A Sentimental Traitor (3 page)

‘Bryan, something I need to tell you.’

‘Yes?’ The first officer was startled from his thoughts, tearing his eyes away from the approaching water and the bridge beyond.

‘You were right.’

‘About what?’

‘Me and Abi.’

The two men turned to face each other. Slowly, as though it were made of lead, the captain extended his hand. His first officer took it. Then, once more, they stared out at what lay ahead, and
said not another word.

The captain had chosen a section of the river called the Pool of London. This was the old mercantile centre, the site of the once-great port of the capital city and deep enough for a World War
Two destroyer and even small liners. It was also playing host to a Polish tall ship, its masts towering more than a hundred feet above its wooden decks as it waited for passage through Tower Bridge
later that night to begin a Christmas goodwill visit. The wingtip of the Airbus brushed the tallest of the masts, causing the plane to yaw. The aircraft was no longer level, the port wing hit the
water first, tearing away from the fuselage, which then cartwheeled twice. As the chaos of the crash subsided, only the tail was clearly distinguishable, sticking out defiantly above the river,
surrounded by floating debris and a small oil fire.

Even after the waters had ceased their raging and settled to nothing more than a dark tidal ripple, there was no sign of anyone on board. They were all dead.

Lake Taupo, New Zealand

Benjamin Usher, the British Prime Minister, a face fashioned for caricature. As a boy he had taken a tumble down the slope of a Cumbrian fell near his home, which had left him
with a squashed nose, ragged ear and a scar high on his cheek. The passage of later years had given him wrinkles that left him looking rather like a bulldog. Resilient. Determined. Even a little
stubborn. He was going to need all those qualities in the coming weeks; he had an election to fight, and no Prime Minister takes such moments for granted, even when eight points ahead in the polls,
as he was. He had never forgotten the words of one of his predecessors, Harold Macmillan, who had been asked to define what worried him most. ‘Events, dear boy, events,’ he had
replied.

At the moment Speedbird 235 hit the water a short distance downriver from the Houses of Parliament, Usher was tucked far away from his problems, or so he thought, in a luxury resort beside Lake
Taupo on New Zealand’s north island, where he was attending the biennial meeting of Commonwealth heads of government. It had been a fruitful three days, swapping ideas and intimacies with
leaders from vigorous economies like India, Canada, and Australia; countries that had escaped the economic permafrost that seemed to have settled on Europe and its currency, and now the
deliberations were almost at an end, time to wrap things up and head home for Christmas. It was early morning on Lake Taupo, and the Prime Minister was enjoying his breakfast, sitting on the
verandah of his lodge soaking up birdsong, when a nervous steward spilled orange juice over the Prime Minister’s immaculately laundered shirt. Only a few drops, but sufficient to drench the
steward in embarrassment. Clumsy bugger. Yet Usher was an old hand, knew there would be a photographer’s lens pointing at him from behind some bush or across the lake, so instead of
succumbing to an instinctive scowl he burst into laughter, making sure that the steward and the wide world beyond realized he couldn’t care less. It was to prove an unfortunate image, in the
circumstances.

He first heard of the tragedy on the Thames while he was changing into a fresh shirt – only the sketchiest details, no one knew yet the scale of the disaster or the death toll, or even
that there was a death toll, but it was not something that could be ignored. He immediately asked for an earlier flight home, but was told there was none. In any event there were still important
details needing to be wrapped up at the conference, so with some misgivings he stayed on those few extra hours. Another misfortune.

The contrasting images of the wreckage and that smile were played side by side. The Prime Minister’s refusal to walk out of the conference led to questions about his sense of priorities.
And even before he had arrived back in London, two days after the tragedy, the media had already made up their collective mind about this act of callousness, Usher’s failure to capture the
sombre spirit of the moment, and on that point they were not for turning, no matter what the Downing Street press spokesman offered in explanation. Grossly unfair, of course, a despicable
distortion, but such, in the end, is the fate of all prime ministers.

Makhachkala, inside the Russian Federation

There were other casualties. Even before the waters had time to settle above the fuselage of Speedbird 235, a small group of wind-scuffed portable cabins standing on a rocky
outcrop overlooking the shore of the Caspian Sea were set ablaze. The spot was a little to the north of the dreary Russian city of Makhachkala, and the cabins were completely destroyed. The fire
raised little local interest and was immediately attributed to unknown delinquents before it was filed away as being solved. The authorities had far more important things to attract their
attention; the province of Chechnya was only down the road with its population of insurgents and suicide bombers, while the entire Caspian was a sea of troubles.

It was the world’s largest inland sea, or lake, and beneath it lay an ocean of oil and gas worth trillions of dollars. That made the region even more unstable. The countries that clustered
around the Caspian shore – Russia, Iran, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan – were without exception led by posses of adventurers and political bandits whose loathing was mutual.
It was a region of irredeemable conflict, yet its peoples were never going to be left to fight it out amongst themselves, for there were too many others who were desperate to claim a share of the
riches. There were plans to lay rival pipelines across the floor of the Caspian, which ensured that the neighbours fought amongst themselves ever more bitterly, arguing about where the pipelines
should cross, and who should control them. And while they fought, the waters of the Caspian became more muddied, the sturgeon swam ever closer to extinction, and the Russians and Iranians ferried
in warships to back up their rival claims. It was a desperate, bloody place, and nobody gave a damn about a Portakabin or two.

Mayfair, London

Even though he was only three miles away from the catastrophe beside Tower Bridge, Harry Jones heard nothing. He was in his mews house, his head bowed in concentration as he
pored over the final draft of his election manifesto. He wasn’t enjoying it, never did. As a former soldier he knew that wars always carried their share of casualties, and what was politics,
except for war without the ethical bits? Careers in Westminster were never more than a headline away from disaster, and one day they would get him, too. People glibly assumed Harry was better
protected than most Members of Parliament – he was independently and almost indecently wealthy, had a thumping parliamentary majority and every year received a personalized Christmas card
from the Queen, yet he took none of this for granted. So he sat in his darkened study, with light cast from a solitary desk lamp, working and reworking every word.

‘Harry, you going to be long?’

He looked up. Jemma was leaning against the doorjamb, yawning. A wisp of thick marmalade hair tumbled across her forehead and she was clad in nothing but a towel. Even in silhouette the effect
was exceptionally distracting, the sort of woman men found difficult in describing without using their hands.

‘Five minutes, Jem,’ he said, returning to his typescript.

‘Make them short minutes,’ she suggested, dropping her towel before turning back to the bedroom.

He rewrote a couple of lines, marking corrections with his Parker Duofold, then reread the whole thing once more, but it was late, his brain too tired, he couldn’t catch the subtleties or
the pace. Part of him, the obsessive part, said it needed another few minutes, one last look, his career depended on it, but instead he screwed the cap back firmly onto his pen and put it to one
side. It was Christmas, dammit, time to follow his star, or at least the trail of light that led towards the bedroom.

Avenue de Cortenbergh, Brussels

The lights were still blazing on the fifth floor of the anonymous office building, a block down from the Park du Cinquantenaire. That was unusual. This was the European Quarter,
the heart of government, where officials administered an empire that stretched from the Black Sea to the Atlantic and up as far as the Arctic Circle, although many of them had fled Brussels and
already returned to their homes for Christmas. In any event, the business of running the Union of Europe was meant to be regular and methodical, it wasn’t supposed to be in need of unexpected
late nights.

Even more surprisingly, the lights were coming from EATA – the European Anti-Terrorist Agency. Not that EATA was like the CIA or MI6, or those thugs at the FSB in Moscow; it was a relative
infant in the intelligence game, no teeth, no claws, no spies wandering abroad with poison-tipped umbrellas or exploding toothpaste. The remit of EATA was simple, its task was to gather information
about matters of public security and put it in a form that their busy bosses could digest. Other intelligence agencies joked that most of the job consisted of pasting up press cuttings and could
better be done by circulating
The Week
magazine or the
Wall Street Journal
, but European bureaucracy never willingly took a short cut. Or worked a late night.

Midnight struck, the avenue grew silent except for the passing of an occasional street-cleaning truck. The park was deserted, its trees bowing their bare branches, the birds asleep. Yet still
the lights in EATA burned. That could mean but one of two possibilities. Either the cleaners had been very careless. Or something was going very badly wrong.

All politics is image, and throughout his career Ben Usher had tried to build the appearance of a Man with the Common Touch. That’s why he and his entourage had flown
back home on a scheduled flight, which made communication difficult, and in business class, which made sleep well-nigh impossible. When eventually he touched down at Heathrow he was tired and knew
he had already lost control of events. Not a good place to be.

His car was waiting at the foot of the aircraft stairs to whisk him away, avoiding the media melee that was waiting for him. Usher wasn’t hiding, merely finding the space to collect his
thoughts; he knew there would be an even larger pack of hounds waiting for him at Downing Street, and he was old enough to remember the fate of Jim Callaghan, another Prime Minister who had
returned from sunnier shores during troubled times. Callaghan hadn’t dodged the Heathrow pack but had spoken to them, very briefly but unguardedly. ‘Crisis? What Crisis?’ the
headlines reported him as saying. In truth he’d never uttered those words, they hadn’t even passed through his mind, yet that hadn’t stopped them being engraved on his tombstone a
few months later. A Prime Minister couldn’t be too careful, not with en election in the offing.

On the road back in to central London, a Stars & Stripes dangled limply beside a Union Jack from an overpass. As they came closer to the centre, there were more, from lamp posts, in windows,
stretched across barriers. Usher telephoned ahead to make sure that the Downing Street flag was flying, and at half mast.

When he arrived he walked directly to the Cabinet Room, which was crowded. He was quickly brought up to date with developments – there weren’t any of substance, apart from the
bodies, which were still being washed up on mudflats and shorelines downstream. The wreckage was being recovered, the Air Accident Investigation Board already at its work, the flight recorders
already being decoded in their laboratories. In the meantime few facts, only theories, and none of them explained how he could deal with the families’ grief. A message to say that the
American ambassador had called, twice. A shower, a change of clothes, a careful selection of a sombre tie.

There was no one else on the stairs as he walked slowly back down from the top-floor apartment. He had this feeling of being entirely alone. He struggled to find some words he might use, a
phrase or two that might help bring a traumatized country together. Put him back in control. Something that came from within. But he was tired from the flight and he felt empty.

He was still juggling phrases in his mind, dropping them, when he reached the black-and-white marble-tiled hallway. He could hear the buzz of impatience from the crowd beyond the steel door. He
was making one last check of his tie when he found his political secretary at his elbow. A young man, always eager to please, sometimes too much so.

‘The American Embassy on the phone again.’

‘The ambassador?’

‘No. His wife.’

‘Save me from this . . .’ Usher muttered, trying to turn away.

‘Wants a quick word. Just one. Needs it, she says. Now. She’s hanging on.’

The ambassador’s wife was a delightful woman, a Virginian, big blue eyes, late thirties, just a little flirty in the way diplomatic wives are encouraged to be, who played her part to the
full but who had never wanted more than to be a softball and cookie-baking mom. Yet now . . . Now Usher felt himself go solid inside. Like a machine. He’d talk to her later, knew he
wouldn’t be able to keep it together if he did it now. Already the polls were showing he was being blamed, not for the accident but for his poor choice in being elsewhere, in the sun while
little children suffered, and he knew he could afford no more slips. So no distractions, not even for her. He shook his head. The young man backed off, a look of disappointment creeping into his
eye. And once more, Usher was on his own.

He had been rushing, trying to cram too much in, and was sweating a little when at last he emerged from the front door of Number Ten to face the massed ranks of microphones, camera lenses and
television lights, every one of them pointed at him.