Free Whispers of Betrayal by Michael Dobbs Page A

so messy when I put my back into it.’
    ‘So you want in. And you thought the best way to impress me was to balls-up a simple vote?’
    ‘Think positive. Get me off my bike, Eddie, and you rob an old rebel of his excuse.’
    They held each other’s gaze, testing.
    ‘You pick your moments, Tom,’ Rankin eventually responded. His tone was considered, contemplative. Not dismissive. ‘The tom-toms are beginning to beat from Downing Street. Testing the tune of an early reshuffle. One or two braves to be burnt at the stake, so rumour has it. Somebody will need to take their place.’
    ‘I’d like it to be me.’ There, he’d said it. No ambiguity, ambition to the fore. It felt good, like favourite shoes.
    ‘Ah, the appetite returns!’
    ‘Put it down to menopausal vanity. An insane desire for a higher profile. Before I have to start dying my hair.’
    ‘And suddenly you’ve become enamoured of our beloved leader?’ There was no hiding the sceptical note. Rankin was a musician, he could recognize a duff score.
    ‘You know me better than that, Eddie. Y’know Brother Bendall better than that, too. One day there’ll be a great shaking of the ground and he’ll get buried beneath an avalanche of his own bullshit. But while History makes up her mind as to when the burial will be, I can be helpful. I
want
to be helpful.’
    ‘And some might say he needs all the help he can get,’ Rankin responded, so softly that it wouldn’t carry as far as the walls.
    ‘Will you put my name forward?’
    ‘It’s my duty, now you’ve offered.’
    ‘But will you recommend it?’
    The Chief Whip took a slug of whisky. ‘Recommend you? Bit like recommending jumping as a cure for vertigo. Who knows? You’re such an awkward sod, Goodfellowe …’
    The McDonnell Douglas MD-82 banked gently over the sea as it positioned itself for a final approach to the airport at Odessa. The sight that greeted her through the cabin window was remarkable and Elizabeth hoped it would prove to be something of an omen.
    Through the window of the Austrian Air flight she could see a fleet of aircraft set out beside the runway, a testament to the might of the infant and independent republic of Ukraine. Bombers, transports, fighter planes, helicopters, MIGs, Tupolevs, Yaks and Sukhois, all ranged in straight rows like the tentacles of a great war machine ready to form a guard of honour.
    ‘Our air force,’ the male passenger in the seat beside her indicated. ‘Big bloody air force,’ he added. Yuri’s English was not good and was very guttural, like an engine running on its last drop of oil, but somehow throughout the afternoon flight from Vienna he had managed to make his meanings entirely transparent to his unaccompanied companion. She had already turned down his repeated invitation to dinner.
    As they taxied past the aircraft on the ground he returned to histheme, jabbing his finger for emphasis. ‘Air force in mothballs. Big bloody moths, eh?’ A laugh originated from somewhere near his large intestine. ‘But no bloody balls!’
    She could see what he meant. The aircraft that at a distance had looked so imposing at closer quarters revealed nothing but disaster. The place was an aeronautical knacker’s yard. There were old military planes with engines stripped, their sides still covered with Soviet stigmata, single-seater fighters shorn of their canopies and propped up on concrete slabs, helicopters with some rotors missing, the others sagging in surrender. Passenger planes, too. One huge hurry-before-they-rot-and-rust clearance sale. You could buy anything here, she’d been told, even buy a navy to match if you took a trip to Sebastopol, and for a price that was always right. An omen, indeed, she hoped.
    She had heard about the wine from a Ukrainian customer who had come to dine at The Kremlin after delivering his son to his Wiltshire public school. The wine was not his personal business, that at least she had managed to gather from his