The Lords' Day (retail) (20 page)

She stared at the phone, hoping it would ring. She wanted to pick it up and issue some far-reaching instruction that would save the day. Instead she asked for a whisky. It had been Maggie
Thatcher’s favourite drink and had seen her through many a long evening, so if it was good enough for her . . . Had Maggie found it lonely, too, Tricia wondered? Sitting in this chair, with
its leather padded arms, waiting for reports from the distant Falklands to find their way back? Tricia had been in her last year at uni at the time, remembered the sense of apprehension that had
overwhelmed the country – what was this bloody woman doing, sending out a task force and even the QE2 to pile disaster upon defeat? Yet she had taken her courage and a Union Jack in her hands
and paraded them before all those doubting men, and stuffed it right up them, not just the Argentinians but many back home, too.

The Americans had been pathetic, even then. Wobbled all the way round the United Nations. Wasn’t it always like that, America First, the rest left to cough and splutter in the dust? A
nation founded on the loathing of kings yet which had placed itself in harness to a few families who acted with a sense of divine right that would have felt entirely at home in the court of
Caligula. Kennedys, Bushes, Clintons, now the Harrisons, all taking their turn to grab the reins of history.

As she sat there, she knew they were coming. Even as she finished her whisky, a C-130 transport of the USAF’s 435th Air Base Wing was lining up on a night-lit runway, its four turbo-props
whining, turning its nose into the wind. On board were nearly fifty men, along with all the equipment they deemed necessary. Soon they were lifting above the dense forests and the surrounding hills
which stretched out towards the nearby town of Kaiserlautern. The plane levelled out at 18,000 feet. It didn’t set course directly for its destination since that would require entering French
airspace and the French had long, inquisitive noses, so instead they headed for the Netherlands, following a flight plan that claimed they were on a training mission. It was while they were in
Dutch airspace that they were joined, briefly, by a second C-130, and for several minutes until they were over the North Sea they danced a careful minuet in the night sky before parting. Only one
of them set course for Heathrow.

For the while, Tricia Willcocks could only guess at much of this. What would Maggie have done, she wondered? Ordered a second whisky, just as she had? It was having its effect, warming her up.
She kicked off her shoes, stretched her toes, wishing they were buried in warm sand somewhere far away, and not having to share a beach towel with Blythe Harrison Edwards. She’d been looking
into the American’s background, getting to know her enemy, curious about the hokum that the ancestor had been a great Indian fighter, but it turned out to be true. William Henry had destroyed
not just the Shawnee chief Tecumseh and his entire army but also crushed the European allies who fought with him. It came as no surprise to discover that those allies just happened to be the
British. The war of 1812. Falling out with prime ministers seemed to be something of a family habit with the Harrisons. The bitch.

Tricia rinsed the whisky round her mouth and let it trickle slowly down the back of her throat, wishing she could rid herself of her troubles as easily. But they would grow worse, of that she
was certain. She couldn’t confront both terrorists and Americans at the same time, and even to try would surely mean disaster. It wouldn’t be much of an epitaph, would it, the woman who
single-handedly smashed the Special Relationship, who turned the trans-Atlantic alliance on its head and left Britain outcast and utterly alone? And maybe even got her Queen killed. Suddenly,
sitting alone in the dark, she felt very frightened.

She wanted to order another whisky but daren’t; they’d use that against her, too, the woman who drank herself dotty while the world
around her burned. She stamped her foot in anger but succeeded only in barking her stockinged foot against an unforgiving chair leg. She yelped in pain, but as the fire spread from her leg and
towards her brain, it began to burn off the befuddling blanket of alcohol and despondency that had settled upon her. Tricia Willcocks was a fighter, as good as any bloody Harrison, so to hell with
defeat – and with the Americans! It wasn’t all over yet. She had no intention of going with grace, that wasn’t her nature, and there was still something she could try. Call the
Americans’ bluff. Stop them. Stand in their way. Defy them! And when it was all over, if there was any retribution ricocheting around, she could try to make sure it landed on the
President’s desk. Already she was feeling warmer. Anyway, what had she got to lose? If they were to drag her away, she’d go down fighting, just like Maggie, like a roaring lion, leave
her nails embedded in the carpet. Or better still, buried in their throats!

9.43 p.m.

Sloppy’s efforts hadn’t met with overwhelming success. He had worked hard to gather in as many members of the FSA’s market monitoring staff as he could, but
his pickings were sparse. Only ten of them, and none were of any great seniority. Their head of department was abroad, others were on leave, and those he had been able to gather in had been
wrenched from the arms of assorted friends, family and restaurateurs. Now they had gathered in their open-plan office in one of the more modest buildings in Canary Wharf, which, like all offices
after working hours, had a cold, funereal atmosphere that entirely matched their own mood. It was clear they weren’t brimming with enthusiasm, and some were almost rebellious. Several
hadn’t even taken off their coats.

‘So what’s this all about, Sloppy?’

‘Simple. The country’s in a total fucking mess and we might just be able to do something about that. We’ve got to find out if anyone’s making money from this siege
nonsense. Need to see if there are any trails, then discover where they lead.’

‘A wild-goose chase.’

‘I don’t chase wild geese, I shoot them. Saves all the trouble.’

‘It can’t be done, not just like that. There are procedures, protocols for this sort of thing, and you know that we of all people have to work by the rules.’

‘Rules? There are no rules for this one. It’s not just money, there are people’s lives on the line here, so bend the bloody rules, break them, if necessary, whatever it takes,
so long as we get the answers we need.’

‘This isn’t just one of your PR stunts, it comes from the top, right?’

‘Look,’ Sloppy insisted, directing their attention to the hostages huddled together on the television screen, ‘right now there is no top. No one to cuddle us or cover our
arses. And I can’t promise there’ll be invitations to tea and biscuits at the palace next week, because right now we can’t be sure there’ll even be a bloody palace. We can
only do what we think is right. It’s called using our initiative.’

The doors of the lift sighed as they opened, spilling another couple of colleagues into the room. They were carrying large insulated satchels over their shoulders.

‘I can’t help you in this,’ Sloppy said. ‘You are the people who know what to look for and which buttons to press on your shiny screens. Do what you have to do, call up
friends and call in favours, get them out of bed or away from whichever bar they’re propping up, but whatever we do, it has to be done now. Tonight.’

‘And if there are any repercussions, you’ll get us out of jail, will you?’

‘I can only promise you two things,’ Sloppy replied. ‘That if any of you lands in the shit, you won’t be alone. I’ll be right there along with you. The only other
thing I’ll promise is an endless supply of what I consider to be the finest curry in town.’

The two recent arrivals opened the satchels and the aroma of Indian cooking began to attack them all.

‘So how about it?’ Sloppy asked.

For a moment there was silence. These were men and women, mostly young, whose professional lives ran by clearly set rules; they were the police force of the City who worked by means of
methodical, painstaking inquiry. No one paid them to rush about taking initiatives. Outside the windows of their office, the world was dark, the City skyscrapers left abandoned to the cleaners and
the night owls. It seemed almost surreal. Most of them were desperately undecided, waiting to see in which direction the wind would blow.

Eventually, a grumbling voice broke the silence. ‘Whatever. Anyway, my ruddy mother-in-law’s visiting,’ it complained.

‘You wouldn’t have a veggie biryani in there by any chance, would you?’ one of the younger women asked.

‘What time is it in the Caymans anyway?’ another demanded.

‘I just want to make sure no one gets curry on my keyboard,’ insisted another as he threw his coat over the back of his chair. The others began to move and, like an old steam
locomotive, puffing and complaining, the enterprise got underway.

10.36 p.m.

There are many pieces that go together to make up a disaster. Some of these pieces may be small but, nevertheless, can be of crucial significance. One such piece was Levrenti
Valentin Bulgakov. He was in his late sixties, a swollen blot of a man with a decidedly delicate heart condition who lived in exile in Islington. That, apparently, was where former KGB officers
went to die when they ran out of secrets and grew perilously short of friends.

Bulgakov was an old hand, with a track record stretching across much of Central Asia and the Middle East, but he’d made his reputation in Afghanistan. He’d arrived there in the late
Seventies when the Russians were interfering and creating such a godless mess in the hope that when it was all over they would be the only big beasts left in town. The recipe had been simple. Find
conflicting loyalties and stir vigorously. Play one faction off against the other, one tribe against the next. Bulgakov had been at the heart of it, working out of the Residency and sowing disorder
everywhere he stepped. In the end the chaos the Soviets created grew so intense that it surprised even themselves, and they had been forced to send in their own troops. The 108th Motorised Rifle
Division arrived in Kabul on Christmas Day 1979, where they found Bulgakov waiting to welcome them. He’d even done his own bit for the invasion by shooting the Afghan head of
counter-intelligence, putting a bullet through his back while the man poured him tea. After that, things had got really untidy. The Soviet Army stayed for a decade, during which time thousands of
villages were destroyed, a million Afghans killed, four million made refugees, and somewhere along the way they even managed to kill the US ambassador. As Bulgakov was fond of saying, you
couldn’t break heads without cracking a few skulls. Confusion reigned throughout the country, and Bulgakov was in his element.

Then that treacherous impostor Gorbachov had arrived and hijacked the Soviet system, and called the invasion of Afghanistan a mistake. Just that. And he made them withdraw, the job only half
done, tails between legs. At that point the blame game had begun, and all those who had been associated with the invasion became non-persons. Overnight Levrenti Valentin had gone from being
folk-hero to fall guy.

Some of his class had made the transition with little difficulty, transferring effortlessly from the KGB to its young sister, the FSB, or moving into banking or oil or mineral exploitation and
cleaning up in the post-Soviet privatisation jamboree. They became oligarchs and hideously rich in the process. But although Bulgakov had garnered huge experience he had found few friends, and not
just because he was a paedophile. He wanted to remain loyal to a system that no longer existed, and was too slow to accept the changes going on around him, let alone profit from them. Eventually,
in despair, he had packed his bags along with a caseload of sensitive papers and followed the exodus to London where several of his old colleagues had already made the journey. But the stupid
English! Although they were polite and professed gratitude for his offer when he opened his case of intelligence files, Mitrokhin had got there first, his trunks stuffed to the lid with some of the
finest secrets the West had ever seen. They had no need for Bulgakov, so they had thanked him for his kindness and shown him the door. They’d offered no appointment, no pension, grew
embarrassed when he was forced to raise the matter himself. The only thing they let him have was a residency permit, rather like a dog licence; no one had the heart to kick him out. So he had
stayed, and been forced to find another route to salvation.

Although he had few friends, he was a man of many contacts and he had hung around the margins of the tsarist courts set up in exile by youngsters like Ambramovich and Berezovsky and Gusinsky.
He’d used his knowledge to gain a little leverage and make a few millions here and there in those early days, but he had never been accepted as one of the band and when, inevitably, the
information he had grew stale and lost its force, they had no qualms about discarding him. As the years passed, Bulgakov had grown old and sick. He had also grown implacably envious. His looks
deserted him, his sexual prowess let him down, his breath turned sour, he found himself down to his last few millions and that, in his mind, seemed like punishment. He found the injustice of it all
rubbed in over breakfast every morning as he scoured his newspaper, and after dinner every evening when he scanned the Internet, reading about the rich kids, the new guys on the block, none of whom
had done half of what he had. He couldn’t even read the football results without feeling pain. Bulgakov believed he deserved more than these upstarts could ever dream of and, as he fretted,
he developed an old man’s sense of unquenchable rage.

Yet the means of his retribution was at hand. During these last hours he had switched his attentions between television screen and Internet link, watching both the siege and the markets. And as
he saw the chaos, his hopes soared. Never again would they turn their backs on Levrenti Valentin Bulgakov! He was about to show them, visit his revenge upon the richest men in Europe, humiliate
them, and make sure they would remember him. The prospect made him even more breathless than usual.