Head of State: The Bestselling Brexit Thriller. Andrew Marr

break in Dubai, and was touched when Alois packed for him. It almost made up for his steerage-class ticket – Alois, as always, travelled first class. But when Ajit discovered, while delving in his rucksack for his washbag at Dubai International Airport, that he had just unwittingly carried a vast sum of sterling through customs, while Alois had brought only a few T-shirts and a credit card, the couple had their first big row.

      ‘But you got away with it,’ Alois had defended himself.

      ‘That’s not the point. You deceived me. You did it coldly, and you put me in danger. You behaved like a shit.’

      ‘For God’s sake, Ajit. Nobody travelling in steerage with a rucksack is going to be checked for currency. You get past the dope-sniffer dogs and you’re home free. It would have been much more risky if I’d had it in my luggage. And if I’d told you about it you’d have been pathetic – all camp and sweaty and scared – and you’d certainly have been caught.’

      ‘Don’t call me pathetic. And don’t you dare call me camp. I’m not “camp”. I’m not “gay”. I’m not “queer”. I’m just an old-fashioned, straightforward bugger. And I’m damned proud to be a bugger. All I ask, Alois …’

      Their voices had been raised enough to attract the attention of the businessmen and white-robed taxi drivers standing around the arrivals hall. The country was full of proud buggers, but they didn’t often talk about it in loud voices in public places.

      The argument fizzled out, but it left Ajit in a terrible mood, and spoiled the holiday for both of them. Alois had taken the money off to the bank recommended to him by his wealth manager at Raworth & Reid in London and opened a new and untraceable account, the ultimate insurance, which even in Dubai took an entire morning. Ajit was left to sun himself by the hotel pool, which proved to be greasy with tanning lotion and full of writhing, screaming Arab teenagers throwing footballs and splashing each other. And the sun was far too hot. He decided that he hated Dubai, and retreated indoors to the fitness suite to work off his bad temper on some kettle bells and the treadmill.

      A wiry, tousle-headed man, dressed only in a pair of shorts, was grunting away on the rowing machine. Both of them did a hard forty minutes in the gym before starting to talk under the refreshingly cold showers. The rower introduced himself as Charmian Locke, a ‘sort of banker’ from London, and added nastily, ‘You musht be the only Indian staying in a fuck-off place like thish.’

      The speech impediment – made all the more noticeable by his huge teeth, like gleaming white tombstones – bothered Ajit. It seemed to come and go. Could it be an affectation? Nevertheless, he explained that his partner had come to invest some money here, and said that Dubai struck him as a bit of a hole.

      ‘It’sh not so bad. The trouble ish, it isn’t Arab and it isn’t Western,’ said Charmian. ‘It ish a hole, I shpose – the hole between the two.’ He and Ajit talked about why so much money was being made in this surreal, gritty little country. Ajit, as a writer, both respected money and was frightened by it. But Charmian’s evident greed and cleverness were catching, and Ajit began to find his new acquaintance’s conversation as interesting as his teeth were alarming.

      However, by the time he and Haydn, both of whom were still disgruntled with one another, returned to the airport a few days later, he had forgotten Charmian. But then they bumped into each other in the queue. Ajit introduced him to Alois as the brilliant money man he’d met in the hotel gym. Naturally, Charmian was travelling at the front of the plane, and he and Alois talked non-stop all the way to London. One of the great things about first-class air travel is that it puts all the crooks together.

      Charmian Locke had worked for one of the biggest investment banks in the world before his blog about life in the City after the financial crash was tracked to his trading computer and he was fired for breaking the firm’s confidentiality clauses. The truth was, he had been bored. His deserved reputation as one of the shrewdest brains on the trading floor meant that he was soon contacted by a friend of his father’s, Sir Solomon Dundas, a flamboyant former private banker now with a company called PLS, with a proposal concerning his future employment. The money wasn’t great, but the job was.

      ‘He’s a damn clever fellow. New generation. Perfectly respectable – just don’t let him smile at you,’ was the judgement of Solomon. And so it was that Alois Haydn came to have yet another link with Professional Logistical Services.

       Professional Logistical Services

      At his insistence, the group of eminent public Britons had convened to meet Alois Haydn in a private club off Shepherd’s Market. He’d ordered them over there, and now he’d ordered them over here. The man was a maniac for secrecy. There was an air of irritation in the room, as they had all left urgent work. They were unaccustomed to being summoned, and unaccustomed to waiting.

      This club was a remnant of a London that – so far as outsiders imagined – had long disappeared. It was the London in which gentlemen never wore brown shoes except with corduroy trousers and tweed jackets; the London whose tobacconists mixed cigarette blends just as sir preferred, and where Purdeys were bought in pairs for young sons; the London of unmarked doors, of Albany chambers (not ‘flats’, still less ‘apartments’), where the tea was forever Darjeeling and the gins only came pink. It was a London, frankly, that was mostly now for sale to wealthy foreign nostalgists. But there were still a few pockets of the old ways.

      A circle of padded leather chairs had been arranged in front of an ornate marble fireplace. One of those present was actually smoking – tobacco. A discreet handwritten sign on the door told club members that the Red Library had been reserved until lunchtime by ‘PLS’. The full name of the company whose executive had gathered in the small, stuffy room in Mayfair had been deliberately chosen because it was the dullest and most meaningless available.

      The average age of the people assembled in the room was well into the seventies, and one weatherbeaten and famous face must have been ninety if he was a day. Yet the gathering unmistakably exuded power as well as experience. An informed observer – Ken Cooper, say – would have recognised everyone there.

      Admiral Lord Jock Dalgety, former chief of the Defence Staff, was rubbing his long red nose and muttering something to General Sir Mike Patten, who had led the British forces in Iraq and who still failed to look convincingly like a businessman. Dame Cecily Morgan, former director of MI5, was sitting utterly still and silent, her hands neatly folded in her lap. She had been recruited by General Patten after a late-night club dinner when they had found themselves the last two guests remaining at the table for ten.

      ‘What, really, do you have to look forward to, Cecily?’ he had asked her as they nursed their brandies.

      ‘Well, Mike, I guess five or six more years of independence in my flat, learning to cope with just a little more pain each year, and then the usual expensive, overheated, piss-scented home. Suffocating, those places. I’ve got a few nieces and nephews, but no children. That’s what the service does to you. I’m luckier than most: there’s enough money left for decent wine and a film-channel subscription until I finally kick the bucket.’ Even as a young woman, Cecily had been known for her blunt speaking.

      The old general nodded vigorously. ‘For me, what I really dread is the old girl going first. Left to myself it’ll be too much whisky every evening and then a fall in the bathroom one night when I’m stumbling around on my way for a piss. Can’t even enjoy the theatre any more. Weak bladder. The old girl does a decent omelette, and keeps an eye on me, but she’s not well. They train you for the battlefield and what might happen there, but where’s the situation report for those last ten years?’

      Patten then began to describe a more interesting possible final chapter to Dame Cecily, earning decent money and travelling, even at her advanced age, to some interesting parts of the world where she might actually meet some rivals from the old days whom she had never dreamed of seeing face to face. The powers that be wouldn’t be happy, but what could they do? God already Called her God. She hadn’t been hard to convince,