Whispers of betrayal

ELEVEN

Amadeus had taken to running, long jogs through the City at night when the traffic had gone and taken most of its fumes with it. He couldn't think in the rabbit hutch that his wife insisted they call home, even when she wasn't there, which was frequently. He needed space, time to figure it all out, wanting to squeeze away the last effect of those cigarettes and get himself honed for what he knew lay ahead. The Barbican where they lived might have been convenient for his wife's shopping and social life, but to Amadeus it was worse than useless, the farthest point from any green field of almost any spot in London. He wished he were back on the mountainside of Longdon, and yearned for an enemy that could be fought with rifle and bayonet.

He was clear that matters had escalated beyond his control. What had started as a skirmish had grown into all-out confrontation. It happens, things slip in war. They had begun in search of an apology but apologies only counted in matters of honour and they'd been disastrously naive to believe they might have found any shred of honour in Bendall. So now the stakes had to be raised. There was no middle way, no subtle means of getting this Government to change its policies. The Government itself had to be changed.

The logic was compelling, inexorable. Bendall had to go.

The consequence was equally inescapable.

Treason.

It was something they couldn't admit to, of course, not out in the open. For a soldier to seek the downfall of an elected Prime Minister was an offence so inexcusable that it would force Bendall's most implacable opponents to rally to his defence. Even the BBC would have to behave itself. It would make the bastard all but impregnable. No, a direct attack was impossible. Instead, Bendall would have to be worn down, undermined, humiliated and hounded until his position had crumbled and he crept out of Downing Street, or was dragged out by envious colleagues.

Somehow treason had become their duty.

This evening Amadeus had run as far as Regent's Park trying to clear his mind, struggling to understand the process by which he had started as a loyal officer and ended up a revolutionary. He still wasn't entirely clear by the time he had got back to the Barbican and headed for his apartment on the thirtieth floor. He used the stairs.

As he opened his door, the first thing he saw was the answering machine blinking at him. He punched the button. A message from a Sergeant Harris at Wood Street police station. Amadeus didn't know a Sergeant Harris, or why he should be calling, but the policeman said it was important. Amadeus was to call back any time up to midnight. Or Sergeant Harris would call again in the morning.

Oh, bugger.

– =OO=OOO=OO-= The sun had not yet risen, yet already the Telecoms Chairman was standing at his desk, tieless, unshaven, agitated. A copy of the morning newspaper trembled in his outstretched hand.

'WHIPPED!' it screamed. 'Bendall Humiliated As Government Loses Vital Budget Vote.'

The front page recounted the dramatic events of the previous evening when, amidst scenes of great frenzy, the Government had been brought to its knees by the failure of dozens of its own backbenchers to vote for a vital financial measure. Yet this was neither insolence nor insurrection; to put no finer point on it, they had simply been nobbled. Only ten minutes before the vote their pagers had vibrated into action and called them off. Go home, the message had encouraged, go sleep or go play or whatever it is you do when the Whips are no longer watching – but go!

It had been a hoax, of course. The Whips had realized that immediately and had made desperate efforts to correct it, only to discover that the telephone number assigned to their paging system was inexplicably and constantly engaged, as if someone was deliberately sabotaging it. So they had called the operator, who had explained that she was powerless to interfere, so they had shouted at her, but the more they had shouted the more she had insisted that there was nothing she could do, and would they please stop using such language. It was, she explained with commendable patience, a number that had been issued with a special security coding and under no circumstances could be interfered with. After all, someone might try to use it irresponsibly…

By the time the Whips had battered their way through female intransigence, it was too late. Many Government supporters had been thrown into chaos, milling about in uncertainty like rustled cattle, while others simply trudged home, blissfully unaware, pagers switched off, as did Goodfellowe. Despite numerous and increasingly desperate points of order the vote had been taken. And the Government had lost.

'How could this happen? How could it happen?' the Telecoms Chairman asked yet again. Since his arrival at the office it had seemed his only form of expression. He was in a state of considerable turmoil, having been woken at two by the Prime Minister. A personal call. Usually a pleasure, for they had been room-mates at university and remained close. It was one of the reasons he'd been given the job as chairman, to use his connections to smooth the path of controversial licence applications and to blunt the edge of government competition policy. He wasn't supposed to get hysterical phone calls in the middle of the night from a Prime Minister threatening to reintroduce transportation to the colonies especially for him.

Over the following three hours, the problem had grown worse. He couldn't raise his personal assistant, and so had incredible trouble raising anyone else. He'd even had trouble getting into the building when he arrived unshaven with eyes like blood drops in the snow – and without his security pass. He was chairman of the company, for pity's sake, he didn't need a pass! But the night security staff, at least those who spoke English, were having none of it. No pass, no come in. It was the only part of Telecoms security that seemed to be working that night.

'The sodding Government loses some sodding vote, all because some sod sods up our sodding pager system. And what I want to know is – which sod's responsible?'

In fact, Bendall had made it crystal clear, in one of the more coherent portions of his telephone conversation, who he deemed to be responsible. The Chairman was responsible. Unless, that is, he could find some other copulative colon to take the blame, and quickly.

The Chairman faced one of his staff. Just one. Sod it, even after all the redundancies he still had more than a hundred thousand on his payroll, and yet all he could find at this hour of the morning was one miserable wretch. An audience of one was not much to share his humiliation, but at least it was an audience. He needed someone to shout at. He stood behind his desk, shaking the newspaper as if to emphasize his point, although in truth it was simply his hand that was shaking.

For a while, the young man standing before him listened in silence to the outpourings of anger until he decided that he was on the brink of one of those moments in which careers suddenly changed paths, where they might be destroyed. Or perhaps made. He was a gambler. So he jumped.

'It was the Opposition.'

'What? What sodding opposition?' the Chairman demanded. 'Anyway, who the sodding hell are you?'

'Hadcock. Tim Hadcock, sir,' the young man introduced himself once more. He was a junior member of the Policy and Presentation staff, not yet into his thirty-somethings, corporate lowlife, yet because of the bizarre accidents that litter a man's life he was confronted at this moment by opportunity. It was a pity, of course, that his director had been forced to commute by rail from Surrey ever since he'd lost his licence and wouldn't be arriving for at least another hour, but Hadcock was nothing if not resourceful and had no intention of hanging around waiting for one of life's accidents. Neither had his Chairman.

'Explain yourself!'

'Well, sir, I've talked to the Director of Engineering – he's hoping to be here shortly – and he is adamant it couldn't have been an accident. And the Director of Security – I got hold of him at a conference in Rio de Janeiro – insists that our internal systems are practically impregnable, both physically and technically.'

'So?'

'So it means that the breach in security didn't come from us. More than likely it came from the other end. From Westminster.'

'What? What are you suggesting, Badcock? That I tell the Prime Minister it's his fault?'

'Well, I don't suppose for a moment that the Government Whips sent out the message. So it must have been someone else at Westminster. Someone with an interest in making a laughing stock of the Government. Someone who's familiar with Whips and pagers, who might have had the opportunity of activating the system. Someone whose presence around the House late at night would be entirely acceptable.'

'You mean…?'

'Someone with both the motive and the means, sir.'

'Such as…?'

'Someone in the Opposition!'

The Chairman's lips began moving as though silently rehearsing a plea. He experimented for a few moments, tried again, then shook his head in defeat. 'What evidence do you have for this allegation?'

'Not a shred.'

'So how do you know it's the sodding Opposition?'

'I don't, sir. But if you'll forgive me…' The young man hesitated. He was about to make that career choice. He was not a Director. Not an Assistant Director. Not even an Assistant to the Assistant. He had so little to lose. 'I thought the purpose of the exercise wasn't so much a matter of proof as one of… well, of presentation. We know it wasn't us. So we need to put someone else in the frame. To take the pressure off us – off you, sir. And since we're unlikely ever to find out who was responsible, someone else will do. Anyone else, actually.'

The Chairman's lips were moving once more, practising, following as Spatchcock – wasn't that his name? – set out his case that it could have been the Opposition. It was the sort of explanation the Government would willingly embrace. No direct accusation, of course, just a whisper or two in a friendly journalist's ear. Unattributable sources, that sort of thing. Or perhaps an allegation from the back benches under the cloak of parliamentary privilege, get everyone running around trying to identify some sort of dirty tricks squad. Press'd love that.

'And there's that new licence application for digital TV around the corner on which we'll need the Government's help, sir,' the Chairman heard the young man remind him. 'We really need to get this one off our plate.'

The Chairman was now sitting. He had had his head in his hands, contemplating.

'Security's certain it couldn't have been our fault?'

'Almost certain.'

'Almost…?' Outside his window the sun was creeping above the horizon. Dawn. The time of scaffolds and executions.

'There is always a theoretical possibility it was down to us, sir.'

The Chairman moaned softly.

'You really want to be hanged for a theory, sir?' A pause. 'Go for the Opposition. It's what the Government wants to hear, isn't it? Bury your doubts, go for what's certain.'

The Chairman raised his eyes. 'What did you say your name was?'

'Hadcock, sir. Tim Hadcock.'

The Chairman's shoulders seemed slowly to discard the steel pins that had been keeping them taut and painfully hunched. Tell me, young Haddock. Are you by any chance free for lunch?'

– =OO=OOO=OO-= The five of them are crowded into an anonymous hotel room. It's an unlikely location for war. Wilting roses on the wallpaper, cigarette burns on the bedside table, cheap foam sofas, that sort of thing. A place that caters for package tourists, where no one will remember their faces. But they'll remember what the five have come here to do.

Amadeus's stomach is a whirlpool of adrenaline and unease, the same feeling he used to get standing in the door of a Hercules with the PJI screaming instructions at him. The man is screaming because the wind is whipping past at a hundred and twenty knots, turning their lungs to ice and beating like a hammer upon their ears. Amadeus has an SA80 rifle hooked to his chest, along with his container and a bergen that is stuffed with ammunition and food and clothing. The red is on and he's about to jump into total darkness.

He knows that's the point where it can all begin to go wrong. You can prepare only so far. There's always the unexpected, things that get out of control. Little things. Like Mary, who decided to try out her new toy on the Whips' paging system without consulting him first. And Skulls's leg, which, now he is sober and sentient, is hurting like hell. Then there is Freddie Payne and his mood swings. Nervous one day, morose the next, followed by outbursts of arrogance and sometimes all three in quick succession.

There's also the interview Amadeus has agreed to have in the morning with Sergeant Harris, and he still doesn't know what the fuck that's all about, although if the good sergeant only wants to talk to him rather than drag him off by the balls then Amadeus knows he's still ahead of the game. Just.

Yes, there's always the unexpected, the sudden shift of the slipstream that can spin you round until you've no bloody idea which way you're facing, only that you're heading down. Knowing that in thirty seconds you might be dead. Or worse, broken.

Thirty seconds is about as long as Mary says it will take.

For this is Mary's piece tonight, inspired with almost comic irony by that halfwit Earwick. Bloody fool didn't know when to stop posing. He'd been showing the news cameras around his new empire of the Home Office, that curious mixture of reprieves and repression that glowers like a decaying white elephant beside St James's Park. It'd only been an establishing shot for the evening news, the sort of thing where politicians are shown walking stiffly up the stairs or browsing self-consciously through a briefing paper trying to pretend they are speed readers. Those who have no clue whatsoever might be seen plucking some book from the library shelf, presumably as evidence of their intellectual curiosity, then destroying the effect by flicking through the pages backwards. Earwick was wise to all this; he wanted to display himself as a Thoroughly Modern Minister, every part a man of the new Millennium, revved up and switched on. So he had seated himself at his computer terminal and logged on. Not that you could see the screen or the password he had entered to access his e-mail, but his two fingers had wandered across his keyboard 'like slugs across a leaf of lettuce,' as Mary had described it later.

There are few surprises in the passwords used by laymen. Many consist of the word itself, PASSWORD. People can be so gloriously unimaginative. But Earwig could never be commonplace, he was a man of theatrical flourishes, his password had to be both personal and significant. He had chosen HOMO.MAN. An obvious signature for a Home Secretary, although perhaps open to misinterpretation if it fell into the wrong hands. Which it wasn't supposed to.

But it had.

Mary had spotted Earwick on the early evening news, taped the replay an hour later and enlarged the image of the keyboard section on her own laptop so that by nine she had everything she needed to know. The following day she had e-mailed his office at the House of Commons, purporting to be a journalist for a provincial newspaper and asking for full biographical details, which she received by return from his parliamentary researcher. The enthusiastic researcher had included everything from his master's love of dogs – 'a King Charles spaniel named Jessie…' – to his abiding commitment to the elderly, the High Church and the family, although from the details provided it appeared that Earwig didn't have a family. What the researcher failed to realize is that in replying by e-mail to Mary he was also supplying her with the encrypted techy scribble that accompanied all e-mails and that included clusters of information such as Earwig's Server Name, his Return Path, and even his User Name.

So now Mary is sitting in the hotel room with the drooping flowers, in front of her laptop, which is plugged into the telephone line. She also has in front of her a copy of the Sun, open at the letters page. She is about to go to war, on Earwick and on Bendall, and to achieve that she intends to go to war on the whole of London. What follows may be incomprehensible to anyone over fifty, just as it is clearer than Shakespeare's English to most teenagers.

She opens up a window for her modem and dials 9 for an outside line.

The cursor on the screen is panting like a greyhound in the slips. So she taps in the number of Earwig's e-mail server at the House of Commons. The hound is off and running. It soon returns, bearing with it a prize – the command LOGIN.

She types in his User Name, presses Return.

Then she enters the difficult bit, Earwig's Password. HOMO.MAN.

Presses Return once again. She's in.

She creates a new file called Forward, and instructs it to copy everything to another address. Not just any other address, mind you, but the editor@thesun.co.uk. (This address involves a dash of guesswork, based on details included on the newspaper's letter page, but when her greyhound doesn't come back with its tail between its legs she knows it's OK. She smiles. She's there.)

Then she hits the Control and D keys simultaneously, a combination that instantly logs her off the system, neatly and quickly so as not to alert any system administrators at the House of Commons. No one knows she's been there.

It's done. A fraction more than thirty seconds, and an effect that will last a lifetime.

The rest of her evening's work on the laptop takes longer. She is completely engrossed, ignoring the distractions around her. Her concentration is total, as if she is under hostile fire, triangulating the position of an enemy mobile communications HQ that is on the move and directing the enemy's own fire upon her. She knows there is only one winner in this sort of game. The screen is becoming hypnotic; at one point she is forced to leave her work and wander into the bathroom to splash water on her face. It's a squalid little room. She ignores the tang of bleach and the mess of men.

As he watches her work, Amadeus feels equally engrossed, but for entirely different reasons. He knows they have now jumped, are out in the slipstream, winds of fate and all that. Nothing to do but wait and pray a little. He wipes the palms of his hand along the sharp creases of his trousers. The others sit around distractedly. Scully is watching television with the sound on mute, McKenzie is browsing through the bible left by the Gideons in the bedside drawer. Beside the door where he is standing lookout, Freddie Payne crushes a can in his hand.

Tonight, in a hotel room filled with drooping flowers and the smell of anxious men, they have gone to war. Many lives are about to be irreversibly changed, and some ended. Soon Amadeus will have blood on his hands.

– =OO=OOO=OO-= Mickey scurried into the Central Lobby through the morning crowds of sightseers and plaintiffs that had already begun to gather. Although she had never met him, she thought she recognized her man instantly. Tall, lean, hair a little longer than was customary in the military but neatly trimmed and swept back, a cleft on his chin that looked as deep as a duelling scar. He was no longer young but in altogether better decorative order than most men of his age. Disturbing slate green eyes, though, eyes that had seen too much.

'Colonel Amadeus?'

Amadeus turned from where he had been examining the almost overpowering mosaic of the ceiling and began to inspect her. His eyes seemed to take everything in; she found it disturbing, but also sensual.

'I'm Mickey Ross, Tom's secretary.' She held out her hand. It disappeared inside his own. 'This place is like a kitchen at Christmas right now. Somebody screwed up the vote last night and everyone's running around like chickens with their feathers on fire.' She was about to take him by the sleeve and guide him to a quieter corner but changed her mind – somehow he didn't seem like the sort of man you took by the sleeve, let alone pushed around. 'So Tom's had to disappear, rush off for a meeting with the PM.'

Amadeus's eyes arched in surprise. 'Now isn't that a pity.'

'He was so looking forward to that drink with you, believe me. And he'd like a rain check, if you'd be willing.' She wouldn't mind a rain check either, come to that. He had an unmistakable muscular intensity. Built for stamina, this one. Anyway, the man deserved more than a polite brush off. The drink had been arranged at Goodfellowe's request, it seemed rude simply to cast him back into the street without a proper explanation. 'I'm not sure whether I'm supposed to tell you this, but seeing as you're in – were in – the military, and an old friend, I know you'll understand.' Now she did take his sleeve. 'The Prime Minister's put Tom on a special Downing Street committee to deal with all the recent attacks.'

'I had no idea.'

'After last night, well, it's all hit the fan again and Tom's been summoned. Orders, orders. I'm sure you'll understand. He's so very sorry. He was really keen to catch up with you.'

'So was I. But if I'd known how important he'd become to the Prime Minister I truly wouldn't have bothered him.'

The irony, inevitably, went beyond her. 'Tom is full of apologies. He insisted that I rearrange the date and take you for a cup of coffee in the Strangers' canteen – not elegant, I'm afraid, but the coffee's wet. Then I can throw you out with a better conscience.'

'That…' – he hesitated, weighing up the invitation – 'would be very kind, Miss Ross. I'd enjoy a coffee. Dry as a bone, in fact. But I wonder if I can ask you for a small favour in addition?'

'Anything.'

'I'm supposed to be meeting a Sergeant Harris at Wood Street police station in a little while and the traffic is the very devil. It'll probably make me…' – he glanced at his watch, calculating – 'a little late. Would you telephone him? Tell him I've been delayed at the House of Commons visiting my old friend Tom Goodfellowe, and that he's got time to issue a few more parking tickets before I get there.' And, while you're doing that, Mickey Ross, you can begin giving me the cover I'm going to need. Glorious cover, as a friend of the friend of the Prime Minister himself.

The police officer had been quite explicit on the phone. He apologized for bothering Amadeus, but they were making enquiries into the attack on Trafalgar Square and other matters. Apparently there had been suggestions it might have had something to do with former military people, and as a matter of routine they'd been asked to look at all recently retired officers. Routine, did he say? There were hundreds of them, thousands, the sergeant wearily admitted. 'And after your letter to the Telegraph, sir…' Amadeus had assured the sergeant that he quite understood. 'Simply a matter of eliminating as many people as possible from our enquiries, Colonel. Just routine. A little chat, at your convenience.'

They were getting closer. But not that close. The military grapevine had already told Amadeus he was no more than one amongst thousands, many hundreds of whom at some time or another had bitched and bawled about higher authority. No, it shouldn't be a problem, so long as he played a straight bat. Hell, with the use of Tom Goodfellowe's name, he might even score a few runs while he was about it.

Amadeus smiled. 'You make the phone call, Miss Ross, I'll queue for the coffee.'

– =OO=OOO=OO-= The precise constitutional grounds for summoning a fresh meeting of COBRA were open to question, but as the Prime Minister had pointed out, since Britain didn't have a written constitution the question – and any questioners – could go hang. He'd left the Cabinet Secretary debating with the Lord Chancellor whether making fools of the Government Whips threatened the end of civilization while he, Bendall, got on with the matter in hand.

There had been an unfortunate turn of events to encourage his impatience – unfortunate, that is, for Bendall and his hopes of containing the situation, for Amadeus had grown weary of sending letters that remained unread and unreported, and so, prompted by Sergeant Harris's phone call, he had decided on a change of tactics. Sergeant Harris had explicitly requested that Amadeus keep the matter confidential. Instead, Amadeus telephoned the editor of the Telegraph. The public had a right to know. There were no mad environmentalists here, no army of Swampies. No fanatics, no Fascists, no Freemasons, neither Ayatollahs nor Iraqis, and not a bloody Marxist or Leninist amongst them, Amadeus had explained. Nothing more than a group of retired and disgruntled but very British army officers. The editor had, at first, struggled to contain his surprise.

'You're saying you were responsible for the attacks? The water? Trafalgar Square?'

'The pager system too.'

'But why?'

'To show that this Government has lied when it says it can defend the country. We're simply proving it can't even defend itself.'

'So you're not eco-warriors as the Prime Minister claims.'

'Bendall's lied about that, too. He knows we're military. He's putting the squeeze on all retired officers even as we speak.'

'What's your next step?'

'You don't seriously expect-'

'But you're going to carry on?'

'Of course. We have a duty.'

'Like Oliver Cromwell?'

'We're retired, not antiques.'

'Sergeant Bilko, then?'

'British, we're British. Not Bilko. More like – I don't know. Beaky? That's it. More like Captain Beaky,' Amadeus had mused, citing a comic song based upon a band of woodland animals who had set out to deal with an evil snake named Hissing Sid. It had been an extraordinary hit back in the early Eighties.

'It's coming back to me- "The bravest animals in the land are Captain Beaky and his band…" Isn't that it?'

Amadeus had laughed, then hung up.

Conscious of his public duty, the editor had called the Prime Minister to tell him what had happened. The Prime Minister had thanked him profusely and indicated that in view of the great sensitivity of the matter he felt sure the editor wouldn't be publishing. The editor had replied that the Government had been weaving such a web of nonsense it was in serious danger of throttling itself, so he was going to do the Government a considerable favour and publish the lot.

The Prime Minister had begun to shout. Something about issuing D-Notices on grounds of national security, to which the editor had suggested that if hacking into the Whips' paging system was so life-threatening the Prime Minister shouldn't be encouraging his bully boys to lay the blame at the doorstep of the Opposition.

At that point the Prime Minister had almost choked. He recovered sufficiently to insist that the editor cooperate fully with the ongoing police investigation. The editor had assured him that he would withhold nothing. In fact, he was going to publish everything he knew in his newspaper, and he would be happy to send a copy round to New Scotland Yard.

This was the moment when the Prime Minister lost touch with his sense of humour and suggested he was going to 'do' the editor personally. The editor enquired whether the Prime Minister had ever heard about freedom of the press and then, like Amadeus, had put the phone down. Faced with an outbreak of insurrection on the news stands, the Prime Minister had decided to summon the unscheduled meeting of COBRA.

Goodfellowe found himself able to listen to the ensuing discussions with only half a mind. He sat fiddling with his watch strap, distracted by the telephone call he'd had the previous night from Sam. It had been an unsettling conversation. She'd asked for money, eight hundred pounds for a summer trip to Florence in order to pursue her university course in the history of art. It was unsettling in two respects. In the first place, Sam wouldn't normally have asked for money, since she knew all too well the financial desert on which his tent was pitched. She demanded his loyalty, not his wallet, so it was clear to him without the need for elaboration that this trip to Italy was important to her. In the second place, it forced him to make a difficult choice. Normally, her request would have caused him few problems because he had no money, so the answer must be no. Yet life was no longer quite that simple. Thanks to the small bequest from his constituent, for the first time in three years he was receiving bank statements printed in black. It wasn't so straightforward saying no any more. He had the money, but it was earmarked for his trip to Paris with Elizabeth. Now Sam was calling upon it. He could split his affections, but not his finances. Elizabeth or Sam, which was it to be? It was a dilemma he found unusually discomforting. He'd lost sleep, didn't want to decide. This was giving him more grief than when he was broke. Somehow he found poverty so much simpler.

Suddenly he brightened. He was a fool. Why did he need to worry about his wallet when he had in his pocket a promise that he was soon to be kicked up to the Cabinet? That was worth money, hard cash, and a considerable amount of it, about another sixty thousand above his backbencher's salary. Come to think of it, more than he'd ever earned in his life. He'd soon be able to afford both Paris and Florence and a hell of a lot more beside, just as soon as the Prime Minister had seen off these irritating Army types.

However, he had to admit that today wasn't proving to be one of the better days in the campaign. True to its editor's promise, the morning's Telegraph had shouted from the top of its front page that the Government had been caught in a lie. Bendall had stretched the truth so tight that the elastic had burst. He wasn't fighting eco-freaks but former soldiers, Britain's best and bravest, and suddenly the morality of the situation was no longer so simple. Slowly but perceptibly, the sands on which the pillars of public opinion rest had begun to shift. What yesterday had been termed 'outrages' were now referred to simply as 'attacks', and Bendall was seen to be fighting not so much for freedom as for himself. The conspirators had an identity, too. 'Captain Beaky' was excellent headline fodder and there wasn't a single newspaper in the land who could resist it.

It all sounded a shade too comic, almost comfortable. So the Prime Minister grew ever more impatient and Earwick sought the opinions of others – a sure sign he was in difficulties and wanting to spread the responsibility, although he had come to one solid conclusion, that whoever else might be included in the ranks of the enemy, the editor of the Telegraph was going to be right up there on the list. Earwick told COBRA so in terms that were remarkably colourful for a Home Secretary. At the point where he suggested that the editor was a national menace and they should bug all his phones, the Police Commissioner went puce. There'd be hell to pay if they were caught bugging an editor. So what? Couldn't they bug a bloody telephone without getting caught? What had the capital's police force come to?

The discussion was beginning to get undignified and more than a little unconstitutional when it was interrupted by a commotion from the door. A dishevelled figure burst in, pursued by a protesting security guard who continued in a state of considerable agitation until the Prime Minister waved him away. After all, it wasn't every day that the Downing Street press secretary kicked down his door looking as though he'd run all the way from Hyde Park pursued by a pack of Chelsea supporters. It had to be more than a bad set of inflation figures. It was.

'They've stuffed up the phones,' the press secretary, Arnold Jumpers, almost choked. He was experiencing considerable difficulty coordinating his need to take in great gulps of air with his need to speak. 'Everything in central London. All the 0207 numbers. It's chaos out there.'

They've cut off our phones?' Earwick gasped, incredulous.

'Oh, more than that, Home Secretary, much more than that.' Bendall let out a slow moan of understanding. 'They've just cut off our balls.'

– =OO=OOO=OO-= In fact, Bendall had it wrong. They had cut off no one's telephones. The press secretary's description had been the more accurate one, if technically a little obscure. The telephones had simply been 'stuffed up'.

All around the centre of London, whenever an 0207 number was dialled, the telephone system chose at least one random digit. The result – constant wrong numbers. From eleven o'clock that morning London had begun to buzz like a nest of dyspeptic hornets. Pick up a phone and the only thing you'd get for sure was chaos.

It was an adaptation of a hacker software program originating in Texas that Mary had pulled from the Internet and that had played the crucial role in a scam inflicted upon one of the more popular TV evangelists during his annual fund-raising drive. As followers phoned to make their credit-card pledges, every second call had been diverted to a different number where their pledge was taken by computer and transmitted to a different bank account. It couldn't last, of course, not for more than a few days, but by the time the authorities had caught up with the operation both the perpetrator and the profit, running into several millions, had been lodged out of harm's way in the Cayman Islands.

The matter hadn't been allowed to rest there. Under pressure from the evangelist who explained that he believed in an eye for an eye and brimstone heaped upon the bitch who had cheated him, the police had proceeded to arrest the perpetrator's husband on a flimsy charge of conspiracy, hoping to lure the wife out of hiding. Instead, out of spite, she had shoved the software on the Internet, making it freely available to everyone and anyone. Ouch. The American telephone companies had been forced to move quickly in order to ensure that Elijah, as the software programme was called, could never be resurrected, but it seemed that their British counterparts had been far less agile. It had taken Mary many days and most of her nights to adapt the Elijah programme, but at the end of it she had been able to talk to the computer that ran the Telecoms regional management centre responsible for central London and persuade it to divert calls, not to a specific number, but simply at random. Anywhere would do, so long as it was wrong. Of course, in normal circumstances such problems would have been overridden by the central network management centre at Oswestry, but these weren't normal circumstances. Mary had fixed Oswestry too.

As COBRA broke up in confusion the capital's streets began to echo with the sound of numbers dialled and redialled in vain. Truly essential services on freephone numbers – police, ambulance, fire, gas leaks and so forth – weren't affected, and Mary had spent a full afternoon of painstaking programming to ensure that all hospitals, doctors' surgeries and other medical facilities listed in the Yellow Pages were passed over by the plague. Yet in a modern city, communications are as important as water, more important than roads. Cut off from its communications, a modern city begins slowly to die. And with it begins to die the authority of those who govern it.