At weekends, with a hundred office staff gone, Number Ten was like a morgue, and Edgeworth liked to escape. The twenty minutes of grim body-building was replaced by a leisurely half hour in the covered swimming pool at Chequers. The daily planning session was replaced by a skim through the weekend newspapers over a breakfast of orange juice, yoghurt and banana, thrown together in a blender with a sprinkling of nutmeg. He made his own breakfast, lifelong bachelor’s habits not being easily broken. Then he would set the log fire in the enormous great hall which occupied the centre of the Elizabethan house, and either read a novel or stroll round the gardens before dipping into Budget statements, communiqués or speeches. Weekend lunches were gregarious affairs, which he used to keep in touch with life outside politics.
At Question Time anyone could see that the PM was coming down with something, and it was no surprise to learn that this Chequers weekend was to be a long one. Pembroke cancelled the PM’s Saturday guests, arranged for the Deputy PM to attend the Kohl funeral, and told his wife that he would be babysitting the Great Leader over the weekend. He then drove towards Chequers in his own Jaguar, an ancient red XJ which he liked to think made him in the image of Inspector Morse.
At 9 p.m. exactly, the PM’s Daimler was driven round to the front of the big country house. Edgeworth and Pembroke, both dressed for the cold, sat in the back. Pembroke wore a black Cossack hat with ear-flaps; the Prime Minister thought he had last seen its like in a Christmas pantomime.
The Prime Minister pressed a button, and a sheet of thick glass rose to separate the driver from his passengers. ‘Lighten up, Joe. I feel as if I’m riding with my undertaker. What’s your beef?’
‘You know perfectly well, Prime Minister. I’ve been saying it all day. This whole adventure is misconceived.’ Pembroke had adopted an aggrieved tone to emphasise his displeasure.
‘It had better not be. You planned it.’ The Prime Minister patted Pembroke’s knee. It was a habit which made the PPS cringe, but what could he do? Edgeworth said, ‘Joe, I have full confidence in your logistic abilities.’
‘What if we had to ditch in the Baltic? I’d like to see Carnforth spin that one away.’ Edgeworth laughed. Pembroke scowled and continued, ‘And what do we really know of Ogorodnikov’s intentions?’
The driver was pulling out to pass cyclists, two abreast, no lights. Edgeworth said, ‘Don’t let your imagination run away with you.’
‘But nobody will even know where we are. Anything could happen.’
Edgeworth looked out at the dark fields. He waved a hand dismissively. ‘Go ahead, sweat the small stuff. I have bigger worries.’
At RAF Northolt, a black-bearded young man, on the promotion fast track at the Foreign Office, and said to be utterly reliable, was waiting nervously in the Commanding Officer’s office. The CO led them to a VC-10 which took them out over the dark North Sea.
Around 11.30 p.m., the aircraft tilted and slowed, and they found themselves approaching a short runway. Once landed, they taxied over to a big yellow Search and Rescue helicopter, the wind from its rotor making patterns in the grass. Pembroke held on to his Cossack hat as they transferred hastily over.
Two aircrew bundled the little group aboard and clambered up after them. The steps were pulled in and the door slammed shut. Pembroke, Edgeworth and the FO man buckled themselves into seats near the rear of the Sea King, and the aircrew joined two more RAF men up front. Then there was thunder and vibration and they rose sluggishly, the ground slipping under them. The lights of Lossiemouth began to dwindle. They passed over a cluster of red lights, an aerial farm. More distant lights marked out Elgin to their left, and Tain and Cromarty ahead; the inky black patch between them was the Moray Firth.
Then, over ghostly-white Highlands, away from curious eyes, the pilot switched off the navigation lights. Inside the big helicopter, it was suddenly pitch black apart from the subdued glow from the instrument panel. The pilot turned the machine north, and flew on for about thirty miles over the desolate peaks. Then he banked sharply and took them east, out over the rolling North Sea waves, past the Long Forties and the Great Fisher Bank, leaving the sovereign territory of the United Kingdom far behind.
To have landed on the deck of a Royal Navy warship, or to have been lowered into the bowels of a Russian Baltic Fleet submarine, would have been to tell a hundred or more sailors of each nationality that a clandestine meeting was taking place between the British and Russian Prime Ministers. It had taken three discussions over a scrambler phone between Joe Pembroke and his counterpart, Alexy Grigorivich, to solve the problem — if ‘solve’ was the word for the scheme they had hastily concocted.
By half past three the Sea King dropped to a hundred feet and flew along the Skaggerak. They passed low over an early morning ferry, its lights ablaze in the dark sea.
The helicopter banked left. The lights of a small fishing town drifted past to port, practically level with the Sea King. On a quiet promontory, the pilot lowered the machine noisily on to a stony beach.
The British Prime Minister and his entourage were now, illegally, in Norwegian territory.
The blades spun down, and the engine whined to a halt.
On another promontory, about five miles away, a lighthouse flashed every few seconds.
A truck driving on sidelights. Truck doors slamming; cigarettes glowing in the dark, illuminating two men jumping down from the big vehicle.
Pembroke and the pilot stepped out. Rough voices, in heavily accented English. The cigarettes were extinguished. In the near-dark, Edgeworth heard rather than saw cash being counted. He climbed out and relieved himself behind a wall, the whiff of fuel catching his nostrils. To the southeast, a sliver of light was beginning to touch the horizon. In another ten minutes rotors were beginning to spin up, and then the refuelled Sea King was once again flying out over the sea, just above the dark waves.
At five in the morning by their biological clocks, the helicopter once more approached a shoreline. The sky was lightening. This time they flew inland, over dense conifer forest, before landing in a clearing. Edgeworth, his nerves ragged, looked down on trees with snow being shaken from them as the big machine lowered itself on to the ground. There was a brief mini-blizzard, and then two crewmen jumped out; they were wearing holstered pistols. One of them lowered the steps. Pembroke left first, looking around warily. Then he shone a little flashlight on to a sheet of paper and set off along a track, followed by the Prime Minister and the translator.
Here the cold was sterner. It had hit them as soon as the door slid open; it was cutting through Edgeworth’s woollen cap, and Pembroke’s pantomime hat was turning into something to covet.
After ten minutes of trudging through deep snow, the path forked. Pembroke looked again at the little hand-drawn map. He grunted and led the way forwards along the right-hand path. Presently there was a frozen lake, stretching into the darkness, and at its far end a wooden cabin, brightly lit from within. They set out across the lake.
The man who opened the door was small, stout and white-haired, and wore a heavy polo-necked sweater. His voice seemed to come from the depths of his chest. The man from the FO translated Ogorodnikov’s Russian in flawless Oxford English: ‘Welcome to Finland, Prime Minister Edgeworth.’
22
The Frog
Petrie tried to convince himself that his random walk round the castle was to clear the mental cobwebs.
He wandered into the theological library, dazzling with baroque, shining with antique globes, but empty. He strolled into the computer room. Svetlana and Shtyrkov were at a screen filled with some weird, patterned shape. She was pointing to something, and murmuring quietly as if the room was full of ghosts who didn’t want to be disturbed. There was nobody else. Into the kitchen and then the bar and the dining area: deserted.