“I think it’s clear she’s evading, ah, capture.”
“Like I said. An admission of guilt.” Malahide clasped his hands behind his head, and rocked back in his chair. “This famous window of hers, the one that frosts when you press a button. What do you suppose she got up to in her office when no one could see her?”
“We’re conducting a preliminary enquiry,” said Nash. “Not inventing scurrilous rumours.”
“If you say so,” said Malahide. “If you say so.” He sat up straight. “Well, I suppose we’d better put Sparrow in the picture.”
“Leave that to me,” said Nash.
He left the office holding his phone to his ear, but without making a connection.
As he passed Josie’s desk, unseen by Malahide, he made a follow-me gesture with his eyes, an invitation Josie accepted a few moments later.
“Remind. Me. Why. We’re. Running?”
This was necessarily a conversation Lech was having in his head because, well, they were running . . .
And the answer, besides, was obvious. Cheapside was about a quarter mile from Slough House, or, by car, maybe three times that. Add roadworks, traffic lights, and you were looking at a half-hour minimum.
“She’s on the roof,” Catherine had said, and Lech had wondered if this were like the joke about the cat, and she was gently breaking the news that Taverner was dead.
Louisa was way ahead, but she was a runner. Give Lech the streets after dark, he could pace ten miles and barely notice, but speed was a different story. Besides, there were people about, staring as he passed. Facial scarring made him the automatic villain. He was basically a trigger warning; a horror-meme waiting to happen.
Sod it.
A team of Dogs, Catherine had said. There for a Safe Collect—Taverner wasn’t armed, and was anyway unlikely to initiate a gun battle on the streets of London. Had he imagined it, or had Catherine laid a slight stress on unlikely? But whatever the outcome, this had to do with Sophie de Greer, and the last time he’d left Slough House on a mission involving her, Roddy bloody Ho had ploughed him down on a dark common. What delights awaited him today?
Panting round the long curve below the Museum of London he could see Louisa at the Cheapside junction, so ignoring the pain in his thighs he increased his speed, the pavement’s damp calligraphy blurring beneath his feet.
Roddy leaned back and made one of his expressions. He had several of these, and Catherine was familiar with all, but was never sure what he was attempting to convey, beyond some brand of superior weariness.
“So this Ronsakov—”
“Rasnokov,” she said. “Vassily Rasnokov.”
“What I said. This Ronsakov dude was at the Grosvenor two nights, only nobody knew it was him at first so he was, like, totally off radar.”
“. . . Yes.”
“And Lamb wants to know what he got up to.”
“. . . Yes.”
“In London.”
“That’s the size of it, yes. I’m sorry.”
In the circumstances, she had to admit, weary superiority wasn’t entirely without foundation.
Roddy reached for his energy drink.
“He might have been asleep,” he said.
“Yes,” Catherine agreed. “He certainly wasn’t watching TV or using wifi. But he ordered two bottles of The Balvenie from room service.”
Roddy looked blank.
“It’s a brand of whisky.”
“Yeah, I knew that.”
“The empties weren’t left in his room, and he didn’t take them back to Moscow.” Give her credit, Catherine delivered this information as if it were an important part of a soluble puzzle, and not, as it had appeared to her fifteen minutes previously, random facts plucked from an inconsequential blizzard. “So there’s a chance he met with someone. Because the Balvenie might have been intended as a present.”
“Balvenie?”
They turned. Ashley Khan was hovering on the threshold. She had her coat on, and her bag over her shoulder, but her departure had evidently snagged on the overheard word, so there she was, repeating it in the doorway.
“The Balvenie,” she said again. “That’s Vassily Rasnokov’s brand.”
The drone hovered insolently, and for a short while Diana saw the world from a different perspective—as one of the monitored, one of the watched—and in so doing understood the impulse the ordinary citizen has when confronted with the unceasing intrusions of daily life, “in the interests of security.” So she did what every ordinary citizen does, most often internally but in this case with a kind of slow-motion deliberation: she raised her middle finger, and invited the unseen watchers to go fuck themselves. Then she turned her back on it and put the sim card in her mouth.
The drone rose higher, its buzz-saw whine diminishing, allowing her to hear more noises: a door being forcibly opened; feet coming up a dark staircase. She dropped the mobile and ground it underfoot, and was just swallowing the sim card when the rooftop access door opened, and the first of the Dogs stepped out into cold sunshine.
“One with the car. Three on the stairs.”
“Stairs?” said Lech.
“There’s always stairs,” Louisa told him.
And there were always four Dogs, or that was how she remembered it. Though it was true that nobody kept Slough House up to date when procedures were modified.
They were on Cheapside, approaching Rashford’s, outside which a black SUV was parked. A man easily identifiable as Dog leaned against it, his gaze directed at the bar’s doorway. Lech was breathing hard, which was his own fault. No excuse for being out of shape.
Reading her thoughts, or perhaps her expression, Lech said, “I was run over a couple of days ago, remember?”
“At, what, ten miles an hour?”
“Still counts.”
“In which case, you’d better take it easy. You can have the driver.”
“In the sense of . . . ?”
“Keep him busy. So he’s not watching the doorway when I come back out.”
“Okay . . . So what’s the plan?”
“Plan?”
“Great,” said Lech. “Situation normal.”
Waving two fingers Louisa left him there, a hundred yards short of their destination, and—ignoring the car parked outside—disappeared through Rashford’s door.
“So your written assignment—”
“They call it a hand-in.”
“Hand-in, right.”
“I’ve no idea why.”
Because you handed it in, presumably. Which didn’t matter. Catherine said, “So your twenty-thousand-word hand-in was on Vassily Rasnokov.”
The hand-in was part of every fledgling spook’s first six-month assessment, regardless of whether their ambitions lay in field work or analysis. Most chose to critique an op from years gone by—a safe enough topic provided the career-blighting embarrassment of, say, picking an operation handled by Diana Taverner was avoided—and it had been some while since the straightforward biographical essay had been in vogue. This was largely because nothing boosted a mark like fresh information, and there was little chance of this being captured by a beginner.
Then again, there was fresh and fresh.
“I found a cross reference to a pre-digital source,” Ashley said. “A case report from the late seventies.”
“I didn’t know Rasnokov was KGB back then. Wouldn’t he have been a child?”
“A teenager,” said Ashley. “And he wasn’t official.”
Which was a detail missing from Rasnokov’s Service file: that prior to his recruitment, he’d carried a shovel on several KGB cases involving the harassment of known dissidents. The oversight was down to a misspelling—“Ronsakov” for Rasnokov—whose handwritten emendation had never been carried over to the master document. So a few small facts about his early career had been lost to history, buried in a cardboard folder deep in Molly Doran’s domain, to which baby spooks were granted access while completing their hand-ins.