A Sentimental Traitor (13 page)

Another silence, before: ‘This week. I’ll make the arrangements.’

The phone went dead in his ear as she cut the connection. From across the room Genscher shook his head in both disbelief and admiration. ‘I owe you, Patreezia.’

‘Oh, my dear Albrecht,’ she whispered, coyly recrossing her ankles, ‘you most certainly do.’

When Harry was eight his mother had turned up at the apartment his father used for business and found her husband in bed with another woman. The other woman had a similar
coloured dress to his mother, although she hadn’t been wearing it at the time. ‘What a coincidence,’ his mother had exclaimed. It had kicked Harry’s belief in coincidence to
death. So when he received an invitation to meet with the director of Europe House, the EU’s headquarters in London, he accepted with a degree of suspicion. Brussels had begun to occupy too
big a chunk of his life for comfort.

With a delicious sense of irony the EU had even set up its London base in a building in Westminster’s Smith Square that had once been the headquarters of Margaret Thatcher, the most
Eurosceptic of Prime Ministers, until her party had run out of money to keep fixing it. Now it had been refurbished, extensively and expensively, and the EU flag flew alongside the Union Jack above
its door.

Security in the reception area was tight, with scanners, CCTV and guards. They even asked him to hand over his mobile phone, something he’d not been requested to do since he’d last
visited Downing Street. Still, Jemma would approve. He passed it across the counter with reluctance; in return, they handed him a receipt.

As he passed through the foyer he found posters announcing the shortlist for The European Parliament Film Prize, which dealt with ‘integration and youngsters, economic crisis and
solidarity, the rules under which we live and the rules that drive our hearts’. God, there were rules for that, too? The films ‘examine European issues with originality and
sensitivity’. Last night Jemma had thrown a pillow and called him the most insensitive bastard she’d ever met, so he guessed this might be one prize he’d never claim, but there
was little need for him to worry, there was a mass of others: youth prizes, journalism prizes, community prizes, even a viral video prize. In the new Europe, it seemed that everyone was a
winner.

The director’s office was large, designer decorated, overlooking the square and the deconsecrated church of St John through the bare branches of a London plane tree. She was named
Mary-Anne, was in her fifties, hadn’t been in post long, she explained, and hadn’t got to know many MPs, so she was taking the opportunity to put right that omission – although
Harry hadn’t heard of any other politician getting this hands-on treatment. There was tea, the offer of biscuits, and did Harry have any special interests with which Europe House might help?
It was all desperately nondescript stuff. It seemed only as an afterthought that they bumped into the subject of the crashed airplane. Such a tragedy, she said. And there she left it, waiting for
Harry. What was Brussels’ involvement, he asked, nonplussed. We are doing everything we can, she said, to support the British government in their efforts to get to the bottom of the matter.
We stand ready to tighten sanctions against the Egyptian regime, if the Foreign & Commonwealth Office requests it, details to be agreed, of course.

And that was it. A young aide entered the office, nodded, with regret the next appointment was waiting, and Harry was ushered out of the room. He hadn’t known what to expect, or what was
expected of him, and as he walked around Smith Square, dodging taxis and scattering pigeons, he was still none the wiser. Perhaps it had been intended simply to dispel the myth of extravagance that
surrounded the EU, washing it away with a simple cup of tea.

He had no way of knowing that while he was sipping his tea, his phone had been cloned and all the information on it, the contacts, calendars, notes, e-mails, even the photo of Jemma in the bath
– everything – had been copied. The phone was protected, of course, with a four-figure parliamentary pin code, but even an amateur could break that. And it gave access to all his other
security-coded accounts – banks, credit cards, investments, even his medical records. What was more his SIM card had now been replaced by a ‘smart SIM’. It contained all the
information of the old SIM and looked identical, but with one or two additional hidden tweaks. It had an embedded GPS, which meant they would know his whereabouts every moment of the day. And every
call would be redirected through a proxy point where it would be monitored. ‘Tapped’, in the language of old. They would be able to listen to every call he made. Harry’s life was
now theirs.

Or, at least, hers.

The life of a politician has many parts that are dreary beyond belief. These men and women come to Westminster fully intending to slay dragons, yet discover they are spending
most of their time picking up other people’s rubbish. The headlines would have them as power brokers, surrounded by an expansive group of aides with fingers in every pie; the reality is that
often they are Don Quixotes who end up making their own tea. Of course it’s different if you are Prime Minister: you’ll get your tea made, but rarely get time to drink it. Downing
Street is littered with half-finished mugs. In fact, there were times when Ben Usher thought that might be an appropriate title for his memoirs. A Half-Finished Mug.

An election year that had held such exciting prospects was turning into a time of torment. An abominable crime had been committed in the heart of the capital and people demanded two things.
Answers. And revenge. He could give them neither. It was all very well blaming Abdul Mohammed Ghazi but the evidence for his guilt was painfully threadbare, little more than the fact that he was a
man of known violence who’d been chasing around the right part of the world at pretty much the right time. It was entirely circumstantial. The Dutch even found the vessel that had been used
– yes, a bloody fishing boat without a transponder – but although the owner had been interrogated and probably beaten, he could tell them little other than that it had been hired by
three men, one or two of whom might have had dusky faces. They talked English, but with an accent – didn’t everybody? There were no adequate forensics; any useful evidence that might
have been left had long since been washed away in seawater. And most predictably, Usher had learned of this first from the
Telegraph
rather than the Dutch authorities. European cooperation
was all very well, but paying a few backhanders worked a hell of a lot quicker.

And still there was the tantalizing question: Why? Where was the motive? There were two schools of thought on this, the first that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt had a longstanding record of
anti-Western behaviour and felt duly aggrieved by any number of slights, real and imagined. Anyway so the argument went, they were Arabs. Motive enough. And the more Britain and aggrieved America
demanded evidence from them, the more the Egyptians grew stubborn, silent, refused to cooperate, couldn’t find Ghazi, accused the West of intimidation, racism, militarism, Zionism, using
threats of violence. Which only served to raise more lurid accusations. The truth no longer mattered any more, dragged down within a whirlpool of accusation and mutual loathing. It was like Iraq
and Libya all over again.

There was another school of thought, there always was. This suggested that all the evidence against Ghazi was circumstantial, and in any event there was no clear connection between him and the
Egyptian government, apart from the fact that he had been born there. One or two bold souls in MI6 even suggested that perhaps they had jumped to hasty conclusions, that perhaps they should be
looking elsewhere, but ‘perhaps’ was quickly overwhelmed by the collective certainties of group-think and the demand for black-and-white answers that could be easily rendered into
headlines. Both ‘Ghazi’ and ‘Egypt’ fitted headlines very well, so they were both guilty.

There was proof, of sorts, and at least enough to satisfy the Americans, who were offering fifteen million dollars as a bounty on Ghazi’s head. While Egypt itself had never been supplied
with Grinch missiles, they had been sold to Gadaffi in Libya, and after his overthrow so much had gone missing. It was easy to suppose that some had ended up on the back of a truck and carted over
the border to Egypt. So there it was. Even if the motive was a little hazy, the weaponry was very solid, and diagrams and updates on it so easy to download.

In an election year and prodded on by the Americans, there could be no pause for doubt, so the rhetoric was ramped up, the moral outrage stoked to overload. Civil servants scuttled throughout
Whitehall finding draconian new initiatives for the purposes of their political masters. An arms embargo was slapped on, then ramped up, ambassadors were withdrawn, trade agreements broken. The
British and US authorities were now talking of imposing travel bans on a number of named leaders in the Egyptian Brotherhood, the next step would be to freeze their foreign bank accounts. It was
becoming very personal, and for no one more than Ben Usher. As the mood had hardened and events moved beyond his control, he had become accustomed to making a grab for the
Telegraph
even
before he had risen from his bed. One morning he found the front page dominated by a cartoon that depicted him gazing out forlornly from a window of Downing Street. Behind him, on the wall above
his desk, was an election poster with a simple message. ‘Get Elected. Get Ghazi.’

None of this made life any easier for government candidates like Harry. There was no way his seat could be considered marginal, in danger, but even so he found that his constituents were no
longer giving their usual tens or occasional hundreds of pounds for his fighting fund, and neither were they giving much of their time. Wars require foot soldiers, there were envelopes to be
stuffed, leaflets to be delivered, doors to be knocked on, websites to be updated, yet instead of shouldering arms the troops were sitting in their fox holes reading the bloody newspapers. The
government was in danger of losing this war.

Late one evening Harry was walking home after a long and wearing day at the Commons, his head down, lost in thought over such things when he found a woman, a stranger, wrapped in Burberry and on
his doorstep.

‘Mr Jones, I hope you don’t mind, but I want to volunteer.’

She was late twenties, presentable, as if she’d just stepped out of a John Lewis makeover session, everything suggesting a young professional.

‘Emily Keane,’ she said, holding out a hand.

‘And so you are,’ he said, taking it.

Yet he wasn’t used to being picked up on his doorstep. The new school term had started and Jemma was back in her own flat, and for once in his life sexual discretion got the better of
Harry. Better not to take her inside. ‘How about a drink at the pub?’ he suggested.

‘Yes, of course,’ she blushed, ‘but . . .’ She began hopping from one foot to the other. ‘I’ve been standing here for ages. Do you think I could use your loo
first, please?’

So Harry changed his mind. ‘Come on in,’ he said, reaching for his keys.

By the time she had sorted herself out Harry had already taken off his coat, so he offered her a drink, which she declined, her raincoat still firmly buttoned, so he suggested they move to the
sitting room. He found that Jemma had left a scarf draped over the back of a chair; for some ridiculous reason, he hastily removed it.

‘You could have written, made an appointment,’ he observed as they sat down.

‘Sorry, yes, but you must get a million letters,’ she blurted, ‘and I didn’t want to end up at the bottom of a pile. Anyway, I’m trained to be proactive.’

‘Trained?’

‘PR, Mr Jones. I’m a senior account director. Getting on fine, but I’ve come to something of a crossroads.’ She was perched on the edge of the sofa, her knees clenched
coyly together. ‘I’ve been with my company five years, it’s time to move on, get more experience. I’ve always been interested in public affairs, politics – my dad was
a local councillor in Devon – so I’ve been thinking about the election, seeing politics from the sharp end. Wondering if I could help you.’ She was gushing, a little nervous.