A Sentimental Traitor (8 page)

‘Some other time,’ the editor snapped. He’d never been nearer a bloodied partridge than a dining table in Hampstead. He also knew the older man was winding him up. Still, he
deserved it. He had overplayed the bomb bit. He needed to get this one right.

‘You are saying that the plane was shot down by a missile.’

‘That’s what I’ve written.’

‘Russian,’ the editor said, chewing his cheek.

‘An SA-24 Igla-S 9K338 portable air-defence missile system. But you can call it a Grinch,’ Hamish added doggedly. He knew when to play pedantic. It confused the hell out of
whizz-kids who never did much more than scrape the surface of things.

‘Photos? Diagrams? The technical shit?’

‘All downloadable from Wikipedia.’

Strauss put his feet up on his desk and gazed out of the window, which had one of the meanest views in Westminster. Everything was grey; it was raining. He scratched distractedly at his crotch.
‘OK, Hamish, so why should we expect readers to believe this missile theory when two days ago we told them it was a bomb?’

‘Because it’s not a theory. Because this time you’re not going to allow anyone to muck around with my copy behind my back. And because there’s more.’

More? Strauss stopped scratching. He twisted around so violently his chair threatened to tip. He was about to shout and thunder that no matter how long Hague had been on the bloody books he
wasn’t going to screw with him, but then came a flash of understanding, a moment in a younger man’s life that would mark the rest of his career as an editor, and possibly pick him out
as a great one. He sensed he had to back off, let this cautious old Scotsman play him for a pike, that it didn’t matter, so long as he delivered. ‘OK. This is your story, Hamish. What
have you got?’

‘The biggest bit of all.’

‘What, bigger than a sodding missile?’

‘The terror cell. The guys who fired it.’

‘You know . . .?’

The Scot had eyes the colour of autumn hazel; they held the other man, not rushing, not striking too quickly, wanting to make sure he was firmly and inextricably hooked. ‘Not the identity,
not yet. Just the nationality.’ Then he whispered one word. ‘Egyptian.’

Humiliations, like buses, tend to arrive in quantity.

‘I know it’s Christmas. I’ve got my entire family waiting for me by the fire but I haven’t even made it out of my dressing gown. And do you know why? Because you
can’t track down a single bloody soul who knows a single bloody thing about the story that’s over the front of every single bloody newspaper!’

It was unfair. He shouldn’t be taking it out on a duty clerk. But it was proving to be one of the most vexed mornings of the Prime Minister’s life.

Usher should have been the one to tell the world about the missile. But the AAIB had sent the scrap of aluminium they thought was a missile to a specialist forensic laboratory for testing. They
needed to be sure. Yet it was Christmas. The government’s own forensic service had been shut down a couple of years before. And this private laboratory would be closed for another two days.
So the
Telegraph
got there first and the others rushed in behind it.

Usher had badgered duty officers, press officers, Secretaries of State, even a couple of friendly editors, but only after several hours did he manage to track down the Chief Inspector of the
AAIB at his holiday hotel on the Isle of Wight. He had just come back from a bracing walk when the receptionist thrust the telephone at him.

‘Have you . . . read the news?’ the Prime Minister demanded, his exasperation causing him to stutter.

‘I’ve read a deal of speculation,’ the CI, Simon Galliani, answered defensively.

‘Let’s cut through the crap, Mr Galliani. Is it true?’

‘Is what true, precisely, Prime Minister?’ the other man answered, lowering his voice and trying to cover the mouthpiece as he looked cautiously around the hotel reception area for
potential eavesdroppers.

‘Was it a missile?’

Galliani cleared his throat. ‘Probably.’

‘Probably? What the hell do you mean “probably”? We don’t pay you to sit on the bloody fence.’

Galliani braced his back and found himself staring into the eyes of a stuffed moose with a threadbare nose. It’s why he liked this place. The old dust. It didn’t smell in the least
like a laboratory. ‘Prime Minister, I am a forensic engineer. It’s not a matter of sitting on the fence but of gathering evidence. We are currently waiting on the results of technical
analysis.’

‘Waiting?
Waiting?
’

Galliani hesitated. This was, after all, the Prime Minister. But he was an engineer, not a moose. He had no intention of being stuffed and mounted. Anyway, he was only a couple of years away
from retirement, they couldn’t touch him. It was time to kick back. ‘Sir, our workload this past financial year rose twelve-point-eight per cent. Yet you cut our budget by more than
twenty per cent. Apart from that, it’s Christmas. It’s also Sunday. Which makes tomorrow a Bank Holiday. When the laboratory opens on Tuesday, and as soon as they are able to confirm
any information, I give you my solemn undertaking that you will be the first to know.’

‘But the whole world knows!’ the Prime Minister all but shouted. ‘Didn’t it ever strike you that you should have let someone know?’

‘Someone? You mean someone like the Transport Secretary? We phoned and e-mailed her office on Thursday, but – well, I suppose it’s Christmas, even in Westminster.’

At the other end of the phone, Usher began to realize he might have mishandled this conversation. He tried to back off. ‘Look, I know you understand how important this is. Couldn’t
you . . . just get the laboratory to open, even over the holiday? Get this thing resolved?’

‘I’d be more than happy to do that,’ Galliani replied, ‘if only you would let me.’

‘Me?’

‘It’s a matter of Health & Safety, you see. A wreck is a dangerous environment, carbon-fibre ash, chemical pollution, and always the possibility of blood-borne pathogens.
We’re required to have adequate staffing levels. Not just a couple of mere lab technicians but there’s fire officers, of course, medical support staff, supervisors . . .’

‘Winston would have wept.’

‘Mr Churchill didn’t have to deal with EU Working Place directives, working-time limitations, budget restrictions, statutory employment practices.’ Galliani found he was rather
enjoying himself; above his head, he thought he saw the moose’s glass eye wink. ‘And if I ordered my staff to return to work I expect we’d be in line for all sorts of
claims.’

‘Claims?’

‘For breaching their human rights.’

‘Didn’t those little children have human rights, too?’

‘I entirely agree, Prime Minister. Perhaps that might have been a point to consider before you let all those EU directives through.’

‘But I hate bloody Brussels,’ Usher whispered beneath his breath.

‘And, of course, if we short-circuited our set procedures, it’s probable that as a result any evidence we obtained would be inadmissible in court. Is that what you want?’

‘What I want? What
I
want?’ He rolled the words around; they left a bitter taste. ‘That doesn’t seem to matter much any more,’ the Prime Minister said
softly, replacing the phone.

Parliament was recalled. It was the middle of the recess; the elves and goblins weren’t supposed to be back from their Christmas break until the second week of January,
but this was too important to wait. It caught the system by surprise; there was still scaffolding on one corner of the Commons’ Chamber where one of the ancient leaded windows was being
refurbished, and no amount of huffing and puffing could persuade the mortar to set more quickly. There was huffing and puffing in every corner, for recesses are rare jewels in the battered crowns
of most MPs, and now it had been snatched away. No one could remember anything like it since the House had sat on a Saturday in 1982 during the Falklands War.

But it was necessary. The media speculation had continued to grow, the headlines becoming ever more lurid. Accusations like
‘Muslim Missile’
and
‘Muslim Murder
Squad’
thundered across the front page. Theories were hurled back and forth, often blindly, in the hope that if they kept it up long enough they’d eventually hit a target. But no
one doubted it was an Arab plot, because the
Telegraph
had said so, and that paper at least seemed to know what it was talking about. On the day of the recall it published further details.
The terrorist who led the cell was Abdul Mohammed, his family name was Ghazi; it meant warrior or champion. He had been a conscript during the 1967 Arab–Israeli War, captured by the Israelis
and turned fanatical by his appalling treatment, so it was said. Later he had been responsible for any number of indiscriminate atrocities, which ended only when Mubarak’s men had dragged him
onto their torture tables. The
Telegraph
reported he had lost an eye and, allegedly, a testicle during this time. The tabloid psychoanalysts had a field day with that. His survival was said
to be a miracle, his release the result of the revolution of the Arab Spring, and he was now an agent of the Muslim Brotherhood who had come to rule in that blighted country.

The story was all supposition and speculation, there was no firm information to go on, the wonks at MI6 couldn’t corroborate it, but neither would they disown it, since no ambitious spy
can afford to admit he or she simply doesn’t know. Ignorance doesn’t read well on the annual assessment. Anyway, McDeath was known to have excellent sources and was considerably more
reliable than the mistyped university thesis the British government had downloaded from the Internet and used as a pretext for war in Iraq. So the British government decided to act.

On the morning that Parliament was recalled, the British Foreign Secretary summoned the Egyptian ambassador to King Charles Street, which runs parallel to Downing Street. As his car slowed to
pull into the rear entrance to the building off Horse Guards Road, it was met by a posse of journalists and photographers who shouted questions through the closed car window and snatched
photographs, a couple even kicking a side panel under cover of the scrum to see if they could get a snarl or look of alarm. The ambassador, however, remained impassive.

The Ambassadors Door, the discreet entrance into the Foreign & Commonwealth Office used by visiting diplomats, is tucked away at the back of Downing Street where it faces the park. As the
Egyptian’s car stopped he was met not by the Minister for the Middle East as protocol normally required but by an official, who conducted him to a small lift. The ambassador had a degree in
comparative economics from the LSE where in his twenties he had gained a reputation as an irrepressible womanizer, yet the joys of life seemed to have been drained from his face, and despite his
proficiency at English he had still brought with him an embassy official to act as an interpreter. They all knew this wasn’t going to be fun and he wanted a witness. The lift to the
ministerial floor was intensely claustrophobic.

Only once he stepped out of the lift did the Minister appear and offer a formal handshake. Their heels clicked along the mosaic tile of the hallway as they took the brief walk to the office of
the Minister’s boss, the Secretary of State, which was vast, constructed by Victorians to impress the natives. Gilded frames, heavy oils, cascading red drapes and marble fireplaces,
everything else clad in ornately carved dark wood that had been ripped from the forests of Africa. Somewhere near at hand the ambassador could hear the insistent ticking of a clock, even though
this was a place that time seemed to have passed by.

‘Darius!’

The Foreign Secretary, Andrew Judd, stood in the middle of his office, beaming welcome, but not moving, forcing the ambassador to come to him, even though the Arab was old enough to be his
father. ‘How are you? And how’s that son of yours? Following proudly in his father’s footsteps at the LSE, so I’m told.’ And so that the Egyptian remembered they were
keeping a watch on his son, too.

‘As-salamu alaykum,’
the Egyptian replied. Arabic. He wasn’t going to make this easy.

‘May peace be with us both, Darius.’ The Englishman’s greeting was cautious as he showed his guest to one of the pair of deep leather chairs by the fireplace. The Arab paused
as he passed an old globe adorned with names like Siam and Persia and the Gold Coast, and so much of it splashed in red. His finger came to rest on his own country, also in imperial red. He
muttered something; his eyes came up to meet those of the Foreign Secretary, and he stared. They were remorseless eyes, drenched in accusation.

And privately, inside, the Foreign Secretary flogged himself; this was his meeting, yet already he’d lost control of it.

The ambassador muttered something in his low, guttural voice: ‘The world has moved on,’ the interpreter translated. Then the ambassador took his chair, while Judd took the other, its
back to the window. It meant that he would be in silhouette, his face hard to read, while the visitor’s face was laid bare to the weak winter sun, a game as old as empire that would show up
every smile, inflexion, grimace or nervous tic. But the Arab was an old hand, he offered not a flicker.