Old Enemies (21 page)

A child’s terror takes hold and grows within a mother, there is no effective defence, and Terri found it ever more difficult to see what was taking place as her knees failed her and her head filled with a silent howl of despair. The shadows closed in around Ruari, there were flashes of the blade, and of his terrified eyes, then more shadows as his face disappeared from view, but if the images were intermittent the sound that came over the link and beat upon Terri’s senses was constant. Her son was in torment. For a moment she questioned if it were truly him, his voice sounded deeper, so grown up, a man’s screams, not the high-pitched squeals of her baby boy running from a bike crash in the garden, yet no matter how she tried to convince herself otherwise, the eyes that stared at her from the screen, accusing, burning into her, were Ruari’s.

Then Ruari’s cries grew muffled, smothered behind some restraining sleeve, and the confusion of images began to clear. A hand appeared. In its palm was a small bloodied piece of flesh. A finger.

J.J. threw up. He was ripped through by a moan of despair but he wouldn’t leave the room, would not run and turn his back on his son, and in any case he wasn’t sure right now his legs would obey him. Then Jan’s voice sounded, cold, drained of emotion, its tone emphasizing that this was no rash outburst, no spasm of emotion, but an act that was entirely calculated.

‘Next time,’ he said, ‘we carve off more important chunks. Six months. That’s what you give us. Six months. Stop screwing around or we drop the boy down a hole in the ground so deep you’ll never see him again.’

The voice faded, the screen went dead. For many seconds, no one uttered a word. J.J. wiped the spittle from his mouth, Terri sat huddled in a corner, sobbing. It was Archer who cut through the atmosphere from his seat by the window. ‘Go to the authorities. I don’t think we have any other option now.’

J.J. slammed his fist into the table, still trying to fight the idea, but his face was drained of colour, apart from the eyes, which were seared red. Slowly his body seemed to deflate, and with it his resistance. ‘How would that work?’ he muttered.

‘I have a word with the Kidnap Unit at Scotland Yard. They’ll go straight into action.’

Hiley shot a sharp look at Archer; J.J. noticed. ‘What do you think of the idea, Will?’ he asked

The risk assessor paused before saying: ‘I think Brian is right.’

‘But. There’s a “but”. I can hear a big bloody “but”.’

Hiley had more experience of these matters than anyone here; it didn’t make him feel any more comfortable. ‘It will take time. Because this is happening abroad it will be handed to a specialist group at the Yard – the Hostage and Crisis Negotiation Unit. They’re specialist, elite – which means they’re small. Less than ten of them, all told. And because the situation’s abroad, it’s a consular matter, they’ll have to go through the Foreign Office, which will go to their Italian counterparts, who will then brief their own police—’

He broke off as J.J. groaned. ‘Sweet Jesus, it sounds about as effective as the United Nations.’

‘No, they’re already up and running, J.J.,’ Archer interrupted, rising onto the balls of his feet. Hiley thought he looked smug. ‘I took the liberty of having a word with them a couple of days ago. They’re waiting for my call.’

‘I thought I told you not to.’

‘It was an entirely informal chat, a hypothetical scenario, but they knew what I was about.’

J.J. sighed. ‘Dear Lord, what am I supposed to do?’

‘Give them the diaries – please,’ Terri sobbed, still sitting on the floor in a corner, her arms huddled around her knees. ‘Or burn the bloody things!’

‘You know that’s not possible,’ J.J. forced the words out through clenched teeth, shamed by his impotence.

‘Then what are you going to do?’ his wife fired back.

‘I don’t know!’ They stared angrily at each other, but quickly he lowered his head, not wanting her to see that his anger was a cover for his humiliation. J.J. Breslin had never felt more powerless. His son, his marriage, his newspaper – his world was spiralling out of control and he risked losing everything. He was desperate to fight, but instead was lashing out heedlessly. He couldn’t do this on his own, yet even in this crowded room he felt utterly lost. He felt ashamed for his display of weakness, for vomiting, for having no answers, and most of all for not being there when his son had needed him most. He had no idea what to do next, or who he could trust. He rushed from the room before they could see his tears.

Harry sat in the chamber of the House of Commons, tucked away on the green leather benches. It was easy to hide here, no major distractions, except when the party leaders appeared to perform their choreographed stunts. For the last two hours there had been rarely more than twenty Members in the great oak-panelled hall, for a debate on a Care Home and Sheltered Accommodation (Domestic Pets) Bill, and many of those present seemed more concerned with signing piles of constituency correspondence.

What was he doing here? It was the question the Prime Minister was pursuing him to answer. So much of Harry’s job as a Member of Parliament seemed menial, sometimes even demeaning, so didn’t it make sense to exchange it for the creature comforts of the diplomatic circuit, swap the barrack room for business class? Yet Harry had always felt at home in the barracks, getting muck under his nails, and if he accepted the Prime Minister’s offer the only way he’d get his hands dirty was cracking lobster shells. Yet it wasn’t as simple as that, he used to love lobster. He’d dived for them off the Massachusetts coast with a thick leather glove to protect him from their claws, but tastes change, lives move on, and leather rots in seawater. That’s why he’d decided to hide away in the corner of the chamber, hoping it would help make up his mind about where his life was going, but as another speaker bobbed up and down like a plastic duck in a storm, Harry decided it was pointless. He wasn’t going to find the solution to his problems here; he might as well consult a horoscope. He couldn’t escape the fact that the answer lay not on any public platform but buried somewhere deep within his private life. What was the point in the public acclaim and having enough letters after his name to fill an entire Scrabble board when at night he went back to an empty house with too many cold corners? The beating from those Irish dog-breaths had brought it home to him. He’d got through it all right, he was Harry Jones, but with someone else hanging around in his life he would have found it so much less painful.

He took himself off from his perch in the chamber and began pacing the corridors of Parliament, but he soon grew bored with offering an invented excuse for the bruising on his face. He found himself out on the Terrace overlooking the Thames, alone except for a curious seagull who hopped along the stone balustrade in the hope of finding something to scavenge. The late-afternoon sun was trying to dry out the puddles, but it wouldn’t win before the next bank of cloud arrived from the east. There was a high tide, silt-laden waters slapping the embankment, a bracing wind, a touch of sleet in the air. This was more his environment. Come on, Jones, coal face or diplomatic couch, make up your bloody mind! He was still struggling when his phone rang.

‘Ha-rry Jones,’ a slow American voice declared.

‘Charley! What a pleasant surprise. Tell me all your secrets while you remember this is not a secure phone. I have a seagull listening in.’

‘You on some beach as usual, with your hands full of women and wine?’ Ebinger asked gently with the studied insolence of an old friend, his deep American tones seeming to warm the air around Harry.

‘Sore point right now, Charley. Still, Christmas coming, maybe I can escape somewhere.’ Suddenly Harry realized he had no plans for Christmas – something else in his personal life he’d been trying – unsuccessfully – to ignore. ‘Are you allowed to tell me where you are?’

‘At home,’ the presidential adviser said. ‘Just packing. Off for a few days spreading American humour and the rules of baseball around Asia and Africa. Putnam was just asking after you. She sends her love.’

In the background Harry could hear Ebinger’s wife shouting in greeting.

‘We keep picking up rumours we’re going to be seeing more of you on this side of the water, Harry. Wanted you to know how thrilled Putnam and I would be about that. And you’d have a very special welcome committee lined up here in Washington, you know that.’ The American was extending a welcome, putting on a little gentle pressure, using cryptic language while making sure Harry realized the welcoming committee would include the President.

‘Fact is, Charley, I’ve been meaning to call to ask your advice. But how did you hear about it all? Hell, I haven’t even told my hairdresser.’

‘You know I’m paid to know everything. I have friends in some very peculiar places, so not much escapes me. If it did, I guess I’d be getting myself fired.’

Harry felt a spot of rain on his forehead, cold, heavy, on the cusp of sleet. It had grown considerably darker in the few minutes he’d been standing here. The seagull, its feathers ruffling in the sharpening wind, flapped and flew away, but as it did so an idea took its place.

‘Charley, since you’ve got friends in such peculiar places, have you heard of the Mandela diaries?’

‘Published a while ago, weren’t they?’

‘No, I mean another set. More private. More pointed. I’m told they’re doing the rounds.’

‘The diaries that could cause a former vice-president of my country a bout of gut-wrenching embarrassment with his wife and church congregation if the scurrilous allegations contained in them ever saw the light of day?’ Ebinger chuckled. The sanctimonious shit in question was from a different administration and a different party; he owed him nothing except perhaps a little retribution.

‘In all honesty I’m not sure,’ Harry replied. ‘Haven’t seen them myself. But I’d very much like to. Any chance?’

‘How urgent is it?’

‘Oh, you know, it’s just started raining here. So before it finishes, perhaps?’

‘Does it ever stop raining there, Harry?’

Harry could hear Putnam shouting in the background. Her husband’s car was waiting.

‘Have to go. I’ll see what I can do,’ Ebinger said. ‘And I hope to be seeing you soon, Mr Jones, over here. You can pay me back then.’

A courier in a dark limousine with diplomatic plates delivered the package. No signature required.

Harry devoured the diaries, cancelling an entire day’s meetings to read them in one session. They were an old man’s meanderings – no, Harry corrected himself, that wasn’t the word, not meandering, there was a point to all these stories. The diaries reflected Mandela’s enduring faith in the decency of Man, but showed damnably little trust in the honesty of men, at least amongst many of those he’d been forced to deal with. Mandela’s had been an intensely political life – at one point he had been only a step away from the gallows, yet later he walked so historically out of his prison and had wound up not in a crude wooden coffin but in the presidential palace. It was scarcely surprising that his long journey had required many kinds of compromise, deals with men he despised. There had been times in his life when he admitted he was guilty of what many would regard as conspiracy and cover-up, not to protect himself but to defend the cause. It was a case of eggs and omelettes and things that needed to be broken for the wider good. Nothing survives wholly intact, least of all political virtue. Page by page had been written with a sharp nib and a memory etched in the most vivid colours. If Mandela’s past crime had been to turn a blind eye, now he sought absolution; and yet, as Harry read and reread the words, his lingering impression was of frustration. Mandela had been so very old when he had written them, and many of those names he mentioned were, like Mandela himself, now dead. Reputations would be tarnished, several wives and widows would be left squirming in embarrassment and outrage at their husband’s follies, there would be one Israeli Prime Minister who would never be able to run for election again and even the Pope would have to revise the glowing eulogy he had delivered to the memory of a favourite cardinal, but if there was something in these pages that would justify murder and kidnap, Harry was unable to find it. So he read them again.