by Mick Herron
Instead, he had a uniform that was too small, because the last guy in the job had been a midget, plus a rubber torch with a fading battery. And instead of riding shotgun in an armoured limo, he had a nightly trudge up and down half a dozen corridors, calling in every hour on the hour; less to reassure management that the facility was still standing than to prove he was awake and earning his pay. Which was so slightly above minimum wage that if you split the difference, you’d have change from a quid. A job was a job, his mum never left off saying, but flush with the wisdom of nineteen years on the planet, Cal Fenton had found the flaw in this argument: sometimes a job was a pain in the arse. Especially when it was eleven thirty-one, and there were six hours twenty-nine minutes to go before you were out the door.
Speaking of which …
Cal was on ground-level, pacing the facility’s east-side corridor, and the door at its far end was open. Not hanging wide, but not firmly closed … Either someone had opened it since Cal’s last circuit, or Cal hadn’t closed it after his cigarette.
Cal and only Cal, because night shift was a one-man job.
Reaching the door, he pushed it gently. It opened with a creak. Outside was an empty car park bordered by a mesh fence, beyond which a pot-holed road disappeared into the shadow of the West-way. The building opposite used to be a pub, and maybe hoped to be a pub again one day, but for the time being was making do with being an eyesore. Posters for local DJs peeled from its boarded-up windows. After watching for a moment, Cal pulled the door shut. He stood in silence, aware of his heartbeat. But there’d been nobody outside, and there was nobody inside either, himself excepted. Eleven thirty-four. He stepped away from the door and checked the office.
Office. Facility. You could get away with words like that, if you weren’t exposed to the reality.
Because the office was a glorified broom cupboard, and “facility” an up-itself name for a warehouse: windowless brick on ground level, then wood for the second storey, like they’d run out of bricks halfway. It was newer than whatever had stood in the same place previously, but after that, you ran out of compliments. Like the once and future pub across the road, the whole place was basically counting out time until the area hit an upward swing, but that figured. DataLok was a cut-price operation, and what you got was less than what you saw. Especially if what you’d been looking at was the company catalogue.
Cal swung the torch in big, forgiving loops. There was nobody in the office. Least of all a guard dog, which a sign on the main gate warned patrolled the premises 24/7, but the sign came in at $4.99, which was a lot less than a 24-hour guard-dog presence cost.
And then he heard something along the north corridor. A scuffing noise, as if a heel had kicked against the tiles.
Cal’s heart phoned in loud and clear. Lub-dub lub-dub lub-dub. Exactly as normal, only twice as loud and four times as fast.
Twenty-four minutes until his check-in call. Which he could make early, of course, on account of being totally spooked.
And here’s how that conversation would go:
“I think I heard a noise.”
“You think you heard a noise.”
“Yeah, along the corridor. Like there might be someone there. But I haven’t looked to see. Oh, and the door was open, but I might have left it open earlier when I nipped out for a smoke. Do you wanna send reinforcements?”
(With combat training, utility belts and Kevlar vests.)
But even a pain-in-the-arse job was better than none, and Cal really didn’t want to lose out on paid employment because a squirrel had wandered in. He weighed his torch in the palm of his hand. It felt solid enough, baton-like, and suitably reassured, he stepped out of the office and into the north corridor, at the end of which was the staircase.
The corridors were on the building’s outer edges. The downstairs office was where the security shifts—himself and an edging-seventy ex-copper called Brian—kept their stuff; upstairs there was a techs’ room, where incoming was processed. And the rest of the facility was a labyrinth of storage rooms: apart from the number pasted above each doorway, the bastards all looked the same. Sounded the same, too: a constant humming. This was the noise information made when it was waiting to be used.
That was what he’d heard one of the techies say once.
He was halfway along the corridor when the lights went out.
“Never heard of him.”
“Oh, poppycock!”
Which was unlike the old man. Put it down, River thought, to being on his third glass. He said, “No, all these years you’ve been telling me spook stories, Alexander Popov’s never rated a mention.”
That earned him a sharp look. “I haven’t been telling stories, River. I’ve been educating you. At least, that’s always been my intention.”
Because if the O.B. ever learned he’d turned into an old gossip, it would destroy something deep inside him.
River said, “That’s what I meant. But Popov’s never formed part of my education. I’m guessing he was Moscow Centre, yes? One of their secret wizards, pulling levers?”
“Pay no attention to the man behind the Curtain,” the O.B. quoted. “That’s quite good, actually. But no. What he was was a bogeyman. Smoke and a whisper, nothing more. If information was hard currency, the best we had on Popov was an IOU. Nobody ever laid a finger on him, and that was because he didn’t exist.”
“So how come,” River began, and stopped himself. Asking questions is good. An early lesson. If you don’t know something, ask. But before you ask, try to work it out for yourself. He said, “So the smoke and the whispers were deliberate. He was invented to have us chasing someone who wasn’t there.”
The O.B. nodded approval. “He was a fictional spymaster, running his own fictional network. It was meant to have us tying ourselves in knots. We did something similar in the war. Operation Mincemeat. And one of the lessons we learned from that was you can discover an awful lot from the details you’re asked to believe. You know how the Service works, River. The boys and girls in Background prefer legends to the real thing. Truth walks a straight line. They like to peep round corners.”
River was used to ironing out the kinks in his grandfather’s conversation. “If the details you were being fed were fake, that didn’t mean they couldn’t tell you anything.”
“If Moscow Centre said ‘Look at this’, the sensible thing was to look in the opposite direction,” the O.B. agreed. And then said, “It was all a game, wasn’t it?” in a tone suggesting he’d fallen upon a long-hidden secret. “And they were still playing it when everything else they owned was up for grabs.”
The fire crackled, and the old man turned his attention to it. Watching him fondly, River thought what he often thought when they dwelt on such subjects: that he wished he’d been alive then. Had had a part to play. It was a wish that kept him at Slough House, jumping through hoops for Jackson Lamb. He said, “There was a file, then. On Alexander Popov. Even if it was full of fairy tales. What was in it?”
The O.B. said, “God, River, I haven’t given it a thought in decades. Let me see.” He peered into the fire again, as if expecting images to emerge from the flames. “It was patchwork. An old woman’s quilt. But we had his birthplace. Or what we were led to believe was his birthplace … But let’s not go round that bush again. The story was he came from one of the closed towns. You know about them?”
Vaguely.
“They were military research stations, served by civilian populations. His was in Georgia. Didn’t have a name, just a number. ZT/53235, or something like that. Population of maybe thirty, thirty-three thousand. The crème were scientific staff, with a service industry propping them up, and military to keep them under control. Like most of these places it was founded in the post-war years, when the Soviet nuclear programme was in overdrive. That’s what the town was about, you see. It was … not organic. It was purpose-built. A plutonium production plant.”
“ZT/53235?” said River, who liked to keep his memory s
harp.
His grandfather looked at him. “Or something like that.” He turned back into the fire. “They all had names something like that.” Then he sat straighter, and got to his feet.
“Grandad?”
“It’s just a—it’s okay. Nothing.” Reaching into the log basket to the side of the fireplace, the old man pulled a long dry twig from the sheaf of kindling. “Come on, now,” he muttered. “Let’s be getting you out of there.” He held the twig into the flames.
He’d seen a beetle, River realised. A wood louse, scuttling blindly on the topmost log of the burning pyramid. Despite the heat, his grandfather’s hand remained steady as he leaned forward, the end of the twig positioned so that the beetle’s next circuit would bring it immediately into its path, whereupon the dying creature would presumably launch itself gratefully upwards, as if upon a rope dangled from a helicopter. What was beetle for deus ex machina? But the beetle had no words, Latin or otherwise, and avoided the offered escape route, making instead for the uppermost point of the log, where it balanced for a moment then burst into flames. River’s grandfather made no comment. He simply dropped the twig into the fire, and settled back in his armchair.
River was going to say something, but turned the words into a throat-clearing noise instead.
The old man said, “This was back in Charles’s day, and he got quite exercised about it in the end. Talked about wasting time on fun and games when there was still a war on, if nobody had noticed.” The O.B.’s voice changed with these words, as he indulged in that harmless habit of imitating someone your listener had never met.
Charles Partner had been the Service’s First Desk, once upon a time.
“And this was the man Dickie Bow claimed kidnapped him.”
“Yes. Though to be fair to Dickie, when he came up with his story, it hadn’t been firmly established Popov didn’t exist. He must have seemed like a good-enough alibi at the time for whatever Dickie was up to. Drinking and whoring, probably. When he realised his absence had sent balloons up, that was the story he invented. Kidnapped.”
“And did he say what Popov wanted? I mean, kidnapping a streetwalker …”
“He told everyone who’d listen, and quite a few who wouldn’t, that he’d been tortured. Though as this took the form of being made forcibly drunk, he had difficulty summoning up sympathy. Speaking of which …”
But River shook his head. Any more, and he’d know about it in the morning. And he ought to be getting home soon.
To his surprise, his grandfather refilled his own glass. Then he said, “That closed town. The one he was supposed to come from.”
River waited.
“It disappeared from the map in ’55. Or would have done, if it had been on a map.” He looked at his grandson. “Closed towns didn’t officially exist, so there wasn’t a lot of admin involved. No photographs to airbrush, or encyclopedia pages to replace.”
“What happened?”
“Some kind of accident at the plutonium plant. There were a few survivors, we think. No official figures, of course, because officially it never happened.”
River said, “Thirty thousand people?”
“Like I said. There were some survivors.”
“And they wanted you to believe Popov was one of them,” River said. His mind was conjuring a story from a comic book: an avenger arising from the flames. Except what was there to avenge, after an industrial accident?
“Perhaps they did,” his grandfather said. “But they ran out of time. Our net filled up once the Wall came down. If he’d been flesh and blood, one of the bigger fish would have offered him up. We’d have had the whole biography, chapter and verse. But he remained scraps, like an unfinished scarecrow. Some reptile dropped his name in a debriefing session, but that was an admission of ignorance by then, because nobody believed in him any more.”
The O.B. turned from the fire as he finished. Light from the flames emphasised the creases in his face, turning him into an old tribal chief, and a pang ran through River as he realised there wouldn’t be many more evenings like this one; that there ought to be something he could do to eke them out. But there was nothing, and never would be. Learning that was one thing. Living with it, another entirely.
Careful not to let those thoughts show, he said, “Dropped his name how?”
“There was a code word involved. I can’t remember what it was.” The old man looked into his glass again. “I sometimes wonder how much I’ve forgotten. But I don’t suppose it matters now.”
Admissions of weakness were not on their usual agenda.
River put his glass down. “It’s getting late.”
“I hope you’re not going to start humouring me.”
“Not without a bulletproof vest.”
“Be careful, River.”
That gave him pause. “What makes you say that?”
His grandfather said, “The streetlight at the end of the lane’s gone. There’s a dark stretch between there and the station.”
Which was true enough, it turned out. Though River didn’t believe that was what had been uppermost in his grandfather’s mind.
Cal Fenton was glad no one was around to hear him yelp like a girl in the dark:
“Jesus Christ!”
Though mostly he was worried there might in fact be someone around.
It wasn’t a generator blow-out. The towers were humming; all that information safe and snug in electronic cocoons. The lights were on a different circuit, and it might just be a power cut, but even as Cal’s mind reached for that possibility, his bowels were acknowledging that if there ever was a power cut, it wasn’t going to happen two minutes after he’d noticed the door was open, or heard a scuffing noise.
Ahead of him, the corridor was empty of everything but shadows, which were larger and more fluid than usual. The stairs ascended into bigger blackness. Gazing into it Cal’s breathing came faster, and his grip on the torch tightened. He couldn’t guess how long he stood there: fifteen seconds, two minutes. However long it was, it came to an end when he hiccuped; an unexpected, belly-deep hiccup which surfaced as a squeak—the last thing Cal wanted was to face an intruder who’d just heard that. He turned. The corridor behind him was empty too. Heading along it, he broke into a jog as unintentional as his recent paralysis; this, then, was how Cal reacted in an emergency—he did whatever his body told him to do. Stand still. Wave a torch. Run.
Danger. Excitement. A grim reliance on his own physical competence …
Back in the office, he flipped the lightswitch, but nothing happened. The telephone hung on the wall opposite. Swapping the torch from his right hand to his left he reached for it, and the receiver moulded to his grip with the exact smooth plastic shape of a baby’s bottle. But the comfort only lasted a moment. In his ear, there was nothing; not even the distant-sea sound of a broken connection. He stood, torch pointing nowhere. The door, the possible noise, the lights; now the phone. Taken together, there was no chance he was still alone in the facility.
He replaced the receiver carefully. His coat hung on the back of the door, and his mobile was in its pocket. Except it wasn’t.
First thing Cal did was check his pockets once more, a little more quickly, and the second was to do it again, more slowly. All the while, his mind was racing on different levels. In one gear, he was re-picturing his movements on getting to work; checking his mental negatives, in case they revealed where he’d left his phone. And in another, he was unfolding what he knew about the facility. Info-dump, the techies called it. Dumping, he’d learned, was what you did with a near-infinity of digital knowledge which nobody was going to want to consult again, barring remote circumstances involving lawyers. If not for that, the digital archives stored here would have long been erased—though erased wasn’t the word he’d heard used; that had been released, and when he’d heard it, the image was of information being uncooped like a flock of pigeons, bursting into the air to the sound of applause …
The phone was nowhere. Som
eone had broken into the facility on Cal’s watch; had fixed the lights, killed the phone, stolen his mobile. It was unlikely that having done this, they’d quietly left.
His torchbeam wavered, as if this would be the next thing to go. Cal’s throat was dry, and his heart pounding. He needed to step out of the office and patrol the corridors; head upstairs and check out that unlit labyrinth with all its stored knowledge, and he had to do this with a horrible chorus beating away in his brain:
That sometimes, information is worth killing for.
From the corridor where the shadows had gone to hide came the soft squeak of a rubber-soled shoe on lino.
And if information was worth killing for, thought Cal Fenton, someone generally had to die.
A quiet night in, thought Min Harper.
Bloody hell!
He poured a drink, and surveyed his estate.
That didn’t take long.
Then he sat on his sofa, which was also his bed, though if dull technicality were to intrude neither were his; they came with the room. Which was L-shaped, the foot of the L being the kitchen area (a sink; a microwave atop a fridge; a kettle on a shelf), and the longest wall boasting two windows, the view from both being of the houses opposite. Since moving into a bedsit, Min had taken up smoking again; he didn’t do it in public, but in the evening he’d hang out of a window and puff away. In one of those houses opposite a boy was often doing the same thing, and they’d give each other a wave. He looked about thirteen, the same as Min’s eldest, and the thought of Lucas smoking gave Min a pang in his left lung, but he didn’t feel anything about this kid doing it. He supposed if he’d still been living at home a sense of responsibility would have kicked in and he’d have had a word with the kid’s parents. But then, if he’d been living at home he wouldn’t have been hanging out of the window smoking, so the situation wouldn’t have arisen. In the time it took him to think this he finished his drink, so he poured another then hung out of the window and smoked a cigarette. The night was cold, with a hint of rain later. The kid wasn’t there.