The South Lawn Plot (33 page)

A
LIGHT RAIN WAS FALLING
by the time Falsham reached the house. Now that he was responsible for considerable lands and a small army of tenant farmers he knew he had to take note of such things. Spring rains would be a gift from God, assuming they did not exceed his need to the point that the land in use ended up like the marshes just a few miles distant.

Dismounting from his horse, Falsham went down on a knee and placed his gloved hand flat on the bare soil that had been churned up by the hooves of horses, his and others. Then he removed the glove and placed his bare hand on the same spot.

Mine, he thought. It was an idea that Falsham still found difficult to fully comprehend. He had spent most of his life as a wandering soldier. He had wandered through Europe's monarchies and wars as if in a dream. He had listened to old men's tales in Flanders and Spain where the shadow of the Moor still stretched back to North Africa and beyond to the Holy Land, a place of mystery, sanctity and the abode of long dead crusaders and warrior bands such as the Assassins.

He had, he now knew, taken his comparative freedom very much as God given. Now he would have to stay in one place though his imagination would, in turn, have to range far and wide in response to the instructions of the old man whose dying wish had been for Falsham and his heirs see England's throne once again in union with mother church.

Falsham sighed. If only, he thought, life would be but one course, and a simple one.

Standing now, he noticed the young boy who had emerged from the stable yard to fetch the horse. The boy was clutching something, a folded piece of paper. Falsham nodded and the boy reached for the horse even as he held out the paper with a muttered “My lord.”

Falsham smiled at the salute but his lightness of mood quickly receded as he read the contents of the message. His presence was required in London, and urgently.For an instant, Falsham thought of taking a fresh horse and setting out at once but just as quickly decided against it. He would take a night at Ayvebury and be “my lord” for its duration. He would set out in the morning.

Falsham was convinced, or had convinced himself, that the path to the old faith, or at least what the heretics considered the old faith, was open and clear. What caused him uncertainty was its length. His mission might take a year or years, perhaps many years. But he had no doubt of its ultimate success. God would not fail those in the right.

The rain was heavier now, and Falsham turned towards the great house, his house. He would need heirs. What was bequeathed to him, the house and its great lands, would always attract avaricious eyes; this he knew for certain.

“Oh, for simplicity in life,” Falsham said as he entered the stable yard. But he knew that such a life was not to be. God had other demands of him.

B
AILEY'S JAW STILL HURT
. The Secret Service agent had caught him full with a straight arm blow as he had dashed free of the reporters roped in area once it was evident that Samantha was in trouble.

Funny, but he had felt no pain at the moment of impact. Nor indeed for some time afterwards. It had started to throb on the flight back to London, and it sure was throbbing now.

He had been given a few days off to recover. Well earned, Henderson had said, which was about as generous as the man would ever get with his words.

But even Henderson knew this to be an understatement. The story, the stories, had been nothing less than sensations, the biggest in years, a perfect storm of news that had demanded extra print runs. And who said newspapers were history?

“Ouch,” said Bailey as he stifled a yawn. He was still jet lagged, still trying to put it all together, the changes in his life and the changed world.

At least, he thought, there still was a world. As soon as it became apparent that President Packer would be incapacitated for some days, the Chinese had taken fright and had agreed to United Nations-sponsored talks to resolve the crisis. They regarded the vice president, Jorgensen, as a dangerous lunatic.

And the man had looked dangerous in front of the cameras, accusing the Chinese of trying to assassinate the president. It didn't seem to matter that Lau, dead at least ten times over by virtue of the chemical concoction he had absorbed, was Taiwanese and a bitter foe of the mainland government.

It seemed, though it had not been confirmed, that Lau was of the view, or somehow aware, that Packer was about to sell out Taiwan by turning around the American fleet just as it came within striking range of Chinese warships in the strait. The Sunday papers had been full of this stuff, but so many stories were floating around that the truth, whatever it was, was drowning in words and verbiage.

Packer was reportedly on the mend, though with the prospects of some facial nerve damage. He was lucky. He had come within a breath of a toxic blockbuster. Ten times more powerful than Sarin, more deadly by far than Ricin, the reports had claimed, but with a life in free air of just seconds and a density that made it ineffective outside a range of just a few feet, at least when unleashed in the quantity that someone had managed to coat a piece of paper with.

The Americans were fit to be tied about that one and obviously going full bore after anyone and everyone who might have been in the plot to assassinate the president. It didn't help their mood that one of their Secret Service agents, a man standing directly behind Packer and whose name Bailey could not remember at such an early hour, had taken the full brunt of the nerve gas cloud and had succumbed on the spot. He was being given a hero's funeral.

Too bad about the agent, Bailey thought. He had absorbed a witch's brew apparently mixed in a lab in one of the former Soviet Central Asian republics. At least the end was quick. Rafter, that was his name.

Everything else was a bit clearer. A woman in Packer's detail had survived with little more than a headache. The gust of wind and sudden downpour had lessened the toxic effect of the poison vapor, thus deciding the final outcome of the attack, now being called “The South Lawn Plot” on one of the television news channels.

Spencer had taken a gulp of the poison but tried to joke afterwards that three or four gin and tonics would have had a more painful effect. The attempt at humor had, rightly, fallen flat and he had been brutally treated in the tabloids, including the
Post
, which had managed to embrace sensitivity for about a day.

Samantha had taken in a little more, but had more or less retained consciousness throughout. She was being proclaimed an all-British hero for the speed that she had moved, once it became apparent that something was badly amiss.

She was the “plucky policewoman” who had risen above and beyond on her very first assignment with the prime minister.

Bailey had sent flowers to her hospital bed. That had been easy enough but it was his marriage proposal that was causing his jaw to ache that little bit more. This was not the way he had planned things. A proposal would only come after a long period of consideration. His mother had been a little unfair when she had once suggested that long in his case would be a lifetime.

But he had thought about it and seemed like the right thing to do. He had not realized how much in love he was until he had seen Samantha slumped over Spencer. And it was that feeling for her that had propelled him from the pack of journalists into the outstretched arm of a Secret Service agent with the tree trunk arm. They had told him afterwards that he was lucky it had been an arm and not a bullet.

That blow, of course, had been just the first of a series of shocks. With all hell breaking loose on both sides of the Atlantic and the prime minister in the middle of it in all respects, it had been open season on Spencer. It turned out that he was not at all far removed from the circumstances surrounding the prince's theological leap.

More stories had surfaced linking Spencer to the order of priests that had been instructing his royal highness in his new Catholicism. Spencer, as a young man, had been Catholic, at one point in early training for the priesthood when he left the seminary, a country house in Essex, after some kind of row or incident.

Reports of sexual abuse had been given short shrift, but there were indications of some kind of doctrinal clash. In what was to become a political trademark of the man, Spencer apparently took exception to some key spiritual aspects of his training and would consider no compromise on these issues. Rather, he had instigated something approaching a latter day reformation within the walls of the seminary.

Such heresy, combined with the man's known volcanic temper, had reportedly caused uproar. He had departed soon afterwards with his former hosts apparently all too eager to brush the episode under the pews. The story had never surfaced throughout decades of the man's political career, but it was doing so now.

“Jesus,” Bailey said, forcing himself to sit up. As he did so the phone on the bedside table erupted. It always seemed to erupt rather than just ring when Henderson called, and, sure enough, the office number was showing.

“You said to take a few days off,” Bailey said after he plucked the receiver off its charger.

“Yes,” he added. “What?”

In response to Henderson's instruction, delivered in a lower, slower voice than usual, the kind that could not be ignored under any circumstance, Bailey's hand moved to the radio. He had it turned to a London news radio station and the familiar newsreader's voice, only this time there was an even more fevered pitch about it than usual.

He pressed a button. His physical state required the mellower BBC.

“Initial reports have described a chaotic scene in which the prime minister was apparently stabbed fatally in the chest by a homeless man that he had taken time to speak with during a visit to Clapham Common, where a new section of replanted parkland was being opened to the public.

“Downing Street has cautioned against rash speculation, but a caller to the BBC said that, in what appeared to have been an extraordinary lapse in security, the prime minister, who survived the recent White House attack, approached the homeless man to speak with him, despite the fact that the man had apparently not been vetted by police officers in the PM's detail.

“Officers shot the man when he lunged at the prime minister's private secretary seconds after Mr. Spencer was struck down. The assailant's condition is unconfirmed, but the caller to the BBC said he believed the man was dead at the scene.

“There is an additional unconfirmed report, from an unrelated source, that the attacker may have been a member of the military at some point and had the necessary training to inflict a fatal wound with a single blow. This was deduced because the assailant, and again this has to be fully confirmed, was in possession of a Victoria Cross, the nation's highest award for military gallantry.

“The cabinet, meanwhile, led by the home secretary, is in emergency session and an official statement is expected at any time.

“Leonard Spencer served a little over three years as head of the government and was no stranger to controversy. Even as he was attending the White House event, his name was linked in sensational reports to a series of deaths of Roman Catholic priests. Those priests in turn have been named possible participants in the religious instruction of the heir to the throne that resulted in his conversion to the Roman Catholic faith, His Highness' unequivocal condemnation of the 1701 Act of Settlement, and what many are describing as the most serious constitutional crisis to affect the realm since the abdication of Edward the Eighth.”

Bailey's finger moved to press another button, but a stabbing pain made him withdraw his hand and grab his jaw. As it happened, the newsreader had even more to impart, details that would sow the seeds of what would become an enduring mystery.

“In a development that will be viewed as deeply ironic, the prime minister was attended at the scene by a man initially identified as an Anglican clergyman but who, according to reports just in, is in fact a Roman Catholic priest. He has been unofficially named as Father John Falsham. The priest gave the prime minister last rites, seemingly at the request of his private secretary, Peter Golding, who, though deeply shocked, was uninjured by the attacker.”

Bailey's finger struck this time, and as it did so, the phone went again.

“Yes, yes, I'm coming in,” he said before Henderson could fire off his summons.

Bailey rolled out of his bed. He felt unsteady on his feet. This was big, more than big, he thought. Big, and a lucky break for Samantha who was not on duty with Spencer's protection detail at the climactic moment, being on leave to recover from Washington.

Bailey shook his head. A headline inspired by a statement from some Oxbridge historian commenting on the constitutional mess came to mind, and not for the first time since the debacle on the White House South Lawn.

All history is recent, the headline had stated.

“And God knows so is my bleedin' holiday,” said Bailey, reaching for his shirt.

T
his story has taken a while and, of necessity, it has required more than one hand to see it complete. I would like to thank my wife Lisa for her love and support from start to finish and our three children, Kate, Liz and Jack, for their patience and long unsatisfied curiosity. Well, here it is, kids!

A particular thanks to John O'Mahony for telling me at the very start that this story might actually work. Over time, the advice and encouragement of friends and colleagues has been invaluable. I would like to especially thank Joan Higgins, Isolde Motley, Bob Sloan, Peter Quinn, Terry Golway, Sean and Colum McCann, Malachy McCourt, Dan Barry, Jim Mulvaney and Barbara Fischkin. A salute to Bryian O'Dwyer for that never to be forgotten day on the lawn. Light in a president's darkest hour.

Trish O'Hare at GemmaMedia, like the cavalry of yore, timed her arrival in the process perfectly. She was quickly followed by Suzanne Heiser, whose imagination and artistry brought forward a cover that brilliantly captures the tale inside it.

A bow to John Banville, Pete Hamill, Tom Fleming and the much missed Frank McCourt. Thanks also to my colleagues over the years at the
Irish Echo
and a thought for those journalists and diplomats everywhere who daily strive to bring sanity and clarity to a world that sorely needs it.

Ray O'Hanlon, Ossining, New York