A sudden outburst of chanting from across the road splintered into gales of laughter.
“Louisa?”
“Why are you with us?” She hadn’t known she was going to ask until she heard herself speak. “At Slough House?”
“That’s important?”
“You’re appointing yourself my handler, yes, it’s important. Because what I heard is, you lost your nerve. Couldn’t take the pressure. So maybe this concern for my well-being is just you making sure your life stays quiet, and I don’t rock your boat.”
Marcus stared for a moment over the top of his shades. Then he pushed the glasses into place. When he spoke, his tone was milder than his look had promised. “Well, that sounds plausible. Bullshit, but plausible.”
“So you didn’t lose your nerve.”
“Shit, no. I gamble, that’s all.”
Someone called his name.
It sounded like his name. It wasn’t, but it sounded like it—it hauled River out of the darkness, and when he opened his eyes, daylight spackled through the branches overhead. The sky was wide-open, and he had to close his eyes again, scrunch them shut, as protection against its bright blueness.
“Walker? Jonny?”
Hands were on him and suddenly the tightness loosened and he could move properly, which brought fresh pain coursing through his limbs.
“Fuck, man. You’re a mess.”
His saviour was a blurry creature, fuzzy patches held together like a walking Rorschach test.
“Get you out of this shit.”
Arms pulled River upright and his body screamed, but felt good at the same time—aching its way out of cramp.
“Here.”
A bottle was pressed to his lips, and water poured into his mouth. River coughed and bent forward; spat; threw up almost. Then blindly reached for the bottle, grabbed it, and greedily gulped down the rest of its contents.
“Shit, man,” Griff Yates said. “You really are a fucking mess.”
“I gamble, that’s all,” Marcus Longridge said.
“You what?”
“Gamble. Cards. Horses. You name it.”
Louisa stared. “That’s it?”
“Quite a big it, actually. Incompatible with efficient operational mode, apparently. Which is a joke. Ops can be the biggest gamble of all.”
“So why didn’t they just boot you out?”
“Tactical error. See, one of the HR bods decided I was suffering a form of addiction, and sat me down with a counsellor.”
“And?”
“He counselled.”
“And?”
Marcus said, “Well, I wouldn’t say it took, exactly. Not a hundred percent. That was a bookie just now, for instance.” He paused for a barrage of car-horns; an impromptu symphony likely to become the day’s soundtrack, as traffic found itself relegated to second-class status on the city’s streets. “But anyway, it turned out that once they’d given me a shrink, they couldn’t fire me. In case of legal hassle. So instead …”
So instead, he’d joined the slow horses.
Louisa glanced at the hotel, through whose big glass doors they’d be walking any moment. “Are you Taverner’s line into Slough House?”
“Nope. Why would she want one?”
“Catherine says she does.”
“Can’t see why,” Marcus said. “We’re basically the Park’s outside lav. If she wants to know anything, can’t she just ask Lamb?”
“Maybe she’d rather not.”
“Fair enough. But I’m nobody’s snitch, Louisa.”
“Okay.”
“That mean you believe me?”
“It means okay. And the gambling’s not a problem?”
“We had a fortnight in Rome last year, me and Cassie and the kids. Paid for by my, ah, addiction.” He pushed his shades up again. “So fuck ’em.”
It was the first time he’d mentioned his family in her hearing. She wondered if that was intended to win her confidence.
He looked at his watch.
“Okay,” Louisa said again, which this time meant he had a point: time was getting on. She led the way into the hotel lobby.
Since they were partnered, it was probably as well he was in full possession of his nerve, she thought.
But today was a babysit. It wasn’t like his ops experience would be needed.
Catherine called River, got Number Unavailable; then Lamb, with the same result. Then studied paperwork. “All shoe and no footprint.” The more weight you carried, the deeper marks you made. But the early lives of these Upshott folk wouldn’t have left tracks in icing sugar.
Stephen Butterfield had owned a publishing company, and a quick dip online showed him numbered among the chattering class’s great and good: always ready to weigh in on the issues of the day, on Radio 4, in The Observer. He’d served on a Parliamentary Commission on illiteracy; was a trustee of a charity supplying schoolbooks to developing countries. But go back, and his early life dissolved into mist. The same went for the others Roddy had backgrounded: light- to middleweight persons of substance; embedded in an establishment that invited them to its high tables, to sup with captains of industry and cabinet ministers. Control was about influence …
With a start, she realised Ho was in her doorway. She had no idea how long he’d been standing there.
He said, “You’re kidding me, right?”
“Kidding you? What do you mean?”
He looked puzzled. “That you’re having a joke.”
Catherine had the ability to make it clear she was taking a deep breath without actually taking one. She did this now. “What am I kidding you about, Roddy?”
He told her.
“It was meant to be a joke.”
Some joke.
“They never target the old houses. Once you know that, it’s kind of cool, actually.”
Once you know that was the key phrase here.
“And I can’t believe Tommy would’ve …”
River ached all over, and couldn’t move as fast as he wanted—they were heading uphill. There was no signal in the dip.
He said, “And this was because of Kelly?”
Christ. He had the voice of a ninety-year-old.
Yates stopped. “You don’t get it, do you?”
“I get it,” River said. “I just don’t care.”
“She’s all I ever—”
“Grow up.” She makes her own choices, he nearly said, but the thought of Kelly’s choices killed the words. He tried his mobile again, his hands taking fat-finger to a new level. No signal yet. An engine drifted into earshot and he looked up, half-expecting to see Kelly zipping through the blue in her flying bomb—but if that’s what she was in, she wouldn’t be buzzing over Upshott.
She’d be in the air by now. He had to raise the alarm.
There’s a plane going to fly into the Needle—our very own 9/11.
On the same day a Russian oligarch with political ambitions would be on the seventy-seventh floor.
Of course, if he was wrong, it would make crashing King’s Cross look like the pinnacle of his career.
And if he was right, and didn’t sound the warning in time, he’d spend the rest of his life grieving for innumerable dead.
“Come on.”
“That’s the wrong way,” Griff told him.
“No it isn’t.”
The hangar. He had to get to the hangar; see if he was right about the fertiliser.
Two steps more, and his phone buzzed in his hand. The signal was back.
A jeep crested a hillock in front of them.