Bolt Action (34 page)

Outside MI5 headquarters

Thames House

1545 London time, 1045 Washington time, 2045 Islamabad time

A
touch of irony, as Sheila ‘Noppy’ Davane waits by the vast, neoclassical structure that houses Britain’s domestic security service. Her protection team consists of two of Tristie Merritt’s former comrades. Current, serving members of 14 Coy., who do a lot of MI5’s muscle work.

All three scan the approaches to the junction where Horseferry Road comes in from their left, heading straight over the roundabout to the north end of Lambeth Bridge, as Millbank runs up the side of the building and continues parallel with the river.

Just the lightest traffic. Except, of course, for the two vans parked as inconspicuously as possible. A bespoke laundry service and a flower delivery agency, complete with Interflora logo. Nice touch. The laundry service is MI5’s. The other, Davane presumes, with a wry grin, must be somebody scrambled on behalf of the CIA. All told, probably about twenty different sets of people are waiting to listen in live to her cell phone . . .

Boy. She’d enjoyed giving it both barrels on the link-up with Washington. Real catharsis. There’s something ornery and obtuse hard-wired into her Protestant, Carrickfergus-farming DNA that loves drawing America’s attention to the perils of terrorism. Such johnny-come-latelys they are. This, after
monitoring the cash flood coming across the Atlantic all those years, for Sinn Fein and the Provos, from church groups, social clubs and bars. Dippy Irish idiots, most of them were, with their mawkish, romantic sense of patriotism.

See how it feels, friend?

Her phone rings, and she’s quick to answer.

‘
Noppy. I’ve got to make this speedy.
’

‘I’ll bet you do.’ Davane looks left and right. ‘How close are you to the Canadian coast?’

There’s a long pause. Wasn’t expecting that, were you? She can hear a quiet discussion in the background. ‘
Salahuddin guesses about a hundred and fifty miles.
’

‘Well, you’ve got seventy miles to go, then.’

‘
That’s when it’s going to happen?
’

Davane doesn’t offer anything. Just sniffs rather loudly, before continuing, all business. ‘So let’s get this over with. I’ve got your letter from the Attorney General. Just as well he was in London . . .’ She tightens her grip on the slim brown attaché case.

‘
You don’t sound particularly cut up.
’

‘Tristie, I had a look at your file. You do good stuff. You did choose a worthy cause with those injured soldiers. And well done, by the way, from Colonel Molloy. He likes you very much, and I do trust his judgement. So between the three of us, things could have worked out . . . but for today’s unfortunate circumstances, of course. If I could have helped, well, I would have tried. Belie that reputation I have.’ One of the 14 Coy. squad-dies moves away from Davane’s shoulder . . . points across the bridge facing them, to a pale grey Bentley. Moving very slowly, about halfway across, travelling at kerb-crawl speed towards them. They can’t get a read on the plates. Not yet.

‘
A car is approaching you, Noppy. Nice car. You need to get into it. Just you. Not Pinky and Perky by your side.
’

It doesn’t surprise Davane in the slightest that Merritt’s got a pair of eyes on the ground. Good eyes evidently because the body they’re attached to is not visible to her and her protectors.
Merritt, you’re actually OK, Davane acknowledges. Better than OK. ‘The Bentley?’ The silver-haired Ulsterwoman has to squint a little, even with her thick bifocals. ‘I’m not getting in.’

‘
When you see who’s in the car, you’ll get in . . . I promise it’s safe.
’

One of the army guys is reading the plate number into a cuff-microphone. Delta Three. Juliet. Uniform. Romeo. Three.

‘
Pinky and Perky can trot along beside the car, you’re not going far.
’

‘We’ll see about that.’

‘
Noppy. I’ve got to run. It’s getting a bit sporty at this end . . .’

‘Tristie . . .’ But the line is dead.

The Bentley pulls to a halt at the roundabout at the north end of the bridge, maybe thirty yards away, giving way to a trail of cyclists passing down Millbank. That’s when the realisation hits Davane. Her instant reaction is to choke and splutter, and – dammit all – appreciate. Another plus-mark for this girl Merritt.

She nudges the cuff-mike soldier. ‘Stop the plate check. Look . . .’ And she points to the front of the car. Delta Three Juliet . . . stupid way to check vanity plates. It spells out D3 JUR3. Or, from a distance, DE JURE, a Latin legal expression, meaning ‘by right’.

Davane and her protectors can’t help but be entranced as the car eases towards them, and its cream-coloured, retractable canvas roof starts to fold away mechanically. One layer into another, until all is safely tucked out of sight. Twenty-five seconds, and by that time the Bentley has eased up on to the kerb in front of them. There’s a heavy bass, reggae beat.

The liveried chauffeur quietens the music. And beckoning to Sheila ‘Noppy’ Davane, from the back seat, with his gold-encrusted fingers and a Caribbean smile of purest white teeth, is the most irritating, vexatious barrister in Britain. Defender of villains, upholder of human rights, perpetual scourge of the police, and MI5 in particular. Thick dreadlocked hair spilling over his shoulders. Basking in the fact that the car, his taste in
European women, the music and the Rastafarian dreadlocks drive most people, certainly every last
Sun
and
Express
reader, to absolute distraction.

In the most polished of upmarket accents, the barrister belly-laughs his welcome. ‘Do come and join me, Ms Davane.’ So speaketh Beveridge Clairmonte, native son of Hagley Gap in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica, LLB, qualified 1984, Queen’s Counsel 2007.

With the shiniest of white teeth, he radiates bonhomie. ‘Let’s put past hostilities to one side. I believe my client might have something of value for you, and vice versa. Shall we proceed without further ado?’

The White House

I
n a small communication suite off the main situation room an urgent conference is taking place. Leading it is the Secretary of State. Although the president is also present, he’s been asked to say nothing and stay out of vision of the various phone cameras. ‘Keep yourself in the background, Mr President . . . but you need to listen to all of this . . . so you know what’s happening out there.’

The past five minutes have been a roll-call of disaster. From the US embassies throughout the world the first diplomatic reactions are being filtered, passed up to the State Department’s various bureaus and on to the White House.

By phone, from the State Department complex on C Street, comes a trembly voice, wired with too much coffee. ‘So far we’ve heard word formally from . . .’ The undersecretary of political affairs, reading through a long list of countries ‘. . . Tajikistan. Afghanistan. Brunei. Malaysia. Maldives. Niger. Jordan. Oman. Indonesia. Kyrgyzstan. Nigeria . . .’ There’s a pause, paper is shuffled, and the roll-call continues. ‘. . . Bahrain. Bangladesh. Chad. Morocco. Tunisia. Algeria. The UAE. Pakistan, obviously.’ The undersecretary takes a long, despairing breath. ‘The footprint is the Middle East, South, South-East and Central Asia, and basically the whole of sub-Saharan Africa.’

The Secretary of State shakes his head, as an aide silently shorthands all of this for the record. ‘And this has come through in the past two hours?’

‘Pretty much,’ replies the disembodied voice. ‘But mostly in
the past hour. That’s when it really took off.’ Something like awe in his voice because this, this . . . wildfire has never occurred on anybody’s watch before.

The Secretary of State turns to the president. ‘I know you’ve made the decision to interdict this flight in the best interests of protecting the American people. I understand. But this is what the rest of the world thinks: those names are the countries that have already signalled – remember, the plane is still in the air, the passengers alive – that there will be definitive and forceful diplomatic repercussions. And these are our
allies.
Where there are parliaments they either have voted or will soon; where there are absolute rulers, they have ruled. Most likely it will fall like this: if these countries host US military bases, they will move to have these closed, or make the functioning of the bases deliberately unworkable. Where there are Status of Forces Agreements allowing our troops to operate, they will sue to have these cancelled. Mostly these SOFAs operate with at least a year’s notice period . . . but so many countries suing us, all at the same time, and for the same reason, will give this an irresistible force. I am sorry you have to be here, but there’s no gloss to put on this, this . . .’ and his face blanks for a moment; the situation doesn’t compute with normal vocabulary ‘. . . this collapse.’

From his side seat, President Hannah looks truly aghast, the chief executive watching his Fortune 500 company unravelling into a penny stock in a matter of hours. ‘I can’t believe this is happening. Happening to me . . .’

On board PK412

T
ristie tells herself, I am not giving up,
I am not
, but I have to go back. She’s about ten feet forward of the entry hole Whiffler made, perhaps over the galley on the right side, but has to go back. It’s not going to work . . .

Jesus. The pain, you wouldn’t believe. Dragging her hips across saw-edged wing-nuts gouging her flesh, inching along, snagging every damned thing . . . All her clothes are long gone. Discarded. She’s naked.

She shoves back against one of the aluminium cross-spars, to retreat in the direction of the hole. It’s hard to push against the friction of your own dead weight. Shoulders strained, neck muscles weary. She has to cant her head, like a miner working a thin seam. It’s cold. In the torchlight, her breath clouding. Her heart thumping. Her skin frozen numb.

As she works her way back, Tristie’s feet feel the jagged edges of the opening. ‘Whiffler . . . Whiffler.’ A note of panic in her voice. ‘I need you.’

She lets herself sink on to the icy floor of the cavity.

Whiffler puts a hand on her foot as he pokes his head up through the gap. ‘What is it, Tristie?’ He can see her in the torch beam, looking back at him over her shoulder. He boggles a bit when the first thing he sees is her clenched backside, before looking up the line of her leg, repeating, ‘Tristie, what is it?’

Whiffler still has the most ridiculous pudding-bowl haircut. She realises why she feels so short of breath. There’s no
oxygen supply up there, other than what percolates up from the hole. It explains the tightness in her chest, and the sudden panting. ‘You’ve got to . . . get me . . . some oil. Cooking oil . . . Olive oil . . . anything . . . I saw some . . . in first class . . . the focaccia bread . . . Go.’

But he doesn’t move. He looks around the roof space, testing struts, pulling on brackets. When he speaks, his voice is apologetic. ‘Just wondering what you need the oil for?’

She gives a long sigh of exasperation. Her lungs feeling curiously deadened. ‘Because there’s a slot . . . I need to get through . . . over there,’ and she points to her ten o’clock, ‘. . . little bigger than . . . the size . . . of a letterbox . . . and I need . . . to be . . . oiled up . . . to have a chance.’

She can almost hear his smile. ‘You’re kidding?’ Tristie Merritt, naked oil wrestler.
Woo, woo.

‘No, Whiffler . . . and I’m going to need . . . your help . . . can’t reach . . . my back . . . and legs.’

He disappears like a mouse down a hole. No doubt the only person on the plane smiling.

Off the main White House situation room

P
resident Charles Hannah breaks the dismal silence in the small communications suite. ‘There must be some way we can work this out?’

‘Work this out how?’ The Secretary of State looks up from a series of mindless jottings. Cubes. Lots of cubes.

‘You know,
work
. . . Christ, we can’t be the first administration that needed to buy a friendly face . . . Cajole. Fudge. Encourage. Incentivise these countries, to make this thing go away.’

The Secretary of State’s expression is tired and blank. He dabs a button on the telecom console. ‘Is the prince still on the line?’ Somebody within the snug suite nods and moments later there’s a burst of white noise and then a live picture on a wall-mounted screen, satellited from a French chateau in horse-racing country. One of Washington’s trusted back channels to the Middle East. ‘Mr President . . . out of sight, please.’

Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia sits at a wide desk, in front of an expensive bookcase full of leather-bound tomes. Looking extremely well fed in a dark polo-neck fleece. The foreground is cluttered with a forest of gold-plated pens, sticking up from their holders. The Yale-educated prince has no formal role within the US–Saudi structure but has served several US presidents as an honest, astute sounding-board of information and opinion, both within the kingdom and the Gulf states, as well as the wider Muslim world.

‘Good afternoon, Abdullah. I want to thank you for your patience.’

The prince waves his hand. It is nothing. ‘We are old friends. If I can be of any assistance, God willing, I want to be.’

Grave tone. ‘Events are forcing us towards a decision . . .’

‘I can assume what that decision will be . . .’ and from his ornate study, the prince wags his finger at the camera ‘. . . in a world of change, this will have consequences.’ Rubs his hand back and forth across his silvery moustache. ‘Perhaps consequences that you and I, with our fixed world view, cannot begin to imagine.’

Pause. The only sound is the quiet hush of the air-conditioning.

The Secretary of State says: ‘We believe that we have no option, at this point. It is our hope that at least if the world does not support us, they will at least understand the terrible choice we had to make.’

‘What terrible choice, my friend?’ The prince holds up a meaty hand and counts off slowly. ‘One. You now believe the recording played out from the plane to be false, maybe there is not even a terrorist on board. Two, perhaps there is not even any weapon involved. Three, Canada does not stand with you. Four, the Islamic world is in uproar. Five, you have mid-term elections in four months and fund-raising for the presidential primary cycle starts in earnest in nine months. No doubt the president’s people are telling him how this will be political suicide: how it won’t play in Peoria, to have the president appear to be . . .’ and the prince makes inverted commas with his fingers ‘. . . to be “weak” in the face of a bunch of Muslim crazies. Did I miss anything out?’

The Secretary of State shuffles uneasily in his chair. ‘I’m still here.’

‘Your problem, Mr Secretary, is that nobody is listening. You’re either the fully fledged superpower you claim to be, in which case nobody will believe that the country that builds the plane, teaches the airlines how to fly the plane, even sets the rules of how the cockpit doors should and should not work . . . that this country with the most powerful armed forces and the smartest universities does not have a way to solve this problem.
Or you’re not that superpower, in which case your problems run deeper.’

The Secretary of State tap-taps the end of his pen on a presidential jotting pad. ‘As crazy as it seems, Abdullah . . . that is the very truth of the situation.’

‘What do the Pakistanis say?’

A hopeless shrug of the shoulders. ‘Next question . . .’ The previous Musharraf administration had reworked the constitution so significantly it was no longer clear whether it was the president or the prime minister who controlled the real levers of power, or therefore whom Washington should be entreating. The Secretary of State had been on video link with Islamabad only fifteen minutes before, trying to convey the latest news, that the cockpit door was disabled, how sorry they were, etc. All the prime minister had wanted was to have his cabinet watch him shriek about appropriating US assets in the country, and demand a scheme of reparation payments. Domestic political posturing.

The prince looks to one side, and a bare, elegant female hand places a cup of steaming coffee in front of him. He smiles his thanks before turning back to the camera. ‘Understand this and you will understand the problem you face: in our hearts we are a nomadic people. The whole of our history and culture tell us we are always journeying across deserts, looking to protect our flock, searching for that next waterhole, or oasis. Which is why we say,
It is good to know the truth, but it is better to speak of palm trees
. . . That is why, my friend, these people are not interested in the truth,
your
truth. Every politician in the Arab and Islamic world will take from this tragic story what they know their peoples want to hear.

‘And that can only be bad for you. Very bad.’