‘What did you think of Africa?’
That took Tom by surprise. ‘Very nice, sir.’
‘A man of few words, I see, but well chosen. Are you hooked by her?’
‘Her, sir?’
‘Africa.’
Tom thought of the drinks under a setting red sun, hearing the lion calling in the distance, seeing the leopard and its prey. He thought of Sannie van Rensburg, even though they’d parted on frosty terms. ‘Could be, sir,’ he said.
‘Well, if poor old Nick doesn’t show himself soon this won’t be the last time you get to go to the dark continent.’
Tom pulled the printout of the day’s schedule from the inside pocket of his suit coat and glanced down at it. As Greeves said, it was a typically busy day for a minister, even though parliament had risen the previous day. Their first appointment, where they were headed now, was a fundraising breakfast in the city, aimed at garnering and shoring up donations for the coming election campaign. After that was a last-minute briefing from the defence company vying to sell aircraft to the South Africans, followed by a media conference at the company’s offices with its chairman; a visit to an HIV-AIDS clinic in Islington — a cheque presentation of some sort; afternoon tea with selected constituents in the Westminster office at Portcullis House; and then, finally, off to Heathrow for the evening flight to Johannesburg. Tom’s bag was in the boot of the police car. He wouldn’t see home again for another five days. He’d call Charlie Sheather in Cape Town to make sure things were ready there. It was another reminder that this was a shoestring operation. Sally couldn’t come to Africa because she was due leave and had a daughter about to go into hospital to have her tonsils out.
The breakfast function was Tom’s first opportunity to see Greeves address an audience in the flesh. Tom had sat through hundreds, maybe thousands of these types of speeches while protecting various politicians over the years. He considered himself a cynic when it came to politics, believing there was little to differentiate either of the main parties. He would have classed himself a left-leaning conservative, and that meant he might as well close his eyes and use a pin to pick the people he voted for. It was rare that someone could hold his attention in a speech, especially as part of Tom’s job was to keep a weather eye on the audience, catering staff and anyone else in the room other than the person doing the talking. This crowd were invitees who had paid five hundred quid a head to listen to Robert Greeves. They were blue pinstripe to the core. While Tom didn’t drop his guard he did keep an ear open to the words coming from the man behind the lectern. He wanted to learn as much about Greeves as he could during the day.
‘Does it really matter,’ Greeves was saying, leaning forward, elbows on the lectern in a bid to get closer to his suited audience, ‘if there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — chemicals, poison gas bombs, Scuds full of nerve agents, et cetera, et cetera?’
Greeves waited during the seconds of hushed silence. Tom half felt like chirping up and saying, ‘Yes, it bloody well does matter, since the government sent us into a war based on a dossier of fiction and half-truths.’
Greeves seemed almost to be looking right at Tom when he said, ‘There was, in fact, one WMD in that country that we know of for sure. Saddam Hussein. Is it right for Britain or the United States to sit back and do nothing while a man gases his own people, assassinates dissidents by the score; while his sons torture, rape and massacre at their whim? No, ladies and gentlemen, it was not right to deal with Iraq in the way we did. It was not right to stop at the gates of Baghdad in 1991; it was not right to abandon the marsh Arabs when they rose against Saddam after that war; and it was not right to say, “Leave him to his own devices, eventually one day his people will wake up and get rid of him. It’s not our fight.”’
Tom had heard the argument before — and it continued to smack of bandaid policy to him. This government was still trying to convince the people that it had been right to get involved in Iraq, even if it wasn’t for the reasons originally put forward. Tom hadn’t become a convert, but he was impressed by the way Greeves was putting his case forward. He went on, as he had done in parliament the day before, to personalise the conflict, to make it about standing up for the people of Iraq — presumably the majority — who were sick of the bombings, the fighting, the executions.
Metropolitan police protection officers had been to Iraq and Afghanistan, accompanying the Prime Minister, Defence Secretary and the Foreign Secretary. Tom hadn’t been picked for these teams as he had yet to renew his qualification on the Heckler amp; Koch sub machinegun — the weapon he would have carried on such an assignment. He’d go if he was told to but, unlike some of the younger officers, he wasn’t volunteering.
Greeves alluded again to the bomb blast in Enfield and Tom couldn’t help but listen in now; he had felt the heat of the blast, seen the charred remains of the computer expert wheeled out.
‘We’ll probably never know what the terrorists were planning when that brave member of the security services lost his life in that house, but what we do know, ladies and gentlemen, is that Britain remains at war with the forces of evil. All of us, not just our tireless security services, need to remain vigilant, committed and resolute in our determination that Britain will not yield to terror; that we will support and agitate for democracy in places around the world where decent people can only dream of such a concept, and that we will remember all those who put their lives on the line every day for people like you and people like me.’
The applause was as close as Tom had seen to thunderous in many years. He, too, found himself on his feet, not wanting to be seen as the only person sitting, but also oddly moved by the speech, especially the last line. A young banker at his table, his face still spotty, who had introduced himself to Tom and therefore knew that he was Greeves’s protection officer, nodded to him and mouthed, ‘Well done.’ Tom felt embarrassed.
‘He’s good,’ Sally said. ‘Too bad he can’t get his bleedin’ children to behave as well as this mob,’ she added as an aside.
Sally left first, as Greeves moved from table to table, shaking hands with the Party faithful. Tom stayed just behind him, at his shoulder.
‘Vehicles ready. All clear outside.’
‘Thanks, Sal,’ he replied into his radio. ‘Moving now.’
Greeves read The Times in the backseat on the drive to the aircraft manufacturer’s headquarters in a business park in Ealing. Tom and Sally repeated their routine on arrival. They waited in an anteroom in the office tower while Greeves had his meeting with the company’s executives. Tom knew the contract was important, not only for local jobs, but for Britain’s standing in the international defence and aviation industry — hence the minister’s personal lobbying in South Africa.
The press conference was held in a purpose-built room on the ground floor. Tom moved in with Greeves and positioned himself off to one side of the podium, where the minister sat with the chief executive officer and chairman of the board. The company’s PR people said all of the reporters in the conference were known to the firm and their identities had been double-checked. From what Tom knew of the media and its workings, this conference was poorly attended — only half-a-dozen reporters and he recognised none of them. No one from TV or radio, and none of the usual Westminster gallery hacks were present. These were defence correspondents, most of them from industry magazines.
The company’s chairman, an ex-Royal Air Force air commodore, gave a long-winded introduction about the merits of the jet trainer on offer to South Africa and Greeves followed with a succinct spiel about the importance of creating British jobs and maintaining good relations with Africa’s most stable democracy.
The questions were a mix of technical probing about the jet’s reported avionics flaws and points of clarification regarding revenues, jobs and the possibility of more sales on the African continent if the South Africans came on board. When the conference was nearly over, one reporter, a young man with red hair and glasses, said, ‘Mr Greeves, why is it that you’ve made fourteen visits to southern Africa in the last four years?’