by Mick Herron
He said, “The good news is, you’ve got a whole twenty-four hours.”
“Is this live?” Coe asked. “I mean, is this an actual op?”
Bachelor touched a finger to his lips.
“Jesus,” Coe said. He glanced around, but there was nobody in sight. “That long?”
“Banks shut at four-thirty, don’t they? News flash. You don’t work in a bank any more.”
“It wasn’t that kind of banking,” Coe said. He glanced at the list in his hand, then back at Bachelor. “Where do I bring the product?”
“My number’s on the sheet. Call me. Do this right, and you’ve a friend in Regent’s Park.”
“Who works with Diana Taverner,” said Coe.
“Closely. Who works closely with Diana Taverner.”
“Yes. I’ve heard she picks favourites.”
Bachelor wondered if he’d made the right choice, a psych grad, but it was too late now.
Coe said, “I spent a night in a ditch last month, in freezing fog. Out on the Stiperstones?”
Bachelor knew the Stiperstones.
“I was told it was part of a reconnaissance exercise. Counted towards my pass rate. Turned out it was a wind-up. Left me so shagged out I nearly failed the next day’s module.”
Bachelor said, “We’ve all been there. What’s your point?”
Coe looked like he had a point, and it was no doubt something to do with the kind of emotions he’d feel, or the sort of vengeance he’d hope to wreak, if it turned out that Bachelor had just handed him the desk-bound equivalent of a night in a freezing ditch.
“ . . . Nothing.”
“Good man. We’ll speak tomorrow.”
Bachelor left the building still with the ghost of a hangover scratching his skull. Maybe Coe would come up with something he could shield himself with when Lady Di made her next move. More likely this was a waste of time, but time was currently the only thing he had on his calendar.
It might help.
It probably wouldn’t hurt.
It depended on how good JK Coe was.
♠
How good JK Coe was was something JK Coe had been wondering himself. The complex knot of his reasons for joining the Service had tightened in his mind to the extent that rather than attempt untangling them, it was simpler to slice right through. On one side fell disillusionment with the banking profession; on the other, an interview he’d read in a Canary Wharf giveaway magazine with an Intelligence Services’ recruitment officer. Like any boy, he’d once harboured fantasies of being a spy. The fact that here in grown-up life, the opportunity actually existed—that there was a number you could ring!—offered a glimmer of light in what had become, far sooner than he’d been expecting, a wearisome way of making a living.
It turned out that a psychology degree and a background in investment banking fitted Five’s profile of desirable candidates. That’s what Coe had been told, anyway. It was possible they said that sort of thing a lot.
But here he was now, less than a week into fledgling status, and he’d been handed what had looked like a desk job but was rapidly becoming more intriguing. It might be, of course, that this was another set-up, and that Bachelor—if that was really his name—was even now celebrating Coe’s gullibility in a nearby pub, but still: if this was a time-wasting riddle, it appeared to be one with an answer, even if that remained for the moment ungraspable as smoke.
Because the names he’d been given belonged to real people. Using the Background database, for which Coe had only ground-level clearance, but which nevertheless gave access to a lot of major record sets—utilities, census, vehicle and media licensing, health and benefits data, and all the other inescapable ways footprints are left in the social clay—he’d established possible identities for each name on Bachelor’s list, and caught a glimmer, too, of a connecting thread. He thought of this in terms of a spider’s web in a hedge: one moment it’s there, in all its complicated functionality; the next, when you shift your perspective an inch, it’s gone.
There were real people with these names, but if they made up a network, it can’t have been a terribly effective one. Because almost all of them were lock-aways of one sort or another. Care homes, hospitals, prison . . . Each time he tilted his head, the perspective shifted.
The afternoon had swum away, leaching all light from the sky. Coe hadn’t eaten since mid-morning, a bacon sandwich he’d been planning to trade off against lunch, but he hadn’t reckoned on skipping supper too. He should call a halt now, but if he did, there was no telling he’d get any further with his task in the morning; odds-on he’d be called to account for that questionnaire he’d barely started. And this was more interesting than devising trip-up questions, and now he had his teeth in, he didn’t want to let go . . .
But he needed help. Oddly, he had an idea where it might be found.
A lecture he’d attended the previous month had been given by a Regent’s Park records officer. She ran a whole floor, it was whispered; ran it like a dragon runs its lair, and it was easy to see how the dragon rumour started, because she was a fearsome lady. Wheelchair-bound, with a general demeanour that just dared you to give a shit about it, she’d held her audience if not spellbound then certainly gobsmacked, through the simple expedient of giving the first student she caught drifting such a bollocking he probably still trembled when reminded of it now. In one fell swoop, the dragon-lady had resurrected several dozen bad school memories. She’d quickly been dubbed Voldemort.
Funny thing was, JK Coe had rather liked Molly Doran, who was every bit as round as she was legless, and powdered her face so thickly she might have been a circus turn. Her lecture—on information collation in a pre-digital era: not, she emphasised, an historical curiosity, but an in-the-field survival technique—had been brisk and intelligent, and when she’d finished by announcing that she would not be taking questions because she’d already answered any they might be capable of coming up with, it had been with the air of delivering a tiresome truth rather than playing for laughs. She had added, though, that she expected to see the more intelligent among them again, because sooner or later the more gifted would need her help.
Only JK Coe had offered the traditional round of applause once she was done, and he quit after two claps when it was clear he was on his own. He’d been relieved Doran had had her back to the class, shuffling her papers into a bag, and hadn’t seen him.
Two thumbs down from his classmates then, but that was okay. Coe, the oldest in his recruitment wave, felt licensed to divert from the popular opinion. Molly Doran was—no getting round this—a “character,” and having escaped a profession which prided itself on its characters, this being how it labelled those who read The Art of War on the tube, Coe was gratified to have come across the real thing. Already he’d heard two conflicting stories behind the loss of Doran’s legs, and this too was a source of pleasure. The Service thrived on legends.
He could track down people with the bare minimum to go on, he’d proved that much today. It wasn’t a stretch coming up with Molly Doran’s extension number; nor was it a surprise that she was still within reach of it, down in the bowels of the Park, on the right side of the river.
Legends don’t keep office hours.
Coe explained who he was.
She said, “You’re the one who clapped, aren’t you?”
He could see his reflection in his monitor as he heard the words, and afterwards had the strange sensation that his reflection had been observing his reaction, rather than the other way round. Certainly, it seemed to retain an unusual state of calm for one who’d just been presented with evidence of witchcraft.
She said, “All right, close your mouth. If you hadn’t been the one who’d clapped, you wouldn’t dare call me now.”
“I’d worked that out for myself,” he lied.
She asked what he wanted, and he explain
ed about the list; not saying where he’d got it from, just that it was a puzzle he’d been presented with. Besides, he reasoned, Bachelor hadn’t sworn him to secrecy.
“And what do you expect from me?”
“Something you said in your lecture,” Coe said. “You said don’t muck about with secondary sources—”
“I said what?”
“—You said don’t fuck about with secondary sources if there’s a primary available. And that there’s always a primary available if you know where to look.”
“And I’m your primary?”
“Or you can tell me who is.”
“So you’re expecting me to point you to someone cleverer?”
“I doubt even you could manage that.”
She laughed what sounded like a smoker’s laugh. Last time he’d heard anything quite like it, he been sanding off the edge of a door.
“That’s right, JK. You did say JK? Not Jake?”
Some jerks get lumbered with Jason. Some saps are saddled with Kevin. But how many poor sods end up with—
“JK,” he confirmed.
“That’s right, JK, you ladle on the syrup. The ladies always fall for that.”
He said, “In that case, I have to tell you, you’ve got a great set of wheels.”
A silence followed, during which Coe’s thoughts turned to the essential elements involved in forging a new identity: fake passport, fake social security number, fake spectacles. He’d need to shave his head, too . . .
And then she was laughing again, more like a rusty bicycle chain this time.
“You little bastard,” she said.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t spoil it now. You little bastard.”
He counted blessings until her laughter passed.
“So this list,” she said at last. “This famous list. You’ve found a link and you want to talk to someone who might know what it means.”
“If it is a link, and not just a coincidence—”
“Don’t be boring. If you thought it was a coincidence, you’d not have called me.”
Coe said, “They all have German connections. Some close, some not so close. But they all have connections.”
“Oh Jesus,” Molly Doran said. “I’m sorry, JK.”
She sounded it, too.
“You can’t help?”
“Just the opposite. I know exactly who you want to speak to.”
“Then why so sorry”
“Ever heard of Jackson Lamb?” she asked.
♠
In his final years as a banker, JK Coe had grown understandably secretive about his profession. In that sense, joining the Service hadn’t involved big changes—broadcasting your daily activities was frowned upon—but he still found it hard to avoid feeling himself separate from the general sway. It was ridiculous, stupid, counter-productive—being an agent, even a back-room, across-the-river agent, meant melding in—and he knew, too, that everyone felt this way, that everyone was at the centre of their own narrative. Still, he couldn’t help it. Take this trip across town right now, to talk to Jackson Lamb. Standing on the tube, Coe was studying his fellow passengers, gauging their identities. There was a checklist he’d memorised, a cribsheet on how to spot a terrorist; and there was another checklist, allowing for the possibility that terrorists might have got hold of the first checklist and adapted their behaviour accordingly, and Coe had memorised this too. And he was mentally running through them, scoring his fellow travellers, when it struck him there was conceivably a checklist for spotting members of the security services, and he was doubtless ticking all the right boxes himself . . . The thought made him want to giggle, which itself was on one of the checklists. But he couldn’t help feeling skittish. He was still in his first week, newest of newbies, and he’d shared a clubby phonecall with Molly Doran, and was now on his way to meet Jackson Lamb.
Who definitely figured among the legends he’d been contemplating earlier.
Lamb was a former joe, an active undercover, who’d spent time on the other side of the Wall, back when there’d been a Wall. So he was definitely the man to talk to if you were looking for dodgy German connections stretching into the past—most of the folk on Bachelor’s list were certified crumblies—but he was also someone who came trailing clouds of story, some of which had to be true. He’d been Charles Partner’s golden boy once—Partner, last of the Cold War First Desks—but after Partner shot himself, Lamb had been hived off to the curious little annex called Slough House, which was right side of the river, but wrong side of the tracks. And there he’d remained ever since, presiding over his own little principality of screw-ups. Some of the stories said he’d been a genius spy; others that he’d blown a whole network, and was the only one who’d come back alive. Nobody Coe knew had ever laid eyes on him. Well, nobody except Molly Doran, and he couldn’t really claim to know her.
He’d phoned Slough House and spoken to a woman called Standish. When he’d said he wanted to speak to Lamb, she seemed to be waiting for the punchline. So he’d explained about the list, and she’d told him Lamb didn’t talk to strangers on the phone, and wasn’t terribly likely to speak to him in person. But if he was prepared to head over Barbican way, she’d see what she could do.
What she could do involved opening the door for him. This was round the back, as she’d said on the phone: Slough House had a front door, but it hadn’t been used in so long, she couldn’t guarantee it actually worked. “Round back” was via a mildew-coated yard. There was no light, and Coe barked his shin on something unidentifiable, so was leaning against the door grimacing when it opened, and he came this close to measuring his length in a dank hallway.
“Now there’s an entrance,” the woman said.
“Sorry. That yard’s a deathtrap.”
“We don’t get many visitors. Come on. He’s on the top floor.”
Trooping up the stairs felt like ascending to Sweeney Todd’s lair. Coe didn’t know what that made Catherine Standish, who’d have been a dead ringer for a woman in white—a lady with a lamp—had she worn white, or carried a lamp. But her long-sleeved dress had ruffled sleeves, and Coe believed he caught a glimpse of petticoat in the two-inch gap between its hem and the strap of her shoe. But Slough House, Jesus . . . Regent’s Park was impressive—a cross between old world class and hi-tech flash—and his own across-the-river complex, if drab, was functional, and had been gutted and refitted often enough that you sensed an attempt to keep up with the times. But Slough House was time-warped, a little patch of seventies’ squalor, with peeling walls and creaking stairs. The bare lightbulbs highlit patches of damp that resembled large-scale maps, as if the staircase had been designed by a wheezing cartographer. And in the corners of the stairs lurked dustballs so big they might have been nests. He wasn’t sure whose nests. Didn’t want to be.
On each landing a pair of office doors stood open. They were vacant and unlit, and drifting from their gloomy shadows came a mixture of odours Coe couldn’t help adumbrating: coffee and stale bread, and takeaway food, and cardboard, and grief.
He thought something moved.
“Did I just see a cat?”
“No.”
And up they went, up to the top floor, and a small hallway with office doors facing each other from either side. One stood open, and was lit by a couple of standard lamps; the effect wasn’t exactly cosy—it remained a drably furnished office—but at least it looked like a space in which things got done. This was Standish’s own, Coe assumed. Which meant that the other—
“You’d better knock.”
He did.
“Who the hell’s that?”
“Good luck,” said Catherine Standish, and disappeared into her room, closing the door behind her.
♠
Okay, so Coe was about to meet a Service legend. Beard him in his den was the phrase that cam
e unbidden, and he raised his hand to knock again, this time while announcing his name in a pleasing, manly fashion, when the door opened without warning.
So here was Jackson Lamb.
He didn’t look like a legend. He looked like a Punch cartoon of a drunk artist, in a jacket that might have been corduroy once, and another colour—it was currently brown—over a collarless white shirt. What a kinder observer might call a cravat hung round his neck, and his hair was yellowy-grey, with clumps sticking out at odd angles. More hair, much darker, could be seen poking through his shirt at stomach level. As for his face, this was rounded and jowly and blotchy; there was a slight gap between his two front teeth, visible below a snarling lip. Yes, like a caricature of an artist, and one in the grip of some creative urge or other. His eyes were heavy with suspicion.
“Who are you?”
“Ah, JK Coe—”
“Oh Christ. I’ve told her about letting strays in. What are you selling?”
“I’m not selling anything.”
Lamb grunted. “Everybody’s selling something.”
He withdrew into his room, and since he did so without actually telling Coe to get lost, Coe followed.
The room’s sole illumination was a lamp set upon a pile of books, which on second glance turned out to be telephone directories. In the feeble yellow light it cast, Coe could make out a desk whose most prominent ornaments were a bottle of whisky and a pair of shoes. In the shadows round the walls lurked what Coe took for filing cabinets and shelves. Blinds were drawn over the sole window, but a cracked blade hung loose, and through the gap some of the evening’s dark leaked into the room, offset by tiny reflections of the traffic on Aldersgate Street, blinking in the beads of moisture hanging on the glass.
Lamb didn’t so much settle into his chair as collapse into it. The noise it greeted him with was one of resigned discomfort.
“You’re from over the river,” Lamb said, reaching for the bottle.
“Ms. Standish told you?”
“Do I look like I’ve time to gossip? She didn’t even tell me you were coming. But you’re hardly from the Park, are you? Not unless they’ve widened their entry criteria.” Looking up, he added, “It’s a class thing. Don’t worry about it.”