by Mick Herron
Louisa shut the door on the driver’s side. “I think we were followed.”
“Yeah?”
“It was keeping back, three cars behind. And disappeared for a stretch. But it was there.”
River nodded, though he wasn’t convinced. That kind of tail sounded professional, and if it was professional, he didn’t think Louisa would have spotted it. But voicing that opinion might be dangerous, and his testicles hadn’t fully recovered yet. “You should have said.”
“Yeah, well, I wasn’t entirely sure.” She threw him a look which was a barely disguised challenge. “But I am now.”
“Okay,” said River. But if they’d been followed, whoever it was had now dropped off the radar.
They were within what Lamb would have called pissing distance of London’s westbound railway lines, which ran alongside a corridor of airport parking, gas-holders, cement works and heavy plant depots, and had parked on a patch of wasteland surrounded on three sides by long low office blocks: low by the capital’s standards, six storeys tall, and originally white. These were set at a higgledy-piggled angle, with gaps between wide enough to drive a car. Two, joined at third-storey level by a walkway, were derelict, glassless, tagged high and low with faded swirls of paint; the stuttering, repetitive squawks of urban discontent—Tox, Mutant, Flume. At ground level each was unwalled, with thick round pillars every few yards; these were scorched black where homeless wayfarers or partying teenagers had made camp, and the floors were strewn with bottleglass and random litter. Toilet smells drifted out to where they stood, on a pitted and rubbly patch of concrete, with thuggish plant-life sprouting from its cracks. River could feel its heat seeping up through the soles of his shoes, and the ground trembled as a high-speed train thundered past.
The third block looked to be in the process of being reclaimed, though how far advanced this was was open to question. Its paintwork, if not fresh, hadn’t yet succumbed to distemper, and glass shimmered in its windows, but a distressed air hung over it, as if it had fallen into bad company, and knew things wouldn’t end well. The fourth side of the more-or-less square was a disused factory—paint or vinyl, River thought—which had a squat, rectangular tower at one end, next to which a tall whitewashed chimney reached up to about the height of the nearby blocks. An extension had been added, long ago; a slant-roofed corrugated-iron and sheet-plastic construction, from whose guttering barbed wire dangled like an ill-fitting crown of thorns. Pictures of Alsatians were studded at intervals, indicating that trespassers would be eaten, or worse. A jagged hole in its wall at ground level suggested that this threat hadn’t been taken entirely seriously.
Three fridges and a mattress formed a nearby cairn, next to which ten-foot lengths of metal fencing were stacked in a pile, chained to each other by their end-poles, and secured to the earth by an iron hoop. An orange skip lay on its side, like a Tonka toy cast off by a giant.
Louisa’s car ticked, as if counting down to something ominous.
“I think I saw this place in a film once,” River said. “It involved zombies.”
“West of Ealing,” Louisa said. “It might have been a documentary.”
River’s phone rang. It was Lamb.
“Why’s your phone on?”
“It’s on vibrate,” River lied. “We’ve just arrived. Place seems quiet.”
“Well, it was until your phone rang.”
River waited, Lamb’s breathing rusty in his ear.
At length Lamb said, “These soldiers, Donovan and . . . ”
“Traynor.”
“Traynor. Once they’ve got what they want, back off. Don’t try to follow them. Let them leave.”
“What about Catherine?”
“Just focus on your end,” said Lamb. “Remember, Ingrid Tearney’s pulling the strings here. And when it suits her, she’ll cut them.”
“We’ll beware of falling puppets,” said River.
“Don’t get cocky. You’re desk drones, not the Dynamic Duo.”
“And we should know that by now,” River finished for him.
Lamb hung up.
Louisa said, “What’s he want?”
“For us to be careful, believe it or not.” River tucked his phone away. “But he’s run out of Enid Blyton analogies.”
Another train rumbled past, picking up speed out of Paddington, and sounded its whistle; an old-fashioned, reliably forlorn noise. A crow, picking at something near one of the abandoned fridges, looked up, emitted a sullen cough, and went back to its meal.
“There was definitely a car,” she said. “But I didn’t get the make or colour.”
“Okay,” River said again.
He was saved saying anything more by the sight of two shadows emerging from behind a pillar in the nearest of the wrecked buildings.
Roderick Ho was finding it quiet in Slough House, now the others had gone. This didn’t usually bother him. Most days, he saw as little of anyone as he could manage, except for the moments he engineered in the kitchen with Louisa, who had given him a look before she left—an amused glance, telling him she’d rather stay behind than set off on a ludicrous exercise: babysitting a pair of ex-soldiers while they stole the X-Files. He’d mirrored this with a look of his own, a slight raising of an eyebrow meaning You and me both, babes, but she was out of the door before he’d delivered it. He needed to practise that look. If he’d been quicker off the mark she’d have caught it, no problem.
He powered his computers down, and cast a goodbye look around his kingdom. Now that Longridge and Dander were history, he ought to check out their office, see if they’d forgotten anything worth having. Longridge had a nice silk scarf; he wasn’t likely to be wearing it in this heat, so might have left it on a hook. Ho got as far as the door before this plan underwent sudden revision.
“And where do we think we’re going?”
“Uh . . . home?”
Lamb placed a paw in the centre of Ho’s chest and kept walking. Ho shuffled backwards until the backs of his thighs met the edge of his desk. Then Lamb let his hand drop and went and stood by the window, his back to Ho.
The street outside was starting to droop. Traffic was heavy still, but tinged with exhaustion: poor sodding workers heading home from battle, rather than the go-getting warriors of the morning. Across the road, a woman stepped out of the dental laboratory, which had an industrial aspect, as if large-scale experiments took place within, rather than individual acts of dentistry. She shook her head, dispelling an unpleasant memory, and walked off towards the tube.
“High Wycombe,” Lamb said.
The farmhouse Ho had found. The one Sylvester Monteith had rented.
“Uh, yeah. A little way past it on the motorway. Satnav’ll find it no problem.”
“I prefer natsav,” Lamb said.
“Huh?”
“Natural savvy. It allows me to avoid demeaning tasks when there are others to perform them for me.”
“Uh . . . Cup of tea?”
“Where’s your car?” said Lamb.
Marcus was driving a black SUV with tinted windows: a vehicle designed for urban military ops, but usually driven by harassed mums caught between the school run and Waitrose. Shirley had pointed this out to him in the past, but didn’t think it was a good subject to bring up at the moment. When Marcus had stopped swearing about Lamb, it had only been so he could pick on her instead.
“You straight yet?”
“Are we back on that?”
“This is not a fucking joke, Dander. You were high earlier. Are you straight yet?”
Shirley thought about lying, but only for a second. “Jesus, it was one tiny toot. Didn’t even kill the hunger pangs.”
“Fuck it, Dander. Fuck it.”
“Keep your hair on. Christ, half an hour, max. It was a half-hour lift, no more.”
“Did you forget wh
at we said earlier?”
“No, partner. It was what kept me going all afternoon, after you’d disappeared on your jolly.”
They were in bad traffic, progress stalled by a breakdown up ahead, reducing the road to a single lane. This had not improved Marcus’s temper.
“So now it’s my fault?”
“Hey. I take responsibility for my own fuck-ups. I’m not carrying yours too.”
Marcus swore under his breath, and then swore out loud, and slapped his hands against the wheel. “Hell! Have you any idea what kind of shit I’m in?”
“Same kind I am,” Shirley said. “The kind where you haven’t got a job and life sucks.”
“I have a family. You’re aware of that, right? I’ve got mouths to feed and a mortgage to pay. I cannot lose my job.”
“Good strategy, Marcus. Shame you didn’t put it into action earlier.”
“Don’t get gobby with me, girl. Or you can get out here and walk.”
“Call me girl again, you won’t be able to walk.”
The pair seethed in silence while the SUV crawled past the broken-down vehicle, from whose windows a forlorn young woman stared.
“Just anywhere up here,” Shirley said at last. “Christ. I’d have been quicker on foot anyway.”
“Yeah, because you’re in a real hurry, aren’t you? No job, and nobody waiting at home.”
“Thanks for the update. But I hadn’t actually forgotten my life was crap.”
“Look on the bright side. Maybe you’ll find some crystal meth down the back of the sofa. You know, the way people find loose change—”
“Don’t fucking judge me, Longridge. You don’t catch me losing a week’s salary to a one-armed bandit.”
“I don’t do one-armed bandits!”
“And I don’t do crystal meth!”
Marcus swerved abruptly into a parking space, and Shirley’s head banged against the backrest.
“Shit!”
“Shit!”
They sat in silence, their anger trying out different shapes. Traffic rumbled past through almost visible heat, and the clock on the dashboard experimented with making time stand still, every second dragging itself over innumerable obstacles. Marcus was the first to surrender.
“So okay,” he said. “We both screwed up.”
Shirley seemed about to offer footnotes but changed her mind at the last moment. “Maybe.”
“You think that fucker Lamb’ll change his mind?”
“He was mad.”
“I know.”
“Really mad.”
“I know,” said Marcus. “So now what?”
“I hear Black Arrow has vacancies.”
“Great.”
Their renewed silence was only slightly less uncomfortable; Shirley tugging at the strap of her seatbelt and letting it slap back into her chest; Marcus drumming his fingers on the steering wheel in a series of broken rhythms. At last he said, “Cassie knows I’m on a job tonight.”
“So?”
“So she’s not expecting me back.”
Shirley let the seatbelt slap against her again, then said, “If you’re about to make a pass, I’ll peel your face with a spoon.”
“Jesus, Dander. No offence, but I’ve been sacked, not lobotomised.”
“Yeah, none taken. Only you’re too old and baldy for me.”
He shifted in his seat. “This op of Lamb’s.”
“The Grey Books.”
“It’s looney tunes.”
“Well, duh.”
She pulled her seatbelt out again, but Marcus caught it before if slapped against her chest.
“Stop doing that. It’s looney tunes, yeah, but what if it’s not?”
“Meaning?”
Marcus said, “This Donovan. Before he was kicked out of the army, he was a high-flier, right?”
“You heard Cartwright,” Shirley said. “MoD attachments, UN committees, meetings at the Park. He wasn’t a squaddie, that’s for sure.”
“And he’s got a thing about the weather.”
“Everyone’s got a thing about the weather, Marcus. The weather’s looney tunes too. Floods and heatwaves, Jesus. I’m just waiting for hurricane season.”
He ignored her. “So everyone thinks what he’s after is worthless, and he only wants it because he’s a headcase. But what if he’s not? What if he knows something we don’t? All that high-level Ministry of Defence stuff, he must have had access to a lot of black-bag ops. What was Louisa saying about that HAARP project?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Well it was something about weather-manipulation. So what if Donovan’s not as fucked-up as he’s pretending? What if there’s something in the Grey Books that actually matters? Proof these weather projects are really going on?”
Shirley shook her head, and looked across the street. In a bar opposite, a young man wearing denim cutoffs and a leather waistcoat was polishing tabletops. She wondered whether they needed cleaning, or if this was part of the floorshow.
Marcus said, “There’s Select Committee reports in there too. Documentation, maybe other kinds of official paperwork.”
“So?”
“So Donovan was kicked out of the army, remember? Maybe this is payback. He’s planning on going Assange on someone’s ass.”
“Yeah, you might want to choose your words more carefully.” Shirley withdrew her attention from the barkeep. “Besides, what’s it got to do with us? Unemployed, remember?”
“Maybe.”
“Right. That Lamb. What a kidder.”
“Seriously, Shirl. If Donovan’s not the tin-hat he’s made us think he is, then this isn’t just a hand-holding operation. Because once he’s got what he’s after, he won’t want to leave witnesses.”
“Lamb’s not about to reinstate us just for looking keen.”
“Maybe not. But what else are we gonna do? You expected home? Because like I said, I’m not.”
Shirley gazed at her thumb for a while, as if contemplating biting it off. Without looking up, she mumbled something.
“Say what?”
“Say fuck it,” said Shirley, more audibly. “Fuck it, then. Let’s go.”
Walking out of the sunlight into the shadow of the crumbling office block was like stepping from a live oven into a dead one: the heat was dirtier, wrapped in all the stink of a derelict building—rot and mildew, beer and piss, overlaid by something sweet and sickly, which River suspected might be a dead animal. Random bits of brick and lead piping suggested local turf wars. The two men were waiting by a pillar, and something in the way they held themselves reminded him of Marcus. The bigger of the two, a broad-shouldered man with a grey crew cut and a boxer’s nose, late fifties, stepped forward at their approach.
“Cartwright?”
An Irish note to his voice contained less warmth than the accent usually carries.
River nodded.
“So you’re Guy.”
Louisa simply looked at him.
River said, “And you’re Sean Donovan. Making you Ben Traynor.”
The second man was cut from the same wood as Donovan, but younger, and where Donovan was greying Traynor was mostly bald, his chevron of hair razored to a light stubble. He didn’t respond to River’s identification, seeming more interested in Louisa, who had come to a halt shoulder to shoulder with River.
“You know what we’re after,” Donovan said.
Before River could reply, Louisa said, “We know what you say you’re after.”
“Let’s not get complicated. It’s a straightforward collection job.”
Neither he nor Louisa had weapons, it occurred to River. Earlier, this had seemed a detail: the job wouldn’t, shouldn’t, require them to be armed. But in the face of the two Black Arrow operatives, the wouldn’t/sho
uldn’t aspect of the job lost ground to the might-just-possibly element. Because if these two weren’t armed, he thought, they were breaking an ingrained habit.
Though calling them Black Arrow operatives was pushing it, he conceded. Killing the boss was definitely grounds for dismissal. Lamb reminded the slow horses of that on a weekly basis.
“How did you know about this place?”
Donovan regarded him without emotion. “Same way I know about Slough House. I do my homework, Cartwright. How about you? Or do you make a habit of setting off half-cocked?”
Since an honest response to that would be “Yes,” River left it unanswered.
Louisa said, “Where’s Catherine?”
“She’ll be released unharmed once the Grey Books are ours.”
“And we have your word for that,” she said flatly.
“Our word’s good.” This was Traynor, speaking up at last.
“That what you told Sylvester Monteith?”
Donovan said, “Monteith signed up for it. He should have known the risks. Catherine’s a non-combatant. She’ll be released unharmed when we get what we want.”
“She’d better be.”
River said, “So how’s this going to work?”
“You go in, make sure it’s all as advertised. Once it’s secure, you open the doors and we follow.”
“Sounds simple,” Louisa said.
“I gather you’re the special needs crew. Anything more complicated than opening a door, I’d probably have looked elsewhere.”
River was getting tired of having the horses’ lowly status underlined. “But maybe kidnapping an unarmed woman seemed the easiest option. Was it just the two of you, or did you have help?”
Donovan’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Feeling sparky now? There’s a good lad. Time to chat up the doorman, right?”
It was on the tip of River’s tongue to say he hoped they’d have a chance to continue this later, but it struck him he’d had this conversation once today already. So he just glanced at Louisa, nodded, and the pair of them walked back out into the sunlight, towards the old factory building.
Nick Duffy watched their progress from the third floor of the other derelict block. Tailing them from the Barbican, he’d thought they’d spotted him, despite his car being an anonymous silver hatchback like every second set of wheels on the road; there’d been a definite phase when Louisa Guy had exhibited paranoid tendencies: slowing excessively for one amber light, pedal to the metal for another. When that happened, Duffy knew, you kept your cool; assumed that the usual traffic inhibitors would do their job, and a regular, even speed would bring the target back into focus at the next crowded junction. Failing that, you always had back-up.
