Dead Lions

by Mick Herron

  “Nothing. Thank you.” Then, as if in retrospective validation of Webb’s comment, Pashkin looked round as if he’d never been here before. “Magnificent,” he said. “Truly.”

  Webb glanced towards the rest of the party: Louisa Guy, Marcus Longridge, the two Russians. He gestured towards the kitchen. “If you want coffee or anything.”

  Nobody did.

  Downstairs, in the underground garage, Marcus and Louisa had frisked Kyril and Piotr for weapons, and allowed themselves to be patted down in return. Marcus had then examined Arkady Pashkin, after which he’d gestured at his case. “Do you mind?”

  “I’m afraid I do,” Pashkin had said smoothly. “There are documents in there—well, I don’t need to spell it out.”

  Marcus had glanced at Louisa.

  “Call Webb,” she’d said.

  Who’d told him, “Oh for Christ’s sake, he’s an honoured guest, not a security risk. Use your common sense.”

  So now Pashkin was laying his unchecked case on the table. He snapped at his men in their shared language. Piotr and Kyril peeled away from the group, and Marcus instinctively grabbed the nearest by the arm: this was Kyril, who spun back, fist raised, and just like that the pair were a heartbeat off knocking seven bells out of each other until a shout from Pashkin froze them: “Please!”

  Kyril dropped his fist. Marcus released Kyril’s arm.

  Piotr laughed. “You, you’re fast.”

  “Forgive me,” said Pashkin. “I simply asked them to check the cameras.”

  “They’re off,” said Webb. “Aren’t they?”

  Louisa looked at Pashkin. “They’re off. As I told you.”

  He gave her a formal nod. “Of course. But all the same …”

  Marcus raised an eyebrow, but Webb, seeing an opportunity to regain the initiative, said, “As you wish.”

  They watched as Piotr and Kyril dealt with the cameras above the door and in the corner, twisting wires free of their casing in a way that didn’t look temporary.

  Pashkin said, “You understand my position.”

  Webb looked like he was trying to, while wondering whether this destruction of security equipment was going to come bouncing back at him. Pashkin, meanwhile, opened his case and removed what looked like a microphone. When he placed it on the table, it hummed into life.

  Marcus Longridge said, “I thought everything had been made clear.” He was cradling one hand in the other, as if a blow had actually been landed. Nodding at the device, he said, “This isn’t being recorded.”

  “No,” Pashkin agreed. “And now we can all be certain of that.”

  The device pulsed gently; invisibly converting into white noise anything picked up by eavesdropping equipment.

  Kyril stood with his big hands clasped in front of him, studying Marcus with what might have been amusement.

  Louisa said, “Anything else in that case we should know about?”

  “Nothing to cause alarm,” Pashkin said. “But please.” He made a sudden expansive gesture, as if releasing a dove. “Let’s sit. Let’s start.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “Do you know,” he added, “maybe I will have that coffee after all.”

  River had the phone to his ear when the jeep reached them and a soldier jumped out: a young guy, fit-looking, wide across the shoulders.

  “Catherine?”

  “Would you put the phone down, sir?”

  “Is there a problem?” This was Griff Yates. “We’re out walking, got a bit lost, like.”

  “Call the Park. Possible Code September.”

  “Sir? The phone?”

  The soldier approached.

  “Today. This morning.”

  “The phone. Now.”

  When the soldier laid hands on him, a night’s worth of stress and fear found brief release. River knocked his arms aside, opening the guy up; he kicked his knee, then jabbed him in the throat with his phone-free hand as the soldier slipped off-balance.

  “Jesus, man!” Griff shouted, as the other soldier leaped from the jeep, drawing a sidearm.

  “River.” Catherine’s voice was very calm. “I need to hear the protocols.”

  “Phone down! Hands up! Now!” Screamed, not spoken; either this was the way they were taught, or Soldier Number Two was going off on one.

  “Manda—”

  The word was cut off by a gunshot.

  “So,” Ho said, “You got a car?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  He hadn’t been. He looked up Aldersgate for a taxi; looked down it too; and when he turned back to Shirley Dander, she was on the other side of the road, moving fast.

  Oh, shit.

  He waited another second, hoping this was a joke, but when she disappeared round the corner, he accepted the dismal truth: they were heading for the Needle on foot.

  Cursing Shirley Dander, cursing Catherine Standish, Roderick Ho began to run.

  Manda—

  Mandarin was the first of River Cartwright’s protocols, the others being dentist and tiger. But when Catherine had called back, her only reward was the Number Unavailable mantra.

  Code September. That part he had completed. Possible Code September. Today. This morning.

  Catherine was alone in Slough House. Lamb hadn’t turned up yet; Ho and Shirley Dander had just left at a lick.

  Code September … It wasn’t an official designation, but was frequently used; its reference point the obvious. Code September didn’t simply signify a terrorist event. It meant someone was planning on flying an aeroplane into a building.

  With the thought, new currents fizzed in her veins. Two courses of action were open. She could assume River had lost his mind. Or she could trigger a major response to an alert for which she had no concrete evidence.

  She called the Park.

  The rally was a long and winding worm now, the gap between its head and the waggly remnants of its tail wriggling through the heart of London. The front had crossed the viaduct at Holborn; some of the stragglers were still on Oxford Street. There seemed no hurry. The warmer it got, the truer this became.

  At Centre Point, where building-site barriers blocked Charing Cross Road, the noise of excavation drowned the chanting. As the rally squeezed past the narrowed junction, a small boy pulled his hand from his father’s and pointed at the sky. Squinting upwards, the man caught a flash of something; sunlight reflecting off a window of the distant Needle. He scooped the boy onto his shoulders, making him laugh, and they continued on their way.

  When Soldier Two fired, River dropped his phone. The shot went overhead, but it was anyone’s guess where he’d been aiming. Soldier One scrambled upright and threw a punch in River’s direction; sidestepping it, River slipped and fell to his knees. A heavy foot stamped on his phone. Griff Yates shouted in anger or innocence, and River reached for his Service card—

  Hands in the air!

  Drop it!

  Flat on the ground! Now!

  River flung himself onto the dirt.

  Empty your hands! Empty your hands!

  His hands were empty.

  Soldier Two, with terrifying casualness, swung the butt of his handgun into Griff Yates’s face, and Yates dropped to his knees, blood spinning all around.

  “I’m with British Intelligence,” River shouted. “MI5. There’s a national emergency about to—”

  “Shut it!” Soldier One screamed. “Shut it now!

  “—break and you’re not helping—”

  “Shut it!”

  River placed his hands on his head.

  Yates, half-sobbing, was still audible. “You cunt! What you bloody do that for, you bloody—”

  “Shut it!”

  “—cunt?”

  Before River could speak, Soldier Two swung at Griff Yates again.

  In Regent’s Park, one of any number of chic, sleek and drop-dead efficient women answered a phone, listened, placed the speaker on hold and buzzed the glass-walled office on the hub, where Diana Taverner was two hours into a
morning she wasn’t enjoying, because she wasn’t alone. Roger Barrowby, currently overseeing the daily outgoings and incomings of the Service’s operational nexus, was sharing her personal space as if bestowing a favour—lately he’d taken to turning up at the Park as early as Lady Di herself, his thinning sandy hair teased into an attitude that lent it body; his prominent chin pinkly shaved and dabbed with cologne; his middle-aged body parcelled into the subtlest of pin-stripes; all of this intended, apparently, to convey the impression that she and he were in the same boat; were shoring up the ruins. Taverner was starting to worry that it was a courtship ritual. Barrowby wasn’t bothered about the Service’s financial competence. He simply wanted to demonstrate that he was pulling the strings that made everyone jump, and making it obvious that hers were the strings he enjoyed tugging most. Perhaps because she tugged back.

  Today, he was studying, rather than occupying, the black leather and chrome visitors’ chair Taverner had inherited from her office’s previous incumbent. “Is this actually a Mies van der Rohe?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Because they’re awfully expensive. I’d hate to think that in these straitened times, the Service budget was being stretched to coddle posteriors.”

  Coddled posteriors was very Barrowby. He had moments so arch, he made Stephen Fry look level.

  “Roger, it’s a chain store knock off. The only reason it’s not in a skip is that in these ‘straitened times,’ the Service budget doesn’t ‘stretch’ to replacing it.”

  Her phone buzzed.

  “Now, would you mind?

  He settled himself on the object under discussion.

  Suppressing a sigh, she answered the phone. After a moment, she said: “Put her through.”

  The pavement pounded beneath Shirley Dander in time with the thudding of her heart—she’d have to slow down soon; run a bit, walk a bit, wasn’t that how you were supposed to do it?

  In the jogging books, maybe. Not in the Service manual.

  She risked a look. Ho was several hundred yards behind, running like a drunk with a sprain, in no state to observe her. So she stopped, nursed her ribs with her left hand, steadied herself against a wall with her right. She was in a small park: trees, bushes, a playground, grass. A clutch of mothers, their offspring strapped in buggies or loaded onto swings, were drinking coffee from a breakfast stall this side of the alley onto Whitecross Street. Shirley passed through it, and at the far end looked up. There it was, the tip of the Needle; visible even here, in this built-up canyon.

  Something was going on over there, and Shirley had no idea what, but at last she was involved.

  A gulp of air. Another spurt of speed. No sign of Ho, but that was okay. If you couldn’t get Windows to start, Ho was your man. The rest of the time, he took up space.

  Her head buzzing like her haircut, on she ran.

  At the entrance to the same park, Roderick Ho gripped the railings and prayed for something. He wasn’t sure what. Just something that would make his lungs forgive him. They felt like he’d been gargling fire.

  Behind him, a car rumbled to a halt. “You all right, mate?”

  He turned, and here was his miracle. A black cab. A great big beautiful black cab, open for business.

  Falling onto the back seat, he managed to gasp, “The Needle.”

  “Right you are.”

  Away he went.

  River blinked.

  Soldier Two swung at Griff Yates again, and in a moment so smooth it looked choreographed, Yates seized his arm, twisted his wrist, relieved him of his gun and put him on the ground. The blood masking Yates’s face painted him a demon. For a moment, River thought he was going to shoot, but instead he turned it on Soldier One. “Drop it!” he screamed. “Now.”

  The soldier was just a boy—they were both boys. The gun trembled in his hands. River plucked it free.

  Then said to Yates, “You too.”

  “This bastard smashed my face in!”

  “Griff? Give me the gun.”

  Griff gave him the gun.

  River said, “I’m with MI5.”

  This time they listened.

  The building had come to life over the past few hours, but on Molly Doran’s floor there was only the gurgling of plumbing, as hot water negotiated clumsy bends in monkey-puzzled piping. The sleek and glossy surfaces of Regent’s Park masked the elderly exoskeleton on which it had been hoisted, and like a spanking new estate erected on a burial ground, it sometimes felt the tremblings of unlaid ghosts.

  Or so Molly put it.

  “You’re on your own a lot, aren’t you?” said Lamb.

  They had worn out the possibilities of new discovery. Everything they knew about Nikolai Katinsky, about Alexander Popov, could fit on a sheet of paper. A set of interconnecting lies, thought Lamb, like one of those visual puzzles; the outline of a vase, or two people talking. The truth lay in the line itself: it was neither. It was pencil marks on a page, designed to fool.

  “What now?” Molly asked.

  “I need to think,” he said. “I’m going home.”

  “Home?”

  “I mean Slough House.”

  She raised an eyebrow. Cracks had appeared in her make-up. “If it’s quiet you want, I can find you a corner.”

  “Not a corner I’m after. It’s a fresh pair of ears,” Lamb said distractedly.

  “As you wish.” She smiled, but it was a bitter thing. “Someone special waiting over there?”

  Lamb stood. The stool creaked its thanks. He looked down at Molly: her overpainted face, her round body; the absences below her knees. “So,” he said. “You been all right then?”

  “What, these past fifteen years?”

  “Yeah.” He tapped a foot against her nearest wheel. “Since ending up in that gizmo.”

  “This gizmo,” she said, “has outlasted most other relationships I’ve had.”

  “It’s got a vibrate setting?”

  She laughed. “God, Jackson. Use that line upstairs, they’ll prosecute.” And she put her head to one side. “I don’t blame you, you know.”

  “Good,” he said.

  “For my legs.”

  “I don’t blame me either.”

  “But you stayed away.”

  “Yeah, well. New set of wheels, I figured you’d want some private time.”

  She said, “Go away now, Jackson. And do me one favour?”

  He waited.

  “Only come back when you need something. Even if it’s another fifteen years.”

  “You take care, Molly.”

  In the lift, he tucked cigarette in mouth in readiness for the great outdoors. He was already counting the moments.

  River said to Griff, “Why’d you come looking for me?”

  They sat in the back of the jeep; the soldiers up front. He’d returned both their guns. This was borderline risky—there was a chance the kids would shoot them and bury them somewhere quiet—but once they’d clocked his Service card, they’d slipped into cooperative mode. One was on his radio now. The hangar would soon be crawling with military.

  Yates’s face was grim. His handkerchief was a butcher’s mess, but he’d only succeeded in smearing blood across his features. “I said, man, I’m sorry I—”

  “Not what I’m asking. Why, specifically, did you come looking for me?”

  Yates said, “Tommy Moult …”

  “What about him?”

  “I saw him up the village. He asked if you’d got back all right. Made me worried you’d been, you know. Hurt.”

  Blown up, he meant.

  “Shit,” River said. “It was his idea, wasn’t it? Leading me onto the range? And leaving me there?”

  “Jonny—”

  “Wasn’t it?”

  “He might have suggested it.”

  The jeep had no doors. It wouldn’t have been a second’s work to tip the bastard out.

  “Tommy Moult, man,” Yates said. “He knows everything happens in Upshott. You think he
just sells apples from his bike, but he knows everyone. Everything.”

  River had worked that out already. He said, “He made sure I was there. And saw what I saw. Made sure I’d be freed in time to do something about it.”

  “What you on about?”

  “Where was he? This morning?”

  “Church end.” Yates rubbed his cheek. “You really a secret agent?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that why Kelly—”

  “No,” said River. “She did that because she wanted to. Deal with it.”

  The jeep cornered, braked sharply, and they were at the flying club, with its toytown airstrip, and empty hangar.

  River hit the ground running.

  Roger Barrowby had gone white, which gladdened Diana Taverner’s heart. Her morning was new-made. Ingrid Tearney was out of the country; as Chair of Limitations, Barrowby could claim First Desk, but it looked like the only snap decision he’d be making was which direction to throw up in. The arch comments were history. He should have stayed in bed.

  She said, “Roger, you’ve got four seconds.”

  “The Home Secretary—”

  “Has final say, but she’ll base that on our best info. Which you now have. Three seconds.”

  “An agent in the field? That’s all it comes down to?”

  “Yes, Roger. Like in wartime.”

  “Jesus, Diana, if we make the wrong call—”

  “Two seconds.”

  “—what’s left of our careers will be spent sorting the post.”

  “That’s what keeps life interesting on the hub, Roger. One second.”

  He threw his hands up. Taverner had never seen this cliché happen before. “I don’t know, Diana—you’ve got half a message on a mobile from a slow horse out in the sticks. He didn’t even cite his protocols.”

  “Roger—you do know what Code September means?”

  “I know it’s not an official designation,” he said peevishly.

  “I’ve run out of numbers. Whether this is real or not, keep it from the Home Sec any longer, and you’re in serious dereliction of duty.”