The House of Cards Complete Trilogy (106 page)

“Now that is what I call a real man,” Eleni mouthed in a stage whisper. “I wonder if he has trouble steering.”

“That’ll bugger up Billy’s private life,” a guard muttered.

“And bugger up our radar ops, too,” the SWO added. “What the hell will they make of that?”

As the glider made a lower pass the young girls giggled while the older women shook their heads in memory of times past. The atmosphere had deteriorated to good-natured farce as everyone gazed into the sky, except for Eleni’s mother, who still maintained a wary eye on the freely perspiring Billy.

“But you’re still all right for tonight?” Billy ventured hopefully to her daughter.

“Not if I catch that one first,” Eleni announced loudly, her thoughts still floating aloft in the cloudless sky.

The confrontation had been defused, for the moment, but for how long the SWO was not sure.

“What d’you reckon, sir? Dickhead at—what?—two hundred meters? Vertical shot. Into the sun. Want me to give it a try?”

The SWO had suddenly lost his humor. “You might well have to try, lad. Soon you might well have to try.”

Billy’s future mother-in-law munched on.

Thirty

The crowds who greet a Prime Minister on his first day in Downing Street are doing little more than practicing for the day when they will cheer him all the way to the gallows. The public loves a good hanging.

“Damn.”

A brace of sapphire-tipped peacocks echoed the cry. He stood on the terrace of his chateau, set in the heart of the golden hills of Burgundy, and cursed again. The great house, all turrets and echoes of tumbrels, stood overlooking some of the finest vineyards in the world, row upon row of liquid gold. On a distant escarpment stood an old fortified abbey, ancient stone glowing in the melting evening sun; in between lay nothing but the thousand acres of his empire. Early tomorrow morning the first of nearly two hundred friends and business associates, drawn by the prospect of the view and the vintage, would start arriving to pay gentle homage and to savor the restored imperial splendors of his home. An empire built on oil.

But now there was too much oil, a whole drumful of it that had been poured over, across, around, everywhere on the cropped lawn leading down to the carp lake. Vandalism as grotesque as a morning raid on the Bourse.

He shouldn’t have fired the gardener. He should’ve sliced off his balls and any other vital part of him then thrown the rest down one of the wells. And he’d still do it, if ever he laid hands on the little bastard.

“It’s appalling,” his wife was complaining at his elbow, “how much damage a little oil spread in the wrong places can do…”

Suddenly his nostrils dilated, sniffing the wind like a fox approaching a familiar copse. He smelled oil, cloying crude as it spurted like virgin butter, as it would spurt one day from rigs off the coast of Cyprus. It was a deal he had lost. But which hadn’t yet been signed.

“Could be worse,” he consoled his wife. “Might even get better,” he reflected, wondering what vandalism might be inflicted on the peace agreement by a little oil spread across its neatly trimmed edges.

***

“This is scarcely going to help.” Claire thrust a copy of the latest wire report across the desk at Urquhart. He read it quickly.

Industry sources revealing the existence of oil in the waters off Cyprus. The Turkish waters off Cyprus. Exploitation rights expected to go to British companies…

“Excellent,” he pronounced, throwing it back across the desk. “More jobs for Britain.” He picked up his pen and continued writing.

“But it will infuriate the Greeks.”

“Why?” He stared inquisitorially across the tops of his half-moon glasses.

“They’re losing out.”

“Even if these reports are true, they’ll be no worse off tomorrow than they were today.”

“Even so, they won’t like it. Wounded pride.”

“I suppose you’re right. They’ll probably go right over the top. There’s no accounting for the excitability of Cypriots, is there?”

“And a British judge, too. This will make everything more complicated. We’ve jumped from a row about a few graves to one about several billion barrels of oil. Instead of hundreds of protesters there’ll be…thousands. The peace deal. The election. Everything. Suddenly much more complicated.”

“As usual, Claire, you display a remarkably agile and perceptive mind behind those inspiring eyes of yours.” He went back to his writing.

Sensing the end of his interest—had it ever started?—she reclaimed the sheet of paper and began to leave. “I wonder who leaked it?” she inquired, almost to herself, as she crossed the room.

“I’ve no idea,” he whispered as the door closed behind her. “But it has saved me the trouble of doing it myself.”

“CYPOS HIT OIL,” the
Sun
screamed.

“
Billions
of
barrels
of
oil
have
been
found
off
the
tiny
Mediterranean
island
of
Cyprus. The discovery is expected to bring a smile to the face of the sun-kissed tourist haunt
—
and to the British oil companies who are queuing up for exploitation rights
…”

By its second edition the reporter had made further inquiries and rewritten the piece under the headline: TURKISH DELIGHT.

The
Independent
took a more cautious line.

“
Large deposits of oil are reported by industry sources to have been discovered off the island of Cyprus that could amount to the largest such find anywhere in the Mediterranean…

“
The
reported
discovery
comes
at
a
delicate
time
in
the
peace
process
between
the
two
Cypriot
communities
who
are
due
to
sign
a
final
accord
in
London
soon. The oil deposits are believed to be exclusively within the continental shelf areas reserved by the Watling arbitration tribunal to the Turkish Cypriot sector.

“
Last night Greek Cypriot sources in London were demanding to know if Britain, whose deciding vote awarded the disputed area to the Turkish side, knew beforehand of the likely existence of oil.
”

The response of the leading daily in Nicosia was far less conditional. In a banner headline across its front page, it announced simply: “BETRAYED!”

***

They had organized a demonstration outside the Turkish Embassy in Belgrave Square. The call had gone out that morning on London Radio for Cyprus and even at short notice a band of nearly two hundred had gathered, even tried to get inside to deliver a letter of protest, but the entrance to the embassy was guarded by bombproofed security that saw them coming before they’d begun to cross the road. They were orderly; a single armed policeman from the Diplomatic Protection Group turned them back and they spent the morning staring sullenly and shouting sporadic protests from behind security barriers. By the weekend their numbers would have grown tenfold.

Passolides was not among them that morning. As so often in his life he’d plowed a lonely furrow, taking himself not to the house of the hated Turk—what was the point?—but to the gates of Downing Street, where the source of this latest betrayal could be found.

Had not the British betrayed his people more consistently than any other conqueror? Stealing the whole island for almost a century, stealing the bases for even longer. Stealing his brothers. And their graves. Now taking the oil. You knew what to expect from a thieving Turk, they made no pretense at their nature. An absolute, uncomplicated enemy who would spit in your eye as they sliced through your throat. You could trust them to be what they were. But the British! They showered you in hypocrisy, fought with weasel words. Smiled and talked of the rules of cricket as they shafted you and sold your homeland into slavery.

He’d been gripping the barrier by the great iron gates of Downing Street for nearly half an hour when a policeman, wondering at the intensity of the old man’s concentration and whitened knuckles, approached him.

“What are you doing, granddad?”

“Minding my own business.”

“If you’re standing there, it’s my business too. What are you doing?”

“Waiting to see your Prime Minister.”

“You’re in luck. He’s just on his way out.”

As the Daimler rushed through the gates it slowed before entering the traffic of Whitehall, and Urquhart looked up from his papers to see an old man staring at him from across the barrier. Their eyes met, held each other for no more than a moment, but in that short time the force of those eyes burning ruby in hate had scorched across Urquhart’s mind. And dimly, through the blastproof windows, he heard the one word the man’s cracked voice hurled at him, and remembered its meaning.

“
Prodóte-e-e-es!
”

He recollected the first time he had encountered it—how could he forget? Carved into the chest of an eighteen-year-old boy they had dragged from the side of his family in the middle of his sister’s marriage service and shot as he cringed against the church wall like a rat in a barn.

Traitor.

Thirty-One

Asking a Greek to talk about democracy is like asking an American to teach table manners.

There were few obvious targets for an anti-British protest in Nicosia. British Leyland no longer existed; British Rail didn’t run that far, even intermittently. The British High Commission provided an exceptionally unpalatable opportunity, being stuck by the accident of invasion on a finger of land barely a hundred meters wide that squeezed past the armed watch towers of Nicosia Jail on one side and the still more heavily armed watch towers of the Turkish Cypriot border patrols on the other. The chances of surprise were nil, the chances of success even poorer, the chances of a bullet from one side or the other excellent, so most Nicosian dissidents searched for other options.

The British Council down from the Paphos Gate was scarcely more welcoming. Since the last riot on its doorstep it had been heavily fortified behind steel shutters from which bricks and bottles bounced pointlessly, even when the sentries in the barracks at the end of the street cooperated by turning a blind eye.

So Dimitri, who had responsibility for the organization but who had little concept of the Britishness of institutions such as Marks & Spencer and Barclays Bank, opted for British Airways and its glass-fronted operational headquarters that lay on Archbishop Makarios III Avenue.

The vanguard arrived soon after dusk, transported from the now-permanent camp of protest outside the Presidential Palace aboard a convoy of mopeds, vans, even taxis. Soon they were joined by many others on foot or using their own resources. The Word had spread.

An exceptional degree of discipline was evident in the early proceedings. Banners were handed out, instructions and advice issued. It helped, of course, that the stewards were theological students, many of whom were from the same village as Dimitri and his brother. An extended family. The Firm had been carefully constructed on foundations of rural solidarity and tribal loyalties; it wasn’t going to fail its most famous son.

It also helped that the demonstrators far outnumbered the police, who seemed content to stand back and monitor proceedings. Several were smiling.

More demonstrators were arriving, the avenue was blocked. The police contingent began to concentrate its effort on diverting the traffic. One of the stewards chattered into a mobile phone, listened attentively, then nodded. Slowly his hand began to circle around his head, stirring the cauldron. The crowd, peaceful up to that point, began chanting, waving their banners, surging forward like a human oil slick on a flowing tide, lapping around the building and clinging to its plateglass windows. The sound of oil was everywhere.

“
British
Out! Bones and Bases!
” they shouted; not very creative, perhaps, but there is little originality in anti-imperial protest. “
Make
War, Not Peace
” was also much in evidence.

The windows, great sheets of glass set between concrete pillars, were pounded—they bent, buckled, bowed, but did not break, not until a sledgehammer had materialized and one by one they were all systematically shattered. Even then, the control was exceptional. They didn’t ransack the offices; instead, the steward exchanged his mobile phone for a can of spray paint and covered the walls and display units with slogans.

By the time he had stepped outside again, two barrels of oil had been positioned either side of the shattered doorway; from the lintel above was hanging a spittle-drenched effigy of Nicolaou. A placard around his neck stated simply: “
Turk
Lover
.”

The shouting reached a crescendo, the pressure of numbers was growing, it would be difficult to control for much longer. It was time. Into each of the barrels was dropped a flare, and out of each began to pour vast quantities of choking black smoke. Oil smoke, which gushed into the night air, smearing the faces of those standing nearby, infesting every corner of the shattered building and burning itself into the morning’s headlines.

As soon as he saw the smoke, the senior police inspector on the scene began issuing his first substantive orders. Lights flashed, sirens moaned, a fire tender began to edge through the crowd. But already the protesters were beginning to melt away into the Nicosian night, mission accomplished, message delivered.

Not a single arrest was made.

Dark spots of hate were breaking out across the Cypriot night.