Chapter 5
Not everyone had been in Ho’s office when River got there. How had he failed to register Jackson Lamb’s absence? Before long this was rectified: a heavy thump on the stair; a loud growling noise which could only have emanated from a stomach. Lamb could move quietly when he wanted, but when he didn’t, you knew he was coming. And now he didn’t so much enter Ho’s office as take possession of it; breathing heavily, saying nothing. On the monitor, the same absence of event: a gloved, hooded boy in an orange jumpsuit, holding the English newspaper with its back page showing. It took a moment for River to register that he’d reached that conclusion—that the figure was a boy.
A thought interrupted by Lamb. ‘It’s not nine o’clock and you’re watching torture porn?’
Struan Loy said, ‘When would be a good time to watch—’
‘Shut up,’ Sid Baker told him.
Lamb nodded. ‘That’s a plan. Shut up, Loy. This live?’
‘Coming over as a live feed,’ Ho said.
‘There’s a difference?’
‘Do you really want to hear about it?’
‘Good point. But that’s today’s paper.’ Lamb nodded again, approving his own deductive brilliance. ‘So if it’s not live, it’s not far off. How’d you pick it up?’
‘From the blogs,’ Sid said. ‘It appeared about four.’
‘Any prologue?’
‘They say they’re going to cut his head off.’
‘They?’
She shrugged. ‘Don’t know yet. Grabs the attention, though.’
‘Have they said what they want?’
Sid said, ‘They want to cut his head off.’
‘When?’
‘Forty-eight hours.’
‘Why forty-eight?’ asked Lamb. ‘Why not seventy-two? Three days, is that so much to ask?’
Nobody dared ask what his problem was. He told them anyway.
‘It’s always one day or three. You get twenty-four hours, or seventy-two. Not forty-eight. You know what I already hate about these tossers?’
‘They can’t count?’ River suggested.
‘They’ve no sense of tradition,’ Lamb said. ‘I don’t suppose they’ve said who the little blind mouse is, either?’
Roderick Ho said, ‘The beheading threat came over the blogs, along with the link. And the deadline. No other info. And there’s no volume on the feed.’
Through all of this, none of them had taken their eyes off the screen.
‘Why so shy?’ Lamb wondered. ‘If you’re cutting somebody’s head off, you’re making a point. But if you don’t tell anybody why you’re doing it, it’s not going to help your cause, is it?’
‘Cutting heads off doesn’t help anyone’s cause,’ Sid objected.
‘It does if your cause involves chopping people’s heads off. Then you’re preaching right at your niche market.’
Ho said, ‘What difference does it make who they are? They’re Al Qaeda, whatever they call themselves. Sons of the Desert. Sword of Allah. Wrath of the Book. They’re all Al Qaeda.’
There was another late entry: Jed Moody, his coat still on. ‘You’ve heard?’
‘We’re watching it now.’
Kay White started to say something, but changed her mind. In a more cruel mood, everyone present would have marked this down as a first.
River said, ‘So what do we do?’
Lamb said, ‘Do?’
‘Yes. What do we do?’
‘We get on with our jobs. What did you think we did?’
‘For Christ’s sake, we can’t just act like this isn’t happening—’
‘No?’
The short, sharp word punctured River’s balloon.
Lamb’s voice became flat and unimaginative. The boy on the monitor, the hood on his head, the newspaper he held—it might have been a screensaver.
He said, ‘Did you think the Batphone was about to go off, Lady Di shouting all hands on deck? No, we’ll watch it on telly like everyone else. But we won’t do anything. That’s for the big boys, and you lot don’t play with the big boys. Or had you forgotten?’
Nobody said anything.
‘Now, you’ve got papers to shuffle. Why are we all in this room?’
So one by one everybody left, except Ho and Moody, whose room it was. Moody hung his raincoat on the back of the door. He didn’t speak, and Ho wouldn’t have answered if he had.
Lamb stood a moment longer. His upper lip was flecked with an almond croissant’s sugary dust, and as he watched the computer monitor, on which nothing happened that hadn’t been happening for the past several minutes, his tongue discovered this seam of sweetness and gathered it in. But his eyes remained oblivious of what his tongue was doing, and if Ho or Moody had turned his way, what they saw might have startled them.
For a short while, the overweight, greasy has-been burned with cold hard anger.
Then he turned, and plodded upstairs to his office.
In his own room River booted up, then sat silently cursing the time his computer took to flicker into life. He was barely aware of Sid Baker arriving, and jumped when she spoke:
‘Do you think—’
‘Jesus!’
Sid recovered first. ‘Well, sorry! Christ! It’s my office too, you know.’
‘I know, I know. I was … concentrating.’
‘Of course. Turning your PC on, that’s a tricky business. I can see it would take all your attention.’
‘Sid, I didn’t realize you’d come in. That’s all. What do you want?’
‘Forget it.’
She sat at her desk. River’s monitor, meanwhile, enjoyed its usual fake awakening; swimming into blue then reverting to black. Waiting, he glanced at Sid. She wore her hair tied back and seemed paler than usual, which might have been her black cashmere V-neck, or might have been the ten minutes she’d just spent watching a young man with a hood on his head, who’d apparently been condemned to death.
And she wasn’t wearing her silver locket. If he’d been asked if this was unusual he’d have said he had no idea, but the fact was Sid wore the locket about half the time, from which he drew the inference that it held no special emotional significance for her. But nobody was likely to ask him.
His computer emitted that high-pitched beep that always sounded impatient, as if he’d been keeping it waiting rather than the other way round.
He said, only half aware he was about to do so, ‘About yesterday. I’m sorry. It was stupid.’
‘It was.’
‘It felt like it might be funny at the time.’
‘Stupid things often do,’ Sid said.
‘Clearing it up was no fun, if it makes you feel any better.’
‘It would make me feel better if you’d done a proper job of it. There were still eggshells under my desk this morning.’
But she was half-smiling, so that probably drew a line under the episode.
Though the question of why Sid had been sent on an op in the first place continued to rankle.
His computer was awake now but in a familiarly human sort of way, which meant it would be another few minutes before it was up to speed. He clicked on the browser.
Sid spoke again: ‘You think Ho’s right? They’re Al Qaeda?’
About to make a smart remark, River bit it back. What was the point? He said, ‘What else? It’s not like we’ve not seen this before.’
Both fell silent, remembering similar broadcasts a few years earlier; of a hostage beheaded for the crime of being Western.
‘They’ll be on the radar,’ Sid said.
River nodded.
‘All this stuff we do, here and Regent’s Park, GCHQ—the lid’s on pretty tight. Once they establish who the kid is, and where it’s happening, they’ll run up a shortlist of suspects. Won’t they?’
He was online at last. ‘What was that link?’