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Prologue

“Was there anything else, Home Secretary?”

Alexia De Vere smiled Holish language Except for prihed at herself One step at a time, Alexia

“No, thank you, Edward I’ll call if I need you”

Sir Edward Manning nodded briefly and left the room A senior civil servant in his early sixties and a bastion of the Westray and as rigid as amonths, Sir Edould be Alexia De Vere’s constant coh the ht now, in these first few hours in the job, Alexia De Vere wanted to be alone She wanted to savor the sweet taste of victory without an audience To sit back and revel in the profound thrill of power

After all, she’d earned it

Getting up from her desk, she paced around her new office, a vast aerie of a rooh in one of the Gothic towers of the Palace of Westn was ly brown sofas at one end (those o), a simple desk and chair at the other, and a bookcase stuffed with dusty, unread tomes of political history But none of that in to cover it Floor-to-ceiling s provided a panoramic vista of London, from the towers of Canary Wharf in the east to the mansions of Chelsea in the west It was a view that said one thing and one thing only

Power

And it was all hers

I am the home secretary of Great Britain The second-overnment

How had it happened? How had a junior prisons ed sojob? Poor Kevin Lo yellow, coffee-stained teeth The thoughtold fossil He wrotenow?

Pilloried in the press for being wealthy, aristocratic, and out of touch with ordinary voters, and dubbed the new Iron Lady by the tabloids, Alexia De Vere’s sentencing refored by MPs on both sides of the house for being “coht work in America, a country so barbaric they still had the death penalty But they weren’t going to fly here, in civilized Great Britain

That’s what they said But when push cah

Cowards Cowards and hypocrites the lot of them

Alexia De Vere kne unpopular the bill had ues, with the media, with lower-income voters So she was as shocked as everyone else when the prime minister, Henry Whitman, chose to appoint her as his home secretary But she didn’t dwell on it The fact was, Henry Whitman had appointed her At the end of the day, that was all that mattered