Power Play. Gavin Esler

       ONE

      Please call me Alex. When you ask what happened to Bobby Black, I have a long and a short answer, depending on how much truth you think you can handle. The short answer is that the Vice-President of the United States wandered off. Whether this was by mistake, on a whim or some temporary insanity, the result is the same–we lost him out there in the mist in the Scottish Highlands. Now that the mist has cleared, this quiet little patch of Scotland is under American occupation, or so it would appear. From my bedroom window here on the top floor of Castle Dubh I can see a line of several hundred yellow-jacketed British police and Mountain Rescue teams on the heather. Above them four US Army Apache helicopters are beating across the hillsides. In the distance there is another line of perhaps a thousand or more British and American soldiers plus black-uniformed US Secret Service personnel quartering the bogland stretching down to Rowallan Loch. In the castle and its outbuildings there are teams from Scotland Yard, Grampian Police, the British government, the Scottish Executive, the US State Department, the Pentagon, the FBI, the CIA, and an alphabet soup of other American agencies, all searching for the Vice-President, or–more likely given the time that has elapsed since the disappearance–they are searching for his body.

      I try to remain calm. It’s what diplomats do. I console myself with the thought that even great public figures can die a banal death, or disappear on a Scottish hillside in the fog. Princess Diana was in a car that hit an underpass in Paris. President George W. Bush once almost choked on a pretzel. The world would be a very different place if George W. Bush’s oesophagus had permanently embraced those awkward crumbs and Vice-President Dick Cheney had become President. It would have taken just a few weeks for the accidental death of the President to be turned into the Pretzelgate scandal, with a series of commissions of inquiry investigating the conspiracy and naming the usual shadowy figures–the CIA, the Cubans, the Communists, al Qaeda, Mossad and the pretzel bakery–as having connived at the killing. As I watch the Apache helicopters hover in mid-air or sweep down over the heather and, as still more busloads of American military personnel arrive at the castle, I also console myself with another thought, this one beaten into me since childhood: inside every crisis there is an opportunity, if you have the wit to seize it. That’s the big question. Do I?

      The longer answer about the disappearance of the Vice-President begins two years ago with a hurriedly arranged meeting between Bobby Black–who was then Senator Black from Montana–and Prime Minister Fraser Davis. I remember trying to persuade Davis to make time in his schedule, at first without success. It was just four weeks before the American presidential elections, and we had no sense of how profoundly the tectonic plates of history were about to shift. Prime Minister Fraser Davis was enjoying a honeymoon of sorts from the voters. They had not figured him out yet. Davis is, among other things, my brother-in-law.

      ‘You have charm, Alex,’ he told me when his youngest sister, Fiona, accepted my proposal of marriage. ‘And an air of menace. The combination appears to work on women. Perhaps it works on men too. It even works on me, up to a point.’

      It