Chapter 49
Ludo
On Friday afternoon I waited for Sunny in our stairwell in the Victoria Tower, bouncing up and down with excitement.
It smelt slightly of caffeine and spoilt milk from where my coffee had seeped into the cracks of the masonry, dried, and gone crusty.
The sound of rushed footsteps came first; then Sunny’s head appeared at a level below my feet, his face lit by a cheesy grin.
He finished coiling the steps, and he stood before me, his face to mine.
I grabbed him by the back of the neck and pulled him into a kiss.
He kissed me back but pulled away more quickly than I’d have liked.
“VladPop has cameras everywhere,” he said. I could still taste Sunny on my lips, and I found myself licking them unconsciously. “How’d you go with Torsten?”
“He was in a bit of a hurry. He’s off to Leaf and Karma’s retreat this weekend and wanted to beat the traffic out of London. He’s proving terribly loyal to Carstairs. I don’t think the old school tie is going to be enough to crack him.”
“Do you think he knows the truth?”
“I’m sure of it,” I said. “When I asked him whether Newton Bardon was a done deal, he denied it, but…” I clicked my teeth with my tongue.
“His tell?” Sunny asked.
“Yeah.”
“We should really invite him to a poker game some night.”
I was so excited I was shivering; the adrenaline was rushing through me. The proof we needed felt close.
“It makes sense that he would know,” Sunny said. “He’s been running around like an obedient lapdog, doing everything for her this whole time. If she’s up to no good, she’ll have outsourced the dirty work to Torsten to keep herself at arm’s length. He’s a useful idiot.”
“I agree. We have to find a way to appeal to his sense of right and wrong.”
“He works in politics, Ludo.”
“Yes, but he’s not a bad person. Not deep inside.”
Sunny was bouncing on his feet. I grabbed his hand and held the tips of his fingers in mine, trying to calm him, trying to calm myself.
I studied the pebble-dash of freckles that decorated the back of his hand and remembered that hand working its way around my body, how good it felt to have it on me, how much I wanted it on me now.
All the excitement, the adrenaline, was making me feel reckless. I wanted to kiss him.
“You know him better than anyone,” Sunny said. “How do we seduce him to our side?”
“I don’t think either of us has the boobies required for that,” I said.
Sunny froze, his eyes wide.
“Ludo, you’re a genius!” I finally got my kiss. It was long, passionate, illicit, and probably being live-streamed to VladPop’s dirt file server.
* * *
Sunny’s plan was an old-fashioned tabloid honeytrap, and I wasn’t happy about it. However, I didn’t have any other ideas, so I went along with it on the condition that the person on whose boobies the plan depended did so with her eyes wide open and her consent freely given.
That evening, Sunny and I sat tucked up on the summer house bed, outlining the plan to Leaf, Karma, and their daughter, Summer.
The plan was for Summer to get close to Torsten during his weekend’s retreat and get him to talk.
The redoubtable duo had been jolly keen to do their bit, but what really mattered was what Summer had to say.
“I’m in,” she said without hesitation when Sunny finished explaining the plan. Was I suddenly out of touch with feminism? “Anything I can do to stop a nuclear power plant on our doorstep, I’ll do it. I have just one condition.”
“What is it?” Sunny asked.
“If the story of how you got this information ever comes out, I don’t want to be called a ‘Derbyshire honeytrap,’ or anything like that, on the front page of the Bulletin.” The look on Summer’s face was intense. “Or I’ll hunt you down and seriously misalign your chakras, mate. You got that?”
“Loud and clear.”
“How would you like us to refer to you, if we ever need to refer to you at all?” I asked.
“How about… environmental justice warrior.”
“We have a deal,” Sunny said. It was the promise of a tabloid journalist. The kind that had earned reporters everywhere our reputation for being untrustworthy. Sunny had absolutely no power to make a promise like that. When our call ended, I took him to task over it.
“We’ll just have to make sure no one ever learns about Summer’s involvement,” he said.