by Mick Herron
That had proved to be something of an error.
Dame Ingrid pursed her lips, giving her the appearance, had she but known it, of a disappointed fish. Doubtless, in recruiting Donovan and Traynor, Diana had claimed that it was Ingrid herself who had been responsible for the death of Alison Dunn, and Donovan’s consequent imprisonment; doubtless, too, she had provided them with precise instructions for laying hands on Virgil-quality documentation which would corroborate the story Alison Dunn had heard in New York. Information that would be more than enough to end Ingrid Tearney’s career.
The Grey Books indeed . . . She should have seen straight through that decoy. Would have done, except that it came gift-wrapped: if Peter Judd’s tiger team were a pair of reality-impaired conspiracy buffs, then they presented no real threat; an outcome so welcome Ingrid had accepted it without question. She sighed . . . She had been too willing to believe in others. It was an abiding weakness, her one great character flaw, and might prove her downfall if her eleventh-hour attempt to eliminate the whole pack of them proved unsuccessful.
Darkness was edging further into the room now, painting her lamplit corner brighter. Nothing to do but wait. And as she did so, she couldn’t quite suppress a sneaking admiration for the tenacity with which Diana Taverner had pursued her aims.
Not the least audacious aspect of which, as far as Dame Ingrid was concerned, was that she had managed all this without paperwork.
A tidy battlefield is a good battlefield, thought Nick Duffy. He wasn’t positive that particular gem appeared in those art of war texts City dickheads read on the tube, but it fitted his mood. From his current perspective, the fencing, the skip, the mounds of urban debris had transformed into landmarks: areas of cover for what was yet to come, which, ideally, wouldn’t last more than a minute. The klieg lights were poised to turn the area outside the derelict factory into a stage, and once that happened, anyone treading the boards would find their dramatic career cut short. They called it dying when it happened on stage. They called it that when it happened elsewhere, too.
He was deep in the shadows of the building nearest the railway tracks, leaning against a pillar, and while he didn’t know precisely what was happening in the complex below his feet, he had a calm feeling nevertheless; the sense of everything going to plan. Pulling the trigger on the red-headed kid had done that. You’d think it would push him in the opposite direction, that he’d have a hollowed-out feeling now, be all butterflies and shit, but that wasn’t how it worked. How it worked was, everything was going to be okay, because the alternative, now he’d killed that kid, was unthinkable. And Nick Duffy didn’t do unthinkable.
One of the Black Arrows approached, not even attempting to look stealthy. In a shaky voice, he said, “We’ve got a prisoner.”
For a second, Duffy thought he’d missed something. “They’ve come up?”
“No. He was spotted on the perimeter, checking us out.”
Perimeter, thought Duffy. These toy soldiers loved their vocabulary.
“He’s a big guy, black. Thing is, there was someone with him.”
Duffy mentally ran through Slough House personnel. A big black guy would be Marcus Longridge; someone else was either Shirley Dander or Roderick Ho. His money was on Dander. Ho was a desk-jockey.
“And they got away.”
“Fuck. Anyone go after her?”
“She’s in block one, far as we know.”
The Black Arrow gestured behind him, in case Duffy had forgotten which block was which.
“Thing is . . . ”
Another thing? Duffy said, “What?”
“They’ve put him in the van. Where we put the first prisoner?”
“Good.”
“Only . . . the first prisoner?”
“What about him?”
“He’s dead.”
“And?”
“Jesus, I mean . . . ” From toy soldier to boy soldier: Duffy could tell that any moment now, his lower lip would wobble. “Nobody said there was going to be killing.”
Duffy nodded. The Black Arrow couldn’t see his face, which was probably as well, because his expression wouldn’t soothe worries away. He leaned in closer, and just to erase any ambiguity from the situation wrapped one gloved hand round the man’s throat as he did so. “Well what the fuck did you think we were going to do? Tag them and release them into the community?” His voice had dropped an octave, a grace note he’d always found effective when explaining grim realities.
“But it’s just—”
“It’s just nothing. For the past six months your crappy little operation has been headed up by someone who today turns out to be an enemy of the state. Now there’s two ways we can deal with this. We can have a nice tidy discussion followed by a full-scale investigation, after which none of you will have a job ever again. Not to mention having MI5 so far up your arses you’ll spend the rest of your lives whistling when the wind blows. Or we can do it my way, which is quick, quiet and leaves no mess. If you’re not man enough for that, say so. But get your head round this first. If you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the problem. Understand?”
The Arrow nodded.
“Didn’t catch that, son.”
“. . . Yes.”
“Welcome aboard. This new prisoner, is he cuffed?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I’ll deal with him. You get to your position. Anyone comes out that factory, the lights go on, and you bring them down. Understand?”
This time he didn’t wait for an answer. Leaving the Arrow in the stench of the dying building, he headed for the van.
In Roddy Ho’s opinion, he wasn’t being given enough credit for taking charge. Think of something, Lamb had told him. Do something, Marcus had said. Any way you looked at it, driving a bus through a front door was “something.” The fact that it turned out unnecessary was one of those wise-after-the-event outcomes it was hardly fair to pin on him.
In his mind’s eye, it had played out differently. He’d rolled straight out of the driver’s cabin, disarming the thug holding Lamb at gunpoint; bit of the old natural grace coming into play as he’d brought said thug to his knees with a quick one-two . . .
Later, with Louisa: “Really, Lamb said that? All I was doing was reacting, babes.”
“Jesus, Roddy, when someone calls you a hero, just accept it, yeah? Is that his gun in your pocket, by the way?”
“Hell’s teeth. Did the impact fuck your hearing up or what?”
And this was Lamb, bringing Roddy Ho back to reality.
“Dunn. Alison Dunn. That was the name of the woman Donovan killed.”
Ho said, “Yes. No. I can’t remember . . . ”
“Give me strength. If it was your brains I needed, we’d all be in trouble. All I want is your typing skills. Look her up. Is this guy related?”
For a moment, Ho couldn’t lay hands on his smartphone, and his life flashed before his eyes. Most of it involved Grand Theft Auto. Then he located it—new holster attachment, duh—and keyed in his password for the Service intranet. Typing skills, typing skills. What Lamb didn’t realise was how much more was involved than simple typing skills.
Alison Dunn, deceased. Military. Scroll down to find her surviving family.
“You know,” Lamb said, looking round at the mess the bus had made of the hallway, “when I first met you, I had you pegged as a waste of space.”
Busy as he was, Ho couldn’t prevent a smirk. He recognised a third-act moment when he heard one. “And when did you change your mind?”
“When did I what?”
Catherine emerged from the room where they’d put Dunn. “As long as you’ve got your phone out, call an ambulance.”
“Like hell,” Lamb said. “We’ll cuff him to a radiator and let the Dogs pick him up. Things are messy enough without a trip to A&E.”
“He’s a civilian,” Catherine said. “Not our jurisdiction.”
Ho looked up from his phone. Standish was glaring at Lamb in a way that made him glad it wasn’t happening to him. Babes, he told Louisa, that lady can be mighty fierce, you hear what I’m saying? Surviving family was her mother and a brother, Craig. There was a fiancé too, one Benjamin Traynor.
Traynor . . .
“Something else you should know,” he told Lamb.
Shirley found a staircase, its fire door hanging by one hinge, and bounded up to the next level. Smells of piss and weed: you didn’t have to abandon a building long before nature stepped in to reclaim it. Even here: not quite the heart of the city, but its appendix or something. Its bladder. She almost tripped at the top, but didn’t; stepped out onto the first level, and ran lightly down a corridor with a view of the wasteground through its glassless windows. Bitching dark now, one big shadow, but Shirley could make out shapes. There was the Black Arrow van, where they’d have taken Marcus. She hoped it was where they’d taken Marcus. The alternative—that they weren’t taking prisoners—didn’t bear thinking about.
Because apart from anything else, there was at least one of them on her tail right now.
At the end of the corridor she swung a hard right: more windows, now with a view of the railway lines, behind a breeze block wall topped with lengths of wire, the topmost one barbed. A digger was parked against the wall, its tool semi-upright, angled like a stepladder. Those things were always yellow or red. This one was yellow.
An open doorway. She spun into it, dropped to a crouch. Waited. Private security operations aimed to hire the brightest and the best: they wanted fitness, smarts and enough nous not to go belting into the dark after an unknown subject without checking out the terrain. What they mostly got, though, were lumbering wannabes who thought duffing up a Goth in a pub car park made them Jason Statham. The one on Shirley’s tail trundled past her wheezing like Thomas the Tank Engine, the gear on his utility belt slapping his thighs in cumbersome counterpoint, before erupting into a brief solo when she thudded into him waist height, sending him flying through the unglassed window. He didn’t fall far—it was only the first floor—but he hit the ground like a sack of spanners. Shirley tried to remember how many Arrows Marcus claimed to have seen, but couldn’t. One down, anyway.
Hearing more feet on the stairwell, she slipped back out of sight, noticing as she did so a strange sensation in her face; an unaccustomed tautening of muscles. She used her hand to check—yep. She appeared to be grinning.
Nothing like a drug-free high, she thought, and waited in the shadows for the next Black Arrow to make his move.
River wasn’t dead.
River might be dead, but act like River’s not.
So: River wasn’t dead.
That, or something like it, was the burden of Louisa’s thoughts as she stood face-to-balaclava with the Arrow who’d just brought him down. Sometimes you can tell when a man in a mask wears a smirk. She wiped it off him by feinting a blow to his stomach, hindsight letting her know that a feint wasn’t necessary—the blow might as well have landed for all his ability to parry it—then punching him in the throat instead, because that had worked well for her so far this evening. While he windmilled backwards, she stepped over River’s prone body and took two lengthy strides down the aisle, towards the ruptured doorway.
Dive and ro-o-o-ollll . . .
She could almost hear the instruction bellowed at her as it had been time and again one long day in hell, issuing from an instructor who looked like a sex doll: five foot nothing, curly blonde hair, ruby red lips never seen closed . . . But boy, could she bellow. Dive and roll! Anyone not diving, not rolling, to her satisfaction spent the next fifteen minutes doings squat thrusts. And like any good sex doll, she was never really satisfied; always wanted more.
But you learned to dive and roll all right, and it wasn’t a skill you forgot in a hurry.
So Louisa dived and rolled, and when she came upright again she was holding the gun Traynor had spilled when he fell. First she shot the man who’d put River down, then the two who were securing Traynor. The rest had scattered by then, back through the ruptured doorway or behind collapsed shelving.
Two shots came back at her, but she was somewhere else already, pulling River’s body behind cover.
“Fuck was that?” he drooled.
Not dead, then.
“That,” she told him, “was a Taser.”
“Not again . . . ”
“Good shooting,” someone said, and she almost proved his point by shooting him too.
It was Donovan.
“Where’s Ben?”
Louisa pointed with the gun. Traynor was still where he’d been dropped and cuffed: in a heap ten yards away. Of the two bodies next to him, one was twitching and the other not.
“Alive?”
“Think so,” she said.
“How many?”
“We saw plenty on the monitor. Twelve? Fifteen? Three are down.”
River mumbled something, fuckin Taser, she thought it was.
Donovan had a gun too. “I’ve worked with these guys,” he said. “Some of them won’t stop running until they reach the sea. And some will think Christmas just came early.”
Another shot was fired, the bullet hammering into a wooden crate, porcupining splinters from its side. Louisa briefly stood and fired twice in the direction the shot had come from, then dropped back under cover.
As if she hadn’t moved, Donovan indicated River. “Is he okay?”
“He’s been Tasered before,” Louisa said. “I think he kind of likes it.”
“You shot the man who did it.”
Louisa didn’t reply.
“That’s good soldiering in my book,” Donovan said.
“We’re not on the same side.”
“Maybe not,” he said. “But I’d sooner have you as an enemy than these clowns as friends.”
One of the clowns took offence at that, and loosed another shot in their direction. Louisa flinched, but the bullet went wild.
River pushed himself up to a sitting position, and dry-retched. “. . . Jesus.”
“Keep your head down,” Louisa hissed. Then she nodded at Donovan’s shirt front, where he’d tucked the folder he’d taken. “Whatever you’ve got there, someone definitely doesn’t want you to have it.”
“That’s right,” he said. “And whoever that is didn’t send the cavalry, did you notice? They sent a bunch of mercenaries instead. You might want to think about that.”
“When we get out of here, I’m going to have to take it from you.”
“That’s a discussion I’ll look forward to. Meanwhile, cover me. I’m going for Ben.”
And without waiting for her reply, he was off.
The temptation was to stay in the pub all evening. By the time she emerged, it would be over: Donovan and Traynor would have the evidence to bury Ingrid Tearney, or would be buried themselves in the caverns below Hayes. If the latter, Diana would have to prepare for Tearney’s wrath. It was as well, she thought, that the Dame had no sense of humour. If she did, Diana might find herself facing exile to Slough House . . .
A knife in the back would be preferable. No metaphor intended.
The strange thing was, the event which had set all this in motion had been engineered for the good of the Service. It had been shortly after Dame Ingrid had taken up the reins, a post Diana Taverner hankered after, but had been clear-eyed enough to admit she wasn’t ready for. Back then time had appeared to be on her side, and an unrocked boat was a sane and sensible course. So when a report had landed on the Home Secretary’s desk which threatened to hole that boat beneath the waterline, Diana had acted.
The minister at the time had been every senior spook’s wet dream: spineless, indecisive, terrified of bad press, and anxious
never to be caught in the vicinity of a decelerating buck. Back then, before Ingrid Tearney had begun her programme of stripping power from the Second Desks, Diana had had weekly meetings with him: he liked to keep abreast of developments, he asserted, his choice of wording corroborated by his focus. But on that particular day, he’d been too rattled by the report he’d received to spare her bosom more than a wistful glance. This, he’d told her. Make this go away, can’t you? Which Diana had taken as carte blanche.
It was the kind of op that was under the bridge in all the right ways: no papertrail, no oversight; just a slush-fund payment to a pair of crash-squad near-retirees, eager to build a nest egg before leaving Spook Street for civilian life. The target being military, it was best to have her die in an accident; the combination of a spiked drink and tampered steering had done the trick. It wasn’t even Dunn’s drink they’d spiked—a bit of lateral thinking there. So in the eyes of the world, Sean Donovan had wound up responsible for Alison Dunn’s death, but then, as a soldier, he’d understand the nature of collateral damage. His protestations had been muted—impossible to deny he had a drink problem—and he’d disappeared into the military justice system, his once successful career a pair of skidmarks in the dark.
Diana left the pub. She did not notice the sleek-looking man in her wake. Outside, it had barely cooled with the going down of the sun; the pavements were sticky with heat, and the air hung in hot pockets. It required little imagination to think something was going on with the weather. A detail that had leaped to hand when concocting this new op’s legend . . .
Because in the years since dealing with Alison Dunn, Diana’s own career had stalled; not as spectacularly as Donovan’s, but just as decisively. Her role had become that of another middle-management drone, while Tearney’s crusade to transform the Service into a bland, national-security delivery system, with herself as CEO, had marched on relentlessly. Budget meetings. Corporate branding. The whittling away of power from individual departments until a more vertical structure was achieved; one in which the traditional routes to power—long service, qualifications, a willingness to crawl over the bleeding bodies piled up in front—had been rendered null. Little wonder Diana’s thoughts had turned to alternative methods of advancement. And she had always prided herself on the elegance of her schemes. When looking for an off-the-book joe, who better than one with a grudge and a skill set?