Even fast horses finish at the knacker’s yard. That slow horses get there first was one of life’s little ironies.
He finished his tea and reached for his phone.
Sean Donovan answered on the first ring. It sounded like he was driving.
“You’re on your way?”
“Yes,” said Donovan.
Monteith paused to admire a passing jogger: her hair damp, her T-shirt tight, her head bobbing in rhythm to whatever was pulsing through her earphones.
“How’s our guest?”
“How do you think? She’s unharmed, a little nervous and very pissed off.”
“Well, she won’t have to endure it much longer,” Monteith said. “Not that there’s any harm in giving her a little scare in the meantime.”
Donovan was silent for a moment, then said, “That’s what you want?”
“It is.” The jogger had gone, but the feeling she’d provoked still lingered: a wish to hear a woman squeal. The fact that Monteith wouldn’t hear it mattered less than that he’d have caused it.
He said, “What’s your ETA?”
“Thirty.”
“Don’t be late,” Monteith said, and ended the call.
Collecting his empty cup, he dropped it into a bin, and paused to look once more at the tiles affixed to the shelter’s walls; their fragments of story, each highlighting an ending, because there was nothing to the beginnings and middles that anyone would want to hear about. He shook his head. Then he left the little park and hailed a taxi.
River walked back up the stairs. Behind him, the woman at the security desk called out.
He turned. “I forgot, I need Ms. Taverner’s signature.” He mimed a scribble in the air. “I’ll be one minute.”
“Come back down. I’ll page her again.”
“She’s just there.” He pointed towards the next landing, then waggled his laminated visitor badge. “One minute.” He reached the landing, and was out of sight of the desk.
Thirty minutes.
Maybe a little more, maybe a little less.
Truth to tell, Catherine Standish was no longer at the front of his mind. The op was the op. This was enemy territory, and the fact that it was also headquarters simply gave it an extra edge.
He pushed through a pair of swing doors. River was coasting on memory, an imperfect blueprint in his head, but there ought to be lifts here. Unclipping the laminate from his shirt, he stuffed it into a pocket, and yes, here they were, in a thankfully unpeopled lobby. What he’d have done had Lady Di been waiting was a question for another life.
Pressing the button, he fished his mobile out. Regent’s Park’s front desk was still in his contact list: unused for years, but still stored because . . .
Because you always hung onto the numbers, in case your old life was given back.
It was answered on the second ring.
“Security.”
“Possible threat,” he said, pitching his voice low.
“Who is this?”
“There’s a couple in a car out front, twenty yards down the road. Making like a lovers’ quarrel, but the male is armed. I repeat, the male is armed. Suggest immediate response.”
“Could I have your—”
“Immediate response,” River repeated, and ended the call.
That might keep everyone occupied for a little while.
The lift arrived and he stepped into it.
Sean Donovan was entering London from the west. The van’s air-con was unreliable, so until Monteith’s call he’d been driving with the windows open, the twin blasts nearly cooling the interior. But now he closed them to ring Traynor, who answered in his usual way:
“Here.”
He didn’t ask Traynor if everything was okay. Benjamin Traynor had served with him in hot places; crouched with him behind walls being pounded to dust above their heads. If Traynor couldn’t handle one middle-aged woman in an attic, they should both reconsider their futures. Especially the next twenty-four hours.
He said, “I’m in the city. Everything’s on schedule.”
“I’ll pull out soon. Spoken to the . . . boss?”
Donovan said, “He’d like you to put a scare into the lady.”
“Put a scare into her.”
“His exact words. ‘No harm in giving her a little scare.’”
Traynor said, “Well, he’s in charge.”
“Where’s the kid?”
The kid, whom Catherine had dubbed “Bailey” for some reason.
“Out front. Just in case.”
“He’s a tryer, isn’t he?”
“Doesn’t hurt to stay alert,” Traynor recited. All those hot places, all those pulverised walls, and he still kept an eye out for the newbies. Of course, he hadn’t spent five years counting the bricks in a series of small rooms. “He’s a good kid.”
“Like his sister,” Donovan said.
“Yeah. Like his sister.”
He ended the call and wound the windows down again. What came blasting into the cab was all petrol and scorched rubber, but anything that didn’t taste of prison smelt like freedom. He glanced at his watch. Twenty minutes before meeting Monteith: a car park off the Euston Road. He’d make it with time to spare.
A lot could go wrong, but it wouldn’t be this bit.
Some lifts descended further than River wanted to go. This one didn’t—it was standard, staff-for-the-use-of—but there were others which required top clearance and disappeared deep into London’s bowels, offering access to secure crisis-management facilities, and even a rumoured top-secret underground transport system; a rumour River had regarded with scepticism until he’d learned that it had been officially denied. That there were other areas where deniable interrogations took place, he’d taken as read. Such were the foundations on which security is built.
But he was heading towards the level where the records rooms were.
He’d rarely had occasion to visit these in his time at Regent’s Park, but knew from conversations with his grandfather, the O.B., that they’d long been in danger of reaching capacity, containing as they did hundreds of yards, miles even, of hard-copy information: reports and records, personnel files, transcripts and minutes of varying levels of sensitivity. River had affected surprise that physical documents remained the mainstay of the Park’s archives, but only to give the O.B. the opportunity of riding one of his favourite hobby horses.
“Oh,” the Old Bastard, a purely affectionate monicker, said, “they had to rethink a lot of those early storage protocols, once they realised computers were like bank vaults. Nice and secure, safe as houses, right up to the moment someone blows the doors off and walks away with the loot.”
On the most recent occasion on which they’d had this conversation, it had been late evening: rain pattering on the windows, brandy splashing with almost as much regularity into their glasses.
“Because computers talk to each other, River—that’s what they’re for. Your generation can’t boil an egg without going online, you rely on them for everything, but you tend to overlook their major function. Which is that they store information, but only in order to divulge it.”
Which River had known, of course. Knew that was why the Queens of the Database worked on air-gapped systems, their USB ports gummed up to prevent flash drives being inserted. The Queens had to skip from one row of computers to another to go online—internet and internot being the waggish coinage. Electronic poaching had replaced the nuclear threat as the Big Fear. The Service liked to steal, but it hated getting robbed.