Whispers of Betrayal (14 page)

It was nonsense, of course, but the noise it generated would ensure that Creech would have to share the headlines in the morning. And time for one last salvo.

‘They pretend their politics are green but these aren’t green politics, these are the politics – and the politicians – who would turn this country back into a medieval swamp!’

Behind him, carefully positioned in a stunning red suit to catch the eye of the television cameras, one of Bendall’s enthusiastic altar girls tried to stifle a moan of animal desire and almost swooned in delight at this outburst of Prime Ministerial passion. She’d not felt this way since she’d been invited on an RAF orientation course where they had squeezed her into a gravity suit that seemed to fondle every feminine part of her, before she had discovered it could be still more intimately explosive when pulling six Gs in a
Tornado. For a few moments the colours swam before her eyes, but she recovered sufficiently to cross her legs and take a mental note of the precise time for her diaries. Parliamentary history was being made, and she was making it. The first politician to have a full-flushed orgasm upon these hallowed leather benches. At least while the House was sitting.

Those who make it to their feet in the Chamber place themselves in the hands of hazard, for no sooner do they start speaking than they discover that the green carpet they are standing on has turned to sand.

Sometimes they are able to make an impression in the parliamentary sands that will endure, some mark that will linger after them for their children and grandchildren to admire. More often, however, the footprints are washed away with the evening tide. And sometimes politicians discover they’ve stepped into quicksand that is just about to swallow them whole.

Goodfellowe knew all this. He’d seen it all before, yet still he ventured out. He’d been watching the proceedings with wry amusement, detached from the mayhem. It had been a first-class parliamentary cockfight, it would take days for the sand to soak up all that blood. The purists would object, of course, insist that it did nothing but bring Parliament into disrepute, but Goodfellowe had never found much that was pure about politics. However, he was still deeply distracted. The shadow of Beryl was enough to cast a pall across the finest of spectacles. He had only half a mind on the action, hadn’t thought the thing through, and was as surprised as anyone to find himself on his feet, wanting to join the fray, for reasons that he himself didn’t fully understand. Something was buzzing around in the back of his mind about the sensible environmentalists, and the need to distinguish between the Swampies and the Sams. There was a difference, wasn’t there? The Swampies didn’t give a stuff about the law, while in Sam’s case …

Suddenly he was back on his bike. In Trafalgar Square. Confused. But it was too late.

‘Is the Prime Minister aware that I wholeheartedly applaud his caution in matters relating to security? Will he allow me to draw him
a little further? He has implied that the attack on Downing Street was carried out by some environmental group. Eco-hooligans, I think was the phrase he used …’

Several other more lurid phrases were offered by those around him, which, although heard clearly throughout the entire Chamber, would fail to be recorded in
Hansard
.

Goodfellowe continued. ‘Can the Prime Minister tell us why he thinks this attack was an environmental protest?’

It was not only meant to protect Sam but was also intended to be helpful – in Goodfellowe’s view, the Prime Minister could only gain by being a little more explicit, and solemn, about the matter. It was an invitation to regain the high ground. However, in his distraction Goodfellowe had failed to comprehend one crucial factor. Bendall didn’t want the high ground. When it came down to it, he hadn’t a single shred of evidence that this mess was the responsibility of green-freaks, but it was a reasonable assumption and he desperately needed a scapegoat. Anyway, it was all good rhetoric, and admitting he had no bloody idea wasn’t going to get him anywhere.

‘I’m perplexed,’ Bendall began his reply, his brow wrinkled, his eyes dismissive, as though inspecting cold porridge. ‘Has my Honourable Friend been sitting elsewhere for the last half hour? I thought I’d made things really rather plain. The reason I suspect it is the work of eco-hooligans is simple. It’s not pensioners and nurses who are trying to close down our power stations. It’s not motorists digging tunnels beneath our motorways. It’s certainly not commuters and shopkeepers bringing London grinding to a halt by staging protests at every corner. And in case he hadn’t already figured it out for himself, I can assure him it wasn’t me or my wife who decided to turn our bathroom into an environmental war zone.’

Goodfellowe was being made to feel like an alien life form, a visitor from another galaxy which had somehow blundered onto earth.

‘To be brutally frank,’ Bendall continued, ‘if the Honourable Member for Marshwood truly wants to be helpful, he’d do far better by bringing round some bath scourer. Then he could really help us clean up. Eh?’

Bendall was in no mood to take prisoners. Two places down from
the Prime Minister, the Chief Whip turned in his seat to cast a look of scorn at Goodfellowe. The lips parted to form a silent but unmistakable word.

‘Idiot.’

A day of broken skies and clouds like sheets of crumpled kitchen towel. Mary’s mood precisely matched the weather. She sat along with the others on top of an open-deck sightseeing bus as it crawled along Regent Street, doing battle with the traffic. Condensation clung to the plastic seats and there was the constant vague tang of diesel fuel in the air. Around them sat a scattering of Japanese tourists. An unlikely meeting place, perhaps, but good for security. Amadeus had reasoned that the surroundings would make anyone trying to observe them stand out ‘like crap in a bowl of custard’, and the constant rumble of London made it impossible for them to be overheard.

The bus continued to pass slowly in front of the fine Nash buildings that lined the crescent of Regent Street, and Mary’s eyes snagged upon those of a man sitting at a first-floor window. He had the sort of sad, distant-world expression that suggested he might be thinking of jumping, but for the fact that the window was, after all, only on the first floor and constructed of plate glass. Behind him the wine bar, of which he was almost certainly the proprietor, stood empty. His eyes seemed exhausted but, as he caught Mary’s glance, he offered her a small wave with plump fingers. Yet the smile was forced. He raised his eyes to heaven, perhaps in hope of discovering salvation, but found only used kitchen towels, and the smile died. Another soon-to-be victim of the downturn.

On the seats around Mary, the morning newspapers were caught by the breeze and began to flap in imitation of dying swans. Their contents were all the same. Water. Suddenly she and the others were famous, or at least notorious. The front pages were filled with Bendall’s condemnation of them as hooligans and eco-terrorists.
‘PM Slams Eco-Yobs.’ ‘Bendall Batters Swampies.’
And so forth.

Perhaps, deep inside, Amadeus and his band had hoped that one blow would be enough, that their opponent would acknowledge his error and immediately submit. But Clausewitz had known better. War is never an isolated act, he had written. Victory never comes gift-wrapped. Instead of offering the apology they had demanded, Bendall had piled insult upon indignity, and made it even worse.

‘So?’

Payne put the question they all carried in their frowns.

‘Fine bunch of crotchkickers we turned out to be. Given Brother Bendall a better press than he’s had for months. Look at it all.’ The Guardsman picked up the pink pages of his
Financial Times
. ‘Still, could’ve been worse. Hell, we could be the water companies.’ He adjusted his rimless reading glasses and seemed almost to smile. ‘Getting hammered, they are.’

‘But not quite the target we had in mind,’ McKenzie added impatiently, failing to see the humour.

‘And what really stinks’ – Scully threw his edition of the
Express
contemptuously to one side – ‘is all this horseshit about us being hooligans and terrorists. I know Bendall’s a lying bastard, but why’s he lying about us?’

Amadeus examined Scully. How much better he looked for a few days’ fodder. Hair neatly trimmed, hiding the streaks of grey, and standing several inches taller in his new clothes. Almost the man Amadeus once knew.

‘I sent him a letter, Skulls. Hand delivered. Made it clear enough that this was a military operation, and what we were about. But …’ A moment’s silence, a slow, defiant shake of the head. ‘Who knows what goes on in his warped mind?’

‘Perhaps that’s it. Mind games,’ Payne offered.

‘What is?’

‘What Bendall’s doing. Calling us names. Insulting us.’ He waved at the newspapers. ‘He’s playing mind games. He knows it’s a military operation that could only have been planned by officers …’ Payne paused for thought, too late, followed by a moment of drowning as he remembered the presence of Scully. ‘Officers … and senior NCOs,’ Payne added hurriedly, trying to extricate himself. He shouldn’t have bothered. ‘Anyway, Bendall knows that the last thing we would want is to be thrown in the same barrel as sodding
Swampies. So he wants to demean us. To provoke us so seriously that either we walk away in disgust …’

‘Nail my balls to the top of Big Ben first,’ Scully snapped.

‘… or we show our hand a little too obviously. He hasn’t the slightest idea who we are, so he’s goading us. Trying to flush us out into the open.’

‘But why should he encourage us to do more?’ Mary pressed, clearly unconvinced.

‘Why the hell not?’ Payne retorted. ‘We’ve probably just handed him an extra five points in the opinion polls. At this rate he’d be happy to keep us in business until Christmas. As far as he’s concerned, yesterday
was
Christmas.’ He paused, sucking at his lower lip. ‘Which may be one good reason for pulling out now. While we’re still …’

‘Ahead?’

‘Alive. Actually I was thinking “alive”.’

McKenzie sniffed, a gesture that might have been an indication of the damp atmosphere rather than of disdain, but only if you didn’t know the man. ‘Is that what ye want? To pull down our colours?’

‘We have to consider that option, Andy. Decide what the hell we’re doing here.’

‘Getting our own back. Getting the Government to change its mind.’

‘And what have we achieved? Made bloody Bendall all the stronger.’ Payne wrinkled his nose in disgust. The aroma of roasting coffee from somewhere at street level surrounded them for a few tantalizing moments, before it was swamped by the stench of diesel and drying paint. ‘Face it, this is a fuck-up.’

The Engineer’s cheeks flushed, as though Payne had slapped him. ‘So you do want away, then?’

There was the slightest pause before Payne responded, a hesitation that spoke all too loudly. ‘What I want to know is what the hell we’re supposed to do next.’

It was clear that things had changed between them, between them all, and inevitably their eyes began to settle upon Amadeus. He offered no reply, seemed distracted.

‘Peter?’ McKenzie pressed. First names. No ranks, not in public.
Use a military rank in a pub in South Armagh and your life expectancy might be measured in minutes.

When at last Amadeus responded, softly, he seemed not to want to join in their concerns, almost as if he wanted to escape entirely from the problem. ‘I was never much of a reader, Andy. How about you?’

The Scotsman seemed startled. ‘Why,
Penthouse
,
Hustler
. On a quiet evening maybe a few bomb-disposal manuals …’

‘What about Livy? Ever read him at the Academy?’

‘No’ exactly from cover to cover.’

‘It’s coming back to me. I seem to remember you spent most of your spare time chasing the commandant’s daughters. Although, if I recollect properly, neither of ’em ran too far.’

McKenzie’s tongue passed briefly across his lips as he tasted sweet memories, but he wasn’t to be deflected. It was a characteristic of his, refusing to be deflected from his target, even while under heavy fire. That’s why he’d been mentioned in despatches in Bosnia. Twice. ‘I believe we were discussing your chum Livy.’

‘So we were. Roman historian. Worth struggling with. He wrote about Hannibal. You remember? The guy who wanted to take his elephants on tour to Italy?’

‘Seem to remember one o’ the commandant’s daughters made a wee mention o’ the matter. Said I looked like Hannibal in my uniform, and reminded her of an elephant when I took it off.’

‘Must’ve had something to do with your wrinkled arse,’ Mary suggested, attempting to sound disdainful, but McKenzie simply smiled.

‘Hannibal wanted to invade Italy,’ Amadeus continued, ‘but couldn’t figure out how – until he had a dream. Now the dream told him to march his elephants over the Alps. Most people thought this wasn’t so much a dream as an extended nightmare, but Hannibal had something of the Para in him.’

‘He was clinically mad, you mean?’

‘I was thinking more stubborn. Bloody stubborn. There was something else, too, because the dream also told him that, once he’d started, he could never stop. That he mustn’t even look back. But, as I said, he was a Para …’

‘Too thick to understand an order, let alone obey it.’

‘Obstinate. Unable to resist temptation and a challenge. So he turned to look behind him and saw this huge set of teeth ready to swallow him.’

‘Must remind you of your nights with the general’s daughters, Andy,’ Mary tried again.

‘Some o’ them, maybe,’ McKenzie replied, staring directly into her eyes. Inside he was laughing at her. And why not? If you played with bombs, when every day you risked having your brains blown out through your backside, you were entitled to laugh a little. ‘But since it’s clear that my brains are located in an entirely different part of my anatomy to the rest o’ you, could someone give me just the smallest wee hint where the hell Livy enters into all this?’

‘Something to do with not stopping, I guess,’ Scully offered.

‘Correct. Yesterday was only Day One. We daren’t look back, not now. Not unless my balls are to join yours dangling from Big Ben.’

‘None of us were trained to run, Peter,’ McKenzie added, almost as a challenge to them all.

Payne spoke next, his tone no longer aggressive. ‘So the next step is … what?’

Before Amadeus could answer, any further attempt at conversation was drowned by an eruption of protest from all sides. While they had been talking, the bus had been inching forward ever more slowly, like a boat rowing through thick weed, until any trace of progress had disappeared and it had come to a full stop. It could advance no further, yet neither could it retreat, and it was blocking one of the main escape routes from Piccadilly Circus. Exasperated drivers in other vehicles began to push forward, trying to squeeze round the obstruction, but every yard they gained succeeded only in strangling the other escape routes until everything began to choke. The Circus was dying, and the horns of a hundred vehicles wailed in dismay.

‘This is Hell!’ Payne barked, resentful.

‘No, no,’ Amadeus roared above the clamour, suddenly exhilarated. His eyes had grown several watts brighter as they cast around the scenes of disorder. ‘Can’t you see? This is like Hannibal’s dream! London is talking to us.’

‘And telling us what?’

‘That we should give Mr Bendall precisely what he wants.’

‘Which is?’

‘An opportunity to get to know us a damn sight better.’

He drew them into a huddle around him, and as they bent their heads he began gesticulating forcefully, one hand chopping repeatedly across the palm of the other as he made his points. It was several minutes before Amadeus straightened his back. The Circus was still blocked, the chaos continuing to grow. A few feet away, the statue of Eros rose disdainfully above it all.

‘By the time we’re finished with Mr Bendall, he’ll wish he had wings to fly away,’ Amadeus concluded.

‘Balls of lead, too,’ Scully added.

‘Are we all agreed, then?’ He looked around at faces filled with renewed expectation. ‘Good. Let’s go round up an elephant.’

They prepare to depart. Payne picks up his copy of the
Financial Times
and heads for the stairs. When he reaches them he pauses, glancing back at Mary. ‘Fancy a spot of lunch? Terrific little Italian bistro just around the corner. Superb linguini …’

‘Sorry, can’t,’ she replies in a flat tone. His gaze is a little too obvious. Something instinctive, feminine, tells her she doesn’t much like him. Anyway, she’s already agreed to have lunch with McKenzie.

Payne shrugs, his smile suggesting it’s a matter of considerable indifference to him, and disappears.

They make their way off the bus, one by one, Scully the last to leave with Amadeus. The RSM scratches away at a stubborn tuft of grey stubble that has survived beneath his left ear. Perhaps he isn’t yet back into the routine of shaving every morning. Or perhaps nowadays he simply misses little pieces of the picture.

‘You look troubled, Andrew.’

The scratching stops abruptly. ‘Can’t help thinking about bloody Hannibal, sir.’

‘What about bloody Hannibal?’

Furrows stretch across Scully’s brow. ‘You know, after the elephants and the Alps. Didn’t they end up kebabbing the bastard?’

Following his encounter the previous day with the Prime Ministerial lash, it might have been understandable if Goodfellowe had felt a little sorry for himself. He didn’t. He was surprised to discover that he saw it not so much as a humiliation as a rite of passage, like some Tuareg initiation ritual designed to summon up the blood before setting out on a lion hunt or mounting a raid on the slaver caravans. The scars were necessary, even welcome, because they would remind him. No more wandering distractedly into the Chamber with only half a mind on the game, no more flippant gestures aimed at Ministers in the guise of ‘being helpful’, no more succumbing to the temptation to throw bricks into the pond for the simple pleasure of watching everyone getting soaked. He wished once more to be part of the tribe, to come in from the shadows and share the warmth of the campfire. He couldn’t achieve this by force of arms, he had to be invited, so he was decided. Whatever it took.

However, much to his discomfort, this was not the line taken by Sam when she telephoned him early at his apartment. He was preparing his diet herbs, a broth of strange substances that smelt so foul it was little wonder it persuaded the appetite to run away and hide.