“Nothing to cause alarm,” Pashkin said. “But please.” He made a sudden expansive gesture, as if releasing a dove. “Let’s sit. Let’s start.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “Do you know,” he added, “maybe I will have that coffee after all.”
River had the phone to his ear when the jeep reached them and a soldier jumped out: a young guy, fit-looking, wide across the shoulders.
“Catherine?”
“Would you put the phone down, sir?”
“Is there a problem?” This was Griff Yates. “We’re out walking, got a bit lost, like.”
“Call the Park. Possible Code September.”
“Sir? The phone?”
The soldier approached.
“Today. This morning.”
“The phone. Now.”
When the soldier laid hands on him, a night’s worth of stress and fear found brief release. River knocked his arms aside, opening the guy up; he kicked his knee, then jabbed him in the throat with his phone-free hand as the soldier slipped off-balance.
“Jesus, man!” Griff shouted, as the other soldier leaped from the jeep, drawing a sidearm.
“River.” Catherine’s voice was very calm. “I need to hear the protocols.”
“Phone down! Hands up! Now!” Screamed, not spoken; either this was the way they were taught, or Soldier Number Two was going off on one.
“Manda—”
The word was cut off by a gunshot.
“So,” Ho said, “You got a car?”
“Are you kidding?”
He hadn’t been. He looked up Aldersgate for a taxi; looked down it too; and when he turned back to Shirley Dander, she was on the other side of the road, moving fast.
Oh, shit.
He waited another second, hoping this was a joke, but when she disappeared round the corner, he accepted the dismal truth: they were heading for the Needle on foot.
Cursing Shirley Dander, cursing Catherine Standish, Roderick Ho began to run.
Manda—
Mandarin was the first of River Cartwright’s protocols, the others being dentist and tiger. But when Catherine had called back, her only reward was the Number Unavailable mantra.
Code September. That part he had completed. Possible Code September. Today. This morning.
Catherine was alone in Slough House. Lamb hadn’t turned up yet; Ho and Shirley Dander had just left at a lick.
Code September … It wasn’t an official designation, but was frequently used; its reference point the obvious. Code September didn’t simply signify a terrorist event. It meant someone was planning on flying an aeroplane into a building.
With the thought, new currents fizzed in her veins. Two courses of action were open. She could assume River had lost his mind. Or she could trigger a major response to an alert for which she had no concrete evidence.
She called the Park.
The rally was a long and winding worm now, the gap between its head and the waggly remnants of its tail wriggling through the heart of London. The front had crossed the viaduct at Holborn; some of the stragglers were still on Oxford Street. There seemed no hurry. The warmer it got, the truer this became.
At Centre Point, where building-site barriers blocked Charing Cross Road, the noise of excavation drowned the chanting. As the rally squeezed past the narrowed junction, a small boy pulled his hand from his father’s and pointed at the sky. Squinting upwards, the man caught a flash of something; sunlight reflecting off a window of the distant Needle. He scooped the boy onto his shoulders, making him laugh, and they continued on their way.
When Soldier Two fired, River dropped his phone. The shot went overhead, but it was anyone’s guess where he’d been aiming. Soldier One scrambled upright and threw a punch in River’s direction; sidestepping it, River slipped and fell to his knees. A heavy foot stamped on his phone. Griff Yates shouted in anger or innocence, and River reached for his Service card—
Hands in the air!
Drop it!
Flat on the ground! Now!
River flung himself onto the dirt.
Empty your hands! Empty your hands!
His hands were empty.
Soldier Two, with terrifying casualness, swung the butt of his handgun into Griff Yates’s face, and Yates dropped to his knees, blood spinning all around.
“I’m with British Intelligence,” River shouted. “MI5. There’s a national emergency about to—”
“Shut it!” Soldier One screamed. “Shut it now!
“—break and you’re not helping—”
“Shut it!”
River placed his hands on his head.
Yates, half-sobbing, was still audible. “You cunt! What you bloody do that for, you bloody—”
“Shut it!”
“—cunt?”
Before River could speak, Soldier Two swung at Griff Yates again.
In Regent’s Park, one of any number of chic, sleek and drop-dead efficient women answered a phone, listened, placed the speaker on hold and buzzed the glass-walled office on the hub, where Diana Taverner was two hours into a morning she wasn’t enjoying, because she wasn’t alone. Roger Barrowby, currently overseeing the daily outgoings and incomings of the Service’s operational nexus, was sharing her personal space as if bestowing a favour—lately he’d taken to turning up at the Park as early as Lady Di herself, his thinning sandy hair teased into an attitude that lent it body; his prominent chin pinkly shaved and dabbed with cologne; his middle-aged body parcelled into the subtlest of pin-stripes; all of this intended, apparently, to convey the impression that she and he were in the same boat; were shoring up the ruins. Taverner was starting to worry that it was a courtship ritual. Barrowby wasn’t bothered about the Service’s financial competence. He simply wanted to demonstrate that he was pulling the strings that made everyone jump, and making it obvious that hers were the strings he enjoyed tugging most. Perhaps because she tugged back.
Today, he was studying, rather than occupying, the black leather and chrome visitors’ chair Taverner had inherited from her office’s previous incumbent. “Is this actually a Mies van der Rohe?”
“What do you think?”
“Because they’re awfully expensive. I’d hate to think that in these straitened times, the Service budget was being stretched to coddle posteriors.”
Coddled posteriors was very Barrowby. He had moments so arch, he made Stephen Fry look level.
“Roger, it’s a chain store knock off. The only reason it’s not in a skip is that in these ‘straitened times,’ the Service budget doesn’t ‘stretch’ to replacing it.”
Her phone buzzed.
“Now, would you mind?
He settled himself on the object under discussion.
Suppressing a sigh, she answered the phone. After a moment, she said: “Put her through.”
The pavement pounded beneath Shirley Dander in time with the thudding of her heart—she’d have to slow down soon; run a bit, walk a bit, wasn’t that how you were supposed to do it?
In the jogging books, maybe. Not in the Service manual.
She risked a look. Ho was several hundred yards behind, running like a drunk with a sprain, in no state to observe her. So she stopped, nursed her ribs with her left hand, steadied herself against a wall with her right. She was in a small park: trees, bushes, a playground, grass. A clutch of mothers, their offspring strapped in buggies or loaded onto swings, were drinking coffee from a breakfast stall this side of the alley onto Whitecross Street. Shirley passed through it, and at the far end looked up. There it was, the tip of the Needle; visible even here, in this built-up canyon.