by Mick Herron
Larry, Moe and Curly.
Curly, Larry and Moe.
Who were these people, and why had they chosen him?
The horrible thing was, Hassan thought he knew.
He thought he knew.
In the pub near Slough House, at the same table River and Sid had shared earlier that day, Min Harper and Louisa Guy were drinking: tequila for him, vodka and bull for her. They were both on their third. The first two had been drunk in silence, or what passed for silence in a cityroad pub. In a far corner a TV buzzed, though neither glanced its way for fear of seeing a boy in a cellar; the day’s sole subject, which forced its way to the surface at last, like a bubble of air escaping from under a rock in a pond.
‘That poor kid.’
‘You think they’ll really do it?’
‘Off him?’
Off with his head, both thought, and winced at the unhappy phrasing.
‘Sorry.’
‘But do you think?’
‘Yes. Yes, I think they will.’
‘Me too.’
‘Because they haven’t—’
‘—made any demands. They’ve just said—’
‘—they’re going to kill him.’
Both set their glasses down, the dual ringing sending a brief halo into the air.
The Voice of Albion had gone public that evening, with an announcement on their website that Hassan Ahmed would be executed within thirty hours. 56 deaths on the tube, its argument ran, = 56 deaths in return. And there was more: the usual drivel about national identity and a war on the streets. The site was a single page, offering no proof of its claims, and there were thirteen other groups currently streaming the Hassan video, claiming responsibility, but the words Voice of Albion had been snatched by Ho from a Regent’s Park memo, so it seemed pretty clear who Five thought were responsible. But what was strange, said Ho, was that the website had first appeared only two weeks ago. And there were few other references to the group on the web.
But a name meant progress.
‘Now they know who he is, they’ll know where to look.’
‘They’ve probably known who he is for ages.’
‘They probably know a hell of a lot more than they’ve said.’
‘Not that they’d tell us, anyway.’
‘Slough House. For the simple things in life.’
Like combing Twitter for coded messages. Like compiling lists of overseas students who missed more than six lectures a term.
They finished their drinks and got another round in.
‘Ho’s probably up to speed.’
‘Ho knows everything.’
‘Thinks he does.’
‘Did you see his expression when he caught the loop?’
‘Like he’d cracked the Enigma code.’
‘Like that was the important thing, that the film was on a loop.’
‘And the kid was just pixels.’
Then, for the first time, they looked at each other without pretending not to. Drinking had done neither any favours. Louisa had a tendency to flush, which might have been okay if it had meant an even pinkness; but instead she grew mottled and patchy, her skin acquiring the topography of a badly folded map. As for Min, his face had sagged, flaps of skin developing along his jawline, and his ears glowed red to match his irises. All over the city—all over the world—this happened; co-workers ruined their chances in the pub, and forged ahead anyway.
‘Lamb must know more.’
‘More what?’
‘More than we do.’
‘You think he’s in the loop?’
‘More than the rest of us.’
‘Not saying much.’
‘I know his password.’
‘… Really?’
‘Think so. I think he never—’
‘Don’t tell me!’
‘… reset it from the default.’
‘Classic!’
‘His password is “Password”!’
‘You sure?’
‘It’s what Ho reckons.’
‘And he told you?’
‘He needed to tell someone. To prove how clever he is.’
For a moment, both examined their glasses. Then their eyes met again.
‘Another round?’
‘Yeah. Maybe. Or …’
‘Or?’
‘Or maybe back to the office?’
‘It’s late. There’ll be nobody there.’
‘My point exactly.’
‘You think we should …’
‘Check Ho’s info?’
‘If Lamb knows anything, it’ll be on his e-mail.’
Both considered this for flaws, and found plenty. Both decided not to raise them.
‘If we get caught looking at Lamb’s e-mail …’
‘We won’t.’
If there was anyone there, there’d be lights in the windows, visible from the road. It wasn’t like Slough House was high security.
‘You sure there’s a point to this?’
‘More point than sitting here getting pissed. That’s not helping anyone.’
‘True.’
Each waited for the other to make the first move.
In the end, though, they had another drink first.
There had been hospitals before, but not since childhood. One bad year had seen River incarcerated twice; first for a tonsillectomy, then for a broken arm, sustained in a fall from a large oak two fields from his grandparents’ house. It hadn’t been the first time he’d scaled it, though he’d had trouble getting down on the previous occasions. This time there’d been no trouble. Only gravity. Back home he’d tried not to mention the injury, on account of having promised not to damage himself climbing trees, but at length had been forced to admit that yes, he was struggling to hold his fork. The O.B. told him later that it was only after having made the admission that River had turned white, then whiter, then dropped to the floor.
Lying in the dark now, what he remembered that occasion for was that his mother had come as he lay in hospital. It had been the first time he’d seen her in two years, and she claimed to have arrived back on English soil only that afternoon. ‘Perhaps at the same moment you had your fall, darling. Don’t you think that’s what happened? That you sensed my arrival, all those miles away?’ Even at nine River had difficulty with this scenario, and hadn’t been especially surprised when he later learned that Isobel had been in the country for several months. Be that as it may, she was with him now, unaccompanied by his ‘new father’, and unfazed by River’s having told his nurse he was an orphan. In fact, the only thing that galvanized her was her parents’ negligence.
‘Climbing trees? How could they let you do such a thing?’
But evasion of blame was so ingrained to her character, even those around her colluded. River himself wasn’t immune. Of the injuries she’d bestowed upon him few had caused as much grief as his name, but even at nine he knew a narrow escape when he saw one. Isobel Cartwright’s hippy phase had been superseded by an equally short-lived Teutonic one, and had River been a year younger, he might have been a Wolfgang. He suspected that his grandfather would have balked at that. The O.B. was as adept at destroying true identities as he was at creating false ones.
But long time ago. Water under a bridge. River was a name for water that passed under a bridge. Lying in another hospital, River wondered who he’d have been if born to a different mother; one who hadn’t rebelled so thoroughly, if ineffectively, against her middle-class upbringing. He wouldn’t have been brought up by his grandparents. Wouldn’t have fallen out of a tree, or not that tree. And wouldn’t have fallen under the spell of an idea of service; of a life lived outside the humdrum … But his mother had drifted in and out of his life like a song. During her longer absences, he forgot the words; when she was around, there was always a new one to add to the list. She was beautiful, vague, solipsistic, childish. Lately, he’d recognized how brittle she’d become. She often imagined she’d raised him herself, and would bristle
convincingly when reminded otherwise. Her hell-raising years were not only behind her, they belonged to someone else. Isobel Dunstable—her late marriage had been a satisfactory one, bestowing respectability, wealth and widowhood in quick succession—might never have looked at a hash pipe in anything other than puzzlement. It wasn’t only her father who was adept at destroying true identities.
Thinking these familiar thoughts was better than the alternative, which was thinking about other things altogether.
There came a scraping from beyond the locked door; as if somebody was balancing on a chair, steadying themselves with their feet against the opposite wall.
As a boy with a broken arm, River had recognized his surroundings for what they were: hospitals were where light gathered in corners, and curtains performed the functions of walls. Where privacy was rarely granted, and unwanted visitors far more common than the other kind.
He heard footsteps heading down the corridor, towards him.
Slough House too was in darkness. At Regent’s Park, even when nothing was happening, there’d be enough people about for a midnight football match: eleven a side, plus linesmen. Here there was only emptiness, and the reek of disappointment. Min Harper, climbing the forlorn staircase, decided that the place resembled nothing more than a front for a mail-order porn empire, and with the thought came the dispiriting sense of being part of an enterprise nobody cared about, where tasks that didn’t matter were performed by people who didn’t care. For the last two months, Min had been examining congestion charge anomalies: cars clocked entering the zone whose owners had never paid; whose owners, in fact, denied being in the zone on the day in question. And time after time, it broke down to the same boring facts: that those who’d been caught were guilty of everyday life. They were playing away from home, or shifting bootlegged DVDs, or delivering their daughters to abortion clinics well out of their husbands’ sight … There were prison camps whose inmates spent their days carrying rocks from one end of the yard to the other, and then back. That might be a more fulfilling occupation.
Something shifted further up the stairwell.
‘Did you hear that?’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know. A noise.’
They halted on the landing. Whatever had made the sound didn’t make it again.
Louisa leant closer to Min, and he became aware of the smell of her hair.
‘A mouse?’
‘Do we have mice?’
‘We’ve probably got rats.’
Alcohol thickened the syllables, and slurred the sibilants.
Whatever they’d thought they’d heard didn’t happen again. The smell of Louisa’s hair, though, continued. Min cleared his throat.
‘Shall we?’
‘Um …?’
‘Go up, I mean?’
‘Sure. Going down’s not an option. I mean—’
Good job it was dark.
But as they set off up the next flight of stairs their hands brushed in the darkness, and their drunk fingers entangled themselves, and then they were kissing, and more than kissing; were clutching at each other in the darkness; each pushing at the other as if anxious to occupy the same space, which turned out to be against the wall in Loy’s room, the first they’d come to.
Three minutes passed.
Coming up for breath, their first words were:
‘Jesus, I never—’
‘Shut up.’
They shut up.
Two floors above them, a black-clad figure paused inside Lamb’s office.
Outside the door, one of Nick Duffy’s crew occupied a plastic chair, tilting it so its back was resting against the wall. Dan Hobbs had been two minutes short of going off-roster when he was dispatched here instead. When an agent got shot, there was no such thing as downtime. Even when it was a slow horse. Even when it was their own stupid fault.
Though short on detail, Hobbs was prepared to accept that it had been their own stupid fault.
Service officers were red-flagged, so as soon as the name was entered on the hospital records, it was pinging its way to Regent’s Park. Hobbs had picked it up: since then he’d put out an officer-down alert; broken a few limits getting to the hospital; established the agent’s injuries; and taken instruction from Duffy: Secure whoever’s still standing and wait there. So Hobbs had, in the only available room: a store cupboard down here among the ghosts.
That had been half an hour ago, and not a peep since, and even as that thought occurred to Hobbs he squinted at his phone once more, and an awkward truth hit him.
He had no signal.
Damn.
A quick trip upstairs. It would take less than a minute. And the sooner he was back in touch with the Park, the less chance anyone would know he’d lost contact to start with.
Then he heard the rubbery squeaks that meant someone was coming down the stairs.
Righting the chair, Hobbs planted his feet on the floor.
* * *
This time, there was no doubting it. There’d been a noise, loud enough to distract Louisa and Min from what they were doing. Three minutes later it wouldn’t have done, but those were the edges on which outcomes balanced.
‘Hear that?’
‘I heard it.’
‘Came from upstairs.’
‘Lamb’s office?’
‘Or Christine’s.’
They waited, but heard nothing further.
‘You think it’s Lamb?’
‘If it was, there’d be a light on.’
They eased apart, zipping up, and moved for the door without noise. Anyone watching might think they’d rehearsed movements like these: stealthy progress through dark territory, with an unknown third party lurking near.
‘Weapon?’
‘Desk.’
It yielded a glass paperweight, which fitted neatly into a fist, and a stapler which would serve as a knuckleduster.
‘You sure we want to do this?’
‘I’d rather be doing what we just nearly did.’
‘Yeah, but—’
‘But now we’ve got to do this instead.’
Or first, perhaps. Whatever.
And anyone watching wouldn’t have guessed either had recently succumbed to drink or lust, because both looked like sober joes as they slipped on to the landing again; Min taking the lead and Louisa watching his hands as she followed, alert for any signals he might drop into the silence that drifted behind him.
The approaching man was overweight and trod heavily, and perhaps had wandered downstairs by mistake; was actually here to get his heart sorted, or have a gastric band fitted. Hobbs ran seven miles daily, rain or shine, and thought being out-of-shape was slow suicide. It meant you’d always come off second best in a physical encounter, which wasn’t something that had happened to Hobbs yet.
He prepared himself for a brush with the public at whose service he technically served.
But the man turned out not to be public. He didn’t even ask who Hobbs was. It was as if he already knew, and already didn’t care.
‘Here’s a tip,’ he said. ‘Mobiles? RaspBerries? Gizmos like that? Not at their best underground.’
Hobbs retreated into bland civil-servantese: ‘Can I help you?’
‘Well.’ The fat man pointed to the locked door. ‘You could open that.’
‘You must be lost, sir,’ Hobbs said. ‘They’ll help you up at reception. With whatever you’re after.’
The man tilted his head to one side. ‘Do you know who I am?’
Jesus wept. Hobbs licked his teeth and prepared to unfold himself from his chair. ‘Don’t have that pleasure, sir.’
The man bent low and spoke directly into Dan’s ear.
‘Good.’
His hands moved.
The stairs seemed steeper after lights out, or maybe they were steeper after an evening in the pub, and a knee-trembler in a dark office. But that thought was broadcast from a different set of experiences. The Louisa who’d come from the pub, the Min w
ho’d just been fumbled with, those skins had been sloughed when they’d heard the intruder. Now they were real people again; the people they’d been before calamity had struck, and exiled them to this damp building on the edge of nowhere important.
No more noises yet. Maybe it had been an unattended accident: a picture dropping off a wall. When the tube rattled past, not many yards away, unanchored objects felt gravity’s pull. Min and Louisa might be creeping upstairs, armed with stapler and paperweight, to launch an attack on a moment’s slippage.
On the other hand, whoever was up there might have frozen on realizing they weren’t alone.
Silent messages passed between the pair:
You okay?
Of course …
We trained for this.
So let’s go …
Up they went.
Whatever had just happened ended with the sound of something being lowered to the floor. This had been preceded by voices, one of which River recognized, so he wasn’t surprised when the door opened and a familiar shape appeared. ‘Jesus on a skateboard.’ Jackson Lamb was loud as a train. He flicked the light switch. ‘Get on your feet, man.’
Because River was lying on the floor. Cardboard boxes were piled against the walls, their labels indicating that they held rubber gloves; fitted sheets; plastic cups; disposable cutlery; other stuff: he’d lost interest and turned the light out. It was clear, though, that Hobbs had locked him in a store cupboard.
‘How long have you been in here?’
River shook his head. Ten minutes? Twenty? Three? Time had happened differently once the key had turned in the lock.
He’d put up no resistance. Getting here had left him drained; had been a nightmare ride through zombiestrewn streets, following a racing ambulance. There was blood all over him. Head wounds bleed. Head wounds bleed bad. This was a factoid he’d clung to. Head wounds bleed bad. That Sid Baker was bleeding bad from the head didn’t necessarily mean anything critical had happened. Could be a graze. So why had she looked so dead?
He’d watched her strapped to a gurney and rushed along a corridor by medical staff, and hadn’t even attempted to come up with a fake identity. A bullet wound meant police, of course, but say what you like about the Service Dogs, their response time was sharp. Hobbs had got here first, and had secured River, pending debriefing.
