by Mick Herron
Hassan opened his eyes. Darkness stared back. He closed them again. Armed-response cops burst in. He opened them. No they didn’t.
He hadn’t known time could crawl so slowly.
And hadn’t known this, either: that fear could take you away from yourself. Not simply out of time, but out of your body. Sitting in a hood and jumpsuit, like a patient in a surrealist’s waiting room, his grasp on the here-and-now slipped away, and that shrill voice at the back of his mind popped up, the one that delivered all his best riffs. Shaky, but recognizably his own, and trying to pretend none of this was happening; or that it had happened, but was now safely over; was now, moreover, material for the most scrotum-tightening stand-up routine ever. All those other hostages—the ones who’d spent years chained to radiators—they wrote their books, they made their documentaries, they hosted radio shows. But how many of them took it open-mic?
‘Let me tell you about my hood.’
Pause.
‘No, really. My hood.’
And then they’d get it, his audience; they’d get that he meant hood, the thing they’d put on his head. Not his ‘hood, where you couldn’t leave your car out overnight.
But that was as far as the shrill voice got. Because it wasn’t over. The stink was too foul for it to be over: the vomit, the shit, the piss; everything that fear had shifted out of its way when making space inside him. He was here. He didn’t have an audience. He’d never had an audience; every open-mic night at the Student U he’d been there, head full of material, stomach full of knots, but he’d never dared take the stage.
Funny thing was, he’d thought that had been fear. His dread of making a tit of himself in front of beered-up fellow students—he’d thought that had been fear. Like stubbing your toe on a railway sleeper, and hopping on the spot with the pain. Not seeing the train bearing down on you.
One minute, walking home. Next, bunged into a cellar, holding a newspaper for the camera.
Now that was fear.
And this, too was fear: We’re going to cut your head off and show it on the web.
He liked the internet. He liked the way it brought people closer. His generation had thrown its arms around the globe, tweeting and blogging to its heart’s content, and when you were chatting online with a user called PartyDog, you didn’t know if they were a boy or a girl let alone black or white, Muslim or atheist, young or old, and that had to be a good thing, didn’t it? …
Except that Hassan had once read about some toerag who’d seen a woman collapse in the street, and instead of trying to help, like a normal person—or hurrying past, like a normal person—he’d pissed on her, actually pissed on her, and filmed himself on his phone doing it, then posted it on the web for other toerags to laugh at. It was as if the internet validated certain actions … For a tiny moment it felt good to have something to blame for all this, even if what he was blaming was the internet, which could never be made to care.
And then that tiny moment too became another chip knocked off a block that was rapidly growing smaller; and the awareness that the moment had passed occupied the moment that followed it, and also the moment after that, and in neither of those moments, nor in any of those that came after it, did armed-response cops burst into the cellar, and find Hassan safe and sound.
The kitchen wasn’t anywhere you’d want to cook a meal. On the other hand, it wasn’t anywhere a meal had been cooked; its surfaces piled with takeaway containers and plastic cutlery, with greasy brown paper bags and pizza boxes, with empty soft drink bottles and discarded cigarette packets. Ashtrays had been made of anything that didn’t move. The lino curled at the corners, and a blackened patch by the back door suggested a small fire in the past.
In the centre of the room sat a formica-topped kitchen table, its red surface scarred with circular burns and razor-straight slashes. A laptop computer occupied the centre of this table, its lid currently closed. An assortment of cables snaked on top of it like electrical spaghetti, and next to these lay a folded tripod and a digicam about the size of a wallet. Once upon a time, you’d needed a building’s worth of hardware to reach the world, but ‘once upon a time’ was another way of saying the old days. Arranged around the table were four mismatched chairs, three of them occupied. The fourth was tilting at a crazy angle, held upright only by the pair of booted feet that were alternately pushing it away then hauling it back. Every other second it seemed the chair would topple, but it never did.
The feet’s owner was saying, ‘We should webcam it.’
‘… Why?’
‘Stick it on the intranet.’Stead of those clips. Let the whole world watch him crap himself start to finish.’
The other two shared a glance.
They were bulldog males, the three of them; different shapes and sizes, but with this much in common: they were bulldog males. You wouldn’t put your hand out to any of them and feel sure you’d get it back. Below them, in the cellar, Hassan Ahmed was calling them Larry, Curly and Moe, and if they’d formed a line-up for him, this was how it would have shaken down:
Larry was tallest, and had the most hair, though this wasn’t a fierce contest: where the other two were shaved to the bone, a mild fuzz covered Larry’s skull, somehow conferring on him an air of authority, as if he were wearing a hat in a room full of bareheaded men. He was thin-faced with restless eyes, which kept checking door and window, as if either might burst open at any moment. His white shirt had the sleeves rolled up; he wore black jeans and brand-new trainers. Moe, meanwhile, was the middle-man in every sense: shorter than one, taller than the other, and with a belly a black tee-shirt did nothing to minimize. Unwisely he sported a goatee he stroked constantly, as if checking it remained attached.
As for Curly—the owner of the feet—he seemed to be the stupid one.
Larry told him, ‘We don’t want a webcam.’
‘Why not?’
‘We just don’t.’
‘He’s stinking that room out like a rat inna trap. We should let the world see what they’re like. When they’re not clambering on to buses with rucksacks loaded with Semtex.’
Moe, his tone of voice suggesting this wasn’t the first time they’d had this conversation, said, ‘We set up a webcam, we double the chances of getting caught.’
‘We’re already putting the video clips out there.’
You could spend all day trying to drum simple stuff into Curly’s head, Larry thought, but sooner or later you were going to have to give up. If you wanted him to understand anything more complicated than a two-horse race, you’d either have to draw him a picture or just give him a cigarette and hope he’d forget about it.
But Moe persevered. ‘This stuff on the web, people are going to be trying to find where it’s coming from. There’s ways of hiding our tracks, and we’ve done all that. But we go live—we put a webcam down there, and it’ll be easier for them to trace us.’
‘And it’s the internet,’ Larry said. ‘By the way.’
‘What?’
‘Internet. Intranet’s something’s else.’
‘Same difference.’
Larry looked at Moe again, and an unspoken thought passed between them.
‘Anyway,’ Curly said. ‘Think he’s scared now? He’ll be a steaming pile of chickenshit this time tomorrow.’
This with an air of finality, as if it were the final step in a careful argument.
‘I’m going for a crap,’ he added.
Both chairs hit the floor when he stood.
When he’d gone, Larry lit a cigarette, then tossed the pack to Moe. ‘Do you think he’s up to this?’
‘He’s not as stupid as he pretends to be.’
‘No, well. Cunt can walk and breathe at the same time, he’s obviously not as stupid as he looks.’
‘I said pretends.’
‘I heard.’
On the other side of the kitchen door Curly listened without moving a muscle, until satisfied they’d finished. And then he moved like smoke down the hall
way and up the stairs, where he locked himself in the bathroom, and made a quiet call with a phone he shouldn’t have had.
Lamb was at his desk with a folder in front of him—an analysis of congestion charge anomalies, or Twitter feeds, or cash-in-hand real estate purchases in Beeston—but his attention seemed focused on the corkboard on his wall, on which an array of money-off tokens were pinned: the local takeaway pizza place; Costcutter’s price promise on Ginster’s sausage rolls. Catherine watched from the doorway. She’d intended to walk in, add her own report to his pile and leave, but something had snagged her. Lamb didn’t look like the Lamb they all knew and hated. There was something there that hadn’t been there before.
The funny thing was, Catherine Standish had once been keen on meeting Jackson Lamb. It had been Charles Partner’s fault. Lamb had been one of Partner’s joes, back in the Middle Ages. He’d turned up one day in the modern world; was Partner’s 10 a.m. He’s one of a kind, Jackson Lamb, Partner had said. You’ll like him. And given the source, she’d thought she would.
At the time, Lamb had been in transition; making the jump from foreign holidays—as the joes all called them—to tending the home fires. This was in that blissful break when the world seemed a safer place, between the end of the cold war and about ten minutes later. And she’d known he’d spent time behind the Curtain. You couldn’t know a detail like that without it colouring your expectations. You didn’t expect glamour, but you understood the bravery involved.
So he was unexpected, this overweight, dishevelled man who’d stumbled into her office an hour and twenty minutes late, hungover, or still drunk. Partner was in another meeting by then, and if he’d been surprised by Lamb’s no-show he hid it well. When he turns up, give him coffee. So she’d given Lamb coffee and put him in the visitor’s chair, which he’d occupied the way a sloth occupies a branch. He’d fallen asleep, or pretended to. Every time she looked his eyes were closed and a bubble was forming at his lips, but still: she felt watched all the time he was there.
A couple of years later, the world was upside down. Partner was dead; Slough House was up and running; and Jackson Lamb was king.
And for some reason, Catherine Standish was beside him. Lamb had asked for her specifically, she discovered, but he never gave her one hint why. And she’d never asked him. If he’d had designs on her, he was years too late; there’d been a time when she’d have slept with him without giving it much thought, or remembering it afterwards, but since drying out she’d been more particular, and had slept with precisely no one. And if that ever changed, it wasn’t going to be for Jackson Lamb.
But now here he was, and there was something about him that hadn’t been there before. Anger, perhaps, but anger with the brakes on; held in check by the same impotence that curbed everyone else in Slough House. Lamb had spent the best part of his working life behind enemy lines, and now here the enemy was, and there was bugger all Lamb could do but sit and watch. Weirdly, this had the effect of making Catherine want to say something comforting. Something like: ‘We’ll get them.’
We’ll get them. People were saying this in offices up and down the country; in pubs, in classrooms, on street corners. Can’t happen here. We’ll get them; and by we they all meant the same thing: those in jobs like her own and Jackson Lamb’s; those who worked, one way or the other, for the security services. Those who didn’t allow things like this to happen, even if they generally didn’t succeed in stopping it until the fifty-eighth minute. And it occurred to Catherine that if anyone thinking these thoughts ever got a look around Slough House, they might re-evaluate their position sharpish. That kid in the cellar? Doesn’t have a prayer.
So she backed away from the door and returned to her room, her report still tucked under her arm.
Chapter 8
There wasn’t much of a moon, but that hardly mattered. River was opposite Robert Hobden’s flat again. Less than forty-eight hours ago rain had been falling in torrents, and River had been on the pavement, stealing shelter from an overhanging window. Tonight it wasn’t raining, and he was in the car—if a warden came, he’d move. From behind Hobden’s curtain, a thin light shone. Every so often, a shadow fell across it. Hobden was a prowler, unable to sit still for long. Much as River hated to admit anything in common with him, they shared that much. Neither could rest quietly in their own skin for long.
And now River almost jumped out of his: what the—
Just a tap on the glass, but he hadn’t seen anyone approaching.
Whoever it was bent, and peered into the car.
‘River?’ she mouthed.
Jesus, he thought. Sid Baker.
He opened the door. She slid inside, pulled it shut, then shook her head free of her hood. She was carrying a pair of take-out coffees.
‘Sid? What the hell are you doing?’
‘I could ask you the same thing.’
‘Have you been following me?’
‘You’d better hope not, hadn’t you?’ She handed him one of the coffees, and he was helpless to do anything but accept it. Peeling the polystyrene lid from her own released a gust of steam. ‘Because that would mean I’d tracked you halfway across London without you noticing.’ She blew softly on the liquid’s surface, and the steam flurried. ‘On foot. Which would make me pretty special.’
Opening his own cup involved splashing hot coffee on to his thighs. She handed him a napkin. He fumbled with it, trying to mop himself dry without spilling more. ‘So what, you guessed I’d be here?’
‘It wasn’t that difficult.’
Great, he thought. Nothing like being transparent. ‘And you thought I might want company?’
‘I can honestly say I’ve never thought that, no.’ She looked past him. ‘Which one’s Hobden?’
River pointed.
‘And he’s alone?’
‘Far as I know. So why are you here?’
She said, ‘Look. You’re probably wrong. If Hobden’s got anything to do with Hassan—’
‘They’ve released his name?’
‘Not officially. But Five have got it, and Ho picked it up a couple of hours ago. That boy’s slick. It’s a good job he’s working for us.’
‘So who is he?’
‘Hassan Ahmed. Ho’s probably got his shoe size by now, but that’s all he had when I left. Anyway, if Hobden’s involved, he’d hardly still be loose. Five would have brought him in.’
River said, ‘That had occurred to me.’
‘And?’
He shrugged. ‘I know he’s up to something.’
‘That stuff you were looking at in the pub. Ready to tell me what that was about?’
He might as well. It wasn’t like he could convince her he wasn’t up to anything. ‘They were Hobden’s,’ he said. ‘The files you stole the other day.’
‘They were what?’
He told her what he’d done, as briefly as he could. When he’d finished, Sid was silent for a full minute. He was glad about that. She could easily have launched into a catalogue of exactly what an idiot he was; explained that theft of government property was one thing, and theft of classified information another. Even if that information turned out to be useless. He didn’t need to know any of that. And nor did she mention that merely hearing what he’d told her put her in the same situation as him. If River wound up in the dock, she’d be by his side. Unless she left the car now. And called the Dogs.
Instead, when the minute was up, she said, ‘So what’s with pi? Code?’
‘I don’t think so. I think his back-up’s a dummy. I think he’s the kind of paranoid who expects someone to lift his files, and wants to be sure they don’t get anything. No, more than that. Wants them to know he was expecting it. He wants to have the last laugh.’
River remembered something else: that Hobden used copies of Searchlight, the anti-fascist newspaper, to wrap his kitchen leavings in; an up-yours to anyone who rifled his dustbins. You think he’s calling us Nazis? he’d asked Lamb. Well, yes, Lamb had said.
Obviously. Obviously he’s calling us Nazis.
‘Well, you can’t say he’s wrong,’ said Sid. ‘I mean, I lifted his files. You went through his rubbish.’
‘And that list didn’t get on the web by accident,’ River said. ‘Let’s face it, the Service screwed him good and proper.’
‘And his revenge involves setting up some kid for execution? You know what kind of backlash there’ll be if it actually happens?’
‘I can imagine.’ His coffee was still too hot. He placed the cup on the dashboard. ‘Islamic communities taking to the streets. Oh, there’ll be plenty of sympathy from the liberal left, why wouldn’t there be? An innocent kid killed on camera. But it won’t just be demonstrators waving placards and demanding respect. It’ll be about revenge. There’ll be stabbings and God knows what. You name it.’
‘That’s what I meant. He might be a raving idiot, but he’s a patriot, for what that’s worth. You really think he wants chaos in the streets?’
‘Yep. Because after the chaos comes the clampdown, and that’s what he’s after. Not the backlash but what follows, when everything gets harsh. Because nobody wants kids executed on TV, but they want riots on their doorstep even less.’
Sid said, ‘I hate conspiracy theories.’
