Keep Calm (3 page)

Adam noticed immediately that Saffron was plunked deep into his chair, all three screens dark.

“What should I make of you, Tatum? Huh? What are you, Forrest Gump or something?”

“I don't know what you mean?” He was being sincere; he had no idea where Saffron was going with this.

“I've worked my ass off for this company—for thirteen years, Tatum. I worked my way up in this business, since I was just out of college. First one in my family to ever even go to fucking college.” Adam nodded. He more or less knew Saffron's history. He also knew it wasn't easy having a new guy just dropped into his world, as Adam had been. He always tried to be respectful, though, and went out of his way to be grateful for all that Saffron did for him, so he truly didn't know where this was going.

“They've put together a delegation on the fucking magnitude of this civil service pitch in London next month, and they cherry-pick from all the offices, and they didn't pick me. I know, I could trust that it was an oversight, I could give them the benefit of the doubt, but they picked you, fucking you, Tatum, and I'm sorry, but that sucks to me. They picked a friend of the boss's son-in-law, and it just kind of makes me want to take a steaming shit right here on my desk and walk right the fuck out.”

“I really don't know what you're talking about, Barry. I swear I don't.”

“Ah, please.”

“I don't. What is it again?”

“A few of the New York group that does all government union services, employee pension specialists, some of them down in Texas that did the whole deal with the Texas government workers program we did, and a bunch of that team in Paris that always gets written up in the company newsletter are going to London next week. They're going to a round table with Sir David himself, and guess where it is? Guess where?”

“Where?”

“At 10 fucking Downing Street. You know what that is?”

“Yeah sure, I mean, it's the White House of England. Right?”

“Good. You're not a total moron. Now guess who they're meeting with, this group? Who they're gonna put the big squeeze on for taking over the investment services on the pension program for the entire British civil service? It's landmark if it happens. Guess who they're meeting with?”

“Who?”

“Roland Lassiter. The prime fucking minister. Among others. And guess who's going from the motherfucking Chicago office. Guess!”

There was silence, for a long moment. Adam didn't want to guess, and Saffron couldn't get the bile from his throat. Finally he did.

“You! Adam Fucking Tatum! That's who. They picked you to be part of the delegation and I swear to God I want to go postal in this damn place. That's how pissed off I am, Tatum.”

Adam just stared across the giant glass desk. He shrugged in confusion.

“I swear to you, Barry, I have no idea what you're talking about.” He sat back in Barry's expensive chair as Saffron's eyes beamed death rays at him. He started to boil now, too. This was Gordon, his father-in-law. This was a setup of some kind, to get Kate home to England. That was what this was: a setup to get Kate and the kids in London with him, and to somehow use the trip to get her to move back home permanently, with or without Adam. He was being set up. He was sure of it, and now he was just as mad as Saffron. They sat there staring at each other.

“I'm sorry, Barry. That's all I can say.”

“I'll bet you're sorry. Go on. Get to work. Ellen Doyle over there in travel's gonna come see you with the details. Pretend like you don't know what she's talking about.”

“I don't.”

“Okay, fine. Get the fuck out.”

*   *   *

ADAM DIDN'T IN
fact know about the London trip. He was being straight with his boss. Kate did, though. She was in on it. Whatever this plan was, she was well aware of the details.

He was playing tetherball in the backyard of their two-story rented white-brick colonial on Birchwood Avenue up in Wilmette with his son when she finally just came out and admitted it. On the ride home from the train station she had played dumb. She pretended the London trip was all new information to her. Pretended that she didn't know that the overly friendly lady in travel would offer up four business-class tickets and a hotel suite in Mayfair so that all four of them could go. Now, there in the yard, she was finally ready to admit the truth.

“Yes, I knew. Okay? You want me to admit it? Fine. I'll admit it. My father rang me last week and told me he had overheard talk of having you going along in the delegation, and he twisted some arms at the company to have myself, Trudy, and Billy come as well.”

Little eight-year-old Billy, with the crazy head of red hair and his father's big brown eyes, stopped his side of the tetherball game at once.

“Go where, Mom? Where are we all going?” Kate looked to Adam for permission to make it public but then decided she didn't need the consent and turned back to Billy.

“London. We're going to visit London. And your grandfather.”

“Really? This is true? I'm going to really meet my grandfather? This is true?” He looked to his father, but didn't wait for an answer either. He jumped into the air with childish ebullience and ran toward the house to tell his sister. Halfway to the house he stopped dead in his tracks and turned back to his parents.

“How come I've never met him until now, besides on computer? How come I've never met him in person if he's my grandfather, my only one?” Neither of his parents was quick to respond, each of them sure the answer would either be wrong or bring on more questions. Kate decided to take charge with a reply.

“He lives a long way away, sweetie. London's very, very far from here. It's not so easy for your grandfather to travel all this way.”

“Oh. Okay, but now I'm gonna finally meet him, right?”

“That's right, love. You are going to meet him. Finally.”

“I can't wait. I'm gonna bring a lot of my soldiers and my sticker collections to show him. And my Portable Play Station.” He turned and purposefully headed into the house to finish his mission to inform his older sister of their trip. Kate looked back to Adam, now playing himself in a feeble version of tetherball.

“Yes, okay, Adam. I knew. My father had called. Explained the trip to me. Yes. He did pull strings. He's just trying to get to meet his grandkids. Find some way to be with us. He's lonely, Adam. Very lonely. For me.” Then, with those awesome blue eyes trained on him, she barreled down.

“As am I, lonely for him. I need this. For me. For my father and for my children and, Adam, I just can't come up with a good reason that it doesn't thrill you to no end. I cannot understand for the life of me how you would see this as some kind of plot staged against you.”

He stopped smacking the big rubber ball on the string and came over to his wife. He wanted to explain to her that he was just being stupidly paranoid. Afraid to lose her. Lose her to her father. Lose her to London, to old friends, lovers, favorite street corners and songs on the radio, things and memories that weren't about him. Afraid that once there, she'd never want to come home. That she would want to reset her life all over, back where she belonged, without her husband. Without the jailbird American wacko who had pathetically lost everything they had ever had. Everything they had built.

He didn't, though. He couldn't find the words, so he gently stroked the side of her face and quietly ended the argument.

“It looks to me like we're all going to London.”

 

AFTER
■
2

They met in the Cabinet Room at Number 10 the first thing the next morning. Investigators from the Diplomatic Protection Group and the Met's antiterrorism unit, SO15, worked all night to collect as many clues and forensic samples as they could from the White Room, where it had been determined that the blast did the most damage, and the cupboard from which the explosion had originated. They had also taken extreme precautions to make sure other explosive devices weren't still set to go off.

Georgia, running point on all matters for the hopefully small interregnum that the bombing had brought on, chaired the session with Lucy Barnathanson, the cabinet secretary, who was taking notes and keeping pace. Sir Donald Darling, the head of SO15, and Hardy Milligan, the director general of MI5, were both there, seated directly across the table from Georgia. To their left was the secretary of defense, then the foreign secretary, Elena Dowl-Curtiss. The commissioner of the Metropolitan Police was present, along with her boss, Sir Melvin Burnlee. The remaining seats were filled behind them with ministers, civil servants, COBRA directors, emergency planning experts, senior Met police detectives, and all of their top staff. Many, in fact most of them, had been working nonstop throughout the night.

Georgia hadn't slept either. She had taken too many of her pills, she knew, but she was on edge, taking several calls an hour from Lassiter's worried relatives, foreign leaders, secretaries, and ministers. At one point, as the home secretary was reading another list of questions that had been drawn up regarding ways to move forward, Georgia fell fast asleep while upright in her seat. She had rapidly dreamt she was asleep upstairs at Number 11 in her four-poster bed. When Early, seated behind her, quietly passed her a ballpoint pen to surreptitiously wake her as the room waited for an answer, she was, for a brief second, unsure how she had gotten down and into the Cabinet Room from her bed.

Burnlee, older than most of the others, was weary and impatient with Georgia, as always. He repeated his question with a bit of a growl.

“Does the chancellor agree that SO15 should be given the oversight on this entire investigation? Are we going to go ahead and classify this as a terrorist act?”

Georgia steadied herself nicely. She got back in the game so fast that only a few saw that she had momentarily left the court.

“If that's the consensus, yes. Although I will say that no one so far has mentioned any theories on who or what we are dealing with. I do suppose SO15 is the right horse to lead, though.” She nodded to Darling, the Counter Terrorism Command's head, seated to her right.

Sir Darling, the major general, was famously a man of few words. Six and a half feet tall and nearly half as thick, he sat steely eyed, poker faced. A former member of the Special Air Service and Special Reconnaissance Regiment, he was a lifelong intelligence operative. Georgia gently patted his arm on the table, prodding him to give a summation of where they were so far.

“Thank you, Madam Chancellor. At this point I must say we have few leads as to the perpetrators. We are actively speaking to several sources and liaising abroad with all the channels one would think we'd be contacting, but as of now there's nothing yet to put a pin in. We expect to have at least a direction before much longer.”

“Let's please hope so,” Georgia said as a wish more than a directive. “Is it ISIL, the Islamic State? Do we have any reason to look that way?”

“None yet, ma'am, although that's a tree we're obviously going to be shaking. My guess is that we'll probably find it to be them or an offshoot of them.”

“It wouldn't be a homegrown Islamic terror group, would it?”

“I personally don't see that as a possibility, Chancellor. Our ears are pretty good right now on that front, but we are combing through that possibility as well.”

Then Sir Darling turned, looked over at the home secretary to give Burnlee one more chance to stop a direction that he was about to go in, and, once getting a nod to move forward, drew attention to a young woman who was sitting in the back row in one of the chairs up against the wall.

“I'd like to turn the floor to someone that I am hoping, with the chancellor's approval, can take the minute-by-minute lead on the investigation. Inspector Davina Steel.”

Steel was young, twenty-seven. A pixie, too, so at five foot five she looked even younger, almost like a teen. She was cute, with velvet skin and thick brown hair that fell naturally to a flick, just below both her ears. She had an almost perfect figure. She wished she were taller, but who at her height didn't? Everything else that was God given, she was okay with, including her mind, which since she'd been a young girl had been her very own secret weapon.

She had an uncanny ability to look at things, events, pictures, photos, tapes, depositions, and eventually crime scenes and, seeing them as broken figures, reconstruct them between her ears, remembering details from other scenarios, considering options, dropped leads, or questions in a way few others ever did. She was as keen an observer of people, places, and things that those in that world had ever seen. It was a talent that in three short years had earned her the sobriquet at the nation's top antiterrorism unit: “Darling's darling.” She had risen with incredible speed from out of nowhere to quickly become one of SO15's top investigators. If she weren't so good, others in the Special Branch would resent her, but it was obviously about her talent and nothing more, so she was applauded and protected by her seniors. In fact, her humble humanity in the face of what was almost a freak-of-nature talent, her pleasant looks, and her tireless work ethic made her a much-loved figure in the large investigative department. She could sometimes have a cranky, irritable side, but in light of her many successes, others found it easy to look past those bits when it reared its head.

Sitting directly behind the mountain of a man that was Major General Darling, having been told in advance that she was going to be up on her feet with a pitch, Steel was far more nervous than she thought she'd be, especially with Georgia Turnbull there, two feet away. She had met Ms. Turnbull before, here in the Cabinet Room. She and many of the cabinet secretaries, along with Prime Minister Lassiter, were here when Steel gave the lead report on the arrest last year at Heathrow that had thwarted a bombing at the Syrian embassy. She had run that file and worked it to great success.