The Dying Light (20 page)
‘He was summoned by a parliamentary committee - I forget its name - and he was asked a specific detailed question and he replied with something that was not true, although he didn’t know it at the time. Then he learned that he had been misinformed and he told one of the committee members he had more to say on the subject. They called him back and he corrects the record.’
‘And you have no idea what this was about?’
‘No, nothing was revealed by the committee. Their hearings are held in private. David was removed from the Joint Intelligence Committee and offered some inferior position - I believe it was in the Work and Pensions Department. He declined and left the civil service. Then his troubles began. He was followed, his flat was searched, his calls monitored. He was given a full security interview that lasted two days. He told me he could feel himself falling apart. They destabilised him - that was the word he used. Then he began to run.’
‘Run? What do you mean?’
‘He began running. He found it kept him sane. It also amused him to lose the people who were always following him. Eventually, he wrote a private letter to Temple pointing out that he had done nothing wrong; that he was not in breach of the Official Secrets Act because he had the highest clearance and he had revealed nothing to anyone outside government, apart from complying with his statutory obligations to answer the committee’s questions truthfully. Temple understood that beneath the surface there was a threat. Eyam knew a lot of damaging things about Temple’s government, things that weren’t covered by the Official Secrets Act. The prime minister had no option but to make a deal. There was a meeting, just the two of them late one night in Downing Street. Temple agreed to stop the harassment if Eyam left London and went to live somewhere quietly and have no contact with anyone in the government or the media.
‘So he went to live near High Castle and began to prepare his counter-attack - an account of official secrecy, and the government’s capture by international corporations. That’s how he described it to me anyway. I surmised his plan was to publish it before the general election, which people believe will be announced some time in the next six months. He told me nothing in detail. That was David all over. You see he didn’t want to involve me. But you, Kate, you are a different matter. He wants you to wage his war. I can tell. I know the way he operated.’ He stopped and examined her with his chin held high. ‘Did you love him?’
‘As a matter of fact yes, Darsh.’
‘But you abandoned him. Why was that?’
‘Maybe it looks like that but—’
‘It does,’ he said unsparingly. ‘I loved him but I did not abandon him, Kate.’
‘You were in love with Eyam?’
He looked away.
‘I mean he wasn’t gay, was he?’
‘What a profoundly stupid question.’
‘Darsh, he left me pretty much everything in his will. We were the best of friends, even if we did fall out from time to time.’
He peered up at the top of the window. ‘No, he wasn’t gay, as you well know. But I am and I loved him.’
‘Look,’ she said after a while. ‘I’d like you to have anything you like from the house: books, pictures - anything. He’d have wanted it. And to be honest I have no idea what to do with it all.’
‘He left it all to you for a reason.’ His eyes returned from the window to settle on her. ‘He wants you to fight his fight. That’s why he left it to you. Not because he loved you but because among his friends you are the most resilient. A “demure, bloody-minded, headbanging bitch” was his expression. Did you know that’s what he thought of you?’
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘So who’s the villain - John Temple?’
‘This isn’t a fairy story with one villain and one hero; it’s about a political condition; it’s about Eden White and his companies . . .’
‘I met Eden White after the funeral. He’s like some kind of manifestation - ectoplasm.’
Darsh ignored her and continued. ‘It’s about Temple and that creep Glenny and the Home Office, the state within a state; it’s about apathy and fear; it’s about the collapse of . . . look this is England . . . I don’t have to explain the deep cultural complacency of the English.’
‘Yeah, yeah. That’s the kind of theoretical shit you read in newspaper columns, Darsh. Someone hounded Eyam from office and then persecuted him and planted child porn on his computer. That’s illegal and wrong. Someone killed Eyam’s lawyer with a rifle outside his cottage last night probably because he’d seen documents. The documents were intended for me.’
He shook his head with genuine sadness. ‘We’re getting to see that bastard side of life, you and I.’
‘Yes, and the point is that David was murdered - by whom we don’t know - and now Hugh Russell. It’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that they are all connected. Have you ever heard of a monitoring system called ASCAMS? Do you know what that is?’
He shook his head but she knew he was holding something back.
‘After the funeral Eden White gave a dinner in honour of David, a lot of government and corporate people. What was that about? Why was White there?’
He snorted an odd laugh. ‘To make sure David was gone?’
‘Is there any evidence to say that this all involves Eden White? His companies sell systems to governments around the world. We know this has got something to do with a monitoring system called ASCAMS. Was ASCAMS one of the systems supplied to the government by White?’
‘These are things for you to find out,’ said Darsh. He removed a boiled sweet from his pocket and unwrapped it.
‘So, Eyam goes into exile in High Castle. What happened then?’
Darsh held the sweet between forefinger and thumb, examined it like a jewel and popped it into his mouth where it moved from one cheek to the other several times before he answered. ‘I went down there to see him last summer. He seemed content - fulfilled even - and happy with this place you have inherited. He was contained, pregnant with some big idea. But then something went wrong. In a letter he told me he was under extreme pressure. I assume that by late October he had made his plans. He spent two weeks caring for his father before he died in late November. It was around then he discovered they’d tampered with his computer. He told me at his father’s funeral - he asked me to go for moral support - and that he thought he would be arrested very soon. It was the last time I saw him. On December 8th he left for France.’
‘For France!’
‘Well, he couldn’t buy a ticket here or leave this country without being picked up. I believe he crossed to France hidden on a private sailing yacht, with a friend. Then he flew to Martinique. I know because he sent me a postcard.’
‘What was he doing there?’
‘Kate, his father’s business fortune was based in the Caribbean.’
She slapped her forehead. ‘Of course, he went because of the money. That’s why there was no mention of him in his father’s will. He and his father must have arranged things so Eyam had funds waiting for him in the Caribbean.’ She paused. ‘Do you know someone named Peter Kilmartin, a friend of Eyam’s? Attached to St Antony’s College. Foreign Office before. He said he’d met you.’
‘I saw him once with David. He wrote a paper on Assyrian mathematics and astronomy. I looked over the mathematics in the paper.’ He shook his head with dismay, either at the crudeness of Assyrian mathematics or of Kilmartin’s, she wasn’t sure which.
‘He comes recommended. Do you agree?’
‘What I saw was a big, vigorous Englishman with higher than average intelligence, some culture and the unconscious brutality of the breed. I can’t tell you whom to trust. Eyam has set you up to complete the job for him and you have to make these decisions for yourself. But of course you still have a choice. You don’t have to do what David wanted. You can forget the whole thing and go on with your life.’ He eyed her without moving. ‘But if you do fight this thing I will help you, because I owe you. Darsh does not forget.’
He told her how to contact him through the Mathematics Institute, instructing her to use the name Koh when leaving messages. Then his attention moved to a butterfly struggling in a cobweb at the top of the window. Like a cat he sprang suddenly from his stool to stand on the table beside her and trapped the butterfly with one ungloved hand. With the other hand he peeled filaments of old spider web from the wings.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Open the window. Quickly!’
She wrenched down the handle and banged on the old frame with the heel of her hand.
‘A red admiral,’ he said, having released it. ‘They emerge from hibernation at this time of the year and are joined by butterflies that migrate from France. People assume they are dead, but with the first warmth of spring they wake.’ He gazed down at her with an inquiring look.
‘Thanks, I’m glad to know that, Darsh,’ she said, closing the window.
He stepped nimbly onto the stool and jumped to the floor in one movement. ‘So, we will be in touch.’ And then he did something rather odd. He kissed her and held her hand for a moment. ‘If you fight this thing there is much that will surprise and shock you, Kate Lockhart. Are you prepared for that? Are you prepared for the fight of your life?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if I can do anything.’
‘Well, I expect the answer will come to you soon enough. Let me know when it does. Let me know what you are going to do.’
‘Is there something you’re not telling me?’
‘Just say the word. That’s all you have to do.’ He got up, arranged his scarf and slipped through the door.
She waited for five minutes after he left, then returned to the ruminative quiet of the Front Quad and went to the porter’s lodge where she found Cecil with his head in a big notebook. ‘They were here,’ he said before allowing his gaze to surface over his reading glasses. ‘The people looking for you: they didn’t say as much but then they didn’t have to because I can tell, see. There were three of them - two women and a man came in separately and looked around the public areas. One of the women said she thought her friend was in the college and she described what you were wearing - most insistent she was. I said I hadn’t seen you.
‘And this arrived for you,’ he said reaching below a shelf, ‘just a few minutes ago by taxi from St Antony’s.’ He handed her a small parcel. Inside was a cell phone with a note from Kilmartin, which instructed her to use the phone only to call the number already in its memory. He also had a clean phone, with no record of purchase or ownership. Conversation should be kept to a minimum without names, and the phone should not be used in a car or at a place that could be readily associated with her.
13
The Spreading Stain
Philip Cannon’s gaze followed the government’s chief scientific adviser’s hand as it left the keyboard in front of him and drifted to one of four big screens on the wall of the new underground facility of Britain’s Security Council.
‘These satellite images were taken this morning, so they are the very latest information we have,’ said Professor Adam Hopcraft, a tall, spare man in his sixties. ‘The two left-hand screens show reservoirs in mid-Wales; and here we have photographs from Cumbria. In each you will see that the open water is stained with a reddish pink dye that spreads outwards in these frozen wisps. And this,’ he said moving to another screen, ‘is a time-lapse study of the North Bowland reservoir in Lancashire, which with others supplies Manchester with drinking water. The stain spreads over three days to colour about one third of the water, which shows these blooms of algae that we are seeing have a great deal of energy.’
He tapped some more on his laptop. Cannon looked round the room. Since moving from BBC News to take the job of director of communications at Downing Street, he occasionally marvelled at the government’s ability to focus talent and brains on a problem. David Eyam had personified the system and, although Cannon always found him a mite arrogant, it was he who had showed him that at the very top of government you sometimes saw brilliant individuals working together and producing absolutely the right policy.
A permanent staff of fifty now worked for the council, which was intended to complement rather than replace the ad hoc COBRA committee. The new council was chaired by a retired admiral named Cavendish Piper, who certainly looked the part with his close-cropped steel-grey hair and weathered features, but who was in Cannon’s estimation among the dimmest government servants he had ever met.
Cannon wondered now if there were rather too many people in the room. Over and above the twelve members of the council present, there were three ministers and twenty or so co-opted specialists, counter-terrorist experts from the police and MI5, scientists from the government service and from the Ministry of Defence, public health officials, local government chief executives, epidemiologists and a group of marine biologists, environmentalists, microbiologists, phycologists - experts in algae - who had been brought in from the universities. It looked like overkill by the prime minister, but he trusted Temple’s instincts: toxic red algae was about to knock everything else out of the news and become a popular obsession that might dominate the first half of a four-week general election campaign that he was certain Temple was planning. The prime minister had to get this one right.
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