by Mick Herron
Some of which went on her coat.
Shirley said, “Like fuck I don’t. Right now, it’s all I want to do.”
She was still holding the gun; Patrice was still chained to the radiator. JK Coe was leaning against the wall, which seemed to be his preferred location. Because, it occurred to her, standing like that, nobody could come up behind him.
But someone could come up behind her, and did.
Catherine said, “Shirley, Marcus is dead. Nothing can change that. And if you kill this man now, it will haunt you forever.”
“I’ve killed men before.”
“While they were chained to a radiator?”
She didn’t reply.
“This is different,” Catherine explained.
Shirley thought: I can handle different. What she couldn’t handle was the thought of this man walking around a world he’d ejected Marcus from.
She raised the gun and levelled it at Patrice, who watched her without changing expression.
But the gun felt heavy in her hand.
Catherine said, “Shirley. Please. If you kill him like this, you might never sleep again.”
“Sleep’s overrated.”
“Take it from me, it’s really not. Sometimes it’s the only thing that can get you out of bed in the morning. The knowledge that you can get back into it come night.”
“He was my friend.”
“He was mine too. He was a good man. And he wouldn’t want you to do this.”
“You think?”
“I know.”
JK Coe said, “She’s right.”
“What?”
“Marcus wouldn’t want you to kill him.”
“How would you know?”
“Psych Eval. Remember?”
The gun felt so very very heavy.
“Marcus thought you were a prick,” she told him.
“He was your friend, not mine.”
Catherine said, “Shirley. This isn’t an op. It would be an execution.”
“I don’t care.”
“You will.”
It felt like the heaviest thing she’d ever held in her hand.
“I don’t want him to be alive when Marcus isn’t,” she said.
“I know.”
“He should die.”
“But you shouldn’t kill him.”
Silently, Coe offered his hand. She looked at it, then at the gun in her own. Then at Patrice, who was still on his back, cuffed to the radiator. A short time ago, he’d been indestructible; storming Slough House, killing Marcus, killing Sam.
Shirley really wanted him dead.
But she didn’t want to kill him. Not like this.
And she felt so very very tired.
She heard Catherine sigh softly as she lowered the gun into Coe’s waiting hand.
Anger Fucking Management. Marcus would be proud.
Then Coe shot Patrice three times in the chest.
“There you go,” he said, and handed the gun back to Shirley.
River rolled and threw up Thames water, then opened his eyes. He was staring at wet pavement. He rolled again and a blurry face, inches from his own, took shape, slipped out of focus, then slipped back in again.
“Louisa,” he said, or tried to. It came out “Larghay.”
“In future,” she told him, “pick up a fucking phone, yeah?”
Then she pulled away and all he could see was the rain, still steadily falling.
In the glow from the streetlights, the drops looked like diamonds.
The rain had stopped, which was such a longed-for, such an unexpected outcome, that all around the city people were saying it twice: the rain has stopped. The rain has stopped. Slough House was all but empty that night, twenty-four hours after the attack. There was still a stain on the wall behind what had been Marcus’s desk; another on the carpet in Louisa’s room, where Bad Sam had fallen; and a third in Coe and Cartwright’s office, beneath the radiator. But the bodies had been removed, and someone, probably Catherine, had cleared away the smashed chair and assorted debris. The broken doors were propped against walls, waiting for the paperwork to go through enough channels that somebody, somewhere, would give up and sign a chitty allowing them to be replaced. Until then, Slough House would be largely open-plan.
Jackson Lamb’s door was undamaged, but stood ajar, allowing a little grey light to spill onto the landing. The room opposite, once Catherine Standish’s, was in darkness, though its door too was open. And on the stairs was a noise, a series of noises, made by someone on their way up; someone unused to the creaking staircase, the damp walls, the various odours of neglect in the stairwell, which it would take industrial solvents or environmental catastrophe to shift.
When Claude Whelan reached the uppermost landing he paused, as if unsure the ascent had been worth it.
“In here,” something growled.
Suppressing a shudder, he went in.
Lamb was behind his desk. His shoeless feet rested on top of it, his right heel showing through a hole in one sock, and most of his toes through a hole in the other. There was a bottle in front of him, and a glass in his hand, whose emptiness was presumably a temporary anomaly. The room’s only light source was to his right, a lamp set on a thigh-level ziggurat of dusty books: telephone directories, Whelan thought. An analogue man in a digital world. Whether that was obsolescence or survival trait, time would tell.
He said, “Legend doesn’t do this place justice.”
Lamb seemed to consider several responses before settling for a fart.
“Or you,” Whelan added.
“Maybe leave the door as it is,” Lamb suggested.
There was a visitor’s chair, so Whelan took it.
Not much of Lamb’s office could be seen in the gloom. A blind was drawn over the only window; a cork noticeboard hung on one wall. And there was a clock somewhere, which Whelan couldn’t see; instead of ticking it made a steady tap-tap noise, a dull repetition which seemed to underline how appalling the passage of time could be.
Lamb refilled his glass, then reluctantly waved the bottle in Whelan’s direction. When Whelan shook his head, he set it down again, unstoppered. “Can’t remember the last time we had First Desk here,” he said. “No, hang on, yes I can. Never.”
“We don’t usually make housecalls,” said Whelan. “But in the circumstances . . . ”
“What, dead agents? Yeah, that’s always a photo op.” Lamb rested his glass on his chest, his meaty fingers embracing it. “Did you tie a teddy to a lamp post?”
Whelan said, “You wanted a meeting. We could have done this at the Park.”
“Yeah. But that would have involved me making the effort instead of you. Frank coughing his guts up?”
If the sudden switch fazed Whelan, he hid it well. “He’s been . . . cooperative.”
“I’ll bet.”
“We’ve not had to adopt unorthodox measures to make him talk, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
Lamb said, “I was thinking you’d have to get seriously innovative to shut him up. I mean, he told Cartwright his life story. It’s not like he’s shy.” He raised the glass to his mouth without taking his eyes off Whelan. He resembled a hippo enjoying a wallow. “But what surprises me is you took him alive. I’d have thought Lady Di would have had the trigger pulled as soon as he broke cover.”
“That was her stated preference, yes.”
Lamb looked interested. “You overruled her?”
“We’d reached a point where I either agreed to do her bidding evermore, or drew a line in the sand. And there’d been quite enough blood shed in London’s streets for one week.”
“Not only its streets,” said Lamb. “So what’s he had to say for himself?”
Whelan shifted in his chair. He was finding it difficu
lt not to stare at Lamb’s feet. It was like catching sight of a joint of meat hanging in a butcher’s window and wondering what the hell that had been when it was still attached to its body. He said, “Lamb, your team’s been at the sharp end, I appreciate that. And you’ve suffered a loss. But that doesn’t make you privy to classified intelligence. What Frank’s had to say is being analysed as we speak. And in due course there’ll be a report. But it’ll be eyes-only, and your eyes won’t be on the list, I’m afraid.”
Or anywhere near it.
Lamb nodded thoughtfully. “Good point. I mean, a lot of this has gotta be pretty sensitive, right?”
“Precisely.”
“Like how Frank’s whole operation was originally funded and resourced by the Service. I presume that’ll be bullet point one when the report’s finished.”
The tap-tap-tapping, Whelan belatedly realised, wasn’t time hammering away but water dripping, off a loose section of guttering perhaps. Leaks can happen anywhere.
He said, “I’m not entirely sure it would be in everyone’s interests for that . . . supposition to be made official.”
“So Lady Di’s influence hasn’t left you entirely unsoiled.”
“I wasn’t wholly naïve to start with, you know.”
“We’ll get to that later,” Lamb said. “You sure you don’t want a drink?”
“I don’t want to deprive you. Your bottle’s nearly half empty.”
“I know where I can lay my hands on a fresh one.” He indicated a second glass, hiding behind the phone on his desk. To Whelan’s surprise, it looked more or less clean.
He’d never acquired a taste for whisky. More of a brandy man. But he was developing the sense that he wasn’t going to get through this conversation unaided, so this time accepted the offer.
While Lamb poured, he said, “There, that makes this just a nice friendly chat, doesn’t it? Colleagues winding down after a hard week. Nothing official about it.”
“If you’d come to the Park,” Whelan said, “there’d be a recording.”
“Now you’re getting it.” Lamb leaned back. “Bad Sam Chapman put in some hard years for the Park, and he was a good soldier. Leastways apart from losing all that money he was. And Longridge had his moments when he wasn’t pissing his salary away on the slot machines. And if nothing else, I reckon I’m owed something for the mess they’ve made of my carpets. So let’s hear the edited highlights of Frank’s post-Agency career, shall we? All unofficial, like.”
A good operative, Whelan had heard, knew how to make a threat sound like a digression.
He took a sip of whisky. He had spent all day at the Park; had arrived there before dawn, leaving Claire asleep—he’d looked in, but hadn’t wakened her—and for most of the hours since had been watching, rewatching, footage of Frank Harkness. Lamb was right: getting him to talk hadn’t been a problem. It rarely was, with unhinged narcissists.
“You know about Les Arbres,” he said.
“A nursery for terrorists,” Lamb said. “Yeah, I’d grasped that much. What was he doing, training them in black ops before they’d done their ABCs?”
“Pretty much. And there was a KGB hood too, who specialised in what Harkness called mental calibration.” Whelan sighed, and let his head rest on the back of his chair. What he could see of the ceiling was a scarred, cobwebby expanse of distempered plaster. “You know what Harkness identified as the biggest threat to our way of life? Here in the west?”
“Radio One?”
“That we encourage our kids to think for themselves. While those who’d bring our towers down teach their children to sacrifice their lives without a moment’s thought. No, more than that. Teach them that death, their own and ours, is their victory, their apotheosis. And we’re trying to fight them with kids who’ve grown up thinking their Smartphones are a human right.”
“And Frank thought this paranoid bullshit made him a visionary?” said Lamb. “He should have written a blog. Saved us all a lot of grief.”
“He’s not entirely without a point.”
“And the west isn’t entirely without weapons of mass destruction. Let’s not pretend we’re babes in the wood.”
“Either way,” Whelan said, “what Harkness wanted was that same dedication, the same energies, only—as he put it—on our side.”
“Jesus wept,” said Lamb. “And that’s what he got.”
“And that’s what he got. Eventually. A troupe of young men trained in all the black arts at Frank’s disposal. Which, seeing as his crew was made up of a bunch of former Cold War warriors, was pretty much all of them.”
Lamb was empty again. He remedied this situation, making sure that it wouldn’t reoccur in the foreseeable future by filling his glass to the brim. “Then what?” he said.
Whelan said, “There have been several . . . events, over recent years.”
“‘Events.’ There’s an administrator’s word.”
“Frank’s team ran terror operations in cities throughout Europe. Dusseldorf, Copenhagen, Barcelona, others. Some quite small towns too. Pisa. That struck me as odd, I don’t know why. But lots of tourists, I suppose.”
“I assume these were fairly quiet terror jobs,” Lamb said. “On account of I don’t remember hearing about them.”
“They were dry runs. Unarmed, though fully functional, bombs left in strategic places. Water sources ‘poisoned’ with harmless but visible pollutants. Food distribution outlets, travel networks, energy suppliers, hotels—all compromised in specific, targeted operations.”
“He was playing games.”
“He claims that after each operation, security was tightened not only at the target site but throughout the city, and even nationally. Loopholes were plugged. Weak links dispensed with.”
“Did it not occur to him to write the odd letter?”
Whelan said, “We both know that wouldn’t have had the slightest effect.”
“You sound like you approve of what he’s been up to.”
“Each operation he undertook, he attempted to duplicate within the year. In all but one case, he was unable to do so.”
“Well, rah-de-fucking rah for him.”
“His point, he says, is we’re sleepwalking into catastrophe. If IS, or whoever comes next, gets serious—his words—they could level whole towns with little more effort and coordination than it’s taken them so far to become the global bogeyman. Paris is attacked and the whole world trembles, but how many people died? One hundred and thirty? Harkness estimates the theoretical bodycount his team have racked up to be into the thousands, and he counts those as lives saved. Because they couldn’t happen again.”
“Until Westacres put a dent in his average.”
Whelan looked up at the ceiling again. “As you say.”
Lamb put his glass down for the first time since Whelan had entered his office. From his pocket he produced a grey rag which turned out to be a handkerchief. He blew his nose, examined the results, raised his eyebrows, and tucked the handkerchief back out of sight. Then reached for his glass again. “Let me guess. One of his mentally recalibrated robots blew its wiring.”
“That’s the risk he was always running,” said Whelan. “But it didn’t seem to have occurred to him. He thought he’d raised a troupe of perfect soldiers. They had firearm skills, explosives skills, they knew how to live under the radar. But the whole point of the Cuckoo program was, the subjects have to believe they’re who they’ve been trained to be. He wanted terrorists, and that’s what he got. At least in one instance. He was called Yves, by the way. If it matters.”
“And not Robert Winters,” said Lamb.
“No. Well. False IDs were part of the process.”
“Pretty professional ones too, I imagine.” Lamb produced a cigarette from somewhere and plugged it into the side of his mouth. “That would have been part of the set-up pack
age, wouldn’t it? Along with the explosives he used for his suicide overcoat. I mean, I can’t imagine him waltzing through the tunnel with that little lot in his hand luggage. That would really be putting the lax into relaxed.”
“No,” said Whelan after a pause. “They were already here. Frank had a cache from a raid on an armoury back in the early nineties. It was thought at the time to be an IRA operation, but . . . ”
“But it was Frank acting on information received. And we all know where the information came from.” Lamb lit his cigarette, and was momentarily wreathed in blue fumes. When it cleared, his eyes seemed yellow. “The same place as the funds used to set up Les Arbres in the first place.”
“You’ll understand we’re not particularly anxious to have that feature in the report,” Whelan said.
“Oh, I can see it might not play well down the corridor,” Lamb said. “I mean, we’re supposed to be protecting the citizenry. Not providing the wherewithal for lunatics to massacre it.” He breathed smoke. “So one of his mini-mes blows a gasket and performs a wet run instead of a dry one. Which is why Frank has to scorch the earth. David Cartwright being top of his list.”
“We’re still not clear on Sam Chapman’s role,” Whelan said.
“He carried Cartwright’s bags back in the day. Including to Les Arbres.”
“Ah.” He waved a hand to dispel Lamb’s smoke. “That’s one of the areas Harkness wasn’t so forthcoming about.”
“Alongside how he got Cartwright on board by putting his daughter up the duff? There’s an angle they don’t teach you at spook school. But shall I tell you what’s more interesting right now?” Lamb inhaled deeply, and when he spoke his voice was pinched. “Your use of the past tense. Wasn’t so forthcoming. Had an accident, has he?”
