Spook Street

by Mick Herron

  You never asked where Frank got his information. You simply knew he had a network, the ghostly remnant of his CIA connections. Someone, somewhere, had picked up a phone when Bertrand’s passport was flagged at border control. But this in turn meant the Lockhead identity was blown . . .

  These thoughts winking into place in the time it took him to say, “I’m there.”

  He ended the call. No point waiting for instructions. Life at Les Arbres had taught him to grasp what needed doing, which here meant reaching St. Pancras before the action moved on. If Bertrand’s passport was flagged, there’d be security waiting. And of all the things that couldn’t be allowed to happen, Bertrand falling into the hands of MI5 ranked way up high.

  What he’d been doing on the Eurostar—where he’d been and why—could stay on the burner for now. What Patrice needed was a car.

  Luckily, there were a number of these in the immediate area.

  River banged his head on the roof when the car struck, then again on the blonde’s head when she crashed into him. Their own car—not his, but he was identifying with it in the circumstances—had been shunted sideways into a set of railings, and the attacking vehicle had bounced back some yards and was stationary in the middle of the road, blocking traffic. He couldn’t smell smoke, but the air had turned thick with damaged-car smells: petrol and scraped metal.

  The view in front of him was bendy and improbable. It took a moment to understand that the airbag had deployed.

  He raised a hand in front of his eyes, and the gesture took forever. Not concussed, but inside a bubble of time that wouldn’t allow free movement. His hand looked like nothing he recognised. For a moment he was remembering a rabbit dead on a counter, but there was no clear reason for recalling this, and the next instant he wasn’t. His hand was just his hand. His head hurt, but he wasn’t concussed.

  The driver gave a groan, muffled by the airbag. The woman, meanwhile, pulled herself upright and shook her head. Her perfect face was going to have one hell of a bruise, supposing they lived through the next few minutes.

  Someone was getting out of the enemy car.

  The blonde’s jacket had fallen open, and River could see her sidearm holster, her Heckler & Koch: he had a hand to its grip before her own locked round his wrist and she snarled, not words but angry sounds. River pulled back, and tried to open his door, but it was jammed shut by the railings. The blonde was easing her gun free in a clumsy, mechanical way. “Devon,” she said. Concussed. Or geographically challenged. And his door still wasn’t opening.

  But the door on the blonde’s side was. A young man peered in, dark-featured, his leather jacket streaky with rain, and River knew him—had seen his photograph—and maybe the young man knew him too, because for a second his face creased into a series of shapes: recognition, puzzlement, disappointment. Then it became a cipher again, right at the moment the blonde woman released her gun at last and pointed it at him.

  “Step back,” she said. “Then get on the ground.”

  Her voice was impressively firm.

  The young man wasn’t paying attention, though. He was staring at River.

  The blonde released her seat belt and leaned towards the open door, her gun inches from the man’s face. “Now!”

  He stepped back, hands raised, but no higher than his shoulders.

  The woman climbed out of the car.

  •••

  Guns didn’t worry Patrice much, or not ones he could see, anyway. Ones he could see were there for effect; they were for pointing while people shouted, and they always shouted the same thing: hands up, on the ground, assume the position. But there was no fallback. The people who wanted you to lie on the ground weren’t going to shoot you if you didn’t, because if they were the type to shoot you, they wouldn’t be telling you to lie on the ground. They’d be shooting you.

  So the woman wasn’t a bother, but the man was. Because he wasn’t Bertrand, but in that first moment, Patrice thought he was: they had the same features, almost; the same hair. Eyes. Something was going on; crawling under the skin, like a worm inside an apple.

  The sky growled, and rain kept raining.

  From somewhere not far away, a siren wailed.

  The woman was out of the car now; had her feet planted firmly the correct distance apart, arms outstretched, her left hand steadying her right wrist. Which might mean she’d used guns before, or just that she’d seen some movies.

  “I told you to get on the ground.”

  “What’s going on here?”

  Patrice didn’t need to turn to know this was a civilian.

  Without taking her eyes off Patrice, the woman said, “Sir, I need you to get back in your car. Everything’s under control.”

  “Are you sure about that?” Patrice asked.

  “Shut up. And get on the ground.” Then, to the interfering stranger, she repeated, “Sir, get back in your car!”

  “I’m going to call the police.”

  “Fine. Do that. From your car.”

  Patrice said, “This is getting complicated. You’ve got civilians butting in. The rain makes things worse. And the police are going to have trouble getting through all this traffic.”

  “I told you to get on the ground.”

  “It’s wet. And I need to talk to your prisoner. He is your prisoner, right?”

  Whether he was or not, he was emerging from the car too, one hand on the roof to steady himself: it was surprising, Patrice thought, how shook up the human body could be by something as trivial as a car wreck. But it all depended on whether you were expecting it or not.

  “On. The. Ground.”

  The woman again, trying for the air of someone who didn’t intend repeating herself, though, as Patrice could have pointed out, she’d already done so several times, and hadn’t shot him yet.

  He took a step nearer, hands still at shoulder height. From behind him a voice, the same one as before, shouted something about the police, though most of his words were washed away by the noise of rain on car roofs. There was a pleasant hissing sound, too, from the engine of the car Patrice had stolen, which now required medical attention. On the pavements umbrellas huddled together in protective formation. It looked like a musical was about to break out.

  The woman said, “I’m not going to—”

  And at the same moment, the man said, “Patrice.”

  “—tell you again.”

  “Patrice.”

  This from behind her, the man she knew as Adam Lockhead, and a puzzle-piece slotted into place: they knew each other; this was a rescue. She moved to one side so she could cover both. Devon was still in the car. Emma hoped he wasn’t hurt, because she could really use back-up.

  That spark fizzed in her brain again, you’re gunna need a pair of tweezers and a sieve, and it was Jackson Lamb, the grubby spook who smelled like booze and fags and a million sins. And who’d misidentified a body as River Cartwright, because this was him here now, a mole on his lip.

  And still the car-crash man wasn’t lying down; had in fact moved closer. If he thought she wouldn’t shoot, he was dead wrong, and might any moment just be dead, because this was three scant days since the Westacres bomb had killed all those kids, and if it wasn’t precisely open season on wrongdoers, the tabloids wouldn’t be making a fuss.

  “Patrice? I’m just back from Les Arbres.”

  “Shut up,” she said, her eyes on Patrice. “And get back in the car.”

  “It burned down, Patrice. There’s nothing there any more.”

  “I know,” said Patrice, and Emma opened her mouth to tell him one last time to get on the ground before she shot him, and never mind this was probably being uploaded to YouTube as she spoke—except she didn’t speak, because Patrice wasn’t a yard away, he was touching distance, and her outstretched arms were pointing skywards. The gun fired, and there was mayhe
m.

  On the pavements, umbrellas scattered. On the roads, cars moved again, despite having nowhere to go.

  The gun was no longer hers. Patrice had it, and was pointing it at her face.

  If Patrice said anything, River thought—if he threw her words back at her, get on the ground—it would feel safer, somehow; as if control had shifted, but was still an issue.

  As it was, he thought Patrice was about to shoot the woman dead.

  Partly it was the gunshot, still echoing overhead. A loose bullet rips a hole in normality, through which more violence might slip.

  He said, “Patrice?” again, making it a question. “Patrice? You don’t want to do anything foolish now.”

  Given that Patrice’s most recent exploit had involved engineering a car-smash on a busy London road, this didn’t carry as much weight as River might have hoped. So he stepped forward and stretched an arm out in front of the woman. Speaking of foolish things: this would stop a bullet like the butter stops a knife.

  He said, “It’s not what Yevgeny would want.”

  “. . . Who are you?”

  “Tell him to put the gun down. The nasty squad’ll be here any second.” This was the blonde, sounding preternaturally calm. Rain had plastered her hair to her skull: River knew women for whom that alone would cause hysterics, forget the car crash and the gun.

  But her intervention wasn’t helping.

  “Shut up,” he told her. Then, to Patrice, “She’s right, though. You’ve got less than a minute.”

  “Twenty seconds,” she said. “Max.”

  Which, thought River, wasn’t as comforting as she appeared to think—once the police arrived, the last place you wanted to be was next to anyone holding a gun. For a force that prided itself on being unarmed, the Met had racked up an impressive number of civilian casualties lately. True, you had to include all the unshot suspects to get a fair picture, but that was best done on the sidelines, not in open range.

  And he really wanted to hear Patrice’s story before the pair of them were cut down in the street.

  “Who are you?” Patrice repeated.

  “Adam Lockhead,” River said.

  The name cut a groove through Patrice’s expression. “No. Where’s Bertrand? And why . . . ”

  Sirens nearly here. Though it was the ones you didn’t hear you had to worry about: they’d be flattening themselves behind car cover; sighting on the three of them from somewhere overhead.

  The same thought must have struck Patrice. He lowered the gun. “Okay. We’re leaving.”

  “We?” the blonde woman said, and at the same moment Patrice—his motion so fluid, he might have been an eel passing through water—jabbed her in the throat with his free hand. She dropped without making a sound. That would come later.

  River swung a punch, which for some reason hit Patrice not on the side of the head, which was where he’d been aiming, but in his open palm, which closed round River’s fist and squeezed so hard he felt it in his toes.

  Patrice spoke so calmly he might have been choosing fruit. “We. You and me. Or I’ll kill you here.”

  Which sounded like he was reserving the option to do this elsewhere later, but River didn’t see he had a choice.

  “There,” Patrice said, pointing through the blocked traffic towards a narrow street where a crowd still loitered—though they scattered when Patrice fired a shot over their heads.

  Then he found himself running, Patrice on his heels, and behind them the noise grew muted: the keening of sirens, pulsing through the rain; the blaring of the traffic, still trying to work out what had happened; and the gasping of a blonde woman on her knees in the road, learning the hard way how to breathe again.

  Some while ago, Shirley had constructed a wall chart based on those signs you see on entrances to building sites: We have gone __ days without an accident. Hers read: We have gone __ days without Ho being a dick, and she’d made a number-card to slot into the empty space. One side of it read “0.” So did the other. It amused her to swap it round occasionally. It was the little things made office life bearable.

  She did this now before slumping into her chair. It was past home-time—and the slow horses didn’t so much keep office hours as nurture and cherish them—but today wasn’t ordinary, and no one was ready to leave. There was a reason she had joined the Service, and if much of the original impulse had been smothered under Jackson Lamb’s tutelage, it could yet be sparked into life by the feeling that something big was happening; something that promised action, and excluded her.

  Like this, for instance—the Google alerts popping into her inbox.

  “Are you seeing this?” she asked.

  She was talking to Marcus. Louisa was still there—her feet in a washing-up bowl, like a character in a ’70s sit-com—but her eyes were closed and she didn’t respond. Nor did Marcus, immediately. He was intent on his monitor, and Shirley could tell by his scowl was either regretting a poor judgement call at an online casino or looking at his bank account. Lately, Marcus had been having money troubles—that was putting it mildly. Lately, Marcus and money had been undergoing a trial separation. And things didn’t look good for them. Before long, Shirley guessed, money was going to be heading out the door for good; was going to walk out on Marcus, and leave him all alone in the world, except for his wife and kids.

  And he persisted in thinking she was the one with problems.

  “Seeing what?” he said, without looking up.

  Her alerts included “armed terrorist London.”

  “YouTube,” she said. “Holy fuck! Is that River?”

  She clicked and played it again. It was a grainy image, made grainier by rainfall: someone’s phone had captured it at a junction on Pentonville Road, and it showed the aftermath of a collision. One car had shunted another into a set of railings, and sat sideways, steam pumping from its bonnet. A man was leaning into the impact vehicle: checking they were okay, you’d have thought, except he suddenly raised his hands and backed up as a gun came into view.

  “When did this appear?”

  Louisa was behind her now, barefoot, watching her screen.

  “Couple of minutes.”

  The gun was attached to a blonde woman, who emerged from the car still pointing it, followed by—

  “There, see? Is that River?”

  —a man who didn’t appear to be armed. But it wasn’t clear whose side he was on, because the woman seemed keen to keep him within the ambit of her weapon.

  “It might be,” said Marcus, who’d come to join them. “He’s obviously pissed her off.”

  But it was too fuzzy to be sure. The characters kept fading in and out of focus, in tune to the excitement of whoever’d been wielding the phone.

  And then something happened so quickly, none of them could tell what it was: the first man made a move, and the gun went off. There was a communal scream from an invisible audience, and the image turned first skywards, and then became a collage of pavement and moving feet, while background voices swore, and asked each other what they’d just seen.

  The clip ended.

  “Play it again,” said Louisa. “Freeze it on River.”

  They watched the first twenty seconds again, leaning closer when Shirley hit pause.

  The frozen rain blurred the three figures to dark outlines.

  Louisa said, “Yes. Yes, I think it is.”

  Shirley clicked on play, and there was movement again, and a gunshot, streetlit rain, and pavements, and stampeding feet.

  “When did this happen?” Louisa said.

  “Not long ago,” Shirley said. “Fifteen minutes?”

  “Any text?”

  Shirley scrolled down to the helpful caption: “Holy fucking shit!” it read, followed by a screed of expert online thought:

  fella with a gun innit

  terrori
sts cant drive strait lol

  OMG what is hapening to London!!!

  “That was Pentonville Road?” Louisa asked, hobbling to her chair and stooping for her socks.

  “You seriously heading out there?”

  “I’m bruised, not crippled,” she snapped, but winced as she padded her feet dry with a tissue.

  Marcus shrugged. “Suit yourself. But it’s still pouring.”

  Shirley was watching the film again. “So he buggered off to France for the day, and soon as he’s back he’s in the middle of this shit? How come he gets all the fun?”

  Marcus said, “Can you get this picture any clearer?”

  “No. But I’m pretty sure it’s River.”

  “It’s the other one I’m looking at.” Marcus tapped a finger against the screen. “I think he’s the joker from this afternoon.”

  They both looked up, but Louisa had already left.

  “Shall we go with?” Shirley said.

  “She’ll be fine. Place’ll be crawling with cops.”

  Shirley hadn’t been so much worried about Louisa’s welfare as anxious not to miss anything. But if there were cops, it meant the action was already elsewhere. General rule of thumb was, the police turned up afterwards.

  She said, “Coe was just with Lamb, wasn’t he?”

  “I think I heard him coming back down.”

  “I’m gunna have a word,” she said. “I wanna know what they were talking about.”

  Sam Chapman said, “So now what?”

  “Another drink?”

  “That’s your answer?”

  “Do you have a better one?”

  Bad Sam sighed, and pushed his glass across the desktop.

  JK Coe had left the room at a nod from Lamb. Rain still beat on the windows, its percussive onslaught muffling thought. Elsewhere in the city, in the slowly filling pubs, the weather had become the main topic of conversation, the Westacres bombing fading into the background like a persistent hangover; something that had to be lived with, but didn’t need constant discussion. London always overcame attempts to cow its spirit. Not even 7/7 had brought the city to a standstill. Though, as Lamb liked to point out, the anniversary two-minute silences did slow it down a bit.