by Mick Herron
‘So how’s the funding work when it’s off the books?’
Catherine thought for a moment. ‘I once heard about an op where a safe house was kitted out. In Walsall, I think. All the utilities, council tax, everything was on standing order. But the house didn’t exist. The money went from Budgeting into a property account, which then funded the op.’
‘Tracking that,’ Ho said, ‘would take forever.’
‘No, but,’ Louisa said. She turned to Catherine. ‘That safe house never existed. But we know one that does, don’t we?’
‘Roupell Street,’ Min said.
They looked at Ho.
‘I’m on it.’
Curly said, ‘We need to get out of the city.’
‘We should dump the car. Walk away,’ Larry said.
He’d been bottling this up, Curly could tell. Until the words felt like a winning argument: This is what we should do, because I just said it was.
‘We killed a spook,’ he said.
‘You killed him.’
‘He’s dead, you were there. You want to argue details?’
‘In a court of law—’
‘You what? You fucking what?’
‘Because—’
‘You think we’ll end up in court, you’re more of a twat than those jeans make you look.’
Larry said, ‘What’s wrong with them?’
‘We killed a spook. You think they’ll arrest us?’
‘What you saying?’
‘They will shoot. Us. Dead. End of. No arrest, no trial, no weaselly words about how you only watched while I cut his head off.’ Saying the words, he could feel the blood pulse through his cutting arm. It was like having an erection, right to his fingertips. ‘A pair of bullets each. Bam bam. Double tap.’
Larry was shaking.
‘So don’t even think about court. We’re not going to court. Get it?’
Larry gave no response.
‘Get it?’
‘I get it.’
‘Good.’ And now he let Larry off the hook: ‘But it’s not gunna happen anyway. We’re not getting caught.’
‘We had a spy with us. You think—’
‘I know he was a spy. That doesn’t mean we’re gunna get caught. You think we’re alone in this? We’re not. The people are on our side. You think they’re gunna turn their backs on us?’
Larry said, ‘Maybe not.’
‘Maybe not. Maybe not. If that’s all you believe, you should’ve just sat in the pub, complaining about the country being taken away from us. Another fucking whiner with no balls.’
‘I’m here. I’m not all noise. You know that.’
‘Yeah, right.’ Curly wanted to say more, to explain to Larry what the future held: that they’d be heroes, outlaws, Robin Hoods. Symbols of the struggle against Islam. And when the war started, leaders of the people. But he didn’t, because Larry didn’t have it in him. Larry thought he was a soldier, but he was just another coward; happy to talk, scared to walk. No point talking to him about a future that was Curly’s alone.
Which Larry didn’t know yet, but he’d find out soon.
But the Roupell Street house led nowhere.
‘Civil Service property since the fifties,’ Ho said, scanning records he’d pulled onscreen. ‘Treasury first, then something called “collateral purposes”.’
‘Safe house,’ Catherine said.
‘And now it’s listed under Sales.’
‘Which means exactly what it sounds like.’ Catherine shook her head. ‘There’ll be no papertrail. Footprint, sorry. All Taverner had to do was check the sales portfolio for an empty property, and use that.’
‘So they were squatting,’ Min said.
‘Basically.’
‘They’d have had a shock if a potential buyer turned up.’
‘In this climate?’
‘Okay, that takes us nowhere. So where are we?’ Louisa said.
‘Twiddling thumbs,’ Ho said. ‘The kid’s toast.’
‘Shut up,’ Catherine snapped.
Ho eyed her warily.
‘Get this through your head. Until we know he’s dead, we keep looking. We’ve no idea what their plan is. They might want to keep to the original timetable because it’s, I don’t know, Hitler’s birthday or something. It might matter to them. We might still have time.’
Ho opened his mouth as if to reveal when Hitler’s birthday was, but thought better of it.
Louisa said, ‘None of us are giving up.’
Their breakfasts arrived: three platefuls of the full English; one mushroom omelette. Ho shifted his laptop on to his knees, then scooped a forkful of beans into his mouth.
‘Were you taught to eat?’ Louisa said. ‘Or is it still a learning process?’
Chewing rapidly Ho nodded at her, as if to indicate that a smart reply was but minutes away.
Min said, ‘Okay, they got the house for free. They’d still need money. For transport if nothing else.’
‘They might have stolen it.’
‘With a kidnap victim? Too risky.’
‘They might have used their own wheels.’
‘Black was a pro. He’d have wanted fresh.’
Catherine agreed.
‘And paid with cash,’ said Min.
‘Most likely,’ agreed Louisa.
‘And if they used cash, it’s history.’
Catherine cut her omelette into uniform slices. The others watched, fascinated.
When she’d finished, she ate two pieces in silence, then took a sip of coffee. She said, ‘Not necessarily. Black was using a fake name. When you’re establishing a cover, one of the first things you go for is a credit card. It’s easy to do. And once you’ve got it, why not use it? It adds verisimilitude.’
‘Adds what?’ Ho said.
Catherine gave him a look
Min said, ‘Sounds good, but where does it take us? We don’t know what name he was using.’
‘Didn’t Lamb check his pockets? For a wallet?’
‘I think he’d have said if he had. On account of it being, you know. A clue.’
‘Let’s step back,’ Louisa suggested. ‘You’re running an op. What do you need?’
‘A legend,’ Ho said.
‘With at least three back-ups.’
‘Back-ups?’
Catherine said: ‘Like a reference on a CV. At least two contact numbers, or addresses, where if anyone comes checking, they’ll find confirmation you’re who you say you are.’
‘And how’s that work when you’re off the books?’
‘You go freelance.’
They thought about it.
‘It’s getting expensive.’
‘Slush fund,’ Louisa said.
‘That’s all tight as hell since the Miro Weiss business.’
Which was when a quarter of a billion pounds, slated for reconstruction work in Iraq, had gone walkabout.
‘Okay, how’d you do it on the cheap?’
‘Friends.’
‘Nobody’s got friends that good,’ Ho objected.
‘Not in your world,’ Louisa agreed. ‘But there must be people owe Taverner a favour. And I mean, what are we talking? You get a phone call from some little England nut, asking if you can vouch for whatever Black was calling himself? Takes two minutes to say yes.’
Catherine said, ‘No. You need a dedicated phone line, and you need to be in character when it rings, 24/7. On the books, this stuff is handled via the Queens. The system tells them, when they get a caller, who they’re supposed to be.’
Min reminded himself that Catherine Standish had been Charles Partner’s Girl Friday. Partner had been before Min’s time, but he was pretty much a legend himself.
He said, ‘Well—’ but got no further.
‘Oh fuck,’ Catherine said.
The first time any of them had heard her say that.
‘I think I know what they did.’
Curly said, ‘Thought we were heading out of the city.’
He didn’t seem to be. They’d passed another mosque, unless they were going in circles, and it was the same one.
‘How big’s this fucking place anyway?’
‘London?’ Larry said. ‘Pretty big.’
Curly glanced across, but he wasn’t taking the piss. He looked like he was hanging on by his fingernails, frankly.
Like someone a policeman would stop, to check he wasn’t going to stroke out at the wheel.
‘Thought you were following the signs.’
‘I thought you were pointing them out to me.’
‘Is there a map anywhere?’ Then answered his own question, pulling open the glovebox, finding nothing but hire-agreement papers and a couple of manuals.
‘There’s that,’ Larry said.
‘What?’
‘That.’ He pointed.
The penny dropped.
Curly said, ‘Okay. Now we’re getting somewhere.’
Letting himself through the door, River paused. A dim glow from the third floor reached him like a ghostly presence, but he heard nothing. Which might mean he was alone. Or that anyone else in the building was being very quiet.
Well, he could hang by the back door wondering. Or go up and find out.
He took the first set of stairs slowly, part wary, part weary. His body was feeling the hours it had put in: surges of adrenalin; shocking sights. It took it out of you. It’s not whether you can cope with the things that happen. The O.B.’s words. It’s whether you cope afterwards, once they’ve happened. Once they’re over.
But this wasn’t over. And he experienced another rush at the thought of what Taverner had done to him.
The second flight came easier; by the time he was on the third he was almost hoping there’d be someone here—one of the cleaners; one of the Dogs. A few hours ago, he’d gone quietly. This time he wouldn’t.
But there was nobody there but Jed Moody, cold and dead on the landing.
Passing him, River went up to Lamb’s office. A shoebox sat on the desk, as Lamb had promised. River did as instructed, then carried the box downstairs.
Back on Moody’s landing, he knelt by the body. He supposed he ought to care that the man was dead, but what he mostly felt was the strangeness of it; that Moody, like River, had been a counter in a boardgame played by other people. Only for Moody, the game was over. Snakes and ladders were one thing. A staircase was deadlier.
He’d had a gun, though, and needn’t have been the one removed from the board. If he’d been prepared to use it, maybe River would be crouching next to a dead Min Harper or Louisa Guy, and Moody would have been in the wind, Lamb’s flight fund in his pocket.
But Moody hadn’t wanted to shoot them, so maybe there was loyalty between slow horses after all. They weren’t friends, or hadn’t been friendly, before this long night started. But Moody hadn’t been able to bring himself to shoot them.
Shoot another one, anyway. Though shooting Sid had been an accident.
For one reason or the other, River allowed Moody another second’s peace.
Then he stripped the corpse.
‘Legends never die,’ Catherine said. ‘They wouldn’t be legends otherwise. When a joe’s deep cover, long-term, they get the works. Passport, birth certificate, everything. Credit cards, library cards, all the stuff you fill your wallet with.’
‘Sure.’
‘We know that.’
‘And it costs.’
Ho rolled his eyes. He’d been involved in more conversation this morning than the past two months, and it was already sounding familiar. ‘We established that. Your point?’
‘They do it on the cheap.’
‘Thank you, superbrain. So they what, picked up some knock-off ID down the market? Maybe Oxfam—’
‘Shut up, Ho.’
‘Yeah, shut up, Ho. How do you mean on the cheap, Catherine?’
She said, ‘They use one that already exists. Did Black ever go undercover?’
This was more like it. Now they had guidance.
‘Turn left in one hundred yards.’
Larry said, ‘She’s that posh bird.’
‘They’re all posh birds.’
‘You know the one I mean.’
‘You know something? I don’t. I really don’t. And I really don’t care.’
It was five, which meant they’d been lost for an hour, and there was no noise from the boot. Curly wondered if the Paki had fallen asleep, or died: from a heart attack or something. Like cheating the hangman. He wondered what difference it would make if they had to do it with him already dead, and decided: not so much. Moe had been dead, and taking his head off had been a serious business. The world would sit up and take notice, either way.
He laughed, a sudden sharp bark that startled Larry, who veered and nearly clipped a car on the verge … Little things mattered. Clip a car, trigger an alarm, get stopped by a policeman up the road: step out of the vehicle, sir, and what’s that on the back seat?
And what’s that banging from the boot?
But Larry recovered, and there was no sideswipe, no alarm.
‘What’s so funny?’
Curly had forgotten. But the insight remained; that it only took a moment for things to unravel. One mistake could spoil everything.
So forget the deadline. Find somewhere safe, and just do it.
Do it, film it, fade away.
Ho pulled Black’s personnel files, which had been downgraded since he quit, but remained live—in direct opposition to Black’s current status, though Ho didn’t say this aloud. He hadn’t liked Black, but still: they were all slow horses, which seemed to count for something this morning.
‘Is it really that simple to check our records?’
‘Can you see ours that easily?’
‘No,’ he replied to the first question, and ‘Yes’ to the second. If it was that easy, anyone could do it. But for Ho himself, yes, it was a piece of cake.
‘I thought they switched the settings regularly.’
‘They do.’
But since Ho had hacked the security settings rather than the database itself, and left himself a trapdoor, it didn’t matter how often they changed the codes. It was like they fitted new locks every month, but left the door hanging open.
He said: ‘Alan Black. Here we go. He worked embassy surveillance mostly.’
‘Cushy gig.’
‘Any undercover?’
‘Give me a sec!’
‘Sorry.’
‘Take your time.’
‘It’s just, we got the impression you were hot shit.’
Ho glanced up from his laptop to find three pairs of eyes sharing a joke. He said, ‘Yeah, well. Kind of fuck off, all right?’
But it felt sort of cool, all the same. Almost as if they’d called him Clint.
Catherine said, ‘As long as you’re there. How did he end up in Slough House?’
Ho said, ‘He shagged the Venezuelan ambassador’s wife.’
‘It says that?’
‘It jazzes up the language a bit.’
Catherine thought back to Alan Black, who’d lasted six months at Slough House. She didn’t have too clear a memory of him, beyond his slow-burn frustration at having been dead-ended, but that was true of all of them, except maybe Struan Loy. And herself, of course. He’d been overweight, average height, average looks—average personality, really. She couldn’t picture him as a successful adulterer. On the other hand, he hadn’t actually jacked it in; he’d been recruited by Taverner for her deep-cover op. So he’d obviously had something going for him.
Not that it had worked out happily in the end.
‘Okay, here it is.’ Ho looked up. ‘He was holding paper on the name Dermot Radcliffe. Full-dress cover.’
‘If he was working surveillance, why’d he need false ID?’
‘Surveillance can be up close and personal,’ Catherine said.
‘Yeah, tell that to the Venezuelan ambassador.’
Catherine ignored that. ‘And working the embassy crowd, you’d be expected to have papers. You’re on foreign soil, after all.’
‘Best not to use your own name when you’re on the job.’
‘Are you two going to giggle about this all morning?’
‘Sorry.’
Ho said, ‘Okay, we have plastic. We have an account number.’
‘But are they still live?’
Catherine said, ‘Like I say, legends don’t die. They don’t get wiped off the books. If he had any nous, he’d have kept the plastic and all the rest when he left the Park. As a failsafe.’
‘In case he ever needed to be somebody else, you mean.’
‘Or needed to remember what it was like being him,’ Catherine said.
‘Let’s check out Mr Radcliffe’s credit rating, shall we?’ Ho said, his fingers busy on his keyboard.
Hassan?
The voice sliced through the dark.
Hassan!
He knew whose it was. He just didn’t believe it.
Open your eyes, darling.
He didn’t want to.
Hassan was emptying out. The open mic slot in his head had closed down; its spotlight faded to grey. In its place was darkness, and engine noise, and the vibrations of this metal coffin he’d been folded into.
Hassan—open your eyes!
He wasn’t sure he could. Choices were made by other people. Hassan Ahmed no longer had will or ability, and was growing smaller by the minute. Soon there’d be nothing of him left. It would be a relief.
But like it or not, he was being dragged back into the light.
Hassan! Open your eyes! Now!
He didn’t. He couldn’t. He resisted.
But from deep in his darkness, he wondered: Why is Joanna Lumley talking to me?
Chapter 17
There was something different about Catherine Standish. This was what Louisa Guy decided as she watched Ho swing through the virtual jungle, a Second Life Tarzan. There was something different about all of them, probably, but it was Catherine who’d assumed the leader’s role. She’d been the Slough House ghost; shifting papers, tutting about mess, always there but virtually absent. A recovering alcoholic, because this was somehow common knowledge. Something about her spoke of loss; of an element missing. A blown bulb. But it had never before occurred to Louisa to wonder what Catherine must have been like at full wattage. She’d been Charles Partner’s PA, hadn’t she? Christ, that made her Miss Moneypenny.