Power Play

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.