Her phone stayed silent. That wasn’t unusual, but stilclass="underline" you’d think somebody would have found time to dial a number. Ask how Louisa was. If she’d done anything interesting lately.
She left her plate to soak. Changed channel. Encountered someone telling her that pink placebos were more effective than blue ones. Could that be right? Was the brain that easily bamboozled?
Her own felt bamboozled constantly; not so much tricked as stifled into submission. When she closed her eyes at night, illegible data scrolled down her eyelids. Sleep was repeatedly yanked from her by a sensed error, the feeling that something was out of sequence for a reason she’d nearly grasped, and grasping would have rehabilitated her career. But it was always gone and she’d be stone awake once more, her unsleeping head on a pillow too thin and too warm, no matter how cold the rest of her bed was.
Jesus, she’d think, each time. Could she get a break? Could she get a decent night’s sleep? Please?
And in the morning, she’d do it all over again.
It was screen-watching. Which wasn’t what she’d joined the Service for, but what she’d ended up doing. And it felt like ending up, too; felt like she had no future other than the one that waited every morning behind the flaking back door of Slough House, and stretched out minute by endless minute until the door shut behind her when she left. And the time in between was spent fuming at the injustice of it all.
She should quit. That’s what she should do. She should just quit.
But if she quit, that would make her a quitter. She hadn’t joined the Service to be a quitter, either.
The screen-watching was virtual surveillance, trolling among the mutant hillbillies of the blogosphere. Some of the websites she covered were Trojan horses, Service-designed to attract the disaffected; others might have belonged to other branches of the State—she sometimes wondered if she were lurking in chatrooms peopled entirely by spooks; the undercover equivalent of teen-sites populated entirely by middle-aged men. Genuine or not, the sites covered a range of mood, from the in-your-face (how to make your own bomb) to the apparently educational (‘the true meaning of Islam’) to the free-for-all forums where argument spat like a boiling chip pan, and rage brooked no grammar.
To pass for real in the world of the web she’d had to forget everything she’d ever known about grammar, wit, spelling, manners and literary criticism.
It felt pointless. Worse, it felt undoable … How could you know when something worse than words was meant, when all you had to go on were the words? And when the words were always the same: angry, vicious, murderous? Several times she’d decided that a particular voice rang darker than the rest, and had passed the information upstream. Where, presumably, it was acted upon: ISP addresses hunted down; angry young men tracked to their suburban bedrooms. But perhaps she was kidding herself. Maybe all the potential terrorists she ever identified were as ghostly as herself; other spooks in other offices, who were sending her own webname upstream even as she was sending theirs. It wouldn’t be the only aspect of the War on Terror that turned out to be a circle jerk. She should be out on the street, doing actual work. But she’d tried that already, and had screwed it up.
Every time she thought about this—which was a lot—her teeth clamped together. Sometimes she found herself thinking about it without realizing that’s what she was doing, and the clue was the grinding of teeth, and an ache in her jaw.
Her first field op, a tracking job: the first time she’d done it for real. Following a boy. Not the first time she’d done that for real, but the first time she’d done it like this: at a distance, keeping him in sight at all times, but not so close he’d sense her presence.
Tracking jobs were done in threes, minimum. That day there’d been five: two ahead, three behind. The three behind kept changing places, as if engaged in a country dance. But it all took place on city streets.
The boy they were following—a black youth as far from the tabloid image as you could get: he wore a pinstripe and plastic-rimmed corrective glasses—was point man in a gun drop. A cache of decommissioned handguns had been hijacked the previous week, en route to a furnace. ‘Decommissioned’ was like ‘single’ or ‘married’: a status liable to abrupt change. The handguns hadn’t been hijacked because they’d make nice paperweights. They’d been hijacked to be retooled, and released into the community.
‘Three? Take point.’
An instruction through an earpiece, propelling her to the front of the queue.
The agent who’d had the target’s heels peeled away: he’d hover by a newspaper stand for a while, then rejoin the procession. Meanwhile, she had the wheel. The target was maintaining an unbroken pace. This either meant he had no idea he was under surveillance, or was so used to it that it didn’t faze him.
But she remembered thinking: He has no idea.
He has no idea. He has no idea. Repeated enough, any phrase ceases to have meaning. He has no idea.
Less than a minute later, the target stepped into a clothes shop.
This wasn’t necessarily significant. He liked his threads: you could tell. But shops made good meeting places. There were queues, occasional crowds. There were changing rooms. There were opportunities. He stepped into the shop, and she followed.
And lost him immediately.
In the follow-up, which began later that day and went on for weeks, the unspoken accusation was of racism. That she could not tell one black youth from another. This was not true. She had had a firm mental picture of the target, and retained it even now: the slight dint in his jaw; his razor-sharp hairline. It was just that there were at least six other young men in the shop—same size, same colour, same suit, same hair—and they’d all been put in play.
Afterwards, it became clear he’d spent less than three minutes in the shop. Into a changing room, out of his suit. When he walked back on to the street, he was dressed like he belonged there: shades, a floppy grey top, baggy jeans. He’d walked straight past Two, who was heading inside to back Louisa up, and passed One, Four and Five unnoticed. Louisa—Three—was just starting to feel the panic. Not a good day at the office.
It got worse when the guns started turning up: in bank raids, in hold-ups, in street corner shootings …
Among the casualties was Louisa Guy’s career.
She thought about pouring another drink, then decided to turn the TV off and get to bed instead. It would bring the morning sooner, but at least there’d be oblivion between now and then.
It was a while coming, though. For at least an hour she lay in the dark, stray thoughts nipping and nagging at her.
She wondered what Min Harper was doing.
Jed Moody edged his way past the crowd by the door and bagged a pavement table where he smoked three cigarettes with his first pint. The shops opposite were a High Street palindrome—Korean grocery, courier service, letting agents, courier service, Korean grocery—and buses passed with noisy frequency. When he’d finished his pint he went back in for a second, but this time carried it upstairs, where tables lined along an internal balcony allowed a view of the stewing masses below. He was halfway through it when Nick Duffy joined him. ‘Jed.’
‘Nick.’
Duffy sat.
Nick Duffy, late forties, had been an exact contemporary of Moody’s: they’d finished training at the same time, both winding up in the Service’s internal security system—the Dogs—a dozen years later. The Dogs were kennelled at Regent’s Park, but had licence to roam. The furthest Moody had ranged was Marseilles—a junior operative had been knifed to death by a transsexual prostitute in what turned out to be a case of mistaken identity—but Duffy had made it as far as DC. He had close-cropped grey hair these days and, like Moody, wore a jacket but no tie. They must have resembled a pair of off-duty whatever, Moody thought. Accountants, estate agents, bookies; perhaps, to the more astute observer, cops. Maybe one in a million would have guessed Five. And Moody would want a background check on that particular bastard.