"You mean you will do to me what you do to innocent passersby, British regulars trying to keep the peace, and Lord Mountbatten?"
"Bet your ass, Brit."
"What splendid company to die among," said the British Prime Minister.
Suddenly there was a laugh, a loud roar of a laugh that seemed to reverberate among the stones. The Prime Minister looked behind her. There was an entrance there, a clean stone doorway. But behind it seemed to be a dirt tunnel. And yet this was not a cellar. There was nothing about this large stone room that was cellarlike. There were many windows. Cellars did not have windows. That the windows were blocked by something did not matter. No one built a cellar with large windows.
"Spoken like a man," said the man with the beard and thick neck and blazing eyes. He wore a tweed suit and carried a briefcase and his face seemed alight with joy.
"And who are you?" asked the Prime Minister.
"Someone who admired your Falklands war. Good to see you people at it again. It's been a long time for you, eh?"
"Who are you? What do you want?"
"We want you out of Northern Ireland. Let everyone be free to do what they want."
"They want to kill each other, you know."
"You could call it that."
"What do you call it?"
"I call it the national expression of will."
"Their will is to kill each other."
"Then what do you care?"
"We have an obligation to see that this is settled peacefully. We have citizens there. We have a tradition of hundreds of years there. We do not intend to leave a tradition of massacre in that poor ravaged land."
"Busybody," said the man with the beard. "You allowed yourselves the Falklands. Why do you deny the same joy to your citizens of Northern Ireland?"
"I don't know who you are, but may I remind you we were attacked by Argentina."
"Someone's always attacked by someone, and that someone always has some inalienable and legitimate grievance. Let the Protestants and Catholics there, in their own good way, kill themselves like Christians."
"Are you a jew or Moslem?"
"Can be both at times, although they would be the first to deny me. I really don't get the proper respect I deserve, the way I deserve."
"Perhaps we can change that. May I first ask that you untie my intelligence aide. His wrists seem bound a bit too tight."
The man with the muscled neck waved to the herder. The Prime Minister saw her intelligence aide watch the quick way the herder responded.
Prime Minister Hazel Thurston saw him rub his wrists and then amble to one of the walls with a window and wait there, apparently innocently. But the Prime Minister knew better. Her aide never did anything innocently or casually. Everything had a purpose.
Whatever he was doing by that window had to be protected, so she distracted her captors by saying she might make a compromise.
"You disappoint me, Hazel," said the man. "I thought you were made of sterner stuff than that."
"The world of reality requires reasonable people to negotiate," she said. "Just what can we do for you?"
"Pull out of Northern Ireland. Just get your troops out and let the people decide."
"I'm afraid I can't do that. But what I will do is form another commission-"
"We'll get you out. You see, you are the only person of power in your government, and without you there as a strong leader, they'll strike a deal. It always happens when a country loses a strong leader. It's absolutely predictable. Any nation with a strong leader like yourself is weak without that leader. Strong people make others around them weak. True, and you have to know it."
"Where did you get that theory?" she asked. She saw her man had his hand behind him now, as he stood directly in front of the window. He was doing something with that hand.
"It is as eternal a fact as gravity."
The Prime Minister saw her man nod. She knew they could not talk because this strange room might be bugged. She also knew this stranger might just be right. Without her in the cabinet, her nation just might strike a deal to withdraw all troops from Northern Ireland.
The only redeeming event came when she was left alone with her intelligence aide. He opened up his hand without saying a word and then both of them smiled at each other. A dark crumbling substance filled his palm. From the open window he had taken earth. Someone had just covered this stone room with earth. It would have to show in the countryaide. It would be one of the first places Scotland Yard would look. A stone house that had suddenly disappeared under a pile of earth could not possibly be overlooked, least of all in the communities around Bath.
They waited for the rescue which they expected any minute. And waited.
The problem was simple. Find one prime minister and her intelligence aide seized outside Bath, England, that morning. The solution was just as simple. All roads were cordoned off. Every house in every village was searched. Every hayloft, garage and alley, can, dumpster, ditch was accounted for on a big grid map by teatime, and by supper there was not a hint of a whisper of what had been done with the Prime Minister.
"She has to be here," said an inspector, who had taken time out to enjoy the refreshing springs and the baths the Romans had built here almost two thousand years before, when they had occupied the island as far north as Hadrian's wall.
The town of Bath was named after these baths. Before the Romans, the Celts, Picts, and Saxons-the general populace of the area-had not considered bathing healthy, and they had the aroma to prove it. The Romans, as clean a people as the Japanese, introduced washing to the then barbaric countryside. And specifically at Bath the waters were said to be curative. Now Scotland Yard needed the cure.
"How in bloody blue blazes do you lose a prime minister amidst a homogeneous, friendly population? We have searched every basement, boardinghouse, and hangar, and by damn, she's gone," said the inspector. "I'm sure they're going to kill her."
"Why is that?" asked the Minister of Defense. "The demands are ridiculous. They say unless we pull out of Northern Ireland right now, she dies."
"Might not be that ridiculous," said the Minister of Defense, letting the waters soak through his pores. "The strangest development has occurred there. Add in the kidnap, and we just might make the deal."
"Give in to kidnappers?"
"Do you know what's happening in Belfast now, Inspector?"
"It certainly can't mean we would have to pull out."
"Combined with the fact that there's hardly anyone left to say no with the force of our iron Prime Minister, yes. Belfast has become not an urban guerrilla battleground but a war zone. Someone has formed a provisional wing of the provisional wing of the IRA and is actually engaging British forces in open combat and winning."
"The IRA? Can't be. They can't get fifty people together without fighting amongst themselves," said the inspector.
"A splinter group of a splinter group. And I suspect they're behind this Thurston kidnapping also. They're outfighting us in Belfast and outthinking us in Bath," said the Minister of Defense.
"Are we going to lose?"
"We may have already lost unless we can find our Prime Minister."