would cross the road to avoid; all in all, nothing more than a bunch of pathetic, disorganised, ego-crazed losers.
He took a sip of his coffee and let the sweetness soften his mood. Towards the back of the crowd, he saw the banner he had been waiting for, and the three women underneath it, two of them holding the poles and one handing out leaflets while trying to start the occasional chant that invariably petered out almost as quickly as it began:
‘ What do we want?
‘ Troops out!
‘ When do we want it?
‘ NOW! ’
The conversations at the tables had stopped as the other patrons watched the protestors go by. Those British and their passions! To foreigners living in London, they were an endless source of amusement. Catching the eye of a gawping waiter, he ordered another coffee as the semi-organised shouting started up again.
Get a life, he thought. As far as he could see, the three women leading the chants were virtually the whole organisation, yet they were trying to cause him so much trouble. He felt the familiar fury rising up inside him. It was ridiculous that he should have to waste his time on them; ridiculous but necessary — for his own sake and that of his comrades.
He fingered the leaflet that another protestor had dropped on his table as he had passed by. More slogans, more platitudes, more hopeless posturing:
‘ Justice for the victims of the Ishaqi massacre! ’
Like the victims care any more, he thought.
‘ STOP THE WAR! ’
I was there; you weren’t.
‘ END THE MERCENARY KILLINGS! ’
The anger blossomed in his chest. You don’t know what you’re talking about.
Leaning down, he grabbed an anti-war flyer from the pavement, carefully folding it in half and then folding it in half again, before dropping it into his jacket pocket. The waiter arrived with his fresh coffee. Downing it in one, he pulled out his wallet and fished out a five-pound note, which he placed under his saucer. Sitting back in his chair, he let the demonstration go past, accompanied by the hooting of angry motorists and some pointing and laughter from a group of Arab customers enjoying their shisha pipes at the table beside him.
Pulling a cigarette from the packet of Royal Crown Blue sitting on the table, he lit it with a match and stuck it between his lips, inhaling deeply. Dropping the match in the ashtray, he rose from the table, before starting slowly along the road, heading in the same direction as the protestors.
By the time he reached the park, the speeches were in full swing. Standing under a nearby tree, he smoked another cigarette, keeping a careful eye on the women as he tried to tune out the ritual denunciations of America, Britain and every other tool of imperialism that they could lay their hands on.
Mercifully, the speeches ended before his packet of smokes was empty. He watched the women pack up their banner and say their goodbyes, before heading off in different directions. After a moment’s thought, he decided to follow the older one. Once he knew where she lived, it would be time to begin.
EIGHTEEN
Carlyle stood on the walkway that spiralled up the inside of the triangulated glass facade of City Hall, looking down into the foyer of the Greater London Assembly, while listening to the clink of glasses and the hum of polite conversation from below. He had been scanning the room for several minutes now, without being able to find any sign of Simpson or her husband. He had, however, seen the Mayor, Christian Holyrod, shoulder-to-shoulder with the man he assumed was the Chilean Ambassador, as they worked the room together.
The upper terrace had been closed off to the public for tonight’s event, so Carlyle found himself alone. As the Mayor stepped up on to a small raised platform to make some introductory remarks, Carlyle turned his back on the throng to take in the views over the river towards the Tower of London. For the next few minutes, he let his mind wander. An occasional phrase drifted up from the floor below but the words were no more than the usual trite nothings that accompanied events like this. He ignored them, as he watched the boats go by on the Thames, and reflected on his previous dealings with the Mayor.
Christian Holyrod was a Boy’s Own story made flesh. That alone would have been enough for Carlyle to be deeply suspicious of the man, even before they crossed swords on what turned out to be one of the more unpleasant cases he had recently had to deal with.
Before turning his hand to politics, Major Holyrod had commanded the 2nd Battalion of the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment (motto: Virtutis Fortuna Comes — Fortune Favours the Brave), one of the first British battle groups to go into action in Helmand Province in south-west Afghanistan, as part of Britain’s latest unsuccessful foray into the world’s most inhospitable country. His subsequent journey from unsung hero to big-time politician began when an American documentary crew arrived to film the story of Operation Clockwork Orange, a mission to capture a terrorist commander who had been hiding out in a mud compound in the middle of nowhere. The mission was a fiasco. Holyrod’s boys were ambushed and a swift retreat followed, leaving the target happily ensconced in his mountain lair, but the firefights and general chaos that followed made for great television. Shaky hand-held pictures of the major shouting ‘Contact, contact, contact!’ while squeezing off rounds from his SA80-A2 assault rifle and trying to drag a wounded squaddie back to his truck were as entertaining as anything that Hollywood could come up with. They made all the main news bulletins back home in Britain even before the show had aired in the US. For almost two days, it was the number one most-viewed video on YouTube, with more than 45 million hits around the world.
Holyrod became an instant celebrity. Within a fortnight, he was offered his own radio talk show, signed up to do a newspaper column, acquired an agent and had received more than a hundred offers of marriage.
Initially, the Ministry of Defence was more than happy to let a stream of journalists beat a path to his door, given their desperation for any kind of ‘good news’ out of a story that had been a complete disaster from day one. For his part, Holyrod quite enjoyed the attention, using this platform to argue that the MoD had seriously underestimated the task in hand, i.e. fighting the enemy. The tone of his interviews became more and more downbeat as he contemplated ‘the big picture’. After telling a very nice girl from the Sunday Express that ‘the whole thing’s gone to rats’, he was hauled back to London ‘for discussions’. His return to the front line was then cut short when he was caught on camera berating the Foreign Secretary, who was in the middle of a four-hour tour of the troops, about the lack of support from politicians back home for ‘his boys’.
Of course, the media had lapped it all up. Opinion polls suggested that Holyrod’s approval ratings were in the high eighties. No politician could live with him. The major’s window of opportunity had arrived. Now he had to decide what to do with it. It was at this point that the leader of the Opposition, Edgar Carlton MP, persuaded his old Cambridge University pal (and brother-in-law, for Christian had married Edgar’s sister, Sophia, some eight years earlier) to run for election as Mayor of London.
So it came to pass that Holyrod resigned from the Army, swapping his fatigues for a selection of very sharp Richard James suits. After six months campaigning under the party slogan Change that keeps changing he won a landslide victory, thus providing a template for Edgar Carlton’s first national government, which duly followed less than two years later.
It was during Edgar’s victorious General Election campaign that Carlyle had first come across both men. It was a nasty case, involving the deaths of several of their friends. With their stellar careers to protect, Carlton and Holyrod did not want the reason for the killings to be made public. All too predictably, the Metropolitan Police was no match for their united front. Although the case itself was nominally solved, the truth — or rather, the underlying facts of the case — never saw the light of day.
Having seen off this particular threat, the two men seemed to have cemented their political relationship. But the alliance was beginning to show signs of wear and tear. In Westminster village, Christian Holyrod was quickly identified as Edgar Carlton’s obvious successor and, therefore, his de facto rival.
Turning all this over in his head, Carlyle felt the familiar stab of anger and frustration that came when he
