounded by security, political minders, hangers-on, their own ministers, other countries’ ministers, their own diplomats, other countries’ diplomats, the ambitious, curious, and star-hungry. For a deal-maker, for a money-maker, for a politician, it was the hot ticket in town, the only place to be – which made it all the more surprising that JP Armitage was leaving.
Under his tan, JP Armitage was sweaty with the heat coming off the crowd. Tucking the paisley silk handkerchief into his top pocket of his dinner jacket, he was moving away from his companions, the famous smile switching off like lights going out over a city. North kept him in sight as he steered his way through the crowds, clapping old friends on the back, shaking hands with new ones, pumping up-down, up-down, index finger pointing to the select – “I see you” – kissing cheeks as he passed, but stopping for no one. For a second, North asked himself whether Armitage too had clocked him, but the eyes had slid over him – another lackey, insignificant, nothing to be gained from shaking his hand or acknowledging his existence.
North let the thirsty grab for his glasses, the last a mature, full-hipped blonde in a black silk cocktail dress who winked at him, blowing a glossy, scarlet kiss, “Thanks, hon – I’m sweatin’ bullets here,” she said as she took the flute before turning back to the elegant, dark-eyed woman next to her. “Would you like a sparkling water, honey?” For a split second the huge dark eyes met those of North and it was electric. Desperation. Terror. Need. North hesitated. But with the door already closing on Armitage, there wasn’t the time to wonder why. Instead, North lowered the silver tray, keeping it tight against his side before sliding it behind maroon velvet drapery as the waiter became one more guest at the party.
Out of the huge oak doors, the hubbub of global citizenry dropped away to only the leather soles of handmade shoes, slapping against the shallow steps. Armitage had already started down the stone staircase, towards security and the exit.
“Mr Armitage,” anyone listening would have put North’s accent somewhere in the cultured streets of Georgetown, Washington, via Harvard and an expensive, affluent childhood in the mid-West.
Armitage turned. His brows were gathered. This was an impatient man. A power to be reckoned with – call him back at your peril.
North smiled with smooth East Coast insincerity. He raised his voice – allowing it to travel to the police guarding the exit. “Mr Armitage, The President very much hoped for a word. He’s a big fan of your New Army. He thinks it’s great – so great.”
If Armitage had been feathered, the assumed courtesy would have swelled him to twice the size. Even so, the tycoon frowned, appearing strangely dismayed by the invitation, his handmade, patent dress shoes still pointing away from North and towards the door.
“It will only take a few minutes. The President insists – you understand.” The perfect political aide stood back, holding out his arm. The leader of the Western world waited.
For Armitage to refuse would have been remarkable. With a heavy sigh, he made to go back through to the banqueting hall, but North shook his head, a charming smile. “A private word.” He emphasized “private” – privilege indeed. North guided Armitage back up the stairs towards another door, this one with its own key pad and through which he could only hope would be a private function room, an office – he would settle for a broom cupboard. Armitage checked his Rolex as North keyed in the numbers which he’d watched the harassed banqueting manager punch in earlier and pushed open the door. To the left was a narrow stairwell. Straight ahead, a closed door. North held his breath – hoped luck was with him. He turned the handle. It was unlocked.
Deferential – the suave courtesies of a political lackey in the presence of a superior, North stood back to allow Armitage entry and as he passed though, Armitage checked his Rolex again. Seven fifty-one. North already knew what it said. He followed Armitage, almost stepping on his heels – the heady smoke and pepper of expensive malt – pulling the door closed behind them, turning the old-fashioned brass key in the lock.
Armitage scowled as he took in the emptiness. The old-fashioned desk with its captain’s chair – the ancient computer next to a grimey phone. He was a busy man. He had to be somewhere else. Could not wait. Another time. Pass on his apologies to the President. Tomorrow he had all the time in the world if the President could free up five minutes then.
He stopped talking as North drew Stella’s gun.
“Where are you in such a hurry to be, Armitage?” In North’s experience, given the choice between a gun and a watch, men watched the gun. But Armitage stared at the Rolex again, apparently hypnotised by it. Seven fifty-three. The tycoon’s gaze flickered to the door. He took a deep breath – steadying his nerves. Stopped himself from checking the time yet again though North felt the urge in him – felt the magnitude of each and every second as it passed. As if Armitage was ageing in front of him.
“Who are you?”
“Does it matter?”
The door handled rattled as someone on the outside attempted to turn it and Armitage opened his mouth to call out. North raised the gun, sighting it so the bullet would go down the tycoon’s throat. Armitage closed his mouth and the rattling stopped. He was sweating again, beads of perspiration running down his temples – the smell of him spiced and expensive. It crossed North’s mind that although the tycoon was steady enough and there was no slur to his speech, Armitage was thoroughly, stinkingly drunk.
“Whoever you are, we need to get out of here.”
North perched himself on the green leather-topped desk, one knee bent resting on the polished seat, his foot on the floor.
“If we don’t, we’re going to die,” said Armitage.
Men exaggerated in the face of death. “I’ll give you anything,” when they had nothing. They lied. “I didn’t do it,” when they did. Said “I can explain,” when they couldn’t. But North believed Armitage. Time was running out for him.
“Then talk fast, and be on your way.”
For years, the bullet had made North doubt himself. Words, pictures, the worst kind of emotions came to him unbidden. He had enough bad memories of his own, enough violent urges, and too many things he should forget. But the urgent, ruinous call in Armitage’s eyes made him curious, made him want to go beyond, to step over the threshold into the darkness at the very core of the man with him. But if he went walk-about in that wasteland of misery, North didn’t know if he’d ever find his way back.
Armitage blinked.
With a sensation of pulling away from the brink of a chasm, North came back to himself just as the old-fashioned metal keyboard smashed against his hand. There was a moment of blinding pain as the gun dropped to the floor only to skitter under the desk. Armitage seized hold of the captain’s chair, using it to keep North away as he made for the door. Armitage wasn’t a coward, but he wasn’t a man whose job it was to kill other men either.
North gripped the curved back of the chair and seat to force it upwards, overbalancing Armitage, making him stagger – knocking the tycoon sideways and into the wall, as he brought the chair down against the other man’s head and shoulders. If the wall hadn’t taken the brunt of the blow, Armitage would have died then and there. Instead North took hold of him and dragged him across to the wall on the other side of the room, slamming him against it, then flipping him, pressing his face to the plasterwork. Before Armitage could gather himself North pulled back both arms, ripping the phone wires from the ancient phone to coil them around and around his wrists, knotting them as he wound the other end around the old Victorian radiator. Armitage’s voice was shrill as he attempted to wrench himself away from the radiator. Instead, the wire tightened itself and the tether pulled him brutally short. He made for the door again, almost dislocating his shoulders – his hands already crimson as the blood vessels constricted.
“Honor Jones?” North smacked the other man’s face once with the palm of his hand, and once with the back. He needed him focused and sober. “Where is she?”
The struggle stopped. The tycoon leaned back against the wall as if he needed its support, and laughed. A hollow, cold noise. “I don’t know.”
“Is she alive?” The touch of Honor’s skin, her lips against his. He didn’t know whether the sensations were from his own desire or Armitage’s memories.
A piece fell into place somewhere. “You’re the one she talked about at the Savoy. North.” Armitage took in the brutality. The gun. His youth. “Then you’re one of these people – or you were. ‘The Board’. You’re one of their killers, except you couldn’t do it, could you? Were you as flattered as I was when you were recruited? That’s what they count on, you know.”
As Armitage talked North thought of the elegant, dark-eyed woman at the reception, crackling with desperate sorrow. The memory of her nagging at him.
“We were at a party like this one when Tarn said ‘Do the right thing.’ Invest in defence, in the New Army. Help us stand against Russia and China. It was patriotic, and privatization brings its own efficiencies. The country’s all but bankrupt. Men like me – we keep it together. Everything I’m doing is for the right reasons. The fact it’s been profitable has been a bonus, that’s all. Tarn persuaded me to manage the money for them, launder it, act as banker. Who knows where my investments start and theirs end? Not even me any more. But whatever it used to be, the Board today is made up of fanatics, North – you must know that. They think democracy is over, that the market only gets us so far, that the country is dying without the leadership it needs.”
North had seen her before. He knew he had. The fearful almond eyes turning, assessing, dismissing him. Turning away.
“As for this? They’ve assured me it’s necessary. I’ve chosen to believe them, because they have Honor and I have no choice.”
“Someone’s stepping out of line,” Stella said before she died. JP Armitage had stopped being a believer, if he ever was. Had stopped thinking about the money he could make, and started thinking about everything he had to lose. They took Honor to keep him loyal.
Hesitation on Armitage’s side. “You’ve only known her days. I’ve known her since she was a child.”
Honor’s face younger. Smoother. Rounder. Sprawling sun-tanned limbs by the pool.
And there was guilt in there. A narrow black line running through Armitage and buried deep. Covered over. Betrayal and money and figures on a page. Honor’s father didn’t commit fraud. Armitage wanted him out of the way – coveting what the other man had.
His firm. His model wife. His teenage daughter. Nothing he deserved. The daughter and the mother would be better off in his care, Armitage assured himself. Happier. Looked after. How was he to know his friend was so close to the edge of sanity?
North’s brain felt as if it was flooding with blood. Was he constructing his own narrative for Armitage or was the tycoon’s sin darker than North had even imagined?
“I loved her mother, North, and I’ve seen Honor grow into a remarkable woman.” Armitage’s face contorted and North realised it was with regret – an emotion so strange to the tycoon that the muscles of his face weren’t sure what to do, where to go. How many years had he spent justifying his role in the tragedy, the destruction and unravelling of the perfect girl by “being there” for her? An old friend of the family who smashed that family apart and put the picture back together with the jagged pieces of a guilt-racked survivor who thought she had to save the world or die trying.
“I tried to keep her out of it till this was over. Somewhere safe. She’s important to me – you have no idea how important.”
The tycoon had Honor committed to hide her from the Board. From his own people. Armitage was the reason Honor was “off the books”, the reason North wasn’t sent the usual briefing. JP didn’t care what happened to Peggy once he had the smart chip. But Honor was different. The Board didn’t want the tycoon knowing they were going to kill the woman he wanted to marry. When he found out, he threatened to bring down the temple.
“Tell me where she is, Armitage.”
That was it – the dark-eyed woman at the reception next door was at the camp, sitting at the table surrounded by children. And she was pregnant. Peggy’s refugee whose name was Sonja. The same Sonja standing in the reception with a curled fist pressed into her ribs, her knuckles white. The beating heart of the child inside her.
Armitage shook his head, impatient with his captor. “They want Honor close by so I don’t ‘disappoint’. I’m not letting them down, North. Everything’s ready to go. Anyone who might get in our way has a personal stake in our success – their children, their husbands and wives. I’m no different. Peggy’s smart chips are already out there. We started manufacture months ago and they’re going into everything. This country first but it’ll be global fast enough, especially because we aren’t charging anyone for the technology. We’re embedding the chips in their weapons systems. Communications. Utilities. In time, we’ll control all of it. Peggy did something magnificent. She’s making the world a quieter place. And more energy efficient.”
“And what else?” Armitage looked sick.
“We tweaked it. Bannerman put in a backdoor. Information is power and we’ll have all the information we need, and if information isn’t enough, we’ll take control, dismantling GPS, disabling entire industries, oil, nuclear, defence systems, turning them on and off to suit.”
“Peggy found out?”
Armitage’s eyes went to the door again and North felt the panic building in the other man, infecting him. His own panic running alongside that of Armitage, matching it pace for urgent pace. Trying to make sense of it.
The Board wanted Honor dead because she was looking for Peggy. And now she was more use alive to bring JP in line.
A hammering against the door. Perhaps it was the noise of their fight or perhaps security had decided the door had been shut for too long? That the President was in the banqueting hall and not in a private meeting with a British industrialist?
“Did Peggy find out?”
“She was always too damned clever for her own good.”
North stood over him. They were of a similar size. Neither had to look down. They breathed in time with each other. Honor’s mouth. Dust on the black silk lapel of Armitage’s jacket. The chimes of Big Ben striking eight o’clock hanging small on the cold wintry air.
“Look after her,” Armitage’s whisper was barely loud enough to be heard. Afterwards, North thought that perhaps he hadn’t heard him say it at all.
Perhaps North only joined the dots as the room blew apart.
Glass and dust took the place of air. The noise came later. The end-of-all-things – an enormous bang travelling through the marrow of him as if the explosion started and finished in his bones. Bricks and stone and metalwork started to fall – a few at first then all at once, travelling towards him faster than thought. Armitage lost – darkness so black it was as if the light of the world had been extinguished. A black hole. Dark matter. Peggy lost. Honor lost. North fought for oxygen as the air was sucked out of the room almost sucking out his innards with it. He tried to persuade his body to sip its breaths. Wasn’t that what you were supposed to do? Wasn’t that the training in another existence? But desperate for oxygen that wasn’t there, his body wasn’t listening. Lifting, shifting, as if gravity had been suspended – the world upside down and roundabout, his eyes rhimed with grit and ash he could see nothing as he flew, turning, spinning, slamming, the door, the thick stone wall gone, the twisting staircase, the wall into the banqueting hall disappeared. Trying to remember what he had been supposed to see, what should-have-been, finding nothing. Jacko. Where was his unit? The young Second Lieutenant dead again. And where the party had been, the throngs of statesmen, the great and good, the unborn child, everything covered in white ash, tattered flesh and blood. No Jacko then. Relief. But no anybody.
There should have been somebody.
North must have lost consciousness for a while. He didn’t know how long. Minutes not hours, and when he came round, he spat blood and dust from his mouth, coughing as he brought up he didn’t want to know what – a high-pitched squealing the only thing to cling to. The rest of the world muffled, dead. There must have been screaming, but he couldn’t hear it. As his vision came and went and came again, he attempted to get to his feet but they slipped on the stone, a sensation of softness under him. He patted himself down. Reeling. Was he there? All of him? No limbs missing, blood in his hair again. He reached for a door – missed it, stumbling, on his knees, sharp pain pushing though the cloth, into flesh. He stood up again, extracted an inch-long nail and threw it to the floor – or where there should have been a floor. Beside him the floor had fallen away, the sides broken beams, yawning open ready to swallow him down. Limping, he kept to the walls, what there were of them – hoped what was left wouldn’t decide their time was done and take him with them.
“Armitage…” he knew himself to be calling but he couldn’t hear the words. He called again, coughing with the exertion of it. Perhaps Armitage could hear even if North couldn’t?
Armitage knew about the bomb. Had been trying to leave. And he stopped him. Killing him. Killing his only hope of finding her. And the only reason the Board had to keep her alive.
Flames were catching, creeping up the walls, crawling across the end of the hall.
Time to leave. He took off his shredded jacket to press it against his nose and mouth, the cloth sticky and wet. Briefly wondered about the bullet in his brain. This much he knew about bombs, the impact of the blast waves on the brain could kill you without leaving a mark. What damage could they do if they already had a bullet in there to work with? Fire caught somewhere. Electrics. Burning wood and roasting meat mixed with the cordite and what he was guessing was PTN – pentaerythritol tetranitrate. A major ingredient of semtex, from the same family as nitroglycerine. Colourless crystals capable of detonation by electrical impulse. The explosive of choice for terrorists everywhere – including it seemed dear old London Town.
He stepped back as his foot caught, pressed against something under it. Crushed under a collapsed beam, his body half-hanging over the gaping hole into the arched vault below and beyond, JP Armitage, billionaire industrialist, traitorous lover, with an estimated personal fortune bigger than the GDP of some countries. Dead and gone. No mark on his face, only a thin layer of white powder covering the mane of hair and the heavy features like a Georgian dandy. They were keeping Honor alive to keep Armitage in line. The building shifted, the slightest tilt as history gathered itself. Plaster-dust fell, ancient timber struts snapped, and Armitage still tethered to the cast iron radiator slipped inch by inch away. North grabbed for him. Cloth. The tail of the silk-lined dinner jacket sliding through his hand. A dry slither, Armitage’s body picking up speed all of a sudden, down, hands tied, a swallow dive into what North could only guess was Hell.
Amid the billowing dust and gathering smoke of the banqueting hall, there was movement on the floor a rolling and unfurling, arms reaching as if the guests had been dead and were rising again because the trumpet had sounded and Judgment Day come upon them. To his knowledge there had been eight heads of state in this room together with some of their key ministers. He wondered how many of them were dead.
The young waiter lay crumpled over the debris – an ever-expanding pool of crimson seeping out from beneath him. “It’s carnage out there,” he’d said, excited to be part of it. North sank to his knees. A tinkling sound as he lifted the handsome head on to his lap – the body covered with sparkling fragments of glass reflecting the flames. A pieta, the thought came to North from some religious tract of his mother’s, a marble Madonna and Christ cut down from the cross, but a floppy-haired Christ not yet dead and smelling of aftershave, and dust and blood.
“It’s all right,” he tried to say but he still couldn’t hear himself. The boy opened his mouth and North thought he groaned, the groan turning into a cough that convulsed the broken body and then a guttural rattle – his panicking eyes fixing on North. “You’re going to be fine.” He laid a hand over the curly hair. He’d comforted soldiers before. Waited with them as they bled out.
Something in the brown eyes shifted as the boy recognised him from the kitchen, and his hand found North’s and squeezed. North smiled. For the sake of the boy, as if he was glad he had this chance to talk together. As if this was their lucky day.
He wanted to move him, but North had seen death in the field before and it was coming on fast. But the boy didn’t have to know that. All he needed to know was that he wasn’t alone, because no one on this earth should face death alone and sooner than he should. North knew that for a fact now if he had never known it before. A noise came up from the young waiter, North felt the sensation. The boy’s urgent need for his mother’s touch. But there was no mother, no time – blood leaking from the corner of his mouth.
Stillness. In the sudden space where there should have been a heartbeat, the eyes glazed. North moved his palm down over the face. Pennies, he thought though he didn’t know from where. There should be pennies to weigh down the eyelids. One final price to pay for being alive, alongside the loss and the suffering. He swept the narrow chest of glass – tidying him, making him presentable for the next life, regardless that the glass was making his fingers bleed. He laid the boy back on the ground, gently does it, so as not to wake him and stood.
His ears ringing, in the silent movie of billowing dust, a figure was waving him over. Man or woman, he wasn’t sure. It took time for him to recognize the curvaceous blonde who had taken his last flute of champagne, the American in the black silk dress who winked at him. Her mouth moved, the gloss stuck over with ash like tiny grey feathers, but he couldn’t hear her. Then the voices came:
I can’t feel my legs.
Mom.
Oh my God.
Dead – he has to be dead.
An agonised weeping babble from a mixture of nationalities – some he recognised, some he didn’t. German. Danish. Japanese. A dark-suited man with blood running down his grey face, laboured regardless in the corner, moving pieces of rubble, throwing them right and left, determined to get to what lay under it, knowing already there was no point. North gazed around the ruined hall, the scraps of what he took to be flesh, the limbless and the crushed, one or two of the more able-bodied bent over the injured, the dying. He couldn’t understand the barrage of voices that rushed into his head, there were too many speaking too many languages and the panic too intense – he fought to block them out before they swept away all reason. He was glad he couldn’t understand most of the words, but the screaming? The screaming didn’t need a translator. It filled his mind with the white noise of anguish.
Fire caught the dry timbers of the hall as he left it. He carried the blonde in his arms, keeping tight hold against the slippery wet cloth. She’d said “Thanks hon” again though he didn’t think she recognised him, smiled as he’d lifted her – though she had to be in agony. White smoke billowed from the building turning blue as it caught the flashing blue lights of the emergency services parked across Whitehall. A yellow-jacketed paramedic came to lift the woman out of his arms but he could tell from the weight of her head against his chest, from the stillness, that she was dead, and he didn’t want to let her go. She’d said “Thanks, hon,” and smiled at her luck in getting the last champagne. She’d have wanted him to hold her – not some stranger. Someone threw a silver foil blanket over him, and he felt a steadying hand on his forearm. The paramedic blocking him was speaking, but he couldn’t hear him. He watched the mouth move up and down, the sympathetic eyes. He wanted North to let her go. So he did.