Read Dead in the Water for Free Online Page B

interested, how they met up again unexpectedly …
    With the phones down and only one computer working, Jeremy walks to the café in the Jardin Botanico , not least for the pleasure of reviving his memories of walking in the gardens with Rachel three weeks ago. It would be a good time to ring her. Midday is one of the times that José and Pablo regularly power up the satphone. It’s a couple of days since they last spoke; and he’s missing her.
    But the satphone’s not on. Shame.
     

7 London
     
    There are two kinds of meetings that Mark has with Angela Walker: those where she seeks genuine advice from the man once known as the court favourite, and those where he is given instructions. When she postpones a meeting it invariably implies a briefing. The Underpass bomb has already become a fact of life. He feels powerless, out of touch and irritable.
    At ten to two he sets out early for Downing Street on foot. But he doesn’t reckon with the throng of photographers and police manning the maze of metal fences around Number 10. He’s late – or he would have been had she been there. Jay Porter, one of her private secretaries, has left instructions for him to follow her down to her office in The Commons. Why can’t these bloody people use phones?
    How things have changed. Two and a half years ago, on the morning after what became known as the Kent Hurricane, he’d been interviewed on the Today programme and most other radio and TV news channels had sought him out for comment. An intensely hot summer, six months without rain, then a September Monsoon that resulted in the flooding and subsequent abandonment of whole tracts of East Anglian Fenland. And just when people had started to come to terms with that, half way into October, after a day of glorious sunshine – the Big One came. Not just high winds, fallen trees and blushing weather forecasters; but a real Caribbean style Hurricane. One hundred and thirty mile an hour winds; power black-outs throughout Kent and Sussex; a train blown off a viaduct; whole caravan parks dumped into the sea; three cross-channel ferries wrecked. And a major air crash.
    In the Great Storm of 1987, nineteen people lost their lives. The Kent Hurricane claimed more than two thousand – and it would have been five times that if deaths of those whose survival depended on efficient emergency services and functioning electrical systems were included in the figures: the sick and the elderly, the infants and the injured.
    Every time Mark was interviewed he dared to state what the politicians fudged: that the summer droughts, the autumn rains and now the Hurricane – all were directly attributable to climate change; that things could only get worse if action were not taken immediately. Amazingly, they’d paid attention. Politicians started wanting to be seen with him. The spring election had been dominated by environmental issues. Angela Walker’s coalition government came to power on a raft of green policies. And there was Mark – right at the heart of things – quietly making suggestions, offering advice, helping with policy. Most, if not all, of Walker’s colleagues wanted to hitch a ride with the rising star.
    He should have known better: politicians and the electorate are no less fickle than the weather itself. During the fifteen months in which Mrs Walker’s coalition government has held office, there have been no violent storms, no drought, no extreme weather of any kind. That first summer in power was one of the most glorious on record: warm and sunny, but not scorching hot; perfect weather for watching a ‘Brit’ winning Wimbledon and English teams triumphing at cricket and in football. Many places in the world were suffering drought and famine, floods and devastation, but Britain was again a green and pleasant land.
     
    “ Sorry to keep you waiting, Mark. I’d hoped we’d have a good half hour, but events are overtaking us, I’m afraid.”
    “ I understand.” At least she’s