“Jesus wept,” said River. “That was like—that was this afternoon.”
Tommy Moult glanced skywards.
“Yesterday afternoon. And he knows about it? You know about it?”
“You’re familiar with the phrase global village?”
River stared.
“Well, Upshott’s the village version of that. Everyone knows everything.”
“Bastard could have killed me.”
“I suppose, to his way of thinking, it wouldn’t have been him doing the killing.”
Moult tramped off. River followed. “It seems further than it did before,” he said after a while.
“Same distance it’s always been.”
A penny dropped. “We’re not heading back to the road, are we?”
“Be a shame,” Moult said, “to go to all this effort, not to mention having the poop scared out of you, and then just scoot home with your tail between your legs.”
“So where are we going?”
“To find the only thing round here worth finding,” Moult said. “Oh, and by the way? It’s top secret.”
River nodded, and they walked on into the dark.
“Okay,” Lamb said at last. “That must be why I keep you round. Now back to your toys, button-boy. If they’re all sleepers then they’re long-term fakes, fakes being the operative word. Their paperwork must be good, but there’ll be a chink of light somewhere. Find it.”
“It’s after midnight.”
“Thanks,” Lamb said. “My watch is fast. And when you’ve done that, do a background on Arkady Pashkin, which is spelt exactly like I’ve just said it.” He paused. “Is there a reason you’re still here?”
Catherine said, “That’s good work. Well done, Roddy.”
Ho left.
She said, “Would it kill you to tell him well done?”
“If he doesn’t do his job, he’s just taking up space.”
“He found this.” Catherine waved the printout. “And another thing—‘chink of light’?”
There was a moment’s silence.
“Christ, I’m getting old,” said Lamb. “Don’t ever tell him, but that was unintentional.”
She went out to the tiny kitchen, and put the kettle on. When she returned, he’d pushed his chair back and was staring at the ceiling, an unlit cigarette in his mouth. Catherine waited. At length, he spoke.
“What do you make of it?”
It appeared to be a genuine question.
She said, “I presume we’re ruling out coincidence.”
“Well, it’s not like Upshott had a sale on. And like Ho said, there’s no other reason to move there.”
“So an entire sleeper network just descended on a Cotswold village and, what, took it over?”
“Sounds like the Twilight Zone, doesn’t it?”
“To what end? It’s basically a retirement village.”
He didn’t reply.
The kettle boiled, and she went back out and made tea. Came back with two mugs, and put Lamb’s on his desk. He made no response.
She said: “It’s not even a dormitory town. No direct rail link to London, or anywhere else. It’s got a church, a shop and a few mail-order outlets. There’s a pottery. A pub. Stop me when it starts sounding like a target.”
“The base was still there when they moved in.”
“Which suggests that if their presence had anything to do with the base they’d have left by now. Or done whatever they meant to do while it was still operational. And who buys a house to carry out a covert op, for heaven’s sake? Half of them took out mortgages. That’s how Ho found them.”
Lamb said, “No, please, keep talking. I find silence oppressive.” Without shifting his gaze from the ceiling, he began fumbling for his lighter.
She said, “If you light that, I’m opening a window. It already stinks in here.”
Lamb removed the cigarette from his mouth and held it above his head. He rolled it between his fingers. She could hear him thinking.
He said, “Seventeen of them.”
“Seventeen families. Or some of them are families. Do you think the kids know?”
“How many we talking about?”
Catherine checked the printout. “About a dozen. Most of them well into their twenties, but at least five still have strong ties to the village. River says—” Lamb jerked upright and she paused, her thread broken. “What?”
“Why are we assuming they know about each other?”
She said, “Ah … Because they’ve all been there twenty years?”
“Yeah. It must come up at dinner parties all the time.” His voice rose a key. “Did I ever mention that Sebastian and I spy for the Kremlin? More Chablis?” He resumed his search for his lighter. “Sleepers operate solo. They don’t have handlers, just a call-code. Do this. Over and out. Years can go by in-between, and they have no contact with anyone else.”
His face had assumed its bullfrog expression. He found the lighter and lit his cigarette but did so on auto-pilot. He didn’t even comment when Catherine crossed the room, raised the blind, and opened the window. Dark night air rushed in, eager to explore this brand new space.
He said, “Think about it. The Wall comes down. The USSR breaks up. Whatever the network was for, at this point it’s tits up. So maybe the mastermind running it, who we’re assuming’s the same guy who dreamed up Alexander Popov, decided to mothball it. But instead of calling them home, he sends them out to the sticks instead. Why not?”
Catherine jumped onto his train of thought. “They’ve spent years burrowing into English society. They’ve all got jobs, all successful in their own fields, and then they’re instructed to move out into the countryside, like countless other middle-class successes. Maybe they’re not sleeping any more. Maybe they’ve become who they’ve been pretending to be.”
“Living normal lives,” said Lamb.
“So I was right. It is a retirement village.”
“Though it seems someone plans to wake them up.”
“Either way,” said Catherine, “it might be an idea to let River know.”
Moult opened the fridge and from its freezer compartment produced a bottle so frosted River couldn’t read its label. Finding glasses on a shelf, he set them on the workbench. Then he uncapped the bottle, filled each glass, and handed one to River.
“That’s it?” River said.
“You expected a slice of lemon?”
“We’ve walked seven miles across pitch-black moorland, and your top secret is, you know where there’s free booze?”
“It was barely two miles,” Moult pointed out. “And there’s a quarter moon.”
On the moor, they’d had to drop to the ground when a jeep passed, carving out chunks of the night, small parts of which glittered—insects, darting about like aerial shards of glass, and reflecting the security patrol’s headlights. Not long afterwards, they’d come through the fence, but not the same way Griff Yates had led River in; instead, they’d emerged onto a stretch of tarmac along which they’d been trekking for over a minute before River registered what it was: not a road but a landing strip. And then the building up ahead took shape, and it was the hangar where the flying club kept their aeroplane. Next to it was a smaller construction, the clubhouse itself, which turned out to be not much more than a garage with added amenities—the fridge Moult was raiding; a few chairs; an old desk cluttered with paperwork; a stack of cardboard boxes, half-covered by a plastic sheet. Light came from a bare overhead bulb. The key to all this treasure had been on a ledge above the door, which would have been the first place River looked, had Tommy Moult not already known it was there.
Tommy Moult, who was now looking at his empty glass as if trying to puzzle out how it had got that way.