The Dying Light (61 page)
‘And now you’re talking to a newspaper?’
‘Yes.’
‘Tell them everything, Alice. I mean
everything
. Tell them how this happened in England. Tell them that even after making a deal with Chris they killed him because they had to eliminate Tony Swift.’
everything
. Tell them how this happened in England. Tell them that even after making a deal with Chris they killed him because they had to eliminate Tony Swift.’
‘I will,’ she said and rang off.
Kate went back with Kilmartin into the committee room. More space had been made for journalists who had long ceased to care about the niceties of parliamentary privilege. Two of the committee had left but ten remained, and were taking turns to question Eyam on the documents in front of them. As the minutes wore on, it became clear that there was something compelling and historic about the events in Committee Room Five. Eventually it was Eyam who decided that enough had been said.
Several times Kate had seen him catch himself and stop speaking. She knew from watching Charlie that it was the pain surging through him. She whispered, ‘You’ve done what you had to do. You can stop now.’
He squeezed her hand and continued to talk but with a low, strained urgency and in short sentences, as though each word was costing him dearly. Half an hour later he suddenly stood up, looked around the room, attempted to thank everyone and collapsed into her arms. Miff and Kilmartin jumped up. But Kate took his weight, which now seemed so slight, and helped him from the room and down the corridor in the direction of the House of Lords Entrance. ‘Carry me over floods, Sister,’ he said as they went.
On their way they passed a TV set. Silent footage was being played of John Temple returning from Buckingham Palace and giving a press conference in Downing Street. Eyam asked her to turn the sound up. Her mother, who had followed them, reached up to the volume control, and squeezed her daughter’s arm. ‘Well done, darling: that was truly splendid.’
‘The general election goes ahead,’ Temple was saying with some defiance. ‘The British public will not tolerate these sordid attempts to interfere with the democratic process, for that is clearly what we have witnessed in Parliament today. They will not stand for it and nor will I.’
‘Prime minister,’ shouted a voice from behind the cameras. ‘Has Eden White fled the country?’
‘Mr White is a valued friend of Britain. No, he has not fled the country. He has, I gather, been called abroad on a routine matter of business.’
‘Do you regret invoking the emergency powers?’ another reporter called out. ‘What do you say, prime minister, to those who were held without charge and were not allowed legal representation?’
‘I say to the country that I will do anything in my power to safeguard people’s lives. The British public knows that sometimes in government you have to make very tough decisions to protect life. That is what I am here for.’
‘Will there be an inquiry into the release of toxic red algae from a government laboratory?’ asked a woman holding a microphone out to Temple.
‘That is already underway,’ he replied, forcing a smile. ‘We always promised that every aspect of this affair would be investigated. Now, if you wouldn’t mind, I have an election to fight. No doubt we will be seeing a lot of each over the coming weeks, and you will all be able to put your questions to me during that period.’ He turned towards the door. ‘Thank you.’
Questions were shouted at his back, but one voice was raised above them all. ‘Will you assure the public that government surveillance of the people’s private lives by the DEEP TRUTH system will be suspended? What do you say to allegations that a foreign power has hacked into the system?’
Temple stopped, then took a couple of paces back to the microphones. ‘Let me make it quite clear that my government holds dear the rights of the individual.’ This was too much for the reporters, who began to barrack him. ‘I will stop at nothing to defend the people,’ he shouted. ‘Nothing! And it is nonsense to suggest that any foreign power has access to government databases.’
Kate looked at Eyam’s impassive features.
‘Did you see that?’ he asked. ‘The mask slipped.’ It was true that on the word ‘nothing’ John Temple’s expression was suddenly contorted with loathing which seemed to transform his whole appearance. ‘People won’t forget that quickly.’
‘A primal scream,’ said Kate. ‘Let’s hope they don’t.’
Outside it had stopped raining and the sun flooded Parliament Square. There was no sign of the police who had entered the committee room. Most of the army had gone and the rest of the police were scaling back their operation with the knowledge that the source of toxic red algae lay in a government laboratory over two hundred miles away. A crowd of several thousand waited. Many of them were Bell Ringers who had left the hotel conference centre and hastened to Parliament, each one of them the accidental or intended victim of DEEP TRUTH; and each one with a name that was no longer part of the government database because Darsh Darshan had used a trapdoor in the system to expunge all reference to them.
A cheer went up when they appeared in Old Palace Yard. Eyam stopped and smiled, but he did not wave because he had no strength.
‘It’s like a revolution,’ said Miff excitedly.
‘No, Mr Miff,’ said Eyam. ‘Simply a restoration: that’s what we must hope for. The restoration of our rights and privacy: nothing more.’
The driver who had brought Eyam in the ambulance with Miff came back to help him into the vehicle. Just as he opened the doors, all ten bells of Westminster Abbey sounded at once. Again the people turned their heads, eyes freshening, as though spring was being announced, or someone had decided that life itself should be celebrated.
‘The Bell Ringers,’ said Eyam with a smile.
‘Bloody England,’ said Kate.
Afterword
The Dying Light
is set in the future but it is not a futuristic novel. I have projected a little way forward from the position in which Britain finds itself in the summer of 2009, which I now realise is exactly sixty years after the publication of George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four
. It did not occur to me to update his dystopia, or compete with it, because I soon realised it wasn’t necessary. My character, Kate Lockhart, returns from the United States to a country that is completely familiar to us but which also contains much of what is repeatedly described in the press as ‘Orwellian’.
is set in the future but it is not a futuristic novel. I have projected a little way forward from the position in which Britain finds itself in the summer of 2009, which I now realise is exactly sixty years after the publication of George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four
. It did not occur to me to update his dystopia, or compete with it, because I soon realised it wasn’t necessary. My character, Kate Lockhart, returns from the United States to a country that is completely familiar to us but which also contains much of what is repeatedly described in the press as ‘Orwellian’.
In the sixty years that have passed since the publication of Orwell’s novel, there has been radical change in Britain. On the whole, these marked advances and restrictions on civil liberties have been quietly introduced with little fuss, debate or reaction from the British public.
Recently a Russian journalist named Irada Zeinalova described living in Britain for her audience at home thus: ‘Your moves are monitored by your bus tickets. There are CCTV cameras on every building and computer chips on the rubbish bin - and they can tell a lot about your life by studying your rubbish . . . Security has got absurd.’ This is precisely the kind of dispatch routinely sent home by western correspondents in the Soviet Union during the Brezhnev era. The picture that Zeinalova paints is difficult to deny. The British have become more closely watched than any other people in the west - maybe in the entire world. We have more CCTV cameras than the rest of Europe put together. CCTV infests not only streets and shopping centres, but restaurants, cinemas and pubs where, with the encouragement of the police and local officials, cameras record the head and shoulders of every individual one who enters.
People are watched the whole time. Road journeys are now monitored by cameras adapted to read car number plates and the data from every trip is kept for five years. This technology allows the authorities to target and track a vehicle in real time, a useful tool if the state wishes to keep tabs on a criminal but also equally useful for tracking political dissidents or climate change activists. Special Police teams are deployed to protest events with the sole purpose of filming innocent protestors and storing their data. Around the country, tens of thousands of people are stopped by the police and required to submit to searches under terror laws. According to the European Court of Human Rights, the genetic profiles of hundreds of thousands of innocent people are now illegally held on police DNA databases.
This depressing list makes you wonder - like Kate Lockhart - what happened in Britain. Why have the British public accepted, without a murmur of dissent, that their government has the right to access the data from everyone’s telephone and online communications, to monitor their children’s lives on a national database or demand over fifty pieces of information before a citizen can leave their own country? It seems extraordinary that at the time of writing we are committed to an ID card scheme that will record all the important transactions in a person’s life and hold the details indefinitely on the National Identity Register computers. The same applies to people’s health records, which will be stored centrally and open to inspection by vast numbers of medical professionals and - naturally - also government agencies. The potential for abuse is obvious in both systems yet there has been remarkably little outcry, which is odd given that Orwell noted that privacy was one of the defining characteristics of the British.
The laws that play a part in
The Dying Light
all exist. I make particular use of the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, which, as my character George Lyme suggests, enables the Prime Minister, a minister, or the Government Chief Whip to dismantle democracy and the Rule of Law overnight. These powers can be invoked on the mere conviction that an emergency is about to take place, and there is no sanction against that person if the powers are invoked wrongly. Even in an academic study like
The Civil Contingencies Act 2004
by Clive Walker and James Broderick (OUP, 2006) you sense the amazement of the authors at measures which allow for the suspension of travel, seizing of property, forced evacuation, special courts and arbitrary detention and arrest. In their conclusion they envision ‘an extensively securitised society with increasing focus on risk management and prevention and its attendant emanations such as pervasive surveillance and physical security, expensive equipment, remote and shadowy organisations and programmes, and the skewing of social agendas’. This description pretty much explains the state of affairs in
The Dying Light
. I stress that I have not made anything up: the law is all there, ready and waiting on the Stature Book, a fact that very few people in Britain perhaps appreciate.
The Dying Light
all exist. I make particular use of the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, which, as my character George Lyme suggests, enables the Prime Minister, a minister, or the Government Chief Whip to dismantle democracy and the Rule of Law overnight. These powers can be invoked on the mere conviction that an emergency is about to take place, and there is no sanction against that person if the powers are invoked wrongly. Even in an academic study like
The Civil Contingencies Act 2004
by Clive Walker and James Broderick (OUP, 2006) you sense the amazement of the authors at measures which allow for the suspension of travel, seizing of property, forced evacuation, special courts and arbitrary detention and arrest. In their conclusion they envision ‘an extensively securitised society with increasing focus on risk management and prevention and its attendant emanations such as pervasive surveillance and physical security, expensive equipment, remote and shadowy organisations and programmes, and the skewing of social agendas’. This description pretty much explains the state of affairs in
The Dying Light
. I stress that I have not made anything up: the law is all there, ready and waiting on the Stature Book, a fact that very few people in Britain perhaps appreciate.
One problem I did not expect while writing about the future was for my vision to be overtaken by events in the present day. No sooner did my fictional Prime Minister, John Temple, mention that he regretted failing to hold David Eyam’s inquest in camera than the current Justice Minister, Jack Straw, introduced a law allowing secret inquests. No sooner was the fictional Deep Truth programme drawing information from social networking sites, than the Home office announced a consultation with a view to granting the government access to data stored on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. I even began to wonder if a system like Deep Truth, a name inspired by a phrase in real government documents about data sharing, existed in reality.
The Dying Light
is a pair to my novel Brandenburg (2005), which is set in the weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, which I witnessed as a journalist. Early in the evening on the night after the border opened, I walked through Checkpoint Charlie along Friedrichstrasse and into East Germany. The sense of evacuation in the dismal, poorly lit streets of East Berlin was very striking. After an hour or two, I turned and joined the crowds making their way towards the glow of the West and had the experience of moving with the East Berliners into that bright illuminated world that had lain out of reach on the other side of No Man’s Land for nearly three decades. The people from the East moved into the light and freedom at the same time. That theme is present throughout
Brandenburg.
is a pair to my novel Brandenburg (2005), which is set in the weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, which I witnessed as a journalist. Early in the evening on the night after the border opened, I walked through Checkpoint Charlie along Friedrichstrasse and into East Germany. The sense of evacuation in the dismal, poorly lit streets of East Berlin was very striking. After an hour or two, I turned and joined the crowds making their way towards the glow of the West and had the experience of moving with the East Berliners into that bright illuminated world that had lain out of reach on the other side of No Man’s Land for nearly three decades. The people from the East moved into the light and freedom at the same time. That theme is present throughout
Brandenburg.
The
Dying Light
is about the reverse process - about a society that still has recognisably democratic institutions, free courts and a free media but is ineluctably drawn towards the night. Objectively, it is intriguing to witness, especially the curious absence of concern, and I have often wondered what Orwell would have made of it. Maybe there is an explanation in his London Letter for the
Partisan Review
at the end of the war when he wrote about returning from the continent and seeing England with fresh eyes, ‘The pacifist habit of mind, respect for freedom of speech and belief in legality have managed to survive here while seemingly disappearing on the other side of the Channel.’ He went on to muse on the lack of public reaction of any kind during the war, which seems almost unbelievable in these emotionally charged times. ‘In the face of terrifying dangers,’ he wrote, ‘people just keep on keeping on in a twilight of sleep in which they are conscious of nothing except the daily round of work, family life, darts at the pub, exercising the dog, mowing the lawn, bringing home the beer etc etc’. Later he concludes, ‘I don’t know whether this semi-anaesthesia in which the British people contrive to live is a sign of decadence, as many observers believe, or whether on the other hand it is a kind of instinctive wisdom.’
Dying Light
is about the reverse process - about a society that still has recognisably democratic institutions, free courts and a free media but is ineluctably drawn towards the night. Objectively, it is intriguing to witness, especially the curious absence of concern, and I have often wondered what Orwell would have made of it. Maybe there is an explanation in his London Letter for the
Partisan Review
at the end of the war when he wrote about returning from the continent and seeing England with fresh eyes, ‘The pacifist habit of mind, respect for freedom of speech and belief in legality have managed to survive here while seemingly disappearing on the other side of the Channel.’ He went on to muse on the lack of public reaction of any kind during the war, which seems almost unbelievable in these emotionally charged times. ‘In the face of terrifying dangers,’ he wrote, ‘people just keep on keeping on in a twilight of sleep in which they are conscious of nothing except the daily round of work, family life, darts at the pub, exercising the dog, mowing the lawn, bringing home the beer etc etc’. Later he concludes, ‘I don’t know whether this semi-anaesthesia in which the British people contrive to live is a sign of decadence, as many observers believe, or whether on the other hand it is a kind of instinctive wisdom.’
Then, as now, the British defy analysis. Are we building the most advanced systems of surveillance ever seen in a free society because deep down we are so sure of our democratic values, our respect for free speech and legality, that we know that whatever happens nothing will change us? Or does our stoicism, our determination to ‘keep on keeping on’ and not get too worked up about things, amount to a fatal complacency? It is difficult to know the answer today but in just a few years time we will.
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