by Mick Herron
“I don’t think anyone’s surprised what quick studies you turned out to be.”
“Is that a clever remark? This is not my first language.” Without turning his head, he spoke to Piotr and Kyril in that one. Kyril replied: Louisa couldn’t read the intonation. Possibly deferential. But it was like being in New York, where someone could ask you the time in a way that suggested you’d just punched their mother.
Their car had a separate driver’s compartment, though the dividing window was rolled down. Louisa and Marcus sat facing Pashkin, who was facing front. Immediately behind them, a red bus loomed. It was full of less rich people moving through London very slowly, and probably no less aggrieved by it than Pashkin, who shook his head in irritation, and began to study the Financial Times.
The car shunted forward and rolled over something bumpy, which probably wasn’t a cyclist.
Louisa blinked as pain stabbed her eyeballs, but it soon went. If you carried on looking like you were holding it all together, pretty soon you were holding it all together.
Pashkin tutted, and turned a page.
He looked like a politician, spoke like one too; he had charisma, probably. Maybe Marcus was right, and he also had frontline ambitions, and this mini-summit had less to do with oil deals than under-the-table promises about future conduct, future favours. That could only be a good thing, unless it turned out a bad one. Political alliances often turned unhappy: some hands got shook, some arms got sold, but it never looked great for HMG when the torturing bastards were strung up by their own people.
Beside her, Marcus shifted, and his leg brushed hers. And now a bicycle whizzed past, and this time instead of a pain in her eyes Louisa felt her heart lurch, and the tired old logic unreeled again in her mind: that Min had got drunk after a row was possible, even after a row so trivial Louisa couldn’t remember what it had been about. And that Min had been knocked off his bicycle and killed—yes, that could happen too. But not one after the other. Not those two things in a row. To believe that would mean accepting some kind of cosmic continuity, an organised randomness of event. So no, there’d been something deeper at work, some human agency. And that could only mean this job she was working on now, and these people in this car. Or others, who knew about the summit, and wanted to stop it happening, or turn it into something else.
She started drawing up a mental list of everyone she didn’t trust, and had to stop immediately. She didn’t have all day.
And then, with the suddenness of a tooth freeing itself from its socket, the car was through the snarl-up and moving smoothly. Above them glass and steel buildings did their best to pierce the sky, and on the pavements sharply dressed men and women threaded between each other, hardly ever bumping. Min Harper had been dead three weeks. And here was Louisa, doing her job.
By the time Lamb’s taxi reached the laundrette, near Swiss Cottage, it would have been cheaper to bin the shirt and buy several new ones. While it swam away in the never-ceasing stream of traffic, Lamb lit a cigarette and perused posters in the laundrette’s window: a local quiz night, stand-up gigs, tomorrow’s Stop the City rally, an animal-free circus. Nobody paid him attention. When his cigarette was done he ground it out and entered.
Machines lined both walls, most of them sloshing rhythmically, making sounds Lamb’s stomach made when he woke at three, having drunk too much. A familiar noise. Dividing the room was a series of benches on which four people sat: a young couple wrapped round each other like an interlocking puzzle; an old woman rocking back and forth; and, up the far end, a short dark middle-aged man in a raincoat, engrossed in the Evening Standard.
Lamb sat next to him. “Any idea how these things work?”
The man didn’t look up. “Do I have any idea how washing machines work?”
“I assume they take money.”
“And washing powder,” the man said. Now he did look up. “Jesus, Lamb. You never been in a laundrette before? Short of tearing a postcard in half, I thought this couldn’t have got more old school.”
Lamb dropped the bag to the floor. “I was your other kind of undercover,” he said. “Casinos, five-star hotels. World-class hookers. Laundry was mostly room service.”
“Yeah, and I jet-packed to work, before they fired me.”
Lamb extended his hand, and Sam Chapman shook it.
Bad Sam Chapman had been Head Dog once, Nick Duffy’s role now, until a high-profile mess involving an industrial amount of money meant he’d had his arse handed back on a plate: no job, no pension, no reference, unless you counted “Lucky to be leaving upright.” He now worked for a detective agency which specialised in finding runaway teenagers, or at least in taking credit card details from the agonised parents of runaway teenagers. Since Chapman’s arrival their success rate had tripled, but that still left a lot of missing kids.
“So how’s life in the secrets business?” he asked.
“Well, I could answer that …”
“But then you’d have to kill me,” Chapman finished.
“But it’d bore your tits off. Got anything?”
Bad Sam passed him an envelope. By its thickness, it contained maybe two folded sheets of paper.
“This took you three weeks?”
“Not like I have your resources, Jackson.”
“The agency not got pull?”
“The agency charges. Any special reason you couldn’t do this in-house?”
“Yeah, I don’t trust the bastards.” He paused. “Well, maybe a couple of the bastards. But not to actually do a proper job.”
“Oh, that’s right. Your crew’s special needs.” With his index finger, Chapman flicked the envelope in Lamb’s hand. “Someone was ahead of me on this.”
“I’d hope so. The cow killed a spook.”
“But not all the way,” Sam continued.
Down the bench one of the youngsters abruptly stood, and Sam paused. It was the boy, or possibly the girl—or possibly they were both boys, or both girls—but whatever, they fed the nearest drier with a clatter of coins so it came grunting back to life, then sat and wrapped themselves round their other half again.
Lamb waited.
Chapman said, “Someone ran the numbers on her, and I expect they gave her a clean bill of health.”
“Because she’s clean?”
“Because they did a half-arsed job. She looks clean now, but go far enough back and it’s a whole other story.”
“Which you did.”
“But my successor didn’t. Or whichever minion he assigned.” Chapman slapped the newspaper on the bench without warning. The thwock stopped the old woman rocking for a moment, though the kids didn’t react. “Christ,” he said. “Me, they sack just to balance the books. If I’d been incompetent, I’d still have a job.”
“Yeah, but it’d probably be round my gaff.” Lamb tucked the envelope into a pocket. “Owe you one.”
“There’s another possibility,” Bad Sam said. “Maybe they didn’t do a proper job on her because they already knew what they’d find.”
Jackson Lamb said, “Like I say, I don’t trust the bastards.” He rose. “Don’t be a stranger.”
“You’ve forgotten your shirt,” Sam called.
Lamb looked at the canoodling couple as he passed. “I’ll never forget that shirt,” he told them kindly.
On the whirling metal circus of the road, it took him five minutes to find a taxi.
Ambling down the road to The Downside Man, River pondered the task in hand. A contact—Mr. B had come to Upshott to make contact: with his handler or his joe. And who that might be, River still had no idea.
It hadn’t taken long to embed himself into the village. He’d been half-expecting a Wicker Man scenario, with locals in sinister masks, but turning up at the pub every night and attending evensong at St Johnno’s was all he’d had to do. Everyone was friendly, and nobody had tried to set fire to him yet.
His cover as a writer helped. On the outside, Upshott had less going for it than other Cotsw
old villages; it wasn’t as picturesque; it had no galleries, no cafés, no bookshop; nowhere the culturally-minded could gather to discuss their artistic leanings. But it remained as much a middle-class haven as its neighbours: a poster for a recent county-wide Arts Week indicated four local venues, and one of the fake barns along the main road housed a pottery, whose prices were comfortably ridiculous. An author fitted in hand in glove.
As for the locals he’d met, they were largely retired, or tele-workers, their livelihood independent of the village itself. Those who’d been employed at the USAF base had moved on long ago, but there remained a smattering of agricultural workers, and a handful who ran trades from vans or garages—carpenter, electrician; two plumbers—but even among the artisans, there was an air of quality craftsmanship, and bills to match.
And few of them were Upshott born-and-bred. The twentysomethings in evidence were the offspring of incomers, Kelly among them; her father, a solicitor, practised nearby. Kelly had a politics degree, and her job in the pub wasn’t a life-choice; more a treading of water while she decided what to do next. It appeared that a politics degree was about as useful as it sounded. But she seemed happy enough: was the centre of a group of friends who worked as estate agents or graphic designers or architects as far afield as Worcester, but returned to Upshott each evening and colonised the pub, when they weren’t in their clubhouse by the MoD range, piloting and taking care of Ray Hadley’s little aeroplane. Which, River thought, was the real umbilical cord: if they wanted the freedom of the skies, they had to keep returning to the village. River, not much older, reckoned they were still young enough to find that a price worth paying.
On the other hand, it didn’t explain what had attracted Mr. B. Maybe Lamb was right, and the old American base was at the heart of it. That was what had put Upshott on the map, even if the base itself hadn’t appeared on maps at the time. It was why he’d placed it at the heart of his cover; the setting for his supposed novel. And now it was gone, and in its place was the Ministry of Defence artillery range, which rendered even more unlikely the chances of anything secreted there having survived fifteen years … But still, it needed looking at, if only because River was running out of ideas. And he needed to see it the way Mr. B had, if that’s what Mr. B had done: after dark and over the fence. Which was what he planned to do later.
And because he was a stranger here, and had no desire to end up in a ditch or under arrest, he wasn’t going alone.
Like Marcus had said, the Needle was called the Needle on account of its mast, but everything about it looked sharp. All 320 metres of it burst into daylight out of a shallow crater, which was paved in red brick, laid in tiers and studded with huge bronze pots, each boasting a tree as yet too spindly to cast shade, though the size of the pots suggested they’d grow tall and leafy. Stone benches were set here and there, around which small graveyards of cigarette stubs had been flattened, and spotlights were trained at intervals on the Needle’s sides. At night, it was lit like a carnival. In daylight, from this angle, it looked dark, vaguely monstrous, and out of place—like it was asking for trouble.
Of its eighty storeys, the first thirty-two belonged to a hotel which hadn’t opened yet, or Pashkin would doubtless have booked a suite there. The rest were privately leased, and not yet fully occupied. But security was tight, and had lately risen several notches with the arrival of Rumble, the out-of-nowhere Apple-rivals who were preparing to launch a new version of their world-conquering e-reader; plus the diamond merchants de Koenig, and BiffordJenningsWhale, the Chinese-owned market traders. Here, along with all the other banks, insurers, inter-dealer brokers and risk-management consultants, were the wealthy embassies of offshore havens, drawn by the bright lights and big views. Quite the little United Nations, though without the avowed intent of doing any good except unto themselves.
On her first visit, Min in tow, Louisa had taken the stairs to the next landing down, but had been unable to access the floor. The stairwell doors were one-way, unlocking only in the event of fire or other emergency, while the business lifts—separate from the hotel’s—were restricted access. Cameras monitored every lobby. As for the suite Spider Webb had finagled, she didn’t know who owned that. A deliberate omission from the paperwork. Whoever it was, they were evidently open to persuasion, but then, Webb was a collector of other people’s secrets. Min had found him laughable, but Spider Webb was the kind of joke you laughed at then looked behind you, in case he’d heard.
She shook her head abruptly. Don’t think about this. Don’t think about Min. Do the job. Collect secrets of your own.
“A problem?”
“No. Nothing.”
Arkady Pashkin nodded.
And keep your thoughts inside your head, she added. She didn’t like the way Pashkin looked at her, as if reading a script from her features.
They were in the lift, heading swiftly skyward. Their names had been recorded on entry, security protocols demanding a register be kept of who was in the building at all times. For the meeting with Webb, they’d be sidestepping this: Webb had supplied a keycard for the service lift which could be accessed from the underground car park. They planned to be above the City but under the radar. No one would know they were there.
Today, though, they’d been shepherded through the atrium, where a small rainforest now flourished. This, the eco-flash of the new hotel, had taken root in the last three weeks. Guests would be able to take walks in the undergrowth when they tired of the big city, and emerge for a drink and a sauna when they tired of nature. All around the greenery, ever-diminishing people pursued a variety of tasks integral to the grand opening of a world-class hotel, which was still a month off.
“In China,” Pashkin remarked, “buildings this size, even with all these fancy, these fancy …”
Losing his way, he snapped a word at Piotr, who replied, “Trappings.”
“All these fancy trappings, they go up inside a month.”
Marcus said, “I gather they’re not overburdened with health and safety.”
In the suite, Pashkin strode round the table as if measuring it. He spoke several times in Russian: short blunt sentences Louisa guessed were questions, because to each Piotr or Kyril made an even shorter response. Meanwhile, Marcus stationed himself by the door, arms folded. He’d been ops, she reminded herself; would have worked on bigger jobs than this before losing his nerve, if that’s what had happened. For now, he seemed unfazed by the views, and was mostly watching Piotr and Kyril.
Pashkin stood with thumbs hooked into his jacket pockets, lips pursed. He might have been a prospective tenant, looking for an angle to hang a price reduction on. Nodding at the cameras affixed above the doors, he said, “I assume they are off.”
“Yes.”
“And there are no recording devices of any sort here.”
“None.”
As if following a mental checklist, he then said, “What happens in an emergency?”
“There are stairwells,” Louisa said. “North and south walls.”
She pointed, to be clear. “The lifts freeze, and won’t take passengers. The wells are reinforced, and all the doors are fireproof, obviously. They unlock automatically.”
He nodded. What kind of emergency was he expecting, she wondered? But then, the whole point about emergencies was you didn’t expect them.
It was difficult, once you’d embarked on such a chain of thought, not to become entangled in its linked banalities.
Pashkin said, “That’s a lot of stairs.”
“It could be worse,” she said. “You could be coming up them.”
He laughed at that; a deep laugh from the heart of his burly frame. “That’s a good point. What kind of emergency might that be, that would have you running up seventy-seven flights of stairs?”
Whatever kind it was, she thought, if it wasn’t serious to start with, it certainly would be before you reached the top.
The pair of them, and the other two Russians, crossed to the window.
Last time she’d been here, she’d been overwhelmed by the space on offer; all that sky overlooking all that city. It was beautiful, but stank of wealth, which was what had been weighing on her that day: her need for money, her need for a better place for herself and Min; a bigger slice of all that space. And Min had been there, of course, in touching distance. They didn’t have much money, and didn’t have enough space, but they’d had a hell of a lot more than she had now.
An air-ambulance swam into view, carving up the distance between east and west. She watched its silent progress; an orange dragonfly, oblivious to its own ridiculous shape.
“Maybe,” Pashkin said, “we should try going down the stairs, yes? To see how well we’d cope with an emergency.”
She turned. Marcus had moved to the table, was leaning over it, his palms resting on its surface. She had the sense of interrupted movement, but his expression was unreadable.
“I’ve a better idea,” she said. “Let’s use the lift.”
In the back of the cab Jackson Lamb opened the envelope Chapman had given him to find just two sheets of paper. He read them, then spent the rest of the journey so distracted he almost forgot to demand a receipt.
When he reached his office Standish was there, her cheeks tinted, as if she were the one who’d just climbed four flights of stairs. “Mr. B has a name,” she said.
“Oh god. You’ve been investigating.”
He shrugged off his coat and threw it. She caught it and folded it over one arm. “Andrei Chernitsky.” The words rolled off her tongue darkly. “He used a passport in that name when he flew out. It’s on the Park’s books.”
“Don’t tell me. Second-rate hood.” Running a hand through greasy thinning hair, Lamb parked himself behind his desk. “Not ranking KGB, but showed up in a supporting role when heavy lifting was needed.”
“You already knew?”
“I know the type. When did he leave?”
“The morning after he killed Dickie Bow.”
