by Mick Herron
“… All right.”
Balancing her cup in one hand, Catherine dabbed her lips with a tissue held in the other. This was all wrong. This was his office, his space; its contents arranged according to the rightness of the places they occupied, even if, to the uninitiated, this might resemble chaos. There were spare cables and mouses, and the wispy envelopes CDs come in, and thick manuals on long superseded operating systems. And there was collateral damage in the shape of pizza boxes and energy drink cans, and that electric buzz that haunts the air around computers. It was his space. And it was wrong that Catherine Standish could just wander in and make like it was hers too.
Didn’t look like she was removing herself soon, either.
“Takes up a lot of your time, I’ll bet,” she said.
Working on the archive, she meant.
“Almost all of it,” said Ho. “It’s my top priority.”
“Must be handy, then, that fake tasklist you’ve rigged up,” Catherine went on. “You know, the one that shows anyone monitoring your logged-on activity how hard you’re working.”
Ho choked on his Red Bull.
Louisa said, “You could have been killed.”
“I was riding a bike, that’s all. Thousands of people do it every day. Most of them don’t get killed.”
“Most of them aren’t chasing cars.”
“I think they probably are,” Min said.
“And where did it get you?”
A mile and a half, he thought, which was pretty good going in London traffic. But what he said was, “I got the guys at the Troc to pick it up on Clerkenwell Road. They tracked—”
“You got the guys—”
“Yeah yeah. Catherine got the guys at the Troc to pick them up.” The Troc was the Trocadero, which was what the hub of the capital’s CCTV network was called. “They tracked the cab west, and the goons didn’t get out at any hotel Excelsior, or Excalibur, or Expialidocious or anywhere else, but went straight on through to the Edgware Road. That’s where they’re staying. West End hotel? Dosshouse, more like.”
Louisa said, “You’d think Webb would have that stuff covered. Where the goons are staying, I mean. They’ve been in country how long? And they’re wandering round off the leash?”
Min thought he might have been given a bit more credit for slipping the leash back on them. Or at least working out where their kennel was. He said, “Like he told us. Over at the Park, they’re busy turning out their pockets for the bean counters. Haven’t got time for the, ah, hands-on stuff.”
“This isn’t trivial. It’s security. These guys have got guns … I mean, Jesus, we just let them wander round the capital tooled up? How’d they get them through Customs in the first place?”
“They probably didn’t,” Min said. “I can’t be certain about this, but I believe it’s possible to lay your hands on illegal weaponry in some parts of London.”
“Thanks for that.”
“Not the good parts. But a lot of places out east. And north.
And some parts west.”
“Are you finished?”
“And anywhere south of the river, obviously. More to the point, they were playing us, Louisa. All that time we were sitting working out the details, them saying yes ma’am, no ma’am to all your suggestions, they were basically just thinking fuck you. We can’t trust them an inch. They’ll say whatever we want to hear and do whatever they want to do. And Webb made it clear that if anything goes wrong, it’s our fault.”
“Yes, I noticed that.”
“So—”
“So we make sure nothing goes wrong.”
They were sitting on the stone balustrade of one of the flower beds on the Barbican terrace overlooking Aldersgate Street. Traffic hummed below, and from somewhere behind them music played; something classical. Over the road, through one of Slough House’s windows, Catherine was visible behind the spare desk in Roderick Ho’s office. The back of Ho’s head was a motionless black blob. They made an unlikely pair of conspirators.
Louisa put her hand on Min’s, which was resting lightly on her knee. “Okay, so they lied to us about staying in a nice hotel because they don’t want us to think they’re just rent-a-heavies, even though they are, and even though that’s what we’re gunna think anyway. Or maybe Pashkin has paid for a fancy hotel, and they’re pocketing the difference. Either way, I don’t think we should be too bothered. What worries me is the lack of back-up info. Audit or no audit, the Park should have known where they were.”
“But at least we know now.”
“At least we know now.”
“Thanks to me.”
“Yeah yeah. Thanks to you.”
“I’ll take that as a pat on the head then.”
“Pat pat,” Louisa said.
“You think they’ll ditch the guns?”
“I think they probably carried the guns because if they hadn’t, we’d be wondering where their guns were. So yes, they’ll ditch them for the time being. But they’ll carry them when their boss is here. That’s what goons do.”
“You’re good at this.”
“I’ve been using my brains. While you were nearly getting yours splattered across Old Street, playing Lance Armstrong.”
“This is about the bike, isn’t it?” Min said, but she didn’t get it.
Over in Slough House, Catherine was still talking to Ho. In the next room, Marcus Longridge was at his computer. Min couldn’t make out the expression on his face. Marcus was a cipher. Nobody was entirely sure why he’d been exiled, and nobody knew him well enough to ask. On the other hand, nobody cared, so it wasn’t a big worry.
Louisa said, “The one who was doing the talking. Piotr. You think he was coming on to me?”
“You wish. He had his arm round Kyril in the taxi. They were kissing.”
“Right.”
“Seriously. Tongues and everything.”
“Right.”
“You need your gaydar seen to.”
“You know what?” she said. “It’s not my gaydar needs seeing to.”
She gave him a sideways look he was getting to know very well indeed.
“Oh,” he said. “Right. Got you.”
“My place tonight?”
Min stood. The music had stopped, or else got quieter. He reached out a hand, and Louisa took it.
“Bring it on,” Min said.
Catherine put her cup down, but kept talking. “Don’t get me wrong, Roddy, it’s a neat trick, but don’t you think you should have programmed it to show a few off-reservation sites? Nobody sits at their computer all day and does nothing but work.”
Ho became aware that his mouth was open, so he closed it. Then opened it again, but only to fill it with Red Bull.
“But perhaps,” said Catherine, “you’re wondering how I know about this.”
He wasn’t, actually. He’d already decided it must be witchcraft.
Because Catherine Standish knew which way up a keyboard went, and probably had a certificate somewhere verifying her typing speed, but anything beyond surfing tourist sites was as far from her reach as dating … well, dating. Even if she’d crept in at night and logged on in his user-name, she couldn’t have found the program he’d written. If Roddy hadn’t been the one who’d hidden it, he’d not have been able to find it himself.
He said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Catherine glanced at her wristwatch. “That’s about thirty seconds too late to be convincing. Which, in a way, proves my point.”
This time Ho really didn’t know what she was talking about.
“Roddy,” she said, “you don’t get people, do you?”
“Get them?”
“Understand what makes them tick.”
He snorted. Understanding what made people tick was what he did. He tossed a mental coin, and it came up Min Harper. Take Min Harper, then. What made Min Harper tick? Hang onto your hat, lady, because Roddy Ho could tell you Harper’s service record, his salary, the m
ortgage on his family house, the rent on his bedsit, his credit card debts, his standing order payments, the family-and-friends earmarked on his mobile network, how many points he’s racked up on his supermarket loyalty card and what websites he’s bookmarked. He can tell you Harper looks at Amazon a lot without buying much, and e-mails the Guardian’s over-by-over cricket blog on a regular basis. And he was about to start telling her precisely all that, but she got in first.
“Roddy.” She pointed to the computer in front of him. “We all appreciate that you can make one of those things sit up and beg. And that the last thing you want to be doing is the kind of data-processing a trainee could do after twenty minutes’ instruction. And we definitely all know there’s a whole suite of rooms at GCHQ keeping an eye on Five’s online wanderings, in case anyone’s anywhere naughty. With me so far?”
Unable to prevent himself, he nodded.
“So bearing all that in mind, I asked myself what I’d do if I had your skills and was, let’s say, prone to wandering around the dark side of the web. And I decided that what I’d do is, I’d write a program that would convince anyone watching that I was doing precisely what I was supposed to be doing, which would leave me free to do whatever I wanted all day long.”
Ho felt liquid drizzling over his fingers, and looked down to find that he’d crushed the not-quite empty can of Red Bull in his fist.
“And at the same time, I imagined I was the kind of, ah, compulsive personality type who it wouldn’t occur to to build a little slack into the system. Something that would look convincingly like a human being was sitting at the keyboard, and not—forgive me, Roddy—a robot. Which is what I meant by not getting what makes people tick.” And now Catherine leaned back, and clasped her hands on her lap. “So. Was I wrong about any of that?”
“Yes,” he said.
“No, I mean actually wrong. Not just that you wish I wasn’t right.”
After a while, Ho said, “You dropped a fibre optic through the ceiling, didn’t you?”
“Roddy, I wouldn’t know one end of a fibre optic from the other.”
In the face of such colossal ignorance, Roderick Ho had nothing to say.
Standing, Catherine collected her coffee cup. “Well,” she concluded. “I’m glad we’ve had this little chat.”
“Are you going to tell Lamb?”
Or the Dogs, he thought. Who would definitely have something to say about a shop-floor spook playing games on the Service network.
“Of course not,” she said. “Lamb doesn’t have to know everything, remember?”
He nodded, dumbly.
“Though I will expect you to be a little more flexible in helping out with research in future. Not just mine, either.”
“But Lamb—”
“Mmm?”
“… Nothing.”
“That’s what I thought.” Catherine paused at the door. “Oh, and one more thing? You even think about using your online tricks to make my life difficult, and I’ll feed your beating heart to a hungry dog. Understood?”
“… Okay.”
“Have a good afternoon, Roddy.”
And she went.
Leaving Roderick Ho feeling pissed off, betrayed—and kind of awed.
One dark night the previous winter, Jackson Lamb had arranged a meeting with Diana Taverner by the canal up near the Angel; a meeting she’d agreed to because Lamb had her balls in his pocket. Lady Di aspired to the Park’s First Desk, currently occupied by Ingrid Tearney, and the methods she’d resorted to to promote her interests had produced a situation that had threatened to become untidy. Lamb’s involvement hadn’t made things any tidier; but in the world of spooks—as in those of politics, commerce and sport—the fact that everything had been bollocksed up beyond belief hadn’t resulted in anything changing: the desks at Regent’s Park remained arranged the way they had been, and Lady Di’s resentment at being barred from the top job hadn’t noticeably diminished. And Lamb still had dirt on her which could get her crucified twice over: once by the media, with ink and pixels, and a second time by Ingrid Tearney, with wood and nails.
This being so, Lady Di hadn’t offered much resistance when Lamb suggested a quiet natter, “at the usual place.” She was late, but this assertion of her dominance didn’t bother Lamb in the slightest, because he was even later. Approaching from the Angel end, he could see her on the bench, looking down the canal. A couple of houseboats were moored on the other side; one with a bicycle rack on its roof; the other shuttered, its door chained up. She was probably wondering if he’d rigged video surveillance from one or the other, because that’s what he’d have been thinking if he were her. But he was pretty certain she hadn’t rigged up anything herself, partly because he doubted she’d want their conversation on the record, but mostly because the window of time she’d had to arrange it, Lamb had been sitting on that same bench, and he’d have noticed.
Like any Joe, he had his favourite spots. Like any Joe, he mostly avoided them; made his visits irregular, aborting them if there were too many people around, or too few. But like any Joe he needed a space in which he could think, which meant somewhere no one expected him to be. This stretch of canal fit the bill. It was overlooked by the backs of tall houses, and there were usually cyclists around, or joggers; at lunchtimes, shop and office workers wandered down and ate sandwiches. Sometimes narrowboats toiled past, heading into the long tunnel under Islington, where no towpath followed. It was so obviously a place where a spook might sit and think spook thoughts that nobody who knew the first thing about spooks would imagine any spook stupid enough to use it.
So Lamb had called Lady Di from there, and issued his invitation and then he’d sat as the afternoon faded, looking like an office worker who’d just been made redundant, possibly for hygiene reasons. He’d chain-smoked seven cigarettes thinking through Shirley Dander’s report of her trip into the Cotswolds, and as he’d lit the eighth a shudder wracked him top to toe, and he coughed like the Russian had coughed. He had to throw the still king-size fag into the canal while he concentrated on holding his body together, and by the time the fit left him, he felt he’d run a mile. Clammy sweat wrapped him, and his eyes were blurry. Somebody really ought to do something about this, he thought, before leaving the bench, so Lady Di could arrive there first.
And now she ignored his approach, barely acknowledging him as he sat. Her hair was longer than last time he’d seen her, and curled more, though that might have been art. She wore a dark raincoat which matched her tights, and when she spoke at last she said: “If this bench marks my coat, I’m sending you the cleaning bill.”
“You can get coats cleaned?”
“Coats cleaned, teeth fixed, hair washed. I appreciate this is news to you.”
“I’ve been busy lately. It’s possible I’ve let myself go.”
“A bit.” She turned to face him. “What did you want with Nikolai Katinsky?”
“I’m not the only one’s been busy, then.”
“When you go harassing former customers, they have a habit of pulling the communication cord. And I can do without the complication right now.”
“On account of your domestic difficulties.”
“On account of mind your own fucking business. What did you want with him?”
“What did he tell you?”
Diana Taverner said, “Some story about his debriefing. That you wanted him to go over what he’d told the Dentists.”
Lamb grunted.
“What were you really after?”
Lamb said, “I wanted him to go over what he’d told the Dentists.”
“You couldn’t just watch the video?”
“Never the same, is it?” His coughing fit had entered that comfortable mental zone where it might have happened to somebody else, so he lit another cigarette. As an afterthought, he waved the packet vaguely in Taverner’s direction, but she shook her head. “And there was always the chance he’d remember it differently.”
“What are you up
to, Jackson?”
He was all innocence and airy gesture: Him? He didn’t even have to speak. Just wave his cigarette about a bit.
“Katinsky’s strictly from the shallow end,” Taverner said. “A cipher clerk, with no information we didn’t already have from other, better informed sources. We only hung onto him in case we needed swaps. Are you seriously telling me you’re developing an interest?”
“You’ve looked him up, then.”
“I get word you’ve been rousting nobodies from the Dark Ages, of course I looked him up. This is because he mentioned Alexander Popov, isn’t it? Jesus, Jackson, are you so bored you’re digging up myths? Whatever operation Moscow was thinking of running way back when, it’s as relevant now as a cassette tape. We won that war, and we’re too busy losing the next one to have a rematch. Go back to Slough House, and give thanks you’re not in the firing line any more.”
“Like you, you mean?”
“You think it’s easy, Second Desk? Okay, it might not be life behind the Wall. But try doing my job with both hands tied, and you’ll find out what stress feels like, I guarantee it.”
She stared at him, underlining how serious she was, but he held it easily enough, and wasn’t bothered about letting her see the smile itching onto his lips. Lamb had done both field and desk, and he knew which had you gasping awake at the slightest noise in the dark. But he’d yet to meet a suit who didn’t think themselves a samurai.
Taverner looked away. A pair of joggers panting down the opposite towpath broke apart for a woman pushing a pram. Only once the pair had jogged on, and the pram was approaching the incline up to the bridge, did she continue. “Tearney’s on the warpath,” she said.
