Head of State, page 12
At the front of the building was a security room where the Special Protection Squad lounged watching CCTV screens, and from which Downing Street’s highly sophisticated central alarm system was controlled.
Tonight, however, thanks to the intervention of Sergeant Hammond, the room was empty. A locked gun rack was bolted to the wall, alongside a poster outlining the proper use of gasmasks. Everyone who worked in Number 10 was assigned to one of two groups – green and blue – for evacuation purposes. The green group was made up of those people the prime minister required for the functioning of government, and they would be brought out very quickly, via the corridor underneath Whitehall that ends at the MoD. The blue group would be evacuated more slowly.
Also in the security room were two metal wardrobes, painted a dull green, containing serge uniforms, gymwear and some stinking old shoes. Between them was a small wooden door. ‘That’s it,’ said Dickie Greene. ‘There should be another metal one behind it.’ Latimer pulled out a large bunch of keys and got to work.
The map Greene was using had been drawn up by the old Department of Works at the time when Downing Street was effectively rebuilt from the ground up in the early 1960s. Concrete and steel underpinning, and reinforced connections to the Cold War network of tunnels below, had been a vital part of the work, though the media’s attention focused on the renovation of the public rooms. These had been carefully dismantled, and then reconstructed to mimic the look of the old building. The attention to detail had been careful, even though the quality of the work had sometimes been shoddy.
Here, tradition was everything, even if the whole place was in fact nothing but political illusion. When the builders started work on the famous black bricks that front Number 10 they discovered to their shock that they were actually cheap yellow London bricks, widely used at the time for fast speculative building. The black was simply the accumulated filth of the ages. Rather than being restored to their original colour, they were painted black again.
By the 1970s Number 10 resembled an iceberg, in that only a fraction of it was visible above the surface; its secrets were hidden below. During the war, SOE’s black ops had been run from the top floor of the nearby St Ermin’s hotel; its lift still didn’t run all the way up. From below the hotel a tunnel had allowed the spooks to get into Downing Street unobserved. That tunnel was still there, as were plenty of others.
Greene and Latimer squeezed through the narrow metal doorway and clambered down a steel ladder. The shaft was lit from below, and was clearly not of recent construction: its steel hoops and raw plasterwork probably dated from the Second World War. But once they were safely at the bottom they found themselves in a surprisingly spacious and well-appointed tunnel, with neat blue flooring, zinc air ducts and even a few rubber plants sitting in white plastic pots. Also accessed by lift from the Cabinet Office, after twenty yards the tunnel ended in a heavy metal blast door with a red wheel lock. Beside this was a large, pale wooden cabinet with hundreds of slots, each of which contained a laminated pass bearing the pale image of the face of a public servant. These were the physical manifestation of Whitehall’s info-log distinction between those with a ‘mole card’ and those without. Getting your mole card was a sign of distinction as highly prized as a minor gong from the Palace or a quiet thank-you from your permanent secretary.
‘That’s not our way,’ said Greene. ‘It leads to Pindar, the socking big emergency bunker that links up to Northwood and the top military boys. You never want to have to spend any time down there, foreign secretary. It’s only for when the balloon goes up. From the MoD you can get all the way to the Houses of Parliament underground, without anyone being any the wiser. But you have to have the right accreditation. In any case, we can hardly carry the prime minister into the MoD, can we?’
‘No … Pindar?’ asked Latimer, who had had an expensive classical education.
‘Yes, the Greek poet fellow. Pretty unreadable, I always found him. The point is, his house is supposed to have remained intact while every other building in Thebes was destroyed after a siege. Last room standing, d’you see? Here we are, well into the twenty-first century, and we’re still run by chaps who read Greats at Oxford. Funny bloody country. Sometimes in my weak moments I almost prefer the French … Anyway, we have to go this way I’m afraid.’
‘This way’ meant a much smaller brick-and-concrete tunnel leading in the opposite direction which, once Dickie had located the switch, was lit only by a series of dim bulbs that receded into the murk. Circular steel bulwarks stamped ‘Gen Post Office’ and neatly-laid-out tubes carrying cabling and covered in dust were clues to the tunnel’s original purpose, as part of a network of underground communications built in the early years of the Cold War.
The first steel door they reached led to ‘Q-Whitehall’, the tunnel supposedly designed to allow Downing Street’s senior staff, the green team, clutching their mole cards, to escape the ruin of Thebes. But Dickie led Latimer beyond that entrance too. The concrete grew slimier, the warm air grew thicker, and the light grew dimmer.
‘Carry on for long enough and they say you’ll pop up under Buck House. But this is hardly royal appointment standard, is it, foreign secretary?’
Latimer was well aware that the former spook was being discreet. The tunnel certainly led to Buckingham Palace, with another one branching off to Clarence House. The main royal residences had a secret communications system and excellent bomb shelters, although the atmosphere inside them was curiously bland, like exclusive airport waiting lounges. The old queen mother had been down there to have a poke around, and Latimer had always wondered if any other members of the royal family ever used the tunnels to pop up in unexpected parts of the capital. He wouldn’t put it past the current king, obsessed as he was with old architecture and family secrets.
By now both men, having walked bent over for a quarter of a mile, were slightly out of breath. Suddenly Dickie Greene came to a halt. ‘It’ll be a hell of a job lugging him all this way … But here we are. This is us.’ With a grunt he began to turn a steel wheel below a circular trapdoor that protruded over their heads. When it finally opened a thin cascade of dirt and dust trickled down on them, swiftly followed by the clatter of a well-oiled steel ladder. ‘You’ll enjoy this bit,’ said Greene.
After a short but stiff climb in the darkness, and a struggle with another metal door which Greene had to shoulder open, the two men clambered, gasping, out into the night air. Greene grinned with pleasure at Latimer’s shock when he realised where they were. They were standing in the middle of Duck Island in the St James’s Park pond, created in the time of Charles II to provide him with fresh fowl. It was unlikely that anyone would be about in the park at that time of night, but if there had been, the pair would have been hidden from view only by an angry goose and the ornate roof of the birdkeeper’s lodge. Despite the seriousness of the situation they couldn’t help feeling a little like a couple of boys in a secret treehouse, unsuspected by the grown-ups. But as they took in the scene, they began to feel that this might just work. If they could manage to get the body here, they could get it away.
Nelson Fraser had proposed a simpler method. There were vaults underneath Downing Street which could be reached through a small door in the garden. Now used to store gardening equipment, they were the obvious place to dump a body. But Amanda had spotted the flaw. ‘They are indeed a fine and private place, Nelson. But have you forgotten what’s directly above them? It’s the bloody terrace. We can’t have a stink there.’
Using the tunnel would mean not having to negotiate the Downing Street gates, which were protected by armed police; it would avoid all the CCTV cameras – even the vaults had them; and the locked back entrance to the garden opened directly onto Horse Guards Parade, where there was a serious risk of bumping into members of the public wandering around at any hour of the day or night. Apart from the one leading to Pindar, the tunnels were so obscure that few of the Number 10 staff were even aware of their existence. The prime minister’s mutilated corpse could rest down there safely until the following night, by which time everything would have been arranged.
5
Saturday, 16 September
Referendum Day Minus Five
The Saturday Delivery
As the first grey-pink trickles of light touched the tops of the plane trees in Whitehall a hard core of PLS members were still at work. Amanda Andrews, the chief whip and the foreign secretary had bedded down in the PM’s apartment. His study and the chancellor’s rooms were firmly locked.
Alois Haydn needed little sleep. The shadows were still deep under the trees in St James’s Park, and sunlight sparkling only on the very tip of the Elizabeth Tower, as he left Downing Street carrying a Waitrose ‘bag for life’, inside which was a freezer bag, inside which was the head of the late prime minister. He was pleased so far with the work of Professional Logistical Services, though he understood very well how much they all disliked him.
He had first run across PLS when one of his larger clients had expressed an interest in buying a state-owned Polish concrete business. When his client’s approaches were rebuffed in Warsaw, Alois had turned to PLS for help. It hadn’t taken them long to produce a dossier revealing the Polish company’s undisclosed and highly sensitive defence and security subsidiaries. Haydn had paid them handsomely, and advised his clients not to proceed.
This defeat was accepted in a thoroughly civilised manner, involving several visits to Poland for dinners and meetings organised by PLS. By the time it was all over Haydn had made a new friend. Colonel Jerzy Babiński of the Polish security service was a sleek, chubby-faced and cheerful man in a well-cut business suit who was almost as smoothly comfortable with the ways of the modern world as Alois himself. Over the following years they had engaged in various small projects of mutual benefit; and Babiński had warmly recommended an old colleague from Białystok named Aleksander for any odd jobs his British friend might need doing. Haydn’s ‘chance meeting’ at the service station with the three Polish brothers hadn’t been anything of the kind.
When Dame Cecily had asked to see the prime minister’s body so that his head could be digitally mapped, Alois had had to admit to the unpleasant operation that had been performed earlier that night. She had taken the news with exemplary calm. ‘Yes, of course, quite necessary and right. Let’s just get it over to the Soho team run by my friend from Shoreditch as soon as possible. And Mr Haydn, it might be better if you didn’t mention it to anyone else. People are funny. Mustn’t frighten the horses.’ So Haydn had picked it up, and was on his way.
He hadn’t gone far when he heard the loud steps of a large man, wearing proper leather shoes, close behind him.
‘Going my way?’
Haydn jumped. Sir Solomon Dundas was the last man he had expected to see. The fabled financier was, as it happened, an executive member of the PLS board, but he had not been brought in on the plot. His area of expertise was the mysterious world of swap options, derivatives and gearing, not Whitehall power-broking and political pimping. Haydn had thought of asking for him to be included as part of the banking-crisis cover story, but the man had the reputation of being a bit of a blowhard, and slightly unreliable, so he had been kept at arm’s length. What was he doing here? Haydn knew better than to ask directly.
‘Sir Solomon. What a pleasure. And where are you off to so early this morning?’
‘Well, I have some pretty big clients in the upper chamber, Mr Haydn. These days I seem to divide my time between the Lords and Lord’s. Flash Harrys in ermine, flash young fellows in whites … Although I have to admit that the old bacon-and-egg tie means a lot more to me than trinkets with portcullises. But I’m rambling on. In answer to your question, I’m on my way to a small private bank in Mayfair. Early birds and worms, you know.’
‘We may as well walk together then,’ responded Haydn.
Sir Solomon was not far short of seven feet tall, and heavily built with it. Skipping along in his efforts to keep up with him, Haydn found himself almost out of breath, and the surprisingly heavy contents of the plastic bag he was carrying bounced unnervingly against his thigh. But he was not one ever to let an opportunity pass him by. Sir Solomon was well known as an opponent of the EU – he was an old friend of the one-time chancellor Nigel Lawson, and had helped to fund the UK Independence Party during its glory days.
‘Solly, knowing your views, I have to ask you something,’ panted Haydn. ‘Do you think that if Olivia Kite pulls it off and we leave the EU, the markets really will tumble?’
‘Bound to,’ growled Sir Solomon. ‘It would be fabulous news for our democracy, and good for all of us in the long term – but in the short term, investors are going to take fright about the uncertainty, if nothing else.’
He sucked on a small cigar, blowing fragrant clouds as he walked.
‘So be careful of your portfolio, Mr Haydn. Government bonds will take a battering, but the first wave of selling will hit our blue chips – Rolls-Royce, GEC, the pharmaceuticals and so on. British Airways is an obvious target. I’d expect the FTSE to fall 20 per cent – and that, by the way, is double the technical definition of a crash. If the fellows in Number 10 haven’t been worrying themselves about how to handle that, they don’t deserve to be in office.’
Haydn flushed. ‘It’s a big organisation. Even I don’t know everything that goes on …’ But then he fell silent. He was thinking, hard. The question of the dither fund was bobbing around the front of his mind. Most of his money was safely ferreted away in the Middle East, and the rest of it was securely held but readily accessible, in case he should need to get away and disappear completely at any time in the next few weeks. But what a prize it would be to take the bulk of the dither fund and do something really spectacular with it. Alois Haydn, who always thought fast, was thinking very fast indeed just now.
After a short time, Sir Solomon halted. Nestling between a shop selling Eastern antiquities and a Parisian shoe designer was a small, yellow-painted building with a heraldic shield swinging in the breeze over its front door. Sir Solomon announced that this was his destination.
As they parted, Haydn said, ‘It was good to talk to you at long last, Solomon. I hope we meet again soon.’ And, still skipping, he headed on towards Soho, where he would deliver the prime minister’s head to the Tintin lookalike and his friends – a group of paunchy youths whose heavy-metal T-shirts encountered soapsuds only rarely.
Alois Haydn was not a man much bothered by the inner voice of conscience. His last words to Amanda Andrews and Ronnie Ashe, both of whom were now visibly tired and nervous, had been to promise them that their role in this business would never come out; that the secret would hold, and Britain’s awesome official-secrecy mechanism would close over the whole episode once the referendum was over. And yet it struck him inescapably that if he leaked everything to Olivia Kite and the ‘No’ campaign – in return for a promise of a personal amnesty – he could make a fortune. Could there be a bigger piece of market-changing information than that the great European referendum was going to go the way few people expected?
You can short a huge private company. Why couldn’t you short an entire country? The conversation with Sir Solomon had fired Haydn up. By the time he turned into Old Compton Street, the package he was delivering seemed almost insignificant.
A Little Politics
Out in the real world, that Saturday was going to be a long day for every MP in the country. Peter Collingwood was very unhappy. He had left three or four messages the previous night for Ronnie Ashe, the chief whip. He needed an answer before he began his surgery, which was imminent.
Earlier that morning he had slipped in the shower of his rented constituency house while fulminating about the matter, and had – he thought – broken a toe. The pain was agonising. But he had not given up. He owed it to the constituency. He had pulled on his socks and shoes with considerable effort. Just as he was putting the kettle on his daughter had called from London, in a furious mood. She had come in at 3 o’clock that morning, drunk and stinking of cigarettes, and her mother had ordered her to call him. ‘Mum says it’s your duty to act as a father for once. The cow.’ The conversation had not gone well. Peter could not find quite the right tone of command. In the House of Commons he was a decisive voice. He was known in the press for his strong and traditional moral views. He had a chiselled chin and dark eyes. But none of this cut any ice with his daughter.
It was too early in the morning for a call like that. She had been, frankly, rude, saying he was just full of the same old shit. He was going to make her cry again, she told him – she could feel it. Her voice was going wavery. Why were daughters so completely impossible? The conversation had gone on just long enough – ‘Why don’t you get a life, you poor, sad old man?’ – for Peter, who was forty-nine, to miss his breakfast. By the time he hobbled to his car and set off for the school annexe where his constituency surgery was held, he was in a bad mood.
Waiting for him, he knew, would be two or three hopeless whingers, smelling of damp wool, the kind of men and women who infested doctors’ surgeries day after day. They’d want him to do the impossible – resurface their road, amputate a neighbour’s tree, deal with the impertinent manager of their local Tesco. Then there would be the same hard case he saw every week, a raddled ex-serviceman who had been thrown out by his wife. For good measure there would be at least one entirely insane constituent, possibly violent.
But none of this – not the pain, not the hunger, not his daughter, nor the prospect of the predictable and dispiriting hours ahead of him – was the source of his unhappiness. No. The real trouble was that a dozen, or perhaps two dozen, intelligent and friendly constituents would also be waiting for him, and would ask what he thought about the referendum and how he was going to vote. Among them would be his constituency party officers, eager to spread the word.
