10th May
It was early afternoon when Joan, Etienne, Duck, Jenny, Helen and I were assembled in the conference room at Bovington.
A very large white board occupied most of the lower part of one wall. It contained notes and photographs about elements of the whole situation.
Like a jigsaw, many did not yet fit together. Elastic strings marked the known connections.
As Etienne distributed coffees, my eyes wandered across the board.
There was a photograph of Sam; the ruins of my house and his; Leadbetter; Hunter; Rycroft; Forrester; Summerland; Holland; Harris; Rider; Hartnell; Walt Cooper with his partner and the Volkswagen campervan, and Tom Meadowcote.
There were other pictures of Meadowcote church and Meadowcote Hall; Arkangel – with the appearance she had used for her videolink conversation with me – and Vladimir Paulov in the picture taken at Lee-on-Solent.
Elsewhere on the board were the words: Asteroid; Orion; Betelgeuse; Meteorite; US missiles; Colonel John Hawker; Major Dwight White; Reverend David Butler; ARK; Area 51; Python; A51H; the starcruiser; Holland’s killer? and Rikard.
‘Let’s start with Leadbetter,’ said Joan, walking to the board and then looking across to Etienne.
‘We have him under guard now, so he can’t get away again and no one can get to him,’ said Etienne.
‘How does he feel about that after all the help he’s given us?’ asked Helen.
‘He’s oddly understanding of it,’ Etienne replied. ‘I spoke to him at some length this morning. He appears to understand that he’s currently a bit of an unknown quantity – both to us and to himself. He seems to have some recall now of things that happened from the point he escaped from here until the present. He has no recall of anything prior to that, however.’
‘Is he still a disciple of the Great Lord Morrison?’ I asked.
‘Seemingly not – he says that he only recalls you from when the two of you met at the military hospital in Norfolk.’
‘Can he remember where he put Hunter?’ asked Jenny.
‘Apparently not,’ Etienne replied. ‘I’m not quite sure what’s happening with him, but I suspect that his mind is unable to reconcile some of the things that have happened to him, and things he’s done in recent times, with his earlier view of himself. Events since he escaped from Bovington may have been bizarre by ordinary standards, but the personality he has exhibited throughout has been consistent.’
‘Kidnapping bishops and stealing secret American aircraft are inconsistent with the behaviour of a repressed local vicar, you mean,’ ventured Joan.
‘Something like that,’ Etienne replied. ‘His mind is only showing to him a consistent, comprehensible self-image. We don’t know what his mind will do next or how he will react, so that makes him highly unpredictable.’
Helen thought back to the previous day. ‘What’s happening to Amy?’ she asked.
‘Who’s Amy?’ asked Joan.
‘The pilot’s computer interface on the starcruiser,’ Helen replied.
‘At the moment,’ Joan answered, ‘no one knows that we’ve got Leadbetter or the starcruiser. Your description of what it can do, together with details the Americans gave to Robin, lead me to think that it might be useful to hang onto it for a little while.’
Joan stepped back to get a better view of the whole whiteboard. ‘Robin and Paul reported that the president’s national security advisor, Charlotte Goldman, speculated that ARK want the missile launch data to disrupt attempts to deflect the asteroid,’ she said.
‘That’s credible surely,’ said Helen. ‘We know they’re fundamentalists. Perhaps they think the asteroid is sent by God and that we should not interfere with whatever outcome God has planned.’
‘If it were only ARK involved,’ Joan replied, ‘that might make sense, but we know that Vladimir Paulov is working with them.’
‘Why does that make a difference?’ I asked.
Joan paused as if thinking. ‘I knew Vladimir Paulov. He used to work for MI6. He really believed in truth, justice, democracy – all the things that western governments talk about to the public while doing quite the opposite in secret. He was also an atheist.’
‘You think he wouldn’t be party to plans by ARK that could lead to the end of the world,’ Duck ventured.
‘You remember the briefing at Thames House, back in April,’ said Joan. ‘Robin Marsh talked about Tom Meadowcote working for MI6 at Gobekli Tepe and using the cover story of being an archaeologist on the dig with Sam Collins.’
‘Yes,’ said Duck.
‘There were two other agents on that mission,’ Joan continued. ‘One of them was Vladimir Paulov. The four of them became close friends.’
‘What happened?’ Helen asked.
‘There was some high level government corruption going on in the UK. The other agent knew about it. To cut a very long story short, the other agent was killed on instructions from the very top.’
‘Did one of the others kill him?’
‘No, we never discovered the identity of the assassin. All I could find was that his codename was Swordfish. The death was made to look like an accident – a trench collapse. The others knew it wasn’t an accident, but the reason for the killing didn’t come out for another twenty years.’
‘What happened to those involved?’ I said.
‘The ex-government ministers who were involved in the original corruption were exposed and eventually jailed. They’re all dead now. As I say, we still don’t know about Swordfish.’
‘Why do you think that Paulov wouldn’t have the same agenda as ARK if ARK was trying to sabotage the interception of the asteroid?’ I questioned.
‘Vladimir vanished after he returned to the UK. I’m sure he went to join one of those ultra-secret American organisations – very probably a specific one that collected disaffected agents and then attempted to undertake ethical, covert missions for the good of humanity.’
‘What made you think that?’ I asked.
‘Vladimir wrote to me with his condolences. He said he was sick of corrupt western governments who weren’t any better than the communists. He made reference to leaving one lot of snakes to join a better one. The group of disaffected agents that I was referring to is called Python.’
I wondered for a moment why Paulov would send condolences to Joan about the death of an agent. ‘Do you mind if I ask the name of the agent who was killed?’ I said.
‘I think you’ve worked that out, Swan,’ said Joan, His name was Bill Stanford. He was my husband.’ Joan paused before adding: ‘With the situation the way it is at the moment, there’s not a lot of point in keeping unnecessary secrets.’
Joan looked at the board once again. ‘Vladimir Paulov and Tom Meadowcote studied physics at Cambridge at the same time, as well as working together in MI6. I’ve always wondered if Tom joined Python too. He had very similar views to Vladimir.’
‘When I was researching Holland, I discovered that he’d studied physics at Cambridge,’ said Helen, recalling her searches on the Internet prior to visiting Great Melford. ‘Given their ages, that could have been at around the same time.’
‘That’s interesting,’ said Joan, stretching and fixing another section of elastic string across the whiteboard to highlight that potential link.
‘Holland didn’t seem like the sort of character who would fit with the ethos of Python though,’ added Helen, ‘judging by the information on the Internet.’
‘Unless he was a member of Python and had infiltrated ARK,’ said Etienne. ‘In that case, he could hardly express liberal, humanitarian views in public.’
‘Getting back to ARK’s plans,’ said Jenny to Joan. ‘You think it’s unlikely that Paulov would have sympathy with the idea of disrupting an attempt to deflect the asteroid. Also, he couldn’t pretend to ARK that he shared their views – they’d be aware of his background and probably his atheism.’
‘In that case,’ said Etienne, ‘if Paulov still adheres to his old principles and is working with ARK, then they must be working together in an attempt to deflect the asteroid.’
‘That brings us back to the question of why they’re bothering,’ said Duck, ‘when the Americans would be planning to do exactly the same thing.’
‘Let’s suppose that the Americans are not going to try to deflect the asteroid,’ suggested Etienne.
‘That makes no sense,’ Joan responded. ‘There’s no way that the president would endorse such a thing, and there’s no reason why he should. Also, there are a lot of good people in the military and in NASA who wouldn’t stand for it.’
‘The president talked to Paul and Robin about secret government organisations within secret government organisations in the US.’ Etienne continued to explain his theory. ‘Suppose that one of those organisations was planning to disrupt the interception of the asteroid. Might someone decide to move the whole control of the defence plan to somewhere self-contained, outside the USA?’
‘That makes sense,’ said Jenny. ‘It can’t take much to disrupt a missile launch – sabotaging power supplies or computers would do it, for example. If an organisation that was planning to disrupt the defence plan had infiltrated key roles within the US system, then it would probably succeed. The only way to defend against such a thing would be to pass control to a centre that was known to be clean.’
‘I can see why ARK would need Python to do that,’ said Jenny, ‘if Python have technical experts like Paulov and Meadowcote, but why would Python need ARK?’
‘Perhaps it’s about obtaining the data to take control of the missiles,’ Joan suggested. ‘The president speculated to Paul and Robin that ARK might have got the launch data from one of those ultra-secret US government organisations. It’s possible that such an organisation might be comprised of Christian fundamentalists and hence be a natural partner for ARK.
‘Some people will put their God above their country. An ultra-secret fundamentalist group in the US could easily have members who are in a position to get the launch data needed to control the missiles – the PAL and the presidential password for the relevant day.’
‘If it’s A51H that’s providing the data to ARK, as Leadbetter told me, then it can’t be planning to sabotage the American defence plan,’ Helen concluded. ‘There must be another organisation that wants the asteroid to hit the Earth.’
‘We need to locate Arkangel,’ said Joan. ‘She must know about the group that ARK, A51H and Python are collaborating to undermine.’
‘It’s possible that Forrester knows something,’ Helen added. ‘According to Christian, Arkangel planned to visit Forrester on the fourth of May. If they met, she may have given him more details or as a Master of ARK, he may have known all about this anyway.’
‘He’s certainly our best next step,’ said Etienne. ‘We don’t know where Hunter is or even whether he’s alive. All the other known members of ARK are dead apart from Forrester, Summerland and Leadbetter, and it’s possible that Forrester is the only one who has had recent contact with Arkangel.’
‘Will you be interrogating Forrester this afternoon?’ Joan asked Etienne.
‘It will be tomorrow afternoon.’ Etienne looked at me. ‘I’d like Swan’s help in the same way as when he spoke to Arkangel. Forrester probably maintains the conviction that Swan has terrifying supernatural powers. That may wrong-foot him in an interview and lead him to reveal something useful. Waiting until tomorrow will give time to discuss our approach to the interview.