Didn’t look like she was removing herself soon, either.
“Takes up a lot of your time, I’ll bet,” she said.
Working on the archive, she meant.
“Almost all of it,” said Ho. “It’s my top priority.”
“Must be handy, then, that fake tasklist you’ve rigged up,” Catherine went on. “You know, the one that shows anyone monitoring your logged-on activity how hard you’re working.”
Ho choked on his Red Bull.
Louisa said, “You could have been killed.”
“I was riding a bike, that’s all. Thousands of people do it every day. Most of them don’t get killed.”
“Most of them aren’t chasing cars.”
“I think they probably are,” Min said.
“And where did it get you?”
A mile and a half, he thought, which was pretty good going in London traffic. But what he said was, “I got the guys at the Troc to pick it up on Clerkenwell Road. They tracked—”
“You got the guys—”
“Yeah yeah. Catherine got the guys at the Troc to pick them up.” The Troc was the Trocadero, which was what the hub of the capital’s CCTV network was called. “They tracked the cab west, and the goons didn’t get out at any hotel Excelsior, or Excalibur, or Expialidocious or anywhere else, but went straight on through to the Edgware Road. That’s where they’re staying. West End hotel? Dosshouse, more like.”
Louisa said, “You’d think Webb would have that stuff covered. Where the goons are staying, I mean. They’ve been in country how long? And they’re wandering round off the leash?”
Min thought he might have been given a bit more credit for slipping the leash back on them. Or at least working out where their kennel was. He said, “Like he told us. Over at the Park, they’re busy turning out their pockets for the bean counters. Haven’t got time for the, ah, hands-on stuff.”
“This isn’t trivial. It’s security. These guys have got guns … I mean, Jesus, we just let them wander round the capital tooled up? How’d they get them through Customs in the first place?”
“They probably didn’t,” Min said. “I can’t be certain about this, but I believe it’s possible to lay your hands on illegal weaponry in some parts of London.”
“Thanks for that.”
“Not the good parts. But a lot of places out east. And north.
And some parts west.”
“Are you finished?”
“And anywhere south of the river, obviously. More to the point, they were playing us, Louisa. All that time we were sitting working out the details, them saying yes ma’am, no ma’am to all your suggestions, they were basically just thinking fuck you. We can’t trust them an inch. They’ll say whatever we want to hear and do whatever they want to do. And Webb made it clear that if anything goes wrong, it’s our fault.”
“Yes, I noticed that.”
“So—”
“So we make sure nothing goes wrong.”
They were sitting on the stone balustrade of one of the flower beds on the Barbican terrace overlooking Aldersgate Street. Traffic hummed below, and from somewhere behind them music played; something classical. Over the road, through one of Slough House’s windows, Catherine was visible behind the spare desk in Roderick Ho’s office. The back of Ho’s head was a motionless black blob. They made an unlikely pair of conspirators.
Louisa put her hand on Min’s, which was resting lightly on her knee. “Okay, so they lied to us about staying in a nice hotel because they don’t want us to think they’re just rent-a-heavies, even though they are, and even though that’s what we’re gunna think anyway. Or maybe Pashkin has paid for a fancy hotel, and they’re pocketing the difference. Either way, I don’t think we should be too bothered. What worries me is the lack of back-up info. Audit or no audit, the Park should have known where they were.”
“But at least we know now.”
“At least we know now.”
“Thanks to me.”
“Yeah yeah. Thanks to you.”
“I’ll take that as a pat on the head then.”
“Pat pat,” Louisa said.
“You think they’ll ditch the guns?”
“I think they probably carried the guns because if they hadn’t, we’d be wondering where their guns were. So yes, they’ll ditch them for the time being. But they’ll carry them when their boss is here. That’s what goons do.”
“You’re good at this.”
“I’ve been using my brains. While you were nearly getting yours splattered across Old Street, playing Lance Armstrong.”
“This is about the bike, isn’t it?” Min said, but she didn’t get it.
Over in Slough House, Catherine was still talking to Ho. In the next room, Marcus Longridge was at his computer. Min couldn’t make out the expression on his face. Marcus was a cipher. Nobody was entirely sure why he’d been exiled, and nobody knew him well enough to ask. On the other hand, nobody cared, so it wasn’t a big worry.
Louisa said, “The one who was doing the talking. Piotr. You think he was coming on to me?”
“You wish. He had his arm round Kyril in the taxi. They were kissing.”
“Right.”
“Seriously. Tongues and everything.”
“Right.”
“You need your gaydar seen to.”
“You know what?” she said. “It’s not my gaydar needs seeing to.”
She gave him a sideways look he was getting to know very well indeed.
“Oh,” he said. “Right. Got you.”
“My place tonight?”
Min stood. The music had stopped, or else got quieter. He reached out a hand, and Louisa took it.
“Bring it on,” Min said.
Catherine put her cup down, but kept talking. “Don’t get me wrong, Roddy, it’s a neat trick, but don’t you think you should have programmed it to show a few off-reservation sites? Nobody sits at their computer all day and does nothing but work.”
Ho became aware that his mouth was open, so he closed it. Then opened it again, but only to fill it with Red Bull.
“But perhaps,” said Catherine, “you’re wondering how I know about this.”
He wasn’t, actually. He’d already decided it must be witchcraft.
Because Catherine Standish knew which way up a keyboard went, and probably had a certificate somewhere verifying her typing speed, but anything beyond surfing tourist sites was as far from her reach as dating … well, dating. Even if she’d crept in at night and logged on in his user-name, she couldn’t have found the program he’d written. If Roddy hadn’t been the one who’d hidden it, he’d not have been able to find it himself.
He said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Catherine glanced at her wristwatch. “That’s about thirty seconds too late to be convincing. Which, in a way, proves my point.”
This time Ho really didn’t know what she was talking about.
“Roddy,” she said, “you don’t get people, do you?”
“Get them?”
“Understand what makes them tick.”
He snorted. Understanding what made people tick was what he did. He tossed a mental coin, and it came up Min Harper. Take Min Harper, then. What made Min Harper tick? Hang onto your hat, lady, because Roddy Ho could tell you Harper’s service record, his salary, the mortgage on his family house, the rent on his bedsit, his credit card debts, his standing order payments, the family-and-friends earmarked on his mobile network, how many points he’s racked up on his supermarket loyalty card and what websites he’s bookmarked. He can tell you Harper looks at Amazon a lot without buying much, and e-mails the Guardian’s over-by-over cricket blog on a regular basis. And he was about to start telling her precisely all that, but she got in first.