Omega (5 page)

'I...'

'How about that tea? I'm sure you'd feel better.'

Perhaps he's right, she thought, a little desperately. She went to the kitchen, fighting back the tears that were trying to break out. This wouldn't do. If Phil was in trouble, he'd need her support, her help, not a weeping wife making things more difficult.... If only
...

She heard his key in the door, and Timmy's paws, scuffling at the woodwork as they always did. Oh, thank God.
...
Or was it going to be even worse, now?

Betty ran to the hall but the two men were there as soon as she was. Timmy rushed in ahead of Phil, his tail wagging furiously, and stopped and growled when he saw the two strangers. Phil stopped too, questioningly.

She went to him, managing to keep her poise somehow. 'Darling -
I
think these gentlemen are police.'

'No,''Mr Summers. Not police. LB7.'

Phil seemed to pale a little. He said 'Oh', and shut the front door carefully. As soon as it was closed, the taller man showed Phil his identity card and then said: 'Beehive Amber, I'm afraid. Sorry about the short notice but you have an hour. I suggest you and your wife go and pack. You can explain to her now, of course.'

'Pack?'
Betty croaked.

Phil put an arm round her. 'It's all right, darling. I wasn't allowed to tell even you.
...
Oh Christ, I suppose I should have expected it, after last night. . . . We're going away for a bit. An official job.'

'Arc you a secret agent or something?' She felt ridiculous as soon as she'd said it.

Phil sighed. 'Nothing so dramatic. Only a ventilation engineer.' He made an attempt at a laugh. 'They tell me it's a privilege to be on the list. . . . Come on, I'll explain upstairs. Thank God I can get it off my chest at last.'

The taller man said: 'You didn't report the dog.'

'Nobody asked me,' Phil replied, looking suddenly alarmed. 'Christ, you don't have to
...'

'We'll handle it.'

'Nobody asked me,' he repeated lamely.

'D'you imagine there's room for them down there? . . .

Go on, lad, or you'll upset Mrs Summers more.'

Phil patted Timmy's head, turning his face away. The shorter man coughed. Then Phil took his wife upstairs. The two men could hear their voices from the bedroom - hers high-pitched and bewildered, his rumbling on and on and on.

The shorter man picked up the phone and dialled a number. 'It's the only thing that gets me, when there's pets,' he complained over his shoulder. 'Why the hell don't they brief these people properly?'

Miss Angela Smith, at fifty-three the elder stateswoman of the Borough Treasurer's Department, thanked the post girl with a motherly smile. The girl had been very jittery since yesterday morning's news; the nearest earth tremor had been thirty or forty kilometres away (London had been quite unscathed) but you'd think her own house had fallen down. Oh well; not surprising when you knew the girl's neurotic mother, which Miss Smith did. As, indeed, she knew most of the borough.

Miss Smith flicked through the routine bulk of the post to see what she had to deal with herself. The perforated edge of a telex sheet caught her eye and she pulled it out; they had a way of being urgent - or if not urgent, at least from someone high enough for them to be treated as urgent.

'She read it and pursed her lips in a silent whistle, an unladylike mannerism she was well aware of but could not cure.

After the address and priority coding, the text began:

FOLLOWING TO BE TRANSFERRED TO FILE LB 0806 WEF. 26/6/04. CROWTHER 102 HOLLY MANSIONS E17. SUMMERS 43 MANOR CRESCENT E10. BERNSTEIN 97 BOUNDARY PLACE
E10...'

Eighteen names and addresses. Eighteen! There had never been more than two on a File LB 0806 instruction before.

File LB 0806 matters were always handled by Miss Smith, in liaison with the Borough Treasurer himself and with no one else. She had never been told the purpose of the drill; merely given it on a sheet which was to be kept locked in her desk and reminded her of her responsibilities under the Official Secrets Act which she had been required to sign.

But Miss Smith was not a fool.

The drill itself was uncomplicated (at least when there was only one name at a time) but it was a nuisance. First, inform the accounts department that until further notice rates demands were to be sent not to the ratepayer concerned but to Miss Smith's desk. Next, contact certain named officials at the local London Electricity Board, North Thames Gas, Thames Water Authority and East Telephone Area with the same instruction. Finally (and the cloak-and-dagger solemnity of this amused Miss Smith), go to the address concerned, where a note would be -always was - pinned to the front door, telling the milkman, newsagent and anyone else concerned not to make any more deliveries till further notice. This note would always name the dairy, the newsagent and so on, and since they were all on the same sheet, none of them would have removed it. Miss Smith, however, had to remove it and then go to each of the addresses and say that as a friend of Mr So-and-so she'd been asked to settle the outstanding account. She was going to look a right Charley, this time, she thought, turning up at (for instance) one of the three major dairies in the borough and claiming to be the personal friend of half a dozen customers who'd all gone on holiday without warning on the same day.

All the accounts and the retailers' receipts, Miss Smith would then address (personally sealing the envelope) to the Home Office, Department LB7. Payment always arrived by return of post and Miss Smith's final duty would be to reimburse the London Electricity Board and the others.

Miss Smith, as has been remarked, was not a fool. Nine ratepayers of the borough had so far disappeared into File LB 0806, over the past year, and so far none of them had returned home. But these homes, she had soon become aware, were also on a Metropolitan Police list for periodic checking to make sure no harm came to them, and the police had their own keys. She guessed that the Post Office had their instructions, too.

It was all so neat, so quiet. All the same, there had been whispers; and Miss Smith, who kept her ear to the ground, knew of worried relatives who had been visited by anonymous soothing officials, and who now wore a 'We could an if we would' air. It had also not escaped her attention that the names accumulating in File LB 0806 included a high proportion of technicians, as well as one nurse and one pest control officer.

And now eighteen of them in one day - immediately after a nation-wide chain of local disasters which some said were a portent of worse to come. Eighteen people, with their immediate families if any, from a single London borough.

Miss Smith had a strong instinct of survival and she had been thinking ahead for some time. She had converted all her savings into small valuables and rarities which she estimated had a good chance of retaining at-least a barter price in any circumstances. She also kept £800 in notes stitched into the lining of an anorak. It was a pity about her pension, but
...

She finished her day's work meticulously, and a busy day it was; none of the eighteen names was missed, though it cost the Council a lot in taxi fares, for which (and for the milk and newsagents' payments) she took care to reimburse herself from Petty Cash immediately. She said good night to her colleagues in exactly her usual manner.

Then she caught a bus home, to her terraced house in Vicarage Road. She was as unobtrusive as possible about the final packing of her motor caravan which stood outside the front gate, but in fact there was little to do because she kept it always ready.

She rolled up a note to the milkman and put it in an empty bottle; the pound note pinned inside it would pay for this week's milk so far. No problems with the newsagent because she always bought her papers over the counter on her way to work. She checked again that the electricity and gas were turned off at the mains.

Everything ready. She picked up Ginger Lad under one arm, which started him purring. Thank God he hadn't been out courting, or she'd have had to wait for him. She'd never had the heart to have him doctored.

With her free hand, she put the milk bottle on the step and double-locked the front door. Then she climbed aboard.

She sat behind the wheel i
n a last moment of doubt, while
Ginger Lad, quite undoubtin
g, curled up on the seat beside
her. Was she being too pr
ecipitate? It might be days, or
it might be months

She braced herself. Days or months, she had no intention of being caught in a great city when
it
happened.

Miss Smith started the engine and drove off.

Suddenly she chuckled, remembering her secret parting joke. She had added her own name to File LB 0806. After all, the LEB might as well get its money.

'Your little "incident" rather missed the limelight, didn't it?' Jennings grinned.

There were times when Harley found his ironical manner exasperating but he was too aware of Jennings' quality, and of his importance to his own private plans, to react to it outwardly.

‘
We'll see,' he smiled back. 'Its coincidence with the earth tremors may turn out to be to our advantage in the end.'

The four of them were meeting in very different surroundings from those of their last conference. This, too, was Harley's office; but here were no tall Whitehall windows, only grey concrete walls hung with maps and charts; no Adam fireplace, only an extractor grille through which the conditioned air whispered steadily. One feature alone echoed the Whitehall room, an Aubusson carpet. A little out of place two hundred metres below Primrose Hill, Harley realized, but he was, after all, the Permanent Secretary.

As yet they were still on Beehive Amber so he spent about half his time here and half in Whitehall. In the unpublicized hierarchy which had been set up for Beehive, Harley was Chief Administrator of the London hive, responsible to the Prime Minister alone and senior to all the regional Chief Administrators. With Beehive Amber, only certain key personnel of the Beehive establishment - just over twenty per cent - were already in full-time residence; another five per cent, either because they were top officials like himself or because of the nature of their work, still commuted with Surface. The remaining three-quarters were on standby, awaiting Beehive Red. When Red was ordered, all would come below; only law enforcement units, intelligence agents and certain specialists need come and go from Beehive by one of the thirty-seven airlocked exits which were concealed all over London, or their equivalents around the regional hives. In the case of real surface chaos
(the situation defined by various criteria in the Beehive directives as 'Category Five Disorganization') even these would be withdrawn; the airlocks would be steel-shuttered and Beehive would settle down, secure, fed, immune and disciplined, till Surface life was so weakened and demoralized that Beehive could send out its forces and take control. (Half a dozen secret exits would remain available whatever the situation, but these - which emerged in such places as a grocer's shabby garage in Camden Town and the up platform of Brixton underground station - were known only to Harley and to a handful of others, most of them in Intelligence Section.)

Beehive, sealed off, could survive on normal rations and full establishment for two years and seven months. Power supplies would never run out, coming as they did from fourteen well-dispersed and interchangeable submarine-type nuclear reactors.

When the time came for Beehive Red (it could be days, it could be months) individual orders would be impracticable. So would watertight security. 'Beehive Red' would be announced without explanation on television and radio; whereupon the remaining three-quarters would make for their designated entrances without further notice. According to plan, twenty-four hours should see virtually all of them underground, out of reach of alerted popular interference or sabotage. Martial law would then be declared. But that part of the plan had to remain elastic; there were too many imponderable factors.

Harley was allergic to imponderable factors and worked round the clock to minimize them.

One thing worried him constantly. Three-quarters of eighteen thousand people meant altogether too many possible leaks, even allowing for the fact that half of them were Servicemen who needed to know very little till their officers told them to move. And one or two of the more sensational continental newspapers had carried stories. . . . Most of Britain must have heard hints of Beehive, however distorted; and Beehive Amber must have spawned more hints which would fall on much more attentive ears in the aftermath of the earth tremors.

It was just as well, Harley thought, that the seismologists' reports were top secret (the real ones, of course, not the statements they were allowed to give to the media). These experts could not hide the inadequacy of their time-factor data but the secret reports showed their unanimous alarm. Harley had not only read the reports - he had cultivated the authors, with everything from flattery to alcohol. And with every day his conviction grew that Beehive Red was approaching rapidly.