by Mick Herron
“Lamb is easily bored,” Molly Doran had said. “Play him right, and he’ll bend your ear for hours. But if he’s in one of his moods, forget it.”
“But this is work,” Coe had said. “It’s Service business.”
“That’s sweet. I remember my first week.” Doran paused. “Oh, and one other thing. Don’t tell him I sent you. Got it?”
“Got it.”
So here, in place of the truth, was Coe’s reason for approaching Lamb:
“Everyone says you’re the one to talk to.”
“Everyone says that, do they?”
“You lived the life. Ran your own network, survived for years. They say—”
Lamb interrupted with a fart, then said in a plummy tone, “I do apologise. That’s never happened before.”
Coe said, “They say you were the best.”
“I was, was I?”
“And my problem’s about a network . . .”
He paused. He seemed to be always pausing. This time, he was partly waiting for permission to continue; partly wondering if Lamb was ever going to invite him to sit. But there was nowhere obvious to sit that didn’t involve retreating into the shadows, and while he didn’t actually believe anything untoward lurked by the walls, he was a little concerned about the floorboards. The air of rot was more pronounced than it had been on the stairs. He figured he was okay if he remained in the middle of the room.
Lamb had closed his eyes, and linked his fingers across his paunch. His feet were visible on Coe’s side of the desk, and he was indeed shoeless, which perhaps accounted for some small part of the atmosphere. Lamb’s recent emission hadn’t helped. He grunted now, and when this didn’t spur Coe on, opened an eye. “You don’t need to tell me about your problem, son. I already know what your problem is.”
So Doran had called him after all, Coe thought. He realised he was caught in the middle of some complicated game between this man and Molly Doran, as intricate as any courtship ritual, but that didn’t matter now, because the important thing was, Lamb was going to explain the oddities in this supposed network . . .
“Your problem is, you’re lying. Nobody talks about me on the other side of the river, or when they do, it’s not to say how brilliant I am. It’s to say I’m a fat old bastard who should have been put out to grass long ago.”
“I—”
“And it’s not only the lying. You’ll never get anywhere in this business without lying. No, your problem’s twofold. First off, as you’ve probably worked out for yourself already, you’re no good at it.”
“I was told not to tell you—”
“And second, it’s me you’re lying to.”
All of this with just one eye open, trained on Coe. It was extraordinary, thought Coe, how much a badly dressed shoeless fat man could look like a crocodile.
“And you’ve no idea how cross I get when that happens.”
But he was about to find out.
♠
It was after nine when Catherine Standish entered Lamb’s room again. Lamb was in his chair, eyes closed, shoeless feet propped on his wastepaper bin. A bottle of Talisker sat on his desk, a pair of thumb-greased glasses next to it. One was a quarter full, or possibly three quarters empty. The other, while not exactly clean, was at least unused.
She knew the routine, a recent parlour game of Lamb’s. No point talking until she poured herself a glass. This was what passed, in his mind, for good-natured teasing.
Slough House had been empty of staff for hours, the pair of them apart. For Catherine there was always work to do, a neverending cascade of it. For Lamb, she sometimes thought, there was nowhere else to be. He had a home; might even—now here was a thought—have a family somewhere. She thought that less likely than finding intelligent life on Twitter, but still: there had to be a reason he spent so many of his waking hours here, even if a goodly fraction of those waking hours were spent asleep.
Without touching the glass she poured a slug of whisky into it, then added a pile of newspapers from the visitor’s chair to the bigger pile on the floor next to it, and sat.
She said, “That wasn’t very helpful.”
He didn’t open his eyes. “This is me you’re talking to?”
“We’re all part of the Service. So someone thought it would be funny to send a Daniel into your den. That doesn’t mean he didn’t need real information.”
“I didn’t object to the little bastard turning up. I objected to the little bastard trying to play me.”
“Well, I think we can safely say he won’t try that again.”
JK Coe’s departure had been precipitous, making up in speed what it lacked in dignity.
“Did you know him?”
“He’s still in his first week. Refugee from banking, but he scored high on the entrance exams and—”
“Entrance exams,” said Lamb. “God help us.”
“I know,” Catherine said. “Just give them a Double-Oh-Seven watch and drop them behind enemy lines. Never did you any harm.”
“Well, we can’t all be me,” Lamb said reasonably. “What’s his day job?”
“Psych Eval.”
“For a washed-up alky, you’re still plugged into the network, aren’t you?”
Washed-up was right. Catherine’s career, like a castaway’s message, had been sealed inside a bottle and tossed overboard. Slough House was where it had beached, and in the years since she hadn’t touched a drop.
The amount of booze Lamb had put away in that time would float a hippo.
“It’s funny,” she said. “I’m sitting here dry as a bone while you souse yourself nightly. How come I’m a drunk and you’re not?”
“Drunks have blackouts,” he explained kindly. “And wake up in strangers’ beds. I never do that.”
“When you start waking in strangers’ beds, it’s the strangers who ought to be worried.”
“You say tomato,” Lamb said obscurely. He reached for his glass, balanced it on his chest, and closed his eyes again. “Tell me about the kid’s problem.”
So she told him about the kid’s problem. John Bachelor, one of the Park’s old lags, had presented him with a list of names; find out who they are, Bachelor had said. Find out if there’s a connection.
Find out if it’s a network.
“Bachelor,” Lamb said without opening his eyes. “Milkman, right?”
“He’s on the milk round, yes.”
“One of his mentals just died.”
“Mentals?”
“Trust me, they’re all mentals.” Lamb craned his head forward, caught the rim of his glass in his teeth, and easing his head back again, allowed the contents of the glass to pour into his mouth. He swallowed, then set the glass back on his chest. “When Daniel Craig can do that,” he said, “tell him to give me a ring.”
“I’ve made a note.”
“Dieter Hess,” Lamb continued. “That was the bugger’s name.”
“Did you know him?”
“God no. I’ve better things to do with my time than pal around with clapped-out spooks.”
It was true, Catherine thought, that you didn’t get that adept at handless drinking without hours of practice.
“I know who he was, but not a joe, an asset. Worked in the Department of Transport on the other side.”
When Lamb said “the other side,” he always meant the Wall. For him, the Cold War had been geography as much as politics.
“He had access to classified info. Troop movements, that sort of thing. Fair play to him, it was useful stuff. How far did Coe get?”
Coe had done the basic searches and come up with a list of possibles connected by a thread: they all had links with Germany. They were offspring of immigrants, or had other family bonds; they had work connections; they’d studied the language and literature to degree level. In
some cases, frequent holidays indicated an attachment to the country. It wasn’t much, Coe had thought, but it wasn’t something he was spinning out of fresh air. It was definitely there.
Lamb grunted. “And means the list definitely came from Hess. So what’s the problem?”
“The problem is, most of those on the list are shutaways. In care homes, a lot of them. Elderly. There’s one who’s younger, thirty-two, and he’s never been anywhere else. He’s severely disabled. One’s been in prison for the last decade, and isn’t leaving soon. Of the whole crew, there’s only one at liberty, a twenty-one-year-old girl.” Lamb wasn’t reacting to any of this. Hadn’t even opened his eyes. “So what Coe wants to know is, what kind of network is that?”
She leaned back in her chair and waited.
After some minutes Lamb raised his empty glass, using his hand this time. He held it in her direction. Suppressing a sigh she reached for the bottle, and filled it for him. Her own still sat where she’d left it, untouched. She was trying to pretend it wasn’t there. If she looked at it by accident—if it looked back—she would turn to stone.
Lamb said, “Any rumours on the late Hess?”
“There was money.”
“But not huge great bucketloads, right?”
“Not from what I’ve heard.”
And Catherine heard a lot. She had fallen far—there were those who’d argue she’d fallen further than Lamb—but the only enemy she’d made on the way was her own younger self. In her private life, she double-locked her doors. But at work she kept all channels open, and even Lamb was impressed by the range of her contacts, and their willingness to share with her.
But if she dealt in raw data, Lamb liked to build castles with it.
She said, “You have that look.”
“What look?”
“That look where you’re about to be clever, and I’m supposed to be amazed.”
Lamb belched.
“Though I could be wrong,” Catherine said.
“Coe’s still slimy with afterbirth, so you can’t blame him for being ignorant. But Bachelor’s third-rate at best. Know him?”
“Of him.”
“Best way. All being a milkman involves is wiping noses and he can’t even do that. If he asked Coe to track down these people, it’s because he doesn’t want to do it via channels, which means he hasn’t told anyone at the Park. I expect he found the list after Hess died, and has been crapping himself in case Lady Di gets wind of it. Coe doesn’t know enough to work out what it means, and he’s too stupid to do it himself.”
“But you’re not.”
“You probably weren’t either, before you pickled what used to be your brain. You never get those cells back, do you?”
When he asked a particularly nasty question, Lamb generally required an answer.
Catherine said, “They’re usually full of information you don’t want to recall anyway. If I ever struggle with your name, there’s your reason.” She thought for a bit. “The fact that it wasn’t much money is a clue, isn’t it?”
Lamb lit a cigarette.
She thought some more. Out on the street, a car honked and another honked back. Impossible to tell whether two friends had driven past each other, or one stranger had cut another up. There were times when it was similarly hard to tell what was happening in this room.
Hess had been receiving money to pay the people on this list. But the people weren’t any kind of network; they were shut-ins and innocents.
She waved away smoke and said, “It’s a ghost network.”
“There you go. All you’ve ever done for the Service is type memos and boil the kettle, and even you can work it out. I despair for this generation, I really do. Bunch of Gideons.”
She didn’t ask.
Not being asked never bothered Jackson Lamb. “Talentless chancers riding on their family pull and the old school tie. Call me a hopeless idealist, but talent used to count for something.”
Catherine stood. “Maybe we’ll put that on your gravestone.”
She was halfway out the door before he said, “You’ll tell him all this, won’t you?”
“Coe? Yes, I will.”
“Another lame duck. Collect as many as you like, it won’t help you fly again.”
“I’m under no illusions about my future, thanks.”
“Just as well. It’s not clear you have one. Unless you count this place.”
Catherine turned. “Thanks. And by the way, what is that round your neck?”
“Somebody’s scarf. Found it in the kitchen.” Lamb scratched the back of his neck. “There’s a draught.”
“Yes, keep it on. Don’t want you catching cold.”
She went back to her own office to ring Coe, thinking: So that’s where the tea towel went.
Lamb finished his drink, then reached for Catherine’s untouched glass. A ghost network. He didn’t especially approve—in Lamb’s lexicon, a joe was not to be trifled with; even an imaginary joe—but the old lag had doubtless done it for beer money, which left Lamb half-inclined to applaud. A ghost network didn’t require joes. All it took was a little identity theft; enough to convince your paymasters you were nurturing the real thing: verifiable names, plausibly sympathetic to whatever cause you’d hired out to. In Hess’s case, he’d scraped together a crew as near their last legs as he’d been himself, but that didn’t matter, because there was no way the paymasters were ever going to get an actual sniff of them. Too soon, he’d have said. Too raw. Bring them on gently. Phrases Lamb had used himself, in the long-ago, but always for real. And what were they supposed to be passing on, Hess’s phantoms? Nothing major. Gossip from the corridors of power, industrial tittle tattle, maybe hints of policy shifts; or possibly Hess had gone for something riskier, and pretended one of them was actually in the pay of the Service. Thinking about it, Lamb suspected the old boy could have made that fly. Milked John Bachelor for office gossip and passed it off as product, explaining the lack of substance everywhere else as being early yield; a thin harvest from a too-green vine, but let it grow, let it grow . . .
And it was only small sums of money.
He supped from Standish’s glass. A low murmur from across the hall told him she was on the phone, giving the lowdown to Coe, who’d doubtless be puppyishly grateful, and just like that Standish had another resource to call on. Networks everywhere . . . And who could be surprised, really, that a worn-out spook had found a way to supplement his pension? Hess had been an asset, and here was a thing about assets: you could never be sure they weren’t going to turn 180 degrees. Lamb accepted that now as he had done then. He hated a traitor, but defined the breed narrowly. Assets switching pavements was part of the game. Because they were the ones doing the risky business, while their paymasters risked only papercuts.
“So no harm done,” he muttered. Least of all to John Bachelor, who’d be able to pass the whole thing off as an old man’s petty larceny; if, indeed, he bothered to pass anything on at all. Ghost networks were only a problem if you believed in ghosts. Bachelor probably scraped by without that superstition.
So no, no harm done.
Unless somebody does something stupid, Lamb thought, but really; what were the chances?
♠
Information is a tart—information is anybody’s. It reveals as much about those who impart it as it teaches those who hear. Because information, ever the slut, swings both ways. False information—if you know it’s false—tells you half as much again as the real thing, because it tells you what the other feller thinks you don’t know, while real information, the copper-bottomed truth, is worth its weight in fairy-dust. When you have a source of real information, you ought to forsake all others and snuggle down with it for good. Even though it’ll never work out, because information, first, last and always, is a tart.
This much, John Bachelor knew.
So the best thing to have, he also knew, was an asset; someone deep in the enemy’s bunker—and for information purposes, everyone was an enemy—passing back knowledge that the enemy thought was his alone. But even better than that was knowing the enemy had an asset inside your own bunker, and feeding him, feeding her, information that looked like the real thing, that nobody dared to poke at, but which was false as a banker’s promise.
And best of all, better than anything else, was having it both ways; was having someone the enemy only thought was their asset inside your own bunker, so while your enemy thought he was feeding you mouldy crumbs and harvesting cake, the reality was the other way round.
All of this, Bachelor wanted to explain to Di Taverner before he got on to anything else, but that wasn’t going to happen. For a start, she knew it all already. And for the rest, she had other things on her mind.
“They should have taken the carpets up,” she said.
“He was an old man.”
“Your point being?”
“Nobody was expecting this. Dieter’s been—had been—defunct for years. As far as anyone knew he was sitting at home reading Yeats, and drinking himself into oblivion. Cleaning up after him was a matter of respect, that’s all.”
“If they’d respected him more, they’d have taken the carpets up,” she said.
They were in her office in Regent’s Park, and it was mid-morning, and the artificial lighting was pretending it was spring. On her desk lay the list; Dieter Hess’s coded original. The copy of Fatherland with which Bachelor had unwrapped its secrets sat next to it.
“And these people,” Taverner said—the people on the list—“they’re all real?”
“They exist, but they’re not a network.” He’d told her this already, but it was important to emphasise the point: that Dieter Hess had not—had not—been running a coy little op behind Bachelor’s back, but had simply been filching pennies to ease his days; to pay for his wine and his books; to ensure, god help us all, that he could turn the heating up. So Bachelor laid it out again, this information that had seeped down from Jackson Lamb to Catherine Standish; from Standish to JK Coe; from Coe to John Bachelor, and was even now being soaked up by Diana Taverner: that the people whose encoded names had been laboriously printed on that sheet of paper in most cases probably didn’t know what day of the week it was, let alone that they were spies. Dieter Hess had picked their pockets, though all he had taken was their names.