The Lure (17 page)

‘Prime Minister, you and I have been plunged into a strange and difficult situation. Do we use the new knowledge for all mankind, or for both our peoples, to create a pan-Europe far ahead of our American and Chinese friends? Or do we smother this dangerous discovery? And if so, what do we do about the scientists who have made it?

‘This is not a matter for large teams of advisers and TV cameras. We must meet, you and I, and decide the matter face-to-face, in secret and alone. You will guess that time is very short. The scientists are to disperse in three days. If they do, so does the new knowledge. We must decide before then.’

The shower was switched off.

‘Shall I leave?’

‘No, just pass me that towel. That one. What’s he getting at, Sally? Decide what?’

Sally Morgan handed over a large white towel, keeping her eyes averted. The Prime Minister appeared, wrapped in it, and started to blow-dry his hair, peering into a half-steamed mirror. She pretended to have misheard.

‘A secret meeting with Ogorodnikov?’ She made a clicking noise with her tongue. ‘Not a trivial exercise, Prime Minister.’

‘But there are precedents,’ Edgeworth said. ‘Kissinger told me he went in and out of China incognito in the seventies. He was supposed to be resting in a Himalayan retreat, and just slipped over the border.’

‘And it’s been done by a British Prime Minister,’ Sally informed Edgeworth. The drier went off and she wondered how he intended to get his underpants on. ‘Anthony Eden left England during the Suez crisis, spoke to the French Prime Minister and came back without anyone knowing he’d been away. But that was just a cross-Channel hop. To meet Ogorodnikov halfway in total secrecy would require clandestine flights over neutral territory and that’s a different ballgame. Altogether different.’

Edgeworth was skilfully wriggling into blue boxer shorts, still wearing the towel. ‘What’s the halfway point between here and Moscow?’

She had anticipated the question. ‘The Baltic Sea, give or take. Lots of islands, one of them owned jointly by Finland and Sweden.’

Now he was pulling on trousers. ‘The Russian President and I have to meet, whatever the difficulties. I’ll speak to Pembroke.’

At eight o’clock, showered and breakfasted, Edgeworth took the narrow stairs down to the large wood-panelled ante-room and turned right again through open double doors to the first-floor drawing rooms and the study. The latter, with its floral-patterned settees and soft cushions, its cabinet with the Bohemian glass collection and its deep carpet, had the air of a middle-class living room. Anne Broughton, the Diary Secretary, was sitting at an armchair with a pile of papers on the oval coffee-table in front of her. Joe Pembroke, the PPS, was leafing through a large black diary. Jean, the Personal Secretary, was pouring tea.

Edgeworth sat down next to Pembroke and loosened his tie. There was an exchange of greetings.

The PPS ran briefly through the day’s events, Anne pencilling comments from time to time on her notes, Edgeworth interjecting here and there. He seemed distracted, impatient almost. Finally, with the day’s schedule barely settled, he said, ‘Ladies, I wonder if you would leave us for a few minutes?’

The Diary Secretary tapped her papers together neatly and left the study, leaving a slight trail of perfume. Jean gave her boss a puzzled glance and followed.

Pembroke waited.

Edgeworth said, ‘Ogorodnikov and I need to meet face-to-face.’

‘When, Prime Minister?’

‘Immediately. We should meet halfway.’

Pembroke said flatly, ‘That’s not possible.’

‘No wagon train, no security and above all no publicity. Just you, me and a translator we can trust.’

‘I’m sorry, Prime Minister, but it can’t be done. And even if it could, I wouldn’t allow it. You can’t possibly dispense with security in this day and age, not even for five minutes.’

Edgeworth smiled grimly. ‘I want to meet Ogorodnikov in the Baltic Sea area and return without anyone knowing I’ve been away. And I want to do it this week.’

‘That’s crazy. It can’t be done.’

Edgeworth patted Pembroke’s knee. ‘Of course it can, Joe. If not by you, then by a PPS who believes it can.’

Pembroke frowned. ‘You have this persuasive way, Prime Minister. Let me see.’ He started to flick through the diary pages. ‘This is Thursday. You’ve done the Queen, the Blair visit and the Young Inventor awards. This morning is Cabinet and Question Time, and tomorrow is the Kohl funeral. And then you have weekend guests at Chequers.’

‘Cancel my weekend guests, Joe, and send Wentworth in my place to the Kohl funeral.’

‘You can’t. Chancellor Kohl was a good friend to us. You’ll cause great offence.’

‘I’ll be indisposed. I’ll head for Chequers tonight to recuperate. See if the medics can come up with something to make me look groggy this morning.’

‘Prime Minister, I don’t know what’s going on here…’

‘And join me at Chequers this evening. Arrive as quietly as you can and bring very warm clothes. By the way, Joe, you don’t happen to fly a Tornado?’

Pembroke exposed teeth and grunted; after all, he thought, when the PM cracks a joke you’re expected to laugh. The bit about the Tornado was, he assumed, a joke.

*   *   *

At weekends, with a hundred office staff gone, Number Ten was like a morgue, and Edgeworth liked to escape. The twenty minutes of grim body-building was replaced by a leisurely half hour in the covered swimming pool at Chequers. The daily planning session was replaced by a skim through the weekend newspapers over a breakfast of orange juice, yoghurt and banana, thrown together in a blender with a sprinkling of nutmeg. He made his own breakfast, lifelong bachelor’s habits not being easily broken. Then he would set the log fire in the enormous great hall which occupied the centre of the Elizabethan house, and either read a novel or stroll round the gardens before dipping into Budget statements, communiqués or speeches. Weekend lunches were gregarious affairs, which he used to keep in touch with life outside politics.

At Question Time anyone could see that the PM was coming down with something, and it was no surprise to learn that this Chequers weekend was to be a long one. Pembroke cancelled the PM’s Saturday guests, arranged for the Deputy PM to attend the Kohl funeral, and told his wife that he would be babysitting the Great Leader over the weekend. He then drove towards Chequers in his own Jaguar, an ancient red XJ which he liked to think made him in the image of Inspector Morse.

At 9 p.m. exactly, the PM’s Daimler was driven round to the front of the big country house. Edgeworth and Pembroke, both dressed for the cold, sat in the back. Pembroke wore a black Cossack hat with ear-flaps; the Prime Minister thought he had last seen its like in a Christmas pantomime.

The Prime Minister pressed a button, and a sheet of thick glass rose to separate the driver from his passengers. ‘Lighten up, Joe. I feel as if I’m riding with my undertaker. What’s your beef?’

‘You know perfectly well, Prime Minister. I’ve been saying it all day. This whole adventure is misconceived.’ Pembroke had adopted an aggrieved tone to emphasise his displeasure.

‘It had better not be. You planned it.’ The Prime Minister patted Pembroke’s knee. It was a habit which made the PPS cringe, but what could he do? Edgeworth said, ‘Joe, I have full confidence in your logistic abilities.’

‘What if we had to ditch in the Baltic? I’d like to see Carnforth spin
that
one away.’ Edgeworth laughed. Pembroke scowled and continued, ‘And what do we really know of Ogorodnikov’s intentions?’

The driver was pulling out to pass cyclists, two abreast, no lights. Edgeworth said, ‘Don’t let your imagination run away with you.’

‘But nobody will even know where we are. Anything could happen.’

Edgeworth looked out at the dark fields. He waved a hand dismissively. ‘Go ahead, sweat the small stuff. I have bigger worries.’

At RAF Northolt, a black-bearded young man, on the promotion fast track at the Foreign Office, and said to be utterly reliable, was waiting nervously in the Commanding Officer’s office. The CO led them to a VC-10 which took them out over the dark North Sea.

Around 11.30 p.m., the aircraft tilted and slowed, and they found themselves approaching a short runway. Once landed, they taxied over to a big yellow Search and Rescue helicopter, the wind from its rotor making patterns in the grass. Pembroke held on to his Cossack hat as they transferred hastily over.

Two aircrew bundled the little group aboard and clambered up after them. The steps were pulled in and the door slammed shut. Pembroke, Edgeworth and the FO man buckled themselves into seats near the rear of the Sea King, and the aircrew joined two more RAF men up front. Then there was thunder and vibration and they rose sluggishly, the ground slipping under them. The lights of Lossiemouth began to dwindle. They passed over a cluster of red lights, an aerial farm. More distant lights marked out Elgin to their left, and Tain and Cromarty ahead; the inky black patch between them was the Moray Firth.

Then, over ghostly-white Highlands, away from curious eyes, the pilot switched off the navigation lights. Inside the big helicopter, it was suddenly pitch black apart from the subdued glow from the instrument panel. The pilot turned the machine north, and flew on for about thirty miles over the desolate peaks. Then he banked sharply and took them east, out over the rolling North Sea waves, past the Long Forties and the Great Fisher Bank, leaving the sovereign territory of the United Kingdom far behind.

*   *   *

To have landed on the deck of a Royal Navy warship, or to have been lowered into the bowels of a Russian Baltic Fleet submarine, would have been to tell a hundred or more sailors of each nationality that a clandestine meeting was taking place between the British and Russian Prime Ministers. It had taken three discussions over a scrambler phone between Joe Pembroke and his counterpart, Alexy Grigorivich, to solve the problem – if ‘solve’ was the word for the scheme they had hastily concocted.

By half past three the Sea King dropped to a hundred feet and flew along the Skaggerak. They passed low over an early morning ferry, its lights ablaze in the dark sea.

The helicopter banked left. The lights of a small fishing town drifted past to port, practically level with the Sea King. On a quiet promontory, the pilot lowered the machine noisily on to a stony beach.

The British Prime Minister and his entourage were now, illegally, in Norwegian territory.

The blades spun down, and the engine whined to a halt.

On another promontory, about five miles away, a lighthouse flashed every few seconds.

A truck driving on sidelights. Truck doors slamming; cigarettes glowing in the dark, illuminating two men jumping down from the big vehicle.

Pembroke and the pilot stepped out. Rough voices, in heavily accented English. The cigarettes were extinguished. In the near-dark, Edgeworth heard rather than saw cash being counted. He climbed out and relieved himself behind a wall, the whiff of fuel catching his nostrils. To the southeast, a sliver of light was beginning to touch the horizon. In another ten minutes rotors were beginning to spin up, and then the refuelled Sea King was once again flying out over the sea, just above the dark waves.

At five in the morning by their biological clocks, the helicopter once more approached a shoreline. The sky was lightening. This time they flew inland, over dense conifer forest, before landing in a clearing. Edgeworth, his nerves ragged, looked down on trees with snow being shaken from them as the big machine lowered itself on to the ground. There was a brief mini-blizzard, and then two crewmen jumped out; they were wearing holstered pistols. One of them lowered the steps. Pembroke left first, looking around warily. Then he shone a little flashlight on to a sheet of paper and set off along a track, followed by the Prime Minister and the translator.

Here the cold was sterner. It had hit them as soon as the door slid open; it was cutting through Edgeworth’s woollen cap, and Pembroke’s pantomime hat was turning into something to covet.

After ten minutes of trudging through deep snow, the path forked. Pembroke looked again at the little hand-drawn map. He grunted and led the way forwards along the right-hand path. Presently there was a frozen lake, stretching into the darkness, and at its far end a wooden cabin, brightly lit from within. They set out across the lake.

The man who opened the door was small, stout and white-haired, and wore a heavy polo-necked sweater. His voice seemed to come from the depths of his chest. The man from the FO translated Ogorodnikov’s Russian in flawless Oxford English: ‘Welcome to Finland, Prime Minister Edgeworth.’

22

The Frog

Petrie tried to convince himself that his random walk round the castle was to clear the mental cobwebs.

He wandered into the theological library, dazzling with baroque, shining with antique globes, but empty. He strolled into the computer room. Svetlana and Shtyrkov were at a screen filled with some weird, patterned shape. She was pointing to something, and murmuring quietly as if the room was full of ghosts who didn’t want to be disturbed. There was nobody else. Into the kitchen and then the bar and the dining area: deserted.

He climbed nimbly up the broad stone stairs on to the terrace. There was a blue sky and a nip in the air. At some stage the overnight rain had turned to snow and there was a thin covering everywhere. Hanning had cleared it from a table and he was sitting at it with an early morning beer. Nineteen sixties’ pop was coming from an elderly transistor radio on the table. The Cabinet Office observer was flicking through sheets of paper and didn’t look up.

Petrie strode over to the parapet and looked out across the panorama. Trees, snow-covered fields, distant mountains. He walked to the south side and there she was at last, in the courtyard. The collar of her long black coat was turned up and she was pacing up and down, making a trail of footsteps in the snow, hands in pockets and breath steaming in the cold air. He wondered where she lived. Did she have a boyfriend? Was it possible such a good-looking girl didn’t have a boyfriend? Or was she spoiled for choice, picking them up and putting them down on a whim? Or a partner. These days you didn’t get married, you had a partner. Petrie ached to know.