Peace on Earth - Gordon Stevens

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Like others of his kind, it was important to him that he was seen to make his first million by the time he was thirty. Politics, in any case, was always a strong possibility for him; his family has had its hands on British foreign affairs for most of the past half-century, probably well before that. Since 1978 his rise has been spectacular. Two years ago he was made Minister of Energy.’

      Nabil knew there was more.

      ‘Eight weeks ago he was promoted to Number Two at the British Foreign Office. The day he moved, the London Times said it was merely one more step to his becoming Prime Minister.’

      Nabil looked at the dates on the newspaper cutting Ahmad Hussein had given him. The day, he thought, that he had seen the article which had planted the first seed of the plan in his mind, the day he had played tawli with the old man in the café. The day, he did not know, that Yakov Zubko and his family had left Moscow and begun their journey to the West.

      ‘How can we get at him?’ he asked.

      ‘He’s ambitious,’ Hussein replied, equally succinctly.

      The meeting finished at twelve. At twelve thirty Hussein drove them to a Lebanese restaurant where they ate a quiet and discreet lunch. When they parted, Nabil gave him the gifts he had bought for his children; that night Hussein gave them to his son and daughter; when they asked who they were from, he told them they were from an uncle who loved them very much but whom they had never met. His wife knew not to ask.

      At four thirty that afternoon Nabil made a single international telephone call, checked out of the Plaza Hotel, took a cab to John F. Kennedy, and caught the six forty-five TWA flight to Rome.

      The sherry was manzanilla. He had a standing order for it from Green’s in the City and kept it chilled in a walnut cabinet in the corner of the office.

      ‘If this is how a bad day ends, Minister, how do we end a good one?’ The civil servant’s question was only half a joke. For the first time since he had taken office the Foreign Minister had sent back a briefing with a request that it should contain more information.

      John Kenshaw-Taylor sat down on the edge of his desk. ‘Edward,’ the Under-Secretary was his senior by at least fifteen years, ‘you know I will always take your advice, as long as you make me think it was my idea in the first place.’

      The man called Edward smiled. ‘Precisely, Minister.’

      The exchange had cleared the air, they settled back into the chesterfields and relaxed.

      It was the way Kenshaw-Taylor had always anticipated ending each day at the Foreign Office, a quality he considered the other newer members of the government lacked, a style, in addition to his ability to digest a brief and reproduce it with maximum impact in the House or in cabinet committee, that had already marked him out in the minds of the Whitehall mandarins as the man to watch, the one who would get to the top.

      The lighting in the room on the third floor overlooking Horse Guards Parade was subdued, in the semi-gloom he could see the outlines of the mementoes he had brought with him from the sanitised corridors of the Department of Energy. None of them referred to himself, at least not directly. On the left of the antique clock on the wall facing his desk was a portrait of his grandfather, below it a letter signed personally by George V. On the wall to the left of the desk, an original newspaper report of the Balfour Declaration, to which the same grandfather had been an advisor, in the gloom to the right a black and white photograph of his father standing behind the seated figures of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta in 1945.

      John Kenshaw-Taylor had dreamt of the Foreign Office, had savoured its charisma and its power, ever since his father had brought him there when he was eight years old. He had taken it with him when he returned to his prep school that evening, held on to it through Eton and Oxford, even during his days in the City, when his natural instincts, as well as his undoubted connections, had amassed him a considerable personal wealth. He remembered the decision to enter politics, the bye-election, his first ministerial post, remembered above all the evening a few short weeks ago, the telephone call inviting him to see the Prime Minister at Number Ten, the suggestion that he should leave Energy and take over as Number Two at the Foreign Office. He sipped the manzanilla and looked at the winter sky gathering outside the window. What a way to start Christmas, he thought, recalling his first day in the building itself, the portraits, their oils glinting in the strange light which seemed to stalk the corridors, the images of the men who had directed the nation’s course and its relationship with the rest of the world, the men who had led the nation itself.

      ‘Thank you, Minister.’ The Under-Secretary rose to leave, placing his glass on the silver tray on the side. ‘Perhaps it has been a good day after all.’ He meant it. For forty years, the British Foreign Office had presided over the dissolution of an empire; after the Falklands campaign, it had been said by some, even the Prime Minister had seen fit to question what remained of its role on the world stage. The new minister, the civil servant felt, was not long for the Number Two job, and when he was at the top, things would change. An old wind blowing through the corridors, someone had remarked. ‘Thank you, Minister,’ he said again.

      Kenshaw-Taylor watched the man leave, staring for a few moments out of the window, looking through the darkness towards Buckingham Palace, then turned back to his desk. Kenshaw-Taylor’s mind was the epitome of clarity and logic. He took pride not only in organising to the last degree whatever he was doing, but in sticking to it, whether in the day-to-day management of his personal affairs, or the advancement of his political career.

      It was seven fifteen. He picked up the telephone and dialled his home in the country; the phone rang for thirty seconds before his wife answered. ‘Samantha, darling, it’s me.’ They talked for ten minutes about what she had done that day, what he had done. That evening, because of his commitments in London, she was due to open the Christmas fayre at the village hall in his stead; tomorrow, she reminded him, the children would be home from school. He assured her he would be back by the following afternoon, and that he was looking forward to Christmas. She said she was already late and would have to go. ‘OK, darling. Love you. Bye.’

      He put the phone down and turned his attention to the despatch boxes. Three to get through. He already knew what they contained and worked out his timetable for the evening. One hour on the first box, the reception he had to attend for fifty minutes, a couple of hours in the flat to finish off the other two. Thank God he wasn’t still at Energy, the midnight meetings about the miners’ strike, the problems about the instability of North Sea oil prices. The move had come just at the right time, and to the right department, kept him away from the law and order problems at the Home Office and the financial worries at the Exchequer.

      He was in an enviable position, he knew, not just because he was in the Foreign Office, but because of his position within it, aware that he would look back on these days with just a tinge of nostalgia. His hands were on the first trappings of power, real power, but he was still far enough from that power not to be encumbered with its disadvantages. He could still take his wife to dinner, could still go Christmas shopping with the children without the armed bodyguards who were always just a pace away from his senior colleagues. He could ask his driver to wait for him, or he could tell the man to drop the despatch boxes at his flat and make his own way home.

      He shut his mind off and opened the first box.

      At eight thirty, precisely according to the schedule he had mapped out earlier, he finished the box. At eight forty-five his driver dropped him at the reception and continued to Pimlico where he left the two remaining boxes at the minister’s London flat.

      Kenshaw-Taylor stayed at the reception until twenty minutes to ten. Pimlico is five minutes from Westminster by car, fifteen by foot. When the Foreign Minister arrived at the flat it was eleven thirty.

      The temperature in Rome was minus three and falling; it was also wet, the blanket of rain sweeping across the runway, sounding like the roll of kettle drums as it cascaded off the metal roof of the terminal building.

      The

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