by Mick Herron
‘Did you look at the files?’
‘Of course not.’
There were ways of telling when someone was lying. The direction their eyes were pointing, for instance: left for memory, right for creation. But Sid’s eyes were directed straight at River’s. Which meant she wasn’t lying, or else was very good at it. They’d done the same courses, after all.
‘Okay, so—’
But she’d gone.
He shook his head, then returned to his laptop. It only took five minutes to confirm that all the files were the same; eternal strings of figures mapping one endless circle. Unless Hobden had taken pi places it had never been before, it seemed unlikely that this was what Regent’s Park had been after. So either Hobden was the kind of total paranoid who flaunted dummy back-ups of his real secrets, or Sid herself had pulled a fast one.
Or something else was going on, and River was in the dark.
That sounded plausible. That sounded entirely likely … Abandoning his sandwich, he headed back to Slough House.
Where there was communal activity again. When he reached the landing, Louisa Guy and Min Harper called him into Ho’s office, as if waiting for someone else to share the news with. ‘They’re showing a new film.’
‘A new one?’
‘A new one.’ This was Ho, in front of his monitor. The others were gathered around him, Sid among them. ‘The first was a loop,’ Ho said. There was no definite inflection to these words, but everyone caught the hidden meaning: the first had been a loop, which he had noticed and nobody else had. ‘Now there’s a new one. Also a loop.’
Stepping to one side, looking round the bodies clustered in his way, River got his first look at the screen.
‘And,’ Struan Loy said, ‘you’re not gunna believe this.’
But River was already believing it, because there it was on Ho’s monitor: same set-up as before, except this time the kid wasn’t wearing a hood. His face was plain to see, and it wasn’t a face they’d been expecting.
Somebody said, ‘It doesn’t mean it’s not Islamists. Who’ve got him, I mean.’
‘Depends on who the kid is.’
‘He’ll turn out to be a squaddie—a Muslim squaddie. Exactly the kind of victim they’re looking for.’
Sid Baker said, ‘He doesn’t look like a squaddie.’
He didn’t, it was true. He looked soft and dreamy. And scared stiff, and even a squaddie can be scared stiff, but it went deeper than that: his features had that untested gloss which is one of the first things squaddies get kicked out of them.
‘That’s why they had him wearing gloves,’ Sid said. ‘They were hiding his colour.’
‘How long’s the loop?’ River asked.
‘Twelve minutes. Twelve and a bit,’ Ho said.
‘Why are they doing that?’
‘A continuous feed would be easier to trace. Less impossible, anyway.’ Ho sighed. He liked people knowing he knew this stuff, but hated having to explain it. ‘You’d get little breaks in transmission every time they switched computer. If their network’s limited to a set number of proxies, that might give us an edge in tracking them.’
‘What’s that in the background?’ Catherine Standish said. River hadn’t noticed she was there.
‘What’s what?’
‘Over his left shoulder.’
Something leant against the wall a couple of yards behind the boy.
‘A piece of wood.’
‘A handle of some sort.’
‘I think it’s an axe,’ Catherine said.
‘Jesus …’
Loy was still worrying away at the kid’s identity. ‘If he’s not a squaddie, maybe he’s a name. Wonder who his parents are?’
‘Anyone missing on the diplomats’ list?’
‘Well, there might be. But it’s not like we’ll be told. Besides, if the kid was a name, the kidnappers would have said. Ups the box-office value.’
Sid said, ‘Okay, say he’s not a squaddie or an embassy snatch. Who is he?’
‘One of their own who they think’s been turned.’
‘Or they caught him with a tart.’
‘Or a half of bitter and a jazz mag,’ Loy put in.
River said, ‘Unless he’s not.’
‘Meaning what?’
‘Unless he’s some random kid who happened to be the right colour.’
Ho said, ‘He look the right colour to you?’
Sid said, ‘Depends on who’s got him. That’s your point, right?’
River nodded.
Ho said, ‘Didn’t we cover this? Swords of the Desert, Wrath of Allah. Doesn’t matter what they call themselves. They’re Al Qaeda.’
‘Unless they’re not,’ River said.
Without fanfare, Jackson Lamb appeared among them.
He stared at the screen a full fifteen seconds, then said, ‘He’s Pakistani.’
Sid said, ‘Or Indian or Sri Lankan or—’
Lamb said, flatly, ‘He’s Pakistani.’
‘Do we have a name?’ River asked.
‘Fuck should I know? But it’s not Al Qaeda’s got him, is it?’
That he’d been about to say something similar didn’t stop River from countering this. ‘Doesn’t rule it out.’
‘Besides,’ Ho said. ‘Who else? Chopping a kid’s head off on prime-time? Nobody does that except—’
‘Idiots,’ said Lamb. ‘You’re all idiots.’
His slow gaze took them all in: River, Sid and Ho; Min Harper and Louisa Guy; Struan Loy and Kay White; Catherine Standish, on whom he seemed to focus with particular disdain. ‘It’s on the table now. Don’t you get it? They cut heads off, so can we. That’s the masterplan behind this piece of theatre. Somebody somewhere will be using the words fight fire with fire. Some other dickhead’ll be saying that what works in Karachi works just as well in Birmingham.’ He caught Loy’s mouth about to open. ‘Or wherever.’ Loy closed it. ‘Trust me, he’s Pakistani, because that’s the average numpty’s shorthand for Muslim. And whoever’s strapped him to that chair’s not Al Qaeda. They’ve strapped him to that chair because he’s Al Qaeda, or’ll do nicely until the real thing comes along. These aren’t Islamic fuckwits waging war on Satan’s poodle. They’re home-grown fuckwits who think they’re taking it back to the enemy.’
Nobody spoke.
‘I’m disappointed. Nobody think I’m off the wall?’
River would have pulled his own tongue out sooner than tell him he’d had the same thoughts. ‘If you’re right, why haven’t they said so? Why mask him until now?’
‘That’s the way I’d do it,’ Lamb said. ‘If I wanted maximum attention. I’d start off letting everybody think they knew what was happening. So by the time I got around to explaining the real deal, everyone would already have an opinion.’
And he was right, thought River. The fat bastard was probably right. Everywhere, everybody would be doing what Lamb had said: reconfiguring their earlier position that this was Islamist extremism. And he wondered how many of them would experience a brief hiccup before civilized outrage reasserted itself; a moment in which the thought would intrude that this foul threat, if neither fair nor just, was at least some kind of balancing.
Catherine said, ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ and left.
Lamb said, ‘Speaking of which, I assume this little gathering means you’ve all finished your current assignments? Because I want hard-copy updates by three. Along with a ten-bullet explanation of precisely why it’s crucial we get a six-month extension on each of them.’ He looked round.
Nobody blinked. ‘Good. Because we don’t want to end up credit-crunched for looking like a bunch of useless tossers, do we?’
On Ho’s monitor, the slightest of flickers indicated that the loop had come to an end and the reel was beginning again. The boy’s face was still soft and glossy, but his eyes were shafts into the dark.
‘Where’s Moody, anyway?’ Lamb asked.
But nobody knew, or nobody said.
&nbs
p; Chapter 7
A shag was making its way up and down the Thames, carving out a stretch of river between Hungerford Bridge and Canary Wharf. She didn’t know much about the behaviour of birds—wasn’t one hundred per cent this was a shag—but she suspected that if another turned up there’d be trouble; feathers would fly, and the loser would end up downriver, looking for a quiet life. That was what happened when territory was at stake.
Take this space here: a bench where you could sit with your back to the Globe. Streams of tourists passed every hour, and in either direction fire-jugglers, buskers and itinerant poets jealously guarded their patches; fistfights, even stabbings, resulting from encroachment on another’s turf. Income was at stake. For the shag, food was the prize; for the hustler, tourist silver. But none of them knew the real value of the estate, which was that it was a blank spot. The bench on which Diana Taverner sat was in a twelve-yard corridor of CCTV limbo. It was a small safe cupboard in the open air, and had been reserved for her alone by a foul-looking splash of birdshit running most of its length; a revolting mess ensuring that even the weariest tourist would look elsewhere to rest his bones, though it was, in fact, a plastic transfer.
Unregarded, then, and off the leash, she lit a cigarette, and dragged a lungful of sweet poison into her system. Like most pleasures, this one diminished the more you indulged it. In normal circumstances Lady Di could let a pack last a month, but today, she suspected, she might be setting records.
A weak light fell upon the river. On both banks, the usual noises obtained: the rattle and honk of city traffic; the constant buzz of a million conversations. Way overhead, airliners were stacking up for Heathrow, while nearer to ground level a helicopter discovered a new shortcut between one side of London and the other.
Taverner breathed out smoke which hung in the air two seconds, then broke apart like a daydream. A passing jogger altered course to avoid the drift. Smoking was almost as good a guarantor of privacy as fake birdshit. Though give it another year or two, and it would probably be an arrestable offence.
Her current need for nicotine lay in the fact that she wasn’t long out of the day’s third meeting: this one with Limitations, formerly Steering & Oversight. It wasn’t clear whether a sense of humour lay beneath the rebranding. Limitations was a cross between an Oxbridge MCR and a railway platform: a collection of chinless wonders, with a sprinkling of field-hardened veterans. You had more chance of reaching a consensus with a vox pop on Marmite. The suits hated operations because operations cost money; the field guys loved them, because the best produced pure gold. To outward appearances Taverner was a suit, but her heart belonged with the field guys, the handlers. Besides, if you removed operations from the curriculum, security didn’t amount to more than putting on a peaked cap and a shiny badge. As far as the war on terror went, you might as well start digging trenches, and handing out tin hats.
The folders she’d brought to this particular meeting were all the same buff-colour; had all been time-stamped fifteen minutes previously; were all logo-ed Mozart, this year’s Grade-A classification. They’d made their way round the table even faster than the pastries.
For a few moments there was near-silence.
At length, a suit piped up. ‘You’re quite sure about this?’
‘Of course.’
‘Humint?’
A snort. The vets loved it when the footlights crowd slipped in a tradecraft term.
‘Human intelligence,’ she said. ‘Yes.’
‘And this Albion crew—’
Somebody else said, ‘Could we do this by the numbers, please?’
General clearing of throats, shuffling of papers.
Tradition decreed that Limitations gatherings were minuted, regardless of whether the session was designated open, and thus recorded, or closed, and thus officially not recorded. So by the numbers it was: date, time, those attending. In the chair, Leonard Bradley of Westminster Parish. In the hot seat, Lady Di. Not that anyone called her that.
‘For those who don’t know, Ms Tearney, Ingrid, is in Washington this week, or would of course be here. We’re grateful to Diana for stepping into her shoes, but then we all know how capable a Second she is. Diana.’
‘Thank you, Leonard. Good morning, everyone.’ Replies were murmured. She tapped her folder. ‘The first anyone knew of this, it popped up on a BBC blog at 4.22 a.m.’
‘I hate to interrupt,’ a suit said.
The almost audible rolling of multiple pairs of eyes suggested that this wasn’t entirely true.
‘Can’t such entries be traced via, ah, I believe they’re called—’
Diana Taverner said: ‘If we had a trace, we wouldn’t need this meeting. We’d have wrapped the whole thing up before Today aired.’
Bradley made a hand gesture that would have looked more complete if he’d been brandishing a pipe. ‘Perhaps we could let Diana finish. Or even start.’
She said: ‘Hassan Ahmed. Born Birmingham, 1990. His grandparents arrived from Islamabad in the early seventies. His grandfather ran a soft furnishings business which his father took over when the old man retired. Hassan is the youngest of four, in his second year at Leeds University. Business Studies. Shares a flat with three other students, but by all accounts, he’s a shy kid. No girlfriend known, or boyfriend either. His tutor couldn’t pick him out from a crowd. He belongs to a student society calls itself the Last Laugh, for budding stand-up comedians, but nobody there has much to say about him. He’s clearly not lighting fires.’
She paused to take a sip of water.
‘He’s Muslim, but only nominally. Before university, he was a regular attender at his local mosque, which is not—and never has been—on a watch list. But his homelife is secular, and his father in particular seems to regard the mosque as a networking opportunity. They don’t use Urdu at home, and it’s not clear Hassan speaks it. There’s no record of his having contact with extreme influences, nor has he been clocked on demos or marches. His name popped up on a petition objecting to the 21/7 convictions, but it’s possible it was hijacked. And even if it wasn’t, it might just mean he happened to be there when the petition went round.’
When she replaced the glass on its coaster, she took care to position it dead centre.
‘It’s a brief profile, and we all know that moderate backgrounds can produce blazing extremists, but there’s absolutely nothing on Hassan to suggest that he’s anything other than what he seems to be. A British Asian studying for a degree. Either way, we do know he was taken late last night on his way home from the comedy club. He was snatched in a back lane not far from his flat, taking a shortcut from where he’d parked his car. The snatchers—’
‘He drives a car?’ somebody asked.
‘It was a present from his father,’ Taverner said.
She waited, but that seemed to satisfy him.
‘The snatchers call themselves the Voice of Albion.’
Now Leonard Bradley leant forward, his face creasing into that mask of perplexity he liked to wear when about to pick holes in somebody’s case. ‘You’ll forgive me—’
She waved him ahead, like a driver might a friendly bus.
‘I thought there’d been no actual contact with these snatchers. But you’ve identified them already? That’s smart work. Very smart.’
One or two murmurs of assent met this.
Diana Taverner said, ‘There’s been no contact, no. That’s to say, they’ve not made any demands or identified themselves in relation to this particular, ah, episode.’
‘But you’ve been keeping tabs on them.’
‘That’s well within our remit, I think you’d agree.’
‘Absolutely. Absolutely. Couldn’t agree more.’
Down the table, Roger Barrowby made a clucking noise with his tongue.
Barrowby was usually called the Barrowboy, a nickname he detested and pretended to revel in. He had thinning sandy hair, a prominent chin, and a habit of pressing the tip of a finger to its central dimple, as if
trying to encourage it back into his jaw. But he appeared to have done something about his dandruff.
‘Roger!’ Leonard Bradley’s tone couldn’t have sounded heartier at a barbecue. ‘You have an interjection? An objection?’ You could have cut the bonhomie with a knife. Taverner wondered why they hated each other.
‘An observation, Len. Merely an observation.’
‘Care to share?’
Barrowby said, ‘Bloody lucky, that’s all. We have a watching brief on a bunch of original thinkers, just as they’re attempting a coup? I mean, how often does that happen?’
Despite herself, Taverner smiled at ‘original thinkers’.
Bradley said, ‘We could argue about gift horses and dental plans. But perhaps Diana has a view?’
‘Watching brief is pitching it high,’ Diana said. ‘They’re one of seventeen groups on the radar right now, which is also a bit high, but there’ve been murmurs something like this was on the horizon. And—’
‘Excuse me?’
Barrowby again.
‘Murmurs?’
She’d have answered, but knew there was no way this was getting past the assembled ex-handlers, who provided a chorus:
‘Not our remit, Roger.’
‘Not even close.’
‘Intelligence gathering’s outside the sphere of this committee.’
‘Of course,’ Barrowby agreed. ‘But if we’re paying for supper, we get to glance at the menu, surely?’
‘We’ll check the books when the financial year closes,’ somebody else said. ‘But how Operations shells out the booty is their game.’
Bradley was nodding. ‘We get to taste the sausages, Roger,’ he said, ‘if you’ll allow me to pursue your metaphor. But we don’t get to watch them being made.’