When Pashkin emerged from the lift, he gave no indication that last night had ever happened; or at least not to him, not to her. He wore a different suit today. Gleaming white shirt, open at the neck. A flash of a silver cufflink. A hint of cologne. He carried a briefcase.
“Ms. Guy,” he said. “Mr. Longridge.”
The lobby echoed like a church.
“The car should be outside.”
And so it was. They sat in the same formation as the previous day, in similar slow-moving traffic. But what difference, Louisa wondered, would it make if they were ten minutes late? There was only Webb waiting. For a supposedly high-level summit, it was low key. She texted him anyway, to let him know they weren’t far off.
At a junction on the edge of the City, the car rolled past three police vans: black, with shaded windows. Figures lurked inside; human shapes distorted by uniform and helmet, like American football players, absurdly padded up for a kickabout.
Pashkin said, “Trouble is expected, then.”
Louisa didn’t trust her voice in his presence.
He said, “Your liberal values, they take a back seat when your banks and buildings are threatened.”
Marcus said, “I’m not sure I have liberal values.”
Pashkin looked at him, interested.
“And besides. A few troublemakers get their heads broken, or thrown in a cell overnight. We’re hardly talking Tiananmen.”
“Isn’t there a phrase for that? The thin end of the wedge?”
The police vans were behind them now, but a hefty cop presence remained on the pavements. Most were wearing high-visibility jackets, not battle armour. Officer Friendly was the first face shown. Sergeant Rock stayed indoors until things got hairy.
But these rallies had a habit of turning nasty, thought Louisa. It wasn’t just the banks the marchers were targeting. It was corporate greed in all its manifestations; all the visible symbols of the rich getting richer, while others had their salaries cut, their debt increased, their jobs rationalised, their benefits slashed.
Not her problem, though. Not today. She had her own battles to fight.
Piotr spoke, and Pashkin replied, in a language thick as treacle. Maybe her face asked the question. Either way, Pashkin chose now to address her directly. “He says it is nearly over.”
“Over?”
“We’re nearly there.”
She’d lost track. But here they were indeed, at the foot of the Needle; the car pulling into the root of its enormous shadow, then disappearing underneath it, to the car park below.
Their plate was registered as belonging to a contractor; officially, their party was meeting with the one of the hotel’s kitchen supervisors in a utilities room below the building’s lobby.
Their entry into the Needle itself would go unrecorded.
James Webb had entered in the same way earlier. Up on the seventy-seventh now, he was considering placement. The tricky thing was, it wasn’t immediately clear which side of an oval table was the head. He tried the chair facing the window. All he could see was a lone plane scarring the blue. Some days you could sit here and be at the heart of a cloud. Right now, he was higher than parts of the sky.
Though hadn’t yet flown as high as he intended to.
“So, Mr. Pashkin. How can we make things easier for you?”
That was the line he’d be taking. That Pashkin had nothing Webb wanted; all that mattered was that Pashkin’s path be made smooth. Later, debts would be called in; suggestions made as to how Pashkin might repay the kindness of foreigners. Even if no tangible favours were bestowed, simply meeting Webb rendered Pashkin compromised. But that was the lure of power. Ambition tended to the reckless, a seam Webb planned to mine.
“I’m here to help. Officially, I don’t speak for HMG.” Modest cough. “But any requests you make will find a sympathetic hearing where it will do most good.”
Cosmetic aid was what Pashkin would want. To be seen in the company of movers and shakers, and reckoned a force in the world. A photo op with the PM, drinks at Number 10, a little attention from the press. Once you were taken seriously, you were taken seriously. If Pashkin’s star rose in the west, it would cast light in the east.
His phone buzzed. Marcus Longridge. They were in the garage. Webb listened, said, “Oh for Christ’s sake, he’s an honoured guest, not a security risk. Use your common sense.”
After hanging up he rose, walked round the table, and tried the other side, so he was facing into the room, with the big view behind him.
Yes, he decided. That was it. Leave the windows for Pashkin to gaze out of. Show him the sky was the limit, and wait for him to bite.
He went to the lobby to wait for the lift.
Behind him, in the far distance, the sun glinted off the wing of a tiny aeroplane, making it seem, for a moment, far larger than it was.
“This Arkady Pashkin character?” said Ho.
Catherine didn’t want to ask. “What about him?”
“You read that feature? Supposed to be from the Telegraph?”
“Supposed to be,” she repeated flatly.
Ho said, “You look at it closely?”
“I read it, Roddy. We all did.” She shuffled papers, moved a folder, found it. Not the actual newspaper, but a printout from the web. She waved it at him. “Telegraph. July seventh, last year. What’s your problem?”
“It’s not my problem.” Ho plucked it from her hand. It ran to three pages, complete with photograph. “Here.” He stabbed the address box at the top of the page. “See that?”
“Roddy. What are you on about?”
“It looks like the Telegraph, sounds like the Telegraph, and you want to scrumple it up and eat it, it probably tastes like the Telegraph. But it’s not.” He held it in front of her. “You took it from the man’s own website. Did you even check the newspaper’s archive?”
“It’s all over the web,” she said numbly.
“Course it is. Because some dude’s posted it all over the web.
But you know where it’s not? In the newspaper’s own archive.”
“Roddy—”
“I’m telling you, that thing’s fake. And you take it away, you know how much evidence there is for Arkady Pashkin even existing, let alone being some bigshot Russian oligarch?”
He made a zero sign with finger and thumb.
“Oh,” Catherine said.
Ho said, “There’s references, true. He’s got Facebook presence, and a Wiki page, and he’s on lots of sites where you drop your marker in and everyone assumes you’re someone. But chase the mentions down, and they’re all referring to each other. The web’s stuffed full of straw men.” He coloured slightly: must have been excitement. “Pashkin’s one of them.”
“But how …?” But she already knew how. The research on Pashkin had been done by Spider Webb: Regent’s Park’s Background section had been out of the picture, because of that damned audit. Odds on it had been Pashkin who’d approached Webb in the first place …
She said, “This Needle summit. Whatever Pashkin’s up to, that’s what it’s about. I’ll pull the plug. Roddy—get over there.”
“Me?”
“Take Shirley.” He stared as if she’d slipped into another language. “Just do it, okay?” She reached for her phone, and even as she did so it rang. To Ho’s departing back she said, “And Roddy? Don’t ever say dude again,” and answered her call.
“Catherine?” said River. “Call the Park. Possible Code September.”
Miles away, somewhere between the two ends of this phonecall, Kelly Tropper guided the blue-and-white Cessna Skyhawk through a clear blue sky. Ahead of her lay swathes of nothingness—that was how it felt; that she was cleaving an absence, which healed itself the moment she’d passed. And if a painful truth sometimes threatened to intrude, that the scars in her wake were as enduring as they were invisible, she generally managed to tamp this knowledge down, and smother it under the conviction that nothing so central to the core of her being could be evil.