The House of Cards Complete Trilogy (70 page)

“What was the King’s response?” a reporter was heard to challenge.

“I don’t know. I haven’t told him. When last I asked to resign, he refused my resignation. As you all know, he is a man of the utmost compassion and understanding. But the task of the Monarch is more important than any one man, particularly a press aide, and so I have taken it upon myself to relieve him of any responsibility by announcing my resignation publicly, to you. I only hope that His Majesty will understand.”

“But why on earth is being a homosexual a bar to your job?”

Mycroft bent his face into an expression of wry amusement. “You ask
me
that question?” He laughed as if someone had made a modestly good joke. No animosity, no snarl of an animal at bay. God, it was a fine performance. “A press officer is meant to be a channel for news, not the target of it. Speculation about my private life would have made my professional duties impossible.”

“Why have you hidden it all these years?” It was Rochester from the back of the bus.

“Hidden it? I haven’t. My marriage broke up recently after many years. I was always faithful to my wife, and I am deeply grateful to her for the years of happiness we spent together. But with that breakup came a new understanding and possibly a final opportunity, to be the man that perhaps I always wanted to be. I have made that choice. I have no regrets.”

With apparent utter frankness he had turned the attack. Anyway, most of the people here were old colleagues, friends, nothing could disguise the atmosphere of sympathy and goodwill. Mycroft had chosen his moment, and his interrogators, well.

Urquhart turned off as the TV reporter continued the saga of the Royal aide, whom he described as “much respected and well liked,” against a background of footage from the just-completed tour.

“Selfish bastard,” Stamper muttered.

“I thought you wanted him out,” Sally interjected.

“We wanted him hung, not walking into the sunset with the applause of the crowd ringing in his ears,” snapped Stamper. Sally suspected he was irritated by her presence in what had formerly been an all-male preserve.

“Don’t fret, Tim,” Urquhart responded. “Our target was not Mycroft, but the King. And even as he surveys his realm from the mountain top, the ground beneath his feet is beginning to crumble. Almost time to give him a helping hand. In the small of the back, I think.”

“But you only have a week before…Those images of the tour are killing you, Francis,” she said softly, marveling at his composure.

He looked at her with narrowed, hard eyes, as if scolding her for lacking faith. “But there are images, dear Sally, and there are images.” A dark smile split his face but his eyes remained like rock. He crossed to his desk, extracting a small key from his wallet before slowly unlocking a top drawer. He extracted a large manila envelope and spilled its contents across the desk. Every action was meticulous, like a craftsman jeweler displaying his most precious stones. There were photographs, perhaps a dozen of them, all in color, which he sorted through to select two, holding them up so that Sally and Stamper could clearly see.

“What do you think of them?”

She was uncertain whether he meant the photographs or the pair of breasts they prominently displayed. The two photographs, as all the others, revealed the uninhibited charms of Princess Charlotte. The only variation on the central theme was the precise position of her body and the contortions of the young man with her.

“Oh, I say,” breathed Stamper.

“One of the more onerous burdens of being Prime Minister is that one is entrusted with a variety of secrets. Stories that are never told. Such as the tale of a young military equerry to the Princess who, fearing that his favored position at the side and on top of the Princess was in jeopardy, took out an insurance policy in the form of these photographs.”

“Oh, I say,” Stamper said once more as he rifled through the other shots.

“It was the equerry’s bad luck,” Urquhart continued, “that he should try to encash the policy with the wrong man, an investigative journalist who also happens to be a former operative for the security services. And so the photographs finished up in my drawer while the unfortunate lovesick boy has been told in no uncertain terms that his testicles will be ripped from his body should any copies find their way around Fleet Street.” He took back the photographs, which Stamper had been clinging to perhaps a moment too long. “Something tells me, Timothy, that I wouldn’t wish to be in his predicament in a few days’ time.”

The two men laughed bawdily, but Urquhart noticed that Sally seemed not to be enjoying the moment.

“Something bothering you, Sally?

“It doesn’t feel right. It’s the King who is doing the damage to you, not Mycroft or the Princess.”

“The limbs first…”

“But she’s done nothing. She’s not involved.”

“Bloody soon will be,” snorted Stamper.

“Call it an occupational hazard,” Urquhart added. His smile was stretching more thinly.

“I can’t help thinking of her family. The effect on her children.” An edge of stubbornness was beginning to creep into her voice and her full, expressive lips pouted in defiance.

His response was slow and stonily firm. “War breeds misery. There are many unfortunate victims.”

“Her only sin, Francis, is to be saddled with a healthy sex drive and an inbred English wimp for a husband.”

“Her sin is getting caught.”

“Only because she’s a woman!”

“Spare me the collective feminism,” Urquhart snapped in exasperation. “She’s spent a lifetime living off the fat served at the Royal table, and the time has come for her to pay the bill.”

She was about to respond but she saw his eyes flare and pulled herself back. She wasn’t going to win this argument and, in pursuing it, she might lose much more. She told herself not to be so naive. Hadn’t she always known that a woman’s sex was no more than a tool, a weapon, which as often as not fell into the hands of men? She turned away, conceding.

“Tim, make sure these get a good airing, will you? Just a couple for the moment. Leave the rest.”

Stamper nodded and took the opportunity to bend over the desk and rifle once more through the photographs.

“Now, Tim. There’s a good fellow.”

Stamper’s head came up sharply, his eyes flickering as he looked first at Urquhart, then at Sally, then back to Urquhart. The ember of understanding began to glow in his eyes, and with it rivalry. She was muscling in on his relationship with the boss, and had an advantage not even Stamper with all his guile and gamescraft could match.

“I’ll get right to it, Francis.” He gathered up two of the images and looked sharply at Sally. “Night, one and all.” Then he was gone.

Neither of them spoke for some time. Urquhart tried to appear nonchalant, taking great care to adjust the razor-sharp creases of his trousers, but the softness of the words when eventually they came belied their menace.

“Don’t go coy on me now, O Gypsy.”

“She’s going to get a very raw deal out of this one.”

“It’s them or me.”

“I know.”

“Are you still on my side?”

In answer, she crossed slowly to him and kissed him passionately, forcing her body up against his and her tongue into his mouth. Within seconds his hands were fondling, bruising. She knew his instincts were angry, animal. Roughly he bent her forward across his desk, sweeping his pen tray and telephone to one side and knocking over a framed photograph of his wife. Her skirt was lifted over her back and he was at her, tearing at her underwear, forcing himself inside, kneading the flesh of her buttocks with such intensity that she winced at the bite of his nails. She was prostrate across the desk, her nose and cheek forced flat into the leather top. And she remembered. As a young girl of perhaps thirteen she had taken a short cut through the back alleys of Dorchester on her way to the cinema and there had come face-to-face with a woman, bent low across the hood of a car. She was black, with bright crimson lips and gaudy eyes that were hard, impatient, bored. The man behind her was fat and white and had sworn at Sally, foul, disgusting words, but he had not stopped. The memory crowded back in all its chilling clarity, as Urquhart’s nails dug ever more deeply into her skin and her face was pressed painfully into the scattering of photographs across the desktop. She felt like crying, not in ecstasy but in pain and degradation. Instead, she simply bit her lip.

Forty-One

The concept of a hereditary monarchy is a little like a bottle of fine champagne that has been left open far too long.

Mycroft found him on the moors above Balmoral, where he often went when troubled and wanting to be alone, even in the middle of winter with snow on the ground and an easterly wind that had found nothing to obstruct or deflect it since it had gathered strength in the shadows of the Urals two thousand miles away. There were ageless spirits up there, he had once said, which lurked in the crannies of the granite outcrops and sang as they ran with the wind through the rough heather, long after the deer had sought the shelter of lower pastures. The King had seen him coming, but had not offered any greeting.

“I had no choice.
We
had no choice.”

“We? Since when was I consulted?” The regal tone betrayed a sense of insult and personal hurt. The anger—or was it solely the wind?—brought a bucolic flush to his cheeks and his words came slowly. “I would have stuck by you.”

“You think I didn’t realize that?” It was Mycroft’s turn for exasperation. “That’s why I had to take the decision out of your hands. It’s time to start following your head rather than your heart.”

“You have committed no offense, David, broken no law.”

“Since when did such things matter? I would have become a monumental distraction. Instead of listening to you they would have been snickering behind their hands at me. You’ve taken such personal risks to carry your message across without interference and I would simply have gotten in the way, another excuse for them to sidetrack and confuse. Don’t you see? I didn’t resign in spite of you. I resigned because of you.” He paused, searching the mists that clung to the moorland around them and burying himself deeper inside the borrowed ski jacket. “And, of course, there’s someone else. I had to think of him, too. Protect him.”

“I feel almost jealous.”

“That I could love two men in such different ways I never thought possible.” Mycroft’s hand reached out to touch the other man on the arm, an unforgivable action between man and Monarch, but the words and the freezing wind seemed to have stripped the formality away.

“What’s his name?”

“Kenny.”

“He will always be welcome. With you. At the Palace.”

The King placed his hand to cover that of Mycroft, who lowered his head, weighed down by gratitude and emotion.

“Ours was a very private matter, not something for headlines and the baying of hounds, of having his private life turned inside out,” Mycroft explained.

“Such plants rarely grow when showered in innuendo and the manure of publicity.”

“I’m very much afraid this may all have been too much for him. But thank you.”

The wind sighed through the heather, a low, mournful sound as the light began to fade, like demons of the night come to reclaim their land.

“It has all been such an unhappy accident, David.”

“Funny, but I feel almost relieved, released. No regrets. But no accident, either.”

“Meaning?”

“I’m not a great believer in coincidence. It was timed to detract from your tour, meant to damage you as much as me.”

“By whom?”

“By whoever had a motive to get at you. And by whoever had the opportunity. By someone who knows the Member for Dagenham and who has the resources to track down a private phone number.”

“It would require someone who could sink very low.”

“The lowest. And he will continue his pursuit of you, have no doubts. There will be more.”

“Then I hope I can find your courage.”

“You already have. All you need is the courage to face up to yourself, that’s what you said. To play the man—your own words. Facing up to others holds fewer torments, believe me. But I think you already know that.”

“I shall need your advice, David, more than ever if, as you say, it is all to get worse.”

Slowly at first, then with gathering force, drops of cold-hardened rain began to fall across the two lonely figures. Darkness was encroaching fast.

“Then the best advice I have for you, sir, is for us to get off this bloody moor before we both freeze to death and save Francis Urquhart the bother.”

Forty-Two

Let them sniff coke.

February: The Second Week

It took less than a second for the phone to be answered in the foreign currency dealing room at one of the City’s leading finance houses which squatted alongside the Thames, in a site near to where the Great Fire that had destroyed half of London more than three centuries earlier had started. It wouldn’t take another fire to ruin the City again, they joked, just another Japanese takeover.

The phones never took long to be answered. The difference between disaster and success could often be measured in seconds, and the chief currency dealer couldn’t afford to be caught napping by either the markets or any of the seventeen other currency dealers, all of whom envied his job and the commissions that went with it. He dragged his thoughts away from the ruinously fashionable forty-foot cruiser he had just agreed to purchase to concentrate on the voice at the end of the phone. It was not, however, a deal, but an inquiry from one of his many press contacts.

“Heard any rumors about some scandal at the Palace, Jim?”

“What rumors?”

“Oh, nothing very specific. Simply a buzz that there’s something brewing that is just about to blow the Royal Yacht out of the water.” He didn’t see the dealer wince. “My editor’s asking us all to check around, bit of a dragnet, really. But something’s smelling pretty ripe.”

The dealer’s eyes flashed up to his screen yet again, checking the mixture of red, black, and yellow figures. Sterling seemed to be fine; all the attention today was on the ruble following news of a fresh outbreak of food riots in Moscow. A cripplingly severe winter seemed to have frozen both the capacity of its leaders and the nerve of its foreign exchanges. The dealer rubbed his eyes to make sure; his eyes ached from the constant strain, yet he didn’t dare wear his prescription glasses in the office. His position was all about maintaining confidence and at thirty-seven he couldn’t afford the slightest sign of age or physical decline; there were too many waiting eagerly to push him off his seat.