The Minister of Information gave up trying to stand tall.
He groaned.
“If I put up my hand I will be the next Prime Minister,” he said. “For all I know I might yet be Prime Minister one day. But I am not the man for this particular moment.” He shrugged. “Margaret Thatcher, our very own little ‘angry widow’ may not be everything that a British Prime Minister might, in an ideal world, be but she is definitely not of the old guard. She is therefore free of blame for what has happened. Moreover, from my acquaintance with the lady in the last year she is not to be underestimated. With my Party Chairman hat on I will also put to you an argument which will be persuasive within the Party, namely that if she falls on her face then the rest of us will have clean hands. In any event, Margaret will need our advice, the benefit of our experience. Better she leads us now while she is still in our thrall than later when she has seen that despite our appearance of finery and grandeur, we are all naked.”
Tom Harding-Grayson frowned.
He took Iain Macleod’s apparent cynicism with a large pinch of salt but it still rankled to hear the case for the elevation of Margaret Thatcher to the premiership outlined in such coldly pragmatic terms.
“Surely it is not that simple?” He asked.
“Nothing in politics is ever that simple, Tom,” Iain Macleod confirmed dryly. “Can I leave it to you to deal with the matter of the treaty? I’m sure our hosts will be getting nervous by now so I’ll leave you to assuage their anxiety. In the meantime I will speak to Jim Callaghan again. If he raises no objections I will speak directly to Margaret.”
“And if she balks at the jump?”
Iain Macleod sucked his teeth.
How little the man who had been the wisest and most ferocious intellect in what survived of the Home Civil Service until a few days ago, understood of the mind of the political animal.
“Margaret will be horrified to hear the news about Ted Heath. She will be eager to carry her banner to whichever member of the old guard she thinks best is qualified, or more importantly, most likely to succeed him. In fact she will probably offer me her support. She will be surprised when I propose that her name goes forward to the Queen. Surprised and possibly, daunted.”
Iain Macleod sighed resignedly.
“However, once she has thought about it for a few minutes she will know her duty in this matter and that will be an end of it.”
Chapter 15
Former Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Agent Dwight Christie had parked up and walked to the quayside. He had not shaved for three days and he felt uncomfortable in jeans and a ‘cowboy shirt’; he had always been at his ease in the staid uniform of the Bureau in much the same way he had enjoyed wearing the uniform of the country to whose downfall he was committed, during his war service between 1942 and 1946.
He sat down on a bench and smoked a cigarette. It was a warm day with a cool breeze blowing down from the north. Had he not been so tired and had his head not ached so badly he might have relaxed a little, allowed some or all of the tension to drain out of his still fleshy frame. One thing was for sure; the days of easy living were over.
Dwight Christie no longer existed.
He had died back in that safe house in Berkeley.
There had been no revolution on Monday night; no great sympathetic uprising from coast to coast or anywhere, in fact. The streets of Washington DC had run with blood but the uprising was over and most people, insofar as they cared, had subsequently breathed a long heartfelt sigh of relief.
Things were so bad that his handlers had gone to ground; either that or they had been swept up by the indiscriminate Federal dragnet trawling across the continent sweeping up anybody who had ever, at any time, aroused the tiniest scintilla of interest in any ‘security’ file held by any organ of the government.
That was what happened after a failed coup d’état’, so he had driven south. If things got too hot he could be across the border in Tijuana in an hour.
He smoked his cigarette and wondered if his wife had heard he was dead yet?
He and Kathleen had been separated three years and out of love long before that but Kathleen was too Catholic to have ever considered asking for a divorce. She would probably shed a tear for him when she heard the news; good people like Kitty did not deserve to be married to men like him. She had imagined she could sooth his inner rage, make of him a better man but in truth he had been too far gone by the time they met. He had needed to be married to bolster his ‘respectability’ within the Bureau; Kitty was the sister of a fellow agent and the FBI liked to keep things ‘in the family’.
Professionally, it was a perfect match.
Christie took a long, hard drag on his cigarette and exhaled raggedly. He had tried giving up smoking several times in recent years but always come back to the weed. A man was a fool to himself if he aspired to absolute ideological or physical purity.
Soon after he and Kitty were married he had very nearly confessed his sins, told her everything. She was so trusting, open, honest and well, cute, and he had almost but not quite betrayed himself. Sometimes he caught her looking at him in that unnerving way as if at some unspoken, perhaps subconscious level she knew that he was not and never had been what he seemed to be.
Hell, now and then he caught himself looking at himself in the mirror in exactly that way!
He had been a bright kid bored and unchallenged at high school and then the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbour. Aged a month short of his twentieth birthday he had pulled out of college one term into his law degree and breezed through the Army’s officer candidate selection board in February 1942, confidently expected to be sent overseas. Instead, he had spent his time in uniform stateside. Hitler’s war had poured untold treasure into the pockets of American industrialists and he had been one of the guys trying to limit the damage. The Army did not really care what it paid for the guns and bullets, vehicles, bases and depots it needed to fight the enemy; but it had to be seen to be dealing ‘honestly and prudently’ if and when anybody ever got around to looking at the books after the war. That was what Christie — and a small army of accountants, investigators and military policemen responsible for auditing procurement — had spent their war doing.
Christie had never been an all American sort of kid traduced by some kind of ‘dream’. That baloney had only ever seemed real in the movies. However, neither had he grown up as any kind of socialist or rebel. It was only when he had witnessed firsthand the way American industry routinely — gratuitously, in fact — systematically fleeced and gouged the American taxpayer, and thus the American people, and the way in which so many obscene fortunes where shamelessly built upon the foundations of the bodies of tens of thousands of dead GIs, that his personal worm had slowly turned.
His internal conversion was a very gradual, insidious thing and ultimately, the more profound for it. There was no Damascene moment, no sudden conversion on a par with St Paul’s on the road to Damascus, simply the continual daily drip, drip, drip of the unequivocal evidence before his eyes. In time of war the moneylenders, the steel men, the shipbuilders, the Fords and the General Motors and the Boeings, the Rockefellers and yes, the Kennedys got richer while American GIs died on the beaches of Iwo Jima and Normandy, and in the jungles of the Philippines, the mountains of Italy and the Ardennes forest of Luxembourg and Belgium. The army of fat cat war profiteers and their political place men salted away their millions while young American soldiers, sailors and airmen bled to death thousands of miles from home; and the American system, the great god of the market economy, the religion of capitalism blessed the thieves and charlatans for whom the war could not go on long enough!