Dead Lions

by Mick Herron

  River could almost talk. “What the. Fuck. Are you doing?”

  “I think you already know, Walker. Jonathan Walker, by the way? Bit of a tired old name.”

  “It’s mine.”

  “No. It’ll be the one Jackson Lamb gave you. Still, won’t be needing it much longer, will you?”

  He knew Lamb; knew River was a spook. There was little point feigning innocence. River said, “I’m supposed to check in. An hour ago. They’ll come looking.”

  “Really? Miss one call and they send out the coastguards?” Moult pulled his red cap off. His hair disappeared with it; those white tufts that had sprigged from underneath. He was bald, or nearly bald, with only a fringe stubbling his ears. “Miss tomorrow’s, and maybe they’ll get worried. Though by then they’ll have other things on their mind.”

  “I saw what you had on the trolley, Moult.”

  “Good. Give you something to think about.”

  “Moult?”

  But Moult had stepped out of River’s line of vision, and all he could hear was feet tracking over rough ground.

  “Moult!”

  Then not even that.

  As carefully as he could, River moved his head to face the sky again. He took a deep breath and bellowed and at the same time arched his back, as though the same rage was trying to burst through his stomach. The trolley rattled, but the clothesline bit deeper, and River’s bellow became a scream that soared into the branches above, then howled around the broken walls surrounding him. And when it was done he was still secured in place, flat on his back on a trolley in the dark. He was nowhere near escape, and there was no one near to hear him.

  And time, he’d come to realise, was running out.

  Behind its powder, laid thickly as butter on bread, Molly Doran’s face was immobile. Even once Lamb had finished she remained silent for upwards of a minute. Then: “And you think it was him. Katinsky. All those years ago, you think he was the one took Dickie Bow.”

  “Yes.”

  “And he’s waited all these years to make his second move.”

  “No. Whatever the plan was then, it was rendered obsolete by the end of the Cold War. No, he’s up to something else now. But Dickie Bow came in handy.”

  “And the cicadas? They’re real too?”

  “The best disguise for any network is if the opposition think they’re ghosts. Nobody went looking for Alexander Popov’s cell, because we thought it was a legend. Like Popov himself.”

  “Who Katinsky invented.”

  “Yes. Which to all intents and purposes,” Lamb said, “means that’s who he is. Nikolai Katinsky is Alexander Popov.”

  “Oh Christ, Jackson. You’ve raised the bogeyman, haven’t you?”

  Lamb leaned back. In the soft light, he looked younger, possibly because he was reliving ancient history.

  Molly let him think. The shadows over the stacks had grown longer, here in this sunless cellar, and experience told her this was her mind playing tricks; adjusting her surroundings to the rhythms of a normal day. Outside, morning was coming. Regent’s Park, never entirely asleep, would soon be shaking off its night-creeps, those spidery sensations that occupy buildings when they’re dark. The day shift would have been alarmed to learn of their existence.

  When Lamb stirred, she prodded him with a question. “So what’s he up to, then? Popov?”

  “I don’t know. Don’t know what and don’t know why now.”

  “Or why he grouped his network in Upshott.”

  “That either.”

  “Dead lions,” Molly said.

  “What about them?”

  “It’s a kids’ party game. You have to pretend to be dead. Lie still. Do nothing.”

  “What happens when the game’s over?” Lamb asked.

  “Oh,” she said. “I expect all hell breaks loose.”

  His mobile phone was in his pocket.

  As information went, this was on a par with a knowledge of penguins’ mating habits: partly a comfort, partly a puzzle, but of no real practical value. The puzzle part was wondering why Moult hadn’t taken it. But either way, it might as well have been lodged in a branch of the tree above him.

  He’d stopped struggling, because this only brought pain. Instead, he was sorting through everything he knew, or thought he knew, about what Moult was up to, and however far and wide his speculation ranged, it always returned to the same point: the sacks of fertiliser he’d found stacked on the trolley in the hangar.

  Why had Moult even taken him there, if it housed secrets he wanted to keep? And if Catherine’s information was accurate, and the village was packed with Soviet sleepers, where did Moult fit in anyway? Though as light seeped into the sky, these questions faded into the background, and the image of those sacks of chemical fertiliser took their place.

  Fertiliser, which, under the right conditions, acted exactly like a bomb.

  And which River had last seen stacked next to an aeroplane like so much luggage.

  Lamb went out for a smoke, but on the pavement remembered he’d finished his last cigarette earlier, so walked to the tube station and bought a packet at the 24-store. Back near Regent’s Park’s front door he lit a second from the stub of his first, and gazed up at a sky that was lightening by the minute. Traffic was now a constant hum. Days began like that now; a gradual accrual of detail. When he’d been younger, they’d started like a bell.

  Nick Duffy appeared again, as he had earlier. He emerged from a parked car, and joined Lamb on the pavement.

  “You smoke too much,” he said.

  “Remind me what the right amount is?”

  Across the way, trees stirred as if troubled by bad dreams. Duffy rubbed his chin. His knuckles were scraped red.

  He said, “Every month she gets a cheque. Once in a while, a little job to do. Providing bed and board to someone passing through under the radar. Or being a post office, or an answering service. All low-key shit, the way she tells it.”

  “Until Min Harper.”

  “She got the call late. Whoever it is used the code she responds to. Bring your car, underground garage round back of Edgware Road.” Duffy had slipped into telegraphese, to spare himself unnecessary words. “Two of them plus, her words, a drunk bloke they’re carrying.”

  “She ever see them before?”

  “Says not.”

  He paused again. Then told Lamb what Rebecca Mitchell had told him, eventually: that one of the pair had smashed Min Harper’s head against the concrete floor of the garage, while the other had backed Rebecca Mitchell’s car up. The next part had been like a kids’ game: balance the man on the bicycle, smack the car into him. Once they’d made sure his neck was broken, they’d loaded bike and body into their own car, and moved the scene somewhere else.

  When he’d finished, Duffy stood staring at the trees, as if he suspected their rustling was a secret conversation, and what they were talking about was him.

  Lamb said, “It should have been picked up.”

  “They took photos. Laid the body and bike out the way they fell in the garage.”

  “Still should’ve been picked up.” Lamb threw his cigarette away, and sparks burst. “You did a half-arsed job.”

  “No excuses.”

  “Damn right.” He wiped his face with a hand smelling of tobacco. “Was she keen to talk?”

  “Not so much.”

  Lamb grunted.

  After a while, Duffy said, “He must have seen something he wasn’t supposed to see.”

  Or someone, thought Lamb. He grunted again, then went back through the big door.

  This time, stepping out of the lift, he was met by an overgrown boy in a sweatshirt with Property of Alcatraz stamped on it, and glasses with heavy black frames. “You’re Jackson Lamb?” he asked.

  “What gave it away?”

  “The coat, mostly.” He shook the pill bottle Lamb had given Duffy earlier. “You wanted to know what this is.”

  “And?”

  “It’s called
Xemoflavin.”

  “Right. Wish I’d thought of reading the label.”

  “Basic research tool,” the kid said. “Name aside, it’s a whole lot of not much. Aspirin, mostly, in a sugarshell coating. Orange, if it matters.”

  “Don’t tell me,” said Lamb. “They sell it on the internet.”

  “Bingo.”

  “As a cure for?”

  “Liver cancer,” said the kid. “Doesn’t work, though.”

  “There’s a surprise.”

  The kid dropped the bottle into Lamb’s waiting hand, pushed his glasses up his nose, and stepped into the lift Lamb had vacated.

  Lips pursed, Lamb wandered back into Molly Doran’s space.

  She’d made herself more tea, and sat nursing it in her alcove. Steam rose in thin spirals and disappeared in the upper dark.

  Lamb said, “I checked his diary, did I tell you? He has no plans for the future.”

  Molly took a sip of tea.

  “And he’s broken things off with the woman he was seeing.”

  Molly placed her cup on the table.

  “And he’s taking some quack cancer remedy.”

  Molly said, “Oh dear.”

  “Yeah,” said Lamb. He dropped the pill bottle into the wastepaper bin. “Whatever he’s up to, at least we know why. He’s dying. And this is his last hurrah.”

  Morning. Light. Surprisingly strong, breaking through the curtains, but then it had been sunny lately; unseasonably warm. Summer in April, full of unreliable promise. If you turned your back on it too long, the temperature would drop.

  Louisa didn’t so much wake as realise she’d been awake for some time. Eyes open, brain humming. Nothing especially coherent; just little mental Post-its of the day’s tasks, beginning with get up, shower, drink coffee. Then bigger things: leave the flat, meet Marcus, collect Pashkin. Everything else—like last night—was just a black mass boiling in the background, to be ignored as long as possible, like clouds on an unreliably sunny day.

  She rose, showered, dressed, drank coffee. Then went out to meet Marcus.

  Catherine was back in Slough House so early it felt like she’d never left, but even so, she travelled there through a city whose fuse had been lit. The underground was full of people talking to each other. Some held placards—STOP THE CITY was a favourite. Another read BANKERS: NO. At Barbican station, someone lit a cigarette. Anarchy was in the air. There’d be glass broken today.

  But early as she was, Roderick Ho had beaten her. This wasn’t unusual—Ho often seemed to live here: she suspected he preferred his online activities to emanate from a Service address—but what was different was, he’d been working. As she passed his open door, he looked up. “Found some stuff,” he said.

  “That list I gave you?”

  “The Upshott people.” He brandished a printout. “Three of them, anyway. I’ve tracked them back as far as they go. And there’s paperwork, sure, they’ve paperwork coming out their ears, but the early stuff is all shoe and no footprint.”

  “Which would be one of those internet expressions, yes?”

  Ho flashed a sudden smile. This was even weirder than people chatting on the tube. “It is now.”

  “And it means …?”

  “Well, take Andrew Barnett. His CV’s got him attending St Leonard’s Grammar School in Chester in the early sixties. It’s a comp now, with a good IT department, and one of its projects is putting the school records online.”

  “And there’s no match-up,” Caroline finished.

  Ho shook his head. “Must have seemed a fair bet at the time. These guys have papered over their early lives all you want. But it was pre-web, and they’d no way of knowing the paper would start to peel.”

  She glanced at the printout. As well as Barnett, he’d run down Butterfield and Salmon and found similar gaps in their histories. And there’d be more, there’d be flaws in the others’ lives too. It was all true, then. A Soviet sleeper cell had taken root in a tiny English village. Perhaps because it no longer had a purpose. Or perhaps for some other reason they had yet to fathom.

  “This is good, Roddy.”

  “Yeah.”

  And maybe she’d been hanging round Lamb too much, because she added: “Makes a change from just surfing the net.”

  “Yeah, well.” He looked away, colour rising. “All that archive crap, I could pull an all-nighter, get it finished in a sitting. This is different.”

  She waited until his gaze met hers again. “Good point,” she said. “Thanks.” She glanced at her watch. It was nine. Louisa and Marcus would be on their way to pick up Arkady Pashkin, which reminded her: “Did you do the background on Pashkin?”

  And now his expression became the more familiar put-upon scowl. Spending a life among computers had a way of prolonging adolescence. There was probably a study on it. It was probably online. “Been kind of busy?”

  “Yes. But do it now.”

  Shame to leave him on a sour note, but Roddy Ho had a way of sticking to his own script.

  They met near the hotel, a little after nine. The tubes had been full, the streets crowded; there was a huge police presence, not to mention camera crews, news trucks, rubberneckers. Crowds were gathering in Hyde Park, from where the smells of a hundred variations on breakfast drifted. Instructions booming from a loudhailer, This is a CO11-notified event, which means that the police will be marshalling the route, were drowned by music and chatter. The atmosphere was one of burgeoning excitement, as if the world’s biggest party was waiting for its DJ.

  “Looks like someone’s out for trouble,” was Marcus’s greeting. He gestured at a group of twentysomethings heading for the park, a banner reading Fuck the Banks lofted above their heads.

  “They’re pissed off citizens,” Louisa said. “That’s all. You ready?”

  “Of course.” Today he wore a grey suit, a salmon-pink tie, neat shades: he looked good, she noticed, the same way she might notice any other irrelevant detail. “You?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Sure?”

  “Just said so, didn’t I?”

  They turned the corner.

  He said, “Look, Louisa, what I said last night—”

  His mobile rang.

  You couldn’t call it sleep. Call it overload: pain, stress; all of it tumbling over and over like an argument trapped in a washing machine; over and over until its rhythm rocked River out of consciousness and dropped him down a well of his own making. In that circular darkness the same half-chewed facts nipped at him like vermin: the fertiliser loaded on the plane, which Kelly would be soaring away in this morning; the sketch she’d drawn of the cityscape, with that lightning bolt smiting that tall building. An aeroplane was already a bomb, but that wasn’t the first thing you thought of when you looked at one. It was only when you loaded it with bags of nitrogen-rich fertiliser that you underlined its essential explosiveness.

  And over and over in his tumbling mind, the image repeated itself; of Kelly Tropper—why?—steering her pride and joy into London’s tallest building; searing a new Ground Zero into the eyeballs of the world.

  Over and over, until at last River lost his grip on the here and now, and—having long since bellowed himself dry—slipped out of his mind.

  While Marcus was on the phone Louisa watched the rally assembling. It was like seeing a hive mind being born; all these different particles coming together, out of which one consciousness would arise. Marcus was probably right. There’d be trouble later. But that was a sideshow, another part of the ignorable background. She wondered if last night would turn out to be her only chance of getting Pashkin on his own. If he’d jet away as soon as the talks were done, leaving her forever ignorant of the reason Min had died.

  Marcus said, “Sorry about that.”

  “Finished? We’re on a job, not an outing.”

  “It won’t ring again,” he said. “And you’re not throwing Pashkin out of any high windows, right?”

  She didn’t answer.


  “Right?”

  “Lamb put you up to this?”

  “I don’t know Lamb as well as you. But it doesn’t strike me his team’s welfare is his top priority.”

  “Oh, you’re looking out for my welfare, are you?”

  “Those gorillas Pashkin has? They’re not for show. Make a move on their boss and they’ll take you apart.”

  “Like they did Min.”

  “Whatever happened to Min, we’ll sort it. But there’s no point in revenge if it costs you everything, and believe me, what you’d planned last night would have cost just that. Anything Pashkin’s goons didn’t do to you, the Service would have done instead.”

  A sudden outburst of chanting from across the road splintered into gales of laughter.

  “Louisa?”

  “Why are you with us?” She hadn’t known she was going to ask until she heard herself speak. “At Slough House?”

  “That’s important?”

  “You’re appointing yourself my handler, yes, it’s important. Because what I heard is, you lost your nerve. Couldn’t take the pressure. So maybe this concern for my well-being is just you making sure your life stays quiet, and I don’t rock your boat.”

  Marcus stared for a moment over the top of his shades. Then he pushed the glasses into place. When he spoke, his tone was milder than his look had promised. “Well, that sounds plausible. Bullshit, but plausible.”

  “So you didn’t lose your nerve.”

  “Shit, no. I gamble, that’s all.”

  Someone called his name.

  It sounded like his name. It wasn’t, but it sounded like it—it hauled River out of the darkness, and when he opened his eyes, daylight spackled through the branches overhead. The sky was wide-open, and he had to close his eyes again, scrunch them shut, as protection against its bright blueness.

  “Walker? Jonny?”

  Hands were on him and suddenly the tightness loosened and he could move properly, which brought fresh pain coursing through his limbs.

  “Fuck, man. You’re a mess.”

  His saviour was a blurry creature, fuzzy patches held together like a walking Rorschach test.