‘Last Wednesday, she phones him to cancel the session. She says she’s been invited to Chequers by Alan Edgeworth, no less. Seems it’s the British Prime Minister’s thing, asking a few people along for the weekend. Have you eaten here before? I can recommend the clam chowder.’
‘I usually just grab a bagel in the Food Court. What sort of people?’
‘It varies enormously.’ The DDO pulled a folded sheet of paper from his back trouser pocket. ‘The guest list for this Saturday…’
‘You mean tomorrow?’
‘Yes, tomorrow, was Malcolm Dundee the Sunday Times editor, some English comedian called Ken Dodd, Alice Grissom from the Mars Corporation, Jack Nicholson who happens to be passing through London and so on. A complete mix. Anyway, the Prime Minister cancels, just like that. The story is, he has a bad cold.’
‘So who’s this lady friend?’
McLarty glanced at his notes. ‘Susan Hope.’
‘The fashion designer?’
McLarty showed surprise. ‘Yes. You know her?’
‘Not personally. My daughter wears her labels.’
‘You don’t say.’
‘I do, sir. It’s a small world.’
McLarty looked for nuances, gave up. ‘Now at this point, Sonny shows the sort of initiative that makes me wonder if we shouldn’t be employing him. He gets curious about this sudden cold. Yesterday evening he decides to do a little off-road driving in the woods around a village called Dunsmore, which happens to be close to Chequers. Sure enough, there’s a ring of steel around the place indicating that the Prime Minister is in residence. Sonny waits. A car appears but he can’t make out the occupants in the dark. An hour or so later, Sonny sees an entourage take off from Chequers in the direction of RAF Northolt.’
‘An entourage?’
‘A PM-sized convoy. The presumption has to be that it contained the PM.’
‘And?’
McLarty gave a sort of a grin. ‘Why do you think I’m giving you this lunch, Melanie? The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has disappeared. If that don’t ring an alarm bell I reckon you shouldn’t be working for this Agency. I want you to find out where Edgeworth has gone.’
‘I’ll try, sir.’
‘Of course I wouldn’t want this to interfere with your busy social calendar.’ McLarty smiled.
Melanie smiled back. Damn racist male chauvinist Prussian pig.
‘Balmoral.’
‘Huh?’ Melanie leaned over the sandy-haired man’s shoulder.
The sandy-haired man pointed to a small cluster of pixels on the screen. ‘Edgeworth has no scheduled trips abroad. Domestic flights from Northolt are usually to visit the Queen in Balmoral.’
‘Where did you get this? We don’t spy on Britain.’
‘As of this afternoon we do. This is a couple of hours old. We were lucky to get the cloud break.’
‘What is this? A castle?’
An older male voice came from the far corner of the underground room. ‘It’s the summer dacha of the British Royal Family, or at least one of them.’ There was the sound of pages turning, and then, ‘Forget Balmoral. The Royals don’t go near it in the winter, on account of it’s like something out of Dr Zhivago. In the Scottish Highlands you spend winter indoors with a roaring fire, drinking whisky until spring arrives.’
‘So who are these people?’ Melanie asked. Sandy had zoomed the picture up until the individual pixels were visible. He was focusing on a group of people, black against the snow. They seemed to be throwing snowballs.
‘Caretaker staff.’
‘How can you be sure?’
Sandy clicked the picture back to its original size. Balmoral Castle, enclosed on three sides by a broad river, was throwing long winter shadows. A cottage and some outbuildings were scattered around. A hill to the south was partly obscured by cloud. There were patches of flat ground in the left and right foreground, like areas for sports like golf or cricket. ‘No helicopters, no security worth a damn, no Prime Ministerial cars, and therefore no Prime Minister.’
Melanie nodded thoughtfully. ‘So where the hell did he go?’
For this one, Sullivan did his own typing. He did it at an efficient, two-fingered speed, in a windowless office whose walls, underneath the oak panelling and the portraits, were imbedded with wire mesh.
Credibility, the CIA Director increasingly realised as he tore up one draft after another, was going to be the issue. After half a dozen attempts, he resigned himself to the fact that, whatever the words, it was going to come out sounding corny: there was a big giggle factor and no way round it. He ended up with a bald statement of the facts and a short section devoted to the possible implications for the USA, putting emphasis on the overwhelming advantage of the new knowledge for the countries which held it. It was slim stuff, and it had an air of hand-waving, exactly the sort of padding which he discouraged in his subordinates’ analyses. He scanned in the telephone transcript from the Gorki-9 intercept; it made a fat appendix.
He sealed it, hand-wrote For the President’s Eyes Only, and telephoned the White House. He asked for a twenty-minute slot alone with the President, and a space was found for him at 11 p.m.
He left the HQ at seven. A Secret Service man drove him to his home on Wisconsin Avenue, where Sullivan’s little fat maid, following wifely instructions, served him boiled fish and boiled rice followed by a fresh fruit salad with fromage frais. All low cholesterol, low fat and virtuous; but just now and then, especially when he was under stress, he longed for a T-bone steak with deep-fried potatoes followed by a dumpling with double cream washed down with two or three beers.
This was one of those occasions.
At ten forty-five, his mind temporarily numbed with an evening of cable TV, he was collected, and ten minutes later he was dropped off at the West Wing security kiosk. A few minutes later he was at the door of the Oval Office, facing another Secret Service agent, this one with a crew cut and a clipboard. The man said, ‘Good evening, Mr Sullivan,’ and tapped on the Oval Office door.
A small, wiry man, with short steel-grey hair and a wrinkled skin, was sitting back in an easy chair, staring into flames. He wore an open-necked shirt, and a tie and jacket lay on the floor beside him. He waved Sullivan to the chair opposite the fireplace.
‘Good evening, Mr President.’ Sullivan took a deep breath. He leaned forward and passed over the sealed envelope containing his report. ‘I got this from McLarty a couple of hours ago. It came in with the Moscow pouch. My people tapped an early-hours’ call from a man called Velikhov, who’s a big name in Russian science.’
‘Never heard of him.’ The President rested the envelope on his lap. His dark eyes stayed on the CIA Director.
‘He’s not high-profile like Sakharov was. In fact, he’s more on the administrative side. But he does advise Ogorodnikov informally now and then on scientific matters. They’re near-neighbours in the Gorki-9 district of Moscow.’
‘The meat, Al?’
‘Okay. We’ve been doing routine telephone taps in the Gorki-9 district for some time. We can only cover a fraction of the calls and it’s nearly always low-grade stuff, wifely gossip and the like. But now and then it throws up nuggets.’
‘So you got a nugget?’
‘Mr President, we got a gold mine.’
The President leaned forward.
‘The call went to a guy called Shtyrkov. Director of a radiation lab, lots of medals for academic distinction et cetera. He’s respected.’ Sullivan took another deep breath.
‘Go on.’
‘Mr President, according to Shtyrkov they’ve detected a signal from an alien intelligence.’