by Mick Herron
Through all of this, none of them had taken their eyes off the screen.
‘Why so shy?’ Lamb wondered. ‘If you’re cutting somebody’s head off, you’re making a point. But if you don’t tell anybody why you’re doing it, it’s not going to help your cause, is it?’
‘Cutting heads off doesn’t help anyone’s cause,’ Sid objected.
‘It does if your cause involves chopping people’s heads off. Then you’re preaching right at your niche market.’
Ho said, ‘What difference does it make who they are? They’re Al Qaeda, whatever they call themselves. Sons of the Desert. Sword of Allah. Wrath of the Book. They’re all Al Qaeda.’
There was another late entry: Jed Moody, his coat still on. ‘You’ve heard?’
‘We’re watching it now.’
Kay White started to say something, but changed her mind. In a more cruel mood, everyone present would have marked this down as a first.
River said, ‘So what do we do?’
Lamb said, ‘Do?’
‘Yes. What do we do?’
‘We get on with our jobs. What did you think we did?’
‘For Christ’s sake, we can’t just act like this isn’t happening—’
‘No?’
The short, sharp word punctured River’s balloon.
Lamb’s voice became flat and unimaginative. The boy on the monitor, the hood on his head, the newspaper he held—it might have been a screensaver.
He said, ‘Did you think the Batphone was about to go off, Lady Di shouting all hands on deck? No, we’ll watch it on telly like everyone else. But we won’t do anything. That’s for the big boys, and you lot don’t play with the big boys. Or had you forgotten?’
Nobody said anything.
‘Now, you’ve got papers to shuffle. Why are we all in this room?’
So one by one everybody left, except Ho and Moody, whose room it was. Moody hung his raincoat on the back of the door. He didn’t speak, and Ho wouldn’t have answered if he had.
Lamb stood a moment longer. His upper lip was flecked with an almond croissant’s sugary dust, and as he watched the computer monitor, on which nothing happened that hadn’t been happening for the past several minutes, his tongue discovered this seam of sweetness and gathered it in. But his eyes remained oblivious of what his tongue was doing, and if Ho or Moody had turned his way, what they saw might have startled them.
For a short while, the overweight, greasy has-been burned with cold hard anger.
Then he turned, and plodded upstairs to his office.
* * *
In his own room River booted up, then sat silently cursing the time his computer took to flicker into life. He was barely aware of Sid Baker arriving, and jumped when she spoke:
‘Do you think—’
‘Jesus!’
Sid recovered first. ‘Well, sorry! Christ! It’s my office too, you know.’
‘I know, I know. I was … concentrating.’
‘Of course. Turning your PC on, that’s a tricky business. I can see it would take all your attention.’
‘Sid, I didn’t realize you’d come in. That’s all. What do you want?’
‘Forget it.’
She sat at her desk. River’s monitor, meanwhile, enjoyed its usual fake awakening; swimming into blue then reverting to black. Waiting, he glanced at Sid. She wore her hair tied back and seemed paler than usual, which might have been her black cashmere V-neck, or might have been the ten minutes she’d just spent watching a young man with a hood on his head, who’d apparently been condemned to death.
And she wasn’t wearing her silver locket. If he’d been asked if this was unusual he’d have said he had no idea, but the fact was Sid wore the locket about half the time, from which he drew the inference that it held no special emotional significance for her. But nobody was likely to ask him.
His computer emitted that high-pitched beep that always sounded impatient, as if he’d been keeping it waiting rather than the other way round.
He said, only half aware he was about to do so, ‘About yesterday. I’m sorry. It was stupid.’
‘It was.’
‘It felt like it might be funny at the time.’
‘Stupid things often do,’ Sid said.
‘Clearing it up was no fun, if it makes you feel any better.’
‘It would make me feel better if you’d done a proper job of it. There were still eggshells under my desk this morning.’
But she was half-smiling, so that probably drew a line under the episode.
Though the question of why Sid had been sent on an op in the first place continued to rankle.
His computer was awake now but in a familiarly human sort of way, which meant it would be another few minutes before it was up to speed. He clicked on the browser.
Sid spoke again: ‘You think Ho’s right? They’re Al Qaeda?’
About to make a smart remark, River bit it back. What was the point? He said, ‘What else? It’s not like we’ve not seen this before.’
Both fell silent, remembering similar broadcasts a few years earlier; of a hostage beheaded for the crime of being Western.
‘They’ll be on the radar,’ Sid said.
River nodded.
‘All this stuff we do, here and Regent’s Park, GCHQ—the lid’s on pretty tight. Once they establish who the kid is, and where it’s happening, they’ll run up a shortlist of suspects. Won’t they?’
He was online at last. ‘What was that link?’
‘Sec.’
A moment later an e-mail winked on to his screen. He clicked on the link it held, and the browser changed from a bland civil service logo to the now-familiar boy, hood, cellar.
Nothing had changed in the minutes since they’d left Ho’s room.
Again they sat in silence, but a different silence to the one that usually prevailed in their office. It was shared, rather than dictated by awkwardness.
But if either were hoping it would be broken by a voice from that cellar, they were disappointed.
At last, River said, ‘There’s a lot of time, effort and money been spent on covering extremist groups.’
Sid had forgotten she’d asked the question.
‘But there’s not a whole lot of live intel out there.’
‘Assets,’ she said.
Any other day, River might have scoffed. ‘Assets,’ he agreed. ‘Infiltrating extremist groups used to be an easier business.’
‘You sound like you know about this.’
‘I grew up with the stories.’
‘Your grandfather,’ she said. ‘He was David Cartwright, wasn’t he?’
‘He still is.’
‘I didn’t mean—’
‘He’s still alive. Very much so.’ He glanced round. She had pushed her chair from her desk, and was watching him rather than the screen. ‘And it’s not like he told me State secrets as bedtime stories.’
‘I wasn’t going to suggest that.’
‘But the first bedtime story he ever did read me was Kim.’ River could tell she recognized the title, so didn’t elaborate. ‘After that, well, Conrad, Greene. Somerset Maugham.’
‘Ashenden.’
‘You get the picture. For my twelfth birthday, he bought me le Carré’s collected works. I can still remember what he said about them.’
They’re made up. But that doesn’t mean they’re not true.
River returned to the screen. The newspaper the boy held trembled. Why was he holding it with the back page showing, though? England triumph—last night’s World Cup qualifier.
‘The BBC,’ he said out loud, thinking of the link Sid had sent him.
‘A blog on their news pages. The link was posted there, along with the beheading threat. Then it mushroomed. It’ll be everywhere now.’
River had a sudden image of darkened rooms all over the country, all over the world; heads bent over monitors, studying iPhones, watching nothing happening, slowly. In some of the hearts of those watching
would be the same sick dread he felt now; and in others, there’d be unholy joy.
‘Can we trace the link?’ Sid asked. ‘The IPS, I mean? Where it’s being broadcast from?’
He said, ‘Depends. If they’re clever, no. If they’re stupid …’
But both knew that this wasn’t going to end as swiftly and satisfactorily as that.
Sid said, ‘He pissed you off, didn’t he? More than usual, I mean?’
River didn’t need to ask. She meant Jackson Lamb.
He said, ‘How long have you been here now?’
‘Just a few months.’
‘I meant exactly.’
‘I don’t know exactly. Since August sometime.’
About two months.
He said, ‘I’ve been here eight months, two weeks and four days.’
Sid Baker was quiet a few moments, then said, ‘Okay. But hardly worth a long-service medal.’
‘You don’t get it, do you? Being here means I have to sit watching this like everybody else. That’s not what I joined the Service for.’
‘Maybe we’ll be needed.’
‘No. That’s what being in Slough House means. It means not being needed.’
‘If you hate it so much, why don’t you quit?’
‘And do what?’
‘Well, I don’t know. Whatever you like.’
‘Banking?’ he said. ‘Insurance?’
She fell silent.
‘The law? Property sales?’
‘Now you’re taking the piss.’
‘This is what I’m for,’ he said. He pointed at the screen, on which a hooded boy sat on a chair in a cellar. ‘To make things like this not happen. Or when they happen, make them stop. That’s what it is, Sidonie. I don’t want to do anything else.’
He couldn’t remember he’d ever called her that before.
She said, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘What for?’
She turned away. Then shook her head. ‘Sorry you feel that way. But one mistake doesn’t mean your career’s over. You’ll get another chance.’
‘What did you do?’ he asked.
‘Do?’
‘To deserve Slough House.’
Sid said, ‘What we’re doing is useful. It has to be done.’
‘And could be done by a bunch of trained monkeys.’
‘Thanks a lot.’
‘It’s true.’
‘Yesterday morning? Taking Hobden’s files?’
‘Yeah, okay, you got to—’
‘I’m not rubbing it in. I’m simply pointing out, maybe things are changing. Maybe Slough House isn’t such a dead end. I did something real. You went out too—’
‘To bring the rubbish in.’
‘Okay. A monkey could have done that.’
River laughed. Then shook his head. On his monitor, nothing had changed. The laugh turned sour in the air.
‘This poor sod needs more than monkeys on his side,’ he said.
Sid nodded.
River’s hand dropped to his thigh, and he felt the hard nub of the memory stick in his trouser pocket.
She meant well, he supposed, but her predecessor here had quit the Service, ground into submission by routine tasks. As had his own; a man called Black, who had lasted only six months, and left before River arrived. That was the true purpose of Slough House. It was a way of losing people without having to get rid of them, sidestepping legal hassle and tribunal threats. And it occurred to him that maybe that was the point of Sid’s presence: that her youth and freshness were meant as a counterpoint to the slow horses’ failure, rendering it more pungent. He could smell it now. Looking at this hooded boy on his screen, River could smell failure on his own skin. He couldn’t help this kid. Whatever the Service did, it would do without River’s assistance.
‘What is it?’
He turned back to Sid. ‘What’s what?’
‘You look like something occurred to you.’
He shook his head. ‘No. Nothing.’
On his desk was a fresh pile of transcripts. Catherine Standish must have delivered them before the news broke. He picked up the topmost, then dropped it. That small slapping noise was as much impact as it would ever have; he could spend the next hour writing a report on another chunk of chattering from another supposed hot spot, and all it would earn would be a cursory once-over from Regent’s Park. Sid said something else, River didn’t catch what. Instead, he locked his eyes on the computer screen; on the boy in the hood who was going to be executed for some reason, or no reason at all, in less than forty-eight hours, and if the newspaper he held was to be believed, this was happening here in the UK.
Bombs on trains were bad enough. Something like this, the press would go intercontinental.
Whatever it was Sidonie Baker had said, she now said again. Something about gloves. ‘Why do you think he’s wearing gloves?’
‘I don’t know.’ It was a good question. But River had no answer.
What he mostly knew was that he needed to do something real, something useful. Something more than paper-shuffling.
He felt the hard nub of the memory stick once more.
Whatever it held, it was in River’s pocket. Was the fruit of a real-live op.
If viewing its contents was crossing a line, River was ready to cross it.
* * *
At Max’s, the coffee was bad and the papers dull. Robert Hobden leafed through The Times without troubling his notebook, and was contemplating today’s front-page blonde on the Telegraph when he became aware of background mutter. He looked up. Max was at the counter with a customer, both staring at the TV on its corner plinth. Usually, Hobden insisted they lower the volume. Today he turned the world upside down, and insisted they raise it.
‘… has yet claimed responsibility, and nor has anyone appeared onscreen other than the young man pictured, but according to an anonymous post that appeared on the BBC’s current affairs blog at four o’clock this morning, the young man you’re watching is to be executed within forty-eight hours …’
Max said, ‘Do you believe this shit?’
The customer said, ‘They’re monsters. Plain monsters. They want shooting, the lot of them.’
But Hobden was barely hearing it.
Sometimes you knew you had a story, and were just waiting for its fin to show above the waves of the everyday news.
And here it was. Breaking surface.
Max said again, ‘Do you believe this?’
But Hobden was back at his table, gathering up keys, mobile, wallet, pen and notebook; tucking everything into his bag, except the newspapers.
Those, he left where they lay.
It wasn’t long after nine. A watery sunshine spilt over London; a hint of good weather to come, if you were in an optimistic mood.
On a large white building near Regent’s Park, it fell like a promise that this was as good as things might get.
Diana Taverner had a top-floor office. Once she’d enjoyed an expensive view, but post-7/7, senior staff had been moved away from external walls, and her only window now was the large pane of glass through which she could keep an eye on her team, and through which they in their turn could cast glances her way, keeping an eye on her keeping an eye on them. There were no windows on the hub either, but the light that rained on it was gentle and blue and, according to some report or other—it would be on file; labelled and archived and retrievable on request—was the closest electricity could come to natural sunlight.
Taverner approved. She didn’t begrudge a younger generation the prizes her own had won for them. There was no sense fighting the same battles twice.
Her apprenticeship had been served in the fag-end of the Cold War, and it sometimes felt like that was the easy part. The Service had a long and honourable tradition of women dying behind enemy lines, but was less enthusiastic about placing them behind important desks. Taverner—Lady Di everywhere but to her face—had done her best to shake that particular tree, and if she’d been told ten yea
rs ago that a woman would be running the Service within the decade, she’d have assumed she’d be the woman in question.
History, though, had a way of throwing spanners in every direction. With Charles Partner’s death had come a feeling that new winds were blowing down the Service’s corridors; that a fresh outlook was required. ‘Troubled times’ was the recurring phrase. A safe pair of hands was needed, which turned out to belong to Ingrid Tearney. The fact that Tearney was a woman would have been a soothing balm to Taverner, if it hadn’t been a severe irritant instead.
Still, it was progress. It would have felt more like progress if it hadn’t involved someone else, but it was progress. And she, Taverner, was Second Desk, even if the new dispensation involved there being several Second Desks; and her team had spring-sunshine lighting and ergonomic chairs, and that was fine too. Because they also had young men with rucksack-bombs on tube trains. Anything that helped them do their jobs was fine by Taverner.
This morning, they also had an execution in progress.
The link had appeared on a BBC blog around 4 a.m., its accompanying message brief but effective: we cut his head off forty-eight hours. Unpunctuated. Short. Radical groups, especially your religious types, tended to sermonize: spawn of Satan, eternal fire, et cetera. That this wasn’t the case made it more disturbing. A hoax would have had claptrap attached.
And now, like all successful media events, it was playing on every screen in sight. Would be playing on every screen in the country, in fact: in homes and offices; above treadmills in gyms; on palm-pilots and iPhones; on the back seats of black cabs. And all round the globe, people would be catching up with it at the different times of their day, and their first reaction would be the same as that of the team on the hub: that this couldn’t be happening in Britain. Other parts of the world boasted outlaw lands aplenty. Tell your average Western citizen that they played polo with human heads in Kazakhstan, and you’d get a nod. Yeah, I heard about that. But even on the wildest of Britain’s inner city estates, they weren’t chopping heads off. Or not on the BBC, anyway.
And it wasn’t going to happen, Taverner told herself. This was not going to happen. Stopping it was going to be the highlight of her career, and would call time on a lousy era for the Service, years of dodgy dossiers, suspicious deaths. It was going to get them out of the doghouse: herself, her superiors, and all the boys and girls on the hub; the hardworking, underpaid guardians of the State who were first in line when duty called, and last to be celebrated when things went right … It wasn’t twelve months since her team had rolled up a terrorist cell that had mapped out a full-scale assault on the capital, and the arrests, the captured weaponry, had made for a two-day wonder. But at the trial, the main question was: how come the cell had thrived for so long? How come it had so nearly achieved its objective?