“Nothing. Not much. A quick call.”
“To?”
“Nick Duffy.”
“I thought you said he was happy?”
“He is. He is. All we need is for him to put that in a report, even an interim one. To make sure everyone stays calm until the Needle job’s done and dusted.”
More silence.
“And we’ve pulled off the intelligence coup of the—”
“Don’t push it.” She thought more. “There’s no chance Harper’s death has anything to do with this op?”
“It was an accident.”
“But what if it turns out to have been a very good accident that has something to do with this op?”
“It won’t. Pashkin’s not even in the country yet. And if anyone had wind he’s planning to join our team, well, it wouldn’t be Min Harper bearing the brunt. He was only … He was a minor cog.”
“A slow horse, you mean.”
“It’s not like he even knew what’s going on. As far as he was concerned, he was babysitting an oil deal.”
She said, “You realise that if this gets out, Roger Barrowby’s the least of your worries? Harper might only have been a slow horse, but let’s not forget who’s in charge of that stable.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll tread carefully round any bruisable toes.”
She laughed. “Jackson Lamb bruises like an elephant.” She made a small noise: changed hands on her phone or something. “I’ll speak to Duffy.” She hung up.
And what Webb had thought then, and had seen no cause to change his mind about since, was that the thing about elephants was, they grew old and died. There’d been a documentary: an elephant carcass left by a watering hole. Hours it lasted, before the flies moved in, and the birds, and the hyenas. After that, it was parts. Jackson Lamb had been legend in his day, they said, but they said that about Robert de Niro.
That was a good thing.
Louisa Guy was handling her end, and no one at the Park, barring Lady Di, had wind of the Pashkin op. After tomorrow, he, James Webb, could be pulling the strings on the most important asset Five had reeled in since, well, ever.
All that mattered was that things kept moving smoothly.
Arkady Pashkin said, “Why aren’t we moving?”
Middle of the city, traffic in front, traffic behind, a big sign saying roadworks ahead, and a stop light clearly visible through the windscreen. So why aren’t we moving, Louisa wondered. You had to be rich to ask.
Pashkin said, “Piotr?”
“Traffic’s heavy, boss.”
“Traffic’s always heavy.” To Louisa he said, “We should have outriders. Tomorrow, I mean.”
“I think they’re reserved for royals,” she said. “And government ministers. VIPs.”
“They should be available to those who can afford them.” He glanced at Marcus briefly, as if estimating his net worth, then his gaze returned to Louisa. “You’d think, with all the practice you’ve had, you’d be better at capitalism than us.”
“I don’t think anyone’s surprised what quick studies you turned out to be.”
“Is that a clever remark? This is not my first language.” Without turning his head, he spoke to Piotr and Kyril in that one. Kyril replied: Louisa couldn’t read the intonation. Possibly deferential. But it was like being in New York, where someone could ask you the time in a way that suggested you’d just punched their mother.
Their car had a separate driver’s compartment, though the dividing window was rolled down. Louisa and Marcus sat facing Pashkin, who was facing front. Immediately behind them, a red bus loomed. It was full of less rich people moving through London very slowly, and probably no less aggrieved by it than Pashkin, who shook his head in irritation, and began to study the Financial Times.
The car shunted forward and rolled over something bumpy, which probably wasn’t a cyclist.
Louisa blinked as pain stabbed her eyeballs, but it soon went. If you carried on looking like you were holding it all together, pretty soon you were holding it all together.
Pashkin tutted, and turned a page.
He looked like a politician, spoke like one too; he had charisma, probably. Maybe Marcus was right, and he also had frontline ambitions, and this mini-summit had less to do with oil deals than under-the-table promises about future conduct, future favours. That could only be a good thing, unless it turned out a bad one. Political alliances often turned unhappy: some hands got shook, some arms got sold, but it never looked great for HMG when the torturing bastards were strung up by their own people.
Beside her, Marcus shifted, and his leg brushed hers. And now a bicycle whizzed past, and this time instead of a pain in her eyes Louisa felt her heart lurch, and the tired old logic unreeled again in her mind: that Min had got drunk after a row was possible, even after a row so trivial Louisa couldn’t remember what it had been about. And that Min had been knocked off his bicycle and killed—yes, that could happen too. But not one after the other. Not those two things in a row. To believe that would mean accepting some kind of cosmic continuity, an organised randomness of event. So no, there’d been something deeper at work, some human agency. And that could only mean this job she was working on now, and these people in this car. Or others, who knew about the summit, and wanted to stop it happening, or turn it into something else.
She started drawing up a mental list of everyone she didn’t trust, and had to stop immediately. She didn’t have all day.
And then, with the suddenness of a tooth freeing itself from its socket, the car was through the snarl-up and moving smoothly. Above them glass and steel buildings did their best to pierce the sky, and on the pavements sharply dressed men and women threaded between each other, hardly ever bumping. Min Harper had been dead three weeks. And here was Louisa, doing her job.
By the time Lamb’s taxi reached the laundrette, near Swiss Cottage, it would have been cheaper to bin the shirt and buy several new ones. While it swam away in the never-ceasing stream of traffic, Lamb lit a cigarette and perused posters in the laundrette’s window: a local quiz night, stand-up gigs, tomorrow’s Stop the City rally, an animal-free circus. Nobody paid him attention. When his cigarette was done he ground it out and entered.
Machines lined both walls, most of them sloshing rhythmically, making sounds Lamb’s stomach made when he woke at three, having drunk too much. A familiar noise. Dividing the room was a series of benches on which four people sat: a young couple wrapped round each other like an interlocking puzzle; an old woman rocking back and forth; and, up the far end, a short dark middle-aged man in a raincoat, engrossed in the Evening Standard.
Lamb sat next to him. “Any idea how these things work?”
The man didn’t look up. “Do I have any idea how washing machines work?”
“I assume they take money.”
“And washing powder,” the man said. Now he did look up. “Jesus, Lamb. You never been in a laundrette before? Short of tearing a postcard in half, I thought this couldn’t have got more old school.”
Lamb dropped the bag to the floor. “I was your other kind of undercover,” he said. “Casinos, five-star hotels. World-class hookers. Laundry was mostly room service.”
“Yeah, and I jet-packed to work, before they fired me.”
Lamb extended his hand, and Sam Chapman shook it.
Bad Sam Chapman had been Head Dog once, Nick Duffy’s role now, until a high-profile mess involving an industrial amount of money meant he’d had his arse handed back on a plate: no job, no pension, no reference, unless you counted “Lucky to be leaving upright.” He now worked for a detective agency which specialised in finding runaway teenagers, or at least in taking credit card details from the agonised parents of runaway teenagers. Since Chapman’s arrival their success rate had tripled, but that still left a lot of missing kids.