Ralph Rafferty fidgeted in the leather armchair. He wasn’t comfortable and he couldn’t get warm. Even with the coal fire blazing in the hearth, it was dark and chilly in the corner of the famous London club not far from Pall Mall. This nightmare needed sorting and the General was late. He was always late. The old man ought to be taught a lesson. Rafferty stretched out his long spidery legs towards the flames, before crossing them at the ankles. The porter had handed him a tie at the entrance. It was still rolled up on the side table.
Anyone would think the General wanted to make the point that he was the busier man. But who was he, after all? A chocolate soldier. Rafferty was a statesman – a brilliant young statesman, moreover, destined to transform the fortunes of his country. Rafferty was only three months into his job as Home Secretary. He might owe his elevation to the bomb in London’s banqueting hall which wiped out the PM and seven members of the Cabinet, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t up to it. Ralph Rafferty had every intention of going down in history alongside Wellington and Churchill. He let the thought of it roll around his head for a while – the glory and portraits, the front cover of Time magazine. Maybe a Nobel Peace Prize – even if he had to start a war to get one. He lifted his chin a fraction, as if a sculptor had begged him to alter his pose, the better to catch the light. Yes, the future belonged to Ralph Rafferty, if he could just keep it together for the next twenty-four hours.
His foot in its handmade shoe bounced up and down in barely suppressed irritation. He should be ploughing through his red boxes rather than sitting here wasting time. The club had a ban on mobile phones. How ridiculous was that in this day and age. Even the air tasted stale, he admitted to himself, as if it was the self-same air that had been breathed by the same kind of men for decades without a window ever having been opened.
Even as a junior minister, and certainly as Home Secretary, Rafferty could have had his pick of London clubs. Occasionally, he pined for something with cocaine laid out in the gents and an Eastern European barman who knew how to make a decent negroni. But he knew this much from his father – your club was a message to the Old Boys that they could trust you. That even if you were occasionally pictured on a carbon framed, hand-built, customized Sarto bike with bicycle clips over the Savile Row suit, you were still one of them.
This place was ancient, exclusive and cripplingly expensive. It allowed no oligarchs, no new money and no women – whatever the law said. Through the centuries, this had been the club of five prime ministers and too many cabinet ministers to count; this had been his grandfather’s club, his father’s club, and so this club was his. However lumpy the custard and bad-tempered the porters.
And, he was willing to admit, he enjoyed the frisson he created here among the country’s wealthiest and most powerful old fogeys. Their desperation in the dining room for him to spare them some pleasantry about the weather as they lifted the bone from their sole meunière. Sound chap, young Rafferty. I knew his father y’know. They were all of them such fools. He picked up The Times, checked his Apple watch with some ostentation, and filled out the crossword in one fluid go. It was garbage. He had no idea of the answers, and he was always careful to carry the paper away with him. He didn’t speak six languages either. He had ‘hello’, ‘how are you?’, ‘have you lost weight?’, ‘it’s a pleasure to be here’ and ‘thank you so much’ in eight. It took remarkably little effort in politics to be considered brilliant.
The gin and tonic fizzed on the tongue, but it did nothing to improve his mood. The young waiter in his white jacket and tight black trousers drifted across to Rafferty. ‘Can I get you anything else, sir?’
Rafferty afforded him a smile of infinite charm. ‘No, thank you, Jonny.’ He made a point of remembering unimportant people’s names – they were always so flattered. Behind his trademark round spectacles, he watched with narrowed eyes as the waiter sashayed over to another powerful man in another dark corner of the club’s smoking room. The lad was a flirt and a thing of beauty, it had to be said. Wasted in this place.
Rafferty tossed his head to rearrange the sweep of hair that fell down over his face, his fingertips settling it just above his eyebrows. The cartoonists thought it was vanity, and in a way it was. If it was vanity to want to hide the real Ralph Rafferty. Courtesy of the three skin-graft operations in his adolescence, the number 666, which his twin brother had once carved into his forehead, was no longer visible. No longer visible, that is, to anyone except Rafferty. Hence the sweep of hair. In his nightmares, he still felt the weight of Christian’s body on his chest – his brother’s bony knees pinning down his shoulders, and the blood streaming from the open wounds into his eyes. Still heard himself screaming for his mother to help him.
After the ‘incident’, as they insisted on calling it, his stricken parents had Christian quietly committed to a psychiatric hospital. His parents were long since dead, but occasionally a doctor rang to argue that with recent advances in antipsychotic medications, his brother should be allowed to return to society. But Rafferty had no intention of letting that happen. It was, he decided, worth every penny of Christian’s share of the family trust to keep his twin locked up in St Mungo’s and medicated out of his head.
He knew his brother wasn’t insane. Never had been. Ralph had tortured him for years till finally deciding that Christian had to go. He’d planned everything meticulously. Even as a child he had known to keep his need to inflict pain hidden from his parents and teachers and friends. He had successfully hidden it from everyone – except for his twin brother. The other particular secret he and Christian shared was the reason his brother carved the number in the first place – his discovery of a gleeful Ralph disembowelling their golden retriever on the stone-flagged floor of the cellar. Of course, Ralph had planned it all, including hanging the family cat and her litter of kittens in Christian’s wardrobe a couple of hours earlier, but his brother wasn’t to know that.
Sitting by the hearth, Rafferty allowed himself a smirk. After the ‘666’ attack, sobbing in the arms of his distraught mother, it was indeed predictably easy to deny responsibility. To pass off the dead pets as his brother’s work. He didn’t think either of them would forget the look of searing hatred that passed between them as he stood at the doorway, his mother’s arm around him, while white-coated orderlies dragged away his twin. Out of interest at university, he’d once filled out an ‘Are You a Psychopath?’ quiz in the Observer and ticked thirty-eight out of forty boxes. It didn’t worry him, but he did at least have enough insight to realize it should.
He was the future of British politics, he told everyone who would listen. Modernism was his brand. Another Emmanuel Macron. Another Obama. Another Blair. Visionary, forward-looking but strong in his convictions, a modernizer but one intent on protecting the country’s interests at a time of acute vulnerability post-Brexit and post-Trump – whatever the cost to himself or anyone else.
And courtesy of Tobias Hawke, everything he’d ever dreamed of was both within his grasp and at risk of turning to dust. Hawke was an unpleasant and arrogant bastard but his AI work was decades ahead of anyone else in the field – the UK was looking at another industrial revolution. Productivity and GDP would go through the roof. If only the bastard would cancel the gala – this gala risked ‘sharing’ Syd and all Syd’s capabilities with the wider world, which Rafferty didn’t like at all. This shouldn’t be about Hawke’s genius and a global response to a new consciousness in the universe. This time belonged to Ralph Rafferty – and his nation, of course. And not to mention that Hawke knew far too much for comfort.
So yes, he would have liked something more from the beautiful waiter, but he had those inclinations under control as well. The public was no longer horrified by gay politicians. He knew he would have met with the same success in public life had he declared himself to be bisexual, but he didn’t trust himself. Because his predilections included not just the firm bodies of young men and women, but the fantasy of wrapping his hands around their throats and squeezing until the life force drained from them. That, he could not allow himself.
Perhaps one day, he mused, his eyes on the waiter’s firm buttocks, swilling the herb-scented Gin and It around his mouth. When he was retired and free from close protection, he’d drive somewhere distant and grim, pick up a fragile whore desperate for cash or drugs, and indulge himself in a moment of exquisite pleasure. Perhaps then? Or even earlier, if he could find a way?
But no, he forced himself to look away from the waiter’s attentive body, the bulging bicep, the smooth pour of coffee into another member’s cup. He polished his spectacles with the tail of the borrowed silk tie before securing them around his ears. He was altogether safer with his dull wife. He wasn’t kind to her, but then again, what did she expect?
His more immediate problem was the scandal that would end his political career if this particular monumental fuck-up ever got out.
‘You’re late,’ he said, as the figure sat down with a ferocious grunt in the chair opposite him, the buttoned leather groaning in protest at the weight of its new occupant.
‘You’re lucky I’m here at all.’ General Kirkham then shouted across to the waiter, oblivious to the lad’s charms, ‘The usual, and sharpish.’
Rafferty was many things, but a fool wasn’t one of them. He didn’t for one moment believe General Kirkham liked him. The man was a Glaswegian brute. You could see it in every part of him – the eye bags hanging down to his jowls, the jutting jaw giving him the underbite of a hungry animal, and the huge hands, calloused despite the years he had spent behind a desk.
And was there any need for him to wear the uniform? With all those ghastly jangling medals and gaudy ribbons. All that did was draw attention to himself. Lord knows the New Army had had more than its share of bad publicity lately. A privatized army had seemed like the perfect solution to rising costs, increased defence commitments, and an isolationist US under President Donald Trump. But the ferocity with which the New Army had put down recent public protests had not done their cause any favours. Rafferty suspected privatization of the armed forces was an experiment which had had its day. Still, Rafferty and the General’s interests coincided when it came to Tobias Hawke, and that could only be a good thing – at least for the pair of them. The General was paranoid about the country’s national security, and that paranoia was something Rafferty could exploit.
He leant in towards the General in a bid to keep the conversation private. ‘You said Hawke could be persuaded to keep quiet about what happened and keep Syd under wraps. Next thing, I’ve an invitation to a gala on my desk and I’m being briefed that his wife killed an intruder. What is she – a ninja?’
‘We couldn’t predict the trollop getting the better of a trained professional – it was a fluke – and “the intruder” can’t be traced back to us. My men are loyal.’
There was silence between them while Jonny served the General his Hennessy XO cognac and slid away as fast as he could. ‘It’s bad enough Hawke insists on telling the world about his precious AI breakthrough. But may I remind you, General, that if what actually happened in that particular circle of hell gets out, everything is over. The millions this government has invested through the years will be money down the drain. Moreover, you’ll end up in prison and I’ll end up your cellmate.’
‘Hold your nerve, Rafferty. “From this wall, we do not retreat!”’ The General scowled at the politician. ‘Let me remind you that the country is vulnerable on all sides. Russia, China, the US, even the sodding Europeans can say and do what they like to us now. We’ve no diplomatic leverage and no clout to protect our citizens here or abroad. We’ve barely got half the nuclear capability we used to have. Do you know we only have one per cent of the total global stockpile of nuclear weapons! One per cent!’
Rafferty did know, because the General spat out the figure at every opportunity.
‘But with Hawke’s work we can hold off any and all of the bastards till kingdom come.’ Aeron Kirkham wiped his mouth with his hand and Rafferty was again reminded of a slavering dog. ‘I won’t allow a few last-minute scruples in Hawke or anyone else blow it for us.’
‘The Chinese are sniffing around – you know that?’ Rafferty said, watching the General.
‘I know that slimeball, Octavius Chin, goes home a hero if he screws this for us. Hawke is decades ahead of the Chinese on all of this.’
‘Chin knows something’s wrong. Don’t ask me how, but he slid up to me at some Foreign Office function last night wanting to deal.’
‘Without Hawke blowing the whistle, the Chinese have nothing.’
‘I should never have let you persuade me to allow those boys out on day release,’ Rafferty said. ‘If Hawke tells the world what went on, it’s over. What if he tells his wife? What if he’s already told her?’
General Kirkham’s eyes, as they rested on Rafferty, blazed. Loaded as they were with scorn and evil, and – some trick of the light, surely – mirroring the flames of the fire in the hearth.
The General reached out his massive hand and patted Rafferty on his bony knee, and Rafferty felt the visceral dislike he had for the older man break out like sweat. ‘Silence is a virtue, laddie. Hawke will understand that, one way or another.’