Ha-de-fucking-ha.
Second night running they’d been out in the open, chasing their tails. The kid could be anywhere, but Anton didn’t think so. He thought they were both still in the area, waiting for a clear shot at an exit. The county might as well have locked its doors and put the empties out. The trains weren’t running, and the roads were a joke.
“Besides, she’s Park. A joe in the field survives hostile contact, he calls it in and digs a hole. She, in this case. And waits for back-up.”
“Which is who stomped your face, right?”
Anton had spent the night with a mouthful of snow, anaesthetising himself. But while stomping his face might look like back-up, it hadn’t felt like back-up, if he could get Lars to appreciate the difference.
“She wasn’t armed,” he said.
“Just as well.”
“Yeah yeah yeah. If she’d come from the Park, she’d have come strapped on.”
Lars wasn’t buying. “On a home visit? It’s Wales, not Ukraine.”
“Could be High Street Kensington,” Anton assured him. “In response to a joe sending up a flare, the Park would send guns. Not a blonde.”
He hadn’t always worked the grey area—eight years in the BND after six in the military, and one thing you learned on Spook Strasse was, folk drove on different sides, but the highway code stayed the same. The Americans wore fake smiles and the Russians rubber gloves, but the processes for taking care of your own were pretty much fixed across all divides.
“She’s not their exit route, in other words,” he said. “Just an added complication.”
They were a mile outside the village, not far from Caerwyss Hall; the car pulled onto a verge. Driving was slow, like learning to ice skate. The fields all around were smooth plains, and the trees against the morning skyline looked like Christmas decorations. Snow, though. Soft and fluffy on the outside, but ruthless as a shark. It was the fucking Disney Corp by other means.
“Two chicks,” Lars grumbled. “What is this? Charlie’s Angels?”
Anton hoped not. Charlie had three.
“Women have a natural advantage,” he said. “First contact, you tend to pull your punches.”
“It’s working so far.”
“Second time round, it’s a different story.” Anton’s knuckles clicked in the cold still air. The gun in his jacket was a reassuring weight.
“You’re sure then,” Lars said. “They’re still in the area.”
Anton was, for all the reasons he’d just said.
“Just as well,” said Lars. “Because here comes Frank. You can repeat all that to him.”
The Fugue Protocol, thought Lady Di.
She was in her office, Saturday morning. Some jobs don’t respect private life.
The Fugue Protococlass="underline" it was a back-door process, dependent on the cooperation of whoever was chairing Limitations. So there’d never been a hope in hell it would be approved, Oliver Nash being far too circumspect to license anything which might cause increased laundry bills round the Cabinet table. Even Oliver, though, had had his antennae up. I can’t help thinking there’s something going on here, Diana . . .
It’s the Secret Service, Oliver. There’s always something going on.
No Fugue, then, but that was fine, because all she’d wanted was her minuted application, so that once the cat hit the fan, spraying blood and fur on the walls, she’d be able to say See? I could have stopped this. It didn’t take genius to work out that Frank Harkness’s presence was part of the deal Peter Judd had warned her about—that he was here to squash whatever had happened at Caerwyss Hall—and nor was it a secret that Lamb was gunning for him. Which he might think he was doing below the radar, but for all Lamb’s street smarts, he was behind the techno curve. It was one thing setting his social retard onto pulling up CCTV records; quite another to expect this to happen unobserved. That particular shit was out of the bag: Diana knew damn well the slow horses had been tracking Harkness’s footprint since his arrival in Southampton, and given their generally poor impulse control, they’d no doubt be haring after him first chance they got. He had, after all, left blood on their carpet last time round.
So yes, things could get messy, and when that happened, whatever you were trying to cover up generally became headline fodder, which in this case meant the Duke’s name being spattered across world headlines. Again. Not in the UK, obviously, where most editors tugged their foreskins when the Palace required, but damage would be done: nothing pissed the public off more than privilege caught with its pants down, and nothing pissed off Lady Di’s own lords and masters more than a pissed-off electorate.
And as with any corporate behemoth, shit cascaded downwards:
The Service isn’t in good odour at present. Too many missteps, too few triumphs. . .
But let’s see how Downing Street enjoyed a scandal that could easily have been avoided.
I applied for Fugue. I could have handled this. But I was turned down.
And then, maybe then, they’d start to listen when she outlined what the Service needed if it were to prosper and protect this increasingly isolated island state.
She stood, left her office, walked the Hub. This was her routine: to make sure the boys and girls—they were always girls, always boys; it was the local language—knew that whatever happened, she was available. There was chatter coming in from Russian sources; a whisper of a potential hack on a High Street bank. Which might mean it was going to happen, or might mean somebody somewhere was bored, or might mean something entirely different was in the wind, and she was being encouraged to look the wrong way. . .
Josie stopped her. “You wanted to know if anything untoward came in from Pembrokeshire way?”
She made it sound like the Wild West.
“Tell me.”
“We got a coded message Thursday night, from a civilian mobile. But the recording stayed stored. Didn’t hit the screen until this morning.”
She handed Taverner a printout: a go-dark notice. One that decoded to Hostile contact.
“Why the delay?”
“Because the ID doesn’t match any existing protocol. Whoever it’s from, it’s not one of ours.”
“Have you checked the number?”
“I was just about to.”
“Don’t bother,” said Taverner, folding the printout. “Someone’s playing cowboys and indians without permission, that’s all. You can file it under forget. Thanks, Josie.”
There was always the possibility, she supposed, resuming her circuit, that Lamb’s crew might pack the mess away without drawing attention to themselves, or to whatever shenanigans had prompted the blackmail effort. On the other hand, if they were sending up distress signals, it didn’t seem things were going their way. And you could usually rely on the slow horses to make a bad situation worse. . .
What she needed, as she’d told Nash more than once, was a root-and-branch overhaul of operational practices.
She was prepared for a certain amount of collateral damage in order for that to happen.
Slough House was absorbing another memory.
The man looked sick, thought Roddy Ho.
And not in a good way.
Handy job the Rodster had been there to hoik him from that wheelie-bin, because no way would he have made it out on his own. So Standish had held the lid while Roddy stood on an upturned bucket and reached down to grab Wicinski’s arms. You could tell he wasn’t dead—the groaning was a clue—but he wasn’t cooperating, and frankly the RodMan would as soon have left him where he was, but he kept on reaching, and Wicinski kept not cooperating, and the upturned bucket wasn’t all that stable, and probably, if you weren’t an expert, it might have looked like Roddy fell into the bin himself. Fact was, though, he’d worked out that this was the most efficient way of getting the job done. It was all about leverage, in the end.