Dead Lions

by Mick Herron

  Lamb switched off the anglepoise and left, locking the door behind him.

  London slept, but fitfully, its every other eye wide open. The ribbon of light atop the Telecom Tower unfurled again and again, traffic lights blinked through unvarying sequence, and electronic posters affixed to bus stops rotated and paused, rotated and paused, drawing an absent public’s attention to unbeatable mortgage deals. There were fewer cars, playing louder music, and the bass pulse that trailed in their wake pounded the road long after they’d gone. From the zoo leaked muffled shrieks and strangled growls. And on a pavement obscured by trees, leaning on a railing, a man smoked a cigarette, the light at its tip glowing brighter then dying, brighter then dying, as if he too were part of the city’s heartbeat, performing the same small actions over and over, all through the watches of the night.

  Unseen eyes observed him. This stretch of pavement was never unregarded. What was curious was that he’d been allowed to stand there so long without interference. A half hour crawled by before a car turned up at last and purred to a halt. Its driver spoke through its rolled-down window. His tone was weary, though this might have had less to do with the time of night than with the man he was forced to address.

  “Jackson Lamb,” he said.

  Lamb tossed his cigarette over the railings. “Took your time,” he replied.

  When River came round he was staring at the sky, and the ground was rolling beneath him. He was on a trolley. Doubtless the one he’d seen in the hangar. Was bound to it, in fact; with the same clothesline—was strapped like Gulliver: wrists, ankles, across the chest, across the throat. In his mouth a wadded-up handkerchief, secured in place by tape.

  Pushing the trolley was Tommy Moult.

  “Taser,” he said. “If you’re interested.”

  River arched his back and flexed his wrists, but the line held firm. The only give came from his flesh.

  “Or you could lie still,” Moult suggested. “Want to be Tasered again? I’m out of cartridges, but I can give you a contact blast. It’ll hurt.”

  River lay still.

  “Up to you.”

  The one name not on Catherine’s list was Tommy Moult. It hadn’t occurred to him to wonder why Moult was here on a Tuesday night, when he was usually only seen at weekends.

  A wheel hit a rock, and if River hadn’t been tied in place he’d have been thrown clear. The clothesline bit into his throat and he made an indecipherable noise: pain, fury, frustration, all muffled by the gag in his mouth.

  “Whoops.” Moult stopped pushing and wiped his hands on his trousers. He said something else, but the wind dragged it away.

  River twisted his head to ease the pressure on his throat. He was less than a foot from the ground. All he could see was black grass.

  And he thought again of what he’d found in the hangar, packed onto the trolley he was tied to now. Which meant it wasn’t on the trolley any more.

  He assumed it was on the aeroplane instead.

  They sat in the car. Nick Duffy’s cheek wore a crease-mark stamped by a pillow. “So what did you think was going to happen?” he asked. “It’s gone two in the morning, and you’re outside the Park’s front door, smoking like a mad man and doing sod all. You’re lucky they didn’t unleash the Achievers.”

  The Achievers were the guys in black, who turned up slightly before things turned violent.

  “I do have clearance,” Lamb pointed out.

  “Only on the understanding you never attempt to use it,” Duffy said. “So I’m dragged out of bed because the duty staff are worried you’re about to storm the place. They all remember last year’s bomb scare.”

  Lamb nodded complacently. “Good to know I’m not forgotten.”

  “Oh, your memory lingers on. Like herpes.” Duffy nodded towards the nearby building. “No way are you getting inside, so whatever you were after, put it in a memo. Lady Di’ll be thrilled. And now, as I’m one of the good guys, I’ll give you a lift to the nearest taxi rank. But only if it’s on my way home.”

  Lamb clapped his hands, once, twice, three times. Then again, and then some more. He kept this up until any humour in it was long since gasping for breath, and only then said, “Oh, sorry. You were finished?”

  “Fuck off, Jackson.”

  “Maybe later. After you’ve taken me into the Park.”

  “Were you listening?”

  “Every word. See, we could do this your way, but then I’d have to walk back from the taxi rank and do things less subtly. Which means making a fuss, and, oh yeah, fucking up your career.” He produced his cigarette packet, examined its empty recess, then tossed it onto the back seat. “Up to you, Nick. I haven’t fucked up anyone’s career in months. It’s fun, but the paperwork’s shocking.”

  Duffy was facing the road, as if the car were moving, and the way ahead had grown complicated.

  “If you didn’t already know you’d screwed up, we’d be on the move.” Lamb reached across and patted Duffy’s hand, which had grown whiter since his grip on the steering wheel had tightened. “We all make mistakes, son. Your latest was signing off on Rebecca Mitchell without doing the full-court press.”

  “She was clean.”

  “Yeah, you established she was a virgin. Which maybe she is, but she didn’t use to be. Not back when she was playing spin-the-bottle with a pair of likely lads from, where was it? Oh yeah, Russia. And she just happens to mow down Min Harper, who’s babysitting some visiting goon from, oooh, where was it again? You really want me to fill in the gaps?”

  “Taverner was happy with the report.”

  “And I’m sure she’ll continue to be. Until somebody holds it to the light and points out the cracks.”

  “Don’t you get it, Lamb? She was happy. With. It.” He tapped the words out on the steering wheel. “Told me to wrap it in ribbons and file it away. So it’s not me you’re screwing with, it’s her. Good luck with that.”

  “Grow up, Nick. Whatever order she gave, you’re the one carried it out. So if anyone gets thrown to the wolves, guess who it’ll be?”

  For a moment they sat in silence, Duffy still tapping out unspoken words on the wheel. Then the tapping grew disjointed, faltered, stopped, as if the words were trailing away even in his mind. “Christ,” he said at last. “My mistake was answering the phone after midnight.”

  “No,” Lamb said. “Your mistake was forgetting Min Harper was one of mine.”

  They got out of the car, and headed for the Park.

  Long before the journey was over every nerve in River’s body was screaming for release. He felt like a tambourine, rattled to someone else’s rhythm.

  Moult, too, looked like he’d been fed through a wringer. Every five minutes he had to pause and rest. Earlier, approaching the clubhouse, they’d had to drop from sight when a patrol passed. That didn’t happen now. Moult knew the patrols’ routine, that was clear. Whoever he was, he knew what he was doing.

  As to where they were going, he was keeping that to himself.

  Pausing, he scratched his scalp through his hat and everything shifted, as if his head had slipped off its axis. He caught River watching, and grinned an evil grin.

  “Nearly there.”

  “Records.”

  Duffy had grown paler now they were inside; wore a tight expression suggesting he might soon spring a leak and deflate into an empty, angry bag. “Records,” he repeated.

  “That’s still downstairs, right?”

  Duffy jabbed the lift button as if it were Lamb’s throat. “I thought your boy Ho was working on an archive.”

  “Yeah, well, he might not have done as much as he likes to pretend.”

  Some floors down—but some floors above the lowest—they stepped into a blue-lit corridor. A door hung open at its far end, and the light streaming through it was warmer, library-like. Some of it was blocked by a squat, suspicious shape: a woman in a wheelchair; quite round, with a messy cap of grey hair, and a face powdered to clownish white. As they approached, her
expression changed from suspicion to pleasure, and by the time the two men reached her, she had opened her arms.

  Lamb bent down for her hug, while Nick Duffy looked on as if witnessing an alien landing.

  “Molly Doran,” Lamb said, when the woman released him. “And not looking a day older.”

  “One of us has to keep in shape,” she said. “You’ve gotten fatter, Jackson. And that coat makes you look like a vagrant.”

  “It’s a new coat.”

  “New when?”

  “Since I last saw you.”

  “That’s fifteen years.” She released him and looked at Duffy. “Nicholas,” she said pleasantly. “Fuck off. I won’t have the Dogs on my floor.”

  “We go wherever we—”

  “Ah-ah.” She waggled a short fat finger. “I won’t. Have. The Dogs. On. My. Floor.”

  “He’s just going, Molly,” Lamb assured her. He turned to Duffy. “I’ll be here.”

  “It’s the middle of the—”

  “Waiting.”

  Duffy stared, then shook his head. “He used to warn me about you. Sam Chapman did.”

  “He had a few things to say about you too,” Lamb said. “Once he’d run the numbers on Rebecca Mitchell. Here.” He produced the pill bottle he’d taken from Katinsky’s office. “Get this checked out while you’re at it.”

  Whatever Duffy had to say in reply was lost as the lift doors closed.

  Lamb turned to Molly Doran. “How come they’ve got you on the nightshift?”

  “So I don’t frighten the youngsters. They take one look at me, see their future, and piss off to the City instead.”

  “Yeah, I thought it would be something like that.”

  Her wheelchair, which was cherry-red with thick velvet armrests, had the turning-circle of a doughnut. She spun it on the spot and led Lamb into a long room lined with upright cabinets which were set on tracks like tramlines, so they could be pushed together when not in use: one huge accordion structure, each row containing file after file of dusty information, some of it so ancient that the last to consult it had long since faded to dust himself. Here were Regent’s Park’s older secrets. Which could all be stored on the head of a pin, of course, if the budget were there to squeeze it into shape.

  Upstairs, the queens of the database ruled their digital universe. Down here, Molly Doran was the keeper of overlooked history.

  In a cubbyhole was Molly’s desk. A three-legged stool sat to one side, but the space in front was left free for Molly’s wheelchair. “So. This is where you’ve ended up.”

  “As if you didn’t know.”

  “Social calls. Never really been a people person.”

  “I don’t think either of us were cut from that cloth, Jackson.”

  She wheeled herself into her customary place. “It’s okay. It’ll take your weight.”

  He lowered himself onto the stool, glaring at her upholstered chariot. “All right for some.”

  She laughed a surprisingly bell-like laugh. “You haven’t changed, Jackson.”

  “Never seen the need to.”

  “All those years undercover, pretending to be someone you’re not. I think they drained you of pretence.” She shook her head, as if remembering something. “Fifteen years, and here you are. What do you need?”

  “Nikolai Katinsky.”

  “Minnow,” Molly said.

  “Yes.”

  “Cipher clerk. One of a shoal of the damn things, we couldn’t give them away in the nineties.”

  “He came with a piece from a jigsaw,” Lamb said. “But it didn’t fit anywhere.”

  “Not a side piece. Not a corner. Just a bit of the sky,” Molly’s face had altered now they’d reached the meat. Her grossly over-painted cheeks shone pinker, their natural colour showing through. “He claimed to have heard of the cicadas, that phantom network that other phantom set up.”

  “Alexander Popov.”

  “Alexander Popov. But it was all just one of those games Moscow Centre liked to play, before the board was tipped over.”

  Lamb nodded. It was warm down here, and he was starting to feel clammy. “So what paper do we have on him?”

  “It’s not on the Beast?”

  The Beast was Molly Doran’s collective name for the Service’s assorted databases: she refused to differentiate between them on the grounds that when they crashed—which they were bound to, sooner or later—there’d be no telling them apart anyway. Just one dark screen after another. And she’d be the one holding the candle.

  “Bare details,” Lamb said. “And the tapes of his debriefing. You know what it’s like, Molly. The young guns think a twenty-minute video’s worth a thousand words. But we know better, don’t we?”

  “Are you trying to sweet-talk me, Jackson Lamb?”

  “If that’s what it takes.”

  She laughed again, and the sound went fluttering into the stacks like a butterfly. “I used to wonder about you, you know. Whether you’d go over to the enemy.”

  Lamb looked affronted. “CIA?”

  “I meant the private sector.”

  “Huh.” He glanced down briefly, taking in his stained, untucked-in shirt, scuffed shoes and undone fly, and seemed to enjoy a moment’s self-awareness. “Can’t see me being welcomed with open arms.” Not that he bothered zipping up.

  “Yes. Now I see you, there was nothing to worry about, was there?” Molly pulled away from the table. “I’ll see what we’ve got. Make yourself useful, and put the kettle on.”

  As she rolled off, her voice floated back: “And you dare light up, and I’ll feed you to the birds.”

  And here they were again.

  Had River slept? Was that possible? He must have drifted off on some naturally produced anaesthetic; his body refusing to submit to more punishment. Through his mind, various nightmare pictures had flitted. Among them, a retrieved image; the page from Kelly Tropper’s sketchbook showing a stylised city landscape, its tallest building struck by jagged lightning.

  And now they were here again, and every bone in his body groaned. Unless that was the noise the tree made as the wind shook its branches, scraping them against the ruined walls of the battered house.

  “Home sweet home,” said Tommy Moult.

  Lamb sucked a biro he’d found, and leafed through Katinsky’s file. This didn’t take long. “Not a hell of a lot,” he said.

  “If it hadn’t been for his mentioning the cicadas,” Molly said, “he’d have been thrown back. As it was, he got the low-grade treatment. Background established he was who he said he was, then got onto frying bigger fish.”

  “Born in Minsk. Worked in transport administration there before being recruited by a KGB talent spotter, subsequently spent twenty-two years at Moscow Centre.”

  “His existence was first noted in December ’74, when we got hold of a staff rota.”

  “And we never made a pass,” Lamb said.

  “The file would be thicker if we had.”

  “Odd. You’d think we’d at least have taken a look.”

  Placing the file on Molly’s desk, he stared into the darkness of the stacks. The pen in his mouth rose slowly, slumped, and rose again. Lamb seemed unaware of this; unaware of anything, as his hand slipped inside his still open fly and he began to scratch.

  Molly Doran sipped her tea.

  “Okay,” Lamb said at last. It was quiet in Records, but grew quieter still now, as Molly held her breath. “What if he’s not a minnow? What if he’s a big fish pretending to be a minnow? How would that have worked, Molly?”

  “A strange thing to do. Why would anyone hide their light? Run the risk of being chucked back with the rubbish?”

  “Strange,” Lamb agreed. “But could he have done it?”

  “Faked a cipher clerk? Yes. He could have done it. If he was a big fish, he could have done it.”

  They shared a look.

  “You think he was one of the missing, don’t you?” Molly said. “One of those we lost sight of when
the USSR collapsed.”

  Of whom there’d been more than a few. Some had probably found their way into shallow graves; others, they suspected, had reinvented themselves and flourished even now in different guises.

  “He might have been. He might have been one of those Kremlin brains who gave us so much trouble. Who wanted out when the war was lost, but not to spend the rest of his life being poked at by the winners.”

  Molly said, “It would have meant placing that name on the rota years in advance. He couldn’t have been sure we’d even see it.” And then checked herself. “Oh—”

  “Yeah,” Lamb agreed. “Oh. Any idea how it came our way?”

  “I could run it down,” Molly said doubtfully. “Possibly.”

  He shook his head. “Not a top priority. Not right now.”

  “My point stands though. He’d have had to do it years before he could know he needed it. December seventy-four? Nobody saw the end coming. Not that far in advance.”

  “You didn’t have to see it coming,” Lamb said. “You just had to know it might.” He looked at the biro in his hand, as if wondering how it got there. “There’s nothing a joe likes more than knowing he’s got his exits covered.”

  “There’s something else, isn’t there? You’ve got the look.”

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “There’s more.”

  Tommy Moult’s breathing had slowed to normal. He’d wheeled the trolley over the rubble that had once been the house’s floor, a bone-wrecking distance for River, who was starting to feel his teeth loosen. He continued to tremble even now they’d come to a halt. Where his bonds cut into him he burned, and his ears throbbed in time to pounding blood. What was holding him together was rage; rage at himself for being so stupid twice in one night. And because he’d had a glimmer of what Moult was planning, and couldn’t believe it, but couldn’t disbelieve it either.

  The tape was ripped from his mouth. The handkerchief was pulled free. Suddenly River was gulping mouthfuls of night air, making up for the night’s thin rations, breathing so deeply he almost gagged. Moult said, “You needed that.”