The Final Cut (7 page)

'You're assuming I'll say yes? In the interests of a peerage?'

'Dear fellow, in the interests of British fair play.'

Further exchanges were rendered impossible, buried beneath the weight of noise. The French player had lunged, tripped, become entangled in the net as in desperation he tried to save a vital rally. Break point. The crowd, as one and on its feet, bellowed its delight.

The captain of the seismic vessel
Happy Valley
flicked the butt of his cigarette high above his head, watching it intently as it hung in the heavy air before dipping and falling reluctantly out of sight beyond the trawler's hull. His lungs were burning; he tried to strangle a cough, failed, shivered violently, spat. He'd promised his wife to give up the bloody things and had tried but, out here, day after day spent under callous skies, criss-crossing the featureless seas of the eastern Mediterranean, he found himself praying for storms, for mutiny, for any form of distraction. But there was none. He'd probably die of boredom long before the weed did for him.

He ached in his bones for the old days, running tank spares into Chile or stolen auto parts into Nigeria, his manifests a patchwork of confusion as he confronted the forces of authority, slipping between their legs with a cargo of contraband as a child evades a decrepit grandparent. Yet now his work was entirely legitimate; he thought the dullness of it all would crush his balls.

So those Byzantine bastards in Cyprus had agreed to exorcize their ghosts and reach a compromise. Peace to all men, whether Greek or Turk and no matter whose daughters they'd raped or goats they'd stolen. Or was it the other way around? Hell, he was French-Canadian and loathed the lot, but they wanted their offshore waters surveying so they could agree an amicable split. And the sanctions-busting business wasn't what it used to be, not with peace breaking out everywhere. Seismic was at least a job. Until the next war.

From the sea behind him came the explosive thud of compressed air. Once, he remembered, it had been bullets and mines. He'd never thought he'd die of boredom. He squinted into the setting sun at the lines of floats and hydrophones that trailed for three thousand meters beyond the
Happy Valley,
crisscrossing the seas on a precise grid pattern controlled by satellite while bouncing shock waves off the muds and shales below the sea bed and down the throats of the computers. The damned computers had the only air conditioning on the vessel while the men fried eggs in their underwear. But, as his bosses at Seismic International never ceased to remind him, this was a thirty-thousand-dollar-a-day operation, the captain and his crew were the cheapest part of it and by far the easiest to replace.

He spat at a seagull that had perched on the rail beside him. The bird rose languidly into the skies behind the vessel, examined the creamy wake for fish and, finding none, gave a cry of contempt before departing in search of a proper trawler. Christ, even the bloody birds couldn't stick the ship. And what was the point? Everyone knew there was nothing but a lot of scrap iron and shards of old pottery down there; not even any fish to talk of, not after they'd blown the once thriving marine world apart with old grenades and other forms of indiscriminate fishing.

He couldn't stick this outburst of peace. He wanted another war. And another cigarette. He coughed and began searching his pockets.

He was standing in his dress shirt, bow tie cast aside, staring out through the shard-proof curtains of the bedroom window across St James's Park when she came in. The room was in darkness, his face cast like a wax mask in the reflection from the lighting beneath the trees in the park. Francis Urquhart, shoulders down, hands thrust deep into his dress trouser pockets, looked miserable.

'They turned old Freddie off,' he whispered.

'Darling?'

'Old Freddie Warburton. The car crash? On life support? They decided there was no point, Elizabeth. So they turned him off.'

'But I thought you said he was useless.'

Urquhart spun round to face his wife. 'Of course he was useless. Utterly and comprehensively useless. I'm surprised they could even tell when his brain had stopped functioning. But that's not the point, is it?'

'Then what is the point, Francis?'

'The point, Elizabeth, is that he was the only surviving member of my original Cabinet from all those years ago. They'll say it's the end of an era. My era. Don't you see?'

Elizabeth had begun taking off her jewellery, methodically preparing herself for bed in the semi-light while she considered her husband's fragile mood. 'Don't you think you're over-reacting a little?' she ventured.

'Of course I am,' he replied. 'But they'll over-react, too, the wretched media always do. You know how the poison has begun to drip. Should've retired on his tenth anniversary. An ageing administration in need of new ideas and new blood. An age which is passing. Now with bloody Freddie away they'll say it's passed. Gone.' He sat down on the edge of his bed. 'It makes me feel so
..
. alone, somehow. Except for you.'

She knelt on his bed and began to work away at the tension in his shoulders. 'Francis, you are the most successful Prime Minister this country has ever had. You've won as many elections as anyone, in three months' time you will have passed Margaret Thatcher's record of time in office. Your place in the history books is assured.'

He turned. She could see the jaw muscles working away, making his temples throb.

'That's it, Elizabeth. I feel as if I'm already history. All yesterday, no longer today. No tomorrow.'

It was back, his black mood, when he raged at the pointlessness of his life and the ingratitude and incompetence of the world around him. The moods never lasted long, but undeniably they were lasting longer. The challenge had lost its freshness, he needed dragons to slay but instead they seemed to have crawled away and hidden between the sub
-
clauses of interminable policy documents and Euro-regulations. The cloak of office hung heavily on his shoulders, ceremonial robes where once there had been armour. He had towered like a giant above the parliamentary scene, quite beyond the reach of his foes, but something had changed, perhaps in him and certainly in others. They speculated openly about how long he would last before he stepped down, about who would be the most likely successor. His reputation for slicing through the legs of young pretenders was formidable, but now they seemed to have formed a circle around his campfire, skulking in the shadows, staying just beyond his reach, finding safety in growing numbers while they waited for their moment to step into the light. A few weeks ago he had appeared in the Chamber at Question Time, ready as always to defend himself against their arrows, carrying with pride the shield that bore the dents and scars of so many successful parliamentary battles. Then a young Opposition backbencher whom Urquhart scarcely recognized had risen to his feet.

'Does the Prime Minister know the latest unemployment figure for this country?'

And sat down.

Impudence! Not 'Will he comment on' or 'How can he excuse', but 'Does he know'. Of course Urquhart knew, two million or other, but he realized he needed not an approximation but the precise figure and had searched in his briefing notes. He shouldn't have needed to search; he should have known.
But
the damned figure changed every month!
And as he had searched, his glasses slipped, and the Opposition benches had erupted as he scrabbled. 'He doesn't know, doesn't care!' they shouted. He had found the answer but by then it was too late. A direct hit.

It was unlike Francis Urquhart. He had bled, shown he was mortal. And the black moods had increased.

'I sometimes wonder what it's all been for, Elizabeth. What you and I have to look forward to. One day we'll walk out through that door for the last time and . . . then what? Horlicks and bloody Bognor?' He shivered as her fingers reached the knot at the back of his neck.

'You're being silly,' she scolded. 'That's a long way off and, anyway, we've discussed it many times before. There's the Urquhart Library to establish. And the Urquhart Chair of International Studies at Oxford. There's so much we will still have to do. And I met a publisher at the reception this evening. He was enthusing about your memoirs. Said the Thatcher books went for something like three million pounds and yours will be worth far more. Not a bad way to start raising the endowment money we need for the Library.'

His chin had fallen onto his chest once more. She realized the talk of memoirs had been misjudged.

'I'm not sure. Not memoirs, I don't think I can, Elizabeth.'

'We shall need the money, Francis. As much as we shall need each other.'

He turned sharply to look at her, staring intensely. In the dark she couldn't detect whether the cast in his eye betrayed mirth or yet deeper melancholy.

'No memoirs,' he repeated. 'Setting down the old falsehoods and inventing new ones. I couldn't write about my colleagues in that way, speaking such ill of the departed. God knows, I uttered lies enough to bury them, I couldn't pursue them beyond the grave. Not at all. Not for a King's ransom.' He paused. 'Could I, Elizabeth?'

Hakim was angry. His coffee was cold, his moustache growing white, his talents under-appreciated, his bank unsympathetic, and everyone knew him simply as Hakim. Not
Mr
Hakim, not
Yaman
Hakim, not
Old Friend and Colleague
Hakim. There was a small sign on his office door to that effect, they would carve it on his coffin,
'Hakim the Forgotten'.
Then they would forget him, the wife, the kids, the bosses, his bank manager. All of them. Especially his bank manager. He sipped the lukewarm mud in his coffee cup and pursed his lips in disgust. A lifetime's conscientious work and yet all he would have to take with him when the time came to go were his unfulfilled dreams.

He paused to consider. What would he most like to take with him into the afterlife? Young girls? Gold? An air-conditioned Mercedes? The vineyard he had always coveted? Probably young girls, he decided. No, on second thoughts he would take his bank manager. Then they could both burn.

He smiled to himself, then coughed painfully. The damned pollution was getting to his chest again. It was one of the many problems of building a capital city in the armpit of Anatolia where they burnt filthy brown coal and choked the streets with petrol fumes. And they were slowly, remorselessly congesting his lungs. A lifetime's service in order that he could choke to death. And be forgotten.

If he just locked the door from the inside and rotted, would anybody notice? His was a miserable office, even by the unexceptional standards of TNOC, the Turkish National Oil Corporation -shelves crammed with old manuals and reports, walls plastered with charts covered in bizarre patterns, a desk dusted with coffee stains and cigarette ash, the dusty accompaniments of his work as a geo-physicist. For all he knew the office's previous occupant might still be hiding within the bowels of the small document cupboard in the corner - even though this had been Hakim's office for fourteen years.

He turned back to the computer screen and re
-
examined the seismic cross-sections that had started coming in from the survey. There seemed to be little of interest, everyone knew there was nothing in the seas around Cyprus - TNOC wouldn't have bothered buying in the seismic had Cypriot waters not abutted Turkey's own. All other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean seemed to have oil, not only the Turks but the Libyans, Syrians, Egyptians, even damned Greeks — everyone except little Cyprus, who perhaps needed it more than most. Dry as dust. God's mystery. A desert amidst a sea of black gold. Such is the oil business.

He looked again. They all laughed at him, old Hakim the Forgotten, but he had the patience for the tedious work of analysis, not like these youngsters whose only interest was in football and fu . . . He stopped. He experienced a strange tingling in his fingers as they hovered over the keyboard, a sensation that he had been here before, or somewhere much like it. A long time ago. Where could it have been? He polished his glasses, giving himself time to remember. These were sedimentary rocks, that was for sure, but sedimentaries bearing oil were like Greeks bearing gifts. Rarely genuine. What type might they be?

Then he understood. He had not only seen it on geological logs, he'd even stuck his hand in the bloody mud. Thirty years ago, as a student at the Petroleum Institute when they had visited an exploratory well being drilled near the sea border with Cyprus. It had pulled up all the right geological formations, the sandwich of spongy sandstones that in theory might have held a billion barrels of oil but had yielded not a single drop. Now he thought he knew why. One of the seismic lines from the recent survey had been shot up to the site of the dry well and went straight through what was obviously a fault plane, a slippage in the earth's crust that played hell with the geology.

He started coughing again, nerves this time. Somewhere he reckoned he still had a copy of his Petroleum Institute report and its detailed findings from the old well. The document cupboard. The thin metal door squealed in protest as with shaking fingers he began ransacking the contents - no skeleton guarding the pirate's doubloons but ancient treasure nonetheless. It was in his hands, a slim ring-bound document that trembled like leaves in an autumn wind as he turned the pages.