Keep Calm (36 page)

“What are you going to do when you see her, Adam? What are you going to do when you see her?” He didn't answer for the longest time. No one said another word as the finely tuned engine of the German marvel purred perfectly along the road at eighty miles an hour. Billy's teeth clattered as he shivered in fear, Trudy's soul quietly ached as she finally knew what real pain of the heart felt like, and Kate could only silently whimper. Whimper and drive.

Out of nowhere, Adam spoke. With one last burst of semi-cohesion, he made an odd, incongruous, final statement.

“I need to see the chancellor of the exchequer.”

 

PART THREE

TURNBULL

TATUM

STEEL

 

TURNBULL
■
1

Georgia had another dream about Roland. They were in the helicopter the morning of the crash. The sun was much brighter than it had actually been that day. The light was blinding, and they were laughing and drinking champagne. Roland was performing for her, doing naughty impressions of the other MPs at the conference in Brighton. There was a buoyancy to the mood as the aircraft flew mere feet above the ground, right over cars and pedestrians' heads. They both thought it was so clever and cute for the pilot to show off like that. Roland reached out the side door and swiped off a man's hat as they both laughed, uncontrollably.

The helicopter landed safely at Shoreham Airport this time. The entire crash was reworked, rewritten, and replayed into just another day at the office. They disembarked, giggly and drunk, and out of nowhere Roland kissed her. She was stunned. Her face grew bright red and her heart pounded as he told her that he had always loved her. She cried as he held her close and kissed her some more. He ordered the helicopter back into the air. They hopped in and floated low over the beach at Brighton, laughing together at the world passing peacefully beneath them.

She woke to feel a cloud of sadness hovering over her like a heavy quilt. The dream, no doubt triggered by the day's scheduled visit to Roland, was unsettling.

*   *   *

IT WAS THE
fourth time she had visited in the nine days since the bombing. It was clear for the first time that his body would, in fact, eventually heal.

“There's so much out there to bring you down, isn't there, Georgia? Once you get up on top of that heap? Once you're the one that needs toppling?” She nodded. Simple speech was still an uphill climb. His one free arm moved ahead of his mouth as if it were trying to help it along.

“Kirsty thinks it's an inside job. I tell her that's science fiction. I still think it's Islamic radicals. That lot. My brother thinks it's the Americans. The CIA. How absurd is that?”

“It's a theory being floated all over the panel shows and Internet, from what I've been told,” Georgia explained. She wanted to tell him she was pretty sure the talk had all been launched by Heaton, but she didn't want to upset him.

Roland reached over, needed water. She helped pour it. He smiled in a tiny way, not sure how grateful he wanted to be for needing help to have a simple glass of water.

“I'm done either way. I can't do it. This is just the end. The crash was the beginning of it, but this is the end. I'll be up on two feet soon. I feel it. They can't keep me down. But I can't play on the stage anymore. I need to let the parade pass.”

She squeezed his hand, kissed his cheek again, and then the drugs walked him into the back rooms of his mind, left his broken bandaged body to lie there, not awake, not asleep. Georgia sat next to him as long as she could, then quietly left.

*   *   *

BACK AT NUMBER
10, she met with several Labour MPs who had been sent over to discuss the transition—almost as if they had placed a wire in Roland's hospital room. The timing was uncanny but, in truth, everyone in Whitehall had been discussing nothing but the timing of when to make it official. Georgia needed to convince the party leaders that it was time for her to stand forward and lead a call to form a government. She would then see the palace and have the king ask her to do the same. None of the ministers meeting in Roland's office thought she would have much competition. Maybe Andrew Rogan or that television whore Deandra Potter, the MP from Hendon who had seemed to Georgia to live in a television studio this last week and a half.
Not the Deputy PM, Felix Holmby
, thought Georgia. He had no standing in the party and was severely personality challenged.

She had been the face of the government during this tragedy and had been a popular figure in the party for almost fifteen years. Polls showed her to be the most familiar player in the party next to Roland. She responded positively to the delegation that had been sent over to address the matter and agreed to make a statement in advance of a party conference the following week. As they left, she wondered what they would think if they knew that she had been behind the plot to place the bomb in the first place. Would they still think she was the “most likely, best face to put forward”?

*   *   *

ANOTHER CALL FROM
Heaton had come in while she was dealing with the party reps. Early scheduled Heaton to meet her. It was time to have a face-to-face. They convened an hour later in the White Room, the very place where the bomb had gone off. Heaton brought an aide with him, a young man with a device that swept the room for surveillance equipment as they waited for Georgia, who arrived mid-sweep. She chuckled at the audacity. Heaton shrugged.

“There are no chances worth taking at this point, are there?” Once the young man with the electronics had finished up, Heaton nodded for him to move on. Some tea was brought in. They were alone.

“There's been a shooting. Up at Dorrington. Two officers of DPG have been casualties. You should know about this. You will in a short time anyway, I'm sure.” Georgia lost her breath for a second.
Was it Steel?

“Two police captains, a woman named Edwina Wells and a man named Tavish. It's all very sad. Also an old mate of mine, Gordon Thompson.” Georgia caught her wind again. She knew she wouldn't have been able to control herself if he had said “Davina Steel.”

“Gordon Thompson? Isn't he the father-in-law of the American?”

“Yes, exactly. It's a mess. It will be cleaned up, though. It will all have actually occurred on land just to the east of my property. It'll plummet down as ‘drugs related,' an arrest gone bad. It's being handled as we speak. No need to make this more of a mess than it is. It shouldn't intertwine with the Roland thing. We're keen to keep them unrelated.” He poured himself some tea. She marveled at how at home David was in matters of intrigue, as if this were his natural state: planning, scheming, hiding, scrambling.

“We need to talk now, you and I, Georgia. We are both in this together and in fact need each other more than ever before. I want to be sure our middle legs are tied tightly and we're running in proper sync. It's imperative. We have to be in lockstep. You and I. Understood?”

“I understand that you're saying that I need to listen to whatever you have planned. I'm getting that loud and clear.”

“Why are you being like this? What will being combative award you? Nothing really. Not at this point.” He sat down in the couch across from where she was standing, stirred his tea, and waited for her to sit. She did.

“David, that bomb was never supposed to go off. It was supposed to be a ‘dud,' just enough to unnerve Roland, nothing more. To play on his already shattered state. Wasn't that your original pitch on this whole idea?” Heaton started to answer. She didn't give him the chance.

“You have lied to me, deceived me, and committed a horrible crime. You put someone I dearly love on the brink of death and through an awful amount of pain. I can never forgive you. I can never trust you. You realize this?” Heaton nodded and agreed with everything she had said.

“Very good. As usual, you've laid out your point of view clearly—always one of your strong points.” She shook her head; his confidence was insufferable.

“I'm sorry, Georgia. In the end, it was felt that a ‘dud' wouldn't have been enough to frighten Roland to retire. I know you thought it would suffice, thought he was on edge, looking for a reason to pack it in, but you were alone in that assessment. I do agree that the amount of explosive was overdone. I truly had no interest in inflicting that kind of damage on Roland, the whole thing just got out of hand, but with that said, we are here, he is alive and will recover, and now you have a job to do as far as the path we've all chosen.”

She stood and paced the room. She hadn't been using her cane these last few days, a by-product, she thought, of so many things: the adrenaline, the pills, Steel. Steel—God, how hard it was sometimes to think of Steel. How badly she wanted to walk out of this room away from this billionaire buffoon and find herself a quiet nook to call Steel and hear her soft flutter of a voice.

“I want us to have a clear plan now, Georgia. You're going to get what you want. You're going to be the PM. The party will kneel at your feet, but you'll need to make good on the referendum. It won't be able to wait. We don't want Strasbourg to go into conference and make amendments that would give the Libs a good reason to balk or, worse, sue for more leverage. We want this done now—in weeks, not months. I need your commitment.”

She looked up at the portrait of Margaret Thatcher, then over to one of David Lloyd George as a wave of shame bolted through her body. How had it come to this? How had this slick-suited, silver-tongued reprobate gotten one over on her? Surely she was brighter than this.
It was the pills
, she thought. He never would have played her this way had she not been under their command.

“You will lead forward as planned. There is no choice.”

“Don't talk to me that way, David. I am not going to become your servant. It won't happen, do you hear me? If you think you'll run Downing Street with me as a puppet, it will not happen!” She was shouting now. “You tell whoever it is alongside you, these faceless men, that I will not be your marionette! I will resign office first. Step down. Leave you with nothing. I promise you this!” Heaton gave her a beat to calm. He knew she would. She always did.

He got up, came over, and put his arm on her shoulder. She wanted to shake it off, pull away from his touch, but didn't.

“It won't come to that, Georgie, I promise. You aren't to be anyone's water carrier. It's just about the referendum. That's all anyone's going to get churned up about. Rest assured.” She turned and looked him in the eye.

“I'm very scared, David, truly frightened, for all of us.”

“Good. You should be. There's plenty to be frightened about.” He leaned farther in, kissed her cheek, and made his exit.

 

TATUM
■
1

The Tatums paid cash for a week in advance on two rooms in a broken-down hotel in Earls Court. Kate had gone in alone and rented the rooms from an old Chinese woman who had no interest in who or what would be in them, only focusing on the cash. A television on the wall blasted a Ping-Pong tournament with Chinese lettering scrolling along on the bottom of the screen. The newspapers on the desk behind her were all copies of the
People's Daily
, in Chinese as well. It seemed to Kate that this may well be the one place in Britain that didn't have images of her husband strewn from wall to wall.

They had driven into London, arrived as the sun set, and then dropped off Adam in an alley not far from the hotel. Billy stayed with Adam as Kate and Trudy dumped the car at Canary Wharf, then took a taxi back to Earls Court. Adam was still pale and needed medical attention, but, thankfully, his bleeding had stopped. Kate had improvised a bandage out of Trudy's scarf, binding the wound on his thigh, which seemed to be the worst of his injuries. Kate ran into a Boots pharmacy along the way and bought bandages and supplies. It was everything she could do to keep moving, stay with the job at hand, not think too much about anything—about her father, about Richard, about a bomb in the prime minister's office, or about her husband being the most wanted man in Britain, maybe even the world.

Once it was dark and they were certain of a path free of CCTV cameras that would record Adam on the way from the alley to the hotel, she and the kids helped him across and inside, past the old woman who was on the phone arguing with someone in Chinese, then into the elevator up to their floor.

A musty yellow film covered almost everything in the two adjoining rooms. The water in the bathroom sink even had a yellowish tint. The mattresses were hard as boards and the blankets old and tattered at the ends. The rooms smelled dank and wet, like the floor of a bus station phone booth. The window shades were also aged and frayed. Nothing in either room was less than forty years old: appliances, furniture, bedding, or literature.

Adam passed out on the bed as soon as they were inside. Kate and Trudy washed his wounds while he slept. Kate did her best to close up anything she could and to disinfect what she couldn't. Billy sat on a creaky chair and cried in the way one whimpered after having cried so much that nothing was left but gentle shivering. In the middle of the night, as Kate slept with the kids in the other room, Adam woke and turned on the television, the volume low. He watched the news. The Adam Tatum show. There was wall-to-wall chatter and clatter on what seemed like every channel about “the American.” Several panels of pundits used the occasion to reiterate long-standing claims about America's dark part in everything currently going wrong with the world. This “Adam Tatum” had opened up the conversation once again about what could and couldn't be done to stop America and its reckless behavior in all facets of modern life.