But superforecasting was, to his mind, flavour-of-the-month stuff. Every administration brought its own stage dressing, from Blair’s “pretty straight guys,” who had briefly imagined themselves the living embodiment of some TV liberal fantasy, to the current crew, a homogenous bunch—because those with independent outlooks had been culled in the first weeks—under the sway of a wave of Svengalis with that fetish for disruption that had rolled tsunami-like across the globe this past decade. Weirdos and misfits they proudly asserted, as if the groundstaff of any political movement had ever comprised anything else. Sociopathy had long been recognised as a handy attribute in politics. Only recently had it been considered worth boasting about. This was the context in which those with de Greer’s peculiar talents were enrolled like jesters at a medieval court, which was better than being rounded up as witches, Whelan supposed. Better for them, anyway. How it would work out for everybody else had yet to be determined.
And lately, prized or not, Sophie de Greer—blonde, thirty-seven, five five; suit and tie in the accompanying photo, though presumably not always—had dropped off, if not necessarily the map, at least some pages of the A–Z; those covering Whitehall and the offices occupied by Rethink#1 on the South Bank, a short walk from Waterloo. Scheduled to attend a meeting chaired by Sparrow three days previously, she had neither turned up nor sent apologies; phone calls went unanswered, emails ignored. Later that day, one of Number Ten’s security team was despatched to her apartment to determine that she hadn’t fallen ill, died or ODed in bed, and reported back in the negative. Nor were there signs of abduction. It was hard to determine whether she had packed for departure, given the few belongings she’d brought to London, but it seemed that, wherever she was, she had a walking-round kit: wallet, phone, iPad, passport. There was no record of her having left the country, no apparent reason for her to want to vanish. Her flat, a six-month let, had weeks to run. Her position on Rethink#1 was “secure”： Sparrow’s word.
None of this amounted to much. And three days wasn’t a long time to be invisible, in Whelan’s opinion. Evidence of a more protracted disappearance lay all around him. In the furnace of government, of course, other metrics applied: Sparrow clearly expected hourly contact with—or from—his team, making a lapse like de Greer’s an aberration. But was it mystifying? From all Whelan had heard, Anthony Sparrow was best kept at a distance; the PM’s string-puller according to some, his headbutter-in-chief to others, he was nobody’s idea of a good time either way. Perhaps de Greer had simply decided she’d had enough, and gone to seek more agreeable company: a bunch of drunk golfers, or a basket of rats. But there would always be those who saw, or professed to see, conspiracy, just as there would always be those who engineered it. Few were more aware of this than Whelan.
Because, prior to his elevation to First Desk, Claude Whelan had worked over the river. Scenes & Ways had been his department—Schemes and Wheezes, in the jargon; a typically schoolboy designation for what had begun, literally, as a cut-throat division, its original brief having been to plot assassinations. This had been during wartime, its current operatives would reassure newcomers, sometimes remembering to add “obviously.” In Whelan’s early years, destabilisation scenarios were the hot-button issue; leverage applied by major players to keep the ragamuffin nations to heel. Then the internet levelled the playing field, and the old rule-book was trampled underfoot. Once, you had to appear big to play the bully. Now minnows could be rogue nations too. Keyboards were weaponised, trolls emerged from under bridges, and somewhere along the way free elections turned into free-for-alls, as if democracy were a shaggy dog story to which a joke president was the punchline. All those decades of the arms race, and it turned out there was no greater damage you could inflict on a state than ensure it was led by an idiot. Somewhere, someone, probably, was laughing.
These thoughts required Whelan to shake himself like a dog waking up. The world’s problems weren’t his doing. His own problems, even: not all were his fault either. And yet. And yet. He had worked in a dirty business, which had helped produce a dirty world. Small surprise that when he’d been in a position to make a difference he’d been brought low by dirty tricks; a ruination engineered not by anonymous disruptors, but by the current First Desk herself, Diana Taverner, aided and abetted by the loathsome Jackson Lamb. And here he was, gifted an opportunity to poke around in Taverner’s cupboards . . .