“I get the picture.”
“Well, since then, like a regrettable number of former colleagues, Andrei has turned to private enterprise to earn his crust. In short, he was in the employ of one it’ll be simpler to keep calling Arkady Pashkin.”
“And you needed him to lay a trail Dickie Bow would follow.”
“Precisely. So Pashkin and I came to a mutually beneficial arrangement, which even now he’s reaping the benefit of. Or trying to. Like I say, he hasn’t rung.”
River shook his head. He ached all over, but underneath that a sense of wonderment pulsed. For the first time in his life, he was facing the enemy. Not his enemy, exactly, but his grandfather’s, and Jackson Lamb’s; he was putting a face to the history that previous spooks had battled with, and it was happening here, in a country churchyard, witnessed by the uninvolved dead.
He said, “And that’s it? You bring the City to a grinding halt for a morning, and that’s it? Christ, what a waste of effort. A few hand-wringing editorials and it’ll be forgotten.”
Katinsky laughed. “What’s your name? Your real name?”
River shook his head.
“No, I suppose not. You don’t have a cigarette, do you?”
“They’re bad for you.”
“Is that a sense of humour poking through? There’s hope for us yet.”
“That’s what this is to you? One big joke?”
“If you like,” Katinsky said. “So tell me. Do you want to hear the punchline?”
He must be on the twentieth floor, Roderick Ho thought, chest heaving, breath thick with the taste of blood. At least the twentieth. He’d crashed through the lobby in Shirley Dander’s wake; had waved his ID at the lone security guard, who was sticking to his post though the City crumbled; had followed his pointing finger to stairs that led forever up. And now he must be at least on the twentieth floor, and Shirley was out of sight. All he could hear was the crashing boom of the alarm, louder in the stairwell as it bounced off walls and skittered off the staircase, while he panted like a dog, on all fours, his forehead resting on the stair above. Drool unspooled from his lip. Everything was a blur. What was he doing this for?
Louisa and Marcus in trouble—didn’t care.
Pashkin not who he said he was—didn’t care.
Shirley Dander thinking him a wuss—didn’t care.
He should be back in his office, deep-sea diving on the web.
You’re aware you’re MI5, right?
Yeah: he didn’t care.
It occurred to him that the program he’d written to fake his work-pattern would have kicked in by now, and anyone checking up on him remotely would find him hard at work on the archive: sorting and saving, sorting and saving. If he’d had breath to spare, he’d have laughed. It was a shame he had no one to share the joke with because it was, after all, pretty funny.
What was her name: Shona? Shana? The chick from the gym he’d planned to meet, once he’d trashed her relationship. Except, he thought, he’d never do that, would he? Trash her relationship, yes; or at any rate, throw a virtual spanner into its works—he could handle that, no problem. But actually going up and talking to her? Never going to happen. And even if it did, how would he explain to her about the program he’d written to fake his work pattern?
Catherine Standish, on the other hand. She knew about it. And you know, Roddy had the feeling she actually found it pretty amusing.
And that’s what he was doing this for, come to think of it. He was here because she’d told him to be here. To help Louisa Guy and Marcus whatshisname.
Sighing, he hauled himself to his feet, and staggered up towards what must be the twenty-first floor
Though was in fact the twelfth.
Marcus went through the fire doors low, arms outstretched, gun pointing ahead, then left, then right, then up. Nothing. He said, “Clear,” and Louisa followed him out of the stairwell. They were on the sixty-eighth, and the logo on the glass doors read Rumble in a streamlined font. There were lights on inside, but no one visible. The reception desk, in front of a huge repro of A Bigger Splash, was uncrewed. Marcus tried the door. It wouldn’t open.
“Maybe they locked it behind them.”
“They’re using plastic,” Marcus pointed out. He took a step back, braced himself, and kicked, to no effect. The noise this made was swallowed by the alarm. No one appeared inside the Rumble suite.
“Ideas?”
“Maybe they went through a wall.”
“Or maybe …”
Marcus raised an eyebrow.
Louisa said, “Maybe he was lying. What floor are the diamond people on?”
One breath, two breath. One breath, two.
There was a City challenge, Shirley had seen a poster for it—you ran to the top flight of a ’scraper, then down, then ran to another one and did it again. It must be for charity, because it couldn’t be for fun. She wondered how many folk died halfway through.
Her legs were soup. A label on a fire-door read 32. She’d seen nobody since the twentieth, when a dishevelled couple had burst into the well, asking, “Are we too late?” as if they’d missed the emergency. Shirley had pointed the way down, and carried on climbing.
And now she must be getting used to the constant wail of the damned alarm, fishtailing round the stairwell, because she was hearing other sounds too—some kind of explosion some minutes back: nothing you wanted to hear this high up.
She’d not been able to raise Louisa or Marcus, but had talked to Catherine, who’d told her the alarms were false; no terrorist bombs were expected … It had sounded like a bomb to her though, if a small one.
One breath after another, at least one of which was a sigh. Arkady Pashkin wasn’t who he said he was, and had two thugs in tow. Shirley had no weapon, but she’d put people on the floor with her bare hands before now. Come to think of it, that’s why she was in Slough House in the first place.
It didn’t matter that her legs were soup, or that she was less than halfway up. The City was coming apart, and that seemed to be Pashkin’s plan. So she wasn’t going to lie here panting while Guy and Longridge stopped it by themselves. Not if a ticket back to Regent’s Park was involved.
Grinding her teeth, she took the next flight.
From way above her, more noise. It might have been a gunshot.
The sixty-fifth. de Koenig. The diamond merchant’s. Its outer room was kitted out on a desert theme, with silks hanging off the walls and a clutch of palms forming a centrepiece, though these had been bent and torn by the blast that had shaken the floor twelve storeys up. Smoke still hugged the ceiling, and any furniture not fixed into place was scattered against the right-hand side of the room. Midway along the facing wall a metal door hung off its hinges.
“They’re gone,” she said.
“Never assume.” Marcus went through the metal door the same way he’d entered the suite: every direction covered. Louisa followed.
It had been a secure room, lined with narrow deposit boxes, a good dozen of which had been blown open. From the floor glinted a shard of broken glass, which wasn’t broken glass, Louisa realised—Jesus, it was a diamond, the size of a fingernail.
And Piotr too, a chunk of his head removed by a bullet, and smeared on the nearest wall.
“Pashkin’s travelling light,” Marcus said.
“He must be on the stairs.”
“So let’s go.”
They ran for the stairwell again, but at the firedoor Louisa paused. “He could be on any floor.”
“He wants out. Once the scare’s over, it won’t be so easy.”
He had to bend into her ear to speak. The scare wasn’t over yet, though the alarm seemed to be winding down, as if running on a tired battery.