3.2

The plane had barely landed when Rita took off down the aisle waving her mobile phone, leaving Max wondering whether he’d seen the last of her. But well before he reached the exit she was there again, pushing her way through the bleary-eyed queue, looking very pleased with herself.

“I’m taking a stopover,” she said, bubbling with excitement.

“Really?”

“Don’t worry”, she whispered. “You won’t have to do a thing.”

“Great,” he said, without great enthusiasm.
She stepped back and glared at him –

“What’s the problem?” she asked – her hand on her hip.
All movement in the aisle stopped, people turned, stared.

“No, no problem. Just…”
Max cuddled her to him and whispered in her ear –

“How long are you staying?”
He could hardly miss the disappointment in her eyes as she swiveled away and was braced for the worst when she suddenly seemed to snap out of it –

“Don’t worry,” she said with a laugh. “Just a few days.”

3.3

Julia stepped through the curtain into the restful sumptuousness of First Class. There he was, just as she’d imagined him, sprawled on a huge seat with his feet up, coolly observing her approach with a snide grin on his face.

“Have you read the brief?”

“Mostly.”

“Pierre?”

“Yes”

“And Shard – the old Judge?”

“Of course.”
The snide grin widened –

“So… you’d have to agree with me that this scheme of theirs is extremely transparent.”

“It’s…”
She wouldn’t have gone quite that far. It was reasonably clear what the sadhus were up to but before she could complete her thought Marlon was pressing his –

“They’re making no attempt to hide what they are doing at all! They don’t give a damn whether we know or not!”

“Well…”
Clearly he had no interest whatsoever in what she thought – cutting her off before she could even begin.

“They don’t care who knows! The little fuckers are virtually advertising what they are up to!”

“I didn’t quite get that impression,” she said.
The sight of Marlon’s big red head always made Julia nervous. It excited a very unpleasant urge to justify every comment – his manner virtually compelled it.

“I mean,” she added impulsively. “The Prime Minister certainly cares about maintaining his privacy.”

“Not much he doesn’t.”
Marlon looked straight past her, his eyes glazed –

“No – there’s more to this than meets the eye. Their only hope is to get this done as quickly as possible. First they want to shock the world – with some dramatic event – then run with the momentum this creates. If it’s not over really quickly – and I mean really quickly – this little scheme of theirs can’t possibly work. And a failed attempt will kill off their idea for ever.”

Julia had seen Marlon like this before, back in Washington at the meeting with the Committee. And she’d seen enough then to know that he was so circuitous it was impossible to ever know for sure where he was going.

Suddenly he was pressing for a response.

“Isn’t change always like that?” she said.

“Not like this! This is bizarre! This is so easy to crush.”

“But… it’s just some kind of experiment – isn’t it?”
Marlon turned away –

“You still have no idea do you.”
His tone annoyed her –

“Marlon – I was the one who got it out of Singh in the first place.”

“How difficult is it to sell a man a prostitute? That, my dear, has a degree of difficulty of zero.”

“There was a lot more to it than that and you know it. Especially when you consider how long I’d been at the model agency and how little Singh revealed to me. I did well to pick up on it at all! None of the other operatives did!”

And right now you wish you had never mentioned it.
You wish you’d kept your mouth shut and left the sadhus alone.