Home Fire(67)

Terry removed her hand. “Be human. Fix it.”

A flutter of silk and she was gone. Now there was only him and the girl who reached out to touch the ice. He bunched his hands together, blew on his cold fingertips. The night his mother had died he’d kept vigil over her body until the morning, reading the Quran out loud because she’d have wanted him to although it touched nothing in his heart. How important it had seemed to do everything with unwavering devotion—not because he believed there was anything left of her to know either way but because it was the last thing he could do for her as a son.

It felt like an effort to reach into his jacket pocket and pull out the phone to call James.

“Thanks for having the tweet about Eamonn taken down, and get me the number of the British deputy high commissioner in Karachi,” he said.

“It wasn’t us who took it down, sir. I’ll text you the number in a minute.”

Hanging up, he considered going to his wife. No, he would fix it, for his son, for the girl, and then he would tell Terry. He stretched out on the sofa, arms crossed over his chest, eyes open. Who would keep vigil over his dead body, who would hold his hand in his final moments?

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Thunder in the house, on the stairs, in the hall. He stood to meet it just as three men from his security detail charged into the room, a human wall around him, a moving wall running him down the stairs, lifting him off his feet and carrying him like a mannequin when he tried to veer away to find his wife, his daughter. Calling out their names, “Terry, Emily,” the only two words in the world that mattered. “Behind you,” his wife’s voice, rapid footsteps following him down. “I have them, sir.” Good man, Suarez! Sirens outside, the human wall moving away from the front door down toward the basement. Guns out, voices coming through the walkie-talkies, Suarez commanding: “Lock the door, don’t let anyone in until we give you the all-clear.” Into the safe room, wife and daughter behind, door pulled shut, Terry turning the multipoint lock.

“Why are we in the bathroom?” Emily said.

It took Karamat a moment to remember his daughter hadn’t been back since he’d become home secretary. She was a visitor from the past, a reminder of a life before. “It’s a safe room now.”

“Oh my god we’re going to die.”

His daughter’s face something he couldn’t bear to look at so he busied himself running his hands along the doorframe. As if he were a father capable of finding a point of vulnerability and fixing it. “Suarez,” he shouted, banging on the door. “What the hell is going on?”

A voice on the other side—Jones, was it?—said, “We’ll get you out as soon as possible,” as though the home secretary and his wife and daughter were in a malfunctioning elevator. The English, sometimes. Even when they were Welsh. He reached into his pocket, but the phone wasn’t there. On the table waiting for James’s text. Emily and Terry didn’t have theirs either. Banged on the door again. “I’m going to need something more than that.”

“Sir, we picked up chatter. About an imminent attack.”

“This isn’t helpful,” Terry said, her arms around their daughter. He should go over to join them, think of something comforting to say, but instead he sat down, back to the tiled wall. What could he say? That they would be all right?

“I’m sorry,” he said, and waited for one of them to tell him it wasn’t his fault.

Terry turned her face away from him, started speaking in a clear, practical tone to their daughter, explaining security protocols, the safety features of this room, the likelihood that chatter meant nothing was going to happen because why would anyone broadcast plans of an attack that they actually intended to carry out? “Blast-proof” . . . “bulletproof” . . . “air supply.” These were the words with which she reassured their child.

How beautiful they both were, his wife and daughter. While his enemies were out there playing politics to bring him down—leaks and innuendos and muckraking, the stuff that gave Westminster a bad name—he was in a reinforced steel box with his wife and daughter while terrorists tried to kill him. He cupped his hands together like a man about to pray or a father cradling his infant son’s head. Or a politician examining the lines of his palm. He didn’t believe in any form of mumbo jumbo but someone once told him that according to palmistry the lines on your left palm represent the destiny you were born with and the lines on your right the destiny you make for yourself. It had since pleased him to note the wide divergence of the two. Heart line, head line, fate line, life line. At what point had he made himself into a man who thought of saving his political career while his daughter was in need of a father’s reassurance? He patted the floor next to him and took her hand in his when she sat down, her head on his shoulder. Counted her fingers as he’d done when she was born, though until Eamonn he’d always thought that was some myth of parenting that no one actually did.

“Your mother’s right,” he said. “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, go online.” That got a small laugh. “To be honest, I’m pretty sure Suarez is pretending this is a bigger deal than it is as a sort of drill. That’s the way he is. Likes to be very certain all his men—and women, before you correct me—know how to act under pressure.”

“Are you saying this to make me feel better?”