The Wormwood Code (7 page)

'Arf.'

'It'd make you want to go and live in France, if it wasn't for the fact that they're worse.'

'Arf.'

He took another bite of a bacon sandwich and watched another little guarded look in the PM's eyes, as the Chancellor said something else he disagreed with, while at the same time doing that thing with his bottom lip.

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1056hrs

G
rogan and Eason were leaning on a railing above the Thames, staring down into the grey water. Grogan was smoking his seventeenth cigarette of the day, Eason was eating a cream cheese bagel with bacon, lettuce, honey, marmite, more cream cheese and more bacon. There was already a dollop of cheese on his tie, to add to the ketchup, and another smear on the tip of his nose. Grogan was letting the cheese on his nose go for the time being.

'So, we have a decision to make,' said Grogan.

Eason bit into the bagel, sending more cream cheese squishing out the middle, like cold white lava oozing from a volcanic bakery product.

'Where to go for third breakfast?' he said.

'No.'

'Lunch?'

Grogan blew smoke to the side, tossed the cigarette butt out towards the water, although a slight wind made sure that it never made it that far, and gave Eason the usual look.

'Tory HQ?' said Eason.

'Yes,' said Grogan. 'We need a plan.'

Eason chewed food and wiped his arm across his mouth.

'Why do I hate the sound of that?' he said.

'Because I'm going to sit in the office and do sod all while you have to go undercover and suck up to a bunch of Tory wankers.'

Eason took another huge bite of bagel, and then crammed the rest of it into his mouth, so that his cheeks bulged with food.

'Huck's sake,' he said.

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1657hrs

T
he PM stormed into the office and slammed the door behind him. Williams, Thackeray, Barney and Igor were sitting around the room, having a discussion on Chelsea's impending Premiership triumph, and whether it could just as easily have been Hartlepool or Wigan or Rushden & Diamonds who were in that position if a Russian gazillionaire had pitched up to buy the club. Barney and Igor were being drawn into the PM's inner circle, which didn't seem to bother anyone.

'Did you hear it?' said the PM. 'Did you hear it?

They looked around the room at each other, wondering if he was talking about another one of the Chancellor's farts.

'Liar! He called me a liar!'

'Oh that,' said Williams, and Thackeray nodded and looked back at the notes he was making for the following day's keynote speech. Barney shrugged and turned back to Barber's Monthly, with all the news on the latest scissor technology coming out of the big hairdressing technology industries in Nevada.

'Liar!' repeated the PM. 'He called me a liar! A liar! I mean, do I say that he's the spawn of the undead? But it's going to come to that. Liar! Jesus suffering Christ!'

'Well you are,' said Thackeray matter-of-factly, looking up from his notes.

'What?' said the PM.

'Well, you know, you are a liar. You lie all the time. I write your speeches, and they're full of lies.'

The PM looked a bit taken aback, wasn't sure what to say.

'I mean, it's no big deal. You're a politician, of course you lie. Everyone expects you to lie. Even if you told the truth, everyone would think you were lying anyway, so you might as well just lie in the first place.'

'I think you should lie even more,' added Williams.

'But...' began the PM, but he wasn't sure what to say after that. Thackeray had a point after all. 'Well, there was also his line about the wishy-washy, pussyfooting government.'

Williams and Thackeray stared at him. Neither of them said, 'if the cap fits', but it was implicit in their eyebrows.

'You're saying I'm over-reacting?' said the PM eventually.

'Yes, Sir,' said Williams.

'Sit down and have a doughnut,' said Thackeray.

'Let me tell you about the new combs coming out of the States,' said Barney.

'Arf.'

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2213hrs

S
aturday night, another day of the campaign behind them all, election day another day nearer. Barney sat alone in a bar just off Marble Arch, nursing a slow beer. Didn't want to drink too much, another early start with the PM's thinning hair the following day. Igor was having dinner with a couple of young American ladies on tour who he'd met on The Mall whilst out for a walk earlier in the day. The PM sat in bed in his pyjamas trying to concentrate on a report on world hunger for the following day. Eason and Grogan worked late, devising a stratagem which would allow Eason entry to Tory Party HQ.

And meanwhile, across the Atlantic, it was mid-afternoon in Virginia, where the real power lay, and where the real decisions which would affect the outcome of the British General Election would be taken. Except, it was a Saturday afternoon, and no one with any interest in it was at their desk.

1345hrs

A
quiet Sunday, eleven days before the general election. Anywhere between a four and ten point lead for the government in the opinion polls in all the Sundays, and for all that the politicians and the media might try to make something of every little snippet they could get their hands on, it was dull, dull, dull and there was little that any of them could do about it. If only they'd all known that the Prime Minister's personal barber had been murdered with a chicken just over a week earlier. The leader of the opposition had turned to personal attacks on the Prime Minister's integrity, with his principal speech writers arguing over whether to call the PM a "liar", a "despicable liar", "very naughty and bad" or a "cheatin', lyin', bitch-slappin' muthafukka". The alternative opposition, in its desperation to break away from the 21% point mark in the polls, had finally turned to Iraq, which it had been holding off on for two weeks.

The Prime Minister was sitting on the London Eye with his main assistants Thackeray and Williams. Also along for the ride were his two new assistants, Barney Thomson, the barber, and Igor, the deaf-mute hunchbacked barber's aide, who had originally been brought in to deal with his hair, but were more and more becoming dragged into the PM's inner circle; although more in an agony aunt kind of position rather than in a policy making capacity. The PM had thought that the Eye might give him a different perspective on things. Had also thought that going amongst the public in central London might be a bit of an election coup, but of course everyone had just been hacked off at him for taking up an entire capsule on the Eye, with his security guys on the one before and the one after, and most of the people there had of course been foreign tourists anyway.

The four men in the capsule were waiting for the PM to start any discussion. Thackeray had tried as soon as they'd moved off, but the PM had been distracted and had talked excitedly about the vision which the Eye afforded them and how it was a wonderful corollary for his government and the vision which it had brought to the country. Thackeray had shut up, they had allowed the PM to grandstand for a while, and then he had talked even himself into silence. Now, as they reached the apex of the loop, a melancholy had descended upon them, as they looked out over London in all its grey, low-rise ordinariness. From up here it looked vast and unremarkable, but had that silent beauty of any of the great cities. Barney glanced at the PM, recognised the feeling of gloom which had begun to dominate his meetings with him. Could tell the man wasn't happy, wasn't enjoying the campaign. Would probably have been more upbeat with more of a fight.

'What d'you think about God?' the PM suddenly threw out into the capsule.

Thackeray and Williams glanced at each other, and immediately decided that this was one which was probably aimed at Barney in any case.

'Arf,' said Igor.

The PM nodded. Even he was beginning to get a handle on Igor's monosyllabic utterances, which contained so much in such a short bark.

'It's absurd, isn't it?' the PM began, looking down at the river. 'Most of the British public don't believe in God, couldn't give a stuff. No one goes to church anymore, the media don't even pay religion lip service. The only aspects of religion that a majority of the country actually care about are
The Da Vinci Code
and the architecture, but just imagine.' He looked at them intently, demanding attention. 'Just imagine I gave a press conference and said just that, said that I thought the whole God thing was a load of crap. We live in a world of natural selection, with no outside influence whatsoever. God? I mean, please. But can I say that? Just imagine the stink. Jesus, they'd be all over me like a viral infection.' He looked around the four men. None of them had anything to say. Belief in God aside, he wasn't wrong after all.

'Liar?' he said. 'The Undead Bastard calls me a liar. But if I am, it's the media which makes me one, with their fucking piety. Imagine, you know, imagine I suggested that God was indicted by the War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague for mass genocide after the Noah's Ark debacle. What then? D'you think I'd get decent press? I don't think so.'

They looked at him a little curiously. There are tangents and there are tangents. The Eye lumbered on. The PM burbled away.

'But, you know, if they came to me and said, do you believe in the story of Noah's Ark, what am I supposed to say? If I say I don't, they'd crucify me. If I say I do, then I'm in a position of having to justify mass genocide, and why we're chasing Karadic and Mladic but not the Lord. It's a tough one, don't you think?'

'All I can say, Prime Minister,' said Williams, to break his flow, 'is that I'm glad Paxman didn't bring up the subject if you're going to talk like that.'

'I have genuine angst about this,' said the PM.

'Noah's Ark?' asked Barney.

'Yes,' said the PM. 'I mean, what if people start talking about it?'

He looked at them, searching their faces for some sort of help with his internal angst.

'What if the politically correct brigade start to ask questions about why this tale of mass slaughter is taught in Sunday schools and in books for little children? They'd immediately look at me, as the most important person in the country, and then what am I going to do? I'm screwed, and those other two Muppets would just be able to sit back and laugh. It's madness.'

'I think, Prime Minister,' said Barney, 'that this might be what you're descending into now.'

The PM glanced at him. It was the kind of remark which would have had Williams or Thackeray dispatched to Afghanistan on the next plane, but they both knew that Barney could get away with it. And while they both resented the hell out of Barney and his new position as confidante to the PM, they had begun to wonder if they could use him to feed opinions and information to the PM which they knew he wouldn't want to hear from them.

'You say that Barney, but then there's the plague of cancers after the Philistines stole the Ark. I mean, he doesn't just grab the first couple of chaps who got their hands on the thing, does he? He does everyone, the whole flippin' lot. Thousands of them. Cancer! And they didn't have radiotherapy in those days, and even if they had, who knows what their health service would have been like. Worse than ours probably. Women, children, everyone. Politicians, even those who spoke out against the Ark theft in the first place. I know in modern translations they've downgraded it to benign tumours or a bit of a cold or web viruses or something, but in the original Greek or Latin or Aramaic, or whatever the heck it was written in, it was cancer. I mean, how can you possibly justify that? You can't. But if the press bring it up, I'm screwed. If I say that I don't think it was actually a true story, they kill me. If I say I believe it, then they start asking about God being called to account for his actions. Law suits, the whole thing.'

He stared at them, each of the four other men in turn.

'And
you
think
I'm
mad?'

Thackeray and Williams recognised that their boss was off on some deranged tangent and had long ago decided to leave him to it. Barney thought about adding to the Prime Ministerial angst, but then decided to remain in silence, as the capsule began its slow descent back to earth.

'Arf,' muttered Igor, as he too looked grimly down into the grey waters of the Thames.

A slow Sunday in the middle of the election campaign. Four to ten points ahead in the polls, the politics becoming increasingly personal, nothing really to be gained or lost, the country just wanting it all over with so that they could get back to normality, and talking about Posh & Becks, and qualifying for the next year's World Cup, and the Ashes series in the summer, and 'I'm A Celebrity Get Me A Haircut', and 'Big Brother 15' and 'Celebrity News At Ten' and 'What Not To Wear In The Summer House'. The only minor blip in the slow march to victory for the government had been the murder of the PM's personal barber Ramone, but the addition of Barney Thomson to his staff had made sure that there had been no ill effects on his hair, and the police were doing a good job of making sure that no one, other than those involved in the investigation, got to hear about it. Such was the discretion being shown by Scotland Yard, that the PM and his people had almost forgotten about it, in the rush of polls and campaign speeches, so that the possibility of the whole sad affair of his barber and the chicken blowing up in his face before election day, had been completely forgotten.

Beneath them London muddled through another ordinary Sunday afternoon.

'You know, sometimes I wish I'd never bothered invading Iraq,' said the PM, looking forlornly down at the river.

0716hrs

T
he PM's inner circle were sitting around the breakfast table discussing the day ahead. The Prime Minister, Thackeray and Williams, Barney and Igor. Outside the room, a gaggle of advisors and parliamentarians, all of whom wanted the Prime Ministerial ear, were waiting in glum silence, wondering why they had become so excluded from election party strategy.