With just a couple of sentences Derek Choi had ruined what should have been a triumphant day. She would not forget or forgive that, either.
An hour later Braddock drove his Range Rover up a broad track, deeply rutted by the tracks of heavy vehicles, that ran like a disfiguring scar across the side of a once picturesque hill. At the top of the hill a massive pit had been dug, a wound to the landscape made worse by the continuous slurry of concrete being poured into it from a line of giant truck-mounted mixers. This despoliation of the countryside was largely subsidized by government funds, despite the blatant flouting of every known planning regulation pertaining to conservation areas and Sites of Special Scientific Interest. (A scattering of rare orchids and several species of butterfly had once added their fragile beauty to the hilltop, only to be obliterated by the first few scoops of the digger’s bucket.) But then, the destruction of the environment didn’t seem to matter if its end result was a gigantic, noisy, bird-shredding wind turbine. That this was made of steel and rooted in concrete — two substances whose manufacture generated vast amounts of CO — was neither here nor there. Nor did anyone seem to care that the turbine, like virtually all others, would be very lucky to operate at more than ten per cent of its full capacity, and would require constant backup from oil- or gas-fired power stations to make up for the times when the wind ceased to blow. Wind turbines were magically going to cut greenhouse gases, keep temperatures down, lower sea levels, and prevent polar bears from falling off melting icebergs. Therefore they were good.
Braddock owned the farm on which the turbine was being erected, and was collecting a substantial subsidy accordingly. It made him laugh, getting paid to wreck the landscape just so a bunch of sandal-wearing, lentil-eating eco-twats could feel better about the environment. The fact that turbines were such obvious cons only made it even funnier. And bunging a couple of dead Greens into the hole, so that they could spend the rest of eternity under thirty feet of concrete, supporting a propellor on stilts, well, that was fucking hilarious.
As the Range Rover went back down the hill again, minus the bodies that had been in the back, there was a smile all over his face.
60
Aberystwyth
‘ You’d better get someone to put a guard on Deirdre Bull’s bed,’ Carver said to Grantham, making the call as he walked across the hospital car park. ‘And I mean more than just a local plod in a skirt. Because the moment Zorn or Razzaq twig that she’s alive, they’re going to need her silenced.’
‘Really? So she talked?’
‘Oh yeah — we’ve got our connection. The attack was carried out by a bunch of eco-freaks called the Forces of Gaia. Their leader was one Brynmor Gryffud. They were into peaceful protest until a mysterious woman, calling herself Uschi Kremer and pretending to be a Swiss heiress, showed up. She used her powers of seduction to persuade Gryffud that the only way he was going to change anything was through violence. You want to know what this woman looked like?’
‘Let me guess,’ replied Jack Grantham. ‘Redheaded, older than she looks, borderline psychopathic?’
‘Got it in one. Looks like I wasn’t the only one that got Gingered. She works for Razzaq. Razzaq works for Zorn. Zorn needed a terrorist outrage. She got it for him.’
‘Fair enough, I’ll buy that.’
‘Good,’ said Carver. ‘And while you’re at it, there’s a few other things I need you to buy.’
He was within sight of the green space where the helicopter was waiting for him by the time he had finished outlining his plans.
‘And you want me to make this possible?’ Grantham asked.
‘You and whoever else it takes, yes.’
‘You’re not giving me a lot of time. It won’t be easy, getting hold of some of the stuff you want.’
‘Don’t see why not. It’s all available off the shelf. And the modifications I need could be carried out by any half-decent mechanic.’
‘Maybe, but it means going public. I won’t even contemplate something like this unless my arse is not just covered, but armourplated. This has to be signed off all the way to the top.’
‘Does that mean going public about me, too?’
‘As long as you’re the man who’s going to do it, yes. But don’t worry, I’ll be discreet. I’ll emphasize the bits of your record that make you look like an acceptable individual.’
‘And you’ll bury the ones that don’t?’
‘Got it in one.’
‘Good luck with that.’
‘Forget it,’ said Grantham. ‘You’re the one who’s going to need all the luck. You’re taking a hell of a risk with this. If it turns out you were wrong, don’t expect me or anyone else to protect you.’
‘I never expect anyone to protect me,’ said Carver. ‘Except me.’
61
Whitehall
Two hours later, just as Carver was coming in to land at Northolt, Jack Grantham was making his presentation to an emergency meeting of the Joint Intelligence Committee. Cameron Young, the prime ministerial representative who had proposed the conference plan barely twenty-four hours earlier with such determined self- confidence, now had an air of desperation as he struggled to find some way of pulling his master from the deep lake of excrement into which he had just been tipped. His present problem was trying to decide whether the Head of the Secret Intelligence Service was a man who could enable some sort of miraculous recovery, or whether the outrageous plan that he had just outlined would only serve to make the Prime Minister’s plunge even deeper.
Dame Judith Spofforth, Head of MI5, was in no mood to accept the kind of risk that was being proposed. ‘I suppose I don’t have to point out that Mr Grantham’s plan…’ She placed particular emphasis on the ‘mister’ as if to emphasize Grantham’s lack of a knighthood. ‘… is not only entirely inappropriate, coming from a department whose responsibility is intelligence-gathering outside the borders of the United Kingdom, but also illegal in more ways than I even care to consider.’
‘We don’t want to tread on our friends’ toes,’ said Grantham. ‘We’re just trying to propose a solution to a problem that affects us all. And, incidentally, we first gathered the intelligence that led us to suspect Mr Zorn’s motives in a number of locations including the United States, Italy and Greece, none of which are exactly domestic. And every single one of the leading suspects in the conspiracy that we believe we have uncovered is a foreign national. So I would argue that we do have reasonable grounds for involvement. As for the legality of the whole thing, this country didn’t have any trouble finding a legal justification for an Iraqi war based on intelligence that many of us knew was, to put it bluntly, absolute bollocks. So how difficult can it be to find a good excuse to do this? Malachi Zorn has waltzed into this country and made complete fools of us all. And he’s done it by killing a great many people, including ones we all knew. I think we have a right to let him know that we won’t stand for that kind of thing.’
‘In the end it all comes down to this man Carver,’ Young interrupted, putting an end to the turf war. ‘You’re asking me to place an enormous amount of faith in the quality of his information, the accuracy of his interpretation of that information, and, above all, his ability to pull off what appears to be little short of a public execution. That’s a very great deal to ask.’
‘It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve had to trust in him,’ Grantham replied. ‘A few years ago he asked me — and Dame Judith’s predecessor, Dame Agatha Bewley, come to that — to believe that there was a threat to the life of President Lincoln Roberts from an assassin called Damon Tyzack. The President, you will recall, was making his first visit to this country, giving an open-air speech in Bristol. Both the US Secret Service and the Metropolitan Police dismissed Carver’s concerns out of hand. Luckily, Dame Agatha and I did not. That is why Damon Tyzack’s remains are currently rotting away at the bottom of the Bristol Channel, whereas President Roberts is still alive and well and
