Careful not to let those thoughts show, he said, “Dropped his name how?”
“There was a code word involved. I can’t remember what it was.” The old man looked into his glass again. “I sometimes wonder how much I’ve forgotten. But I don’t suppose it matters now.”
Admissions of weakness were not on their usual agenda.
River put his glass down. “It’s getting late.”
“I hope you’re not going to start humouring me.”
“Not without a bulletproof vest.”
“Be careful, River.”
That gave him pause. “What makes you say that?”
His grandfather said, “The streetlight at the end of the lane’s gone. There’s a dark stretch between there and the station.”
Which was true enough, it turned out. Though River didn’t believe that was what had been uppermost in his grandfather’s mind.
Cal Fenton was glad no one was around to hear him yelp like a girl in the dark:
“Jesus Christ!”
Though mostly he was worried there might in fact be someone around.
It wasn’t a generator blow-out. The towers were humming; all that information safe and snug in electronic cocoons. The lights were on a different circuit, and it might just be a power cut, but even as Cal’s mind reached for that possibility, his bowels were acknowledging that if there ever was a power cut, it wasn’t going to happen two minutes after he’d noticed the door was open, or heard a scuffing noise.
Ahead of him, the corridor was empty of everything but shadows, which were larger and more fluid than usual. The stairs ascended into bigger blackness. Gazing into it Cal’s breathing came faster, and his grip on the torch tightened. He couldn’t guess how long he stood there: fifteen seconds, two minutes. However long it was, it came to an end when he hiccuped; an unexpected, belly-deep hiccup which surfaced as a squeak—the last thing Cal wanted was to face an intruder who’d just heard that. He turned. The corridor behind him was empty too. Heading along it, he broke into a jog as unintentional as his recent paralysis; this, then, was how Cal reacted in an emergency—he did whatever his body told him to do. Stand still. Wave a torch. Run.
Danger. Excitement. A grim reliance on his own physical competence …
Back in the office, he flipped the lightswitch, but nothing happened. The telephone hung on the wall opposite. Swapping the torch from his right hand to his left he reached for it, and the receiver moulded to his grip with the exact smooth plastic shape of a baby’s bottle. But the comfort only lasted a moment. In his ear, there was nothing; not even the distant-sea sound of a broken connection. He stood, torch pointing nowhere. The door, the possible noise, the lights; now the phone. Taken together, there was no chance he was still alone in the facility.
He replaced the receiver carefully. His coat hung on the back of the door, and his mobile was in its pocket. Except it wasn’t.
First thing Cal did was check his pockets once more, a little more quickly, and the second was to do it again, more slowly. All the while, his mind was racing on different levels. In one gear, he was re-picturing his movements on getting to work; checking his mental negatives, in case they revealed where he’d left his phone. And in another, he was unfolding what he knew about the facility. Info-dump, the techies called it. Dumping, he’d learned, was what you did with a near-infinity of digital knowledge which nobody was going to want to consult again, barring remote circumstances involving lawyers. If not for that, the digital archives stored here would have long been erased—though erased wasn’t the word he’d heard used; that had been released, and when he’d heard it, the image was of information being uncooped like a flock of pigeons, bursting into the air to the sound of applause …
The phone was nowhere. Someone had broken into the facility on Cal’s watch; had fixed the lights, killed the phone, stolen his mobile. It was unlikely that having done this, they’d quietly left.
His torchbeam wavered, as if this would be the next thing to go. Cal’s throat was dry, and his heart pounding. He needed to step out of the office and patrol the corridors; head upstairs and check out that unlit labyrinth with all its stored knowledge, and he had to do this with a horrible chorus beating away in his brain:
That sometimes, information is worth killing for.
From the corridor where the shadows had gone to hide came the soft squeak of a rubber-soled shoe on lino.
And if information was worth killing for, thought Cal Fenton, someone generally had to die.
A quiet night in, thought Min Harper.
Bloody hell!
He poured a drink, and surveyed his estate.
That didn’t take long.
Then he sat on his sofa, which was also his bed, though if dull technicality were to intrude neither were his; they came with the room. Which was L-shaped, the foot of the L being the kitchen area (a sink; a microwave atop a fridge; a kettle on a shelf), and the longest wall boasting two windows, the view from both being of the houses opposite. Since moving into a bedsit, Min had taken up smoking again; he didn’t do it in public, but in the evening he’d hang out of a window and puff away. In one of those houses opposite a boy was often doing the same thing, and they’d give each other a wave. He looked about thirteen, the same as Min’s eldest, and the thought of Lucas smoking gave Min a pang in his left lung, but he didn’t feel anything about this kid doing it. He supposed if he’d still been living at home a sense of responsibility would have kicked in and he’d have had a word with the kid’s parents. But then, if he’d been living at home he wouldn’t have been hanging out of the window smoking, so the situation wouldn’t have arisen. In the time it took him to think this he finished his drink, so he poured another then hung out of the window and smoked a cigarette. The night was cold, with a hint of rain later. The kid wasn’t there.
When he was done, he returned to the sofa. It wasn’t a particularly comfortable sofa, but the bed it unfolded into wasn’t comfortable either, so at least it was consistent. And its lumpy narrowness was only one reason Min wasn’t in the habit of bringing Louisa back here; others being the way cooking smells hung around all night, and the peeling floor in the bathroom down the hall, and the borderline psycho in the room below … Min should move; get his life back on a proper footing. It had been a couple of years since everything went down the pan, a process that had begun when he’d left a classified disk on the tube, and woken next morning to find its contents being discussed on Radio 4. He’d been at Slough House within the month. His domestic life collapsed shortly afterwards. If his marriage had been strong to begin with, he sometimes lectured himself, it would have survived his professional humiliation, but the truth, he’d come to understand, held a tighter focus. If he himself had been strong, he would have ensured that his marriage survived. As it was, his marriage was definitely a thing of the past, what with Louisa being on the scene. He was pretty sure Clare wouldn’t tolerate that particular development, and while he hadn’t told her about it, he wasn’t convinced she didn’t know. Women were born spooks, and could smell betrayal before it happened.
His glass was empty again. Reaching to refill it he had a sudden glimpse of a future in which this never changed; one in which he was always in this soul-destroying room, and never released from the career-ending Slough House. And he knew he couldn’t let that happen. The failures of his past had been atoned for: everyone was allowed one mistake, surely? This olive branch from Regent’s Park, in the shape of Spider Webb’s summit; all he had to do was grab hold of it, and be pulled ashore. If this was a test, he intended to pass it. Nothing at face value, that had to be his mantra. He’d assume everything held a hidden meaning, and keep digging until he found what it was.