GAVIN ESLER
Power Play

For Anna

Contents

Cover

Title page

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

THIRTY-ONE

THIRTY-TWO

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

About the Author

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

ONE

Please call me Alex. When you ask what happened to Bobby Black, I have a long and a short answer, depending on how much truth you think you can handle. The short answer is that the Vice-President of the United States wandered off. Whether this was by mistake, on a whim or some temporary insanity, the result is the same–we lost him out there in the mist in the Scottish Highlands. Now that the mist has cleared, this quiet little patch of Scotland is under American occupation, or so it would appear. From my bedroom window here on the top floor of Castle Dubh I can see a line of several hundred yellow-jacketed British police and Mountain Rescue teams on the heather. Above them four US Army Apache helicopters are beating across the hillsides. In the distance there is another line of perhaps a thousand or more British and American soldiers plus black-uniformed US Secret Service personnel quartering the bogland stretching down to Rowallan Loch. In the castle and its outbuildings there are teams from Scotland Yard, Grampian Police, the British government, the Scottish Executive, the US State Department, the Pentagon, the FBI, the CIA, and an alphabet soup of other American agencies, all searching for the Vice-President, or–more likely given the time that has elapsed since the disappearance–they are searching for his body.

I try to remain calm. It’s what diplomats do. I console myself with the thought that even great public figures can die a banal death, or disappear on a Scottish hillside in the fog. Princess Diana was in a car that hit an underpass in Paris. President George W. Bush once almost choked on a pretzel. The world would be a very different place if George W. Bush’s oesophagus had permanently embraced those awkward crumbs and Vice-President Dick Cheney had become President. It would have taken just a few weeks for the accidental death of the President to be turned into the Pretzelgate scandal, with a series of commissions of inquiry investigating the conspiracy and naming the usual shadowy figures–the CIA, the Cubans, the Communists, al Qaeda, Mossad and the pretzel bakery–as having connived at the killing. As I watch the Apache helicopters hover in mid-air or sweep down over the heather and, as still more busloads of American military personnel arrive at the castle, I also console myself with another thought, this one beaten into me since childhood: inside every crisis there is an opportunity, if you have the wit to seize it. That’s the big question. Do I?

The longer answer about the disappearance of the Vice-President begins two years ago with a hurriedly arranged meeting between Bobby Black–who was then Senator Black from Montana–and Prime Minister Fraser Davis. I remember trying to persuade Davis to make time in his schedule, at first without success. It was just four weeks before the American presidential elections, and we had no sense of how profoundly the tectonic plates of history were about to shift. Prime Minister Fraser Davis was enjoying a honeymoon of sorts from the voters. They had not figured him out yet. Davis is, among other things, my brother-in-law.

‘You have charm, Alex,’ he told me when his youngest sister, Fiona, accepted my proposal of marriage. ‘And an air of menace. The combination appears to work on women. Perhaps it works on men too. It even works on me, up to a point.’

It was always ‘perhaps’ and ‘up to a point’ with Fraser Davis, and finding exactly where that point might be was a special skill of mine. I guessed that he never thought I was good enough for his sister, although it took some time for Fiona to come round to her brother’s opinion.

In those first days of October two years ago, no one expected Theo Carr and Bobby Black to win the White House. The opinion polls had been consistent for months. Carr was way behind, more than ten points adrift against a comfortable, competent incumbent President. The American economy had at last picked up, and the smart people I knew in Washington–diplomats, journalists, members of Congress–dismissed Carr and Black as too extreme, too right wing, too out of touch with the mood of America. Their rhetoric was all from the past, talk of taking the War on Terror to ‘the Bad Guys’ and ‘the Worst of the Worst’, whoever they happened to be. When I raised the prospect of a meeting we were in the private sitting room in Number Ten Downing Street–the Prime Minister, me, his special adviser, Janey Masters, and the Director of Communications, Andy Carnwath. Fraser Davis joked that Theo Carr and Bobby Black talked as if they had an ‘Enemy of the Month Club’.

‘Y’know, a calendar of men with beards they plan to bomb. One Dead Beard a Month until the War on Terror is won.’ Fraser Davis prided himself on his sensitive political antennae and expertise on the United States. He turned to me. ‘Forget Bobby Black, Alex. Waste of my time.’

‘Meeting Bobby Black is never a waste of time, Prime Minister,’ I contradicted him. ‘Trust me.’

You can get away with contradicting the PM’s judgement about once per meeting. More can be perilous.

‘I simply don’t see why I should bother with Losers,’ he responded, looking up from his briefing papers and pouting a moist lip in my direction, the way he did when he was annoyed. ‘Fix me up with the Winners, for God’s sake. Get the President or Vice-President in here. That’s what we pay you for.’

I pointed out that unfortunately the incumbent President and Vice-President were not coming through London. Bobby Black was.

‘Thirty minutes of your time,’ I persisted. ‘At Chequers.’ Chequers is the Prime Minister’s private retreat in the countryside just outside London. ‘Tea and biscuits. A chat. It can do no harm, and it could do a lot of good. It will raise your profile in Washington and—’

‘Nonsense,’ he snapped, arching a prime ministerial eyebrow and pouting once more. Davis is a toff, of course, even though he tries to hide it. He makes a big thing of his love of football and is forever telling newspaper feature writers that his iPod is full of Kill Hannah and Nickelback, though I have never once heard him enquire about football match results, nor have I ever seen him listen to his supposedly beloved rock music. He’s Eton to the core, Oxford PPE, once a City smoothie, a stint as a management consultant, and then time in a hedge fund where he made a lot of money and decided that he understood ‘how the market works.’ At moments when we disagree he and I are like two different species sizing each other up. My own background as a soldier in Northern Ireland gives me a bit of an edge. Davis likes to joke that his brother-in-law had ‘strangled IRA terrorists with his bare hands.’ Perhaps he likes this joke because the closest the Prime Minister ever came to serving his country in uniform was wearing a tailcoat at Eton and the Bullingdon dining club.

‘Look, I simply haven’t got time to listen to Yesterday’s Man.’ Davis smiled that way he has which looks like a smirk. ‘Black and Carr want to continue making the same mistakes in their War on Terror that we made thirty years ago in Ulster. Why, oh why, do these bloody Americans persist in thinking you can wage war on a tactic, for goodness sake?’

The British ability to suck up to the Americans and to patronize them simultaneously should not be underestimated. Janey Masters and Andy Carnwath shook with laughter at this Prime Ministerial aperçu. I didn’t.

‘Prime Minister, you are making a serious mistake,’ I contradicted them all firmly. The chorus of laughter stopped. I was now on the edge of being rude, but I had the floor and so I used it. ‘You should not make unnecessary enemies.’

‘Unnecessary enemies?’ Davis repeated, rolling the words around his mouth like a sip of unexpectedly good wine.

‘Bobby Black wants to meet you,’ I explained. ‘And he is a man who plays favourites and bears grudges.’ I advised that even if Black and Carr lost the presidential election, Senator Black would eventually have a position of considerable leadership, one day Senate Majority Leader. ‘A good friend and a bad enemy. His reputation is as Washington’s silent throat-slitter.’ All eyes were on me now. Very busy people in power remind me of children: self-obsessed, in their own little world. Any device that catches their attention is legitimate. ‘You cross Bobby Black at your peril. He’s coming to London and we should be nice.’

The Prime Minister sighed and then agreed. Reluctantly.

‘Very well then, Alex. If you say so. Fix it. Fix it. Please ruin my weekend at Chequers.’

And so I fixed it. I felt confident that ruining his weekend was the right thing to do and that Fraser Davis would soon be grateful. It really is what I am paid for.

On that day of Bobby Black’s visit I drove myself down to Chequers from central London while Andy Carnwath, Janey Masters and the Prime Minister travelled by helicopter. Another of Fraser Davis’s routine jokes at my expense is that I was brave enough to interrogate IRA suspects face to face but too timid to get on a ‘heavier-than-air machine’. He regards such schoolboy teasing as a sign of affection. I went to a different type of school.

The Chequers event was–how shall I put it in the language of diplomacy?–not a meeting of minds. Bobby Black and Fraser Davis had little in common, except for one fact: each of them always thought that in any meeting, in any gathering, he was the smartest person in the room. On that day, when we brought these two super-egos together at Chequers, at least one of them had to be wrong. Perhaps both of them. Bobby Black had flown from Washington to Heathrow and then helicoptered over to meet the Prime Minister. I remember it as an unseasonably warm day, early October, a day belonging more to summer than the start of autumn. The fine weather put everyone in a good mood. The American helicopter came down on the lawn, picture perfect. Unusually for Chequers, which is by tradition always private, we allowed a tight pool of British and American TV crews to film the occasion. What everyone saw on the evening news on both sides of the Atlantic was Davis and Black greeting each other with all the false bonhomie demanded on such occasions. The American network TV coverage–as I had predicted–helped raise Fraser Davis’s profile in the United States.

We carry out confidential public opinion surveys in key allies once a year, and the most recent showed that when you asked Americans about British prime ministers they could name Churchill, Thatcher, and Blair. Fraser Davis, like the rest of our political leaders, simply did not exist. That night, thanks to me, for a few seconds on the American TV evening news, Fraser Davis did exist. The two men ran their hands up each other’s arms to show how touchy-feely they were. They grinned. They exchanged pleasantries. The Prime Minister said he was ‘delighted’ to meet the grizzled Senator, more than twenty years his senior. Bobby Black, his owlish eyes glinting behind thick glasses, managed to appear as if he had just flown the Atlantic on the off chance he might catch a few words with our own esteemed Dear Leader, the Bright New Thing in London.

‘I’ve come to learn how to win elections,’ he joked for the cameras. ‘Like you did, Mr Prime Minister.’ Bobby Black’s Chief of Staff, Johnny Lee Ironside, winked at me as we stood on the edges of the photo-opportunity, our faces split by broad grins. He’s a tall, lanky southerner with a South Carolina accent that makes me think of the warmth of a hit of Southern Comfort.

‘Good work on this get-together, Ambassador Price,’ he whispered.

‘Please call me Alex,’ I introduced myself. He seemed like someone I could do business with.

‘Johnny Lee.’

I had checked him out beforehand of course. Born Charleston. Rich Old South family, Anglophile, Harvard Law, Rhodes scholar. And now, as I could see, polite and generous. My kind of American. We moved to the main Chequers dining room. It was scheduled to be a half-hour visit before Bobby Black headed to a Republican fund-raising dinner in the City to tap rich donors resident in the UK. Afterwards he was flying to Paris and Berlin for quick photo-calls with the French President and German Chancellor, and more fund-raising, then back to Washington. Well, that was the plan. We sat across the big shiny walnut dining table on the opposite side to the Americans. Bobby Black started talking about the challenges of international terrorism. It was–disappointingly–a cut-down version of his standard campaign speech. I had heard it so often that, like the Lord’s Prayer, I could recite passages by heart.

‘Afghanistan … Taleban … hearts and minds … stay the course … democracy and freedom … al Qaeda … the Worst of the Worst … lessons of Iraq … shared values, shared sacrifice …’

It was warm and stuffy, Senator Black spoke quietly, and my mind wandered. I began to think of my own future.

Another two years as Ambassador to Washington and I would be in line for a knighthood, then promotion to Head of the Foreign Office, and eventually a peerage. Or–as Fraser Davis had hinted–I might be interested in quitting and thinking about going into politics. I could undoubtedly secure a safe seat under his patronage. As Bobby Black droned on, I started thinking of other things–of lunch, of the drive back to London, of seeing Fiona, and of the difficulties we had been having.

‘… Iranian threat … shadow on the Gulf … oil supplies … nuclear proliferation … Islamic bomb … generations to come …’

I love and admire the United States, especially ordinary Americans, but so many of their top-tier politicians struck me as even worse than ours–difficult though that may be to believe. The kind of people with whom, after you shake hands, you feel you should count your fingers just to check none has been stolen. Bobby Black made me especially nervous, which was one of the reasons I wanted him to meet Davis. Besides, it helped me enormously back in Washington that Black and others knew how close I was to the Prime Minister. I tuned in again. Bobby Black was offering clues about a future Carr presidency. It struck me as unlikely that I would ever need this information. Theo Carr worried, he said, that ‘Russia wants its Empire back and we’re not about to give it to them,’ but the main struggle would continue against ‘militant Islam.’ The new President would demand from all America’s allies ‘more commitment of blood and treasure’ in this ‘existential struggle against terrorism.’ Prime Minister Davis rolled his eyes.

‘Guts,’ Bobby Black was saying softly, waggling a fat white finger in our direction. I watched the finger’s reflection in the polished walnut of the table top. ‘Old fashioned guts, when it comes to facing down the Russians, the Iranians or al Qaeda. Guts, and leadership, Mr Prime Minister. Moral fibre.’

I sipped the weak black coffee and nibbled at the digestive biscuits that mark British hospitality on these occasions. Suddenly the man Black had called ‘Mister Prime Minister’ sprang into life.

‘Leadership demands Followership,’ Davis snapped, the wet, pouty lip directed at Bobby Black. ‘Don’t you agree, Senator? And what kind of leadership are you expecting to offer that others will follow?’

Bobby Black winced and then smiled. He did not like to be interrupted, and I did not like his smile. He replied softly and deliberately, so you had to lean towards him to hear.

‘There are some very Bad People out there, Mr Prime Minister, and—’

‘Forgive me, Senator Black,’ Prime Minister Davis interrupted again, with a degree of condescension that grated even on me. Johnny Lee Ironside shuffled uncomfortably in his chair and raised an eyebrow in my direction. The Prime Minister was in no mood to hold back. ‘Forgive me, but most people across Europe understand that there are “Bad People”, as you put it, “out there.” We’ve had terrorist attacks for years–decades. We had them in Belfast from Nineteen Sixty-nine, and in Glasgow, in London, Madrid, Amsterdam, Berlin, Istanbul, Rome. Our experience tells us that the challenge is to avoid creating more terrorists than you can possibly kill or arrest. So how do you propose to do that when the way you talk sounds like you are still making the same mistakes we made decades ago? The IRA taught us that subtlety and sophistication would help. That’s why Ireland is now–mostly–at peace.’

Like Harrow, Fettes, and Winchester, Eton is a school that produces many brilliant minds but very few humble ones. Bobby Black sat bolt upright and blinked behind his glasses at the Prime Minister. What I saw in his eyes was something akin to hatred. He did not like being interrupted and he certainly did not like being contradicted by a Prime Minister young enough to be his son. At that moment I hoped that the opinion polls were correct and that Black and Carr would lose the presidential election by a landslide. When he spoke, it was again so quietly I had to strain to hear him.

‘Mr Prime Minister,’ Bobby Black said coldly, stressing certain words as if they deserved to have capital letters, ‘the IRA did not do suicide bombings or fly planes into buildings. This is a different world. Neutrality is immoral. Appeasement is immoral. Subtlety and sophistication–as you call it–to folks where I come from in Montana, are just European excuses to do nothing except wring hands, wet the bed, and complain about the wicked Americans. There was nothing subtle about your British citizens trying to blow up American airliners halfway over the Atlantic Ocean. And let me be clear. When Governor Theo Carr is elected President of the United States next month, the Carr administration will expect and require full cooperation on matters of national security from all allies of the United States.’

Expect and require. Your British citizens. Oh, shit. I put my coffee cup down. Now it was Fraser Davis who looked as if he had been shot. He began finger-pointing as he spoke. His lower lip was exceptionally moist, the way it gets when he is irritated and wants to start lecturing. I do not usually get these things wrong, but the informal Chequers meeting was unravelling before my eyes and I could do nothing to stop it. I looked over to Johnny Lee Ironside who nodded. He shared my pain.

‘Senator Black, of course you will have our full cooperation and friendship. But for our part, we will expect the new President–whoever that might be–to lead an American administration that listens to its friends as opposed to lecturing them, and that upholds the way of life you say you want to defend. We urge you to look at the mistakes of the past and at your own country’s record on human rights, the detention without trial of terrorist suspects–including British nationals–and matters that clearly fall under the United Nations’ definition of torture.’

‘Fuck the United Nations,’ Bobby Black said softly. The room fell silent. Fraser Davis’s lower lip dropped an inch. Bobby Black said it so quietly but with such unmistakable anger that I thought for a moment I had misheard him. Looking at the stunned faces I knew that I had not. Everyone held their breath. Bobby Black’s eyes stared intensely from behind his glasses. The Prime Minister’s pouty lip formed a single response.

‘Pardon?’

‘Fuck the United Nations,’ Bobby Black repeated, without raising his voice. ‘Fuck ‘em. We’ll do it alone if we have to. We’d like help. Everybody likes help. But we’re the United States of America and we don’t need it.’

Prime Minister Davis smiled although, yet again, the smile could look just like a smirk. He tried to make light of what we had just heard.

‘Fuck the United Nations–would that be the official policy of the incoming Carr administration?’

I caught Johnny Lee’s eyes again. They had an expression that said, ‘Get us out of here.’

‘If necessary,’ Bobby Black answered, and brushed some imaginary fluff from his suit sleeve. ‘On international terrorism, there is no middle ground. There is Right, and there is Wrong. Any country or organization that is not with Right is with Wrong. It would be a sad day if the United States had to withdraw from the UN. A sad day for the United Nations. The US would get over it.’

He stopped speaking. A silence fell upon us while we thought about what he had said. The meeting was effectively over, after ten minutes of the allotted thirty. Bobby Black pushed his seat back so it scraped on the floor. Johnny Lee Ironside stood up.

‘Thank you for your time, Mr Prime Minister. Our helicopter is waiting. I’m heading for the City of London.’

‘And thank you for sparing time in your busy schedule, Senator Black.’

‘No problem, Mr Prime Minister.’

A chill ran through me. Of course, Fraser Davis should have held his tongue. He should have listened to Black and nodded without being so sarcastic and condescending. For his part, Bobby Black should not have been so foul mouthed and imperious. You can bring people together, but you cannot make them like each other. The Prime Minister headed towards his study muttering under his breath about that ‘awful bloody man’. Bobby Black strode briskly out of the room and across the grass to the helicopter, his lopsided grin firmly in place. On the way out, Johnny Lee shook my hand and whispered to me: ‘Well, Ambassador, looks like we got ourselves a problem.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘We’ll talk.’

‘Unless we lose,’ Johnny Lee responded. ‘In which case you’ll never have to deal with either of us again.’ He started to laugh. ‘Which I guess Prime Minister Davis must be praying for right now.’

I smiled awkwardly and nodded. You won’t win, I thought, as the helicopter took off. Ten points behind in the opinion polls with just a few weeks to go until polling day: without some kind of miracle you can’t possibly win.

TWO

It wasn’t a miracle, but it had the same transformative effect on the fortunes of Theo Carr and Bobby Black. The day after that catastrophic meeting at Chequers, I was woken early by Andy Carnwath, who called with the news that a bomb had exploded in an American airliner taking off from Manila Airport in the Philippines and bound for Los Angeles, killing everyone on board.

‘You’re going to be busy,’ Carnwath said. ‘Fraser wants you back in DC today.’

‘Why?’

‘The suicide bomber was British.’

I prepared to leave for the airport immediately. Fiona said she intended to stay in London for a few days longer.

‘But Fiona …’

She pushed a strand of strawberry-blonde hair behind her ear and gave me the kind of pout that reminded me of her brother. I felt her slipping away from me.

‘Don’t start this, Alex. Don’t do that “but you are my wife” stuff again. I have given up almost everything to follow you to Washington–almost everything–but I am entitled to hold on to something of my own life. I promised to meet Haley and Georgia for lunch, and that is what I am going to do.’

Haley and Georgia were Fiona’s business partners in an interior-design consultancy they had set up after leaving Oxford, which owed at least some of its success to the idea that people could employ a company connected to the Prime Minister to renovate their homes.

‘Fine,’ I said, accepting the inevitable. ‘That’s fine.’

I headed to the airport alone, calling Andy Carnwath on the way for a further briefing about the Manila attack. It was the day we woke up to the possibility that every one of our nightmares might become true. All through the presidential election campaign, Carr and Black had consistently argued that the United States government and the President in particular were complacent about the terrorist threat. There had been no significant incident in the United States since 11 September 2001, and to many of us Carr and Black sounded like a pair of wackos: shrill, scaremongering, out of touch.

‘Who was the bomber?’

‘Name of Rashid Ali Fuad,’ Carnwath said, ‘from Yorkshire. Leeds.’

‘Acting alone?’

‘Our people doubt it, but that’s all we have.’

‘Definitely British?’

‘Oh yeah. Definitely one of ours. Lucky us.’

As we drove into Heathrow, I could see, all around the perimeter, armoured troop carriers and fully armed soldiers. There were groups of police officers with Heckler & Koch sub-machine-guns at the terminal building, long lines at the check-in desks and serious flight delays as every piece of electronic equipment was checked. I skipped through the priority channel and into the first-class lounge where I sat in front of the BBC’s 24-hour news channel. It said that Rashid Ali Fuad had climbed on board an American Boeing 747 aircraft at Manila, sat in a window seat and detonated a bomb in his laptop computer. It punched a hole in the plane and caused a crash on take-off followed by a catastrophic explosion. The aviation fuel caught fire and the blaze incinerated everyone on board.

It was like being on the hinge of history. Everything after that moment was changed. The Manila atrocity confirmed to tens of millions of American voters that the world was just as dangerous a place as Governor Theo Carr and Senator Bobby Black had always insisted it was, and that the dangers came not just from countries with a long record of hating America, but also from people like Fuad who were citizens of the country most Americans thought of as a friend and ally, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It was as if a switch went off in the heads of tens of millions of voters and, in that one instant, the out-of-touch scaremongerers, Governor Theo Carr and Senator Bobby Black, suddenly seemed prescient and timely. Bobby Black cancelled the rest of his European trip. He skipped Paris and Berlin and flew instead to the Philippines. He stood on the tarmac in front of the charred hulk of the jumbo jet promising, ‘No More Manilas.’ It became the slogan that won the election. He pointed at the wreckage and at the body bags laid out on the tarmac, ready to be loaded on to a US Air Force C-5 transport plane with the ashes and dust of the American dead. With tears misting his glasses, Bobby Black promised that, ‘America is grieving now, but there will come a time for vengeance, and that vengeance will be swift, brutal and just.’ He stared straight at the cameras.

‘There will be No More Manilas,’ he repeated. ‘I want everyone round the world to hear me. No More Manilas.’

‘No More Manilas’, they chanted in Boston and Houston and Fresno and Tallahassee and Atlanta and Baton Rouge in the closing days of the presidential campaign. ‘No More Manilas’ tee shirts, buttons and bumper stickers became bestsellers for street vendors from New York City to San Diego. The funerals of the dead from the Manila atrocity began just before election day, and America went to the polls in mourning: resolute, defiant, wounded–and determined to secure justice. I admired, as I always do, the resilience and good sense of the American people, but I looked at the tracking polls with a degree of concern. The opinion polls measured a profound switch to Carr and Black, enough to win the presidency of the United States against all the predictions of the supposed experts. Bobby Black was about to become Vice-President of the United States.

On Inauguration Day the following January, I watched from the diplomatic stand on Capitol Hill as President Carr and Vice-President Black were sworn in at a sombre ceremony in a country that felt itself definitively at war. The crowds lining Pennsylvania Avenue and around the Capitol carried American flags and thousands upon thousands of banners repeating the same slogan time after time.

‘NO MORE MANILAS. NO MORE MANILAS.’

President Theo Carr said as much in his Inauguration speech. He promised that his administration had ‘no higher ideal, no greater purpose, than to ensure the life, liberty, and the right to pursue happiness of every American citizen by freeing our people from the shadow of the gunman, bomber, and terrorist. We will, as John F. Kennedy said on his Inauguration at this very spot, bear any burden, pay any price, to secure our great nation from those who would destroy us. They will not succeed. They will never succeed. They shall not pass.’

I stood to applaud when President Carr finished. After Manila, the whole world stood to applaud. We were, yet again, absolutely shoulder to shoulder with the Americans in their time of trouble; until, of course, the Carr administration settled into power with all the confidence of sleepwalkers, and the issue of Rashid Ali Fuad’s British citizenship started to become part of the wedge between us, most especially in the mind of Vice-President Black. I could not believe how quickly relations deteriorated.

Just one day after the Inauguration, while the bleachers for the spectators watching the parade were still being dismantled all along Pennsylvania Avenue, the Washington Post published details of the argument between Prime Minister Fraser Davis and Vice-President Black at their Chequers meeting the day before the Manila bombing. The way the story was written made it look as if Fraser Davis and the British government were soft on terror, and that this weakness somehow contributed to the loss of all those innocent lives at the hands of what the paper kept calling ‘the British suicide bomber, Fuad.’ The reporter, James Byrne, claimed to have received a transcript of the Davis-Black row at Chequers from ‘reliable Carr administration sources.’ The report highlighted the section where Bobby Black said, ‘Fuck the United Nations.’

The Washington Post story caused uproar in Britain, across Europe and at the United Nations. Black and Carr’s popularity in the United States–which was very high in those first days–actually increased. Curiously, Fraser Davis’s popularity in Britain increased too. I suspected it was because, unlike Tony Blair, nobody reading the story could accuse Davis of being an American poodle. But how did Byrne get the story, based on secret transcripts of a private conversation more than three months earlier? I considered the options and then called the Vice-President’s Chief of Staff, Johnny Lee Ironside. I told him that it was very unhelpful to have this kind of leak.

‘Makes it sound like someone in the White House is anti-British.’

‘We didn’t leak it, Alex.’

‘But you benefited from it,’ I told him. ‘And it didn’t come from us. The Prime Minister is livid. Cui bono?’

‘C’mon, you guys did okay,’ Johnny Lee retorted. He was in good humour. There was not a problem between the two of us. ‘I read the British papers. Davis comes out of this just fine. Maybe you leaked it?’

‘Me? For goodness sake, Johnny Lee, I am not a leaker—’

‘Listen, Alex, lighten up. Who cares, all right? I mean, we both come out ahead. My man says fuck the UN, which plays to our home crowd. Your man says fuck the Americans, which plays to yours. So everybody wins.’

I didn’t think so. But I let it rest.

I could not escape the thought that maybe Johnny Lee had leaked the transcript himself. He clearly suspected the same about me because I knew the reporter James Byrne quite well. Welcome to the Washington House of Mirrors. What you see reflects only upon where you decide to look. After just one day of the Carr-Black administration, I was beginning to worry that the next four years were going to be difficult. In that judgement, at least, I was correct.

THREE

‘Fear’, Vice-President Bobby Black said to me, ‘works.’

It was now a week after the Inauguration and a week after the Washington Post had published the story about the row between Davis and Black. We were in the White House, and things were getting worse.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Fear … works,’ he repeated, separating the words in his whispering drawl.

The Vice-President of the United States shrugged and blinked behind his glasses, as if that were explanation enough. I had been invited to the White House–‘summoned’ might be a better word–for a bollocking. I had left early from the Ambassador’s living quarters at the British Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue. I’d said goodbye to Fiona, kissed her and told her that I would be late–a long day at the White House followed by planned meetings with the new people in Congress, the new Speaker of the House of Representatives, Betty Furedi, plus two sessions on Capitol Hill, and then finally, around 6 p.m., a cocktail party to welcome the new Turkish Ambassador.

‘Dinner? Eight?’ I said as I kissed her. ‘That’s what we scheduled?’

‘Yes,’ she said, without enthusiasm. She pushed a lock of hair behind her ears. ‘See you for dinner at eight.’

We entertained most evenings. That night I had planned a small dinner for a visiting delegation of representatives of British airlines to bring them together with two key members of a Congressional committee that was proving difficult about landing rights at JFK and O’Hare Airport in Chicago. There was no direct relationship between the problems we were having and the Manila attack, but Rashid Ali Fuad’s British citizenship was mentioned repeatedly in the committee hearings, and constantly talked about on the US TV news networks.

‘Dinner at eight,’ Fiona repeated. ‘You know, sometimes I feel less like an Ambassador’s wife and more like a flight attendant. All I do is smile at strangers and serve them beverages.’

‘We’ll talk about it later,’ I said.

‘We always talk about it later.’

‘You want out?’ I snapped. ‘This isn’t much fun for me, either, being married to someone who treats me like I’m some kind of kidnapper.’

‘I just want my own life back, that’s all. Not just a part of yours. Is that too much to ask?’

‘No,’ I agreed. ‘That’s not too much to ask. We will talk about it, I promise.’

I kissed her on the cheek but did not ask how she was going to spend her day. At that moment, on my way to the White House, I had enough to deal with.

‘Eight o’clock then.’

‘Yes.’

There is a peculiar excitement about going to the White House, no matter how many times it happens. You remember the details. Every sense is on overload. It is like drinking from the Enchanted Fountain of Power. That day it was a small meeting which filled the Vice-President’s tiny office–just Bobby Black, his Chief of Staff, Johnny Lee Ironside, the White House Deputy National Security Adviser, Dr Kristina Taft, plus me, and a note-taker. A vase of lilies left over from the Inauguration celebrations sat on the Vice-President’s desk, heavy with pollen. I still remember how the flowers gave off a pungent smell. Bobby Black had called me in to discuss the publicity given by British newspapers to the behind-the-scenes rows between the two governments, following the exposé in the Washington Post. It had become echo-chamber journalism, nothing more than the hollow sound of our worst prejudices as the British and American media had a go at each other. Johnny Lee Ironside had warned me that the Vice-President would bring up the related case of another British national who had been picked up by US special forces on the Pakistan-Afghan border. He was called Muhammad Asif Khan, and he had been arrested, detained, or kidnapped–you can choose your word–either inside Afghanistan, as the Americans claimed, or inside Pakistan, as his family and the Pakistan Government insisted. The American account said Khan was a British accomplice of the Manila bomber Rashid Ali Fuad, though we had no evidence of this and suspected the Americans didn’t either.

Khan’s family–from Keighley in Yorkshire–said he had disappeared while visiting relatives, and claimed he was being tortured by the CIA, or that he had been handed over to a ‘friendly’ country with a dubious human-rights record so that their intelligence agencies could torture him on behalf of the Americans. A number of British newspapers, politicians and human-rights groups, along with the Pakistan Government, protested that in its first week the Carr-Black administration was ‘already even worse than that of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.’ The Guardian newspaper had called the Khan disappearance a ‘blight’ on ‘all the hopes’ for the new presidency. No one would confirm where Khan was being held, though some reports said it was in Egypt. Since the Manila atrocity, reports of this kind of treatment of suspected terrorists had grown. Johnny Lee told me to think of it as ‘outsourcing’.

‘Like putting a call centre in Bangalore,’ he said to me. ‘You employ some real experts, hungry for the work, and you get more bang for your buck.’

‘Is Khan in Egypt, Johnny Lee?’

‘No idea, Alex. God help the sonovabitch if he is. The Egyptians don’t do nice, from what I hear.’

The fact that Khan’s father and uncles were from Keighley, geographically just a short drive from Leeds, the home town of Fuad, the Manila bomber, was asserted in the American media as evidence of a connection. The Khan family angrily denied it. They were politically well connected, friends of a British Muslim Labour MP who made a fuss, organized a series of well-publicized protests and asked awkward questions in Parliament. Fraser Davis was in trouble at Prime Minister’s Questions, embarrassed by the Opposition, and also by some on his own side. Mostly he was embarrassed by being dropped in it by the Americans.

‘Can the Prime Minister confirm under what circumstances he believes it is legal for the CIA or the American Army to kidnap and torture British citizens?’ was just one of the unhelpful questions Fraser Davis faced in the Commons and on television.

‘Can the Prime Minister confirm the whereabouts of Mr Khan?’

‘Can the Prime Minister tell us how dispensing with due process of law and alienating the entire British Muslim community will help the Carr administration win their so-called War on Terror?’

And so on.

British newspapers showed pictures of Khan–clean shaven and smiling–helping a group of handicapped children on an Outward Bound course in the Lake District, a model citizen, apparently. The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek magazine showed a different Khan. This one was an Islamist fanatic, a Taleban supporter and wannabe suicide bomber who had been recruiting young British men of Pakistani origin to kill–Americans and Jews preferably–without compunction. Khan, they claimed, was planning some kind of unspecified attack in the United States or against American targets ‘along the lines of Manila.’

Where the truth lay in all this, I did not know. What I did know was that the row between London and Washington had now entered an even more aggressive phase. All the rest had been just foreplay. At least Johnny Lee Ironside and I had established a good relationship, I would almost say a friendship, in the months or so since the initial disagreement at Chequers. We met frequently and talked on the telephone almost every day.

‘Heads up,’ he said. ‘The Vice-President wants to see you about Khan and other matters, and it isn’t going to be pretty. Be prepared for Incoming.’

‘Thanks,’ I replied. I appreciated the warning.

‘He’s in need of a human sacrifice, Alex, and as the top Brit around here, you have been selected.’

I pretended to laugh.

‘Ritual slaughter is one of the perks of the job. I’m looking forward to it. Obviously.’

That day of my White House visit I heard the morning TV weather reports predicting an ice storm all around the Chesapeake Bay. Flat blue clouds rolled in from the northeast, bringing a chill which drilled the bones. After I kissed Fiona goodbye, I came out of the ambassador’s residence, around half past seven in the morning. I was swathed in a long black coat and I jumped into the embassy’s dark green Rolls-Royce with the heating turned up full blast. I felt bad about Fiona; bad about the way it was going. On the journey down Massachusetts Avenue I tried to see things from her point of view. Yes, I had taken her away from her friends and career in London, but she knew all the drawbacks when she married me. Yes, I had a hectic job, but being the wife of the British Ambassador was not such a bad deal, was it?

And yes, yes, I wanted children. I’m young for an ambassador but when you hit late forties you are getting old for fatherhood. I felt time passing and the ticking of the clock that women are supposed to possess but men are not. Because Fiona is twelve years younger than me, perhaps she did not feel it so intensely, but I was slowly waking up to the idea that I might need a bit of diplomacy in my private life.

I got to the White House shortly before eight o’clock. Dr Kristina Taft met me near the media stakeout position at the West Wing door. That day she was still the Deputy National Security Adviser, though not for long. The newspapers called Kristina a ‘Vulcan’, one of the hyper-rational academics full of brainy ideas and yet apparently devoid of human emotion whom Carr and Black had brought in to run American policy. I could not square the newspaper hype with the smiling face that greeted me, though I admit I was slightly intimidated. Kristina was about the same age as Fiona and we stood shaking hands for the photographers. We exchanged a few words as the Marine Guard saluted and the machine-gun fire of lenses and flashguns went off in our faces.

Nothing happens at the White House by accident. Everything in the Carr presidency is scheduled into fifteen-minute slots, and there are therefore ninety-six of these across the President’s twenty-four-hour day. Even ‘downtime’–relaxation–is scheduled in fifteen-minute bites, though a sensible president will make sure he gets at least thirty-two of these a night. I used to wonder if some presidents–especially Kennedy or Clinton–had a fifteen-or thirty-or forty-five-minute schedule for sex. Anyway, Kristina Taft could have chosen for me to arrive discreetly, away from the cameras. Instead she picked the entrance designed to give the American media a full photo-opportunity of the British Ambassador being called in for his bollocking by Bobby Black. It was to be, as Johnny Lee had told me, an act of ritual humiliation. My humiliation. I shook hands and beamed. The ‘special relationship’ between the United States and the United Kingdom deserves no less than the occasional warm smile of hypocrisy.

‘Welcome, Ambassador.’

‘Dr Taft. Nice to see you. A pleasure.’

‘I think the cameras have had enough,’ she said out of the corner of her mouth as she steered me inside. ‘You know, the Vice-President told me he is looking forward to meeting with you. He insisted we clear serious face-time.’

Serious face-time with Bobby Black? Diplomatic Warning Bell Number One went off in my head.

‘Vice-President Black is a very busy man,’ I replied carefully. In that first week he was more often on the newspaper front pages than the President himself, a pattern which was to continue for the next two years. ‘I am grateful for the meeting. He’s never out of the news.’

Kristina Taft smiled again, but her grey eyes didn’t. She was wearing a sober dark suit, no discernible make-up, no jewellery. This was an attractive woman deliberately making herself look as serious as possible. She led me inside.

‘We’re going to have to wait a few minutes,’ she said. ‘He is in for a one-on-one with the President. Coffee?’

I accepted and we sat in a hallway watched over by two Secret Service agents. Kristina poured the coffee. I had of course done my homework, reading the briefing papers about the new Carr people. Kristina’s said that her academic career had been stellar, and also that her supposed boss at the National Security Council was in trouble, accused of employing illegal aliens at his home in Virginia. It was just the first of the scandals that were to hit the Carr administration.

Kristina was from the start acting up, as National Security Adviser, with all the authority that implies, although in that first week the gossip was that she was too young for the job; someone else would be brought in. She was, however, born to high office, part of a political dynasty. Her father had been Governor of California and the Tafts are Republican royalty, with a former President, William Howard Taft, to their credit in the early twentieth century. His main claim to historical fame is that he was so fat–300 pounds–that he once got stuck in the White House bathtub. I looked over at Kristina and thought of a hummingbird: she was petite, hyperactive, with the figure of someone who exercises regularly. My briefing papers said Washingtonian magazine had voted her America’s ‘most eligible bachelorette’, under a glamorous picture of her in a full-length evening gown. The New York Times reported that, during the transition, before Theo Carr was actually sworn in, Kristina Taft had a row with Bobby Black and had stood up to him. She had suggested, the story claimed, a White House reading list, including novels to help National Security staff understand how Arabs, Iranians, Pakistanis, and other Muslims might think.

The New York Times congratulated Kristina on her fortitude in taking on Bobby Black and also on being a ‘civilizing influence’ in the White House. It was a compliment that would not necessarily help her career.

‘So,’ I said, trying to figure Kristina out, ‘what’s this reading list I hear so much about? And can I get a copy? Or are the novels you read Top Secret, US Eyes Only?’

She had the grace to laugh.

‘They are so secret you can get them from any bookstore, if you are open-minded enough to try.’

She explained about the row. During the transition, Theo Carr had held a brainstorming meeting of all his foreign policy advisers and challenged them to name the core failure in American policy in the past fifty years. Kristina stood up and said it was the ‘United States’ inability to understand the psychology of our enemies in the way we understood the psychology of the Russians during the Cold War.’

‘Explain what you mean, Dr Taft,’ Carr had asked, almost like a job interview. Perhaps it was a job interview. Kristina delivered a history lesson. She said that since the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, all America’s troubles originated in an ‘Arc of Instability’ stretching from Palestine and Israel through Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran to Pakistan and Afghanistan.

‘But we don’t understand what we are doing,’ Kristina insisted. ‘So we blunder about like dinosaurs with powerful bodies and very small brains. If we don’t change, we are going to be extinct.’

Theo Carr was clearly interested; Bobby Black less so.

‘Give us an example of this dinosaur tendency, Dr Taft,’ Black said. ‘I want some facts.’

‘Fact: Under George W. Bush the United States military destroyed Saddam Hussein in Two Thousand and three,’ Kristina replied. ‘Fact: the United States and its allies overthrew the Taleban in Afghanistan in Two Thousand and two.’

She paused.

‘So?’

‘So, what good did it do us? At great cost to ourselves in American lives, we took out Iran’s two most dangerous enemies, and the Iranians still hate us. Fact: Under Bill Clinton in Nineteen Ninety-eight we saved the Muslim people of Kosovo from slaughter and get no credit from Muslims anywhere. So how dumb are we? We think tactics and ignore strategy; we screw up because we don’t think through what the objective really is. No More Manilas means no more being dinosaurs.’

‘The objective …’ Bobby Black started to say something but Theo Carr waved him to be silent.

‘How do we do better, Dr Taft?’ Carr asked.

‘By thinking like the people of the region, sir. By remembering the old Arab cliché, that My Enemy’s Enemy is My Friend. By getting smart. By getting others to do the dirty work for us.’

‘But how?’ Carr insisted.

That’s when the White House reading list was born, despite Bobby Black’s protests.

‘Here’s a start. Arabs and Persians watch our TV, our movies, read our books, listen to our rock music. We should do the same with their literature. They understand us and we do not understand them.’

‘Through storybooks?’ Bobby Black scoffed.

‘One good novel revealing how ordinary Muslim people think,’ Kristina responded, ‘is worth a dozen CIA estimates about the opium crop in Afghanistan or political gossip on instability in Iraq or Pakistan or wherever.’

‘She speaks Arabic, that’s why she thinks this way,’ Bobby Black responded. ‘I speak American and, in plain American, we need to understand these people a whole lot less, and condemn a whole lot more.’

‘I speak Human,’ Kristina contradicted Bobby Black a second time, which is maybe where all the trouble between them started. ‘And it’s the human battle we need to win.’

The President looked at Kristina, then at his Vice-President, and decided the novels should stay on the White House reading list. As Kristina told me the gist of the story that day waiting for Bobby Black, she suggested some bookstore titles for me, beginning with an Egyptian novel called The Yacoubian Building.

‘A young man from a poor background wants to become a police officer,’ she told me, ‘but he’s from the wrong class and can’t afford the bribes. So this decent young guy becomes a terrorist instead. The author says the real disease in the Muslim world is despotism. Terrorism is just one of the symptoms. He’s right.’

I tried to digest this thought.

‘So, has the Vice-President read this insightful book?’ I asked mischievously. Kristina Taft laughed again. I had broken through. I could see her visibly relax in my company, and I sensed an opportunity. Bobby Black was shaping up to be the most powerful Vice-President in US history, even more powerful than Dick Cheney. After Manila, Theo Carr announced that Black would be in charge of anti-terrorism policy. It was difficult for me to see how his approach and Kristina’s ideas could ever work together in the same administration. She would need allies. So would I.

‘More than two hundred American dead,’ Bobby Black had said in speeches in the dying days of the campaign. ‘Two hundred and forty seven of our people; thirty-nine of other nationalities. Two hundred and forty seven of Us. Every American will be avenged. You have my word. No–More–Manilas.’

All through the transition, London had badgered me to find out what this sabre-rattling talk actually meant. The most important question for any British government is always to figure out what the Americans are up to, and I am the person who is supposed to know.

‘The Spartacus Solution,’ I told Andy Carnwath when he contacted me at Fraser Davis’s insistence.

‘What the fuck is that?’ he said. Phone conversations with Andy Carnwath are typically littered with so many expletives that within the Civil Service they are known as ‘The Vagina Monologues’. I explained that the British military attaché had heard whispers in the Pentagon that Bobby Black had been very impressed by a discussion paper written by an obscure US Army General, Conrad Shultz. General Shultz–according to the DoD, the Department of Defence buzz–had written a paper during a year’s sabbatical at West Point calling for ‘The Spartacus Solution’ to terrorism.

I had no idea what the paper was about but I reminded Carnwath that Spartacus led the slave rebellion against the Romans. He and his fellow rebels were crucified on the roads into Rome.

‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ Carnwath said. ‘Slaves? Crucified? You’d better get a copy of this fucking fairytale, Alex. Top priority.’

The urgency of getting a copy of ‘The Spartacus Solution’ became even more obvious when Theo Carr announced that General Shultz was to become the new Director of Central Intelligence.

‘So, come on, has the Vice-President been reading anything on your booklist, Dr Taft?’ I teased. ‘I mean, anything at all?’

‘Vice?’ Kristina replied mischievously, sipping her black coffee and using a nickname for the Vice-President that was already current in Washington, even though he had been in the White House for such a short time. ‘Vice boasted to me that he hasn’t read a storybook in thirty years and did not need fiction to tell him that, once you’ve got people by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow. So I guess I have some work to do.’

She watched for my reaction. I nodded, sympathetically. Diplomatic Warning Bell Number Two went off in my head. Dr Kristina Taft had now clearly signalled to me that there was serious tension in the White House, and the Carr administration was less than ten days old. Perhaps she was also signalling that she herself was out of her depth, but I was less sure of that. It would take me a long time to find out what her depth might be.

We were interrupted by an aide who came through to say that Bobby Black had finished his meeting with President Carr and was now ready to see us. We walked down the corridor. The Vice-President was behind his desk. He did not get up. He did not apologize for keeping me waiting.

‘Ambassador Price.’ We shook hands. His fist was cold and moist, like wet dough. The air smelled strongly of lily pollen.

‘Mr Vice-President.’

‘You know Johnny Lee.’ Johnny Lee Ironside nodded. I was glad to see him. He was to become a guide into the Heart of Darkness that is the OVP, the Office of the Vice-President. I congratulated Bobby Black on the election.

‘I’m very pleased to see you here in the White House, Mr Vice-President,’ I said. ‘The Prime Minister has instructed me to pass on his personal congratulations and his sense of awe’, I continued, ‘at your ability to confound conventional wisdom. Prime Minister Davis would like to learn your election-winning secret.’

Bobby Black smiled the way a car salesman does with an irritating customer.

‘Our secret is that winning the War on Terror isn’t the most important thing,’ he said. ‘It’s the only thing. The voters of this country understand that. I’m hoping to get your Prime Minister to understand that too. It’s kind of like missionary activity on our part you might say. Spreading the word.’

The November election had been a split decision. Carr and Black had won the White House but the Democrats scraped through to keep control, narrowly, of Congress. That was one of the reasons I was so keen to meet the new House Speaker, Betty Furedi, later that day, to try to gauge how much she would cooperate with Carr, and how much she might get in the way. Vice-President Black looked across the desk at me and blinked. A slack, lopsided grin appeared across his face.

‘Fear’, he said, by way of further explanation of the election victory, ‘works.’

I took a breath. If Bobby Black thought fear was a useful weapon to use upon the American electorate, then perhaps our discussions about the treatment of British terrorist suspects like Muhammad Asif Khan might not be about to go so well. I looked at Kristina Taft. She pulled out a Montblanc pen and gazed at the yellow legal pad in front of her. She did not catch my eye. The Vice-President launched into a short speech.

‘Newspaper stories in your country about torture’, he began softly, ‘are not helpful: not helpful to President Carr and this administration, not helpful to my people, not helpful to the fight against terror, and not helpful to the close cooperation between our two countries.’ Bobby Black went on to explain that in what he called ‘exceptional circumstances and exceptional times’ the ‘exceptional’ use of torture was justified. ‘You do not need me to remind you that, since Manila, these are exceptional circumstances,’ he emphasized, ‘which is why the President as Commander-in-Chief has authorized enhanced interrogation techniques. Some people choose to equate these with torture. I don’t care what word you use. I care that we get the job done.’

He hit a doughy hand on the table in front of him for emphasis. The Vice-President did not equivocate. Nor did he talk about ‘robust treatment of detainees’, which is the phrase that a beleaguered Prime Minister Davis had used in the Commons. And he did not try to pretend all this was simply some rough stuff that had got out of hand. Bobby Black confirmed to me that one of the first acts of the Carr Administration had been to sign what was known as National Security Directive 1402227. He clasped his hands together in an attitude of prayer and calmly explained that this directive specifically authorized the use of ‘highly coercive methods of interrogation by the United States’, which might be considered to fall within the United Nations definition of torture. This time he did not say ‘fuck the United Nations’, though I suspected he was thinking it.

‘The presidential authorization’, Black said, ‘comes with safeguards.’

‘Safeguards?’ I repeated. ‘What safeguards can you have on highly coercive interrogation, Mr Vice-President?’ He tapped his fingers together. His ruthlessness had an honest face. He never pretended otherwise.

‘All highly coercive procedures must be carried out under the supervision of a designated senior CIA officer. Only the Central Intelligence Agency–not the US military–only the CIA is authorized to carry out these enhanced interrogation procedures.’

I gulped. So, those were the safeguards? In their entirety? There was a pause while I was allowed to digest these statements.

‘Well, in the Khan case—’ I began, but Bobby Black cut me off. He said it was ‘just one of those things’ that the story had got into the British press, and that he did not bear grudges about that.

‘In fact, I’m mighty grateful the British media are reporting we are playing hardball with al Qaeda and their British supporters like Mr Khan,’ he said. ‘Because we are. We are serious. Committed. Determined. We do not do this lightly. It shows the nature of the exceptional threat we face.’

He had the franchise on the word ‘exceptional’.

‘Legally Mr Khan is not—’

‘Legally we have a Golden Shield, Ambassador Price. A Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card. The President, under the Constitution of the United States, has absolute authority to manage a military campaign as he sees fit, including whichever enhanced interrogation techniques he chooses to authorize, notwithstanding any definitions of torture used by foreign powers or multinational organizations.’

‘But the United Nations’ definition …’

He grinned. ‘You know what I think of the United Nations.’

I tried to change the subject. ‘Specifically, when it comes to British citizens like Muhammad Asif Khan—’

‘Well, let me tell you about British citizens,’ Bobby Black interrupted again, ‘including the British citizen who was the Manila suicide bomber, your Mr Fuad …’He paused for effect. ‘The fact that British citizens might be subject to coercive interrogation techniques shows that we do not discriminate in favour of our closest friends and allies. Look around this room.’ I did as I was bid. Kristina Taft still did not catch my eye. ‘There’s a new team in Washington, Ambassador. We have a mandate from the American people to go after the Bad Guys, to implement what some of us are calling “The Spartacus Solution”, and I intend to see we do it.’

‘The Spartacus Solution?’ I leaned forward with real interest now. ‘I have heard the term but I …’

‘Yeah,’ Bobby Black said, and nodded to Johnny Lee Ironside. ‘Give the Ambassador a copy, Johnny Lee. With my compliments.’

Johnny Lee handed me a short bound document of maybe fifty pages of A4. I felt thrilled, as if I had just been handed the Holy Grail, but I tried not to look too pleased. The document said on the front: ‘The Spartacus Solution–how the United States will win the War on Terror.’ The Vice-President looked over at Kristina.

‘This is the kind of bedtime reading that might get us somewhere against these SOBs, even more than storybooks, isn’t that right, Dr Taft?’

Kristina looked up and smiled. It did not take much emotional intelligence to understand what she was thinking behind that smile.

‘Thank you, Mr Vice-President,’ I said, to break the awkward silence.

‘You’re most welcome,’ Bobby Black responded. ‘Anything and everything for our British friends. Now, before you go, Ambassador, Johnny Lee tells me you had experience in the British Army in Ireland?’

‘As a very young man in Northern Ireland, yes, Mr Vice-President. I had a short time in Military Intelligence and—’

‘So, if you and your British Military Intelligence buddies could have prevented a terrorist attack, let’s say the bombings on the London Tube, by torturing one or two bad guys, would you have done it?’

‘If,’ I replied, clutching at ‘The Spartacus Solution’ document, as though it might be taken away as punishment for giving the wrong answer. ‘It’s a big “if”,’ Mr Vice-President. When you begin to torture someone, you can never know for certain if—’

‘Of course you damn well would use torture,’ he answered his own question definitively, snapping at me but again never raising his voice. ‘Torture works. Fear works. Read Spartacus and tell me you agree.’

I blanched. It sounded like an order.

‘Mr Vice-President,’ I responded, keeping as calm as possible, ‘I will of course read “Spartacus”, and thank you again for the documents. But I also read American history. De Tocqueville wrote that America is great because America is good. In the worst days of your Civil War in Eighteen Sixty-three, President Lincoln signed into law instructions to the Union Army that torture and cruelty were not to be permitted. With great respect to you, Mr Vice-President, if Lincoln could win a war for the very existence of the United States without using torture, so can we now in the twenty-first century. I prefer Lincoln over Spartacus.’

Everyone in the room was looking at me now, including Kristina. Bobby Black stretched his neck like a turtle emerging from its shell.

‘Well, thank you kindly for the historical lecture, Ambassador,’ he said slowly. ‘But I think you will find that in Lincoln’s day nobody was blowing up airliners with C4 plastic explosives or crashing them into skyscrapers filled with civilians. The Confederates were not suicide bombers. The people we now have to face down–well, they inhabit a different moral universe from the rest of us normal folks, and your Prime Minister needs to get out front and centre of this and get your own citizens into line. The human-rights question people oughtta focus on is the right of normal folks to go about their business without getting blown up by some British fanatic like Rashid Ali Fuad in Manila or your friend, Mr Khan. If you don’t see your problem, well, we do. And if you don’t act, we will.’

Bobby Black gently slapped both wet palms down on the desk. He was white with anger and it was clear that the meeting was over. I said something about democratically elected governments not being able to pick and choose which aspects of human rights to support, which to abandon, depending upon apparent necessity. I said this not because it would change anything, but for the weakest of diplomatic reasons–so that I could report back to Downing Street that I had made a protest on behalf of the UK government. They could spin it to the press and in the Commons. Bobby Black looked at me with pity on his face, as if I had farted, and out of a generous spirit he’d decided to ignore the smell. His eyes were glazing over with indifference.

‘Thank you for your time, Ambassador,’ he said, reaching forward to shake my hand. Wet dough again. ‘Enjoy your bedtime reading.’

Johnny Lee Ironside nodded at me. ‘Good to see you, Alex. Let’s get caught up soon.’

Kristina Taft showed me out.

‘You’re brave,’ she whispered. ‘Not many do that.’

‘Is it always like this?’ I replied, putting the copy of ‘The Spartacus Solution’ in my attaché case and presuming on a connection with her that I sensed I had now made. Kristina did not reply until we were almost at my car, which–I noticed–was now parked at the more private south entrance, away from the cameras.

‘Pretty much,’ she said. Then she tugged gently at my sleeve. ‘Maybe we should talk,’ she whispered. ‘We seem to be on the same page on all of this.’

I nodded.

‘You were brave too. Over the books.’

She shrugged. ‘It’s not brave to do what you think is right.’

I looked straight into her grey eyes and a moment of recognition passed between us. One of the peculiarities about being British Ambassador in Washington is that there are always factions within US administrations, and sometimes they see you as a potential ally, a useful tool or even as an intelligence asset for use against the other factions. It is a difficult and dangerous game to play. It’s also thrilling. Being allowed to play it at all makes the British a little bit special in the diplomatic corps in Washington.

‘Of course, let’s talk,’ I responded. ‘Any time. You say when.’

‘Not in the White House,’ she said. ‘I’ll figure out someplace. I might need more help than you think. Later today they’re announcing that I’m being promoted to National Security Adviser.’

‘Congratulations!’ I was genuinely pleased for her, though I was not sure she would survive. She was too young, too inexperienced, and Bobby Black already had his tanks on her lawn. He was already doing her job.

‘I’ll call you,’ Kristina said.

I understood. Or at least I thought I understood. If the meeting I had just endured was a sign of things to come, then relations between Britain and the United States were about to take a serious turn for the worse, mostly as a result of one man. Kristina would need friends and so would I. I was also flattered and intrigued to be asked to spend time with one of the rising stars of the Carr administration.

I climbed back into my car and told the driver to take me to the rest of that day’s meetings on Capitol Hill–but he informed me of a surprise hitch. While I had been meeting Vice-President Black, Speaker Furedi’s office had called the embassy to cancel. She had to be in the House chamber for an emergency session to discuss the Carr administration’s demands for a huge increase in defence funding. The Carr team wanted to rewrite the entire budget as an emergency antiterrorism measure. Carr and Black were talking about Spartacus and vengeance for Manila, while Betty Furedi and the Democrats in Congress were reluctant to pay for whatever it was they had in mind.

‘We’re sorry, Ambassador,’ Furedi’s Chief of Staff, a soft-voiced Californian called John Crockett said to me when I rang him for details. ‘I hope you understand. We’ll reschedule.’ I always thought Crockett was a decent man.

‘Of course, John. Not a problem. I know how busy Speaker Furedi must be. Call me.’

Suddenly I had a two-hour hole in my day. I felt like a schoolboy who is told that lessons are cancelled. I had nothing planned, nothing to fit in, and I realized that I also had a longing to see Fiona. I would apologize and tell her that I would no longer try to hurry her into motherhood, and that perhaps she should spend more time in England. I sensed that she felt trapped. I would make the peace and buy flowers on the way back to the embassy. I replanned my day very quickly. First, I would call Downing Street and tell them about Bobby Black and the Khan case. Then I would mention–just in passing–that I had obtained from the Vice-President himself a copy of the document that we all were so desperate to see, General Shultz’s report on fighting terrorism, ‘The Spartacus Solution’. Then–after receiving the well-deserved congratulations of a grateful British people from Downing Street–I would give Fiona a big surprise.

FOUR

By the time I stepped out of the Rolls-Royce at the embassy with the copy of ‘The Spartacus Solution’ in my attaché case in one hand and a bunch of flowers for Fiona in the other, the ice storm had rolled in over the Potomac and all down the Chesapeake Bay. The roads were slick, the air bitterly chilled, the sidewalks mostly empty. Dampness seeped through my coat like cold fingers. I stopped off at a florist’s near Dupont Circle to buy Fiona as large a bunch of flowers as I could find. I forget what, exactly. Roses. Maybe tulips. They were just closing because of the ice storm, and grateful for the business.

When I reached the Great House, as the Ambassador’s residence is sometimes called, I walked into the living quarters. I put the attaché case down. I had the flowers in my hand and I bounded up the red-carpeted stairs two at a time, like an eager suitor, anxious to make amends. Fiona sometimes worked at her interior designs in the library, and so I tried it first, but there was no sign of her. I checked my watch and decided that she might be exercising on the treadmill in the small gym next to the main guest bedroom, but there was no sign of her there either. I turned the flowers in my hand. I was about to head towards the final possibility, that she was still in our own bedroom, when I heard a noise from the guest quarters. I turned. You never know what twist of fate, what nerve or synapse drives you to take a decision, but I suddenly threw open the door of the guest quarters.

Fiona and her lover were in front of the three large mirrors above the dresser. They had angled the mirrors so they could watch themselves. He was naked. Fiona wore a black bra, nothing else. Their clothes had been discarded carelessly and were strewn on the floor. He was behind her, holding her hips with his big hands. She was grasping the table top of the dresser in front of the mirror and gasping. I could not see Fiona’s face. Her hair was stuck to her skin with sweat. The man turned and I recognized James Byrne, the Washington Post columnist, immediately. He had been over for dinner at the embassy a number of times, to parties and diplomatic receptions. I had known him since before I was Ambassador, and before he had been given his syndicated column. Byrne was standing upright, his hips moving. He is a big man, bigger than me, over six feet, slim and muscled, a Bostonian who had played American football for one of the Ivy League college teams. He had hair on his back and shoulders, like a monkey. The hair was slick with sweat and it disgusted me.

I said, ‘Get your dick out of my wife.’

Byrne looked at me and stepped away from her. Fiona turned too. She stood up slowly and put her hands to her face in shock. She gasped something which I did not catch, clasped her breasts and ran towards the bathroom. I heard her slam the door, but all the time I was watching Byrne. I walked towards him and hit him once, hard, in the throat with my fist. He fell to the floor like a puppet whose strings have been cut, gasping for breath. I stood for a moment and thought about killing him, but the moment passed. Instead I turned him over with my foot and looked at him gagging on the floor, then I walked out of the room. I had to step over the flowers, which were scattered all over the floor. Despite the ice storm, Fiona left for London that very same day, on the overnight flight from Dulles to Heathrow. Tulips. The flowers were definitely tulips.

FIVE

Some people are in the fund-raising business. I am in the friend-raising business. When you are a British diplomat in the United States, you look around and decide who the future leaders and opinion-formers might be, and in the words of Prime Minister Davis’s Communications Director, Andy Carnwath, ‘You get up their arse, Alex, and you stay there.’ Diplomacy is political proctology. Up the arse and stay there.

I am regarded as being good at it. A few years back, just before Fiona and I were married, I was Number Three at the Washington embassy. I sensed that Governor Theo Carr was preparing a run for the presidency as soon as I heard he had hired Arlo Luntz as his Chief Political Adviser. Luntz is a world-class operative. Like Bobby Black, I don’t much like him, but I do respect him. All three of us–Black, Luntz and me–have one thing in common: we came from nowhere, we were born to nothing, and we try to do the best we can. I respect that. Anyway, at the time I persuaded the then British Ambassador in Washington that I should go down and meet this Theo Carr before he hit the big time. Luntz called me back straight away.

‘Sure,’ he said, sensing an opportunity of his own. ‘Governor Carr always makes time for our British friends.’

I hurriedly made arrangements. Luntz greeted me at the Governor’s Mansion. He is unimpressive to look at, a badly dressed, shambling figure with scuffed shoes and an appalling jet-black wig, but what lies beneath the bad wig has made him one of the most sought-after political consultants anywhere in the United States. Luntz walked down the central staircase in the mansion towards me wearing a stained blue suit, which fitted him the way a horsebox fits a horse. We shook hands and I followed him upstairs to meet Governor Theo Carr. We sat on the porch at the back of the mansion, the three of us, drinking iced tea and chewing over world affairs.

‘To what do we owe this honour, Mr Price?’

‘Please call me Alex, Governor. I was just passing through on my way west and I thought it would be good to say hello.’

I offered to host a visit to London, guaranteeing that Governor Carr could speak to Members of Parliament, my future brother-in-law (who was then the Leader of the Opposition,) government ministers, and maybe even the then Prime Minister, Fraser Davis’s predecessor.

Carr and Luntz nodded that it would be a good idea. Of course it was a good idea. A convenient friendship was born.

‘Passing through our state capital? No way,’ Theo Carr told me as I prepared to leave. He had that famous twinkling in his eyes and a cheeky grin. ‘Delighted as we are to see you, Mr Price, no one just passes through here.’

Theo Carr was Governor of a state of ‘flyover people’–the people you fly over on the way between the east and west coasts.

‘Busted,’ I admitted, holding my hands up in mock surrender. ‘I made a point of coming to see you, Governor Carr. You are worth a deliberate detour, as they say in the tourist guidebooks.’

He laughed. ‘Yeah, like a National Park. And why might the–what’s that title again?–Minister Counsellor at the Embassy of the United Kingdom in Washington be sufficiently interested in Governor Theo Carr to make a detour?’

‘Talent spotting,’ I laughed along with him. ‘I think you might be President of the United States one day …’

‘You–and Arlo here–and my momma, God bless her,’ he interrupted with more twinkling and more of a grin. ‘Makes three of you. Just a couple of hundred million American voters to go.’

‘… and I thought we should do what dogs do in the street, and sniff noses.’

Theo Carr laughed uproariously. So did Luntz.

‘Let’s just leave it at noses,’ he guffawed, and slapped me on the shoulder. It was a Gateway Moment. Fast-forward a few years, and now here I am promoted to Ambassador and he is what the US Secret Service calls POTUS, President of the United States, and Arlo Luntz is the most highly regarded and devious political consultant on the planet. It was worth the deliberate detour.

‘We didn’t do so badly, Alex,’ Theo Carr told me at the White House reception for the Inauguration, ‘for a coupla country boys.’

In those first months of his presidency–and despite all the trouble I was having with Vice-President Black–President Carr, building on that early familiarity, always called me by my first name.

At diplomatic functions or G8 Summits he would point at me in that friendly way of his, and call out, ‘Yo, Brit Guy, how’s the nose-sniffin’ comin’ along?’

None of this bonhomie made any impression on the Vice-President. Month after month it seemed to me that Black had a moat around him, like an old-fashioned castle.

‘The drawbridge is up, the portcullis down, defences primed to repel invaders, Alex,’ Johnny Lee Ironside once told me. Johnny Lee has many talents, of course, including a fine turn of phrase. He’s loyal. Discreet. Clever. And unlike those who talk behind the Vice-President’s back, Johnny Lee genuinely admired and respected Black, yet even he sometimes called his boss by the Churchillian phrase once applied to Soviet Russia–a riddle inside an enigma, wrapped in a mystery. What makes Johnny Lee special is that he is part of a dying breed within American politics, a gut-instinct Anglophile who does not just think relations between Britain and America are the most important rock for the United States, he breathes and eats it. Once when we were talking about the aloof nature of his boss, Johnny Lee confided that he had been reading the works of Evelyn Waugh and they provided a clue.

‘The Vice-President is an Englishman,’ Johnny Lee informed me, bizarrely.

I did not understand. ‘The Vice-President is from Montana,’ I blurted out. ‘Couldn’t be further from English in every way.’ The centre of gravity in American politics had shifted from East Coast anglophiles like Johnny Lee to people like Theo Carr, Bobby Black, and Kristina Taft. They were all from the West or Midwest. Johnny Lee shook his head.

‘Your Mr Waugh says that an English gentleman understands two social states–Intimacy and Formality. Intimacy is for family, lovers, and close friends. Formality is for everybody else.’ Johnny Lee smiled. He delights in being more learned about English culture than those of us who happen to be British. ‘Whereas we colonial-American types are capable of three social attitudes–Intimacy, Formality–but also Familiarity.’

I congratulated him. It was a great insight into Bobby Black’s character. Unlike many Americans, he could not do Familiarity. Theo Carr is the administration’s backslapping baby kisser. Bobby Black isn’t.

‘So how do you explain it?’ I wondered.

‘British genes,’ Johnny Lee said. ‘The Black family is from Scotland, ‘parently.’

Ah, I thought. A useful clue to the heart of Bobby Black’s darkness. Not Englishness after all, but Presbyterianism. The Vice-President was some kind of dour Scot from the mountains of Montana, with a chip on his shoulder about the English. I filed this piece of information away for further consideration.

As Arlo Luntz tells it, friendship in Washington, like that between me and Johnny Lee, is a ‘power resource’. It enables you to get things done. The more friends you have, the more stellar the cast list at your dinner parties, the more influential you are … therefore the more friends you have … and so on, in a virtuous circle of power. Luntz is full of little observations and proverbs like this, rules for conduct in modern politics. He told me once that Washington DC Rule Number One is ‘Don’t Make Unnecessary Enemies.’ Rule Two is that ‘the bigger your friends, the more juice you have’, ‘juice’ being Washington slang for power or influence, though not always in a good way.

‘And you have plenty juice, Ambassador Price,’ Luntz said to me, almost as an aside. ‘Anybody whose brother-in-law happens to be Prime Minister has plenty juice.’

In that first year of the Carr presidency, Vice-President Bobby Black had more juice than anyone in DC, except perhaps Carr himself, and yet he routinely broke Arlo Luntz’s basic rules. Bobby Black stomped on people. He made enemies, necessary and–like Kristina Taft and me–unnecessary enemies too. His own friends were anonymous corporate types from his previous business past, middle-aged balding men in grey suits who ran oil companies, high-tech businesses and private security corporations, plus lawyers and lobbyists from what Washingtonians call ‘Gucci Gulch’–a corridor of nastiness along K Street in northwest Washington. It takes its name from the inhabitants who wear $500 tasselled Gucci loafers along with their $2,000 suits.

‘Friends in the shadows,’ Johnny Lee Ironside once told me of his boss, without explanation. ‘FOBs.’

FOBs meant ‘Friends of Bobby’. I knew some of the names. Just the names. Ron Gold of Goldcrest, the energy and private security consortium, was a long time FOB. So was Paul Comfort, the CEO of Warburton, the high-tech military and construction contractor. Warburton had somehow snagged all the latest contracts for rebuilding Iraq. This caused more bad feeling with Downing Street, much more than the public row about torture, Manila, Muhammad Asif Khan or the United Nations all put together. Fraser Davis was furious. He shouted at me on the secure line that the Americans had their snouts in the trough. More importantly, we did not.

‘British jobs are at stake, Alex!’

He demanded an explanation of how $7 billion in Iraqi contracts went to just one company, Warburton, on a no-bid basis, meaning no British firms could compete.

‘A billion dollars worth of these infrastructure projects is in the south–Basra–that’s supposed to be our bailiwick, Alex!’

‘I don’t think the Americans see it like that, Prime Minister.’

‘But … the Vice-President gave you a copy of that Spartacus document. He must think highly of you, yes? And of his relationship with the United Kingdom government? And yet he did not talk about the Iraq contracts?’

‘You know what it is like dealing with the Vice-President, Prime Minister. It’s not easy.’

I lamely tried to explain that no American firms were allowed to compete for the contracts either, and that Speaker Betty Furedi had promised a Congressional investigation into what she called the ‘Iraqi sweetheart deal scandal.’

‘But investigations in this town are like belly buttons, Prime Minister,’ I said, ‘everyone’s got one.’

Davis was apoplectic but impotent.

‘It’s just not right,’ he bellowed, ‘just not right.’

* * *

Warburton’s CEO Paul Comfort, like Bobby Black, was from Montana. They were childhood friends. People suspected something in their relationship, but could not get to the bottom of it. Campaign contributions? Soft money? I’d heard Comfort was a ‘bundler’–one of the people who ‘bundled’ contributions together from many sources and provided Bobby Black with serious and above board cash. But Gold and Comfort were just names to me. I read about them in the Wall Street Journal business pages. I knew they were members of NEST–Bobby Black’s National Energy Strategy Taskforce–set up to map out US energy policy for the twenty-first century, but you never saw them on TV, they never gave interviews, I never had the pleasure of meeting them. Men, as Johnny Lee said, from the shadows.

Johnny Lee Ironside also says that outside the White House there are five permanent Washington Tribes–Diplomats, Congressmen, Lawyers, Journalists, and Lobbyists. The Five Tribes overlap. Their people sleep with each other and sometimes marry. They play golf and poker, entertain together, commit adultery, and their children go to the same schools. Members of all Five Tribes know that, like the Carr-Black administration, the people in the White House come and go, but the Tribes go on forever. Superficially the Tribes defer to the Office of the President, and to the Office of the Vice-President, but all the time they know that the President and Vice-President will only trouble the permanent Tribes at most for eight years before being replaced by the next incumbents. The Office of the Vice-President is, of course, proverbially ‘one heartbeat away’ from the most powerful job in the world, but those of us in the permanent Five Washington Tribes feared Bobby Black, because he was much more important than that.

Here’s an example. A Wednesday morning, just after 11 a.m., six months after the Inauguration. An intruder, a deranged man from West Virginia, leaped over the White House fence and ran towards the Oval Office, threatening to kill President Carr. He set off the alarms and was stopped by the Secret Service before he could get more than twenty metres. The deranged man had a gun, an old Smith & Wesson revolver, and the Secret Service shot him in both legs. He was lucky they did not kill him immediately. The gun turned out to be empty. Not a bullet in the chamber. I was in the library of the Great House at the embassy on Massachusetts Avenue where I like to work.

CNN were live in the White House pressroom where Sandy McAuley, the Communications Director, was fielding reporters’ questions about the incident. I put my papers to one side and watched.

‘Where was the President–and the Vice-President–at the time of the incident?’ one of the reporters asked.

McAuley twitched a little. ‘Vice-President Black was at his desk in the West Wing, working on papers.’

Pause.

‘But where was President Carr?’

McAuley twitched some more. ‘President Carr was in the family quarters.’

‘Doing what?’

‘President Carr was exercising on a rowing machine in the gym.’

You could hear the intake of breath from the journalists, and a few titters of laughter. Even those of us who are not professional workaholics usually put in a few hours work in the mornings. It was just after 11 a.m. on a weekday, six months after President Theo Carr’s election, and when a nutty assassin tried to get in to the White House, the President was on a rowing machine? And Vice-President Bobby Black was in the West Wing, at his desk, working on papers? Running the country? Told you something, didn’t it?

* * *

Kristina Taft understood this quicker than anyone. She had been confirmed as National Security Adviser and called me a couple of days later. She decreed that our first private meeting would not, under any circumstances, take place at the White House. She suggested breakfast one morning at her apartment in the Watergate.

‘At six.’

I gulped. ‘Six a.m.? Sure.’

Kristina explained that she usually woke at five, sat on an exercise bike for thirty minutes, read some papers, and then left in time to get to the White House before seven every morning. I considered the private meeting a show of trust and an honour.

‘I don’t want word to get out to anyone,’ she warned me.

‘Anyone?’ I responded.

‘Especially not the Vice-President. I’ll send the help away.’

By the ‘help’ she meant her security staff as well as her maid. When we met she was alone.

‘I’m the new kid on the block,’ she said over poached eggs and muffins. From the start there were whispers that Kristina was too young for the job, and that it was not much of a job anyway–just ‘executive assistant’ to the Vice-President who was driving national security policy himself. In Washington it’s like this. You can go from being ‘up-and-coming’ to ‘has-been’ without any intervening period of success. I could feel Kristina’s nervousness.

‘Until this administration, I only ever came to DC as a tourist,’ she said. ‘You have been here for years, Alex. I need advice on how to handle it. How to get it right.’

‘Arlo Luntz will tell you that there are no second acts in Washington life. You have to get it right first time.’

‘Luntz is extraordinary.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘take time to get to know him. He’ll also tell you that the best people know what they do not know, and strive to fix it.’

Maybe that was the reason I liked Kristina from the start. That was what she was like too. In that first breakfast meeting I suppose I showed off a bit. I told her how administrations had functioned in the past. I had been in Washington for part of the Clinton years and part of the George W. Bush debacle, and I knew people who remembered Bush senior, Reagan, and Carter.

‘Who was it who said that happy families are all alike, but unhappy families are each unhappy in their own particular way? Anyway, the same is true for political administrations or governments. In my experience, they always end unhappily.’

‘Always?’

‘Always. Sometimes, like now, they begin unhappily. Unhappy does not mean ineffective. DoD, State, Justice, and the CIA are always at each other’s throats. That’s normal. That’s life. That’s power. You–as National Security Adviser–have to act as referee. Honest broker. That’s why President Carr wants you around. He trusts you to be honest and fair. Sometimes the infighting will suck in Treasury as well, but all of that’s manageable. The problem … well, I’m not sure how you can fix a problem like Bobby Black.’

‘Me neither,’ she admitted, brushing a few crumbs of muffin from her lips.

‘You want people to read novels on Muslim culture; he wants to bomb somewhere. Almost anywhere will do. There’s not a lot of give and take here, I’m thinking. He’s a problem for us too.’

‘Fiction’, Kristina shrugged, but her face remained impassive, ‘is always a kind of Lie, but it only works because it is also a kind of Truth. And it is a Truth we all need to hear, even Vice. I have been talking to Arlo about this. Arlo is in on everything, and he jumped in on my side about the reading list. It was a small thing, but it helped.’

‘How exactly?’

‘Arlo told the President that all power demands a degree of fiction. The way Arlo sees it, people in power are not supposed to lie, but they cannot tell the truth all the time either. We require believable stories, simple explanations, myths, what the newspapers call “spin”. A convenient fiction, Arlo calls it, and he says it is better than a complicated truth for most voters.’

‘The real question is, whose spin, whose fiction, or whose myth gets accepted,’ I said. ‘Whose truth or version of the truth do we trust?’

‘That’s why history always belongs to the victors,’ Kristina said, offering me another toasted bagel, which I declined. ‘Winners dictate the truth. More coffee?’

‘Please.’

‘So, anyhow … Spartacus,’ she switched tack as she poured. I watched her carefully, not sure what to make of her. She spoke fast; she thought fast; she did not suffer fools gladly, or at all. And I confess that from that first conversation she wound me into her. I would gladly have stepped inside her brain with a flashlight and have a look around.

‘Yes, Spartacus.’

‘Well?’ Her grey eyes were steady as they looked into mine. ‘You were in Northern Ireland, right? Would the Spartacus Solution have helped?’

She arched an eyebrow. She already knew my answer.

That night of the ice storm, the night I had discovered Fiona with James Byrne, Fiona had immediately packed her bags and headed to the airport in the teeth of the bad weather. She caught the overnight British Airways flight back to London. We did not say goodbye. After she left I sat in the study at the ambassador’s residence, poured myself a large whisky and read through General Conrad Shultz’s document. Page after page of it promised a relentless war on terrorists, their supporters, and the regimes that gave them space to operate.

‘Well, Spartacus is a view, I suppose,’ I told Kristina. ‘A one-eyed, one-dimensional approach–let’s kill bad people. If only life were that simple, and that all the Bad People wore black hats so we knew who they were. What we learned in Northern Ireland is that nobody is born a terrorist. We are all born as babies. So you need to have a two-or three-dimensional approach–fight, kill if you have to, but also persuade, cajole, bribe, whatever it takes to stop the baby growing up wanting to kill you …’

‘Exactly!’ she clapped her hands together and poured me more coffee. ‘Exactly! Do you think it sends the right signal when the new Director of Central Intelligence says we should treat terrorists like ancient Rome treated rebellious slaves, crucifying them on the streets? And the Vice-President buys into it? It’s just another Faith-Based Initiative–you do it and you pray to God it might work. Well, what happens when this is leaked? When some of it gets in the newspapers? You know what the reaction on the Arab street will be? “Here come the Christian Crusaders one more time.” It plays into every prejudice about us and our motives. Dinosaurs. Goddamn dinosaurs.’

Now it was my turn to shrug. ‘I don’t understand why Black and Shultz seem so determined to piss off a billion Muslims, most of whom do not want to be our enemies.’

‘Me neither,’ Kristina shook her head. I could feel her mind whirring with ideas. ‘Spartacus will tear us in two,’ she said, indiscreetly. ‘You are either for it or against it, and … I guess I’ve said enough.’

It was time for me to go. I asked to use her bathroom while she cleared the breakfast dishes. I have always been nosey about other people’s lives. At parties I sometimes open bathroom cabinets and take a peek. In Kristina’s case perhaps I was looking for signs of human habitation. Did she have a man? Why did I care? As I peed, I looked around. There were no signs of male habitation, but I noticed a polished steel cabinet on the wall. I don’t know why I tried to open it, but I did. It was locked, of course, and with no sign of a key. Perhaps Kristina expected from her visitors precisely the kind of nosiness I was demonstrating. When I came out of the bathroom Kristina walked me to the door. She gazed straight into my eyes and gave me that smile of hers.

‘Can I ask you something else?’

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘I hear you and Fiona split up a couple of months back.’

I swallowed. ‘I… we … have things to … work out.’

Kristina looked at me with sympathetic warmth. ‘Washington is a killer for relationships. Harry Truman said that if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.’

I laughed. ‘Harry Truman also said that if you tell someone to go to hell you should be able to see that he gets there. An observation which is lost on the Vice-President, I think.’

‘Does the Fiona thing affect your relations with the Prime Minister?’

‘No. At least I don’t think so.’

‘That’s good.’

We kissed each other goodbye, on the cheek, chastely, European style.

‘Let’s do this again,’ she said.

‘Definitely,’ I replied.

It was by now seven thirty on a Monday morning and by her standards Kristina Taft was already late for work. I wanted to see her again, even if the reasons why were jumbled up in my head. I caught a cab from the Watergate up Embassy Row, my mind buzzing from the meeting, wondering whether I should call Kristina back and if so when.

I had no time to take a decision because the moment I arrived at my desk I received a hand-delivered letter from a lawyer employed by James Byrne. I suppose I should have expected it. If anything, after I hit him, I had expected something even worse. I am not sure how he left the residence that day. After the punch to the throat he would have needed medical treatment. I assumed that he might call the police and cite me for assault, but he didn’t. What Byrne did do was to get his lawyer, Dan Feingold, to write a threatening letter. It said that I had caused ‘laryngeal trauma’. His smashed voice box, according to a specialist’s report that the lawyer had helpfully included, meant Byrne faced a permanent impairment in his ability to speak. I confess it made me laugh out loud. The lawyer’s letter said Byrne had been ‘forced to give up a lucrative career’ on the Sunday TV talk shows and would be seeking ‘punitive damages’ from me. I stared at the letter for a while and when I calmed down, I called the lawyer on the telephone number at the top of the headed notepaper.

‘Mr Feingold? Alex Price.’

‘I would rather deal with your attorney, Ambassador Price,’ he said smoothly.

‘I’m sure you would, Mr Feingold,’ I replied. ‘But you’re going to have to deal with me. I regret that Mr Byrne has a voice problem.’

‘You do?’

‘Yes, I regret it so much that I intend to drive over to his home later today to talk things over with his wife and family. I’ll apologize to Mr Byrne and explain matters in detail to his wife and four-year-old son, and then to his editor at the Washington Post.’ I heard Feingold suck in air. ‘In particular I will explain to his wife and child why I am reluctant to pay Mr Byrne financial compensation for fucking my wife in the main guest bedroom of the British Embassy residence.’

Feingold coughed into the telephone. He apologized and said he suffered from allergies. Then he said that before I did anything that could be construed as ‘harassment’ of his client, he would like to talk to Mr Byrne.

‘Of course,’ I said. Two hours later, Feingold called me back.

‘Ambassador Price, good news, Mr Byrne accepts your apology,’ he said, his voice full of defeat. ‘Everything is now resolved between you. No further action on your part is necessary.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, and put down the telephone. Fear, as Bobby Black says, works.

SIX

In the days following our breakfast meeting, I thought a lot about Dr Kristina Taft. When you are the British Ambassador in Washington, when your marriage is breaking up, and your wife is the sister of the Prime Minister, you have to ask yourself whom you can trust, and the answer is almost no one. But from the start I trusted Kristina. Maybe it was a matter of instinct. There was also an obvious attraction, though we kept it hidden. Perhaps at first we even kept it hidden from ourselves. I was intrigued by her intelligence and I particularly liked her observation that Fiction is by definition always a Lie but it only works because it is also a kind of Truth. It hit a chord.

My father ran out when I was a child. My mother found a job, but I was raised mostly by my grandparents and there was never much money. I won a scholarship to a private school where I was always the kid who could not afford to go on the foreign trips, despite my talent for languages. To help pay my way through university I became an officer cadet in the British Army. I studied languages and linguistics, and at first I thought that humans invented stories to show off their language skills. Gradually I came to realize that it is exactly the opposite. Humans invented language because we are bursting with stories to tell, and because that is the way we make sense of, control, and organize our world. We invent stories to play god. In the beginning was the Word. Luntz was right too. Everyone complains about political ‘spin’, but a coherent Lie is much more valuable than an incomplete Truth. That’s why governments need people like me, like Luntz and Johnny Lee.

And so I began meeting Kristina regularly. We never called it ‘dating’, though that was what it became. Sometimes we met formally at White House meetings, semi-formally at dinners or cocktail parties, and occasionally we met in her apartment for a working breakfast. We shared confidences, gossip, and ideas–at least up to a point. She never told me any secrets, she never betrayed anything that would have compromised her position or the Carr administration, though we did frequently consider what we should do about our mutual problem with Bobby Black. Then came the night I drifted into Blues Alley, and our relationship took a different turn. It’s a jazz club near where Wisconsin meets M Street in Georgetown. As the name suggests, it is down a back alley, though being Georgetown it is a well-kept, bijou back alley. Once Fiona left, I entertained less often and drifted into Blues Alley a little more, always alone, for the late show and a few beers.

I could guarantee that I would never see anyone I knew. The Washington workaholics–which is most people–are, like Kristina, at their desks at six or seven in the morning, and that means they are in bed by ten. If they happen to be jazz fans, they might take in the early 7.30 p.m. show, but you never see them at anything that finishes after midnight. As for me, I no longer seemed to need much sleep. Jazz past midnight was just fine.

The night I met Kristina in Blues Alley, it’s difficult to say which one of us was the more surprised. It was a Friday. Herbie Hancock was playing, and the late show began at 11 p.m., way too late for the kind of people I like to avoid. I was wearing a dark shirt and black jeans and I sat at the corner of the bar in the back with a bourbon on the rocks and a beer. Kristina was already there when I arrived, also alone, at a corner table. I did not see her, but she watched me for a while as I sat at the bar. She said she worked on the same logic as I did–that with a show past midnight, no one she knew would be there. During the second or third Hancock number I felt a movement by my side.

‘Like to join me at my table, Ambassador?’ Kristina whispered in my ear, so close I could feel the heat of her breath. I was shocked to see her. She giggled with pleasure at my surprise, then I moved over with her and took a seat. She was wearing dark clothes, a black dress and heels. She had let her hair fall down her face and had a touch of jewellery and make-up.

‘You look … different,’ I said lamely. ‘You look very nice.’

She smiled and touched my arm. ‘I like to remember I am a woman,’ she replied. ‘Sometimes.’

I signalled for another round of drinks: beer and bourbon for me; vodka tonic and a glass of water for her. We listened to the jazz together with only a few whispered conversations between numbers, though she glanced at me and smiled as if to check that I was enjoying things as much as she was. We had to sit close to talk, and her hair brushed my face. I was aware how good she smelled.

‘I love it here,’ she whispered in response to one of my questions, ‘partly for the music, partly because it is so … anonymous. Jazz in Washington is an unnatural vice. A taste of freedom. Or anarchy. A reminder that this is a black southern city, not the uptight place we work in. Everything else is so … controlled.’

‘You like being naughty?’

‘Doesn’t everyone?’

By the break in the set, past midnight, I was already slightly drunk. I think she was drunk too. We sat so close together I could feel her breath on my face and neck.

‘It’s late for you White House people. You turn into pumpkins after dark.’

‘Whatever you think of me, Alex, I am a California girl, and my body runs on California time. We wake up three hours after the rest of the country and never catch up.’

Her laughter tinkled over me. She asked me about my background and I told her.

‘I have all the lower-middle-class insecurities about never quite fitting in,’ I laughed. ‘That’s why I overcompensate by working so hard.’

‘Not fitting in? You’re a chameleon, Alex. You blend in everywhere.’

I shook my head. ‘Any time soon they will offer me a K, a knighthood–I’ll be Sir Alex. It comes with the job. Then, when I go back to London, I get the peerage–I’ll be Lord Price of Somewhere-or-Other. And yet… people like Fraser will never see me as one of them. Because, deep down, I’m not.’

The whisky was talking.

‘Does that matter?’ she said, laying a hand on my arm. ‘Your Lordship?’

‘I guess not,’ I shrugged and looked around the nightclub. ‘Not in this great democracy.’

She tactfully changed the subject.

‘The army must have been rough for a twenty-two year old,’ Kristina said. ‘Especially Northern Ireland.’ I nodded.

‘That’s why Spartacus gets to me,’ I said. ‘Because it’s like Northern Ireland for slow learners.’

‘Meaning?’

‘When an IRA sniper took out one of our boys we’d round up a few Republicans and beat the shit out of them. Show them who’s boss. Revenge was always a relief, but it didn’t help us as much as it helped them. It gave them another grievance and helped them recruit more to the cause.’

I drank my whisky.

Kristina was full of questions that night, I think because our relationship really had changed. She asked me directly about Fiona. I told her the whole story.

‘You hit Byrne! In the throat! So that’s why he sounds like a frog on acid!’

‘Shhh. Not so loud.’

She punched the air. ‘Yes! At last! On behalf of the government and people of the United States,’ Kristina shook my hand in mock seriousness, ‘thank you for silencing that major-league asshole. How about you break his typing fingers too, yes? Let me buy you a drink.’

‘So, what about you?’ I wondered. Herbie Hancock was walking back on stage for the rest of the set. ‘What are your secrets, Dr Taft?’

She was drinking a lot of vodka, but then I was drinking a lot of bourbon. I felt her leg shift next to mine as she leaned towards me.

‘I have no secrets,’ she laughed. ‘None. Blameless.’

Her grey eyes danced with amusement behind the cocktail glass.

‘But you do have a private life?’

She laughed again. ‘Yes, but it’s private, Ambassador. Private. Se-cret. It’s so private it’s a secret even from me. But I … I understand why Fiona used Byrne.’

‘Used?’ I was puzzled by the word. She shrugged.

‘Oh, come on. You must have heard the feminist joke? What’s the difference between a man and a vibrator? One is cold, mechanical sex. The other runs on batteries? For some women at some times, a man like Byrne is just something to fill the void–though I don’t know why Fiona would hook up with a guy who spends more time on his appearance than she does.’

‘The … void?’

Kristina looked at me impatiently. ‘You know the difference between the White House and a nunnery? In the White House you get to wear your own clothes. Otherwise, we get up in the morning, pray to God all day we’re doing the right thing, and go to bed late at night. Alone. The nunnery of Pennsylvania Avenue.’

‘Power’s supposed to be an aphrodisiac,’ I said.

‘Only for those who do not have it,’ she said. ‘For the happily married, the White House is a strain. For the rest, it’s death. Game over.’

‘So there is no one in your …?’ I blurted out.

She shook her head. The music started to grow louder. ‘Not any more. It ended when I accepted the job from the President. I’ll tell you about Steve sometime, but maybe not tonight.’

She turned away and we watched Herbie Hancock. Steve, I thought. Lucky Steve. We sat through to the end of the set, but I was less interested in the jazz than in her. We stood up to applaud and then sat back down to talk.

‘Okay,’ she said, as if steeling herself for what she was about to say. By now we had both drunk way too much. Kristina told me that before coming to Washington to talk about the Deputy National Security Adviser job, she had been dating a history professor from Stanford, Stephen Haddon. Haddon was an expert on Germany in the interwar years and the rise of Hitler. They had considered living together. At one point they even talked of marriage, until Carr’s people headhunted her to join his campaign team.

‘I couldn’t resist,’ she said. ‘But Steve could. Big time. Maybe if I had known how much I was going to get fucked over by Bobby Black …’

She did not complete the thought. Instead she explained that Professor Haddon refused to move east. He wanted nothing–absolutely nothing–to do with Washington life, the scrutiny it would bring, or the Carr administration.

‘Steve’s idea of heaven is to sit in the Public Record Office in Berlin and write about how decent people in a civilized country like Germany became so scared that they allowed their society to be hijacked by Nazis,’ Kristina said. ‘And who could blame him? Steve isn’t even a Republican. Why would he put up with this shit?’

‘You loved him.’

‘Yes,’ Kristina said. ‘Part of me still does.’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘I know the feeling.’ Blues Alley was closing and they wanted to clear up. We drained our glasses and walked out into the Georgetown air, which was warm and humid in the late summer heat.

‘I need to get a cab,’ she said. ‘I gave my adult supervision the night off.’

‘I’ll walk you back …’

‘There’s no need … oh, ‘kay, what the hell, a walk will clear my head.’ She laughed and took my arm. ‘I need it to be clear. It’s what I’m good at. Newspapers say I’m a Vulcan, ‘parently.’

We turned right on M. It was about a mile to the Watergate building. It must have been one o’clock in the morning. Washington is an early town, except for the tourists. The streets were empty.

‘I talk to no one about my private life,’ Kristina told me as we walked, raising an eyebrow as if the idea startled her. ‘And now I have talked to you, Ambassador Alex Price. It’s weird.’

‘Weird that you trust me?’

‘Yes. Even more weird that I want to.’

Her hair fell a little to one side. I put my hand on her, gently. She did not move away.

‘Sometimes, I just want to hold someone,’ I said softly. ‘To put my arms around a woman and hold on. But I … have something that keeps me back … A fear of failing again.’

We had stopped in the street where M forks towards Pennsylvania Avenue. Kristina looked at me and I felt her hand grasp mine with a quiet desperation.

‘Me too,’ she said, squeezing hard. ‘Me too.’

Her fingers were small, but her touch made my heart pump hard. We stared into each other’s eyes and said nothing, did nothing.

‘Maybe I made a mistake about Steve.’

‘You mean you’d prefer to be the wife of a history professor in California than to work in the White House?’

She laughed. We were still holding hands.

‘Maybe I’d prefer to be the wife of a history professor than to work with Bobby Black.’

She laughed again and kissed me suddenly on the lips, just a peck.

‘I guess not,’ she said.

We stopped holding hands and walked on, briskly. We started to talk about business, once more about what we could do about Bobby Black, and then about the problems Carr was having with Speaker Furedi and the Democrats in Congress, but I remember the grasping of our hands and that peck on the lips as one of the most erotic encounters of my life. We reached the Watergate.

‘I’d invite you up but …’

‘No,’ I protested, taking the hint. ‘I have to get back.’

‘Early start.’

‘Yes, always an early start. Sleep is for cissies.’

‘We should do this again,’ she said. I nodded.

‘Pursue our secret jazz vice together.’

‘S a deal.’

‘Deal.’

We stood silently again for a moment by the doorway to the Watergate, knowing that something important had passed between us but not fully understanding what it was. She put her arm again on mine and it was as if I had been connected to some kind of energy source. I wanted to kiss her properly, but I stopped myself from trying. It was impossible, I decided. Don’t even think about it.

‘Thank you for the drinks,’ she said as I kissed her on both cheeks.

‘Thank you for our conversation,’ I replied. ‘I … really like your company.’

I felt like an adolescent.

‘Me too.’

I watched her hit the keypad on the building and fumble in her bag for keys. When she was on the far side of the glass she turned and gave me a sad little wave, and a smile. Don’t even think about it, I repeated to myself several times in my head. I decided I would walk the mile and a half back to the embassy.

Don’t even think about it, I told myself with every stride.

Don’t even think about it. Don’t even think about it.

But that meant that I was thinking about it. I could not stop thinking about it.

I walked fast, to clear my head. Plenty of cabs tooted but I let them pass, until I reached the Great House and my bed just after two in the morning, which is around 7 a.m. British time. Just as I was ready to switch off the lights, my secure phone rang. At least by now I was sober. It was Andy Carnwath, the PM’s Communications Director.

‘Alex, we have a problem.’

‘I’m listening.’

‘Several problems.’

One problem that I already knew about was that the Prime Minister was scheduled to fly to Washington for an IMF meeting in a couple of weeks time. London told me that my ‘absolutely top priority’ was to secure a one-on-one with President Carr, and it would be regarded as a humiliation for all of us if I failed. In the current mood of anti-British feeling I had not nailed it down yet. I thought that might be the reason for the call. It was something worse.

‘Our security people say it is very important that we all back off on the Khan case. All of us. Immediately. And especially you, Alex. We don’t want Khan mentioned in any way to the Americans; we don’t want him talked about publicly; we want none of this to cloud the Prime Minister’s visit. Most especially we don’t want any more fucking aggro with the Vice-President.’

Andy Carnwath stopped talking.

‘Delighted as I am to hear your voice Andy, why does this require a two a.m. phone call and not an email?’

‘I don’t know all the details,’ Carnwath said, ‘but I do know that Khan is a dirty little fucker. And his family is. It’s complicated, Alex, but I needed to stress it to you in person. Our people are on top of it.’

‘Manila?’ I started to feel very uneasy.

‘No, thank fuck,’ Carnwath sounded relieved. ‘Something else, something slow burning and, according to our people, something even worse than Manila–if you can believe that.’ I could believe anything. ‘Khan’s relatives are on the Watch List. The PM’s been told that being too robust in the defence of Muhammad Asif Khan will blow back and haunt him. So, back off–but, here’s the thing, under no circumstances must you tell the Americans why you are backing off. You got that, Alex?’

‘Of course.’

The ‘Watch List’ was the Security Service list of people thought close enough to staging a terrorist attack to demand up to twenty-four-hour-a-day surveillance.

‘And one other thing I need to tell you,’ Andy said. ‘Brother Yank has been asking questions about you. You’ll hear it from the embassy security people. Discreet approaches from the US Secret Service to our people to check and make available all your security clearances and background.’

‘Oh, fuck,’ I said. And then, despite myself, I smiled. Maybe Kristina was checking me out. And then I stopped smiling. Maybe someone else was checking us both out.

‘Any reason we should be worried, Alex?’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘Goodnight then, Alex. Sorry to wake you, but I’m heading to Berlin right now with Fraser for the Euro-fucking-bollocks, and you can see why this would not keep.’

‘Yes, of course. Goodnight, Andy.’

I was completely sober now, and unable to sleep. I lay and looked at the ceiling, thinking about the implications of the Khan case, and about whether Kristina might help me out of a jam by fixing the one-on-one meeting between Davis and Carr that Downing Street so desperately wanted. I finally fell asleep. As I did so I dreamed about Kristina’s hair brushing my face.

As we were eventually to find out following the publicity over the Heathrow conspiracy trials, the British Security Service, MI5, really was on to something with Muhammad Asif Khan. A cousin of his, Hasina Khan Iqbal, had been flagged up as a security risk after she applied for a job at Heathrow Airport. MI5 started looking at Hasina and then at other members of the family, including her older brother, Shawfiq. It turned out that Shawfiq already had a file fat enough to ensure that the whole family was put on the Watch programme. The Iqbals’ father was dead, but the brother and sister, mother and maternal grandmother lived in Hounslow in west London. Shawfiq–and this interested our security people a great deal–chose to go out of his way to attend a mosque in Slough that was well known for the extremism of some of its members. For her part, Hasina, as is obvious from the newspaper pictures during the trial, is a strikingly statuesque woman. At the time I was tipped off by Andy Carnwath about the Khan family, Hasina would have been twenty years old. In the newspaper pictures her face is always set off by a black hejab and abaya. By her own later account to counter-terrorism police officers, it was shortly after the disappearance of Muhammad Asif Khan, and the Carr administration talk about vengeance against the perpetrators of the Manila bombing, that Shawfiq instructed Hasina to get a job at Heathrow Airport, Terminal One. Shawfiq was now head of the family and Hasina did as she was told. She applied to a confectionery and newspaper chain, but was told the only job vacancies were in Terminal Five.

‘Go along for interview anyway,’ Shawfiq instructed. ‘Take the job. You can get a transfer later.’

On the day of the interview, a Saturday, the watchers recorded that Hasina Khan Iqbal appeared to have dressed with special care. She had put on her dark kohl eyeliner and a hint of make-up, repeatedly making sure that not a single stray hair emerged from her tight-fitting black headscarf. Shawfiq was filmed by the watchers as he drove her from the family home in Hounslow to Hatton Cross Tube station. Hasina caught the Piccadilly Line to Heathrow. The newspaper store manager offered Hasina a job in Terminal Five immediately. The police reports showed that later he claimed he had had one minor reservation. Looking at her CV it was obvious that Hasina Khan Iqbal was overqualified for the position of shop assistant.

‘You could go to university,’ the store manager had said.

Hasina had replied that her family did not want her to study any more and that they needed the money. Shift work was ideal, she said, because it enabled her to look after her elderly grandmother. She might go to university ‘sometime’, she said, if the family agreed. It did not seem much of a big deal.

After he dropped Hasina at the Tube station, the watchers followed Shawfiq Iqbal to Twickenham. He was filmed parking his dark blue Subaru near Harlequins rugby ground, known as ‘The Stoop’, a place he was to return to repeatedly over the next year or so as the Heathrow Airport bomb plot developed. The Stoop lies about half a mile from Twickenham. Shawfiq walked with the crowds streaming along the pavement towards the big game, the Heineken Cup Final, the biggest club rugby event in Europe. Shawfiq had bought a ticket to see London Wasps play Toulouse. In his martyrdom video, Shawfiq explained that he felt weird in the rugby ground, completely foreign. He was uninterested in sport, had never seen a rugby game before, and the ticket for the West Stand was expensive, which he resented.

‘Rugby’, Shawfiq declared aggressively, waving his hands in the martyrdom video, ‘is not a game played by people like me or for people like me.’

He quoted something he had read in a book, a quote attributed to the historian Philip Toynbee. Toynbee was supposed to have said that blowing up the West Stand at Twickenham would set back the cause of English fascism by decades. Shawfiq laughed on the martyrdom video as he jabbed his fingers towards the camera in accusation.

‘When you mess with the Muslims,’ he said, bouncing jauntily at the camera, ‘the Muslims come and mess with you.’

On that day of the Heineken Cup Final, Shawfiq Iqbal was recorded on surveillance cameras and by the watchers walking around inside the ground, taking photographs on a digital camera. Crowds in their tens of thousands streamed towards their seats. The pictures show that Shawfiq photographed the fans drinking beer. He walked around at various levels inside the stadium, photographing the underside of the West Stand and the reinforced concrete pillars on which it stood. At one point he filmed a short movie. He asked a couple of Wasps fans in their yellow-and-black hooped shirts how many people were inside Twickenham at maximum capacity. One fan, with a pint of Guinness in his hand, mugged for the camera as he said it was ‘about eighty thousand.’

‘Eighteen thousand?’

‘No, EIGHTY thousand,’ the fan repeated. ‘Eight-zero.’

‘Wow,’ Shawfiq said, genuinely impressed. He had no idea what was normal for an international rugby match, but, as he said in his emails to Waheed, Umar, and the other conspirators: Eighty thousand is twenty-five times as many as died on 11 September.

‘Eighty thousand,’ you can hear Shawfiq repeat on the camera footage, as if he cannot quite believe it. ‘Wow.’

Shawfiq shot pictures of the bars, souvenir, and programme stands, the hamburger and pie stalls. He confessed in the emails to Waheed and Umar that he had never seen anything like it. When the teams ran out just before kick off he was in his seat. He noted in one email that there were more non-white people among the thirty players on the pitch than among the 80,000 people in the ground. It was all-ticket, all-white; no Asian fans that he could see, anywhere.

‘Where are the Muslims?’ he asked in the email. ‘Where are the Muslims? Muslim Free Zone!’

Shawfiq watched only part of the game. He found the play confusing, brutal, incomprehensible, typical of the worst of Western culture. On that I agree with Shawfiq. Rugby is organized violence broken up with committee meetings. The security cameras and the watchers recorded that he left the ground during the first half after around thirty minutes of play.

Before he did so he was filmed looking up to the sky and watching the long, slow descent of a passenger aircraft towards Heathrow Airport, a few miles away to the west. It was, he wrote in an email to Waheed, an extraordinary sight. Three hundred tons of metal, flying at 250 miles an hour, hanging as if suspended in the air. The possibilities, he decided, were incredible. Shawfiq left the ground and returned to his Subaru near The Stoop. The vehicle by that time had been fitted with listening devices and cameras, and so was the family home. The watchers at first used a white van that they moved near the house; later they rented a small apartment nearby for the months of surveillance that followed as the conspiracy unfolded.

As he drove away from The Stoop, Shawfiq called Hasina on her mobile phone. I suppose he must have been wondering how she had got on in her job interview, but Hasina’s mobile was switched off. Then he switched on the radio to the Five Live commentary which called the Wasps-Toulouse Twickenham game a ‘real thriller’. After a few minutes he turned the radio off and played a CD of a man singing verses–sura–from the Koran. When he arrived home in Hounslow half an hour later, Shawfiq Iqbal spent that evening sending JPEGs of the pictures he had taken to a number of email addresses in different parts of the United Kingdom, with a few annotations and a brief commentary. He prayed. He checked his maps of Heathrow and Twickenham, and then smoked half a dozen cigarettes, lost in thought. Some time later that night his mother told him that Hasina had indeed got the job. She would start work at Heathrow Terminal Five the following week.

That night Hasina took off her make-up and sat by the mirror in her bedroom, brushing her long black hair. In her later statements to police she said that she tried to read a book while lying on her bed, but could not settle. When police raided the house just over a year later they found the book still by her bedside. The novel, White Teeth by Zadie Smith, a story about race relations in multicultural England, was still unfinished. Hasina said from the moment she got the job at Heathrow she could not concentrate on reading, and instead kept wondering why the manager in the shop where she was to work had asked her about her plans for the future and university. At that time, Hasina told the police, she did not know exactly what her brother was planning, but she knew enough to recognize that the future was like a foreign country, which she was not planning to visit. She too prayed before she went to bed.

SEVEN

Details of ‘The Spartacus Solution’ were not leaked, as Kristina and I had feared. They were publicly announced, boasted about by Bobby Black at a news conference two days before the Prime Minister’s visit to Washington. It was as if he had taken a brick and thrown it into a calm pond. I sat at my desk in the embassy watching the Spartacus news conference–as it came to be called–on television, open-mouthed. It began normally, as the regular daily White House press briefing, introduced by the Communications Director Sandy McAuley, who said the Vice-President had a short statement to make. There would be a press handout and the Vice-President would then take questions. An aide passed around a two-page document which turned out to be an executive summary of ‘The Spartacus Solution’ pamphlet that Bobby Black had given me in confidence at the start of the Carr administration.

The news conference led all the TV and radio bulletins, and would ensure that Bobby Black made the cover of Time Magazine, Newsweek, The Economist, Der Spiegel, and the front pages of the main European and American newspapers. He delivered a short statement on the need to meet terror with ‘appropriate severity’, and then called for questions. The BBC’s White House correspondent asked whether–in the light of the Vice-President’s comments about Spartacus–it was pointless the Prime Minister raising the issue of the alleged torture of Muhammad Asif Khan on his visit to the American capital. Bobby Black offered a lopsided grin.

‘My good friend the Prime Minister of Great Britain is welcome to raise any issue with us,’ he said. ‘Any issue at all. That is what friends do. Doesn’t mean to say we are going to agree.’ Then he started to repeat the kind of things he had told Fraser Davis at that disastrous meeting at Chequers the previous year. He went through his ‘Neutrality Is Immoral’ speech, coupled with the instruction that America’s allies were all expected to help win the ‘War on Terror’.

‘Be clear: if you are in the business of harming American citizens, or of helping those who do, you will pay a price and the price could be your life.’

The declassified version of ‘The Spartacus Solution’ that was handed round to White House journalists argued that the United States could never completely defeat all its enemies in the War on Terror, but it did not have to. What America had to do, General Shultz argued in his essay, was to punish to the utmost those terrorists it could catch, without mercy, even at the risk of being thought cruel and imperialist.

The handout included what I thought was the essay’s most controversial conclusion, in full.

The Romans in the Roman Republic and later in the Empire knew they could never be sure to deter a slave rebellion. There was always the chance that somewhere, someone would rise up violently against his master. But when it happened on a grand scale under Spartacus, each of the captured rebellious slaves was crucified on the roads around Rome, their bodies left to rot and be feasted upon by vermin. In the twenty-first century, Roman methods are inappropriate, but Roman psychology is useful. There will always be rebellions, always troublemakers, always potential suicide bombers. The Spartacus Solution will ensure that terrorists are kept alive long enough to confess, to betray their comrades, and pay the full penalty. The United States in the twenty-first century must be a good friend. We must also be a ruthless and implacable enemy.

One other conclusion was also made public:

The more hostile media we receive for perceived human-rights abuses, the more discriminate our deterrence and the more potent the Spartacus Solution. Hostile media works for us. It is an effective communications tool. The Romans understood it best: Fear works.

‘But just talking of a Spartacus Solution, Mr Vice-President,’ one of the White House reporters asked, waving the extracts in her hand, ‘isn’t that inflammatory? Crucifying terrorists on the road to Rome? Is that seriously going to be American policy in the twenty-first century?’

‘You are, with respect, confusing a metaphor with a policy,’ Vice-President Black retorted. ‘What is inflammatory is blowing up American airliners on takeoff from Manila.’

Another British reporter, Jack Rothstein from The Times, stood up. I liked Rothstein and had in the past briefed him about our side of the rows over torture and Muhammad Asif Khan.

‘Mr Vice-President, diplomatic sources say this kind of talk is not in the best traditions of the United States. Abraham Lincoln …’

‘And I have explained to “diplomatic sources” that Abraham Lincoln did not have to deal with your British suicide bombers,’ Bobby Black interrupted scornfully.

‘We will not rest until all the people attacking us are in a place where they can no longer do any harm. We will do what it takes. Abraham Lincoln would understand that, even if a few diplomats in striped pants don’t get it.’

Black went on the offensive. He said that since 9/11 you were ‘either with the United States or you were against it. There just is no middle way. There is no split-the-difference between Right and Wrong.’

‘Aren’t things a bit more complicated in the real world than simply black or white?’ a woman from CBS suggested.

‘On the contrary: since Manila, there is no such colour as grey,’ Bobby Black shot back. ‘International leaders, diplomats, journalists who see the world in terms of grey are deluding themselves, or, worse, they are deluding the people who elected them–or, in the case of some TV news anchors, they are deluding the people who watch their news programmes.’

I listened to the interview with sinking heart. My job is a study in shades of grey. I sent Kristina a text message: ‘You watching this?’ She did not text back. A couple of hours later, FOX News quoted an unnamed ‘American official’ describing me personally as ‘a leading appeaser of terror’ for my intervention in the Khan case, and saying it was ‘not expected’ that Prime Minister Fraser Davis would ‘waste time during his upcoming Washington visit’ arguing on behalf of the rights of a terrorist, ‘unlike Ambassador Alex Price.’ We started to take hostile calls at the embassy. The people at FOX News gave out our number on the air, which meant that every right-wing wacko with access to a telephone dialled in to shout abuse at what one caller described as the ‘pansy-assed British faggots.’ Ironic, you might think, given that at that very point I was no longer pressing Khan’s case at all.

Late that night, Kristina called me on my mobile. ‘I guess you saw it?’ she said.

‘Oh, yes.’

‘What did you think?’

‘Any statement which pisses off your friends and encourages your enemies is not a good idea.’

‘That good, uh?’ Kristina said.

‘Are you coming to the dinner for the Prime Minister?’ I wondered. I was hosting the event at the ambassador’s residence.

‘Yes.’

‘Will you be my partner for the evening?’

Kristina thought for a moment.

‘Of course.’

Then she rang off.

dThe day before the Prime Minister was due to arrive in Washington, I had yet another run-in with Bobby Black. It was becoming increasingly difficult to deal with him, even though I had managed to ensure–thanks to some deft footwork from Kristina–that Fraser Davis would indeed sit down with President Carr for his allotted fifteen minutes of ‘special relationship’ face-time. I had promised that Davis would not raise the Khan case. Johnny Lee Ironside called me.

‘I see you got your man in,’ he laughed. ‘Despite the best efforts of me and my man to keep him out.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I replied.

‘You and me need a serious talk, Alex,’ he said.

‘You coming to the dinner for the Prime Minister? It’s over at ten. Stay behind afterwards and have a few beers with me. We need to do something to make all this better before it turns into a festering sore.’

‘Talking ‘bout festering sores,’ he said, ‘the Vice-President wants to see you again. Wants to whup your English ass.’

This time it was about Britain’s reluctance to provide locations for part of the anti-ballistic missile shield the newspapers call ‘Star Wars’. Fraser Davis had been back-pedalling. The Poles and Czechs had been threatened with Russian nuclear obliteration for their part in playing host to the American radar network, and there were political problems too. As soon as the Spartacus Solution news conference ended, you could feel the wave of unpopularity towards Carr and Black hit Britain, Europe, and most American allies.

It was profoundly dispiriting. Carnwath told me it was starting to rival the way the United States was seen during the Bush/Cheney administration at their worst. Fraser Davis could read opinion polls. He did not like the new wave of anti-Americanism. None of us did. But he also knew he had to be careful. Carnwath told me that at all costs Fraser wanted to avoid what he called ‘the poodle factor’–being seen to jump to every American demand; being thought of as the new Tony Blair. On the way to the White House, I skimmed through my briefing papers on missile defence in the back of the Rolls. This time it was just Bobby Black, Johnny Lee, the British military attaché Lee Crieff, and me. No Kristina. As she feared, she had been sidelined in matters that she should have played a part in.

Bobby Black sat at his desk and scowled. He delivered a terse lecture on the ‘need for urgency in the creation of the missile shield, and the need to live up to commitments.’ When he finished talking, I prepared to argue back, saying that we accepted the urgency but the British people were not persuaded about the nature of the threat requiring a space-based antimissile system.

‘There is a clear danger to Britain,’ I said, ‘and no clear benefit.’

It would always be cheaper for the Russians to build more missiles than it ever would be for the Americans to keep increasing the power of the supposed missile shield–even assuming that it did work. Our scientists said that, so far, it didn’t.

Suddenly Bobby Black snapped: ‘Thanks, Ambassador.’

‘B-but …’

Then he said, ‘Goodbye.’

That was it. Vice had spoken. I was ushered out by Johnny Lee who said, ‘We’ll talk after the dinner.’ He said it in a whisper. Later that evening, I read on the wire services that the White House had briefed journalists that ‘the British have been consulted’ about Strategic Missile Defence and that the British had ‘agreed with the Carr administration that they would make radar early warning facilities fully available in the United Kingdom in a timely manner.’

It was nice that he told us.

Woof, woof.

By the time of Fraser Davis’s visit, Bobby Black was so obviously the driving force in the White House that late- night comedians were joking that it was Theo Carr who was ‘one heartbeat away’ from the presidency of the United States, and I decided I needed to try to get Black and Davis together again, under tight supervision. James Byrne, in one of his Washington Post columns, said Black had become ‘like one of the Dementors in a Harry Potter novel–he sucks the souls from those who meet him’, and that he represented the Carr administration’s ‘Dark Side’.

The day after our discussion about Star Wars, Prime Minister Fraser Davis arrived in Washington for his forty-eight-hour visit. He met President Carr without a hitch, and then on the last evening the Vice-President and his wife Susan were guests of honour at my dinner at the embassy. Much thought from Johnny Lee and me went into the choreography of the evening. Davis and Black were never to be allowed to meet each other without significant adult supervision. We brought them together at the cocktail party, where they stood awkwardly side by side and allowed a few photographs to be taken alongside one of the other guests, the comedian Mike Myers. They smiled at each other, shook hands, said nothing. Then, just as we moved into dinner, Bobby Black turned to Fraser Davis.

‘Now is the time,’ he said softly. There was such a hubbub of people moving into the dining room that I barely heard the words.

‘The time for what?’ the Prime Minister smiled affably.

‘Now is the time for you to crack down on that group of your citizens who are the seedbed for terrorism. These Pakistani people have to be dealt with.’

To his credit, Fraser Davis remained calm. ‘If you mean British citizens of Pakistani origin, then they are of course British and need to be treated with equal—’

Before he could finish, Bobby Black said, ‘We are actively considering making all of these Pakistani–British people apply in person to the US embassy in London should they ever wish to get on a plane to this country. And if you do not help us in this, Prime Minister, we may take the same steps with all British citizens.’

‘There is only one class of British citizen, Vice-President Black,’ Davis responded. ‘You must do what you need to do, but you must treat all of our citizens alike, whatever their background.’

‘If that’s the way you want it,’ Bobby Black scowled and walked in to dinner, shepherded by Johnny Lee Ironside. I led the Prime Minister to his seat and took a deep breath. At least they had not actively come to blows. At the end of the dinner I made a short speech about the importance of British-American friendship in a dangerous world, about the fact that our values and interests were so often the same. I ended by trying to tease the Vice-President in a sneighbourly way. As part of the bad publicity about me being supposedly a ‘friend of terrorists’, someone had leaked my fear of flying in helicopters to various news outlets. Presumably more evidence of my role as a pansy-assed Brit. The Washington Post printed a gossipy piece suggesting that the British diplomat who was not frightened to stand up to the wrath of Vice-President Bobby Black over Muhammad Asif Khan was nevertheless terrified of a heavier-than-air machine. Towards the end of my speech I joked about it.

‘If you read the papers last week, you will know that I have a thing about helicopters. I confess that they are my personal hell–especially the ones that bring my esteemed neighbour Vice-President Black to and from official engagements.’

There was an intake of breath around the table as people began to calculate whether the British Ambassador was about to have a go at Vice in the company of the British Prime Minister. I should explain that the Vice-President and I really were neighbours. The ambassador’s residence is next door to the US Naval Observatory, which is the official vice-presidential residence. This accident of geography did not mean we were the kind of neighbours who drop in for coffee or climb over the fence to borrow a lawnmower or a cup of sugar. If you go on to Google Earth and zoom in on Massachusetts Avenue on the satellite photographs, you will see that–uniquely for Washington–Bobby Black’s home in the Naval Observatory is blanked out, pixelated. The White House isn’t. You can see it clearly. You can even look at some major US military facilities around the world; but one of the few places where Google Earth cannot shine is Bobby Black’s official home, next door to my own home, which, of course, Google Earth does show in every last detail, almost down to the rose bushes and fireflies in the garden.

‘Even though our two nations do not agree on the Kyoto Treaty on carbon emissions, Mr Vice-President,’ I smiled, full of diplomatic good cheer, ‘may I respectfully suggest that the small sacrifice of switching off the helicopter engines when the Chinooks sit idling on your lawn would signal we are more in harmony on global warming than people think—’ I paused for effect–‘as well as being good neighbours and friends, of course, with the heli-phobe next door.’

There was much laughter and then applause. Susan Black threw her head back and hooted with amusement in that easy Montana way of hers. So did the Prime Minister. Mike Myers laughed too, and then said ‘Groovy, Baby,’ in his best Austin Powers accent, so everyone got the joke. I stared over at Bobby Black, who was sitting opposite Mike Myers. His lopsided grin was fixed on his face. He turned his spoon towards his tiramisu dessert, did not look at me, and said nothing. My own tiramisu tasted of sulphur. There was to be no change in the pattern of helicopter emissions over the next year.

When the guests left at ten o’clock, the hour that most Washington events finish, I said goodbye to the Vice-President and Prime Minister, and had a few words with Kristina. Then Johnny Lee Ironside and I headed outside for a beer on the porch. The night was still warm, though we were heading towards autumn. The last moths of the year danced around the garden lights.

‘Clusterfuck,’ he replied, using one of his favourite words.

‘Unbelievable. Does he mean it about making British citizens of Pakistani origin apply for special visas?’

‘First I heard of it,’ Johnny Lee said, sucking on a bottle of Sam Adams beer. ‘Doesn’t mean to say it won’t happen.’

We began talking about the eccentric ways of those we were paid to serve.

‘I mean, Davis and Black,’ Johnny Lee went on, ‘two men, great on their own, who just can’t stand each other. You know what the Vice-President said to me the other day?

He said the British are even more of a pain in the ass than the French. You hear me? How does anyone handle that?’

I swallowed a few mouthfuls of beer and asked Johnny Lee whether he thought the Vice-President of the United States and the British Prime Minister–men who spend their whole adult lives seeking the highest levels of power and then obtain it–were truly different from the rest of us.

‘You bet,’ Johnny Lee said, pulling the beer bottle from his mouth. ‘Different as spare ribs from a spare tyre.’

‘But how come?’ I persisted. ‘Do they start different or do they become that way because of the job?’

‘The rich are different from you and me,’ Johnny Lee suggested, ‘because they have more money. Presidents and Prime Ministers are different from you and me, because they have more—’

‘Juice,’ I said. ‘They have more juice.’

‘Hang-ups,’ Johnny Lee contradicted, with a laugh. He made a sign with his finger at the side of his head to suggest mental illness. ‘More psychoses. Frickin’ nut jobs. All of them.’

‘Okay, nut jobs,’ I agreed. ‘But does power attract nut jobs, or does it create them?’

‘Hmmm, we’re getting in deep here, brother,’ Johnny Lee nodded vigorously, grabbing yet another beer. ‘For my money, they start off fucking weird. They might get weirder, sure. But they always start off fucking weird. You never really know them, you know?’

I disagreed. After years of watching government ministers close up, members of Parliament, prime ministers, Congressmen and presidents, I had concluded that normal people do want to serve their country, but they became peculiar when they achieved power.

‘I have never met an evil politician,’ I said, ‘but I have met plenty who are delusional. The chief delusion is that they need to stay in power otherwise the country will go to hell.’

Johnny Lee laughed.

‘In this town,’ he gestured with the beer-bottle neck towards the lights of Washington DC, ‘politics attracts freaks just like your light here attracts bugs. Normal folks have lives. Abnormal folks have political ambitions. Normal folks go to bars. Abnormal folks go to political meetings. My mama always told me politics is just show business for ugly people.’

‘Then your mama was as cynical as you are,’ I scolded him. ‘Plenty of decent people enter public service, but it twists them inside out. It’s like living in a fishbowl or a cocoon.’

Now it definitely was the beer talking. It was near midnight and I was getting drunk. I poured us two fingers of Jack Daniels over ice.

‘Fishy-bowl? Co-coon? Ambassador Price, I do believe you are talking what we Washington Tribesmen call bullshit.’

‘No, no, hear me out,’ I protested, passing him the whisky. ‘Hear me out. A fishbowl because people in power have no privacy any more. None. Everything Vice-President Black or President Carr or Prime Minister Davis says or does, is written down, photographed, recorded, and dissected. They got blamed for the great food they ate at the IMF banquet, right? Because half the world is going hungry. But if Davis or Carr refused to eat the fancy food set in front of them, they’d get blamed for lousy gesture politics, a stunt that makes no difference to the poor. Politicians can’t win, Johnny Lee. The press asked President Reagan about a cancerous polyp in his colon, for God’s sake.’

Johnny Lee took a sip of the Jack Daniels. ‘United States media–finest in world,’ he responded, jabbing the whisky glass at me. ‘Our journalists have a goddamn constitutional right to peer up the president’s ass.’

A doctor or psychologist would say that Johnny Lee and I were engaged in ‘relief drinking’ as a way of dealing with stress. Like me, Johnny Lee was in theory married but in practice separated. The rumour was that his wife, Carly, had remained in Charleston to pursue her career as a lawyer, but mostly–or so I was told–to pursue her golf instructor, her tennis coach, her pool boy, and various other diversions. Johnny Lee and I never discussed this, or Fiona leaving me. Some things are best left unsaid.

When you are married to the younger sister of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, you cannot afford a scandal. When you are the Chief of Staff to the Vice-President of the United States, you cannot get a divorce until it is politically acceptable to get one. The two of us argued in good-humoured drunkenness until Johnny Lee got up to leave. I walked him to where his car and driver were waiting. He burped.

‘So what we gonna do, Alex? We can’t go on trying to keep your man and mine apart. And we can’t get them together without worrying about it coming to a fistfight. So what we going to do?’

Suddenly, standing unsteadily in the embassy driveway, I explained an idea I had been turning over in some dull recess of my brain. Johnny Lee listened and said it sounded like a ‘neat idea’. He burped again and told me we should sleep on it and talk in the morning. We said goodbye and I sat on the porch for another half-hour, having one more beer and one more whisky, thinking through the idea. Early the following day, when I still had a pounding head and a bad stomach, Johnny Lee Ironside called and said he had been thinking over my idea, and we should try to make it work. I had suggested–though it would take months to organize–that we should invite Vice-President Bobby Black to Scotland for a private visit, to shoot grouse in the Highlands with members of the British royal family. He could explore his roots, and along the way meet the Queen and key members of the British government, including the Prime Minister. He and Fraser Davis would be told that mutual self-interest meant they had to kiss and make up. Had to. Imperative. They would be instructed to joke about their rough words at Chequers and to insist that, despite the occasional differences, they were truly the best of friends.

‘Let’s do it,’ Johnny Lee said. And so we did.

EIGHT

Plans involving heads of state, kings, queens, presidents, vicepresidents and prime ministers are like plans involving oil tankers. They take a long time to execute. The idea of bringing Bobby Black over for a kiss-and-make-up trip to the Scottish Highlands took a while to ferment, and then required agreement from everyone you can think of: the Office of the Vice-President, the White House, the State Department, Downing Street, the Foreign Office, and Buckingham Palace.

The date was eventually set for the October of the Carr administration’s second year, two weeks before the mid-term elections when most of Congress is up for re-election. It seemed a long way in the future, but just the fact of the acceptance by Bobby Black helped improve relations between London and Washington. The Vice-President was interested. Enthusiastic. He asked Johnny Lee to get him books on grouse shooting. He knew that the birds fly at speeds of up to eighty miles an hour and he wanted to prepare himself as best he could. He commissioned family research from a genealogy company and instructed Johnny Lee that he needed to visit churches in the Aberdeenshire area to find graves of his ancestors. Perhaps most importantly, the plan to require British citizens of Pakistani origin to apply for special visas if they wanted to travel to the United States was quietly dropped.

‘At least for now,’ Johnny Lee Ironside told me. For me, ‘for now’ was good enough.

Susan Fein Black’s desire for the trip also helped. She quickly realized that the Queen was genuinely interested in horses and called me one evening to ask if Her Majesty would like to know about Mrs Black’s own rare-breeds programme for horses on her ranch in Montana. I said I would find out. It is one of the curiosities of the world that the more republican the country, the more fascinated the citizens are about the British royal family. After all their exertions to get rid of the monarchy, you might have thought Americans would be different, but they are not. Susan Black sounded unbelievably girlish on the phone.

The plans for the trip to Scotland started to develop. The Blacks were to go shooting, they were to have tea with the Queen–informal–and then come to a dinner–formal–with Her Majesty, other members of the royal family, and the Prime Minister. Then Davis and Black were to spend a whole day together trying to work through all their differences. Well, as I say, that was the plan.

The biggest thaw in US–UK relations came when I heard from the Queen’s Private Secretary, Sir Hamish Martin, that the Queen would be delighted–(‘absolutely delighted, Alex,’)–to hear about the Montana rare-breeds programme, and Her Majesty wondered if, instead of joining her husband on the shoot, Mrs Black would care to visit a horse-breeding bloodstock facility near Balmoral in the company of the Queen herself.

(‘Very, very informal,’ Sir Hamish whispered to me.)

When I phoned the Naval Observatory to relay this request, a secretary passed me over to Susan Black in person, and I could again feel the excitement in her voice. I imagined her turning cartwheels across the floor. A little royal stardust had been sprinkled on the visit. Even the dark heart of the Vice-President began to melt under its influence.

Over the next months, as I spent more and more time organizing these few days in Scotland, things with Kristina changed completely. From the moment Fiona had left me I had been busy and lonely, although the busy part usually helped me forget about the lonely part. I soon realized that, at every stage, seeing Kristina seemed to help. Perhaps it was that my friends and family were all in London, hers all in California. Whatever the reason, we became closer and closer. She confided in me how she continually felt sidelined. She had been specifically forbidden by Bobby Black from playing any part in his National Energy Security Taskforce, even though it dealt with areas–the Arab world and Iran, mostly–in which Kristina spoke the main language and had special experience.

‘It’s like I’m the National Security Wife,’ she told me bitterly, biting energetically at a bagel with cream cheese at one of our regular breakfasts. ‘I get allowed to dress up and look good, but when it comes to anything important, the men go talk somewhere else. I need to find a way around this.’

We both knew there was no way, not unless Kristina was prepared to take on Bobby Black directly. But that would be a battle she was destined to lose.

‘Can’t the President…?’ I wondered.

‘He doesn’t want to lose his impeachment insurance,’ Kristina joked. She was helping herself to scrambled eggs. I said I didn’t understand. She rolled her eyes in mock exasperation.

‘We have a Democratic Congress, Alex,’ she explained, her eyebrow arching skyward, ‘you with me so far? The Democrats are hoping to pick up seats in the mid-terms, big time.’

I nodded. The American political process, to outsiders at least, seems like a series of permanent elections. Presidents are elected every four years, but Congressional elections take place every two years, and in the ‘mid-terms’ all of the House and a third of the Senate is up for re-election.

‘Arlo Luntz says the polls look bad and that Bobby Black is to blame. Vice is very unpopular, Arlo says. A vote-loser. And the Democrats are claiming he was at the heart of the corruption in the Iraq contracts. They say there were kickbacks from Goldcrest and Warburton to the Carr campaign. But even under a flaky liberal like Speaker Betty Furedi, no Democrat will ever impeach President Carr, no matter what he does wrong, if they know he will be succeeded by President Black.’

I must have looked stunned at this impeachment talk. ‘Theo Carr hasn’t done something really bad, has he?’

‘It’s a joke, Alex,’ Kristina laughed, and I felt her hand gently on my arm. She paused for a moment and scowled. ‘Kind of.’

I laughed too, as much at my own inadequacies as at her humour. She poured me a fresh black coffee. I always had gossip to trade, and Kristina usually listened more than she spoke, but that morning it was like some kind of therapy for her to get it all out.

‘Luntz told me he advised the President to make sure Bobby Black goes to Scotland on your shooting trip in the run-up to the mid-terms,’ Kristina told me. ‘Says the further Vice is away from the campaign, the better. I even think Arlo wants the President to drop Bobby Black from his own re-election ticket, but that’s real tricky.’

For me this was all heady stuff. Knowing who was up and who was down at the White House was a key part of my job. I had some gossip of my own to trade.

‘Vice enjoys being thought of as the President’s Dark Side,’ I said. ‘Did you know that?’ Kristina looked at me, stunned. ‘What do you mean, enjoys?’

‘Johnny Lee Ironside told me. We have a few beers from time to time. We talk.’

I had mentioned the Congressional hearings into the Iraq contracts to Johnny Lee. The Vice-President had been described in all kinds of ways, usually beginning with the prefix ‘Un-’–uncooperative, unforthcoming, unreliable, unwilling to appear before the Joint House and Senate Investigative Committee, and then–when he was subpoenaed and had no choice but to appear, he pleaded executive privilege, refusing to say on what basis the contracts had been awarded to Warburton, except that it was a ‘national security matter’. He was declared uncommunicative and unhelpful.

‘That shit makes his goddamn day,’ Johnny Lee laughed. He told me the Vice-President routinely asked his staff to search out any negative comments in newspapers that suggested he represented President Carr’s ‘Dark Side’, so he could have the best ones framed for his Ego Wall. An ‘Ego Wall’ is the wall in the private office of any Washington politician dedicated to the qualifications and citations that mean the most to the Big Political Beast–military honours, photographs showing the Big Beast shaking hands with a past president, a world leader or Hollywood movie star, plus university degrees and military citations.

‘You want to put the Boss in a good mood,’ Johnny Lee Ironside had told me, ‘tell him some pinko Democrat bedwetter like Hurd or Furedi called him a mean SOB: that’ll do it. The sun comes out all over Planet Black.’ Johnny Lee giggled like a schoolboy. ‘Ma-aaan, he Baaa-aaaad!’

Kristina looked at me, fascinated, as if I was reporting on a new species of ape from the African jungle or an alien civilization discovered on a distant planet.

‘Un-fucking-believable,’ was all she said. Then she traded one further important piece of insider gossip. She handed me a draft speech that Vice-President Black was about to deliver at the US Naval College at Annapolis, Maryland, to a class of midshipmen. I pushed my scrambled egg to one side and started to read.

‘The next stage in Spartacus,’ Kristina suggested.

‘All options remain open’, the Vice-President was scheduled to say, ‘when dealing with Iran.’ In case journalists were too stupid to get the point, he added, ‘Including military options. Neutrality on Iran’s nuclear programme is immoral. The programme itself is immoral. It has to be stopped. It is a threat to Israel, to other countries in the region, and to world peace. An Iranian regime determined to acquire nuclear weapons is a nightmare for the entire world. The administration of President Theo Carr will end the nightmare. We will do so by all necessary means.’

‘Oh, fuck,’ I said. ‘All necessary means’ is the phrase diplomats use when they want to threaten a war. ‘We need to tone this down.’

Kristina nodded.

‘He’s getting ahead of where the President is,’ she said. ‘Vice says that unless we are prepared to at least threaten an attack, the Iranians will not take us seriously, and the Israelis will go ahead anyway, with extreme prejudice.’

‘Not necessarily,’ I said. ‘The Israelis would need to fly through Jordanian and Iraqi airspace. If you didn’t want them to do so, they couldn’t.’

Kristina shook her head impatiently. ‘That’s not my point. Once Vice makes public any kind of threat against Iran, we will end up going to war. I know how he operates. He will argue that our credibility is at stake and we have to follow through. It’s like World War One–you have train timetables and you start mobilizing your soldiers and in the end you can’t stop the war even if you want to. But that’s not the worst. The Israelis are letting it be known that the bunker-busters that we supplied them cannot get the job done.’

Bunker-busters are bombs or missiles capable of causing an explosion a long way underground.

‘Exactly,’ I said, ‘which is why negotiations are the only way …’

She interrupted again, very impatiently. ‘Which is why there are those within the Israeli government who are talking about Canned Sunshine.’ My jaw dropped. ‘Canned Sunshine’ is a military expression for a nuclear bomb. ‘They are calling for nuclear pre-emption.’

‘Nuclear pre-emption?’ I blurted out. ‘That’s … that’s like committing suicide because you fear dying. They couldn’t possibly drop a nuke …’ She waved me quiet.

‘Vice says Spartacus applies to states as well as to individuals, and if ever a regime needed to be crucified, it’s the Iranians. He wants to hit them after the mid-terms. Or to get the Israelis to do it.’

‘Oh, fuck,’ I said.

‘And if we do go in, we will call on all possible support from all our allies. Which means you, Alex.’

I didn’t feel like eating breakfast any more. I drank my coffee and left to return to the embassy, where I called Downing Street immediately on the secure line.

‘How do we feel about being sucked into war with Iran?’ I said to Andy Carnwath.

‘What the fuck do you mean, Alex?’

I explained about Canned Sunshine. For once Andy Carnwath could not think of any expletives appropriate to the information.

Later that night, around midnight, I was lying on my bed reading a book, sipping whisky and water and listening to a CD of Charlie Parker. Kristina called me on my private cellphone.

‘You’re up late,’ I said.

‘You got time to talk?’

‘Of course.’

I pushed the book I was reading to one side. It was called Sleepwalking to Hell, a recently published history of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis, written by Kristina’s former lover, the University of California history professor Stephen Haddon. A liberal, I guessed, with a strong libertarian streak. Haddon argued that the transition from a sophisticated and prosperous Weimar democracy to a Nazi dictatorship was not one catastrophic leap. It was a series of little steps.

Any one of these steps might seem sensible by itself because the German people wanted to escape Bolshevism, anarchy, and economic collapse, but taken together they led decent people inexorably towards the Nazis. Haddon wrote in his preface that it could happen again. Terror produced terrified people, and terrified people made bad decisions.

‘Is that jazz?’ Kristina said.

I turned it down.

‘Charlie Parker.’

‘Perfect,’ she said. ‘Just perfect.’

Kristina was on her way home. President Carr and the First Lady, Rosa Carr, had invited her to the private White House movie theatre to watch a film with the Carr family, Bobby Black and his wife Susan, Arlo Luntz, and a couple of Democratic senators that Theo Carr had decided he should get to know better. The senators were on the Armed Services Committee, and Carr was still after more money for the Pentagon budget. It was a huge mark of confidence in Kristina to be invited to share private time with the President, and she was bubbling with enthusiasm. I wasn’t really listening. I had something I had been meaning to say, and that night I said it.

‘Instead of going home, Kristina, why not come here right now. Spend the night with me.’

She giggled. Then the line went quiet.

‘You mean it, Alex?’

‘Yes, I mean it,’ I said. ‘I have meant it for months.’

NINE

The visit of Bobby Black to Scotland took so long to organize I sometimes thought it would never happen. But it did happen, almost exactly two years after he and Prime Minister Davis had their first row at Chequers and just two weeks before the US mid-term elections which, yet again, all the experts, polls, and pundits claimed were going to offer a very sharp rebuke to the Carr administration. In preparation for the shooting trip, Vice-President Black insisted that the visit be kept as private as possible, and that his entourage be as small as possible. I spent hours on the telephone with Andy Carnwath in Downing Street and Sir Hamish Martin at Buckingham Palace fixing exactly who would meet Bobby Black at which point, who would shoot grouse, when he would meet Her Majesty the Queen, when Susan Black would go off to see the horses, and when Fraser Davis would turn up. I also talked repeatedly with Lord Anstruther, who was a Junior Defence Minister in Fraser Davis’s government and whose estate was right next to the royal estate at Balmoral.

Anstruther had agreed to host the visit, though if he had realized exactly what he was in for, he would have told me to get lost. I tried to explain that when the President or Vice-President of the United States moves anywhere, it is rather like a medieval pope moving around Christendom–up to a thousand staff, journalists, hangers-on, advisers of all kinds–but, until Anstruther experienced it, I don’t think he quite understood how big a ‘small entourage’ really was going to be. In the week before the visit I had called the Prime Minister to warn him, yet again, that it must not fail.

‘We cannot afford a repeat of the row at Chequers,’ I said. ‘You and Bobby Black are fated to like one another, whether you want to or not.’

Fraser Davis was very positive. He asked me to go over the arguments he should use with Bobby Black to deflect him from a confrontation with Iran without causing a row, and the kinds of things he should say if the question of special visas for British citizens of Pakistani origin were to be raised.

‘We say it is unfair, unworkable, discriminatory and the twenty-first century equivalent of the Jim Crow laws,’ I said. Then I reminded the PM that the policy details were not significant. What was significant was the tone. The policy would come right as long as he was nice. Very nice.

‘But I’m always nice, Alex,’ Fraser Davis replied, sounding rather hurt. I could imagine his wet, pouty lip. ‘As you well know.’

‘It has taken us months to bring this off.’ I refused to be deflected. ‘We mustn’t blow it. You mustn’t blow it.’

‘Well, it is different now,’ Fraser Davis responded, brushing aside the possibility of failure. ‘It’s not as if he is just some obscure senator. He is representing the American people. I promise you, Ambassador Price, that I will represent the interests of the British people, with every courtesy. Is that good enough for you?’

It was good enough. And so one day in late October it finally happened. Bobby Black’s White House motorcade swept into Lord Anstruther’s great house of Castle Dubh in the Scottish Highlands shortly before eight in the morning for the start of the grouse shoot. Castle Dubh is a massive Victorian pile with false battlements built over Jacobean foundations. From the faux-ramparts you can easily see twenty miles over the Scottish mountains, up into the hills and down to Loch Rowallan and Rowallan village, and even across to the royal estate at Balmoral. As the cars swept into the driveway, the leaves were turning autumnal reds and golds. The air was clear and cool, the skies that morning empty of cloud and full of the sounds of songbirds. The Americans arrived to the roar of a dozen police motorbikes, nine saloon cars, two stretched limousines, plus communications vehicles, and two identical four-by-fours scrunching up on Anstruther’s gravel drive, like a gigantic metal snake uncoiling in front of us.

‘You told me a small entourage,’ Anstruther whispered to me as we stood in front of the house and watched the cars arrive.

‘This is a small entourage,’ I replied. ‘You don’t want to see the full works, believe me.’

Anstruther blinked. I think it began to dawn on him what lay ahead. The Vice-President stepped out, not from one of the limousines as you might expect but, for security reasons, from one of the bulletproof four-by-fours. Anstruther greeted him warmly and invited Bobby Black and Johnny Lee inside for a quick breakfast, while the servants fussed around the Secret Service and other members of the vice-presidential party.

‘I can’t wait to get out on the mountains,’ Bobby Black said, clapping his pudgy hands together and looking genuinely happy.

‘Me too,’ Anstruther agreed with a nod of recognition. ‘Just a quick coffee then.’

The rest of us tried to look pleased. Diplomacy, like politics, requires acting ability. Blair knew it. Clinton knew it. So did Ronald Reagan, obviously. Reagan once said that politics was just like being on the stage–you have a helluva opening, you coast a little, and then you have a helluva close. You meet people you do not like, but you act in whatever way is necessary to win them over. You meet people who despise you, and you bear their hostility with fortitude.

On that day of Bobby Black’s hunting trip, we joked and laughed as we dressed in the shooting gear handed to us by Lord Anstruther: jaggy brown and green tweeds which abraded the skin and chafed the knees. We brought our own walking boots. We looked the part as we sipped coffee and watched the American communications teams set up in one of the large Castle Dubh outhouses, Bolfracks Bothy. Our mood was upbeat. We were doing the best for our countries and we were having fun doing it.

‘My daddy used to say that a man should avoid any enterprise that requires the purchase of new clothes,’ Johnny Lee quipped as he struggled to pull on his tweeds. ‘The old man had a point.’

‘You should pass it on to Arlo Luntz,’ I said. ‘Sounds like one of his pieces of wisdom.’

‘Arlo came out with a knockout phrase the other day,’ Johnny Lee smiled. ‘He said, “Sincerity in public life is the most important political virtue. Fake that, and you got it made.” Guy’s a freaking genius, you ask me.’

In a good mood of banter and fun we shouldered our day-hike rucksacks filled with food, water, and small metal flasks of whisky, then we strode out to the front of Castle Dubh and climbed into a fleet of freshly washed Land Rovers arranged by Anstruther. Secret Service and British police teams had spent the previous forty-eight hours checking the grounds, the neighbouring glens, and the mountainside as best they could. The presence of armed protection officers was to be kept to a discreet minimum and only on the perimeter of the shoot, for fear of scaring away the whole point of the trip, the grouse themselves. In our mood of jollity we behaved as if it were a Boys’ Own adventure, on which nothing could possibly go wrong. Anstruther had winked when he handed the whisky flask to me.

‘Salvation from Speyside,’ he said.

We parked the Land Rovers at the side of a muddy track and started hiking up the mountain as the sun split through a clear blue Highland sky. It was cold, with the edge of the moon visible over the hills, like a poster from the Scottish Tourist Board, and I was nervous. The Queen, the Vice-President, the Prime Minister, at least two other government ministers, staff from Number Ten, the Foreign Office, and the Office of the Vice-President were all being brought together over the next forty-eight hours in the Scottish wilderness, thanks to what Downing Street was calling Alex Price’s ‘great idea’. I wasn’t sure what would come of it, but I hoped for a footnote in the history books, if I was lucky, and a few headlines for my own Ego Wall. The Balmoral Understanding. The Aberdeenshire Entente. The Scottish Special Relationship. Something had come of it already.

In the thaw leading up to the trip, the Americans had announced that Muhammad Asif Khan, the British detainee we had all made so much of a fuss about, was to be released. The release of Khan was privately regarded as very useful by the British security service, MI5. They wanted him out of jail so they could watch him. They needed to know if he was indeed connected to what they were now convinced was a major conspiracy that included his cousins, a plot that was leading towards what Andy Carnwath told me was an imminent attack involving Heathrow Airport.

‘Imminent?’

‘Within the next month or so,’ he responded. ‘That’s what I’m told. That’s all I know.’

‘Not during Bobby Black’s visit?’

‘Not during the Vice-President’s fucking visit,’ Carnwath replied, exasperated, ‘as far as we know, Alex. Though I will obviously have to get bin Laden on the blower to ensure al-fucking-Qaeda cooperates so as not to interrupt your fucking plans.’

Carnwath repeated his instructions that on no account must I mention anything about the Heathrow plot or Khan’s family to any American, any member of the Carr administration, any US government official.

‘The Americans have no fucking patience when it comes to things like this,’ he said. ‘They will want to charge in and put their big boots all over everything. Our people say we need to give them time to get a result in court. The Prime Minister is putting everything on the line for this, Alex. You understand how important this is?’

I said that I did understand. If it went wrong, Fraser Davis’s political career would melt. Khan’s arrival in Britain was expected to include some kind of hero’s welcome from his handful of supporters. It was scheduled for the same day as the beginning of the Vice-President’s shooting trip.

‘Accidental timing,’ the Foreign Office said. ‘A coincidence.’

‘Coincidences,’ Johnny Lee whispered to me with a wink, ‘are God’s way of reminding folks he’s still around.’

Coincidental or otherwise, on the Scottish moors none of us thought very much about anything–except the grouse and whether Bobby Black was enjoying himself. Anstruther took the Vice-President with him to hunt on the right of the shooting party.

‘Best if we keep him on the far right,’ Anstruther whispered to me with a knowing wink. ‘If you see him or his gun heading leftwards, don’t forget to duck. I hear in the Carr administration that the right hand sometimes doesn’t know what the far-right hand is doing.’

‘Not so loud,’ I hissed, worried that all our good work might be undone with some feeble joke at Bobby Black’s expense. The Vice-President’s problems on shooting trips in the past had been well publicized. There had been a minor scandal in his first year in office when the Vice-President had mysteriously shot one of his hunting companions in the backside on a quail shoot in Texas.

The hunting companion had been Paul Comfort of Warburton, the long-time FOB, Friend of Bobby, who had to spend a painful night having buckshot removed from the cheeks of his bottom. Details were hard to come by, although Comfort appeared on TV and publicly blamed himself for stepping into Bobby Black’s line of fire. Kristina said to me at the time that it was a display of true loyalty.

‘Greater love hath no man’, she smiled, ‘than to lay down his ass for his friend.’

Princess Charlotte was also to be with Bobby Black on the right of the shooting party. I was pleased because she was a charmer, and Black warmed to her immediately. The Princess and Anstruther had a closeness that I never figured out, a closeness despite their marriages to other people and the fact that she was fifteen years his junior. There was gossip. Possibly it was an aristocratic affair that oiks and retainers like me would never be told about.

I looked around and thought how far I had come from my grandmother’s little three-bedroomed semi to this walk in the Highlands with the great and the good and the not-so-great and not-so-good. At least Bobby Black was on good form. He breathed the clean air and said how much he liked Scotland. It made him feel ‘at home.’ He smiled in his owlish way, and muttered about ‘ancestral roots’. When I saw him in his green and brown shooting gear I realized that I had never before seen him without a dark suit, white shirt, and sober tie, and I had never seen him happy either. For his age, mid-sixties, Black was fit, wiry, with a hint of a suntan on his face from the golf course and the quail hunts.

After an hour’s walk from where the Land Rovers dropped us off, we reached a high valley with a stream–a burn–flowing through the heather. Anstruther suggested that Prince Duncan and some of the others stay in the middle or move to the left. Prince Duncan had every sign of a hangover. We headed to the shooting butts at a place called Shap Fell. Everyone fell in line and deferred to Anstruther. I was told he could trace his ancestry back to Robert the Bruce and the de Brus family from Normandy sometime after 1066. In aristocratic circles this was regarded as more impressive than the Battenberg family of mere British monarchs who had been imported from Germany when the British royal line was in danger of dying out. Since I was unable to trace my own ancestry on my father’s side even by one generation, I suppose I should have been in awe of Anstruther, but I wasn’t. I liked him. He told me he had joined the Labour Party at university only because there were already ‘too many Anstruthers in the Conservative Party.’

When Fraser Davis was elected, Anstruther switched sides and was offered a job at the Ministry of Defence.

‘Ah,’ I told him, ‘we have something in common.’

‘Which is?’ Anstruther cocked his head sideways with curiosity.

‘We are both class traitors.’ He had the good grace to laugh.

Barbara Holmes, the Foreign Secretary, walked with us for the first couple of hours. She had a pair of worn hiking boots and an impressively battered Barbour jacket. She was a vegetarian, which meant she had to swallow some of her supposed principles for the pleasure of a hunting trip to meet Bobby Black and the Queen, though she seemed to manage the process of political indigestion with reasonable grace. Johnny Lee and I walked behind the main hunting party, alongside four of Bobby Black’s US Secret Service bodyguards and a couple of our own British protection people–the minimum possible. After their survey of the hills over the previous two days–mostly by helicopter–the security services said they were satisfied, as the Americans put it, that the probability of anything bad happening to the Vice-President ‘tended towards zero.’ It was a phrase of perfectly duplicitous precision.

* * *

Lord Anstruther and Vice-President Black hit it off immediately. Every time I looked to where they walked together or whispered in the shooting butts, they were deep in animated conversation, sometimes pointing out local landmarks and sometimes jabbing their fingers towards where they thought the grouse might be. Anstruther is a tall, handsome man, early forties, a contemporary of Fraser Davis’s at Eton. Davis and Anstruther both have Scottish ancestry, but they fit perfectly into the English upper classes. Anstruther, with a shock of black hair that flicks across his forehead, has a passing resemblance to the actor Hugh Grant, but instead of Grant’s blinky-stuttering foppishness, Anstruther has steel about him. He had served in a Guards regiment in Northern Ireland and the 1991 Gulf War, and was famous for being a member of the Dangerous Sports Club. Apparently it involves jumping off mountains, leaping down waterfalls, and sitting in underwater cages waiting for great white sharks to appear. As I watched him and Black in conversation it occurred to me that Anstruther might be in line for promotion. We could use him in the Foreign Office, in charge of the Americas. I’d put in a word with Downing Street.

He was telling Black that the grouse season began in Scotland on 12 August–the ‘Glorious Twelfth’–and lasted until December.

‘How Glorious is this Glorious Twelfth?’ Black wondered.

‘A bloody nonsense,’ Anstruther scoffed. ‘Marketing ploy. Not the best time to shoot.’

‘When is the best time?’

‘Right now,’ Lord Anstruther said, looking proudly over the endless expanse of purple heather that formed his estate. ‘When the birds are fat, sleek, and fast. These are the best days on the moors, Mr Vice-President. I’ve been shooting since I was a wee lad, and these are the best days …’

‘Bobby,’ Black said. ‘Please call me Bobby.’

‘Dickie,’ Anstruther replied, with a smile and a handshake, immediately reciprocated by Black. ‘You can never be sure when you will have a good day or a bad day with shooting, but …’

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