The Sins of the Fathers

Chapter Eleven

The Rosen House

Sanibel Island

Florida

Sean Fletcher took Jake's call outside, on the small lawn, right beside the lake, so that he could talk and smoke at the same time. Gideon Palmer sat on Jacob's old chair, watching the leader of the free world do his thing and chugged on his second beer. He wanted something stronger, but it was a little early and they had lots to discuss. Beside him, breaking several of his own protocols, Pan Deacon swigged from his own bottle. He was still pale, still haunted by what he had just heard, his hands still shaking a little. Palmer reached out for the pack of cigarettes Fletcher had left on the wicker table and lit one for himself, before offering them to Pan.

"No...thanks...I don't...God, that was simply...horrible?" Deacon suggested, feeling the desperate need to talk all of a sudden, as Palmer exhaled and sent smoke up into the humid afternoon air.

"Your esteemed colleague still seems to think that Mena is acting?" Palmer sighed, feeling less nauseous, but even more angry. He had been talking for forty years, and no one had been listening.

"My colleague is a twat then...and compromised...but he will not be alone?" Deacon said as he put his beer back on the table, turning it between his fingers. "But I don't see how she could fake that...every word hurt her...she was dying inside, telling me what she had been made to do...but your big problem here still remains the bloody same? However convincing Lady Forbes is, it is her word against them...and the judge and jury probably don't want to believe her anyway? They seem to prefer the status quo?"

"But this will damage them...even if the Security Council don't go for the jugular...general attitudes to the Symonds regime will change?" Palmer insisted, but if he was honest, he was not even convincing himself. Politicians had no problem dealing with difficult regimes, just as long as they were getting what they wanted out of the relationship. The United States of America were on friendly terms with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan and many other Muslim nations with dubious human rights records. Most first world countries were. It did not matter if women were oppressed as long as the deals were done. Only public opinion could change attitudes, because politicians needed to win elections. And the UN were doing everything they possibly could to keep the investigation out of the media.

"Self-interest trumps other concerns...every single time." Deacon grumbled quietly, not at all happy about it, but he was a pragmatist. "I think you will have more success against the individuals...even the British might throw one or two under the bus, just to show some clear contrition...but they will compromise on the headline stuff because of Hycanil...they will all want a much lower price. Symonds is ninety-four...and it was forty years ago?"

"I know it is not within your remit, Mr Deacon...but they need to get it into their thick heads that I will go public if they fuck us over?" Fletcher growled, coming back up the steps from the garden, and catching the end of their conversation. He had arrived from the airport just in time to catch the end of Mena's latest interview, and hearing what the man his sister had been married to for over thirty years was really like had not improved his mood. "I don't know what I have got to do to make them understand that?"

"Pan, please...Mr President...and you really know a lot more about those thick heads than I do...I am just a field investigator...I hardly ever visit New York?" Deacon grinned as Sean Fletcher slumped into the seat beside his old friend and reached for his own beer. "You guys have been fighting this shit for so long...hearing things like that...and I never realised that it was like that...it's crazy? I didn't have a clue?"

"You've spent most of your time working in Africa, Pan?" Palmer asked, partly making conversation and partly wanting to talk about something else. Deacon was right, he had been fighting Drew Symonds, and then Reformism, for forty-three years, ever since Brianna and Caitlin were taken into police custody and handed over to their birth father. His life had just fallen apart in that moment, and it was never the same again, for anyone. Not that they were the only ones, of course. Covid was a game-changer on its own, and millions of people lost track of family and friends during the endless lockdowns, even without the revolution that had grabbed power in Britain. If it was not for his father-in-law, Palmer would have been as helpless as anyone else, fighting a system that was changing beneath his feet in an effort to find and free his wife and her sister, who was more like a daughter to him at the time. Jacob Rosen was the difference, and it was Jacob who had started the war.