by Mick Herron
“Where are they now?”
“Do you know, that’s a really good question,” Emma said, reaching for her shot. “Not sure. London?”
“Are you anxious to lose your job?”
“I figure that’s out of my hands.” There was a short interval, during which she saw off her tequila. “The Met’s on the case now anyway. Can’t keep this one quiet. He was firing a gun in the street.”
“Your gun.”
“I hadn’t forgotten. You haven’t asked about Devon yet.”
“. . . What the hell has Devon got to do with anything?”
“Devon Welles. He was driving the car.”
“Oh. Right. He’s not dead or anything?”
“Couple of cracked ribs. I packed him off to A&E. You want me to have Giti Rahman released?”
“Why would I want that?”
“Because there doesn’t seem much point hanging onto her. Whatever it is you’re so desperate to keep under wraps is leaking worse than a broken sieve. I’m not sure which’ll happen first, a Freedom of Information request or an offer for the film rights.”
“Ms. Flyte, all that’s been broadcast to an easily amused world so far is your own inability to carry out a straightforward arrest. And if you want your career to survive that hiccup, I suggest you keep a low profile from now on.” She paused. “You’re a disappointment. Go back to the safe house. Sit with Ms. Rahman. And if I ever relieve you from that not particularly onerous duty, you’ll know hell just installed air conditioning.”
Emma put her glass down. She thought: another round exactly like that, and the varying degrees of pain, humiliation, embarrassment and anger she was feeling would subside into a molten mass from which she needn’t emerge until morning. It might even have stopped raining by then.
She said, “Lady Di? I wish I could say the same about you. About being a disappointment, I mean. But no, you more than live up to everything everyone says.”
She disconnected.
Louisa said, “Wow. Was that your career I just saw leaving?”
“Tell me you don’t know what that feels like.”
“You want another drink?”
“What I want is a cup of coffee. Can you organise that? Because I need the bathroom.”
Louisa, watching Emma retreat to the back of the bar, decided to hang on a while; join her in that coffee. Her flat with all its quiet comforts would still be there later. And sticking with Flyte might give her the inside track when River and Patrice broke surface.
Pissed off as she was with him, she had to admit that all the exciting stuff happened round River.
Somewhere not far away—or not as the pigeon flies, though few cared to do so in the cold wet dark: even London’s pigeons have their limit—River was adding this to his list of unexpected beauties: a dazzle ship in the rain, its perspective-bewildering doodles becoming extra smeary, its black-and-white pipe-and-funnel finish ballooning into ever more cartoony shapes. It seemed to shimmer in the downpour, as if the lights trained on it were all that anchored it in place.
Patrice said, “That’s something.”
River, as if explaining an object of national pride to a tourist, said, “They were painted like that to confuse submarines. It made it harder to sink them, to pinpoint them as targets.”
“And that worked?”
“Well, this one’s still here.”
Though its patterning was not the World War I design, but a recent hommage, jauntier than the original.
HMS President was moored on the Embankment, on the approach to Blackfriars Bridge. In the background, cars and buses crossed the Thames, their tyres a swooshing soundtrack. This riverside road was quieter; one lane closed to traffic. Someone was always trying to improve the capital’s roads, and if they ever finished the job, they might turn out to have succeeded. Meanwhile, canvas-shrouded fencing was pitched along a stretch of kerb, reaching from the ship’s purpose-built jetty up to the bridge itself, lanterns fixed to it at regular intervals. These too wobbled in the wind, bouncing dizzy halos off the sturdy buildings on the other side of the road: banks and publishers and other dubious institutions.
River and Patrice had walked, because they were already so wet it made no difference, and it didn’t seem like something a pair of fugitives would do: stroll along in the pouring rain, pointing at the sights along the way.
Though their apparent camaraderie didn’t stop River wondering whether Patrice would kill him before the night was done.
He could run for it, of course. But running from trouble had never been a core skill of his; running towards it was more his thing. And running wouldn’t give him the answers he was after.
A figure waited near the dazzle ship, on its walkway’s sheltered platform. Before they reached him, River said, “There’s something I should tell you.”
Patrice showed little curiosity, but so far, apart from that moment he’d first laid eyes on River, he hadn’t shown much of anything. Had simply transmitted a dull grey pulse, performing each action as it was required; as if he were a wind-up construct, its movements oiled to perfection.
“I met your mother today,” he said. “Natasha.”
Patrice said nothing.
“She misses you.”
Patrice shook his head, but still said nothing.
“She wants to know you’re all right. It worried her, when Les Arbres burned down. Any mother would worry.”
“I have no mother.”
“She didn’t abandon you, you know. Or at least—she came back. She wanted to see you, to be with you. They wouldn’t let her.”
“I have no mother,” Patrice repeated.
“She was there for years. Never far away. In case you needed her.”
Patrice looked at him and said, “Those things never happened. Stop talking.”
“I will if you want. But I don’t think you do.”
As casually as if he were swatting a fly, Patrice reached out to slap River’s cheek, but River had been expecting this, or something like it, and blocked the blow. But not the second, which was aimed at his throat. Patrice pulled it at the last second, or River would have been laid out on the pavement.
Patrice said, “Stop now. Or I’ll make you.”
Maybe he had a point.
The figure under the shelter watched them approach. He wore a raincoat, its collar up, but there was something familiar about him, about the way he stood—because this was Frank, of course. His hair thinning; his cheekbones more pronounced; but still tall, fairish, broad-shouldered. Strong and capable. His way of growing older had been to grow more like himself.
As they reached him, he opened his arms. Patrice stepped dutifully into them, and Frank kissed him on one cheek, then on the other. There seemed little affection in the gesture. It was more, River thought, like a general greeting a soldier back from the front.
“I didn’t know you were in England,” Patrice said.
“You didn’t need to know I was in England,” Frank said. He turned to River. “You’re River Cartwright.”
“And you’re Frank. I didn’t get your surname.”
“Harkness. Frank Harkness.”
The accent was American, but with its corners sanded away by European exile.
River said, “Great to have this opportunity to chat. You sent someone to kill my grandfather.”
There were noises from the boat, whose features included a bar; overlapping voices and the tinselly ringing of glasses, mostly muffled by the rain. There was nobody in sight. River could have shouted without risk of being overheard.
To his surprise, Frank laughed.
River said, “You do know what happened, right? To your boy, Bertrand.”
Patrice took a step nearer, like a dog reacting to danger.
“You want to call him off?” River said.
“Why did he have Bertrand’s passport? And he said he was at Les Arbres.”
“There’s nothing to see there,” Frank said. “Not any more.”
“But why—”
“Excuse us,” Frank told River. “This won’t take long.”
It took River a moment to realise he was being asked to give them some privacy.
Well, he couldn’t get wetter.
From the laughably inadequate shelter of a nearby tree, he watched Frank put an arm round Patrice’s shoulder, and lean close. Whatever instruction or advice he was offering demanded intimacy . . . Water snaked down River’s back, throwing an uncontrollable shiver into him; a full-body spasm. How long had today gone on for? It had already been old when he’d arrived at his grandfather’s to find the body in the bathroom. How much longer, and what would happen yet?
Then Frank kissed Patrice again, and stepped back.
When Patrice approached River, he tensed, wondering if he’d just witnessed a Godfather moment; the older man explaining to the younger why he, River, had to die. But instead Patrice paused, then leaned forward, hands in pockets, and kissed River on the cheek. One cheek only.
He said, “We will speak again soon.”
Then he walked back the way they’d come; just a man hurrying through the rain, eager for the next place of shelter.
“Sorry about that,” Frank said. “Patrice, he’s a little confused right now.” He produced a pack of cigarettes, and offered them to River, who shook his head. Frank used a lighter, and the space filled with blue French smoke. “On account of your grandfather killing his best friend.”
“And your son.”
“Uh-huh.” He might have been acknowledging a vaguer relationship. Someone he shared a lift with once, perhaps. “I can’t believe he let that old bastard get the better of him. It’s like, lesson one. Don’t let your guard down just because the target appears harmless.”
River said, “The target was my grandfather.”
“I hadn’t forgotten.”
River wanted to punch the cigarette clean out of his mouth. Break his nose, black his eyes, watch him crumple in the rain. But instead of using his fists he said, “I shot your son’s corpse in the face. To mess up the forensics. I thought it might buy us twenty minutes.”
“His name was Bertrand.”
“I don’t care.”
“You should,” said Frank. “He was your brother. It’s good to see you, son. How’ve you been?”
Taverner disconnected and said: “I swear to God, I sometimes think I’m the only thing standing between this place and total chaos.”
Claude Whelan looked up from his laptop. Four viewings of the YouTube video now, and any further information it held wasn’t going to reveal itself on a fifth. The young man who’d brought it to Diana’s office had assured them it was being assessed by experts, its every pixel weighed and measured. Whether any knowledge thus acquired would help save Claude’s bacon, or ensure it was served extra crispy, would no doubt become clear in its own sweet time.
Diana said, “The other man in the car—the one who was using the Lockhead property—Flyte says it was River Cartwright.”
For a moment, Whelan’s mind didn’t bother taking this in. Then he said, “River Cartwright? He was supposed to be dead. What’s he doing with a cold body passport?”
“Let me think.”
He was happy to. As long as she was doing that, she wasn’t binding him more tightly inside this mad conspiracy which had just looped back on itself. The Cartwright mess—that’s what she’d called it this morning, back when he’d thought he was in charge round here—the Cartwright mess had nothing to do with Westacres. Cartwright was a Service legend who’d subsided into dementia, shot his grandson, and gone walkabout in Kent. Though apparently it hadn’t been his grandson after all . . .
The fact that it was Taverner doing the thinking didn’t prevent Claude from having ideas too.
He said, “David Cartwright.”
“Yes,” she said, already working the same seam.
“He was around at the right time. Twenty years ago.”
“He could have taken the properties. Nobody would have questioned anything he did. He was Charles Partner’s right hand.”
“But why?”
“Why anything? Money, power, sex—it doesn’t matter. If one of the cold bodies came to his door and ended up dead, you know what that means?”
“They’re cleaning house,” said Whelan.
Once, late at night in New York City, he’d sat with Claire in the back of a yellow cab as it tore down Broadway, and watched each set of traffic lights turn green at their approach. Sometimes, problems solved themselves: each question finding its own answer before you’d arrived at it.
He said, “Cartwright supplied the cold bodies to someone long ago. And now they’ve gone operational, they’re covering their tracks. With Cartwright dead, they’re secure.”
“Except,” Diana said. “You know what’s wrong with this picture? It’s hung backwards. If you’re a terror group planning a Westacres, you tie up your loose ends first. They should have come for Cartwright before the bombing.”
“But they didn’t. So maybe—”
“They didn’t know the bombing was going to happen,” Diana said.
Out on the hub, the work of the Service continued. There was a muted flatscreen on the wall whose rolling news channel remained fixated on Westacres. Relatives of the dead were fair game now, the three-day interval deemed long enough for mourning, and the transforming power of involvement in world-event had rendered several of them experts in counter-terrorism. One such was performing now, his head bobbing angrily as he explained the failings of the intelligence services, their laxity, their incompetence. Whelan could see him through the office’s glass wall. It must be of comfort, he thought, to pretend you had an understanding of how the world operated. Especially when it went wrong, and the result was carnage: broken bodies, torn flesh, and lives forever damaged.
He said, “I’m not sure which is worse. That someone planned this, or that it’s all some colossal fuck-up.”
“Welcome to Regent’s Park.”
“Let’s back up. Young Cartwright had Adam Lockhead’s passport. There was a body at Cartwright’s house. Ergo—”
“It was Adam Lockhead’s body,” Diana said.
“So young Cartwright turned up in time to foil the assassin, then went haring off across the channel on the killer’s passport. He was walking back the cat. Trying to find out who wanted to kill his grandfather.”
“Well, if nothing else, it shows the old man really does have dementia,” Diana Taverner said. “Otherwise he could have just asked him. Saved himself a journey.” Briefly she raised her fingers to her lips, and he understood that she was a smoker, unconsciously miming a nicotine hit. “So the question is, what did young Cartwright find out? How much does he know?”
“And who came after him?” Whelan said. He reached out and tapped the pad on his sleeping laptop, making the Pentonville Road video come to jerky life once more.
Taverner said, “The only thing that makes sense is, he’s the other cold body. Paul Wayne.”
“And he’s not rescuing Cartwright, he’s abducting him,” said Whelan. “So he can find out where the old man is now.”
His eyes flicked from the small screen in front of him to the larger one out on the hub. As if it were part of an installation, the recurrence of violent action in urban iconography, the YouTube film was playing on that one too now: more fodder for the debate on how the effort to keep the streets safe had fallen short. First Westacres, now this. Already, there’d be those straining to join the dots between the two. If anyone managed it, you’d hear the howls of outrage even while the screen remai
ned mute.
Diana Taverner said, “You realise, the more complicated the situation gets, the simpler the solution becomes.”
“I’m not going to want to hear this.”
“I don’t care. As long as you’re First Desk, there are decisions you’ll have to make. Not for your own good, not for mine, not even for your wife’s—”
“Leave Claire out of this.”
“Of course. But I’m simply stating facts. Your choices are no longer about your own moral comfort. They’re about the greater good.”
“And the greater good, as you see it—”
“Is the survival of this Service.” She pointed out towards the hub. “Westacres happened. There’s nothing we can do about that. But we’ve stopped similar things happening in the past, and we’ll do so again in the future. Provided we’re allowed to. Provided we maintain what trust is still out there.”
“There’s not an awful lot of that about,” Whelan said, indicating the TV.
“There’ll always be those pointing fingers. But the vast majority? They trust us to keep them safe. Because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be doing what they do—getting on trains, walking down streets, visiting shops. They’d be holed up in their bedrooms, living off canned food and bottled water. That’s the measure of our success, Claude. That the country still leads a normal life, even while we bury the dead.”
“I’m not sure Marketing’ll approve that as a slogan.” He closed the laptop. It was good to have these visible punctuation marks: without them, conversations might go on forever. “What are you suggesting we do?”
“The obvious. We have an armed terrorist on the streets, accompanied by a rogue agent. They present a clear and present danger to the populace.”
“You want me to issue a shoot-to-kill order.”
“Well there’s no point shooting to wound. People would only get hurt.”
“Diana—”
“It’s what I’d be suggesting even if it weren’t for the . . . additional aspects of the situation.”
“But it would certainly suit our interests if this pair were dead, and unavailable for interrogation,” he said. “Except young Cartwright’s not exactly rogue, is he? I mean—”
