Eight hours’ flying, add five for time zones—if Alan Mitchell would agree to work through the night, Hannah could have his answer in Sunshine by breakfast hour on Monday.
“So you’re taking off now?” he asked.
“Well, not exactly,” said Parker. “You see, if we did, we’d land after one A.M. at Heathrow. That’s not allowed. Noise abatement, I’m afraid.”
“So what the hell are you going to do?”
“Well, the usual takeoff time is just after six this afternoon here, landing just after seven A.M. at Heathrow. So they’re going to revert to that timing.”
“But that’ll mean two jumbos taking off together,” said Hannah.
“Yes, it does, Chief. But don’t worry. Both will be full, so the airline won’t take a loss.”
“Thank God for that!” snapped Hannah, and put the phone down. Twenty-four hours, he thought, twenty-four bleeding hours. There are three things in this life about which one can do nothing: death, taxes, and airlines.
Then he spotted Dillon walking up the steps to the hotel with two fit-looking young men. Probably his taste, thought Hannah savagely, bloody Foreign Office. He was not in a good mood.
Across the square, a flock of Mr. Quince’s parishioners—the men in neat dark suits, the women brightly caparisoned like birds of brilliant plumage—were streaming out of the church at the end of morning service, prayer books in white-gloved hands, wax fruit bobbing and nodding on straw hats. It was an (almost) normal Sunday morning on Sunshine Island.
In the home counties of England, things were not quite so peaceful. At Chequers, the country residence of the Prime Ministers of Great Britain, set amid twelve hundred rolling acres of Buckinghamshire, Mrs. Thatcher had been up early as usual and had plowed through four red dispatch boxes of state papers before joining Denis Thatcher for breakfast before a cheery log fire.
As she finished, there was a tap on the door, and her press secretary, Bernard Ingham, entered. He held the Sunday Express in his hand.
“Something I thought you might like to see, Prime Minister.”
“So who’s having a
go at me now?” inquired the PM brightly.
“No,” said the beetle-browed Yorkshireman. “It’s about the Caribbean.”
She read the large centerfold spread, and her brow furrowed. The pictures were there: of Marcus Johnson on the hustings in Port Plaisance, and again, a few years earlier, seen through a gap in a pair of curtains. There were photos of his eight bodyguards, all taken around Parliament Square on Friday, and matching pictures taken from Kingston Police files. Lengthy statements from “senior DEA sources in the Caribbean” and from Commissioner Foster of the Kingston Police occupied much of the accompanying text.
“But this is dreadful!” said the Prime Minister. “I must speak to Douglas.”
She went straight to her private office and rang Douglas.
Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Mr. Douglas Hurd, was with his family at his official country residence—another mansion, called Chevening, set in the county of Kent. He had perused the Sunday Times, Observer, and Sunday Telegraph, but he had not yet reached the Sunday Express.
“No, Margaret, I haven’t seen it yet,” he said. “But I have it within arm’s reach.”
“I’ll hold on,” said the PM.
The Foreign Secretary, a former novelist of some note, knew a good newspaper story when he saw one. This one seemed to be extremely well sourced.
“Yes, I agree. It’s disgraceful, if it’s true. ... Yes, yes, Margaret, I’ll get onto it in the morning and have the Caribbean desk check it out.”
But civil servants are human beings too—a sentiment not often echoed by the general public—and they have wives, children, and homes. With six days to go to Christmas, Parliament was in recess and even the ministries were thinly staffed. Still, there had to be someone on duty the next morning, Monday, and the matter of a new Governor could be addressed then.
Mrs. Thatcher and her family went to Sunday-morning service at Ellesborough and returned just after twelve. At one they sat down for lunch with a few friends. These included Bernard Ingham.
It was her political adviser Charles Powell who caught the BSB program Countdown at twelve o’clock. He liked Countdown. It carried some good foreign news now and again, and as an ex-diplomat that was his specialty. When he saw the program’s headlines and a reference to a later report on a scandal in the Caribbean, he pressed the “record” button on the VCR machine beneath the TV.
At two, Mrs. Thatcher was up again—she never saw much point in spending a long time over food; it wasted part of a busy day—and as she left the dining room a hovering Charles Powell intercepted her. In her study he put the tape into her VCR and ran it. She watched in silence. Then she rang Chevening again.
Mr. Hurd, a devoted family man, had taken his small son and daughter for a brisk walk across the fields. He had just returned, hungry for his roast beef, when Mrs. Thatcher’s second call came through.
“No, I missed that too, Margaret,” he said.