by Mick Herron
“I thought you were having one of your fits.”
“Fits? I don’t have fits.”
“Pardon me. One of those coughing extravaganzas where it seems likely you’ll heave your lungs up.”
“I’m allergic to interfering spinsters,” said Lamb. “That’s probably what it is.” He scratched the back of his head, and when his hand appeared again, it was holding a cigarette.
Catherine had long given up being amazed by such tricks. She was perturbed, though, by the industrial appearance of the cigarette in question. “Wouldn’t it be quicker to burn a tyre and breathe it in?”
“Possibly,” said Lamb. “But you know what Health and Safety’s like.” He slotted the cigarette into his mouth, but made no move to light it. This was just as well, as he had it in backwards. “What is it you’re not telling me?”
She paused. “Now, that’s a list I try to keep as long as possible.” But it was a forlorn defence: Lamb was growing rosily benign, the way witches in fairy tales do. She stepped further into the room and said, “I spoke to Molly Doran last night.”
Lamb’s expression didn’t alter.
“Ambushed her on her way home.”
“There are those who might think that’s taking unfair advantage of a cripple,” said Lamb.
“I only—”
“But that’s Molly for you. And as she obviously didn’t flay and hang you from the nearest branch, she must have been in a happy mood.”
“Her records are pre-digitised,” said Catherine. Sometimes, if you kept on track, you could drag Lamb’s attention after you. “I wanted to know if the paper versions of our records had been purged as well.”
Lamb looked at his watch.
“. . . What?”
“It’s five past April,” he said. “Congratulations. That little brainwave only took you, what? Fifteen weeks?”
She suppressed a sigh. “You’d already done that.”
“But Molly didn’t let on. Like I said. Happy mood.” He removed the cigarette, then reinserted it the right way round. “Nobody’s looked at our folder in years. Gives you a nice tingly feeling, doesn’t it? Being forgotten. Or is that just me?”
“But the paperwork’s still in place,” said Catherine. “So even when they’re forgetting us, they’re forgetting to forget us properly.”
“If you’re getting philosophical, I need a drink.” He opened a drawer and thrust his hand into it like a bear exploring a hollow trunk. “Anyway, it’s all a tub of shit. Not what you just said, though that too. But our status as untouchables. We’ve not been forgotten. We’ve been repurposed.”
An audible sneer accompanied the word, like a sommelier offering an alcopop.
She stepped to one side and tipped the visitor’s chair so its cargo of takeaway receptacles slid to the floor. Then she produced a tissue from the sleeve of her dress and wiped the seat down. Once more or less satisfied, she sat. “You said you didn’t know what Taverner was up to.”
He said, “That’s what I said, yes. But a funny thing about me, and this is what sets me apart from the rest of you clowns, my brain stays switched on. So while I didn’t know before, I do now. Do you need me to say that again?”
“I just about followed. What’s happening?”
“It’s like I said to Guy. She spotted him, so he must have been a beginner.” Lamb had found a bottle in his drawer: Talisker. “Light dawning yet?”
“It’s a training exercise,” she said.
“Give that woman a goldfish.”
“That’s why we’ve been wiped.”
“Yeah, so Lady Di can paint targets on our backs and let her junior agents off the leash,” Lamb said. He leaned back, and his chair complained angrily. “I suppose she might have hoped that, somewhere in the dim recesses of whatever passes for you lot’s mental processes, you might still remember some tradecraft. Like making sure you’re not being tailed when you go about your daily business. Or even just paying some fucking attention, the way normal people do. Which might have made it a slightly more taxing exercise for the early learners.” He unscrewed the cap off the bottle. “Fancy a drink?”
She said, “So the Park have been using us for practice. And they wiped us first so the newbies won’t know we’re spooks too.”
“To be fair,” said Lamb, “thinking of you lot as spooks requires a mental leap. Like calling Farage a statesman.”
“And now Kay White is dead.”
Lamb was watching the liquid rope he’d made by pouring whisky very slowly from the bottle into the glass. So she couldn’t see his expression as he said, “Did Molly tell you that?”
“She didn’t have to.”
When he looked up, there was nothing to suggest the news had come as a surprise.
Kay White had been a slow horse, some years back. Lamb had fired her when she’d betrayed them all—his view—to the Park, presumably on the understanding that she’d be reinstated over there. That didn’t happen. It never did.
Catherine said, “She kept in touch with a few former colleagues. And they keep in touch with me.”
“A fishwives’ network,” said Lamb. “How jolly.”
“She fell off a stepladder while clearing out her attic.”
“They say most accidents happen in peoples’ homes,” said Lamb. “That’s why I never visit anyone.”
“No, it’s why you’re never invited anywhere.”
He tipped his glass in her direction, then drank from it.
“That’s not like you.”
“What isn’t?”
“To have one of your crew die without batting an eyelid.”
Lamb put the glass down. His unlit cigarette was between his fingers now. “One of mine? She’s a distant memory. Wasn’t even that until you brought her name up.”
“All right, so she wasn’t current. But she used to be one of us. That ought to matter.”
“Might of, if I hadn’t fired her for dumping us all in the shit. I mean, it was a long time ago, and it’s not like I carry grudges.” He put the cigarette back in his mouth. “But she deserved to die. Even Gandhi would admit that.”
“Did it never occur to you that for a supposed backwater of the security service, we suffer a lot of fatalities?”
“I’ve always assumed that was down to public demand.”
“So it doesn’t worry you, this . . . accidental death? Now, of all times?”
“Seriously? You’re seriously asking me that?” He threw his head back and barked at the ceiling. Some might call it laughter. “Look, I trust Taverner about as far as I can fly. But she’s not gunna take out a contract on Slough House just to give her learner spooks something to do. Don’t get me wrong, she’d do it if she had a reason. But this isn’t that.”
Catherine pursed her lips, and didn’t answer.
“Christ, Standish, they’ve never needed to kill us. I mean, fucking look at us. What would be the point?”
“The timing worries me.”
“It’s spring. When else do you clear out your attic?”
She stood. “What did that crack mean, earlier? About international assassins?”
“Nothing to get your ovaries in a twist. Assuming yours aren’t already knotted.”
She waited, but he wouldn’t elucidate further.
“So now you’ve worked out what’s going on,” she said, “are you planning on taking it up with Taverner?”
“Is Notre Dame flammable? Speaking of which.”
He sparked a flame from a lighter he was suddenly holding, and applied it to his cigarette.
Catherine shuddered. “You really need to get a grip on some health issues.”
“What I don’t know about healthy living,” said Lamb, “you could write on the back of a fag packet.” He breathed out smoke. “And tell Cartwright and Guy that the n
ext time they sneak out without permission, I’ll hang her by his testicles. Or vice versa.”
He reached for his glass again, and Catherine left him to it.
Preparing to leave, Oliver Nash said, “I saw something rather extraordinary on the way in.”
Nash being Nash, this would probably be one of those pop-up tourist experiences London pulls from its sleeve occasionally: a wondrous mechanical elephant, or a herd of fibreglass cows.
It had been a successful meeting, from both points of view; Diana’s because she had got what she wanted, and Nash’s because he hadn’t noticed. The venue was Diana’s office, down on the hub. Previous First Desks had chosen to occupy one of the upper storey rooms, whose expensive windows afforded leafy views, but Diana preferred to be where the action was. Most of her career had been spent here, almost all of it as Second Desk (Ops), her initial meteoric rise having been followed by a hard stop. Since then, it sometimes felt she’d done little but bide her time, paying obeisance to one First Desk after another; watching mistakes made and successes forged, and knowing that if she’d been in charge, there’d have been fewer of the former, more of the latter. And now she was where she’d long wanted to be, and much of it involved taking meetings with Oliver Nash and similar examples of Whitehall mandarin: decent human beings in themselves, but lacking the sense of urgency that the times required.
Take the business of cyber security.
There was little official appetite for deep-cover ops, she’d reminded him; software was replacing human agency as the cornerstone of intelligence work. Hundreds of hours of recorded conversation; miles of emails—that was how they were measured, in actual miles—and gallons, bathtubs, reservoirs of pixellated flow: all of these, gathered at a distance, were the fruits of Spook Street. And even once they were harvested, human agency remained at a remove, the intelligence pored over instead by algorithms whose acronyms were increasingly twee, but which were at least as open to subversion as the most disenchanted joe. You didn’t have to buy an algorithm a drink, or set it up with an easy lay. You just had to work out what made it dance, and once that was done—once you had its number—it was your creature, and would do whatever you wanted. And that was how vulnerable everything was these days: you were only one hack away from open government.
“We need bigger firewalls, Oliver. Bigger ones, better ones. The kind you can see from space.”
“Ha, like the Great Wall of—”
“Precisely.”
“Not unironic, in the circs.”
She let him chuckle over that, accurately gauging the moment at which mirth would deflate into a sigh.
“Diana, I am on your side in this.”
“Why does that phrase drain me of confidence?”
“But you can’t be unaware of the bigger picture.”
“There is no bigger picture. We’re talking about national security, about protecting our virtual borders. For God’s sake, look at the self-harm we’ve inflicted in the name of national sovereignty. You’d have thought there’d be few lengths we’d not be willing to go in pursuit of that particular grail.”
“Leaving aside your jaundiced view of recent history, you’re overstating the case. Besides, and don’t imagine I’m unaware of this, the last such restructuring was completed not twenty-four months back. After a significant, not to say unprecedented, budgetary dispensation.”
“Two years is a long time online.”
“Be that as it may, this is not a case you’re going to find it easy to pursue in front of Limitations. Claude Whelan had friends Down The Corridor, remember. Forgive me if I’m treading on your amour propre, but you’re not quite as popular, perhaps because you’re not as ready to, as our American cousins would say, make nice.”
“I’m not in this business to make nice, and I don’t like having to make do, either. Nor am I looking to Whitehall for friends or playmates. I just expect support from that direction when I’m looking to repel our common enemies.”
“As witness the Kazan episode.”
“Which received an ovation from the committee. In case you’d forgotten.”
“It tickled the right erogenous zones, yes, but in the cold light of day, wiser opinion holds that now is not the time to pour oil on troubled wildfires. And some who’ve gone to the bother of examining the minutes have pointed out that at no time were you given carte blanche to perform the, ah, procedure in question. You were simply asked to examine the viability of such an operation.”
“Well, I think I did that with exceptional clarity.”
“And besides, there are other needs than yours, many of them equally pressing. I’m not saying there isn’t a case to be made for the upscaling you have in mind, but that’s what you have to do—make a case. Not simply assert your demands.”
“And what if I told you that I won’t be making demands? That all I’m looking for is approval to refocus existing resources?” She uncrossed her legs, then crossed them again. “All I require can be met through internal rebudgeting.”
This gave him pause.
“I’m serious, Oliver. I’ve identified a saving.”
“I thought you were cut to the bone.”
“We are. But I can prioritise.”
“Enlighten me further,” said Nash. “Please.”
“There’s a project called Chimera.”
“Oh, very on-message. How come I’ve not heard of it?”
“Because I run a tight ship. Chimera’s not appeared on any agenda within the last few years because it’s been doing precisely what it ought to do, when it ought to do it, within budget.”
“Good lord. Are you sure you want to close it down? We could have it mounted and put on a plinth.” He shifted in his chair. “All right, all right. A little levity never did any harm. Remind me, what’s the precise nature of this, ah, Chimera?
“Probably best if we don’t emphasise what we’re losing, and focus on the gains to be made.”
“Of course. And I’m sure you’re right, and there’s no need to blind the committee with technical detail, but for my own peace of mind, I really do need a glimpse of precisely what we’re deciding we can live without.”
“Very well,” said Diana. “Chimera was set up in the mid-nineties and involved long-term, real-time analysis of the psychological effects of operating under deep cover in domestic pressure groups.”
“Ah. Animal Liberation Front kind of thing?”
“I can neither confirm nor deny.”
“All very . . . surreptitious. Subterfuguous?”
“I don’t want to hammer home the obvious, but we are the secret service.”
“Is there an adjective from subterfuge?”
“I’ll make a note, Oliver. Have someone look into it.”
He said, “And this was costing enough that you can make substantial savings by closing it down?”
“We’re a bureaucracy. Everything we do costs money, because it all has to be discussed by committee, every member of which is claiming expenses. So do we really need to debate first principles, or can I rely on your support when it comes to the next Limitations meeting? Redirecting funds, that’s all. With the committee’s approval it can be done in-house, and the next you’ll hear about it, it’ll be in place. No fuss, no fireworks.”
“I’ll give it some thought. But in principle, I see no objection.”
“I’m grateful. Now, I’ve a call to make. Was there any other business?”
“There was something.” Nash checked his phone, which was where he kept his notes. “Ah yes. The minister’s been getting calls. An American, resident here, claiming that his partner, in the life-partner sense I think, that his partner was murdered in Moscow. On Putin’s orders.”
“And was he one of ours?”
“A Brit, you mean? No, I gather he was a Russian citizen.”
“S
o even if he was murdered, it wouldn’t be our business. Why are you bringing it to me?”
“The minister had no particular instructions,” Nash said. “He just wants to stop receiving these phone calls.”
“That’s a police matter. Really, you can’t keep urging me to keep costs down on the one hand, and—”
“Mea culpa.”
“—offering my services to any of your Westminster cronies who have a passing problem.”
“I’m sorry, Diana, you’re right. As always. Thanks for your time.” He rose to go, putting his phone away, and said, “I saw something rather extraordinary on the way in.”
A wondrous mechanical elephant, she thought. A parade of fibreglass cows.
“Please tell.”
“There was a tour arriving as I came through the lobby,” he said. “One of those civil service groups?”
These were regular outings: covens of civil servants given whistle-stop tours round Regent’s Park, or at least, round those non-classified areas that were close enough to thrill by association. This is where Bond hangs his raincoat. Some floors below us lies the hub.
“It’s not that extraordinary. They’ve been a feature for years.”
“Ah, yes, no, I meant who was in the group. Damien Cantor? The boss of Channel Go, you know who I mean? Richest man in the country under thirty-five, I’m led to believe.”
Diana discovered something on her desk that required attention, and it was a moment before she replied. “And he was being shown around the building?”