by Mick Herron
More ghosts.
When Lamb at last raised the arm that had been dangling over the side of his chair, it held a cigarette. He slotted it into his mouth and, from somewhere on his person, produced a plastic lighter which refused to work. After staring at it in wounded disappointment, he tossed it over his shoulder, and looked balefully at Catherine.
“Can’t help you,” she said.
“Christ. Remind me of your purpose?”
“You smoke too much. Like you imagine it’s a virtue.”
“I can see how an idiot might think so.”
While he began the laborious process of opening drawers and rummaging through them without actually looking, she said, “We’re being watched by the Park, on and off. And hunted by someone else. At the same time?”
Lamb’s only reply was the clicking of another lighter, drawn from the depths of a drawer, and equally useless. It joined its companion somewhere in the shadows behind.
She persevered. “They must be connected.”
“How?”
“Well, I don’t know!”
“So think about it. How many points of connection could there be? Jesus, a man could die trying to get a smoke round here.” But his roving hand found a box of matches even while he spoke, and he brandished it in triumph, offering her a view of stained armpit. With a dexterity that would have impressed her in a squirrel, let alone an overweight drunk, he removed a match from the box and struck it one-handed, though lost points by dropping the open box while completing the action. Matches went everywhere, but the lit one reached his cigarette, which was all that mattered. Its job done, he tossed it away. Said, “Loy wasn’t a slow horse anymore. Nor was White. Why would anyone think they were?”
Catherine said, “Because they’re operating from out-of-date information.”
“And where might that come from?”
“Oh Lord . . .”
“And that would be the sound of a penny dropping, would it? If it took me that long to join a pair of dots, I’d still be wondering why my Y-fronts shrink when I look at porn.” He paused to draw in smoke, scrunched his face in presumable pleasure, and yawned his exhalation. She’d not have been surprised to glimpse a crocodile bird, pecking shreds of meat from his teeth. “Takes it out of you, being a genius.”
“It must be a constant strain.”
“That and coping with the ill-tempered sarcasm of subordinates.” He heaved himself more or less upright. More matches dropped to the floor. “I met this dwarf a couple of nights ago. I might have mentioned it.”
“It cropped up.”
“He told me his journo friend heard a whisper that Rasnokov had declared war on the Park’s assassination squad.” Vassily Rasnokov was the GRU’s First Desk. “All jolly hockey sticks, I’m sure, except that the Park doesn’t have an assassination squad. It gives orders as and when, or hires local talent, like it did in Kazan. So the GRU has the same problem George W had back in the day. How do you declare war on something that doesn’t physically exist?” He paused to smoke. “Answer, you go ahead and do it anyway, and hope to fuck no one notices.”
“We get called a lot of things,” she said. “But nobody’s ever accused us of being assassination specialists.”
“And nobody thinks we are. But once the label’s been applied, the facts cease to matter. These guys have been given our names and told we’re the targets, and they’re getting on with it. They must have realised while breaking Kay White’s neck that she was more Milly Molly Mandy than Modesty Blaise, but so what? They’re getting paid to do a job, not worry about the details.”
“But who applied the label? Or do I hear the distant clucking of chickens coming home to roost?”
“I like to think I’ve made a lot of enemies,” Lamb conceded. “But seriously, this day and age? Even I’d put me way down on a list of people worth killing. You’d have to be halfway through the Cabinet first. Not to mention whoever invented fruit-flavoured beer.”
“I’m sure the GRU have similar priorities. But either way, this list they’re working from, it must have come from Molly’s archive.”
“Uh-huh. Can’t have come from current records, because we’re not on them. And while it might be out of date, it overlaps with the present. If White and Loy were on it, then Cartwright and Guy are too. Not to mention you and me.”
“And Roddy.”
“Every cloud.” He made his own final cloud, then squashed his cigarette out on the side of his bin. It was not, Catherine noticed, one of the monstrosities he’d been smoking lately. Just an ordinary filter tip.
He saw her noticing. “What?”
“Just wondering what we do now.”
“We gather them in,” he said. “Before more bodies hit the streets.”
The activating order came from Catherine Standish, but he knew it originated from Lamb himself.
Blake’s grave. Now.
Roderick Ho stared at the text for a full five seconds, as if waiting for it to self-destruct, then tapped out his answer:
Roger that.
Then thought a few moments, and sent another:
A-OK.
Just in case she didn’t understand the first one.
After that, he was locked and loaded; ready to rock and roll. Cylinders firing and systems go: Welcome to the Rod-eo, he thought, then thought it again, because it was a new one. Welcome to the Rod-eo.
Saddle up.
Blake’s grave meant Bunhill Fields, the cemetery not far from Slough House. Blake was some dead guy, but that wasn’t important; what mattered was, it was where the team assembled when heavy shit was going down, and Slough House itself was off-limits. The emergency zone. And getting the call meant dropping everything and travelling light, because when you were called to the graveside, you needed to make sure it wasn’t going to turn out to be your own.
(A brief image struck him: of Lamb cradling Roddy’s body in his arms. Lamb’s broken gaze was directed heavenwards. Why? he was wailing. Why? For some reason Lamb was dressed as Batman, while Roddy’s own sweet corpse was in Robin costume. Very strange.)
Anyway. When word came down from Lamb that he needed his team, everyone knew what the real score was: he needed the Rodster. The rest of them could stand round making up the numbers, and that was fine, but what Lamb wanted was his best guy by his side. The others were camouflage.
And this was the part of the job Dyno-Rod loved: the part where his street-skills came to the fore. Roddy Ho was the Duke of Digital; everyone knew that. He was Master of the Monitor, Lord of the Laptop, but that was only half the story. Take him away from his screens and he was also King of the Kerb, Sultan of the Streets, the something of the Pavements. He scrabbled about in his cupboard for his second-best pair of trainers—your second-best pair were your best pair, every fool knew that: they were what you wore when the going got rough—and grabbed his dark-blue hoodie from its hanger. Prez, pro, padrone, prince. Prince of the pavements. With smooth, practised economy Roddy readied himself for action: trainers on feet, hair tousled just right, and bang, he was out the door, only returning twice; once to change his blue hoodie for a black one—more ninja—and again to check he’d locked up properly. After that it was showtime, all the way.
No car. This was what it meant to go dark; you surrendered to the city, let it breathe you in gently, and carry you where you needed to go. Any watchers out there, they might hold you in their gaze for a moment, but then you’d shimmer and vanish, and they’d be left shaking their heads: what just happened? Then return to their original stance, waiting for your appearance, not understanding that you’d been and gone. That you’d cast no shadow; had slid through the streets like a whisper, your effortless passage a silent hymn to London’s dark and energising graces.
So any Regent’s Park newby assigned to pin a tail on the RodMan better bring their A-game, because the Rodinator l
eft no trail. They’d have a happier time of it chasing smoke through a hurricane: Roddy owned the streets.
It was threatening rain, though, so he caught a bus.
When Lech Wicinski received the word he hadn’t the faintest clue what it meant, but his carefully composed reply—What??—elicited no response from Catherine. So he phoned Shirley.
“I just got a strange text.”
“‘Blake’s grave’? Me too. It means get there, now.”
“Why? Do you think Lamb knows?”
“Knows what?”
For fuck’s sake.
“. . . Knows we just beat up a civilian. And stole his stuff.”
“Oh, that.” Shirley fell silent. “But why would he want us at Blake’s grave? When he could just bollock us in his office in the morning?”
A bollocking, Lech thought. He was thinking more along the lines of police, arrest, trial, imprisonment. Shirley’s more relaxed approach was likely drug-addled lack of perspective, but on the other hand might be based on experience. What happened earlier probably wasn’t the first time a slow horse had walked away from someone else’s wreckage. He’d heard rumours: about politicians, scaffolding, tins of paint. Mind you, that sounded a lot more accidental than thumping a civilian with a sap then stealing his money. So presumably Shirley hadn’t been involved.
He said, “So what does getting to Blake’s grave usually entail?”
“You mean, what does it mean?”
“. . . Yes, okay. That.”
“Means some shit has hit a fan. And we’re all about to get spattered.”
“Then why so cheerful?”
Shirley said, “Well, it beats an early night.”
So Blake’s grave, Lech interpreted, was the Slough House equivalent of the Park’s Apocalypse Protocol, in which all agents got out of the building and off the map, to regroup at various locations around the city. For Slough House, of course, only one rendezvous point was required. Otherwise, the slow horses would simply be several groups of a single person each, which was pretty much what they were the rest of the time.
The Protocol also demanded you went dark: no phone, no vehicle, no watchers on your back. So Lech took batteries and SIM card from his phone. If Slough House had gone tits up, he’d better not paint himself bright colours. On the other hand, if this was Lamb’s idea of a wind-up, he wanted the wherewithal to Uber himself home afterwards, so instead of leaving the parts behind he put them in his pocket. Then he checked himself in the mirror, as he always did now—still a mess; those scars will never heal—and left the flat at the same time that Shirley, still in Shoreditch, ordered a vodka for the road. It would take her, like, five minutes to get to Bunhill Fields? Ten, max. And she knew it was an emergency shout, that three-word text, but really: what kind of emergency could it be? And if it was a really big one, she’d need another vodka inside her.
She was still keyed up from earlier. Playing it over in her head, they’d been lucky, her and Lech; him that she’d turned up at the right moment, when the guy in the black mac had been about to make his face a bigger mess than it already was, and him and her both that nobody had come in while they were dragging a stunned body into the cubicle. Two strokes of luck: maybe this was an end to her jinx-run. Maybe this time she could partner up without having to pencil in an expiry date.
Not that her last partner had been her best friend or anything. In fact, when you got right down to it, it was possible he hadn’t even noticed they were partners.
And why did it matter whether she had a partner anyway?
The thought was one she’d been pushing away for as long as it had been creeping up on her. Her relationship history was back on an upward keel—she’d recently made it to a six-day anniversary—and it wasn’t like she was desperate to share an office again. It was more that, when it was her turn, she didn’t want to be bleeding on a hillside on her own, in the snow. She wanted somebody with her, holding her hand or saying her name. Not that she was superstitious. Shirley had no plans to die soon. But planning had nothing to do with it, as her late colleagues would no doubt testify. Or Blake, for that matter. She doubted he’d picked out his grave in advance. One day you’re wondering what to do at the weekend; the next, your weekend’ll never come.
But if Lech was going to fill the current vacancy, it was probably best she didn’t go into too much detail.
She finished her drink, left the glass on the bar. The pub was half full, and she didn’t feel eyes on her as she went, but waited in a shop doorway for two minutes anyway, checking the pavements, one hand on the window to steady herself. That last vodka: maybe not a great shout. But legend had it that being drunk caused double vision, and she wasn’t even seeing one person following her, let alone two, which made her both sober and untailed. She gave it another minute, long enough for a few deep breaths and a peculiar dance-like motion involving shaking her limbs very loosely, then stepped out onto the street. Five minutes; ten max. She’d probably get there first.
“Where is everyone?” asked Louisa.
“I was wondering that myself,” Catherine said.
That there was nobody around wasn’t in itself a surprise: the cemetery locked its gates after hours. That Louisa had arrived first was stranger: she had farthest to come. On the other hand, she’d ignored protocol and driven, so maybe that shortened the odds. It was one thing going dark; quite another spending the evening farting about on public transport. She lived way out of the centre because it was more affordable. Not because she enjoyed the commute.
Catherine was asking, “Were you followed?”
“I’m pretty sure not.”
“Pretty sure?”
Louisa said, “I spotted the guy the other day, and I’ve been careful since. Or maybe paranoid’s the word. I don’t think I was followed. Why, what’s going on?”
“Let’s wait till the others arrive.”
“Why’s Lamb not here?”
“He will be.”
Louisa eyed Catherine’s dress. It was ankle length, as usual, with sleeves that blossomed at the cuff. On any given day, she looked like she was dressed as a Victorian puppet. Not many people could have carried it off, but Louisa had to admit Catherine was one of them. On the other hand, it was hard to picture her scaling cemetery railings.
“Lamb has a key,” Catherine told her.
“I know.”
“He opened the gate.”
“How did you even know I was wondering that? And if Lamb was here then, where is he now?”
“Here’s someone.”
Which was Lech. “You do know there are two Blake’s graves,” he said.
This was true. There was a small headstone, suggesting the poet-painter William Blake’s remains lay nearby, and a larger memorial, flat upon the ground, which seemed more confident of those remains’ location.
“They’re, like, twenty yards apart?” said Louisa.
“I know.”
“So we’d probably have seen each other, whichever one we were waiting at?”
“I know. I was just saying.”
Darkness was traditionally forgiving of facial blunders: ill-advised piercings, drunken-error tattoos and New Romantic makeup stylings were diminished in shadow, and seemed less stupid. Lech’s scars, though, it made worse. The first thing you thought when you saw him was that you wanted to turn a light on. Probably not entirely fair to lump him with those who’d made their faces a sideshow: it hadn’t been his decision to have PAEDO carved into his cheeks. But it had been his choice to obliterate the word with haphazard scars, so he couldn’t claim not to have had a hand in it. And right now he looked nervy, Louisa thought, as if his evening had already gone wrong in some unspecified way, and he was waiting for it to go more wrong differently. Not necessarily an unwise state of mind when Lamb had sounded a siren, but still. There was such a thing as a positive atti
tude.
She wondered where River was. A summons like this, she’d have expected him to be first on the scene.
And now came Shirley, weaving into the graveyard’s central reservation like someone who’d been drinking with barely a pause since leaving the office. Not that Louisa was one to judge, but there was a margin there in which she could feel smug.
Catherine took one look and said, “Oh, for goodness’ sake. Here.” She produced a bottle of water from somewhere.
“Oh, cheers,” Shirley said. She took a hefty slug. “Thirsty work.”
“What is?”
“This. Whatever this is.”
The cemetery was wedged between Bunhill Row and City Road, from which the noise of traffic was still constant. That was the direction Shirley had arrived from, and Louisa couldn’t help wondering not whether she’d been seen climbing in, but by how many people, and what they’d done about it. Probably nothing. It wasn’t that London lacked the civic-minded; more that even the civic-minded didn’t much care when short drunk strangers hauled themselves over pointy railings.
Anyway, it wasn’t like they were tramping on actual graves. A few luminaries apart, the dead were fenced off from the flagstoned pathways.
Shirley was peering round, checking off a mental register. “Where’s Cartwright? And douchebag? And Lamb?”
“Not here, obviously,” said Catherine. “And a little respect for your colleagues, would you mind?”
“Sorry. Mr. Lamb.”
And if River wasn’t here yet, it probably meant he’d headed off to the O.B.’s, to be with Sid. Louisa wondered how she felt about that, not that she had a right to feel anything. Sid was one of them, she thought, one of the originals, though there’d been slow horses before them, and would be slow horses afterwards. Unless Slough House itself was headed for extinction. Being wiped from Service records wasn’t an encouraging sign.
She heard a strangled cry from Bunhill Row, followed by a tearing sound and a muffled thump. The kind of noise you’d get, she thought, if you dropped a computer nerd a short distance onto a hard surface.
Roddy Ho was on his feet when she got there, one pocket of his hoodie hanging loose but a scowl fixed firmly in place.