Martin said, “I do that, and you bury this whole conversation? Me being Kahlmann? Running an op in London?”
“I don’t give a fuck what you’re up to.”
“Doesn’t that count as treason?”
“Wouldn’t be the first time.”
“It sounds like I’m getting off lightly.”
“You haven’t heard the message yet,” said Lamb.
“These events in Wales,” said Peter Judd.
“For the record,” Diana Taverner told him, “I’m not aware of any events having taken place in Wales. Or anywhere else.”
That morning had seen an ill-tempered Oversight meeting, during which Diana’s delivery of her planned showstopper—I applied for Fugue. I could have handled this. But I was turned down—failed to receive a standing ovation; Oliver Nash, in fact, going so far as to hint that her attempt to initiate the protocol had been made in bad faith, with precisely this result in mind: a potentially headline-grabbing car-wreck caused by someone else’s driving. Her intention being, he only just refrained from saying, to bolster her own case for a bigger, sturdier vehicle. But however it was spun, the deaths of two Service personnel—one recently resigned—and a known Annex-C mercenary, in Wales, made the Park look out of control, which hardly burnished the reputation of the woman supposedly at the wheel. The curious relish with which Nash kept repeating ‘in Wales’ suggested that he considered this an added aggravation, which might have tempted Diana to suggest that it was, if anything, a mitigating factor, had she not registered in time the presence of one Llewellyn Jones, a former Home Office minister who could usually be relied upon to be comatose by the ten-minute mark, but whose eyes had unglazed at the mention of his homeland as if a rugby squad had burst into the room bearing daffodils.
“In that case,” Judd said, “you’ll be pleased to hear that they didn’t happen anyway.”
She already knew this. The dead were still dead, of course, but that was a detaiclass="underline" one was a Slough House operative, so to all intents and purposes had been declared surplus to requirements, and if Emma Flyte’s name had caused raised eyebrows around the Committee table, the abruptness of her resignation, which Diana had allowed to be known was due to personal problems, allowed speculation to wander freely. Besides, Flyte had been known for her startlingly good looks. This lent credibility to her involvement in violent altercation, the potential for an unhappy ending being a recognised tax on female beauty. As for the merc, his obsequies boiled down to a red line through an entry on a database, and nobody was going to lose sleep over that.
For housekeeping purposes, the deaths had been ascribed to drug-related warfare between rival gangs, which sounded enough like a bad TV drama to satisfy most sections of the media.
So whatever had happened already hadn’t happened, but it was nice to have confirmation, so she simply said, “I’m pleased to hear it. Care to elucidate?”, elucidating being one of Judd’s preferred modes of discourse, there being, somehow, a lubricated quality to it.
He was happy to do so.
She drank her coffee while he talked. They were in a café off Fleet Street, at Judd’s suggestion—he wanted somewhere with no danger of journalists being present. London was damp and unlovely, but last week’s snow was a dim memory she’d already heard referred to as fake weather. Now, there was talk of continued drizzle and bitter winds for days to come, which surprised Di Taverner not one whit. There was always a bitter wind blowing from somewhere. If the weather didn’t supply it, you could rely on Whitehall. Meanwhile, Judd was explaining that his clients—those whose company had hosted the party at Caerwyss Hall—were content to draw a veil over the sorry episode. The savage eradication of problems might be their preferred business strategy, but western democracies weren’t really their playground of choice. What should have been the discreet despatch of a troublesome snoop might easily have become a local bloodbath: brushable under the carpet most places their products were regular bestsellers, but rather more noticeable where there were more second homes than secondhand cars.
“Besides,” said Judd, “he rang again.”
“The boy?”
“Sounded as if he were reading off an idiot board. It seems he’s experienced a complete, he called it ‘memory-wipe,’ of all and any events taking place over the New Year. Probably due to an overindulgence in whatever he was smoking at the time. Apologised quite fulsomely. Quite restores one’s faith in the younger generation, the whole drug-taking, blackmailing, body-burning episode aside.”
“So he’s gone home with his tail between his legs and that’s it?”
“Sometimes, we have to accept that wrongdoers walk away unpunished,” offered the man who’d solicited at least one murder, to Diana’s certain knowledge.
Others would face consequences. Slough House needed looking at, Nash had made clear that morning. Whatever one of their operatives had been doing away from his desk, let alone in a knife fight with a mercenary in a snowy field, demanded investigation: the department was supposed to be a holding cell for incompetents, he reminded her, not a halfway house for would-be Tarzans.
She didn’t tell him she already had plans for Slough House. Or that they’d been put in operation the day she took over First Desk.
The rest of the morning’s meeting had been equally frustrating. Diana had expected her revelation that a civil servant working within the Brexit Office had been working for the BND to be met with shock and umbrage, and a concomitant level of gratitude for the Service’s diligence in unmasking her. Instead, there was an air of resigned acceptance that Brexit had thrown up yet another source of embarrassment. Much of the business of government for the preceding two years had been to find a scapegoat for the ongoing catastrophe; blaming at least part of the mess on German interference was, on the face of it, attractive, but wouldn’t play well with the public, who might with some justification wonder why a foreign agent had been appointed to the office in the first place.
“And she was being run in-country?”
This from Archibald Manners, Parliamentary appointee to the Committee, and long-time Park-watcher.
“By one Martin Kreutzmer,” she said. “Something of an old hand.”
“Molly Doran’s work, by any chance?”
Diana had allowed that this was so, skipping over Jackson Lamb’s role in the proceedings, which, anyway, hadn’t weighed more than a two-minute phone call. You know how your tame lab rats are supposed to keep tabs on foreign talent? Remind me, does that include feeding them Service gossip on a silver fucking tray like this was Downton fucking Abbey? His follow-up suggestion—that she spend a minute or two ascertaining exactly who the fuck Peter fucking Kahlmann was, the better to feed him his own fucking arse before dropping him off the nearest fucking tower block—quickly became an unsanitised instruction to Richard Pynne, who’d morphed into Richard fucking Pynne in the time it took him to reach her office. Peter fucking Kahlmann, it turned out, was a cover for Martin fucking Kreutzmer, which, if they’d known from the drop, would have made Operation fucking Goldilocks a non-starter. Little Hannah Weiss, their fledgling double, was in fact a triple, a revelation which led, in turn, to the further discovery that Diana Taverner didn’t always have to press a button to cause the glass walls of her office to frost over. Sometimes she could do it through sheer force of rage.
Anyway. The Committee didn’t have to hear about that.
And if Lamb thought this little offering made up for leaving bodies strewn about the Welsh countryside in his futile attempt to have Frank Harkness skinned alive, he was going to be disabused in pretty short order.