Never Apologise, Never Explain - James Craig [54]
Pulling a cigarette from the packet of Royal Crown Blue sitting on the table, he lit it with a match and stuck it between his lips, inhaling deeply. Dropping the match in the ashtray, he rose from the table, before starting slowly along the road, heading in the same direction as the protestors.
By the time he reached the park, the speeches were in full swing. Standing under a nearby tree, he smoked another cigarette, keeping a careful eye on the women as he tried to tune out the ritual denunciations of America, Britain and every other tool of imperialism that they could lay their hands on.
Mercifully, the speeches ended before his packet of smokes was empty. He watched the women pack up their banner and say their goodbyes, before heading off in different directions. After a moment’s thought, he decided to follow the older one. Once he knew where she lived, it would be time to begin.
EIGHTEEN
Carlyle stood on the walkway that spiralled up the inside of the triangulated glass façade of City Hall, looking down into the foyer of the Greater London Assembly, while listening to the clink of glasses and the hum of polite conversation from below. He had been scanning the room for several minutes now, without being able to find any sign of Simpson or her husband. He had, however, seen the Mayor, Christian Holyrod, shoulder-to-shoulder with the man he assumed was the Chilean Ambassador, as they worked the room together.
The upper terrace had been closed off to the public for tonight’s event, so Carlyle found himself alone. As the Mayor stepped up on to a small raised platform to make some introductory remarks, Carlyle turned his back on the throng to take in the views over the river towards the Tower of London. For the next few minutes, he let his mind wander. An occasional phrase drifted up from the floor below but the words were no more than the usual trite nothings that accompanied events like this. He ignored them, as he watched the boats go by on the Thames, and reflected on his previous dealings with the Mayor.
Christian Holyrod was a Boy’s Own story made flesh. That alone would have been enough for Carlyle to be deeply suspicious of the man, even before they crossed swords on what turned out to be one of the more unpleasant cases he had recently had to deal with.
Before turning his hand to politics, Major Holyrod had commanded the 2nd Battalion of the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment (motto: Virtutis Fortuna Comes – Fortune Favours the Brave), one of the first British battle groups to go into action in Helmand Province in south-west Afghanistan, as part of Britain’s latest unsuccessful foray into the world’s most inhospitable country. His subsequent journey from unsung hero to big-time politician began when an American documentary crew arrived to film the story of Operation Clockwork Orange, a mission to capture a terrorist commander who had been hiding out in a mud compound in the middle of nowhere. The mission was a fiasco. Holyrod’s boys were ambushed and a swift retreat followed, leaving the target happily ensconced in his mountain lair, but the firefights and general chaos that followed made for great television. Shaky hand-held pictures of the major shouting ‘Contact, contact, contact!’ while squeezing off rounds from his SA80-A2 assault rifle and trying to drag a wounded squaddie back to his truck were as entertaining as anything that Hollywood could come up with. They made all the main news bulletins back home in Britain even before the show had aired in the US. For almost two days, it was the number one most-viewed video on YouTube, with more than 45 million hits around the world.