by Mick Herron
But Catherine said, “Where did they come from? These rumours?”
“One of the course teachers,” Coe said, after a moment’s thought. It felt strange, rummaging for memories from that part of his life when he was still whole. It was like poking round somebody else’s attic. “It was a scenario one of the games teams was presented with, back when the Wall came down.”
“The pointy heads,” said Chapman.
Lamb said, “Yeah. The ones who have consoles instead of ops. Tell me about this scenario.”
“The Park was approached by an American agent, a Company man, who wanted to tailor the Cuckoo idea. Instead of aiming it at specific national types, he wanted to see if it was possible to . . . to build an extremist. To raise a prototype fanatic. He was prescient, you’d have to give him that. He was thinking in terms of suicide bombers long before the West woke up to them.”
“And how,” said Chapman, “did he plan to go about building a fanatic?”
“Indoctrination. You bring children up in the right environment, they’ll be anything you want them to be. Catholic. Communist. Ballet dancer. Fanatic.”
Chapman looked at Lamb. “An American. Frank?”
“Les Arbres was the middle of France, not a training camp in the desert,” said Lamb. “They’d be more likely to raise a bunch of cheese-eating hippies than a suicide squad.”
From her shadows, Catherine said, “But this was never done, right? He was never given the go-ahead. Isn’t that why it was all rumour and story? Never on the syllabus?”
“Like I said, it turned out he wasn’t Company, he was ex,” Coe said. “Former CIA. He’d been burned for unreliability. Once they found that out, he was shown the door. So no, his Project Cuckoo never happened. It just became one of those anecdotes that get swapped after lights-out.”
“So what was going on at Les Arbres?” Chapman said.
Lamb said, “If he didn’t get official backing from his own team, and didn’t get it from the Park either, it looks like he went through the back door. And guess who was holding it open?”
“Cartwright?” Chapman said. “Oh, come on—Cartwright?”
“And all these years later, they’re trying to close it again,” Lamb said. “So yes—Cartwright.”
“Oh lord,” said Catherine.
“What’s up with you?”
“Why now?” she said. “Why try to bury it now, after all this time?”
Lamb’s eyes narrowed, and he squashed his cigarette into a coffee mug already half-full of dead-ends.
“What?” said Bad Sam.
“Don’t you see?” said Catherine. “Project Cuckoo. Purpose-built fanatics . . . ”
“Oh shit,” said JK Coe.
“Westacres,” said Lamb.
Many a tear has to fall, thought Claude Whelan obscurely; a lyric from a forgotten song, a moment from his past. Long-stemmed glasses on a starched tablecloth. A dining room with a view of the sea; the windowpanes spattered with rain. If he asked, Claire would know the precise holiday, month and year, the name of the hotel. He was hopeless with such details, his ability to memorise facts being reserved for his working life. Outside of that, he simply had the long view, like the one offered by those hotel windows, and the generic details that might have come from anywhere: the long-stemmed glasses, the pristine tablecloth.
He was in a stairwell, taking a moment away from the Hub. A brief opportunity to ring Claire, let her know he’d be late. She understood: of course she did. He was First Desk. The country was shaking at the knees, the tremors from Westacres still rocking the capital. She had fierce notions of loyalty. She would have been shocked had he suggested he’d be leaving soon.
“As long as it takes,” she’d said.
“Thank you, darling.”
“I’ll make up the spare bed.”
And now he was watching raindrops coursing down the windows, miles away from that holiday hotel, and brooding on loyalty, and how it pulled you in different directions. His first COBRA session this morning, and his Second Desk had made a liar of him. Her reasons had been oddly persuasive, but treachery always had its convincing side. And there was a way out of this, of course: do his job, catch the bad people, and the problem would disappear. And this was what he intended to do anyway, so really, where was the difficulty?
But he knew that Claire, with her damn-the-torpedoes approach to ethics, would take a different view: she’d expect him to be on the phone to the PM by now, offering his resignation—the Service had dropped the ball; hell, the Service had polished the ball with an oily rag, pumped it up and handed it to the opposition. Here you go. Do your worst. All before his time, but no matter. You didn’t have to be there when the ball was dropped. You just had to be standing in the wrong place when somebody noticed.
And Whelan knew that this was not only the honourable course, it was probably the safest, but . . . but damn it, we’d be in lockdown, Claude. We’d have Special Branch going through every desk. It would make the Cambridge spies inquiry look like garden party chit-chat.
So, not only the shortest-lived First Desk ever, but one whose microscopic tenure had seen the Service hobbled and chained; an onlooker at its own court martial.
He removed his glasses and polished them on the sleeve of his jacket. At moments of weakness, he liked to recall the codename he’d gone by over the river: Galahad. All the weasels—yes, that’s what they were called—all the intelligence weasels were assigned codenames, largely so they’d reflect a little of the glamour of actual spooks. So: Galahad, and Claire had loved that. My knight in shining armour, she’d said. Had there really been such knights, or were they just a bunch of talented ruffians? It didn’t matter; remembering that he’d been Galahad buoyed him. He’d been made to change it on his elevation: he was RP1 now; functional, yes, but boring. And now he was no longer alone; one last polish of his glasses, and back on they went.
Diana Taverner had found him. “News,” she said.
He waited.
“Adam Lockhead. One of the . . . ”
“Properties,” he said.
Cold bodies.
“He’s turned up.”
A wave of relief flushed through Whelan. “Where?”
“On the Eurostar. His passport lit up coming through border control. His train arrives in five minutes.”
“You’ll have him arrested?”
“I’ve sent Flyte.” She paused. “It would be best if there were no . . . official chain of custody. Just in case.”
Whelan looked towards the windows again: at them, rather than through them. The raindrops were choosing zig-zaggy routes to the sill, as if this were the safest way of navigating glass.
Catch the bad people, he thought, and the problem goes away.
“Well,” he said at last. “Keep me in the picture.”
Coming through passport control before boarding the train, he’d had the sense of triggering a silent alarm. Have a good journey, sir, sure, thanks, but River read in the tightening of the chubbily pretty guard’s eyebrows as she handed him “his” passport that something had shown up on her screen. A red flag. But not so red they’d prevent him getting on the train.
Which might just mean they wanted him back in England with as little fuss as possible.
So on the train, while the grey winter landscape slipped into darkness, before the train itself disappeared beneath the sea, he’d wondered how big a hole he’d dug himself into. Travelling on someone else’s passport? Not great, though he could plausibly claim cover; he was a member of the security services, even if the claim would ring hollow to anyone who’d heard of Slough House. Travelling on someone else’s passport, though, who was recently dead, shot twice in the face? That might take more confidence than he’d faked for the guard.
In the end, he’d fallen asleep, and only woke when the train was pulling into L
ondon: it was early evening, and the weather still foul. With no luggage to fuss with River was first on the platform, joining the throng milling around St. Pancras in the uncoordinated way of crowds everywhere. The tube, he decided. He’d head for the tube. That would be the best way of shaking them off.
That there was someone to shake off, he had no doubt. He might not be in joe country any more, but he was definitely back on Spook Street.
Emma Flyte spotted him stepping off the train. Youngish, fairish, reasonably athletic-looking, no luggage: there’d be other candidates, but she felt confident this was the one. She had her phone to her ear, which was as good as a disguise, most places. She said to Devon Welles, “I think that’s him.”
“Gotcha,” Welles said. He’d just arrived back in the city when Emma had called, and was now on a stool outside a sushi joint. “Ready to play?”
“Soon as you like,” she suggested, slipping her phone into her pocket. Some jobs, you needed both hands free.
Sleep had left him spacey, off-kilter, and his unexpected trip to France felt distant already. More immediate were last night’s events—the weight of the gun as he’d obliterated dead Adam Lockhead’s face. The red smears on the wall and the top of the staircase; traces his grandfather had left on his way down to the kitchen, where River had found him on arrival.
I knew he wasn’t you.
But River was him now, or was using his passport. Adam Lockhead; also Bertrand, son of Frank. A French/American hybrid, using an English cover. He wondered what had happened at Les Arbres, and how much his grandfather knew about it; wondered, too, whether the blood on his grandfather’s hands went deeper than smears left on the furnishings. River had always known the O.B. was a spook, but some parts of the picture he’d purposefully left vague. His grandfather must have been responsible for many deaths: by omission, by sacrifice, by deliberate targeting. But he wondered how many times the O.B. had actually pulled a trigger. It would be ironic—though he wasn’t sure “ironic” was the word—if the only death David Cartwright had brought about with his own stained hands had been committed while no longer in his own right mind.
He was out of St. Pancras now, heading for the underground platforms it shared with King’s Cross. River could never be here without remembering the morning he’d crashed this place: a fucked-up training exercise during rush hour, a misidentified “terrorist”—blue shirt, white tee—and a projected hundred and twenty people killed or maimed; £2.5 billion in tourist revenue lost . . . He didn’t know how these figures had been reached, but it didn’t matter, because whichever way you added them up the bottom line came out the same: River was now a slow horse, King’s Cross the hurdle he’d fallen at. Being here was like having a toothpick jammed under a fingernail. If it was up to him he’d blow the damn place up, but that was what had got him into trouble in the first place.
Then there was someone too close behind him, and before he could turn, a rock-like hand had taken a grip on his upper arm.
“Adam Lockhead?”
It was a man who’d taken hold but a woman who was speaking; a strikingly attractive blonde.
“I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else,” he said.
“Well, we’ll soon find out, won’t we?”
In her hand she somehow had his passport—there were posters on every surface warning you to watch out for pickpockets, but none of them suggested that professional dips would get quite so in-your-face about it.
“No, that’s you,” she said, opening it. “Adam Lockhead. Or did you mishear?”
River found himself being steered out to the street, the three of them walking abreast like colleagues heading to a meeting. “I’m a member of the security services,” he said as they stepped into the grey evening.
“Excellent,” she said. “Because that gives me so much jurisdiction you wouldn’t believe it.”
Few things gave an honest copper as much satisfaction as making an arrest: it was only afterwards, once you got solicitors, the CPS, the whole judicial machinery involved that things siphoned off into paperwork and loopholes. She wasn’t a copper any more, and this wasn’t precisely an arrest, but Emma Flyte wasn’t above feeling a quiet hum of pleasure as she climbed into the back seat alongside the prisoner. Devon, too, was feeling the moment: she could read this by the set of his shoulders, and the way he carelessly tossed the parking ticket they’d received into the footwell.
But this was police too: the tickle in her memory, looking at “Adam Lockhead.”
It was rush hour’s last grumble, and as Devon pulled away into the slow-moving traffic up Pentonville Road, Lockhead looked round. “This isn’t the way to the Park.”
This was true. They were heading for another safe house—if the Service ever diversified into private rentals, they wouldn’t have to worry about the cuts. On the other hand, they’d have nowhere to stow problems like Adam Lockhead while they worked out what to do with him.
“Keep him isolated. Don’t interrogate him. Restrain him if necessary.” Diana Taverner’s instructions: Emma was starting to feel like Lady Di’s personal gopher rather than head of internal security.
“Who is he?” she’d asked; a not unreasonable question, she felt. But Taverner’s response had nearly melted her mobile: a twenty-second blast of controlled fury, following which she’d repeated her instructions. Keep him isolated. Don’t interrogate him. Restrain him if necessary.
If not for that, Emma certainly wouldn’t have said what she said to Lockhead now, which was: “Have we met?”
He stared, his expression utterly serious. “I think I’d remember.”
It was the mole on his upper lip. Not that she recognised it, precisely, but it nudged something, a tantalising knowledge on the edge of recollection. She opened his passport again, glanced at the photograph. Not the same man. Similar, but there was no mole, and the words You’re gunna need a pair of tweezers and a sieve made their way to the surface. She’d almost landed the memory—was about to reel it in, drop it to the deck of her conscious mind—when something punched the car’s sidepanels, and her teeth crunched together as Lockhead slammed into her and the whole world blinked.
He hadn’t been able to achieve the speed he’d have liked—it was central London: walking pace the usual ceiling—but he hit the target hard in the circumstances: swerving out into the opposite lane when the oncoming traffic hit a lull, then a violent full-on smash to the driver’s side. He was out of his own recently-stolen vehicle inside seconds, limping slightly from the morning’s events, but otherwise unscathed. The target car’s driver was a hefty-looking black man whose reactions had been distinctly below par, and had mostly consisted of being swallowed by his airbag.
All around them, cars were screeching to a halt, and pedestrians pointing. It was still raining, of course; the ideal setting for an accident.
His second of the day.
After being sideswiped by the taxi in the garage forecourt, an impact he’d barely had time to brace for—instinct had taken over; his body ignoring his mind, leaping for the roof, pulling himself over the cab even before it had screamed to a standstill—Patrice had lost himself in the same sidestreets Sam Chapman had tried to vanish into, with more success, because nobody came looking. They were all too busy picking themselves up off the ground. The rain had continued to hammer down, and the skies growled occasionally, as if hating to give the impression they were already doing their worst. By the time he’d re-emerged onto a main road the pavements were largely empty, and the gutters were swirling with oil-flecked water, puddles swamping the intersections.
Nothing like the rain for clearing the streets.
He’d rung home, the part of him that hated to do this standing no chance against the part that insisted he follow protocol.
“Package still undelivered.”
This was greeted with a silence that whistled down the line all the way from E
urope, he wasn’t sure exactly where. That, too, was protocol.
Eventually, Frank had spoken. “Are you compromised?”
Meaning injured or taken.
Patrice said, “I’m gold,” because any other metal would have meant the opposite. The injuries he’d collected rolling over the taxi weren’t worth enumerating. Injuries only mattered if they slowed you down: if they didn’t, you were gold. “I’m gold.”
“Bertrand lit up.”
So did Patrice, hearing that. It was unprofessional, but it couldn’t be helped; if Bertrand was alive, things might yet be all right. Yves was gone, of course, blasted to pieces in lunatic martyrdom, but that didn’t mean everything was over. They simply had to clean up the mess he’d left, by laying a thick cold blanket over anyone who knew who they were. That had been Yves’s real legacy. He had wanted to fulfill what he’d come to believe his destiny, but all he’d achieved had been to make it necessary to destroy all traces of his past.
Which existed only in fragments. Like Patrice, like Bertrand, like all of them, Yves had had his childhood removed even while it was happening, and replaced by qualities Frank favoured: obedience to him, and reliance on no other. Attachments were encouraged only because without them, there was nothing to purge. Patrice remembered how, for Yves’s seventh birthday, Frank had given the boy a photograph of his mother, the first Yves had ever seen. Frank allowed him to look at it for five full minutes before handing him a box of matches. Yves had not hesitated for a second. There had been glee in his eyes as he had trampled the resulting oily mess beneath his feet.
Always, he had gone further than any of them. Patrice had been frightened of Yves, a little. He sometimes wondered if Frank had been too.
Bertrand, though, had been the attachment Patrice had never purged himself of. If Bertrand was alive they could complete this mission together and get the fuck off this godforsaken island.
But “Where?” was all he said.
“St. Pancras. The Lockhead passport.”
