by Mick Herron
“His actions have been unwarranted, unauthorised, and he’s been involved in a violent death. We can argue semantics if you like, but nothing he’s done today has improved his CV. Which was already less than exemplary.”
“Still—”
“And we have reason to believe his grandfather made possible one of the worst ever terrorist outrages on British soil.”
“Hardly the grandson’s fault.”
“So why has he been hiding him?”
“We’re not likely to find out if we have him gunned down in the street.”
“And if he’s allowed to talk, then the media coverage we’ve seen so far is going to look like a PR script. This is a turning point, Claude. It’s not just your career that’ll be over. And mine. It’s the Service as we know it. Which is imperfect, sure, and sometimes slow to respond, but we can make those things better—you and I. But not if this fiasco becomes public. If that happens, we’ll have nothing to build on. Because there’ll be no trust and no public belief. It’ll all be buried under the Westacres rubble.”
If Taverner hadn’t been here, he’d have reached for his wife’s photo. Would have found strength in that contact, even though she would never agree to what was being offered him: a swift way out of a situation not of his making. But then, he had been here before, hadn’t he? He had found his way out of corners in ways that Claire wouldn’t have approved of. Corners she hadn’t known he’d been in.
“What about David Cartwright?” he said at last.
“He’ll turn up eventually. But it’s not like he’s going to be making any sense. No, this is our chance to make everything go away. And it’s not even a push, Claude. It’s a nudge. The Met will be going in heavy-mannered whatever recommendations you make.”
“I can’t give instructions to the police force.”
“But you can make a call to the PM.”
He could feel it sliding out of his reach, any sense that he had a choice in what was about to happen.
“Young Cartwright is not an enemy of the state.”
“If he’s discovered what his grandfather did, then he very likely is. Because that would mean he has information that can do serious—irreparable—damage to the Service. And if that doesn’t make him an enemy of the state, I don’t know what would.”
It had been hours, he thought, since she had referred to the sword she’d left dangling over his head; the false information he’d fed COBRA. Instead, she wanted him to find his own way to the decision she’d placed in front of him.
If he did what she wanted, he’d be bound forever in her coils.
If he didn’t, she’d throw him to the wolves.
With a wash of nostalgia, he remembered life across the river, where the worst he had to contend with was the passive-aggressive needling of his fellow weasels.
He said, “This isn’t right.”
“Maybe not the right thing to do. But it’s the right decision to make.”
Nothing in her demeanour, he thought, indicated that she’d ever had a moment’s self-doubt in her life.
Keeping his face as expressionless as possible, Claude Whelan reached for the phone.
•••
A police car flashed past, or didn’t; the sky growled dramatically, or held its breath. Mermaids might have risen from the Thames, and the dazzle ship taken to the air. Probably all that happened, though, was the rain. If asked to reconstruct the moment later, that’s all River would have been able to swear to.
“. . . What did you say?”
“You heard me, River. I’m your father.”
“My father?”
“You want to hear it in a Darth Vader voice?”
River didn’t want to hear it at all.
He blinked several times, but nothing altered. They were under a shelter on the bank of the Thames, whose night-time reflections were rendered impressionist by steady rain. From the dazzle ship’s bar drifted a murmur of voices, and an unidentifiable tune. And here was Frank Harkness, who’d run some mysterious commune in the heart of France; who’d raised boys like Patrice, like Bertrand, and sent them out to be killers.
He had an English woman, I remember. I saw her once, or more than once. Perhaps these occasions have melted into one.
Natasha’s words, floating back to him the way those reflections floated on the water.
She was very beautiful, and very cross, the time I saw her, and they have big argument, big row, and Frank tells everyone to leave. And when we come back, she is gone.
His mother had never stayed with anyone long. Even her eventual marriage, which had elevated her into comfortable respectability, hadn’t gone the distance, her husband having succumbed to a dicky heart within three years of their union.
The distance she’d come, the respectability she’d assumed: all of that was summed up in her use of the phrase dicky heart.
“How can you possibly . . . ?”
He could almost see his words, so effortfully did they struggle into the air. And then crash to the ground, unable to reach the end of their sentence.
“We should go inside,” Frank said. With a tilt of the head, he indicated the bar behind them; the comfort room on the dazzle ship. “You look like you could use a drink.”
“. . . How can you possibly be my father?”
“Seriously? We need to have this conversation?” Frank shook his head. “I gathered you were a late starter, but—”
River grabbed him by the lapels and shook him, but it was clear that Frank was allowing himself to be shook. To be shaken. There was a solidity to his frame, something like a tree trunk—you could push on it all day and night, but there was no way you were toppling it without serious tools.
“That’s better,” Frank said. “For a moment there, I thought you were going to pass out. But this is better. You’re strong. You’ll do.”
“You’re lying.”
“You know I’m not. If you thought I was, it’s the first thing you’d have said.”
River let him go. “That’s just mind games. That’s bullshit. You can’t possibly—”
But already it felt like knowledge he’d been deliberately resisting till now. Already it felt like he was the last to know.
“We met, we fell in love, she became pregnant. Your grandfather didn’t approve, do I need to tell you that?”
The O.B. and his mother, and the rift that had driven them apart. For years he’d watched on the sidelines, with neither party giving anything away. He had missed the original Cold War by years. This one would do until the next came along.
“He drove a wedge between us. What did she tell you about me?”
“Nothing. She told me nothing. She never speaks of you.”
“Well, you have to hand it to the old man. When he drives a wedge, it stays driven.”
This time a police car did flash past, though flash was not the word. It slowed, rather, while its occupants gave them the once-over, before negotiating the chicane the roadworks had assembled. There was other traffic too, none of it important.
“Why did he do that?”
“Drive us apart?”
“Yes. Why would he do that, especially if—if me. If she was pregnant. Why would he do that?”
“Maybe he didn’t like the thought of having a Yank for a son-in-law. Or he was worried I’d take his precious daughter way over the big blue sea.”
“No.”
“No he didn’t find her precious, or—”
“No, you’re lying. None of that’s anywhere near the truth.”
He was thinking of all those years, all those conversations. All the times his grandfather had asked “whether he’d heard from his mother”: never using “Isobel,” as if this would presume on a deeper acquaintance . . . He had missed her terribly for all of River’s life, without ever admitting it out lou
d. And the reasons he was being offered here were nowhere near enough to account for that.
Frank said, “Okay, there was a little more to it. Your grandfather—he was a great one for making deals.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“There were certain things I needed. A project I had to get off the ground. If I kept away from Isobel, your grandfather would . . . smooth the way. Allow certain things to become possible.”
“Les Arbres,” River said.
“How much do you know about that?”
It might have been an enquiry at a dinner party.
“You ran some kind of commune there,” River said. “And burned it to the ground the same day you sent your boy out to kill my grandfather.” He ran a hand through his hair, and it came away sopping wet. “Which smells like cover-up to me. This project of yours went badly wrong, didn’t it?”
“There’ve been mistakes,” Frank said. “I’d be the first to admit that. But nothing we can’t get right next time.”
“And you tried to bury it by killing my grandfather!”
“And I’m sorry. That was the wrong approach. I get that now.”
“The wrong approach? What the hell are you, a fucking self-help guru? You sent your own son—who died, by the way. Your son died.”
Frank said, “He knew the risks.”
“And that’s all you’ve got to say? That he knew the risks?”
“You think I’m not screaming inside? I’m hurting, River. Believe me, I am. But Bertrand was . . . there was a mission, and it’s still going on, and when you’re out in the field you lock the hurt inside. There’ll be time for that later.” He paused. “For both of us.”
Not going there, thought River. Not going there. But part of him went there anyway, joining dots and filling in corners. His half-brother . . . More than a passing resemblance. No wonder he thought he’d get away with turning up at the O.B.’s house, pretending to be River. No wonder River had been able to use his passport.
And River had obliterated that face, in the name of operational expediency.
But not going there.
“What’s the mission?” he said.
Frank smiled a crooked smile. “Right now?” he said. “Right now, River, the mission is you.”
The gunplay on Pentonville Road had sent further tremors through the city, making the old and the vulnerable nervous, but adding a sweet edge to the nightlife of the young. This wild-west frisson had its upside. Just like in frontier towns, the risk of sudden death was greater, but your chances of getting laid were similarly enhanced.
Patrice recognised this in scenes glimpsed through windows as he made his way though the heart of London. Social interaction had been tightened a notch. People were smiling more brightly, their laughter strung a note higher, everything more brittle. Which was useful. A group was emerging from a bar, armed with umbrellas and busy with laughter. He fell in among them, his expression breaking easily into companionship. “I couldn’t hitch shelter as far as the next tube, could I? I have got so wet today!”
“’Course you can, darlin’.”
“Hey, a little less of the darlin’s, you!”
“Take no notice of him.”
An umbrella shifted on its axis, and he was offered its protection.
“That’s great,” said Patrice. “Thanks.”
“It’s not just the rain you’ve gotta watch out for,” somebody slurred. “Mad people out there waving guns about.”
They moved in tortoise formation, past the pair of policemen on the corner who were peeled and alert for suspicious pairings.
“Evening, officers.”
“Keep the streets safe!”
Patrice smiled and nodded with the rest of them, and slipped free at the next corner. Two of the girls invited him to stay with the party—there was always a party—but he had a gun in his pocket, and a destination. And an instruction from Frank, who had been giving him instructions since he was a toddler, and who had ensured, way back then, that there was no question of Patrice not carrying them out.
“An address,” Frank had said, out of earshot of the young spook who’d been pretending to be Adam Lockhead. He’d recited it slowly. Aldersgate Street.
Patrice knew not to ask why. Frank let him know anyway.
“It’s where he’s stationed,” he’d said, indicating the young spook. “And that department doesn’t run to safe houses.”
“So Chapman might be there,” Patrice guessed.
“And the old man too. You know what to do.”
Patrice did, but Frank told him anyway.
“Kill them all. Call me when you’re done.”
Patrice nodded.
He was heading past Smithfield Market now, all shuttered up against the evening.
Aldersgate Street was minutes away.
Back in Slough House, Shirley was reliving her near-death experience.
“He’s a fucking psycho,” she said happily.
“And this is fun because . . . ?”
“Keeps life interesting. Hey, what if we get him annoyed at Ho? Roddy’d shit himself if the Mad Monk pulled that knife trick on him.”
“Yeah, well, it wasn’t so much a knife trick,” Marcus pointed out, “as just a knife.”
They were in their office, the overhead bulbs growing starker as the darkness outside solidified, and the more Shirley replayed the YouTube videos—and there were two now, another Citizen Journalist having uploaded footage—the surer she became that it was River caught on camera. Which was cool. The last time the slow horses had found themselves on a war footing had been the most fun she’d had since being kicked out of yoga class for starting a fight. If this turned out to be Slough House business, she might get to punch some heads. At the very least, this would give her something to talk about at her next Anger Management session.
Besides, there was nobody waiting at home. Not that she wanted to run through that sorry scenario again, even in the privacy of her own head.
She said, “I’m going to make a cup of tea. Want one?”
But Marcus only grunted.
•••
Ho was in his diving bell, gazing at the world at the bottom of the sea.
That’s what it felt like, anyway.
After fetching the ice for Chapman’s knee—and Jeez, it was painful the way old folks crumbled: Ho was broad-minded, it was one of the things Kim, his girlfriend, most admired about him, but seriously, old people made him feel ill—he’d returned to his machines. He planned to stay late; there was stuff he preferred to do from a Service computer. It was kind of a dare—a task he’d been set. A quest, even. A quest, and the prize was his lady’s hand. Though after four dates, and the amount of money he’d shelled out, her hand was the least he was owed.
It wasn’t that she wasn’t into him. Roddy Ho didn’t fool easy, and Mama Internet had taught him well. When a chick was really into you, there were ways you could tell, and one of the ways you could tell was when she said “I’m really into you,” saying it low and breathy into his ear, friendly as a kitten, her leg brushing across the front of his trousers.
So yeah, she was into him. It was just that so far, at evening’s end, she’d had an important reason for getting home alone, a sick flatmate or a need to be up very very early next day, “but soon, Roddy, soon,” which was a phrase he’d hugged to himself like a hot-water bottle once he’d got home alone himself. Soon. He liked the sound of that. And if completing a quest made soon come sooner, then he was up for it. That was definitely the right phrase.
So anyway: his task. What had happened, the evening before, Kim, his girlfriend, had been asking him how he did what he did; how he hacked in and out of other people’s networks, big and small. He’d had to laugh. “Hacking,” he’d explained, implied slicing and chopping, like using a machete to move thro
ugh a jungle. But when he did it—“When Roddy Ho does it, babes”—ghosting was the word you were after, because he left no tracks, and nobody knew he’d been there.
“So you can’t, like, change anything? You leave everything the way it was?”
Again: ha! She was so cute and so sexy, but she really didn’t get the things the Rodster could do with a keyboard.
“Kim,” he’d said. “Babes.” She loved it when he called her that. “I can change anything I want. I just make it look like it’s always been that way, you dig?”
And she dug, of course she did, because she laughed too in that sexy way she had, and gazed at him with liquid eyes.
“That’s great, you’re so wonderful, because . . . ”
Because it turned out she had a friend with a problem.
Long story short, the friend had been ripped off by the company she worked for, well, used to work for, only they’d fired her for some made-up shit when the real reason was she was too good at her job, and they couldn’t afford to pay the commission they owed her—“Thousands of pounds, Roddy”—and now she couldn’t afford a lawyer to sue them, so if there was any way he could “ghost” into this company’s system and adjust their accounts so the money they owed her ended up on her credit card or something, that would be beyond wonderful. Because she was such a sweet friend, and pretty too, and she’d be so grateful to Roddy, and Kim would be grateful too, and wouldn’t that be nice, Roddy having two pretty girls feeling grateful and friendly towards him at the same time?
And Roddy had gulped and adjusted himself, and said, “Sure, babes,” but it had come out squeaky.
So anyway. As luck would have it, Kim had had the company’s details jotted down on a piece of card, which was in front of Roddy now. So it was just a matter of getting into submarine mode, diving into the deep web, and it didn’t matter that the others were still floating round Slough House, because not one of them would realise what he was up to if they were watching over his shoulder.
Because he worked better at low temperatures he opened the nearest window, let cold damp air refresh him, then settled to his quest.
