The Third Attempt - a story of a coup d'état in Britain
Jul 17, 2020 15:34:51 GMT
lordroel, stevep, and 1 more like this
Post by James G on Jul 17, 2020 15:34:51 GMT
Chapter Eighty–Eight – One Odd Man, One Decent Man
Hinchingbrooke Park, near Huntington, Cambridgeshire – February 27th 2014
Jane took the cup of tea offered to her by the police detective and at once spoke kindly to the man: “Thank you, Sergeant.”
“It’s okay, Missus Snyder. Can we go over a few things once again? I stress that this is in no way formal and you can call your solicitor back again should you wish…
I just have a few of-the-record questions.”
“I’ll talk to you, Sergeant.” Jane wasn’t worried at all. They were in a waiting room, not an interview room where there would be recording equipment. Her solicitor had told her during the night that she had done no wrong and there was no possible charge that Cambridgeshire Constabulary could bring against her.
“How well did you know Patrick Collins?”
“I knew him as ‘Peter Cole’, Sergeant.”
“Oh yes, I’d forgotten that. He was using that alias only with you as far as I can tell.”
“I don’t know about that.” Her solicitor had said to her that it was best not to speculate on things that she didn’t know. “What I can say is that I barely knew him. To think that he saved my life while giving up his own is… well… I don’t know how to answer that.”
“My superiors are all over me to keep as little mention of him as possible hidden from any future public record. I’m just curious about him and I knew that you had a few dealings with him.”
“He was only a journalistic source. He supplied me with some information that I was going to use for a story, but it looks like that story may never be written now.”
“You’ve told me all about yourself and Miss Swann – your relationship to her – but you said that you had no idea about how the two of them knew each other even though they both knew you.”
Jane hadn’t told the police what she knew about those two and how they connected. Instead, the spook who’d come up here from what she presumed to be Collins’/Cole’s employer had been told what she knew there. Such things hadn’t appeared to come as a surprise to the man from MI-5 who told her he was called Jamie Trent.
Remembering what Michael had told her in addition to the legal advice she’d received, she said nothing in reply now either.
“We believe that Collins was following Swann as she was stalking you, Missus Snyder.”
“He was an odd man.”
“And he died saving you.”
“Yes, he did.”
Jane could picture perfectly in her mind now the exact moment when Charlotte had tried to kill her and ‘Cole’ had come from seemingly nowhere to save her life and give up his own. She reckoned deep down that he hadn’t meant to lose his own, but that was how things had turned out.
“I have another matter on my mind…”
“Go ahead, Sergeant.” Jane would try to answer him as long as it wasn’t a question that she couldn’t give an answer to.
“You were staying in the house of the local M.P for this area after you split up from your husband. Mister Snyder and Mister Williams are good friends though, are they not?”
“John Williams is a decent and honourable man. I know him and his wife very well indeed and John had no problem letting he stay in his house, none at all in fact.”
“That’s what people say about him.” The police officer sitting next to her, sipping his tea like she was, didn’t seem to really believe what he was saying, but then again Jane knew that recent events had shown her to be a terrible judge of character and moods.
Maybe he did mean it…
“He’s back in London now anyway, and I guess that I will soon be going back too.”
“Yes, today might be the day for my local M.P to become much more important that he already is.”
“I do hope so.”
Despite everything that had gone on yesterday here in south Cambridgeshire, Jane was thinking like a journalist (if she still had a job) and knew that she had good connections to the man who she thought would be the next Prime Minister.
Should she find herself unemployed after leaving London like she had, she wouldn’t have to hunt for long for a new job.
Good things could come from bad events, such was the way of things.
Yet, that wasn’t up to her though; other, distant people were about to make that decision.
Chapter Eighty–Nine – Who Shall Kiss Hands?
St. James’ Palace, Central London – February 27th 2014
Lord North had been here inside St. James’ Palace since yesterday evening and he was dead on his feet. He desperately needed a little nap; just to close his eyes for an hour would have been amazing.
Yet, to do so would mean leaving here for a period of time in which many things could go on which wouldn’t be to his benefit and could destroy all of his carefully-laid plans. He couldn’t leave because he was needed here to influence the decision making process that still hadn’t reached the conclusion that he sought it to.
Her Majesty had gone back to Buckingham Palace to get herself some rest overnight, but those who wanted her to make a decision on the future – advisers official and unofficial – had been up all night because they were yet to agree upon a course of action for their Monarch to take. It was dawn outside now, Lord North saw by the light slowly creeping in through a window, and that meant that they had all be here for a very long time indeed.
What the people here wanted was for Her Majesty to request that a new Government be formed in her name under the leadership one of three different surviving politicians who had been proposed to do that. Not enough of those who were here at St. James’ Palace – the vast majority of such people being Privy Councillors like Lord North was – could agree on the choice of one in particular and a consensus was far from immediate grasp.
The names put forward to lead a new British Government were those of Louise Cooper, David Peterson and John Williams.
The first two were junior members of the destroyed Government who had survived that attack on the Houses of Parliament yesterday while the third was the Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee – a man very well-known and with a higher public profile than the other two. Cooper had held the position of Treasurer of Household (a sinecure role that meant she was a Deputy Government Whip) while Peterson had previously filled the role of a Minister of State at the Department for Education.
This trio of MPs had all been absent from Parliament yesterday along with thirty-two elected others, including five from Sinn Fein who had refused to take their seats despite being elected four years ago. From among the thirty MPs who were now the only democratically elected politicians left after the massacre the day before (all had been away from the Commons Chamber for a variety of reasons), those three had the necessary support of a number of Privy Council members to lead a Government.
Getting enough people to agree on which one was to head a new unity Government was the problem though, not the lack of candidates.
Lord North had always knew that it wouldn’t be an easy thing for him to do to get his choice of Williams named as an interim Prime Minister, but he hadn’t expected it to be this difficult. Making sure that there were enough MPs of greater standing within the Commons Chamber to be killed yesterday had been easy enough after Lord North had manipulated the political situation so that they would be there, but he had never been able to guarantee who would survive that attack.
Even when he had got the news about Cooper and Peterson yesterday, along with Mark Fenton from the Labour Party (a Minister in the previous Government before 2010) remaining alive, he had still felt that he would have pushed Williams into office over everyone else within a couple of hours. There were too many of his fellow Privy Council members though who didn’t want Williams there though.
With hindsight, he would have ordered the deaths of some of these people too!
The room in which Lord North was inside within St. James’ Palace lightened up quicker than he could imagine. He currently stood in front of a window, with his back to the palace grounds outside, alone and watching the others here as they argued amongst themselves. There were no instances of shouting, but too many people here had opinions that they wanted to forcefully express to others no matter if they wanted to hear it or not.
His only hope of getting what he wanted at the minute was George Tate. He had stroked that man quite a bit and he was the man that their Monarch listened to. He wasn’t here at the minute, but he was soon to come back.
Whilst Lord North was waiting for a return of the decision-maker-in-chief, she who wore the crowns of the Commonwealth (metaphorically, of course), he knew that he should have been further working the room. There were still many here who had not firmly made up their mind and he might have swayed them had he said the right words. Yet he was dreadfully tired and could easily say the wrong thing.
He just had to wait and hope that he would get his way.
*
It was after Nine before Her Majesty returned; seemingly a lifetime for people such as him who had been aware for more than twenty-four hours now. There was no pomp or ceremony in her arrival back at St. James’ Palace though he knew that her journey would have taken place under extreme security.
Only he among all the others knew that there was no chance of any more ‘terrorist’ attacks taking place.
Surprisingly, matters were dealt with very quickly indeed.
When their Monarch spoke, everyone here was silent and listened carefully to her well-articulated statement. A decision had been made, she told the sixty plus people here, and it had been a hard one indeed. She had considered all of their advice and reached a judgment on who she wished to ask to form a national unity Government in her name until nationwide elections could be held.
Louise Cooper, the MP for Bexhill and Battle in East Sussex, would be asked to kiss hands and establish an emergency, temporary Government. All other MPs left alive would be invited to join her, Her Majesty hoped, but that decision was out of her hands.
Lord North’s heart sank at the news and it took all the inner strength that he had to keep standing and not collapse to the ground in woeful regret.
If he had waited until May and attacked as planned at the State Opening of Parliament then things would have been very different… very different indeed.
Chapter Ninety – Old Habits
Notting Hill, Central London – February 27th 2014
Lauren was now unemployed.
That was a strange state of affairs for her to be in. She had never in the whole of her adult life been out of work. Every single day the moment she had left university to yesterday she had held down a steady job. There had been many different roles that she had filled in her long career working for politicians, but she had always seamlessly moved from one job straight into the other. There’d never been a moment like this before.
Her feet were up on the footstool as she sat in her sofa with a TV dinner before her. She hadn’t been out of her flat all day and had done nothing, but old habits die hard and she had rushed making food as she always did.
Thinking on it, she realised that she was stupid; she could have taken her time to cook something proper or even gone out for dinner. There were friends that she had rarely seen over the past few months whose company she missed; they would have come out with her had she explained her situation.
Newsnight was on the television. Regular broadcasting had not yet been re-established on the various UK channels due to the rolling, uninterrupted coverage of yesterday’s dramatic events, but the BBC was now putting out this programme. It was to be an extra-long edition of the show, but its presence on the screen was a sign that things were getting back to normal for everyone but her.
She wasn’t really watching it though, but rather Lauren was just staring down at her plate of bland food wondering what she should do with her life now that she was out of work. She had been thinking on this all evening as she sought to gain a notion of who might employ her.
Coming away from those thoughts, she tried to pay attention to the programme. There was only one subject for Newsnight and that was the new Government, one which Lauren knew she was not going to be part of. People were being named for the emergency coalition administration and these were political figures expected and unexpected to be in that. Eighteen MPs, she was informed by the coverage, had been named to serve in Cooper’s new Government along with quite a few Lords, some of the latter were to occupy senior positions that would normally have gone to those elected to the Commons.
Those names represented a wide variety of people. There were Conservatives, Labour people and members of the Lib-Dems and even the Welsh Nationalists. It was a grand coalition of politicians, though they were mainly people who she never expected to ever attain governmental rank. The same was true of the reporters with Newsnight who she was certain had spent the past few hours trying to find out about many of these once obscure figures.
‘Prime Minister Louise Cooper’, she thought, was something I never expected to hear.
That little mouse-like woman from the South Coast was now running the country with the blessing of the Monarch. It was amazing how that had happened, which was a process that she had no knowledge of. If this had been another country, the US for example, then Lauren wouldn’t be sitting here listening to such a woman being spoken of as a national leader. She wondered yesterday when back in Downing Street, minutes after the remains of Colin Parsons’ evil conspiracy had struck, why no one here had though to safely place a senior member of the Government away from the Houses of Parliament when everyone else was there.
Such a thing was called ‘Continuality of Government’ and it had once been done in this country, though many years ago. Who would ever have thought that Parson’s final act of nefarious treason against his country would have been to strike against the Government when it was all in one place at a time known to everyone?
It was obvious now that such a thing was one hell of a target, but no one had done anything to change things. She wouldn’t blame herself, it wasn’t her fault, but it was still something that someone should have foreseen beforehand.
The ringing of her phone stopped these thoughts. It was her landline, not her mobile. Lauren quickly put her cushion and the plate that rested atop of it on another chair as she got up and left her living room for the hallway where the phone was.
“Hello?”
“Am I speaking to Miss Lauren Carter?”
“Yes…?” This sounded very official.
“Good evening, this is Sam Gardner: I’m with the Prime Minister’s Office.
The Prime Minister would like you to come over to Downing Street and talk with her, as soon as possible to be honest. Would you be able to? You can still use your old access pass but if you don’t have that anymore, I can have someone meet you.”
“She wants to see me?” Lauren lost all of her usual cool; this was so unexpected.
“Yes, the Prime Minister does. Can you come over; I know that it is late.”
“I can be there within the hour.” Lauren jumped at the opportunity for what sounded like reemployment.
“I shall inform her at once, Miss Carter. She will be glad to hear that. I shall see you soon.”
“You will!” Unwittingly, Lauren let out her excitement over the telephone connection.
After replacing the phone receiver, Louise left the hallway and almost ran towards her bedroom to start getting changed. She needed to look smart because she was going back to work in a place where image mattered; another old habit wasn’t dead.
She smiled as she quickly dressed and told herself that she was back and would be doing just what she had been doing before. Many things would have changed in Downing Street, but not all of them; there was a place for someone like here even working for the nobody that was Louise Cooper.
Chapter Ninety–One – A Lone Tear
Globe House, Victoria, Central London – March 2nd 2014
Harriet found that there was no one to tell that she was off on her lunch break. She had no supervisor here at Globe House to inform that she would be gone for thirty minutes so she did as she pleased.
Coming down from her office up on the third floor, Harriet initially set out to leave the building and take a wander around the Victoria area. On the way down in the lift she changed her mind though. She got out on the first floor and then went across to find the staff canteen that she had been shown earlier today when she had first reported for work here.
There really wasn’t anywhere outside that she wanted to go to and she decided to explore the area tomorrow.
Once in the canteen, Harriet got herself a hot drink and a sandwich before finding a table near a window that looked out over the nearby Victoria train station. She couldn’t see as much of the station from this height; the view was nothing like that offered by her own office higher up.
There was a train in sight though and she wondered where it was going…
The trickle of a lone tear fell from her left eye and started to run down her cheek.
Instinctively, Harriet wiped that away with a finger and was sure that by doing so she hadn’t ruined her make-up. It had come from nowhere and she silently admonished herself for starting to cry right here in this busy place on her first day assigned to the HM Passport Office. No one appeared to have noticed, but if they had, she didn’t want this to be talked about here as gossip.
That was not the best way to make an impression among her new colleagues.
Harriet opened her sandwich from the plastic wrapping and looked down at it on the paper plate. Her hands went back to her lap and she just glared at the food rather than starting to eat it.
Her mind went to Patrick, her mind went to Thursday…
***
She hadn’t known that Trent had left Thames House on that day to go out of London, let along up into Cambridgeshire. Too much had been going on at the headquarters of the Security Service that day to pay attention to where her Desk Head had gone off to. The rumour mill within the office, not just with the few officers she worked alongside at in Unusual Inquiries, had been running wild with people saying that the D-G was about to get fired. Having never met that man, Harriet hadn’t really cared about his fate because had had a lot on her on plate at that point.
The whole of the National Security Directorate had been busy following the previous day’s events for her to have worried about who was sitting up in the Director-General’s office. The men whom the detained Colin Parsons still had out there trying to topple the British Government – which he had achieved in part – were being sought with a distinct lack of success.
Trent had come to see her late that afternoon and brought her into his office. His whole demeanour had at once told her that something serious was going on, though his mentioning that he had been in a place called Huntington hadn’t meant anything. With him being a rather cold fish, she had been quite concerned when he had put his arm around her too during that walk from her desk into his office.
He hadn’t pulled his punches.
Trent had told her the minute that he’d closed the door, before he’d even offered her a seat, that Patrick was dead. ‘Murdered’ was the actual word that he had used before he had tried to give her a hug. The embrace was something that she had deftly avoided by sitting down and telling him at once that she was okay and all she wanted to know was the how, when and why of her colleague’s death.
The names Jane Snyder or Charlotte Swann hadn’t meant anything to her.
She hadn’t been able to understand how Patrick had got himself out of his self-imposed exile within his Finchley house and up to Sawston in Cambridgeshire. More confusing was why he had apparently been following the American journalist and then tackled her when she had apparently tried to kill the wife of an ex-politician named Michael Snyder.
None of it had made any sense.
That had been what had happened though. Such was how Patrick had been killed. Trent’s following information that Charlotte Swann had been some kind of crazed stalker trying to kill Jane Snyder had no importance as far as she was concerned. She had wanted to know instead why Patrick had been tracking the knife-wielding American who had killed him.
Trent had given her no information with regard to that.
After being sent home from work that day – before hearing on the rumour mill that Sir William Hunt had indeed been fired by the new Prime Minister and her directorate head Cliff Dunning was taking his place – she had spoken with Martin on the phone to see if he’d been able to tell her anything. Her boyfriend had disappointed her in that regard too.
No one knew of the ‘why’ Patrick had gone to that Sawston place to lose his life apart from the fact that he trailed the woman that would kill him there. That made it worse; to know the ‘why’ would have made it a little easier to understand.
She hadn’t cried for him Thursday, Friday or Saturday.
***
Earlier in the week, Dunning – before he’d got his new role – had told her that she would be getting new responsibilities within the Security Service following his closure of the MATCH investigation.
He’d promised her what would be a promotion and it could be argued that he had kept his word.
She’d now joined the ranks of middle management in dealing with underlings, though no longer would she work down the road at Thames House. She was here at Globe House now, which was the London regional office for the Passport Office, as the senior – and lone – Security Service operative working in this facility. She was responsible on-site as the ‘go to person’ for all civil servants within the building where they had concerns about passport applications that might involve threats to national security. It all sounded great and a true promotion, though she had found, after just a few hours here this morning, that it was a non-job.
If something did crop here that could be a worry, then she would forward all details of that to a colleague of hers that was across at Marsham Street (HM Passport Office HQ was co-located with the Home Office there). He would then work with Thames House in sending out investigating officers to do any necessary field work.
She herself would do nothing but sit in her office and dismiss the worries of harassed frontline passport staff. There hadn’t been a case in the past six weeks that she could see after reviewing her predecessor’s files where there was any sort of national security threat that popped up from passport applications. At least ten applications had been brought to his attention a week, but they were almost always nothing at all to be concerned about.
Foreign nationals who applied for British passports after living here for the required number of years did so all the time and some of them had come from unstable countries. She was supposed to look for terrorists or maybe convicted war criminals who’d fled their homelands, but those type of people were not flagging up for the attention of the Security Service officer assigned here.
In short, she would be doing nothing with her days and stuck behind her desk in this building. There would be no more going out and investigating murders covered as anything but the murders that they were or talking to self-confessed mass murderers in Hereford.
That was all over for her now.
Harriet returned her attention to her sandwich. There would be no more tears, just lunch. The MATCH investigation was over and Patrick was gone. It was back to doing what her father had long ago told her that she would do when she joined the ‘family business’ that was being an intelligence officer in service of the Crown: paperwork within a vast bureaucracy.
Chapter Ninety–Two – Patsy
Millbank, Central London – March 2nd 2014
The rain had stopped just after the two of them had come out of Thames House and Susan had asked him if he fancied taking a stroll back up to Portcullis House rather than getting taxis as everyone else was. Williams knew what a hint to be alone and talk was and so he’d accepted the offer of his fellow MP to walk this afternoon.
“They might as well as given us a few children’s puzzles to play with for that hour rather than go through all that.”
“Sorry…?” A passing coach hadn’t allowed Williams to catch exactly what Susan Norton had said to him.
“It was a waste of time, John.” Susan stopped for a moment to light a cigarette as they waited to cross over on the pelican crossing over Horseferry Road. As they went over that, holding up the light traffic this Sunday, she continued with what she was saying: “They treated us like children and told us nothing for what they patronisingly assume is our own good.”
“You might have a point there.” Williams hadn’t heard anything that he didn’t know from the briefing just given to a selection of surviving MPs that had included the two of them.
“Where did those planes that someone turned into what were for all intents and purpose guided missiles come from?
Who flew them straight into the correct part of the building to do all that damage?
Our former Home Secretary hasn’t given them anything and they have no direct evidence to link him to anything!
Parsons is a ‘patsy’ – that’s the American term, isn’t it? – as far as I can tell.
I used to be a criminal defence solicitor, I told you that before, didn’t I? If he was my client, I’d be very happy indeed because when his case comes before the C.P.S, no matter how much political pressure that they’ll get, they’ll have to refuse to prosecute. We were told that we were given all that the spooks back have there have, but that amounts to nothing.
He’ll be a free man by Easter!”
Williams couldn’t think of any response to give to that. He didn’t agree with all that Susan was saying, yet his disagreements sounded weak as he tried to frame them in his mind. Therefore, he didn’t want to express them because he didn’t want her to think he was stupid. It wasn’t a set-up – the Security Service was a damn professional organisation and not in the business of framing people – but their case was rather weak. Nonetheless, Parsons appeared to be guilty of what was being said about him.
The man had almost killed him! Only through the somewhat lucky intervention of Snyder had Williams been on the Underground when the Commons Chamber was destroyed and more than six hundred of his colleagues cruelly murdered.
The smoke that Susan exhaled blew towards Williams as they walked. The nicotine cravings almost overcame him, but he managed to stop himself from asking her if he could pinch one off her. He successfully fought off that urge and thought of something to say to take his mind off that desire.
“How long can we expect Louise Cooper to be our Prime Minister for, Susan?”
“The day following the election will be the day that the party dumps her.” Susan sounded noticeably confident with that prediction.
“Are you coming back?”
“I don’t know if they’ll have me, John.”
Williams quickly considered Susan’s answer there. She had resigned from the Conservative Party the other week to join up with the BORM. The Bill of Rights Movement had just lost most of its other MPs in Parliament though and she was the only one of three left. The nationwide movement was far from dead, though its leaders had all been killed on Wednesday along with everyone else. Susan was a late arrival to that party and Williams suspected that her heart had never truly been fully in it either.
She’d clearly been considering re-joining the Conservatives before he’d asked her that.
The party may have just lost all but ten of its previous three hundred and forty-one MPs, but the Conservatives hadn’t been destroyed – neither had the country’s other political parties either.
Nationwide, there were local party organisations at the minute working hard to prepare for the election that would he held in three and a half week’s time. The mandate given to Louise Cooper’s emergency government had only been a temporary one and a new Parliament needed to be formed to give the country back its democratic representation. MPs may have been killed, but they would soon be replaced.
Nothing was going to change there.
“What about you?”
“What do you mean?”
They were continuing up Millbank and getting closer towards the Houses of Parliament. The neo-Gothic buildings looked vastly different to those images that he had seen on the television on Wednesday when a cloud of thick black smoke hung over them and fires had been raging that cameras on a circling news helicopter had broadcast. From down here, days later, he couldn’t see the immense destruction caused to much of the Palace of Westminster.
Nevertheless, while Elizabeth Tower (containing Big Ben) and Victoria Tower still stood, he could see the gap in the skyline where the Central Tower was missing. It had previously risen over the Central Lobby that sat between the Commons Chamber and the Lords Chamber… three historic locations burnt to cinders now.
It was a weird sight to behold. For years he’d been used to seeing the three towers above the Houses of Parliament as part of the Westminster skyline. The news media had focused upon the heroic efforts of the London Fire Brigade in saving Big Ben from destruction, but he cared more about the loss of other major parts of the building.
Where would the new government, let alone the temporary one, sit?
“You turned down Cooper’s offer of a place in her new Cabinet? Aren’t you concerned, John, about all the negative media coverage that has brought you?”
“That’s not the end of the world.” A few sections of the media had sought to portray him in a bad light after he’d refused to become Home Secretary. They had said that he was sulking over not becoming Prime Minister himself. That had only been from a few silly newspapers though and nothing he couldn’t deal with later this month when he was up for re-election in South Cambridgeshire.
“Why?”
“Well…” This reminded him all of the conversation that he’d had with Snyder Thursday night when the man had tried to browbeat him into serving in Cooper’s new Cabinet. “I’ve never wanted anything like that, Susan. I turned down a Government post last November too.
I just want to serve my constituents directly and also work with my committee to help the country that way. Look at all the ministers that we’ve had and all they did to feather their own nests. Some of them were good people caught up in it all and they forgot what they were elected to do.
I have selfish reasons too.
The man you call the patsy – Parsons – still has those hired killers out there, somewhere. If you’re right, and it wasn’t him, then there’s someone else pulling the strings. Either way, I don’t fancy becoming the subject of their ire at some point.
Maybe I’m a coward, but I love my wife and my son and don’t fancy one day being blown up. Wednesday brought that all home to me.
No, no matter what, I’m staying doing what I’ve always been doing and thanking my lucky stars that I was absent from the House when all that happened.”
“Ah, I see.”
With that somewhat off-hand remark, Susan dropped her cigarette butt and the conversation ended there. The two Parliamentarians continued walking back towards the gutted Palace of Westminster and their offices within Portcullis House on the other side of that target for evil, faceless killers.
Hinchingbrooke Park, near Huntington, Cambridgeshire – February 27th 2014
Jane took the cup of tea offered to her by the police detective and at once spoke kindly to the man: “Thank you, Sergeant.”
“It’s okay, Missus Snyder. Can we go over a few things once again? I stress that this is in no way formal and you can call your solicitor back again should you wish…
I just have a few of-the-record questions.”
“I’ll talk to you, Sergeant.” Jane wasn’t worried at all. They were in a waiting room, not an interview room where there would be recording equipment. Her solicitor had told her during the night that she had done no wrong and there was no possible charge that Cambridgeshire Constabulary could bring against her.
“How well did you know Patrick Collins?”
“I knew him as ‘Peter Cole’, Sergeant.”
“Oh yes, I’d forgotten that. He was using that alias only with you as far as I can tell.”
“I don’t know about that.” Her solicitor had said to her that it was best not to speculate on things that she didn’t know. “What I can say is that I barely knew him. To think that he saved my life while giving up his own is… well… I don’t know how to answer that.”
“My superiors are all over me to keep as little mention of him as possible hidden from any future public record. I’m just curious about him and I knew that you had a few dealings with him.”
“He was only a journalistic source. He supplied me with some information that I was going to use for a story, but it looks like that story may never be written now.”
“You’ve told me all about yourself and Miss Swann – your relationship to her – but you said that you had no idea about how the two of them knew each other even though they both knew you.”
Jane hadn’t told the police what she knew about those two and how they connected. Instead, the spook who’d come up here from what she presumed to be Collins’/Cole’s employer had been told what she knew there. Such things hadn’t appeared to come as a surprise to the man from MI-5 who told her he was called Jamie Trent.
Remembering what Michael had told her in addition to the legal advice she’d received, she said nothing in reply now either.
“We believe that Collins was following Swann as she was stalking you, Missus Snyder.”
“He was an odd man.”
“And he died saving you.”
“Yes, he did.”
Jane could picture perfectly in her mind now the exact moment when Charlotte had tried to kill her and ‘Cole’ had come from seemingly nowhere to save her life and give up his own. She reckoned deep down that he hadn’t meant to lose his own, but that was how things had turned out.
“I have another matter on my mind…”
“Go ahead, Sergeant.” Jane would try to answer him as long as it wasn’t a question that she couldn’t give an answer to.
“You were staying in the house of the local M.P for this area after you split up from your husband. Mister Snyder and Mister Williams are good friends though, are they not?”
“John Williams is a decent and honourable man. I know him and his wife very well indeed and John had no problem letting he stay in his house, none at all in fact.”
“That’s what people say about him.” The police officer sitting next to her, sipping his tea like she was, didn’t seem to really believe what he was saying, but then again Jane knew that recent events had shown her to be a terrible judge of character and moods.
Maybe he did mean it…
“He’s back in London now anyway, and I guess that I will soon be going back too.”
“Yes, today might be the day for my local M.P to become much more important that he already is.”
“I do hope so.”
Despite everything that had gone on yesterday here in south Cambridgeshire, Jane was thinking like a journalist (if she still had a job) and knew that she had good connections to the man who she thought would be the next Prime Minister.
Should she find herself unemployed after leaving London like she had, she wouldn’t have to hunt for long for a new job.
Good things could come from bad events, such was the way of things.
Yet, that wasn’t up to her though; other, distant people were about to make that decision.
Chapter Eighty–Nine – Who Shall Kiss Hands?
St. James’ Palace, Central London – February 27th 2014
Lord North had been here inside St. James’ Palace since yesterday evening and he was dead on his feet. He desperately needed a little nap; just to close his eyes for an hour would have been amazing.
Yet, to do so would mean leaving here for a period of time in which many things could go on which wouldn’t be to his benefit and could destroy all of his carefully-laid plans. He couldn’t leave because he was needed here to influence the decision making process that still hadn’t reached the conclusion that he sought it to.
Her Majesty had gone back to Buckingham Palace to get herself some rest overnight, but those who wanted her to make a decision on the future – advisers official and unofficial – had been up all night because they were yet to agree upon a course of action for their Monarch to take. It was dawn outside now, Lord North saw by the light slowly creeping in through a window, and that meant that they had all be here for a very long time indeed.
What the people here wanted was for Her Majesty to request that a new Government be formed in her name under the leadership one of three different surviving politicians who had been proposed to do that. Not enough of those who were here at St. James’ Palace – the vast majority of such people being Privy Councillors like Lord North was – could agree on the choice of one in particular and a consensus was far from immediate grasp.
The names put forward to lead a new British Government were those of Louise Cooper, David Peterson and John Williams.
The first two were junior members of the destroyed Government who had survived that attack on the Houses of Parliament yesterday while the third was the Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee – a man very well-known and with a higher public profile than the other two. Cooper had held the position of Treasurer of Household (a sinecure role that meant she was a Deputy Government Whip) while Peterson had previously filled the role of a Minister of State at the Department for Education.
This trio of MPs had all been absent from Parliament yesterday along with thirty-two elected others, including five from Sinn Fein who had refused to take their seats despite being elected four years ago. From among the thirty MPs who were now the only democratically elected politicians left after the massacre the day before (all had been away from the Commons Chamber for a variety of reasons), those three had the necessary support of a number of Privy Council members to lead a Government.
Getting enough people to agree on which one was to head a new unity Government was the problem though, not the lack of candidates.
Lord North had always knew that it wouldn’t be an easy thing for him to do to get his choice of Williams named as an interim Prime Minister, but he hadn’t expected it to be this difficult. Making sure that there were enough MPs of greater standing within the Commons Chamber to be killed yesterday had been easy enough after Lord North had manipulated the political situation so that they would be there, but he had never been able to guarantee who would survive that attack.
Even when he had got the news about Cooper and Peterson yesterday, along with Mark Fenton from the Labour Party (a Minister in the previous Government before 2010) remaining alive, he had still felt that he would have pushed Williams into office over everyone else within a couple of hours. There were too many of his fellow Privy Council members though who didn’t want Williams there though.
With hindsight, he would have ordered the deaths of some of these people too!
The room in which Lord North was inside within St. James’ Palace lightened up quicker than he could imagine. He currently stood in front of a window, with his back to the palace grounds outside, alone and watching the others here as they argued amongst themselves. There were no instances of shouting, but too many people here had opinions that they wanted to forcefully express to others no matter if they wanted to hear it or not.
His only hope of getting what he wanted at the minute was George Tate. He had stroked that man quite a bit and he was the man that their Monarch listened to. He wasn’t here at the minute, but he was soon to come back.
Whilst Lord North was waiting for a return of the decision-maker-in-chief, she who wore the crowns of the Commonwealth (metaphorically, of course), he knew that he should have been further working the room. There were still many here who had not firmly made up their mind and he might have swayed them had he said the right words. Yet he was dreadfully tired and could easily say the wrong thing.
He just had to wait and hope that he would get his way.
*
It was after Nine before Her Majesty returned; seemingly a lifetime for people such as him who had been aware for more than twenty-four hours now. There was no pomp or ceremony in her arrival back at St. James’ Palace though he knew that her journey would have taken place under extreme security.
Only he among all the others knew that there was no chance of any more ‘terrorist’ attacks taking place.
Surprisingly, matters were dealt with very quickly indeed.
When their Monarch spoke, everyone here was silent and listened carefully to her well-articulated statement. A decision had been made, she told the sixty plus people here, and it had been a hard one indeed. She had considered all of their advice and reached a judgment on who she wished to ask to form a national unity Government in her name until nationwide elections could be held.
Louise Cooper, the MP for Bexhill and Battle in East Sussex, would be asked to kiss hands and establish an emergency, temporary Government. All other MPs left alive would be invited to join her, Her Majesty hoped, but that decision was out of her hands.
Lord North’s heart sank at the news and it took all the inner strength that he had to keep standing and not collapse to the ground in woeful regret.
If he had waited until May and attacked as planned at the State Opening of Parliament then things would have been very different… very different indeed.
Chapter Ninety – Old Habits
Notting Hill, Central London – February 27th 2014
Lauren was now unemployed.
That was a strange state of affairs for her to be in. She had never in the whole of her adult life been out of work. Every single day the moment she had left university to yesterday she had held down a steady job. There had been many different roles that she had filled in her long career working for politicians, but she had always seamlessly moved from one job straight into the other. There’d never been a moment like this before.
Her feet were up on the footstool as she sat in her sofa with a TV dinner before her. She hadn’t been out of her flat all day and had done nothing, but old habits die hard and she had rushed making food as she always did.
Thinking on it, she realised that she was stupid; she could have taken her time to cook something proper or even gone out for dinner. There were friends that she had rarely seen over the past few months whose company she missed; they would have come out with her had she explained her situation.
Newsnight was on the television. Regular broadcasting had not yet been re-established on the various UK channels due to the rolling, uninterrupted coverage of yesterday’s dramatic events, but the BBC was now putting out this programme. It was to be an extra-long edition of the show, but its presence on the screen was a sign that things were getting back to normal for everyone but her.
She wasn’t really watching it though, but rather Lauren was just staring down at her plate of bland food wondering what she should do with her life now that she was out of work. She had been thinking on this all evening as she sought to gain a notion of who might employ her.
Coming away from those thoughts, she tried to pay attention to the programme. There was only one subject for Newsnight and that was the new Government, one which Lauren knew she was not going to be part of. People were being named for the emergency coalition administration and these were political figures expected and unexpected to be in that. Eighteen MPs, she was informed by the coverage, had been named to serve in Cooper’s new Government along with quite a few Lords, some of the latter were to occupy senior positions that would normally have gone to those elected to the Commons.
Those names represented a wide variety of people. There were Conservatives, Labour people and members of the Lib-Dems and even the Welsh Nationalists. It was a grand coalition of politicians, though they were mainly people who she never expected to ever attain governmental rank. The same was true of the reporters with Newsnight who she was certain had spent the past few hours trying to find out about many of these once obscure figures.
‘Prime Minister Louise Cooper’, she thought, was something I never expected to hear.
That little mouse-like woman from the South Coast was now running the country with the blessing of the Monarch. It was amazing how that had happened, which was a process that she had no knowledge of. If this had been another country, the US for example, then Lauren wouldn’t be sitting here listening to such a woman being spoken of as a national leader. She wondered yesterday when back in Downing Street, minutes after the remains of Colin Parsons’ evil conspiracy had struck, why no one here had though to safely place a senior member of the Government away from the Houses of Parliament when everyone else was there.
Such a thing was called ‘Continuality of Government’ and it had once been done in this country, though many years ago. Who would ever have thought that Parson’s final act of nefarious treason against his country would have been to strike against the Government when it was all in one place at a time known to everyone?
It was obvious now that such a thing was one hell of a target, but no one had done anything to change things. She wouldn’t blame herself, it wasn’t her fault, but it was still something that someone should have foreseen beforehand.
The ringing of her phone stopped these thoughts. It was her landline, not her mobile. Lauren quickly put her cushion and the plate that rested atop of it on another chair as she got up and left her living room for the hallway where the phone was.
“Hello?”
“Am I speaking to Miss Lauren Carter?”
“Yes…?” This sounded very official.
“Good evening, this is Sam Gardner: I’m with the Prime Minister’s Office.
The Prime Minister would like you to come over to Downing Street and talk with her, as soon as possible to be honest. Would you be able to? You can still use your old access pass but if you don’t have that anymore, I can have someone meet you.”
“She wants to see me?” Lauren lost all of her usual cool; this was so unexpected.
“Yes, the Prime Minister does. Can you come over; I know that it is late.”
“I can be there within the hour.” Lauren jumped at the opportunity for what sounded like reemployment.
“I shall inform her at once, Miss Carter. She will be glad to hear that. I shall see you soon.”
“You will!” Unwittingly, Lauren let out her excitement over the telephone connection.
After replacing the phone receiver, Louise left the hallway and almost ran towards her bedroom to start getting changed. She needed to look smart because she was going back to work in a place where image mattered; another old habit wasn’t dead.
She smiled as she quickly dressed and told herself that she was back and would be doing just what she had been doing before. Many things would have changed in Downing Street, but not all of them; there was a place for someone like here even working for the nobody that was Louise Cooper.
Chapter Ninety–One – A Lone Tear
Globe House, Victoria, Central London – March 2nd 2014
Harriet found that there was no one to tell that she was off on her lunch break. She had no supervisor here at Globe House to inform that she would be gone for thirty minutes so she did as she pleased.
Coming down from her office up on the third floor, Harriet initially set out to leave the building and take a wander around the Victoria area. On the way down in the lift she changed her mind though. She got out on the first floor and then went across to find the staff canteen that she had been shown earlier today when she had first reported for work here.
There really wasn’t anywhere outside that she wanted to go to and she decided to explore the area tomorrow.
Once in the canteen, Harriet got herself a hot drink and a sandwich before finding a table near a window that looked out over the nearby Victoria train station. She couldn’t see as much of the station from this height; the view was nothing like that offered by her own office higher up.
There was a train in sight though and she wondered where it was going…
The trickle of a lone tear fell from her left eye and started to run down her cheek.
Instinctively, Harriet wiped that away with a finger and was sure that by doing so she hadn’t ruined her make-up. It had come from nowhere and she silently admonished herself for starting to cry right here in this busy place on her first day assigned to the HM Passport Office. No one appeared to have noticed, but if they had, she didn’t want this to be talked about here as gossip.
That was not the best way to make an impression among her new colleagues.
Harriet opened her sandwich from the plastic wrapping and looked down at it on the paper plate. Her hands went back to her lap and she just glared at the food rather than starting to eat it.
Her mind went to Patrick, her mind went to Thursday…
***
She hadn’t known that Trent had left Thames House on that day to go out of London, let along up into Cambridgeshire. Too much had been going on at the headquarters of the Security Service that day to pay attention to where her Desk Head had gone off to. The rumour mill within the office, not just with the few officers she worked alongside at in Unusual Inquiries, had been running wild with people saying that the D-G was about to get fired. Having never met that man, Harriet hadn’t really cared about his fate because had had a lot on her on plate at that point.
The whole of the National Security Directorate had been busy following the previous day’s events for her to have worried about who was sitting up in the Director-General’s office. The men whom the detained Colin Parsons still had out there trying to topple the British Government – which he had achieved in part – were being sought with a distinct lack of success.
Trent had come to see her late that afternoon and brought her into his office. His whole demeanour had at once told her that something serious was going on, though his mentioning that he had been in a place called Huntington hadn’t meant anything. With him being a rather cold fish, she had been quite concerned when he had put his arm around her too during that walk from her desk into his office.
He hadn’t pulled his punches.
Trent had told her the minute that he’d closed the door, before he’d even offered her a seat, that Patrick was dead. ‘Murdered’ was the actual word that he had used before he had tried to give her a hug. The embrace was something that she had deftly avoided by sitting down and telling him at once that she was okay and all she wanted to know was the how, when and why of her colleague’s death.
The names Jane Snyder or Charlotte Swann hadn’t meant anything to her.
She hadn’t been able to understand how Patrick had got himself out of his self-imposed exile within his Finchley house and up to Sawston in Cambridgeshire. More confusing was why he had apparently been following the American journalist and then tackled her when she had apparently tried to kill the wife of an ex-politician named Michael Snyder.
None of it had made any sense.
That had been what had happened though. Such was how Patrick had been killed. Trent’s following information that Charlotte Swann had been some kind of crazed stalker trying to kill Jane Snyder had no importance as far as she was concerned. She had wanted to know instead why Patrick had been tracking the knife-wielding American who had killed him.
Trent had given her no information with regard to that.
After being sent home from work that day – before hearing on the rumour mill that Sir William Hunt had indeed been fired by the new Prime Minister and her directorate head Cliff Dunning was taking his place – she had spoken with Martin on the phone to see if he’d been able to tell her anything. Her boyfriend had disappointed her in that regard too.
No one knew of the ‘why’ Patrick had gone to that Sawston place to lose his life apart from the fact that he trailed the woman that would kill him there. That made it worse; to know the ‘why’ would have made it a little easier to understand.
She hadn’t cried for him Thursday, Friday or Saturday.
***
Earlier in the week, Dunning – before he’d got his new role – had told her that she would be getting new responsibilities within the Security Service following his closure of the MATCH investigation.
He’d promised her what would be a promotion and it could be argued that he had kept his word.
She’d now joined the ranks of middle management in dealing with underlings, though no longer would she work down the road at Thames House. She was here at Globe House now, which was the London regional office for the Passport Office, as the senior – and lone – Security Service operative working in this facility. She was responsible on-site as the ‘go to person’ for all civil servants within the building where they had concerns about passport applications that might involve threats to national security. It all sounded great and a true promotion, though she had found, after just a few hours here this morning, that it was a non-job.
If something did crop here that could be a worry, then she would forward all details of that to a colleague of hers that was across at Marsham Street (HM Passport Office HQ was co-located with the Home Office there). He would then work with Thames House in sending out investigating officers to do any necessary field work.
She herself would do nothing but sit in her office and dismiss the worries of harassed frontline passport staff. There hadn’t been a case in the past six weeks that she could see after reviewing her predecessor’s files where there was any sort of national security threat that popped up from passport applications. At least ten applications had been brought to his attention a week, but they were almost always nothing at all to be concerned about.
Foreign nationals who applied for British passports after living here for the required number of years did so all the time and some of them had come from unstable countries. She was supposed to look for terrorists or maybe convicted war criminals who’d fled their homelands, but those type of people were not flagging up for the attention of the Security Service officer assigned here.
In short, she would be doing nothing with her days and stuck behind her desk in this building. There would be no more going out and investigating murders covered as anything but the murders that they were or talking to self-confessed mass murderers in Hereford.
That was all over for her now.
Harriet returned her attention to her sandwich. There would be no more tears, just lunch. The MATCH investigation was over and Patrick was gone. It was back to doing what her father had long ago told her that she would do when she joined the ‘family business’ that was being an intelligence officer in service of the Crown: paperwork within a vast bureaucracy.
Chapter Ninety–Two – Patsy
Millbank, Central London – March 2nd 2014
The rain had stopped just after the two of them had come out of Thames House and Susan had asked him if he fancied taking a stroll back up to Portcullis House rather than getting taxis as everyone else was. Williams knew what a hint to be alone and talk was and so he’d accepted the offer of his fellow MP to walk this afternoon.
“They might as well as given us a few children’s puzzles to play with for that hour rather than go through all that.”
“Sorry…?” A passing coach hadn’t allowed Williams to catch exactly what Susan Norton had said to him.
“It was a waste of time, John.” Susan stopped for a moment to light a cigarette as they waited to cross over on the pelican crossing over Horseferry Road. As they went over that, holding up the light traffic this Sunday, she continued with what she was saying: “They treated us like children and told us nothing for what they patronisingly assume is our own good.”
“You might have a point there.” Williams hadn’t heard anything that he didn’t know from the briefing just given to a selection of surviving MPs that had included the two of them.
“Where did those planes that someone turned into what were for all intents and purpose guided missiles come from?
Who flew them straight into the correct part of the building to do all that damage?
Our former Home Secretary hasn’t given them anything and they have no direct evidence to link him to anything!
Parsons is a ‘patsy’ – that’s the American term, isn’t it? – as far as I can tell.
I used to be a criminal defence solicitor, I told you that before, didn’t I? If he was my client, I’d be very happy indeed because when his case comes before the C.P.S, no matter how much political pressure that they’ll get, they’ll have to refuse to prosecute. We were told that we were given all that the spooks back have there have, but that amounts to nothing.
He’ll be a free man by Easter!”
Williams couldn’t think of any response to give to that. He didn’t agree with all that Susan was saying, yet his disagreements sounded weak as he tried to frame them in his mind. Therefore, he didn’t want to express them because he didn’t want her to think he was stupid. It wasn’t a set-up – the Security Service was a damn professional organisation and not in the business of framing people – but their case was rather weak. Nonetheless, Parsons appeared to be guilty of what was being said about him.
The man had almost killed him! Only through the somewhat lucky intervention of Snyder had Williams been on the Underground when the Commons Chamber was destroyed and more than six hundred of his colleagues cruelly murdered.
The smoke that Susan exhaled blew towards Williams as they walked. The nicotine cravings almost overcame him, but he managed to stop himself from asking her if he could pinch one off her. He successfully fought off that urge and thought of something to say to take his mind off that desire.
“How long can we expect Louise Cooper to be our Prime Minister for, Susan?”
“The day following the election will be the day that the party dumps her.” Susan sounded noticeably confident with that prediction.
“Are you coming back?”
“I don’t know if they’ll have me, John.”
Williams quickly considered Susan’s answer there. She had resigned from the Conservative Party the other week to join up with the BORM. The Bill of Rights Movement had just lost most of its other MPs in Parliament though and she was the only one of three left. The nationwide movement was far from dead, though its leaders had all been killed on Wednesday along with everyone else. Susan was a late arrival to that party and Williams suspected that her heart had never truly been fully in it either.
She’d clearly been considering re-joining the Conservatives before he’d asked her that.
The party may have just lost all but ten of its previous three hundred and forty-one MPs, but the Conservatives hadn’t been destroyed – neither had the country’s other political parties either.
Nationwide, there were local party organisations at the minute working hard to prepare for the election that would he held in three and a half week’s time. The mandate given to Louise Cooper’s emergency government had only been a temporary one and a new Parliament needed to be formed to give the country back its democratic representation. MPs may have been killed, but they would soon be replaced.
Nothing was going to change there.
“What about you?”
“What do you mean?”
They were continuing up Millbank and getting closer towards the Houses of Parliament. The neo-Gothic buildings looked vastly different to those images that he had seen on the television on Wednesday when a cloud of thick black smoke hung over them and fires had been raging that cameras on a circling news helicopter had broadcast. From down here, days later, he couldn’t see the immense destruction caused to much of the Palace of Westminster.
Nevertheless, while Elizabeth Tower (containing Big Ben) and Victoria Tower still stood, he could see the gap in the skyline where the Central Tower was missing. It had previously risen over the Central Lobby that sat between the Commons Chamber and the Lords Chamber… three historic locations burnt to cinders now.
It was a weird sight to behold. For years he’d been used to seeing the three towers above the Houses of Parliament as part of the Westminster skyline. The news media had focused upon the heroic efforts of the London Fire Brigade in saving Big Ben from destruction, but he cared more about the loss of other major parts of the building.
Where would the new government, let alone the temporary one, sit?
“You turned down Cooper’s offer of a place in her new Cabinet? Aren’t you concerned, John, about all the negative media coverage that has brought you?”
“That’s not the end of the world.” A few sections of the media had sought to portray him in a bad light after he’d refused to become Home Secretary. They had said that he was sulking over not becoming Prime Minister himself. That had only been from a few silly newspapers though and nothing he couldn’t deal with later this month when he was up for re-election in South Cambridgeshire.
“Why?”
“Well…” This reminded him all of the conversation that he’d had with Snyder Thursday night when the man had tried to browbeat him into serving in Cooper’s new Cabinet. “I’ve never wanted anything like that, Susan. I turned down a Government post last November too.
I just want to serve my constituents directly and also work with my committee to help the country that way. Look at all the ministers that we’ve had and all they did to feather their own nests. Some of them were good people caught up in it all and they forgot what they were elected to do.
I have selfish reasons too.
The man you call the patsy – Parsons – still has those hired killers out there, somewhere. If you’re right, and it wasn’t him, then there’s someone else pulling the strings. Either way, I don’t fancy becoming the subject of their ire at some point.
Maybe I’m a coward, but I love my wife and my son and don’t fancy one day being blown up. Wednesday brought that all home to me.
No, no matter what, I’m staying doing what I’ve always been doing and thanking my lucky stars that I was absent from the House when all that happened.”
“Ah, I see.”
With that somewhat off-hand remark, Susan dropped her cigarette butt and the conversation ended there. The two Parliamentarians continued walking back towards the gutted Palace of Westminster and their offices within Portcullis House on the other side of that target for evil, faceless killers.
