The Lords' Day (retail) (10 page)

‘Who are you? What do you want?’

‘Ah, Mr Eaton,’ the gunman began, smiling. ‘I hope your knees have recovered.’ It was a cruel jibe and Eaton wanted to throw it straight back at him, man to man, just as
he was used to in Parliament, but he wasn’t a fool. He bit his lip. The young attacker had already won their first round. ‘My name is Masood,’ he continued. ‘And you ask me
what I want. I want three things. First, very simply, the television coverage must be restored. I want what happens here to be witnessed in every part of the world. We have nothing to
hide.’

‘Sadly, I don’t control the BBC,’ Eaton responded, trying to cast a net of lightening humour. ‘Even you must know that.’

‘At this precise moment you control nothing at all, perhaps not even your bladder. But you see, Mr Eaton, I think I am more powerful than you, more powerful than even the Prime Minister of
Great Britain. I can persuade the BBC. I feel sure they are listening to us. And if the cameras in this chamber aren’t working in sixty seconds and the television coverage restored, something
– how shall I put this? – something quite unpleasant will happen.’ He pointed to the blank monitors set high in the chamber. ‘I want these screens back in action and showing
us what the rest of the world is seeing. In sixty seconds. Or else.’

‘Or else what?’

‘Or else you might die, Mr Eaton.’ The young man laughed, but it hit a false note. He was nervous, too, yet his hand was steady as he raised his assault rifle and pointed it directly
at the Prime Minister. He began examining his watch.

Twenty seconds had already passed before Daniel, cocooned in his OB van, realised that the world was waiting upon him. He was the last link in the BBC chain. He had cut off the broadcast; he was
the only one who could reinstate it. And the digital clock was ticking. He shook himself out of his daze and began staring at his phone, waiting for it to ring with instructions from any of a huge
number of more senior BBC executives who might take the weight of responsibility from his shoulders, but the bloody thing remained ominously silent. No one was willing to lift the burden from his
shoulders. Another fifteen seconds passed, and the next five seconds were filled by the young attacker reminding him they were running out of time. ‘What do I do?’ Daniel demanded in
despair of his colleagues; no one had an answer or would catch his eye, and he knew there was nothing in the BBC’s Producer’s Guidelines that would save his hide. His head began to
throb, he thought he was getting another one of his nose bleeds – pity’s sake, not now! Blood. Pain. Confusion. Despair. The only thing Daniel could be certain of was that he was on his
own. The decision was to be his.

With less than ten seconds to go, he gave the instruction. They began broadcasting once more.

As the large screens in the chamber flickered back into life, Masood smiled once more. He had won another victory. ‘Excellent. You see, Prime Minister, it wasn’t so difficult after
all.’

‘What else is it you want?’ Eaton demanded impatiently, desperately trying to regain a little of the initiative.

‘What else? Ah, yes. I want Mrs Willcocks.’ He looked around the chamber. ‘I would like Mrs Tricia Willcocks to step forward, please.’

12.07 p.m.

Until two years ago Harry had been the minister at the Home Office, one of the senior briefs in charge of police and security matters. It was a role only one step away from the
Cabinet itself, until he had dared to disagree with his Secretary of State in public. The Secretary had made a particularly woolly speech embracing multiculturalism and the melting pot; the
following day, in an unscripted and uncharacteristically unguarded moment, Harry had responded that the quickest way for a nation to lose its will to live was to lose its roots. Just like an army
needed to know what it was fighting for, he said, so a nation needed to know what it stood for. He followed up by suggesting that you couldn’t build paradise on platitudes. Harry was the sort
of man who always followed up. Stripped of the coded language used in Westminster, it was like throwing a bucket of ice water over his boss. That was unwise. Nobody could accuse Harry of being
unfit for purpose, but it was made clear to him that he was no longer wanted on voyage, so before they made it official and asked him to creep out the back door, Harry had stridden out of the front
door and quit. Melanie had been upset; she enjoyed the glamour of being a Minister’s wife, the invitations, the attention, the coverage she’d begun to get in the
Tatler
, and the
annual trips to Davos. The
Mail on Sunday
had even asked if she’d like to write an occasional travel column. She’d been too busy at the time to accept, but it was flattering to
be asked – except they didn’t ask any more, not since Harry had jumped ship. Perhaps that was where it had started to go wrong, he sometimes thought. She did so love the spotlight,
sought it out, like a moth, or an exotic dancer. Yet his ministerial experience had left Harry with many things – an understanding of how the system worked, and a list of names and telephone
numbers that was still able to open many doors, friends who were still at the heart of things. Now he used that knowledge. Harry had to report what he had seen, and he knew just the man.

‘The Ops Room,’ he demanded when the switchboard at Scotland Yard answered. ‘Give me Gold.’ They hadn’t wanted to put him through at first, until he had explained
who he was, and where he was calling from.

The Operations Room at Scotland Yard is the heart of their security control system, and Gold is the officer who is its head. Gold, in the person of Commander Mike Tibbetts, a twenty-three-year
veteran of the force, was at that moment in his office struggling to cover his dismay as he looked out over an open-plan Ops Room that was wallowing in bewilderment, like a dismasted ketch. They
were barely a few hundred yards from the action in the Lords, but they might have been on the other side of the moon for all they knew of what was happening there.

‘Harry, long time – too long,’ the policeman muttered, dispensing with the niceties, his voice tight as a piano string. ‘What the hell’s going on?’

‘I’m in a corridor. Just along from the chamber. There are eight of them, so far as I can tell.’

‘Eight, you say? We’ve only just got television pictures back and we’re still counting.’

‘All male, mostly young and fit. These are trained men, Mike.’

‘A diplomat amongst them, so it seems.’

‘Sent abroad to die for his country. So what are we doing about it?’

There was a well-rehearsed procedure for any siege – isolate, contain, evacuate and negotiate, in the words of the manual – but no matter how well rehearsed it might be, somehow
Tibbetts feared this situation might be stretching the jargon to its breaking point. ‘SO-15’s up and running, CO-19 stood to,’ the policeman said, referring to the
counter-terrorist command and the armed response unit of the Metropolitan Police. ‘They’re ready to go. We’re pushing the security cordon further back, establishing a
stronghold.’ He sighed, one of those deep outpourings of frustration that sound like a death knell on a career. ‘We’re still checking the rest of the parliament building for
stragglers and explosives. But mostly it’s clear, people couldn’t wait to get out. You must get out yourself.’

‘In good time, Mike. What about the Boys? Are they in the mix?’

The Boys. The Special Air Service. The most finely honed unit in the British Army, based at Hereford, from where they were called upon to do the dirtiest jobs in the world. They had a reputation
for ferocity, adaptability and, when necessary, brutal success. Who Dares Wins. It had been Harry’s last active posting before they’d sent him to count paperclips.

‘No, not yet,’ the policeman responded, revealing his reluctance. So long as this was a police show, he was in charge; once the SAS boys got involved, things had a habit of growing
messy. ‘There’s still a view here that these are guys who have just got lucky and might want little more than the publicity.’

‘Mike, these bastards are well trained and extremely well tooled. Kalashnikov assault rifles. Machine pistols. Best there is. You can’t buy that sort of thing on the Portobello Road.
They’re the full Monty. I beg you, don’t underestimate them.’

‘So who in God’s name are they?’ the policeman cried out softly in exasperation. ‘Arabs? Islamists? Al Qaeda? What bloody hole have they crawled out from?’

Harry leaned his forehead against the deep wood panelling of the corridor trying to round up his drifting thoughts. ‘Not so much a hole as a complex of caves, I suspect. Somewhere in the
mountains of the North West Frontier. They’ll be Pashtun, Baluchi, something like that, not the rag-tag mob of the Islamic international brigade – from what I’ve seen of these
guys, close up, they’re remarkably similar. Same physiognomy. I’ve seen something like that before . . .’ He began rhythmically banging his forehead, like a drumbeat calling his
struggling thoughts to order, but they shuffled along at their own pace for a while; memories of his briefings on active service in Iraq, fragments from his researches in the clandestine corridors
of Oxford. Suddenly they had all lined up together. ‘Mike, I think I may have got it! I know who these bastards are. And if I’m right, I can guess what they want.’

Yet from the end of the phone there was no sound of enthusiasm, not even of enquiry, only an exquisitely painful silence. It was a few moments before the other man spoke. The piano string in his
voice seemed to have broken. ‘Harry, get over here. Now. You’re right, these guys mean business. And I think we’re going to need you.’ Then he cut the link. He didn’t
even give Harry the chance to tell him what he knew.

12.12 p.m.

Inside the chamber, Eaton had been confused by the attacker’s request. ‘She’s not here. Tricia Willcocks isn’t here,’ the Prime Minister said.

‘I find that difficult to believe,’ the young terrorist responded, looking carefully round the chamber.

‘She’s indisposed. Ill.’ At last he had one over the bloody man, although the consolation was small.

‘Ah. A pity. She has quite a reputation. I was hoping to meet her. So which other members of the Cabinet are absent?’

‘I have one in China on a trade mission, another is attending the funeral of her father.’ Eaton cast around him. ‘Other than that, I believe we are all here.’

‘Then I would like another female member of the Cabinet to come forward, please . . .’ He put his hand to his temple, reaching for his mental list, hesitating over the name.
‘Mrs . . . Antrobus. The Education Secretary. Am I right?’

‘Why do you want her?’

He spoke slowly, as though talking to a dullard. ‘I want to put her on television. Make her famous. But I can’t see her, where is she?’ he demanded, his eyes probing along the
benches. ‘I want you to point her out.’

‘I’ll not hand anyone over to bloody men like—’

He was interrupted by a voice that came from a seat behind him. ‘That’s all right, Prime Minister.’ Marjie Antrobus stood, a tall, willowy blonde who had Norwegian blood in her
somewhere. ‘No point in hiding.’ And she was right. There were only five women in his Cabinet, one was at a crematorium and another still in bed. That left only three.

‘Ah, Mrs Antrobus. Please come and join me here on the steps.’

Slowly, delicately, being careful to take her time, for she wasn’t a woman to be rushed, Marjie Antrobus picked her way along the row in which she was seated and made her way forward. She
was the youngest woman in the Cabinet, with three children of school age, one of them still at nursery. That had seemed to Eaton to be as good a claim as any for being appointed Education Secretary
and she had justified his choice, proving both popular and resolute. Not often you could find a Minister who could catch the fantasies of male colleagues yet still do the mother thing. She stepped
forward. Her blue eyes held more curiosity than fear as she stood beside the young man.

And that was where he shot her, right between her blue eyes, on the steps of the throne.

12.23 p.m.

T
ricia Willcocks came back from a dark pool of oblivion to discover that her head was still throbbing like a drum. Only slowly did she realise that
it wasn’t as simple as a migraine; at the very limits of her consciousness, out beyond the pain, someone was pounding on her front door. She tried to ignore it, to burrow into her pillows and
slip back into comforting oblivion, but the noise was insistent. Whoever it was had no intention of being denied. With curses tumbling from her lips, she pulled aside her bedclothes and slipped
into her robe. Shouts came from the front door, calling her by name, demanding her presence. She didn’t recognise the voice, male, aggressive, and very strident. She decided it would be
prudent not to open the door but to speak to them from behind it and give them a piece of her bloody mind, and she was standing by the panic button and about to let forth when the door seemed to
dissolve into splinters and come crashing from its hinges. Standing in the blinding sunlight on her doorstep were shadows that, through her pain, she slowly realised were men in visored helmets,
boots and body armour with the most extra ordinary array of weapons, every one of which was pointed at her.

‘Oh, fuck,’ she said. Then she fainted.

12.25 p.m.

Scotland Yard is a monument to the Sixties. The architectural fashion of the time had been for drab concrete mausoleums, and unsurprisingly the Operations Room within it was
low-ceilinged and dreary, crammed with old-fashioned communications consoles on the desks and portable fans to push around the stale air. The Ops Room was supposed to be replaced by new hi-tech
premises in Lambeth – it had been promised for several years – but still they were stuck here amidst dinginess that reminded Harry of the control room on one of those Soviet-era
submarines that had been left rusting in Sebastopol harbour. He arrived from the Lords still a little breathless; he’d run all the way. He accepted a mug of the institutional coffee as he and
Mike Tibbetts gazed at the large video wall, watching events relayed by a dozen cameras from vital points around Westminster.