by Mick Herron
“He needs somewhere quiet to sit,” Miss Standish had said, barely glancing round her old office. “He’s had a long day.”
“Well, I don’t know about—”
But already she was gone, and the old man—David Cartwright—was commandeering her chair, settling behind her desk as if this was his kingdom, and Moira the usurper.
So she had made him tea, and attempted conversation, until he slumped into a kind of vacancy, which Moira found mildly disturbing at first, then forgot about. It wasn’t as if she didn’t have work to do; a task which manifested itself, as her tasks tended to, in stacks of paper of varying heights, and which was soon accompanied by her usual repertoire of “tchah”s and “duh”s; of well I never dids, and what on earths; and, ultimately, a bloomin’ cuckoo is what this is.
At which the old man snapped out of the realm he’d wandered into and said, “Cuckoo?”
“Les Arbres was weird,” Bad Sam said. “Like a commune, but more regimented. And without many women, though there were kids.”
Ho had returned with a bag of ice, which he’d solemnly delivered to Catherine, then left. Chapman was applying it to his knee as he spoke. The room was damp, and the radiator supplied little heat; merely banged and wheezed at intervals, as if clearing its throat. Lamb was slumped in his chair, fiddling with an unlit cigarette, and Catherine had retired to a dark corner, like a child hoping its parents won’t notice she’s still there, attending to adult conversation which had turned unsuitable.
“I was there to watch David’s back, but it was a cushy gig. France was hardly hostile territory, the odd waiter aside. And you didn’t have to worry about anyone flying the coop. Defection wasn’t a big problem that year.”
“This was when?” Lamb’s voice was uncharacteristically muted.
“First time? Summer after the Wall came down.”
“Tell me about Les Arbres.”
Bad Sam described the house, the grounds, the location. He’d counted eight male adults. “I recognised one of them. Yevgeny, he was calling himself. First names only at Les Arbres. He was former KGB. He’d done a turn at the embassy in London, and back then we used to keep spotter’s cards on the visiting talent. Molly Doran made them up. Remember?”
Lamb grunted.
“She’d tape their pictures onto playing cards, making a big thing of whether they were hearts or clubs or diamonds. Lover boys or rogues, she’d say. She was pretty good at telling who was which.”
“What jolly japes we all had,” Lamb said. “Back when the world was teetering on the brink of nuclear catastrophe.”
“Oh, lighten up,” Bad Sam told him. “We’re all still here. Anyway, Yevgeny, he was a heart, I remember. Actual name, or embassy name, Ivor Fedchenko. But when I told Cartwright who he was, he brushed it off. Not important, he said.”
“And you let it go?”
“I hadn’t been in the job long, but I knew my pay grade. I was a junior Dog, Jackson. He was David Cartwright.”
“What was he doing there?”
“Debriefing an ex-agent. Code name Henry. That’s what the docket said, anyway.”
“And you stayed there?”
“Nope. Hotel in the nearby town. Angevin.”
“And you weren’t present at these debriefings.”
“Like I said, junior Dog. Jackson, I was his driver, his minder, his bottle washer. I wasn’t privy to classified discussions.”
“Debriefing a decommissioned spook doesn’t sound like he was juggling the nuclear codes. You lay eyes on this Henry at all?”
“How would I know? Nobody was wearing their codename on a badge.”
“Who was in charge?” Catherine asked softly.
He said, “There was an American, we weren’t introduced. But he seemed to be Boss Cat. I think his name was Frank.”
“You think,” Lamb repeated.
“His name was Frank. What’s this about, Jackson? It was years ago, it happened in peacetime, and nobody made a run at the old man. If you hadn’t mentioned France, I wouldn’t have remembered it.”
Lamb said, “Cartwright was far too senior to be making housecalls. I find that odd. How many visits did you make?”
“A couple. With me, anyway. The second was later that year.”
“And nothing unusual happened either time?”
Bad Sam said, “You’re sure this has something to do with what happened today?”
“I’m not even sure where Ho got that ice from. Right now, we’re all in the dark.” The snap of a lighter disproved his point, and for a moment Lamb’s face was visible. Catherine coughed. The lighter died, but Lamb’s cigarette tip glowed red. “There are bodies hitting the floor, though. That’s usually a sign something’s amiss.”
“The last night of our second trip, he was . . . distracted. Upset. Drank more than usual. And he was never too abstemious.”
“Warning to us all,” muttered Lamb, and was rewarded by a sigh in the darkness.
“There’d been a rumpus during the day. A woman turned up unexpectedly, Frank’s girlfriend, and they had a fight. She could scream and shout for England, I gather, which she was, by the way. English. I guess the old man must have taken some of the collateral, because he seemed cowed. But it was over by the time I got there. She’d just driven away.”
“Where’d you been?” Catherine asked.
Bad Sam looked sheepish. “Round back of the house, with a couple of the Russian guys. We were playing pétanque.”
“Sweet God in heaven,” said Lamb.
“So anyway, he started rambling on, telling war stories. I got the feeling he liked playing the old sage, you know? The grizzled warrior, telling fireside tales.” Chapman paused to adjust the bag of ice. “So there was a fair bit of that. But towards the end, he was pretty far gone on the brandy, and making less sense, except there was one thing he repeated, said it twice. ‘Wish I’d never heard of the damn thing,’ he said. I asked what damn thing he meant. First time, he didn’t reply. But the second time . . . ”
Bad Sam paused again, moulding the icepack over his knee.
“For Christ’s sake,” said Lamb. “Stop milking it.”
“Project Cuckoo,” Sam said. “He said he wished he’d never heard of Project Cuckoo.”
“Cuckoo?” the O.B. said. “That what this is about? Project Cuckoo?”
Moira Tregorian said, “I’m sorry, I don’t . . . ”
The old man shook his head. Last thing he’d been expecting. But there it was. Things came back to bite you. There was a saying, wasn’t there, as easy as closing a door, meaning nothing simpler. Door shut, job done. He was sure there was a saying something like that. But what it didn’t mention was making sure you were on the right side of the door when it closed.
He didn’t know where he was. It seemed to him he’d climbed some stairs, but this wasn’t like any part of the upstairs he was used to. There should be more light—all the best rooms in the Park had views—but this was one of the secretarial chambers, judging by its size. Bit of a cheek, stuffing him in this poky hole and expecting him to sing for his supper, but he supposed there was something to be said for it, telling stories in the dark. Hadn’t he done this, time without number; telling stories to . . . Young lad. Keen as mustard. Found him in the garden, his scabby knees showing. Name would come back.
Cloudy as the present was, though, some things you didn’t forget.
He said, “Project Cuckoo. Right you are, then. You taking this down?”
And his voice sounded stronger now, because he knew which side of the door he needed to be on.
All he had to do was step through it, and close it behind him.
Cuckoo.
JK Coe said, “There was a Soviet village, or there were rumours, anyway. It might have been a legend. There were a lot of them about.”
In the g
loomy light of Lamb’s room Coe might have been Marley’s ghost, draped in invisible chains. There was nowhere to sit, so he leaned against the door. Hanging on a hook was a raincoat—it could only be Lamb’s—from which ancient odours crept, released by Coe’s pressure; a mummy’s tomb of long-dead fragrances: cigarettes and whisky, and bus station waiting rooms, and damp desperate mornings, and death. Coe wondered if it was just him, or whether the others could smell it too: Lamb himself, and Catherine Standish, and the man called Chapman.
“Any time you feel like drifting off into dreamland,” Lamb suggested, “feel free to use my arse as a pillow.”
“Give him a chance, Jackson,” said the woman in the dark.
“I say Soviet, but the point was, it was anything but. What they did was create an American town, picket fence, Main Street and all, way out in Georgia, or wherever. Just like there’s an Afghan village on the Northumberland moors, in the military zone, except that’s for strategic purposes. But this was for people to live in. Be born in and live in. Learning American English, and watching American TV. Spending American dollars. A sort of finishing school. That was Project Cuckoo, USSR-style. They’d have a different name for it. But it was a means of breeding a perfect simulacrum of the enemy, so you could learn the way he thought, the way he dreamed, the way . . . well, everything.”
Coe had been Psych Eval, in what felt like a different life. One of the modules had been in Black Ops. That was a favourite with everyone, because you got to hear about the spooky shit. As in, this was the kind of shit spooks got up to once. But also as in, there was some seriously spooky shit out there.
“The theory was, if you wanted to plant a sleeper, that was the right kind of nursery to grow them in.”
Lamb growled, but it wasn’t clear if this was an objection, an agreement, or a digestive necessity.
“And do you think it ever really happened?” Catherine asked.
“There was another story,” Coe said, “that somewhere near the Red Sea, back in the sixties, there was a perfect replica of the White House. And the Sovs had someone living there for years, with a full staff, all English-speaking, and the point of him was, they’d initiate crises, and monitor his responses, and this would give them an insight into how the actual President might react to a given situation.”
“And do you think,” and it was Chapman this time, “that that ever really happened?”
“No,” said Coe. “You’d have to be insane to base strategic policy on how a puppet reacted to a fake crisis.”
“Yeah, that was the thing about the Cold War,” said Lamb. “Everyone kept their heads.”
He seemed to lose his for a moment, but it turned out he was rustling about in a carrier bag under his desk. When he reappeared he was holding a bottle. There were two smeary glasses on his desk, the only items there which hadn’t lately been used as an ashtray. He poured two fingers into one glass, four into the other, and pushed the former in Chapman’s direction. To Catherine he said, “If you want to nip straight from the bottle, be my guest.” To Coe, “But you can buy your own.”
Coe didn’t respond. He had spoken more in the past ten minutes than in the last six months. His head was pounding. There was a line of verse stuck in his mind, a bright rain will wash your wounds, and it kept circling round without going anywhere. He wanted his music back. If he had to be in Slough House, and he might as well be here as anywhere else, he’d rather be at his desk, earbuds planted, listening to Jarrett carving music out of the air: November 12, 1976. Nagoya. That would wash his wounds, he thought.
“Was there anything else?” he said.
“Are we keeping you up?”
“I just—”
“Yeah, well just don’t.” Lamb half-emptied his glass into his mouth, and didn’t seem worried about savouring the taste. “So that was what the Reds got up to. Doubtless the Yanks had their own version. But what about us? Or wasn’t that on the syllabus?”
Coe said, “Not on the syllabus, no,” and Lamb’s ears twitched.
“His name was Frank. Frank Harkness. American chap, ex-Agency, though I didn’t find that out until later. That he was ex-, I mean. Assumed at the time he was on the books. Well, you do, don’t you? Assume the worst.”
Which was meant in jest but had a sour edge, spoken aloud. Never mind.
“Back then I was gunning for First Desk. Never admitted that before. But it’s true, I took it for granted it was mine for the asking. Simply a matter of waiting out the incumbent, and keeping my copybook clean. Didn’t seem too much to ask. Been doing it for years.”
Though there had been moments when his copybook hadn’t been all that clean. When his conscience hadn’t been spotless, come to that. But again: no time for nitpicking. The details. He had a daughter.
“Her name was Isobel.”
He wondered if he had skipped ahead here. But it didn’t matter; the tape would be running. Spill it all out, let them join the dots for themselves.
“Lovely child.”
She had been, too. It was later that it had all gone wrong. But then, it was later that he was supposed to be talking about, wasn’t it? Project Cuckoo.
“It wasn’t Frank’s idea, exactly,” he said. “The notion had been around for a while. The Agency had tested it, and the Sovs had their version, of course. The Chinese. But not us. Nothing to do with morality or ethics—sheer pragmatism. There’d be big investment required, and the time we’re talking about, well . . . Lines were being redrawn. Gorbachev was beating rugs in the Kremlin, throwing up dust clouds. Nobody knew what the world would look like once they cleared. So not much point in setting up a long-term project to confound our enemies when nobody knew who those enemies would be two Christmases down the line. We’d have ended up looking foolish. And the main objective of an Intelligence Service is not to look foolish if it can be avoided.”
The words were finding him now. He had always known they would, sooner or later. The Franks of this world were born damage-doers; in their one-eyed crusade to protect their innocent, they’d rain down fire on everyone in sight. And David Cartwright, God help him, had given this particular Frank a brand-new box of matches. So yes, he’d always known there’d be an accounting.
“But he had a different angle, did Frank. And you have to hand it to him, there were some things he saw more clearly than most. One thing had come to an end, so we had to be ready for the next. That’s what he said.”
The old man’s eyes crinkled with the effort of memory. When this was done, he thought, he’d head back home to Rose. Cup of tea, or something stronger. Tell her about his day. Though maybe not this part, no. This story wasn’t one he’d want her to judge him by.
His hands were trembling. Now there was a funny thing.
The woman said, “Are you all right? Would you like another cup of tea?”
This was clever, he conceded. The art of a good debriefing: always allow for the possibility that you can have a rest, that it would soon be over.
You could never have a rest.
It wouldn’t soon be over.
“Extremism, Frank said. That was what was taking hold in the Middle East. All very true, we told him, but it’s not like they’re exporting the stuff, is it? And if they want to chop the hands off thieves, well, it probably keeps shoplifting to manageable levels in downtown Baghdad. Because we’d just won a war, you see? We didn’t want to hear about the next one, not yet.”
“I’m not sure you should be getting yourself into this state.”
“Frank, though, he thought we should be preparing ourselves. Because this wasn’t going to be over in a hurry, he said. When you have an enemy with nuclear capability, it could all be over in seconds. When your enemy’s armed with rocks and knives, they’ll come at you slowly. Raise their children to hate you. They’ll stare down through the generations, preparing for a war that lasts centuries.”
“I really don’t think—”
“And he already had a network, you see. A network impossible to imagine even a year earlier. A couple of KGB agents, and others from the Soviet satellite states. Some Germans, a Frenchman. He called them his rainbow coalition. Ha.” The laugh was a bark. “Combined experience, he said, these people knew more about counter-terrorism than any official service in the world, because they’d played both sides of the fence, do you see? Black ops. Give them the wherewithal, Frank said, and they’d establish a version of Cuckoo equipped to face the future. Fight fire with fire, that was the name of his game. You want to fight extremists, you have to raise extremists.”
He looked at the woman. She wasn’t writing any of this down.
She said, “And that’s what you authorised him to do?”
“Well, no, of course we didn’t,” David Cartwright said. “He was a lunatic. We told him to sling his hook.”
Coe dry-swallowed; coughed. Ever Mr. Empathy, Lamb poured himself another drink.
From the darkness, Catherine said, “For God’s sake, let him get some water.”
Lamb said, “Oh, is he thirsty? Are you thirsty? You should have said.”
“Speaking out’s not his forte,” Catherine said. “That’s rather the point.”
To his own surprise as much as anyone’s, Coe said, “I’m fine.”
“There you go,” said Lamb. “He’s fine.” He slumped even further into his chair. He already resembled a Dali portrait. “And as long as we keep the carving knives out of sight, he’ll stay that way.”
The words put a buzz in the air. Coe could hear it, and knew that if he shut his eyes he’d feel it happen: the sharp edge slicing through his soft belly, then the slither and slap of all he contained falling wetly to the floor.
“You’re not having a panic attack, are you?” Lamb asked kindly.
“No.”
“Does the thought of having one frighten you?”
“For Christ’s sake, Jackson, leave him alone.”
Coe said, “There were rumours. About Cuckoo.”
There were always rumours. Spooks love their stories: it’s why they’re spooks.
