by Mick Herron
“You can assume all you like. I’m saying he’s somewhere between an arsehole and a—”
“Jesus, Lamb!” She shook her head. “He’s a member of the club. Him being there means nothing.”
“Yeah, shut up. So here’s what I’m thinking. Peter Judd bankrolled the Kazan operation, presumably for reasons of his own. Nothing to do with the hit itself. More to do with the power and influence that come with buying First Desk.”
“He hasn’t bought me.”
“Oh believe me, Diana, he owns every last fucking inch of you.”
There was a waterborne scuffle a hundred yards down the canal: some ducks seeing to business. She let the noise distract her, as if its very irrelevance were an escape hatch; as if this reminder that the world contained a million other moments, all of them happening right this second, rendered her own situation no more meaningful than anyone else’s. But it was difficult to maintain that illusion with Jackson Lamb next to her. More than bones might soon be broken. And she recognised, out of nowhere, that looping prayer that had earlier leaked from a houseboat. Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet. It was music, that was all. Music folded so carefully into the dark that it might have been just another city noise; the misplaced optimism of a terminal case.
Lamb said, “You invited him in and now he’ll sell everything that’s not nailed down, the way his kind always do. And Slough House isn’t nailed down. So do you want to forget about those fucking ducks for a minute and concentrate on the big issue? You pissed off the GRU when you took out one of their agents, and they’re looking to even the blood count. And thanks to Peter Judd, or someone like him, they’ve decided Slough House fits the bill.” He flicked his cigarette in the direction of the canal, and for a moment it was a tiny rocket, leaving stars in its wake. Then it was only a hiss. “So this is where we are. And because I’m a people person, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give you one chance to decide whose side you’re on. And before you do that, here’s a tip. Whatever rules this wet-job crew are playing by? So am I.”
Firing that cigarette into the dark might have been a mistake; he hadn’t anywhere near finished it. But another had appeared in his fist already, and he aimed it at her as if staring down its barrel.
“Start talking.”
And Diana did just that.
When his phone buzzed with Catherine’s text, Blake’s grave. Now, River switched it off and removed the battery one-handed; left the parts on the passenger seat. Gone dark. It seemed to fit.
There are states in which all moods become possible at once: fear and fury, grief and excitement, dread, bewilderment, and a sudden deep attachment to something which might already have slipped away. River had spent these last years missing Sid, though he hadn’t known how much until now; the knowledge had arrived hand-in-hand with the awareness that she might have been taken away again. So he was driving too fast through darkness, the sky having deepened from blue to near-black, and the lane ahead, narrowed by his headlights’ focus, was a constantly swirling channel hedged on both sides by a blurry green mass. He was tensed to brake, but desperate not to. They were minutes ahead of him, in a possibly white car. XTH??? The number plate hardly mattered. The first car to swim into his vision would be the one he was chasing. There’d been nowhere to turn off, not without plunging into an unlit field.
They looked surprised when I said she was in there. They thought the house was empty.
Two of them, “from the hospital.” They’d come looking, the same way they had come looking in Cumbria, though this time they hadn’t expected to find Sid, which must mean they’d been looking for River. That bore thinking about, but not right this minute; for now, all he had to do was catch up, before they did whatever it was that missionaries did. Which River doubted involved saving souls, though it might include liberating them from the flesh.
Fear and fury, grief and excitement. Because he could not deny there was exhilaration in this; the pleasure of hot pursuit, a live mission. River’s brief tenure at the Park seemed a decade ago, and the long days at Slough House since must have seen slow poison feeding into him, because even now, with Sid’s life at stake, there was part of him that was glad this was happening. He tried to banish the thought, but couldn’t. He was glad this was happening, because the life he’d led since exile from the Park was not the life intended for him, not the one his grandfather had prepared him for. The O.B. had never wanted First Desk for himself, preferring to be the power behind the swivel chair, but he’d wanted it for River. That was the unspoken dream, present in the silences between the stories he’d told, but he’d never realised that it was the stories themselves River craved to be part of—that it was the danger he yearned for, not the satisfaction of moving pieces around the board. River didn’t want to be the storyteller. He wanted to be living in the tale. And if he’d had flashes, these last few years, of the ice in the soul required to plot an enemy’s destruction, he was just now learning the corruption that action demanded, the addictive joy in abandoning scruple and surrendering to the chase, even when someone you loved was in danger.
Which was the thought he was having when he took the corner way too fast and met the oncoming car.
The ducks concluded their meeting with some acrimony and adjourned, all parties seething. As Diana finished her account of her dealings with Peter Judd and the angels, their noise was being enfolded within the evening’s other disturbances: the traffic in the near-distance, and the aimless chatter of pedestrians on the road above, muffled by trees, so their language had no more clarity than that of the ducks.
When the girl had come to her—Ashley Khan; in her sixth month of training, and no guarantee she’d reach her seventh, not after tonight’s encounter—Diana had considered sending the Dogs out, to bring Lamb in under heavy manners. And then reality kicked in: if Lamb was breaking bones just to show her he was serious, then he was monumentally pissed off. Which meant he knew that his former team was being hunted down, and was looking for someone to blame. And given his talent for mayhem, and the tightrope she was currently walking, it would be safer to have him hear the facts from her than find them out for himself.
The ducks’ departure had left the canal as ruffled as an unmade bed, which now quietly made itself before her eyes.
“Not just Judd, then,” said Lamb after a while. “You’ve got a whole coven of the fuckers.”
“Businessmen. Entrepreneurs. Concerned about our national security.”
Even as she was saying the words, she could feel their hollowness. Lamb possibly noticed this too, as his immediate response was another fart.
“Judd’s no fan of Slough House,” he said. “Last time we locked horns, I seem to remember he ended up a butler short.”
Butler wasn’t quite the word for Seb, Peter Judd’s erstwhile fixer, fiend and legbreaker, but it was true that he hadn’t been seen for a while.
“But what the altogether fuck’s he playing at now? Sponsoring a hit, okay, that puts you in his pocket, and I’m sure he’s enjoying having you wiggle around there.”
“I’m not in his pocket.”
“Tell that to his stiffy. But feeding the opposition my crew, what’s that about? It’s as carefully planned as a Trump tweet. There’s no sense playing both ends against the middle when you’re the one in the middle.”
Diana said, “It’s not Judd.”
“Then who?”
She said, “White and Loy were old news. They’re off the books. And even the books have been off the books since I wiped Slough House. Which means the details this GRU team have, if that’s who they are, came from Molly Doran’s archive.”
“Thanks. I’d got that far.”
“And Judd hasn’t had access to the archive.”
“And you’re gunna tell me who has.”
“One of the angels—one of the backers—his name’s Damien Cantor. Media playboy, grew up on th
e internet and graduated from YouTube with honours. He—”
“I don’t give a shit about his CV.”
“But maybe you’ve noticed Channel Go? That’s his baby.”
“His baby? What’d he do, screw a shopping channel?”
Diana said, “Judd wanted Cantor on board because he’s got money, a ton of it. And what floats his boat is influence. He wants to be setting the agenda, not just reporting it, because that’s how it is these days. You own a news channel, it’s like putting a deposit down on a government.”
“Another Murdoch mini-me, eh? Paint my fucking wagon.”
“He’s also a narcissist and a show-off. Essentially, a PM-in-waiting. So he couldn’t resist letting me know he’d put one over on me.”
Lamb gave an impressed whistle. “Have to get up early in the afternoon to manage that.”
“Fuck you, Jackson. Give me one of those.” She meant a cigarette, but realised too late what she’d let herself in for: Lamb removed the one inserted between his lips and passed it to her. After the briefest of hesitations, she accepted. He produced another from behind his ear and lit both. Once that was accomplished, she said, “He told me one of his ex-security staff had signed on with the Park. When I ran his name, I found he’d had a run-in with Molly. Lurking in her stacks. Not something she approves of.”
“Yeah. She really puts her foot down when that happens.”
“You’ll like this, then. He called her a crip.”
Instead of responding, Lamb stared across the canal, at one of the houseboats moored opposite. A flickering behind its curtains suggested candlelight within, or perhaps a TV, or an iPad. Anything, really.
She said, “Tommo Doyle’s his name. And he could have photographed the Slough House file while he was in the archive. On Cantor’s instructions, I mean. Because Cantor knew about Slough House. Judd told him.”
“Told him what, precisely?”
“That the department existed, that I’d wiped your records, that I was using your crew for target practice. It must have given him the idea you were a sellable commodity.”
“And there’s nothing a rich man likes better than knowing something’s for sale.”
“There were already rumours the Kremlin’s furious about Kazan, and looking to take revenge. Ready to declare war on our equivalent of their murder squad. Except we don’t have a murder squad, which left them punching shadows.” Diana paused. “Cantor’s not interested in ideology. But he wants to be a player, and these are the boys who stole the White House. If he offered them a viable outlet for their anger, who knows what he’ll get in return?”
“Yeah, and he starts feeding tigers their breakfast, who does he think they’ll eat for lunch?” said Lamb. “The stupid fucker. And that’s why my old crew are falling off ladders and burning to death. You’d think the GRU would have noticed our team-list is written in faded ink on yellow paper.”
“Why would they care? They just have to be seen doing it. By us. By Rasnokov. By the Gay Hussar himself. Welcome to the fake-news world, Jackson. You’ve been hiding in Slough House too long. Things have got nasty out here.”
“They always were,” said Lamb.
Words smeared across River’s mind in the moments afterwards, each syllable flat as a fly on a windscreen, its shape still apparent amidst the mess:
Shit
No
Sid
But while it was happening there were no words, only movement. River’s brain became a blank, while his hands and feet did his thinking: slamming the brakes on, going into a skid so loud, so total, he had no choice but to go with it, turning the wheel so the car spun as it approached collision, like a cartoon animal trying to avoid the inevitable, pulled one way while its legs tried to go the other. The windscreen filled with light and just as suddenly emptied: there was a tooth-grinding scream of metal on metal, and directions scattered and reassembled themselves in a different order. He was no longer moving. The car he’d nearly hit was parked sideways across the narrow lane. And River was still facing it, so one of them had managed a 180º turn. He suspected it had been him.
He’d done a parachute drop once, overseen by the military. Low opening, they called it: pulling the cord at the last possible moment. River still remembered his feet hitting the ground; it was a memory stored in most of his bones, including those in his ears and thumbs. This was similar. There was also an old joke here somewhere. The good news is, your airbag works.
River buried his face for a moment in the soft mass, then tore it from its casing. It deflated with a Lamb-like noise.
“You bloody maniac!”
The other driver was standing next to his door.
“Sorry,” River mouthed.
“I’m calling the police. I’m calling the police. You bloody—”
“Sorry.”
“—bloody stupid maniac.”
River nodded, because it was the least he could do. He was a bloody bloody stupid maniac: pointless to argue the toss. Or to waste more time. He tried to recreate his sudden turnaround, which proved a lot more complicated when done consciously, with an angry man providing the chorus. But it got done and then he was away again, still driving too fast down a narrow dark lane, but conscious of something having shifted inside him shortly before he didn’t crash; some realisation he’d arrived at, the way you might put your hand inside a crowded wardrobe, and pull out exactly the thing you hadn’t known you were looking for.
The end turned out to be a clearing by the side of the road; a small parking space among trees, from which, Sid guessed, a footpath would lead somewhere picturesque, or interesting, or historical. She was not in the mood for any of these things. But it didn’t seem likely that her preferences would count for much.
“Nearly there,” said Jim, as Jane parked in the far corner.
What now? Sid asked, then realised she’d done so without making any noise. She cleared her throat. “What now?”
“Nothing to be alarmed about.”
“No. But what?”
Jane spoke for the first time in a while. “There’s a lake through the trees. Well, a large pond. Looks nice on the map.”
“Area of natural beauty,” said Jim. “One of those phrases you hear.”
“We’ll take a look, shall we?”
There’s a word for questions that don’t require an answer.
Sid provided one anyway. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”
Jim laughed. “You’ve come this far. What’s a hundred yards more?”
“It’s dark.”
“We have a torch. And it’ll be lighter by the lake. Water reflects.”
“You know what?” said Jane. “I think a dip would sharpen us all up. What do you say to that?”
She’d directed this at Jim, who said, “Night swimming—why not? It’ll only be cold for a few moments. After that, it’ll feel quite normal.”
“I don’t have a costume,” said Sid. She seemed to be having trouble with her volume control: the words came ballooning out of her mouth, as if she’d taken helium. This was what happened when you got near the end: everyday things slipped away. The last time she’d died, it had happened suddenly, so she hadn’t been nervous. This time, there was too much warning. These people were going to kill her. She didn’t know why, but didn’t feel she’d find any reason acceptable, even if it were carefully explained.
“Skinny-dipping,” said Jim. “Why not? We’re all adults.”
He reached over and released Sid’s seatbelt. The strap brushed her breasts as it spooled back into its cavity. “Or,” he said, and for the first time his voice became his own: no longer the jolly vicar but the ice-toned intruder. “We could finish it here in the car. Which will be messier, but we can do that if you prefer.”
His head was right up against Sid’s, their eyes inches apart. Sid stared into them,
and nothing stared back.
“All right,” she said.
Jim tilted his head slightly: a question.
“Let’s finish it here in the car,” Sid said, adjusting her sleeve.
Lamb said, “You realise, if this goes on much longer, I won’t have two spooks to rub together.” He in- then exhaled, a thin cloud that drifted away across the canal. “Not that they won’t enjoy that,” he added. “Last time Ho experienced friction, someone was giving him a Chinese burn. Well, just a burn in his case.”
“You’ve gone dark,” Diana said, a refrain she’d played earlier. “Stay that way. All of you. Another few days, a week at most, and you can safely graze again. We’ll find this hit-team, send them home in a padded envelope.”
“I love it when you talk stationery.” Lamb turned to look at her. His face was the moon’s: craters and hummocks and random patches of grey. “White and Loy, I can live with. But Sid Baker was in that file too. And that’s a different story.”
Diana said, “She’s dead,” but didn’t put a whole lot of effort into it.
“She was dead,” he agreed. “That’s the official line. But you needed it on record that she actually wasn’t, in case it came back to bite you. I mean, it was your fuck-up that nearly got her killed. So you buried the truth in Molly’s archive, where no one was likely to look. Because everything goes straight to digital now, right?”
“Except you.”
“Pretty much a last resort where I’m concerned, yeah.”
She said, “I wouldn’t be the first First Desk, and I won’t be the last, to hide things among the paperwork. So okay, yes, I wanted Baker out of the picture. I’ve kept her safe all this time. New name, new footprint. Nice little cottage near the lakes.”
“I’m hearing the world’s biggest but coming in to land.”
“She’s gone absent. Her milkman reported it a couple of days back.”
“And you did what?”
“I didn’t get the report until earlier today.”
“That’s what I like about the Park,” said Lamb. “Always on the ball. Any chance you included her hideaway details among that paperwork? Don’t even bother answering that. Found out where she went yet? And why?”