Lamb said, “I checked his diary, did I tell you? He has no plans for the future.”
Molly took a sip of tea.
“And he’s broken things off with the woman he was seeing.”
Molly placed her cup on the table.
“And he’s taking some quack cancer remedy.”
Molly said, “Oh dear.”
“Yeah,” said Lamb. He dropped the pill bottle into the wastepaper bin. “Whatever he’s up to, at least we know why. He’s dying. And this is his last hurrah.”
Morning. Light. Surprisingly strong, breaking through the curtains, but then it had been sunny lately; unseasonably warm. Summer in April, full of unreliable promise. If you turned your back on it too long, the temperature would drop.
Louisa didn’t so much wake as realise she’d been awake for some time. Eyes open, brain humming. Nothing especially coherent; just little mental Post-its of the day’s tasks, beginning with get up, shower, drink coffee. Then bigger things: leave the flat, meet Marcus, collect Pashkin. Everything else—like last night—was just a black mass boiling in the background, to be ignored as long as possible, like clouds on an unreliably sunny day.
She rose, showered, dressed, drank coffee. Then went out to meet Marcus.
Catherine was back in Slough House so early it felt like she’d never left, but even so, she travelled there through a city whose fuse had been lit. The underground was full of people talking to each other. Some held placards—STOP THE CITY was a favourite. Another read BANKERS: NO. At Barbican station, someone lit a cigarette. Anarchy was in the air. There’d be glass broken today.
But early as she was, Roderick Ho had beaten her. This wasn’t unusual—Ho often seemed to live here: she suspected he preferred his online activities to emanate from a Service address—but what was different was, he’d been working. As she passed his open door, he looked up. “Found some stuff,” he said.
“That list I gave you?”
“The Upshott people.” He brandished a printout. “Three of them, anyway. I’ve tracked them back as far as they go. And there’s paperwork, sure, they’ve paperwork coming out their ears, but the early stuff is all shoe and no footprint.”
“Which would be one of those internet expressions, yes?”
Ho flashed a sudden smile. This was even weirder than people chatting on the tube. “It is now.”
“And it means …?”
“Well, take Andrew Barnett. His CV’s got him attending St Leonard’s Grammar School in Chester in the early sixties. It’s a comp now, with a good IT department, and one of its projects is putting the school records online.”
“And there’s no match-up,” Caroline finished.
Ho shook his head. “Must have seemed a fair bet at the time. These guys have papered over their early lives all you want. But it was pre-web, and they’d no way of knowing the paper would start to peel.”
She glanced at the printout. As well as Barnett, he’d run down Butterfield and Salmon and found similar gaps in their histories. And there’d be more, there’d be flaws in the others’ lives too. It was all true, then. A Soviet sleeper cell had taken root in a tiny English village. Perhaps because it no longer had a purpose. Or perhaps for some other reason they had yet to fathom.
“This is good, Roddy.”
“Yeah.”
And maybe she’d been hanging round Lamb too much, because she added: “Makes a change from just surfing the net.”
“Yeah, well.” He looked away, colour rising. “All that archive crap, I could pull an all-nighter, get it finished in a sitting. This is different.”
She waited until his gaze met hers again. “Good point,” she said. “Thanks.” She glanced at her watch. It was nine. Louisa and Marcus would be on their way to pick up Arkady Pashkin, which reminded her: “Did you do the background on Pashkin?”
And now his expression became the more familiar put-upon scowl. Spending a life among computers had a way of prolonging adolescence. There was probably a study on it. It was probably online. “Been kind of busy?”
“Yes. But do it now.”
Shame to leave him on a sour note, but Roddy Ho had a way of sticking to his own script.
They met near the hotel, a little after nine. The tubes had been full, the streets crowded; there was a huge police presence, not to mention camera crews, news trucks, rubberneckers. Crowds were gathering in Hyde Park, from where the smells of a hundred variations on breakfast drifted. Instructions booming from a loudhailer, This is a CO11-notified event, which means that the police will be marshalling the route, were drowned by music and chatter. The atmosphere was one of burgeoning excitement, as if the world’s biggest party was waiting for its DJ.
“Looks like someone’s out for trouble,” was Marcus’s greeting. He gestured at a group of twentysomethings heading for the park, a banner reading Fuck the Banks lofted above their heads.
“They’re pissed off citizens,” Louisa said. “That’s all. You ready?”
“Of course.” Today he wore a grey suit, a salmon-pink tie, neat shades: he looked good, she noticed, the same way she might notice any other irrelevant detail. “You?”
“I’m fine.”
“Sure?”
“Just said so, didn’t I?”
They turned the corner.
He said, “Look, Louisa, what I said last night—”
His mobile rang.
You couldn’t call it sleep. Call it overload: pain, stress; all of it tumbling over and over like an argument trapped in a washing machine; over and over until its rhythm rocked River out of consciousness and dropped him down a well of his own making. In that circular darkness the same half-chewed facts nipped at him like vermin: the fertiliser loaded on the plane, which Kelly would be soaring away in this morning; the sketch she’d drawn of the cityscape, with that lightning bolt smiting that tall building. An aeroplane was already a bomb, but that wasn’t the first thing you thought of when you looked at one. It was only when you loaded it with bags of nitrogen-rich fertiliser that you underlined its essential explosiveness.
And over and over in his tumbling mind, the image repeated itself; of Kelly Tropper—why?—steering her pride and joy into London’s tallest building; searing a new Ground Zero into the eyeballs of the world.
Over and over, until at last River lost his grip on the here and now, and—having long since bellowed himself dry—slipped out of his mind.
While Marcus was on the phone Louisa watched the rally assembling. It was like seeing a hive mind being born; all these different particles coming together, out of which one consciousness would arise. Marcus was probably right. There’d be trouble later. But that was a sideshow, another part of the ignorable background. She wondered if last night would turn out to be her only chance of getting Pashkin on his own. If he’d jet away as soon as the talks were done, leaving her forever ignorant of the reason Min had died.
Marcus said, “Sorry about that.”
“Finished? We’re on a job, not an outing.”
“It won’t ring again,” he said. “And you’re not throwing Pashkin out of any high windows, right?”
She didn’t answer.
“Right?”
“Lamb put you up to this?”
“I don’t know Lamb as well as you. But it doesn’t strike me his team’s welfare is his top priority.”
“Oh, you’re looking out for my welfare, are you?”
“Those gorillas Pashkin has? They’re not for show. Make a move on their boss and they’ll take you apart.”
“Like they did Min.”
“Whatever happened to Min, we’ll sort it. But there’s no point in revenge if it costs you everything, and believe me, what you’d planned last night would have cost just that. Anything Pashkin’s goons didn’t do to you, the Service would have done instead.”