River, though. He’d keep it together. Whatever they asked of him, he’d do his best.
This might turn out to have to be quite good.
Off the train, River took the stairs three at a time, ignoring the “Watch it, mate!” thrown at his back. The sudden brightness of the street pulled him up short: loud traffic, a quantity of pedestrians, the glare and dazzle of a summer’s morning. The heat as thick out here as in the underground, and accompanied with smells of tar and rubber. A clock thumping in his head, reading forty-eight minutes . . .
He crossed the road against the lights, and was nearly clipped by a cyclist—and that too, like the stalling tube train, and the trembling in his knees, seemed familiar, as if racing the clock was an everyday experience, or an everynight one—yes, he thought, running now, leaving the main drag, heading for the leafier areas: that was it. This was the stuff of his dreams. Everyone knew what it felt like, struggling to reach somewhere that receded with every effort made, so your heart felt ready to burst from sheer frustration, though for River it was more of a memory than a suppressed fear; it was what he’d been through, years before, when King’s Cross crashed, and it was all his fault. A training exercise that went wrong, a mis-identified “terrorist”; twenty minutes of slapstick in the morning rush-hour . . .
That was how you got to be a slow horse.
Mind you, he’d had help.
Thank you, Spider Webb.
The pavement widened. There was parkland to his left, behind iron railings, and branches overhead mottling everything with patchy shadow. A couple sat in a parked car, having what looked like a row. River’s lungs were punishing him. Forty-four minutes. He stopped to calm his breathing: no point arriving like a damp rag. He had to look like he belonged, which was exactly what he might have done if not for King’s Cross and Spider bloody Webb . . .
Sometimes, a career went off like a volcano. Somewhere under the ashes of his own hid the glowing coals of what might have been, but only River himself, and possibly his grandfather, still believed they might yet spark back to life. And River only believed that sometimes, and not today.
Today was where he was, though. He ran a hand through his dirty-blond hair, and approached the front door of Regent’s Park.
The meeting had drawn to a close and the Second Desks dispersed, all but Diana Taverner, whom Dame Ingrid addressed on her way out of the door.
“Diana? Could you spare a moment?”
Leaving Diana hovering while Tearney fussed: looking for her glasses, which remained on the chain round her neck; collecting her papers; pausing interminably for no obvious reason, as if struck by an idea whose genius demanded immediate inspection, in absolute stillness. All of it, Diana had no doubt, for the pleasure of making Diana hover.
It was grim. From almost any angle, she knew she held the advantage. Looks: no competition. Height: ditto. Ingrid Tearney was a hobbit of a woman, one Y-chromosome short of being a trainspotter. She did her best—she could afford to—but all the designer labels in the world couldn’t disguise a coypu on a catwalk. Squat body, short legs; and the trio of wigs she regularly rotated, grey, blonde and black, to cover the hair loss she’d suffered in her teens, though moulded by experts to look soft and buttery, still resembled something you might ask to borrow if you needed a bike helmet. Wealth, okay, Tearney had the edge there, but her education was so-so (LSE, as against Diana’s Caius, plus a year at Yale), and her upbringing was Staffordshire or somewhere, one of those counties that only existed because otherwise there’d be gaps in the map. In all those areas Diana Taverner had Tearney beat cold, and if there were any way of making a fair fight out of it, which Diana had been known to resort to when desperate, the result would hardly be in doubt.
But Tearney had other strengths. She was smart—desk smart—committee smart—and what she lacked in sex appeal, she made up for in a nanny-knows-best briskness which cowed the public schoolboy still cloistered inside those other Second Desks, not to mention the weak-kneed politicos of all stripes Down the Corridor. And she had, too, a bred-in-the-bone instinct for knowing how to needle, humiliate and frustrate her underlings. Like now: Diana hovering in the doorway, waiting for her Dameship to finish gathering herself together, which she’d only do once satisfied that Diana was starting to twitch.
Dame Ingrid said, “There. Sorry about that. Walk with me?”
They headed off down the corridor.
“Terribly dull these meetings can be,” Tearney said. “I do appreciate your taking the time to attend.”
Attendance was compulsory. The Service was a corporation like any other.
“I should be on the hub,” Diana said. “Will this take long?”
“I just wanted your confirmation that the records transfer has been completed satisfactorily.”
“As of last month, yes.”
“And we’re talking about records up to Virgil level, yes?”
“As per the brief.”
The grading system changed on a biannual basis, but Virgil was currently the second-highest classification. The service being what it was, this meant that a lot of sensitive data was logged Virgil, on the ground that those most likely to wangle access to intelligence—oversight committees, Cabinet Ministers, TV producers—tended to focus their attentions on the highest grade, Scott-level, on the assumption that this was where the hardcore secrets were. Virgil-level, being more accessible, was generally overlooked. Which didn’t mean Ingrid Tearney wanted those records stored off-site.
“Ingrid, I thought you already knew all this.”
“Merely dotting i’s, my dear. You’ll be warmly acknowledged in HR’s weekly catch-up this morning, I can assure you.”
“I’m so grateful. Was that all?”
“You know, one of the burdens of leadership,” Tearney continued, as if Diana hadn’t spoken, “is not being privy to the gossip below stairs. It can be difficult to take the temperature, if you know what I mean.”
Assuming she was not genuinely being asked if she understood a common idiom, Diana said nothing.
“And it would be good to know precisely how things stand.”
“Well, we’re over-worked, under-resourced and under-appreciated. The general mood more or less reflects this.”
Dame Ingrid laughed, a rather more tinkling sound than you’d expect the warthog to make, Diana thought grudgingly. She said, “I can always rely on you to deliver uncomfortable truths, Diana. That’s one of the reasons you’re such a valuable Second Desk.”
“Is there a problem, Ingrid?”
“Our new overlord is rattling his sabres. He’s spoken of the need for fresh starts, for—I think he said a reboot. Always keen to appear savvy.”
“All new ministers say that.”
“This one means it. Too many skeletons falling out of closets, apparently. As if it were possible to maintain an effective security service without an occasional blurring of the boundaries.”
Which was a polite way of describing, among other faux pas, the wholesale illegal surveillance of the nation’s online footfall, not to mention the toothless surrender of same to a foreign power.
Diana made a non-committal noise.
“We’re not natural allies, are we? You and I.”
“I’m fully committed to the Service,” Diana said. “Always have been. You know that.”
“And you’re currently wondering how best to make that commitment known in the event that Peter Judd succeeds in removing me as head.”