Checks and Balances, Chapter One - Comments Appreciated

This is the first chapter of the novel I'm working on, Checks and Balances. It's a British thriller with dystopian elements, though perhaps its most interesting attribute is its "anti-heroine." I'd love to hear what people think. Thanks, G

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The Peak District, Year Eight of the First Lord and Eternal Blessed First Lady’s Glorious Regime, June.

“We’re going to send Michaela to Somerset House and have her seduce and kill the First Lord.”

I glanced at Michaela, as she leaned against the reinforced metallic wall of our commandeered mine shaft’s control room. Her wavy, obsidian-black hair had grown out of the practical cropped style, we all sported, and into an elegant bob. She’d swapped her usual guerrilla outfit for a vintage silk gown that someone had decided would pass muster in London. The emerald dress showed off her curves and emphasised the beauty that shone through even in army fatigues, but that didn’t stop it being five years out of date.

“Derby and Hull have both been bombed this month for their sympathy to our cause. The army wiped out an entire platoon last week. There have been too many deaths, too many prisoners. We’re losing. We need to find out where the Regime is going to strike next, and we need to stop the First Lord once and for all.”

David stood under the screen that showed our hacked CCTV camera feeds. He crossed his arms. Years of outdoor living and physical labour had given them the muscular tone and hearty glow he could only have dreamt of in old life as an academic. His unblinking eyes and fixed mouth seemed to challenge me to defy him in front of all the local officers of the Treaty, whom he’d summoned to this underground meeting. He should have known; I could never resist a challenge.

“That’s insane. The First Lord has his pick off all the girls in the capital. Even if he did choose Michaela, she’d be a moment’s entertainment to him, not a military confidant, and she wouldn’t get within a mile of him with a weapon. Worse, there’s a chance that far from seducing him, she’ll be seduced and used against us. Julien can be very charming, very persuasive.”

“I am a loyal servant of the Treaty,” Michaela snapped. “I’ve been a member of the Treaty since it was founded, since I was a young girl. My father gave his life to kill the First Lord’s wife. The Treaty brought me up. I didn’t just walk in off the street with no history like you.”

I thought of the tiny, shy twelve-year-old I’d met when I’d first thrown myself on the Treaty’s mercy, five long years ago. I struggled to reconcile her with the beautifully arrogant seventeen-year-old ingénue in front of me.

I grabbed Michaela by her billowing, ribboned sleeves. “I didn’t walk in off the street, Michaela. I left behind my life as the wife of an officer of the First Lord’s army, because I believed in the cause. It’s easy to be loyal when you’ve known nothing else, when you owe the Treaty everything. I made sacrifices to serve.”

I’d told the lie so often. My mind conjured up a clear image of Oliver Bonham, the senior army officer who’d never existed. It amazed me that all of them, even David, had bought my story when I’d turned up at their camp and continued to believe it.

David grabbed hold of me from behind and broke my grip on Michaela’s arms. I trained every day, but my strength was still no match for his. “Desperate times call for desperate measures, Melanie. Everything you say may be true, but we need to try. We need to use every weapon at our disposal.”

“You’d know, I suppose. You and your PHD in politics.”

David claimed to be a working class hero, but he’d spent longer at Oxford than I had, and came from a much wealthier background. Token student protests about global warming and globalisation had mutated into something more extreme once the First Lord and Lady came to power. In a different world, he’d have become a professor and written the occasional scathing article for the New Statesman. Instead, he shot down helicopters and interrogated captured soldiers. As did I.

He released me, without rising to the bait, and turned to the computer’s controls. The Regime strictly controlled internet access, but the Treaty attracted plenty of support from the technological fringes of society. They’d managed to set up a functioning computer network underground, and made it possible not only for us to use the internet freely, but to view most security cameras at will.

David set the feed to show Somerset House from the Strand. Its elegant arches and columns formed a stark contrast to the grey, utilitarian network of abandoned mines and tunnelled caves. They weren’t home exactly, but were certainly the place where I spent my nights after long days of raids on nearby towns, manning anti-aircraft posts and watching out for Regime troops.

I tried not to torture myself with sights from my old life, but Somerset House’s beauty wasn’t what David wanted us all to reflect on. He wanted us to see the heavily armed soldiers guarding the gate and pacing the street. The helicopters hovering above. The giant banner with the First Lord’s winged unicorn insignia hanging above the archway, and the two even huger portraits that fanned down either side of it. Honour the First Lord demanded the one on the left, above an image of a striking man in fake nineteenth century military uniform. Remember the Eternal Blessed First Lady mourned its companion on the right-hand side. The woman in that painting looked as studiedly fragile and innocent as Marie-Antoinette’s idea of a shepherdess, despite the Treaty’s tendency to regard her as having been a psychotic she-devil.

They were all symbols of the Regime’s power and illustrations of why we fought. And in the case of the painfully rococo portrait of the Treaty’s most high-profile victim, a reminder of what the organisation could supposedly accomplish when it put its mind to it. All designed to make me agree that Michaela should take her chances.

“Let me go instead.” The words were out of my mouth before I could think through the implications of what I was saying, before I could consider the madness of it.

Everyone stared at me, trying to find the nicest way to raise the obvious objection.

“Look at yourself,” Michaela spat, after the silence had gone on too long. “Don’t you realise that you’re old? They say you were beautiful once, but you couldn’t seduce secrets out of a minor official anymore, never mind the First Lord.”

Her words stung, but I fought hard to keep any signs of hurt off my face. In my old, privileged life, I’d had every hope and expectation of still looking young and beautiful at thirty-five. Few things hold back the clock like wealth and power. The Treaty camp didn’t possess a mirror, but I could well imagine the changes wrought by five years of camping in the peaks and hiding out in abandoned mines, wracked by cold, hunger, and the constant fear of discovery.

David gave Michaela one of his patented “gentle looks.” An innocuous sideways glance, a half-smile. From anyone else, it would have been utterly unremarkable, but it shocked her into a guilty silence more effectively than a lesser man’s glare, or shouted reprimand, ever could have. The leader of the resistance could communicate a hell of a lot with just his eyes. He shared the trait with his greatest enemy.

David put a muscular arm round my waist, and I managed not to flinch. I’d almost grown used to his touch over the years. He’d never dream of forcing himself on a woman, and as far as he was concerned, I enjoyed our embraces every bit as much as he did. In reality, I slept with him because I needed security, I needed status, and I needed secrets. Plenty of women—those who fought for the Treaty and those loyal to the regime with overactive imaginations—found his cropped dark hair, bright eyes, and sculpted figure to be attractive, but I kept my heart safely out of proceedings. There was only one man I’d ever loved. Only one man I ever would love.

“Melanie, you’re still beautiful. Michaela was intolerably rude, but the central point is true. All the evidence shows that, like all powerful men throughout history, Julien takes mistresses in their late teens and early twenties.”

I put my hands to my head and tried to push away the awful mental images his words conjured up. How many mistresses had there been? How young and how beautiful?

“Precisely. He’s been there, done that. Michaela would be one in a long line. I could offer something different. We’re the same age, I believe, the First Lord and I. I can offer shared memories and experiences. I can wave my ex-husband’s name around and claim the Treaty have held me prisoner for all this time. If I pretend to provide him with information, perhaps I can get some in return. I believe Michaela when she says she’s committed, but you must have heard the stories. No seventeen year old can be relied upon to stand against his charm, his beauty, the glow in his eyes, the way he looks at people like he can see into their soul and makes them feel like they’re the only person in the room.”

No seventeen year old could resist the insistent touch of his hands. The arms that could make you feel protected against anything. The kisses that could make you lose all control.

“And you think you’re immune, do you? Far beyond that sort of childish infatuation at the grand old age of thirty-five?”

Now it was my turn to get “the look,” but I’d developed some immunity to that, too. I made determined eye contact, his blue eyes burning into mine. “I think I’ve had chance to develop a little cynicism. I think I’ve come to understand the games that people play at court. I think I’ve stopped believing in love. I’m quite confident that I can stand before Julien St John Helmsley without falling to my knees in paroxysms of lust and adoration.”

I’d never been less confident of anything in my life.

“Perhaps you’re scared.” The others had wisely stayed out of it so far, but now Christopher, David’s de facto second-in-command in spite of his youth, stepped into the fray. He looked like a taller and more muscular version of Michaela, with his cropped black hair and the huge, dark eyes that made him appear disconcertingly sweet. “You’ll send my sister because the end justifies the means, but you can’t bear the thought of your woman in the First Lord’s bed.”

Christopher perfectly calibrated his words, either an insult or a spur to action. David would never willingly admit to anything as traditional as jealousy or having a woman who was “his.” Furthermore, he prided himself on always putting the Treaty and the ultimate goal of overthrowing the First Lord and freeing the country over every consideration. He’d said a million times that he would give his life. The least he could do was give my virtue.

David punched the rickety lift doors. “Of course I can’t bear the thought of her in that bastard’s bed. I can’t bear the thought of any woman suffering that fate. I can’t bear the thought of the man who destroyed Nottingham, blockaded the north and took away the country’s most basic rights touching any woman or experiencing any earthly pleasure. I can’t bear the thought that he’s still alive, still ruling us all, after so many good men have died. I can’t bear the thought of him, full stop.”

David hated Julien. That was hardly unusual in our circles. People generally didn’t risk their life by joining the Treaty, unless they despised and disapproved of the First Lord and his Regime. But for most of my fellow rebels, Julien was an abstract symbol of everything that had gone wrong with the country. David hated him in an oddly personal way.

I touched David’s arm. He spun on me and raised his hand. For a second, my breath held and I braced myself, but he dropped his arm and regained composure. My breath released, and I was thankful not to face the same fate as the door. For all my grandstanding, I’d never been good with physical pain.

“We all feel that way,” I soothed. “And that’s why we have to do this, and we have to do it right. How exactly do you expect Michaela to get herself admitted into his presence? She could wander the capital for weeks and never find an opening. But as the returning wife of a war hero, I’m sure I could approach some colonel or other and beg an audience.”

David bowed his head. I had no wish to know what thoughts of old atrocities were running through his mind. The screams as Regime bombers turned Nottingham into a wasteland. Paul, the Treaty’s first martyr, tortured to death. Treaty Members and suspected Treaty affiliates rounded up and imprisoned or worse.

“You’ll both go,” he snapped. “Claim you’re distant cousins or something. Let the great ruler decide whether he prefers youth or experience. Just make him fall for one or both of you, make him talk, and then destroy him.”

Michaela and I nodded our heads in sync, all thoughts of our early argument put aside. David had spoken, and there was no point in arguing with him when he was in this mood.

“You’ll need to go to the infirmary and have them fit you with a hormonal implant,” I said to Michaela, gentler now. I touched the characteristic raised bump on my upper arm. “You’ll never pass as a loyal citizen without one, and we don’t want you to end up carrying the First Lord’s heir.”

Michaela shuddered—avoiding the implants was a key sign of resistance—but after a moment’s hesitation, she let herself into the lift—which was mercifully still functioning, despite David taking his temper out on it—presumably heading for the tunnel where we’d developed a makeshift health centre.

Why had I talked myself into this? An unknown, pretty commoner like Michaela could try her hand and would either strike it lucky or return home defeated. And if I were really the imprisoned wife of an army hero, I’d have a pleasant homecoming and perhaps some sharp questioning.

But I was neither of those things, and I’d face one of two fates. I’d be either shot on sight or welcomed back into the fold like the prodigal son.

I genuinely didn’t know what to expect. No one else would dare to make the decision, so my fate would be entirely in the hand of the First Lord. And while people called him many things, no one could ever accuse Julien St John Helmsley of being predictable.