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Annabel, Tariq and Alec came in to Ruby Parker’s office in a group. Annabel had been shot in the chest, a rib deflecting the bullet. She walked like Frankenstein with a stick, but the heroic cop-trope was buried too deep for anyone, or even common sense sanity, to interfere. Alec was covered in contusions and cuts, but only Mordred had the cop-trope glory-look of being plastered in dried blood and bits of gore. Together they were cop-trope perfection and they looked like they belonged in an eighteenth century madhouse.
They went downstairs to Tariq’s computer domain. After twenty minutes, everyone who’d been assigned to the task had arrived. Mordred explained his theory, and their brief, and what he was hoping to find, and asked if there were any questions. There weren’t.
GCHQ didn’t quibble. It sent over everything on request, although there was a distinct sense of Humouring The Children about some of their replies. At 7.30, someone’s mobile rang. Mordred looked around, thanking God it wasn’t his. Mum, that’d be the final straw. He checked he’d pressed the off button as advised.
Annabel answered, listened and put her hand over her mouth. She stood up. “Sorry, I have to make a return call,” she muttered. “Good news. Fantastic news. Just excuse me a moment, please.” She left the room.
They all looked at each other. Tariq gazed at his screen, pretending not to notice.
After a few moments, they heard her scream. Alec and Tariq got up and ran out.
“I’m finally free!” she yelled, somewhere in the distance. “I’M FINALLY FREE!”
She screamed again. Then it sounded like she was crying.
Everyone tried to ignore it. The morphine? having embarrassing side-effects? She’d had a brutal day and in a few hours she probably wouldn’t remember anything. Right now there was too much else to concentrate on.
After a minute, Alec came back in. He slapped Mordred on the shoulder and grinned. “I’m pleased to report the al-Banna marriage is officially up, running and probably going to Australia,” he whispered.
“What the hell just happened?” Mordred asked.
Alec chuckled. “Great news, completely out of the blue apparently. Her father just died in hospital.”
Twelve hours later, patterns began to emerge. Leads were followed up, new discoveries were cross-referenced and the group began to re-divide the labour according to the emerging consensus. Grains of wheat appeared among the chaff. The demoralising effects of that afternoon’s operational disaster were nullified by a growing sense that they were winning, and miraculously, without even leaving the building. Thenceforth, they worked shifts. Half the team went to the pods to sleep. At 5am came Mordred’s turn. At eight, he awoke to the sound of a gentle ding. He pressed the release button and his bed ejected slowly from the wall.
Alec stood waiting for him, fully dressed. “I wasn’t sure whether you’d be dead,” he said, “the state of you.”
Mordred was too beat for jocularity. He threw his legs over the side of the bed and felt like someone had spent the entire morning punching him. Was he going to vomit? No, probably not.
“Say something,” Alec said.
“Like what?”
“That’ll do. Get showered and dressed. Your orders are to cross the river to Saint Thomas’s, get a full check-up, and when they give you the green light, go home and get some proper sleep. There’s a car waiting to ferry you. It’ll be straight in at the hospital, no hanging around in the waiting area. Everything’s been arranged, courtesy of the Big Park. Report back here at eight. We’ve done it.”
“Done what?”
“Remember four hours ago when we were all in Tariq’s computer room? What we were doing then? That.”
He couldn’t be bothered to pursue it.
“It’ll all be explained when you get back here,” Alec said. “I’ll be here too. Eight this evening. Don’t be late. Put your alarm on.”
“Bit of an odd time.”
“See you later.” He threw his coat over his shoulder and left.
Done what? It was pretty clear: Alec’s body language screamed it out. He didn’t know either.
Mordred washed and shaved painfully, dressed in the new clothes Amber had laid out for him and took the lift to the canteen. He sat next to Sandi from Accounts and ate a bowl of porridge with cream. She had her laptop open, eating a Pop Tart, occasionally stirring her coffee with one hand, and typing with the other. She was wholly engrossed, and didn’t appear to notice Mordred at all. He couldn’t help catching sentences out of the corner of his eye. Do you really think that Russian piece of crap’s gonna work on me? and Before they could stop him, he threw himself off Spasskaya Tower. Nadia screamed. He looked around the canteen. Every second person with an open laptop, typing.
Kevin took him to Saint Thomas’s at nine. As promised, it was straight in, straight out. He’d had a nasty ‘fall’, that was what the doctor told him. Stop drinking and clubbing was the hidden subtext. He was home at ten. He ate two paracetamol tablets and a stale Chelsea bun and crawled straight into bed.
He didn’t sleep well. When you lived on your own, there was always the temptation to get up and wander round during bouts of insomnia. Go to the kitchen, put the TV on, read a bit of a magazine, surf the net, fiddle with your apps. No one cared whether you rested or not, and so what if you fell asleep later, at work? You were usually in a bad mood when sleeplessness hit, and work seemed as good a fall guy as anything.
He went to bed for the tenth miserable time at 2pm, and managed to stay there. At seven, his phone rang. It took him a moment to realise where he was. He picked it up and looked at the screen. Alec. Bloody hell. Mind you, anyone would be cause for irritation right now. Still an hour to go. He wanted to get ready at his own pace.
“Hi,” he said.
“You ready to go?” Alec asked.
“It’s only bloody seven o’ clock. It’s not for an hour.”
“I thought we might grab something in the canteen first.”
“I’m not even hungry. Where are you?”
“Outside your block of flats. I’m coming up the stairs now. I thought we’d get the bus over together.”
“Why? Why can’t we just meet there like any normal day?”
“I came over to see if you were okay. Ruby Parker’s orders. I’m to ‘keep an eye’ on you. In a thoughtful, caring way. Also, I forgot to tell you this morning: you’re to put your best suit on.”
There was a knock at the front door.
“That’s me,” Alec said, “obviously. Knocking.”
Another shower, another shave. Alec sat in his pinstripe suit and watched Channel 4 News, then they went downstairs and caught the bus. They arrived at Thames House with ten minutes to spare.
“I’m bloody starving,” Alec said. “Why do you never have any proper food in your flat?”
“I tend to buy then eat, buy then eat. I don’t store things.”
“Why the bloody hell not? What if you get ill? Couldn’t you just keep a few cans for emergencies? And what about guests? I know you’re a vegetarian, but even a can of baked beans or spaghetti hoops or macaroni cheese would be better than nothing.”
“Consider me warned.”
“For your own good. Do you think there’s time for something from the canteen?”
“If we’re quick and there’s no queue. Maybe a slice of pizza?”
“Even a single boiled potato would be better than nothing. Come on.”
When they arrived, the canteen had just moved to its late menu and a new batch of food was being prepared. By coincidence, all that remained from the last sitting was five boiled potatoes. Julie let them have them for free.
“Put salt and a sachet of mayo on,” Alec said, when they were eating. “They’re surprisingly good.”
Three minutes later, they knocked on Ruby Parker’s door. Mordred looked at his watch. By a miracle, they were two minutes early.
“I might as well begin by apologising,” she said, when they were seated. “To you, John. It turns out you were right, after all. There is no ‘internet cloaking device’. Even saying those three words makes me feel slightly silly now. How we – I - can ever have believed it defies me.”
“So what do we have instead?” Mordred asked.
“As you predicted,” she went on, “an apparent conspiracy to withhold information about the protests until too late. The evidence is too glaring for them to deny, though I’m sure they’ll try. We’ve three senior GCHQ executives, including the Director himself, two Joint Intelligence Committee members, one of whom is the chairman Sir Joshua Haines, and the really interesting odd one out, Sir Thomas Calderhouse. Of course, they must have liaised with the Americans, because it ‘got past’ the NSA as well. But that’s out of our jurisdiction.”
“What’s so ‘really interesting’ about Sir Thomas Calderhouse?” Mordred said.
“I’ve suspected for a long time that he’s the head of MI7’s Blue Department,” she said. “The Blue Maiden.”
“Should make for an interesting interview,” Alec remarked. “Given yesterday.”
“I hope so,” she replied.
“I still don’t know why we’re here,” Mordred said. “And I’m not sure Alec does either. Why eight o’clock sharp? Why are we all wearing suits?”
“In a minute, we’re going to get in a car and go across London,” she replied. “There we’re going to meet the six co-conspirators. The fact that they’ve asked to see me probably shows they’re in panic. Their common membership of the same London club doesn’t bode well for them either. We couldn’t have known that at the outset.”
“Do they know you’re bringing us along?” Alec asked.
“I don’t think I could do this without some back up,” she replied. “But neither do I need to match person for person. I’ve enough cards in my hand. John’s coming because he can see things I can’t. You’re coming because I trust your judgement.”
“What do we expect them to say?” Mordred asked.
“As I pointed out earlier,” she said, “the evidence is fairly undeniable. My guess is they’ll want to cut a deal of some sort: concessions for silence. I haven’t mooted anything yet because I don’t know for certain that will be their approach. Obviously, the moment it becomes apparent it is, Phyllis is top of the agenda. We should even get Fenella Decristoforo-Salvaterrra. The most they’re entitled to ask us for is time. We can sit on our findings for a short period, give them a chance to put their separate affairs in order. We can’t, in all conscience, bury what we’ve discovered.”
“Do we have any idea yet why they acted as they did?” Mordred asked.
“Not the slightest,” she replied. “And I can’t even begin to speculate. In many ways, that may turn out to be the most interesting aspect of the entire evening.”
It was dark when they arrived at their destination. A row of Georgian terraced houses on a cul-de-sac terminated by a high park fence topped with razor wire. There was no sign indicating which dwelling was the Godolphin Club, though Ruby Parker seemed to know it. Fully-grown trees and Victorian style lampposts alternated on the pavement, the one taking away nearly all the light the other bestowed. Most of the houses didn’t look lived in. All in all, this felt like one of London’s gloomier, less happy-to-be-part-of-the-modern-multicultural-metropolis nooks.
They were admitted, as was common in these sorts of places, by someone whose role lay somewhere between greeter and waiter, and who, one hundred years ago – and possibly here, today, for all Mordred knew – would probably be described as a servant. About fifty, immaculately pressed black trousers, white shirt, waistcoat, bow tie, ready smile. Ruby Parker gave him their names.
“Follow me, please,” he said. He turned and preceded them up a flight of stairs.
It suddenly occurred to Mordred that Ruby Parker might not hold as many cards as she thought she did. The conspirators had Phyllis, after all. How much they thought they could get in exchange for her they probably didn’t know, but they might well think it was a lot. They might be right. Maybe Ruby Parker didn’t think they’d stoop that low. If so, she was almost certainly wrong. If life had taught him one lesson, it was that there were no depths to which the establishment wouldn’t willingly sink when it felt its existence to be under threat.
They walked across a landing with six closed doors leading off it – this place was a lot bigger than it looked from the outside: possibly, it was two houses knocked into one. They stopped before the end door. The servant knocked, turned the handle to admit them, and retired, closing them in.
The room in which they found themselves was large and furnished in typical traditional London club style. A fireplace, vertical striped wallpaper, framed antique portraits, two sofas, six or seven leather upholstered chairs, discreet standard lamps, and a variety of low-lying tables. There was a strong smell of alcoholic spirits.
They were confronted by six men and two women. One of the latter was Fenella Decristoforo-Salvaterra: she sat with a very old man in a chair, covered by a blanket, obviously her adopted father. The other five men and one woman – all smartly dressed as if for the office and in their late fifties or early sixties - were presumably the conspirators. They stood, faces turned anxiously towards the entrants. There was nothing hostile or sinister about any of them. On the contrary, they looked as if they couldn’t wait for the axe to fall and end their misery.
“Thank you so much for coming over, Ruby,” the man closest to them said. “Of course, we’ve already met on a number of occasions. Allow me to introduce myself and the rest of the room to your two colleagues. I’m Joshua Haines, the Permanent Under-secretary of State for the Ministry of Defence, and also chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee. My committee colleague, Rosie Marshall from the Foreign Office. Robin Partridge, Edward Tumwebaze and Pete Marks from GCHQ. Tom Calderhouse, who I’m now able to tell you, because he’s just resigned, was the head of MI7’s Blue Department. Of course, you’ll already recognise Fenella Decristoforo-Salvaterra and possibly her father Peter, although his appearance has considerably altered in the last few months as a consequence of a terminal illness. Please sit down. We appreciate you probably have lots of questions.”
Three seats had been reserved for them. Without asking, Haines poured three large brandies and brought them over.
“You probably know what my first question is going to be,” Ruby Parker said.
“Phyllis Robinson was dropped off at Thames House ten minutes ago,” Calderhouse said. “I believe Cavendish looked after her quite well, given the obvious constraints on holding a person prisoner. We’ve only had her for a few hours. Just long enough for her to recover from the chloroform and submit to a thorough medical check-up. She was fine once she knew who we were. As of course, she would be.”
“Good. I’d also be very grateful if you could give Steven Harris his marching orders.”
“That’s a bit vindictive, isn’t it?”
“It’s common sense,” she replied. “A traitorous disposition.”
Calderhouse shrugged. “It’s out of my hands. But point taken. I can leave it as a strong recommendation to my successor.”
“I’d like to express my regret for killing one of your agents,” Mordred said. “It’s only just beginning to sink in. In my defence, they did open fire on us, and I honestly don’t think I had much choice, given the situation.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Calderhouse replied. The truth seemed to suddenly dawn. “Oh, yes. I do see now. Sorry, I didn’t realise it was you who’d made him fall. Well, you may be pleased to know that he dropped precisely fourteen feet onto a window cleaner’s platform. Severely winded, bit of damage to the lower back, but he should be back at work within the week.”
“Are you – serious?” Mordred said.
“With respect, what do you think happened?” Calderhouse replied. “If he’d landed in the street after falling from that height, there would have been bits of him everywhere. Even we couldn’t have kept that hush-hush.”
Mordred smiled. “Good. That is good.” He drank his brandy.
“What do you want from us?” Ruby Parker asked.
“Want?” Haines said. “What do you think we want?”
“I take it you want to make a deal. I warn you, I can’t suppress our findings, not for anything. I am, however, prepared to give you a little compassionate time to prepare your families.”
“Doesn’t it worry you that one or all of us may flee the country?” Tumwebaze asked.
“As I say,” she replied, “it’s a risk I’m prepared to take.”
Haines scoffed. “Come, come, Ruby. You talk as if we’re murderers.”
“People have died as a result of this,” she replied.
“We gave them the war they themselves wanted,” he said. “We gave them a reason for existing. As Vernon Johns once said, ‘If you haven’t found a cause worth dying for, you haven’t found a reason for living.’”
Alec smiled drily. “With respect, sir, that’s easy for you to say.”
“Do you really think we didn’t expect you tonight?” Haines asked. “If so, think again. This, or something very like it – our arrest and subsequent exposure on the rack of public disgrace – was part of our intention from the beginning. In one sense, you’ve merely stumbled onto the stage. You’re playing the walk-on roles we wrote for you long ago.”
Mordred felt his hackles rise. He felt Alec’s rise too.
“I’m not sure I follow,” Ruby Parker said.
“I don’t expect you do,” Haines told her. “That’s because you haven’t shown the slightest curiosity about what must surely, from your point of view, be the oddest thing of all. The question of how we eight became modern-day gunpowder plotters.”
She smiled. “I expected you all to deny it. I expected to have to wrangle, at best, and, at worst, fight for my reputation, perhaps even my life. I therefore put my curiosity on ice.”
“As a luxury you couldn’t afford to indulge,” Calderhouse said.
“I take it you do feel curiosity,” Haines asked her.
“Naturally.”
“Good, because I’m going to satisfy it. I’m going to tell you, and then everyone in the world. I’ve been rehearsing for a long time now. This is a performance I hope I’ll give again and again for the rest of my life. Welcome to its opening night.”
Mordred sat back in his chair. Telling a curious story in an old-time London club. Rather like Arthur Conan Doyle.
“Somewhere in the last fifty years,” Haines said. “Britain – and the world, really - went seriously wrong. It was Peter who first made me realise it, discussions we had about science. I’m sixty-two now. When I was young, we were putting men on the moon. If you’d asked me what the future would be like, I’d have said bright. I honestly believed that by 2010, we’d have colonised Mars, eradicated world hunger, discovered a cure for cancer, and all be working two-day weeks. We all thought that, all of us. But somewhere along the way, governments everywhere stopped showing an interest in science. One by one, they were captured by finance, and one by one, that’s all they began caring about. So where have we ended up? Well, as a by-product of marketing and sales, we’ve got the greatest social networking machinery the world’s ever seen. And that’s the sum of our achievement, really. Meanwhile, the best minds continue to be sucked away from urgent scientific questions and put to work on inane financial ones. In short, Ms Parker, my seven co-conspirators and I did what we did because we looked at what the world’s become and decided it’s not right. Obviously, we’re prepared to go to prison for what we believe.”
“Where does the NSA fit into this?” she asked.
“That’s a matter for Washington to discover,” Haines replied. “Suffice it to say, we worked together. Some of us and some of their people. It’s not for us to give them up, but I doubt the CIA will have to dig deep.”
“So you actually want me to call the police?” Ruby Parker said.
“We’ve already prepared our families,” Haines told her. “When you leave here, we expect you to turn us in, yes. It goes without saying that nothing you possess can be used to incriminate Peter or Fenella. They’re booked on to a private jet direct to Saint Martha’s rock tomorrow morning.”
“But what if the police want to question them?” Alec asked.
“We all know they’re not implicated,” Haines said. “What you may have believed about them was so much mischievous hearsay, bizarre speculation, and hardly their responsibility. Keeping them here on the grounds that the police might want to ‘interview’ them would be both pointless and unkind, especially in view of Peter’s condition. And it could be embarrassing for you.”
“Agreed,” Ruby Parker said.
“In that case,” Haines said, “I think that concludes our meeting. Thank you for coming to meet us.”
The servant put his head round the door. Mordred wondered if he’d been listening in all along. He hadn’t noticed anyone inside the room, say, pull a cord or anything.
“Could you have our coats ready, Timothy, please?” Haines asked. “Mr Mordred, I believe Peter and his daughter would like a word with you before you leave. In private.”
Everyone shuffled out surreally. In fact, nothing that had happened here tonight had possessed the slightest suggestion of normality. It had been like something from a deranged Agatha Christie novel: no innocent suspects, only perpetrators and detectives, the former calling the latter to the library to explain why they did it.
Timothy closed the door on the last of the leavers. Mordred went to sit with Fenella and her father. She wore a dark brown dress and had her hair in a bun; he was covered in a blue blanket. He looked weary and emaciated, but when he spoke, his voice sounded almost healthy.
“I only wanted to say, please thank your sister for me. She gave them a good run for their money. It’s not over yet, tell her. She may expect a little help from me shortly.”
“I’ll pass the message on,” Mordred said.
“Could you come and visit us – me – on Saint Martha’s Rock?” Fenella asked. “I don’t think this is the end for World War O. We need to keep in touch. And I’d like to show you something I think might amuse you. You’re welcome any time.”
“I’m sure I can justify that on the grounds of national security. Where are Rory and Maria, by the way?”
“Downstairs, I believe,” Fenella said. “Good night, Mr Mordred. Don’t forget, will you?”
“I promise I’ll visit as soon as I conceivably can.”
When he got outside, a black taxi was waiting with its engine idling. Ruby Parker and Alec sat side by side on the back seat, talking quietly. Mordred got into the rear and sat down on the chair facing them. The car pulled away. Ruby Parker rang Phyllis and spoke to her consolingly for a long time. She told her to go home, take tomorrow morning off and report in at midday.
The car pulled up outside Thames House. Ruby Parker went inside. The two men exchanged goodnights and went their separate ways, feeling melancholy.
