‘Is he?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
Flyte said, ‘He claims the document wasn’t classified.’
‘That’s his defence? Good luck with that in court. He downloaded it from the Service database, Flyte. That’s not like nicking Post-its. You’re aware what use the document’s been put to?’
‘I am.’
‘You see, that worries me too. That knowledge puts you way out of your depth. And interrogating Ho without authorisation, that’s outside your jurisdiction too. Mind telling me what you’re up to?’
‘With respect, ma’am, I’m authorised to interview Service members at my discretion.’
Taverner paused. It was true: as Head Dog, Flyte had authority to question any Service member, herself included, though if it ever came to that there’d better be seconds involved, and an ambulance on standby. ‘But you abandoned a lockdown I instigated. Where’s your authorisation to do that?’
‘As a division head, I can delegate as I see fit. I had Devon sub me.’
‘Devon?’
‘Devon Welles, ma’am. You can’t miss him. He’s the Dogs’ diversity appointment.’
Taverner said, ‘You might not have escaped Lamb swiftly enough. You seem to be infected.’ She consulted her phone, aware that Flyte was all but ticking in front of her: she was carrying news; it was ready to break.
‘Ma’am—’
‘One moment.’ She finished checking the duty calendar, and flashed it at Flyte. ‘According to this, Welles was off roster. He should be halfway through a forty-eight-hour leave.’
‘Yes, he should. But like I said, I asked him to sub me.’
‘And he’s still there now?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you can categorically state that Lamb’s team have been locked down for the past twenty-four hours?’
Flyte took a deep breath. ‘There might have been a slight interruption.’
‘Which would make this a disciplinary—’
‘It would. But can that wait? I need to see Mr Whelan.’
‘He’s not in the building. You’re seeing me.’
‘Then you might not want to hear this.’
‘Anything I might not want to hear, I definitely want to hear,’ Taverner said. She stared at Flyte hard. ‘Let’s go to my office.’
The boys and girls on the hub didn’t look up. They were too busy bouncing off each other like pinballs in a machine: there came a point when it stopped mattering that they were individuals. They swarmed. There was a day when all the butterflies arrived, Flyte remembered reading once: a town on the Black Sea, she thought it was. On one single day, marking summer’s arrival, the town became alive with butterflies. That thought came to mind, seeing the hub bright with activity. It wasn’t just the work being done. It was the knowledge that results were taking shape. The boys and girls were becoming butterflies.
It was possible Diana Taverner didn’t feel the same way, because she frosted the wall once they were in her room.
‘This had better be good,’ she said.
‘The final item on the Watering Hole paper,’ Flyte said.
‘The what?’
‘That’s what they’re calling it. The Watering Hole paper.’
‘I’m making a list myself,’ Taverner said. ‘And it’s getting longer by the minute. What’s the final item?’
‘Seize control of the media,’ said Flyte. ‘But it doesn’t mean exactly what it says.’
‘You seem to know a lot about this.’
‘It was actually Lamb who saw it. This final thing, the media thing, what they’re going to do is some kind of attack on camera. Somewhere there’s a lot of press, a lot of media. Somewhere public. Somewhere soon.’
‘The Abbey,’ said Taverner.
‘Yes, the Abbey,’ Flyte said. ‘Today. The Abbotsfield memorial service.’
They brought him some pizza. A meat feast, he’d ordered; the jokers arrived with a plain cheese-and-tomato onto which anchovies had been added: you guys, he thought, shaking his head, scraping the offending morsels to the edge with his finger. You guys.
Then they left him alone.
It had gone on all night. After his session with Emma, after he’d finished putting her straight on a few things, the guys had come in and he’d had to go through it all over again. You don’t talk to each other? he’d wanted to ask. But Roddy Ho knew how it went, because Kim – his girlfriend – was just the same: whenever they were together for more than ten minutes, she found it too intense and needed to be somewhere else for a while, somewhere quiet, on her own. That was gender politics for you – chicks need their downtime. Was he right, or was he right?
That aside, the fact that they were keeping him here suggested a high-level threat remained in place. It made sense, cotton-woolling him – God knows, you wouldn’t want to hand the bad actors a propaganda coup like rubbing out the Rodman – but you’d have thought all concerned would have copped on by now: that if there was any rubbing out going on, it would be Roddy Ho doing it.
Because there was a word for the kind of cool he had, and it was this: feline. Cats, you only had to look at them to know they never put a paw wrong, or if they did, it was a temporary disarrangement. They landed on their feet, cats. And that was the kind of cool Roddy Ho enjoyed, where there might be the occasional excitement – a bit of a tussle, like the other night – but you always knew who was going to come out on top.
At the same time, he could hotdog it with the best of them. Your typical maverick. Best of both worlds.
Like he’d told the guys: ‘So sure, they sent someone to take me out. And look where it got them. Next time, they’ll know to send two.’
And the guys had exchanged a look.
So now he finished his pizza, except the anchovies, and as he sat licking his fingers it occurred to him that nobody had yet told him what had happened to Kim, his girlfriend. Now he’d explained that the document he’d shown her wasn’t even classified – seriously: the Dyno-Rod, passing on secrets? C’mon – she was surely cleared of everything except curiosity, and since when was that a crime? But they were leaving him in the dark.
Or maybe …
But there was a corner of his mind Roderick Ho preferred not to visit, and he backed away from it now. It was a corner where different decisions had been made, and different destinations reached; one which, if he’d spent more time there, might have meant he’d be a little more slow horse, a little less the Rodster. It would have meant he’d asked more questions when Kim came into his life, and had more people around to help answer them … But there was no going back. This was who he was now, and Kim was his girlfriend, right? Kim was his girlfriend. And if he was partly in the dark right now, well, that was the thing about the secret world. A lot of it was just too … secret.
Roddy shook his head. It would all come out in the wash, he guessed. Meanwhile, he supposed he’d have to stay here so nobody got too worried about him. He smiled to himself. Who is this guy? is what they’re wondering, he thought. Some kind of Bond–Q combo? Scouts the Dark Web by day, and come nightfall goes clubbing with an uber-foxy chick, tossing villains through windows?
Who is this guy?
That’s what they’re wondering.
In the room next door, the two guys were sharing a meat feast. They didn’t speak much, but at length one of them paused to say, ‘Who is this guy?’
And they both shook their heads, and carried on eating.
Claude Whelan was back in Downing Street, in one of the cubbyhole incubators. The PM had kept him waiting – not a great sign – but the time had been swallowed by a call from Di Taverner, with an update from the hub. When a funeral-suited PM arrived at last, his face was red with exertion. ‘I’m in Cabinet all morning, no time to change later. This is awfully form-fitting. It doesn’t make me look fat?’