When he got back to his office Wicinski was there, but not working; staring, rather, at Roddy. So that was the way it was. Okay, thought Ho. You and me. Right here, right now. One hand tied behind his back, kind of, but that wouldn’t slow him down: a back-flip, a left-handed throat jab . . . His arm was suddenly wet because he’d crushed his plastic bottle, flushing its contents over his wrist, in reaction to which he’d bitten through his pizza, half of which dropped to the floor. Shit. He put the bottle on his desk, retrieved his lunch, Wicinski’s eyes never wavering. You wanna piece of me? thought Roddy. Wanna try your luck? Bigger men than Wicinski had been mentally ground to paste by the Rodster. He removed a small brown pellet of dirt from his pizza—he was always finding pellet-shaped bits of dirt here just like the ones he found at home: strange—and flicked it away. Not about to let the staring weirdo spoil his lunch.
He logged on and picked up where he’d left off. One-handed he might be, but snatching data from Hampstead’s Mickey Mouse street-warden company was easy as kicking a puppy: the algorithm he’d triggered before going to warm his pizza had finished its job already, decoding the password. He copied it, flipped to the command screen and pasted it where the prompt demanded: bingo. Free and total access to all stored data, so now he could spend as long as he liked watching raw footage of cars parked on various roads in Hampstead, across a four-month timespan. He’d like to see Wicinski pull that off. The Rodster, on the other hand; give the Rodster anything with a monitor and a keyboard, he’d be watching rough cuts of the next Star Wars movie before you’d opened the popcorn.
Still sticky-fingered, he fed today’s date into the search box, and his left-hand screen fragmented into thirty-two boxes, each providing a live feed from one of Hampstead’s traffic-control cameras. And this was Roddy working single-handed, he reminded himself; his primo digits out of action, though flexible enough to shovel what remained of his pizza slice into his mouth. Back to the command screen: let’s skip back a couple of hours, see what was happening then. He could feel the new boy’s eyes on him. Maybe Lamb hadn’t given him anything to do; maybe Lamb had just told him to observe and learn, which was fair enough, but let’s face it: the only lesson he’d be taking home today was how far short of Roddy Ho’s skill sets he fell. Watch and weep, new boy, watch and weep. Roddy was viewing footage from this morning now, thirty-two boxes’ worth, each flipping into a new channel every few seconds because there was a lot of CCTV in Hampstead: a lot. Like everywhere else in London, when you walked the streets you were auditioning for the non-speaking role of passerby.
Or perhaps trying out as a stuntman.
Because there: blink and you’d miss it. Sixth screen along, third row down. He paused everything, moved the clock back thirty seconds, maximised the box that had caught his eye and ran it again. River Cartwright, jumping onto a moving car and clinging on for maybe seven seconds? Six? Roddy was going to time it, bet on that, but meanwhile he was enjoying the spectacle: the world’s worst suicide attempt. The car couldn’t have been going more than twenty. It was kind of a pity Cartwright had fallen off soon as he did, because if he’d managed another second or two, he’d have been dumped slap in the middle of the junction. And as far as Roddy was concerned, there was nothing wrong with River Cartwright that being involved in a major traffic pile-up wouldn’t put right.
A small detail entertainment-wise, but a crucial one so far as his task went, was that the number plate of the car Cartwright was attempting to sledge showed up bright and clear in the frame.
He finished his energy drink, and tossed the empty into the bin. Tracing a plate, assigning an identity to the vague shape behind the wheel, was something he could do in his sleep; such a lowly task he didn’t feel down to doing it himself, so he emailed a screenshot to Shirley Dander: let someone else do some work for a change. Wicinski was still staring, so he leaned back in his chair and swivelled the monitor to show off his success.
“Congratulations,” Wicinski said after a while. “Data theft. Quite the hot-button crime.”
“For national security,” Roddy reminded him.
“Which might have mattered once. But this is a post-Brexit, post-truth, fake news world, and something I’ve noticed is, people are pissed off.” Wicinski smiled, but not in a good way. “Hate figures are the new black. People find a spook like you watching their every move, you’ll be the poster-boy for every anti-government pressure group going.”
And this was exactly the kind of shit the HotRod was used to: the frank admiration disguised as contempt; the derision that masked drooling envy. Life in Slough House, he was surrounded by no-hopers, trying not to let him see they were grabbing for his coattails. Whatever coattails were.
Ho said, “Who’s gunna find out?” Wicinski was starting to irritate him. Also, a bit of meatball or something was lodged between two molars, and with his right hand currently inflexible, he was going to have Voldemort’s own job freeing the damn thing.
“Yeah,” said Wicinski. “That’s what everyone says. Right up until somebody blows the whistle.”
“Last time someone tried something like that, Lamb found out about it first.”
“Yeah? And then what?”
Roddy couldn’t remember. Hadn’t been good, though. And besides, he himself, the Dyno-Rod, was pretty pitiless in vengeance mode too. Not so long back, he’d heaved a would-be killer through a window. Welclass="underline" details were hazy. But he’d been there, and the would-be killer had wound up dead on the pavement. Do the math.
He returned to his screens. Wicinski’s gaze, he knew, remained fixed upon him: a dark-eyed stare intended to unnerve. Which, okay, was starting to do that, but not because the RodMan scared easy—helclass="underline" he’d been sharing a building with J.K. Coe for a year, and he was a genuine psycho—it was more about Wicinski’s past having been wiped from Service records. That was spooky. What they knew he’d done was enough to put you off the guy. So whatever he’d done that someone wanted covered up, well, that must be seriously dark.
The chunk of meatball came loose of its own accord, and Roddy’s mouth filled with what tasted like beef.
Blowing the whistle, he thought. Was that an actual threat? Could be. That was the trouble with the slow horses; they were constantly rattling their cages, checking the bars still held. If it weren’t for Roddy himself, his calming influence, the idiots would have burned the building to the ground long ago.
The stuff he and Lamb had to put up with. Good job he had Wicinski’s number . . . First suspicious move from you and the Rodster’ll tie you in knots, thought Roddy. Lead you down the garden path, drown you in the pond. He could picture himself going over this with Lamb; the older man’s shoulders heaving. What I could have done with ten men like you in the old days, Lamb was saying. Ten joes like you, I’d have run rings round the Kremlin. Eyes narrowing with suppressed pleasure, Roddy registered the ping of an arriving email but didn’t open it, so remained unaware that Shirley Dander had tracked Harkness’s car to a national hire chain; an office in Southampton. The vehicle was an Audi; the customer one Jay Featherstone, who’d used a Canadian passport. Until someone got a look at its photo, and confirmed it was the man himself and not a proxy, she couldn’t be sure she’d tagged Harkness; that it was a hire car, even, didn’t mean it hadn’t subsequently been snatched. But if the customer were legit and the car stolen from him he’d have reported it by now, unless he had good reason not to, like being dead or something—too many variables, Shirley decided. Time being, they might as well assume Frank Harkness was disguised as a Canadian, which could mean wearing a plaid shirt and carrying a hockey stick, but more likely meant he’d be using his normal voice, wearing normal clothes, and banking on no one knowing the difference. In Southampton, or anywhere else that wasn’t Toronto, that seemed a safe bet.