‘… has yet claimed responsibility, and nor has anyone appeared onscreen other than the young man pictured, but according to an anonymous post that appeared on the BBC’s current affairs blog at four o’clock this morning, the young man you’re watching is to be executed within forty-eight hours …’
Max said, ‘Do you believe this shit?’
The customer said, ‘They’re monsters. Plain monsters. They want shooting, the lot of them.’
But Hobden was barely hearing it.
Sometimes you knew you had a story, and were just waiting for its fin to show above the waves of the everyday news.
And here it was. Breaking surface.
Max said again, ‘Do you believe this?’
But Hobden was back at his table, gathering up keys, mobile, wallet, pen and notebook; tucking everything into his bag, except the newspapers.
Those, he left where they lay.
It wasn’t long after nine. A watery sunshine spilt over London; a hint of good weather to come, if you were in an optimistic mood.
On a large white building near Regent’s Park, it fell like a promise that this was as good as things might get.
Diana Taverner had a top-floor office. Once she’d enjoyed an expensive view, but post-7/7, senior staff had been moved away from external walls, and her only window now was the large pane of glass through which she could keep an eye on her team, and through which they in their turn could cast glances her way, keeping an eye on her keeping an eye on them. There were no windows on the hub either, but the light that rained on it was gentle and blue and, according to some report or other—it would be on file; labelled and archived and retrievable on request—was the closest electricity could come to natural sunlight.
Taverner approved. She didn’t begrudge a younger generation the prizes her own had won for them. There was no sense fighting the same battles twice.
Her apprenticeship had been served in the fag-end of the Cold War, and it sometimes felt like that was the easy part. The Service had a long and honourable tradition of women dying behind enemy lines, but was less enthusiastic about placing them behind important desks. Taverner—Lady Di everywhere but to her face—had done her best to shake that particular tree, and if she’d been told ten years ago that a woman would be running the Service within the decade, she’d have assumed she’d be the woman in question.
History, though, had a way of throwing spanners in every direction. With Charles Partner’s death had come a feeling that new winds were blowing down the Service’s corridors; that a fresh outlook was required. ‘Troubled times’ was the recurring phrase. A safe pair of hands was needed, which turned out to belong to Ingrid Tearney. The fact that Tearney was a woman would have been a soothing balm to Taverner, if it hadn’t been a severe irritant instead.
Still, it was progress. It would have felt more like progress if it hadn’t involved someone else, but it was progress. And she, Taverner, was Second Desk, even if the new dispensation involved there being several Second Desks; and her team had spring-sunshine lighting and ergonomic chairs, and that was fine too. Because they also had young men with rucksack-bombs on tube trains. Anything that helped them do their jobs was fine by Taverner.
This morning, they also had an execution in progress.
The link had appeared on a BBC blog around 4 a.m., its accompanying message brief but effective: we cut his head off forty-eight hours. Unpunctuated. Short. Radical groups, especially your religious types, tended to sermonize: spawn of Satan, eternal fire, et cetera. That this wasn’t the case made it more disturbing. A hoax would have had claptrap attached.
And now, like all successful media events, it was playing on every screen in sight. Would be playing on every screen in the country, in fact: in homes and offices; above treadmills in gyms; on palm-pilots and iPhones; on the back seats of black cabs. And all round the globe, people would be catching up with it at the different times of their day, and their first reaction would be the same as that of the team on the hub: that this couldn’t be happening in Britain. Other parts of the world boasted outlaw lands aplenty. Tell your average Western citizen that they played polo with human heads in Kazakhstan, and you’d get a nod. Yeah, I heard about that. But even on the wildest of Britain’s inner city estates, they weren’t chopping heads off. Or not on the BBC, anyway.
And it wasn’t going to happen, Taverner told herself. This was not going to happen. Stopping it was going to be the highlight of her career, and would call time on a lousy era for the Service, years of dodgy dossiers, suspicious deaths. It was going to get them out of the doghouse: herself, her superiors, and all the boys and girls on the hub; the hardworking, underpaid guardians of the State who were first in line when duty called, and last to be celebrated when things went right … It wasn’t twelve months since her team had rolled up a terrorist cell that had mapped out a full-scale assault on the capital, and the arrests, the captured weaponry, had made for a two-day wonder. But at the trial, the main question was: how come the cell had thrived for so long? How come it had so nearly achieved its objective?
The anniversaries of failure were marked on the streets, with crowds emerging from offices to observe a silence for the innocent dead. Successes were lost in the wash; swept from the front pages by celebrity scandal and economic gloom.
Taverner checked her watch. There was a lot of paper heading her way: the first sit-rep was due on her desk any minute; there’d be a Crash Room meeting thirty seconds later; a briefing for the Minister before the hour was out; then Limitations. The press would want a statement of intent. Ingrid Tearney being in DC, Diana Taverner would deliver that too. Tearney would be relieved, actually. She’d want Taverner’s fingerprints on this in case it went tits up, and a citizen had his head cut off on live TV.
And before any of that happened there was someone at the door: Nick Duffy, Head Dog.
It didn’t matter which rung of the ladder you were on: when the Dogs appeared uninvited, your first reaction was guilt.
‘What is it?’
‘Something I thought you should know.’
‘I’m busy.’
‘Don’t doubt it for a minute, boss.’
‘Spit it out.’
‘I had a drink with an ex last night. Moody. Jed Moody.’
She said, ‘He got the boot after the Miro Weiss business. Isn’t he at Slough House?’
‘Yes. And not liking it.’
The door opened. A kid called Tom put a manila folder on Taverner’s desk. The first sit-rep. It looked implausibly thin.
Taverner nodded, and Tom left without speaking.
She said to Duffy, ‘I’m somewhere else in thirty seconds.’
‘Moody was talking about an op.’
‘He’s covered by the Act.’ She scooped up the folder. ‘If he’s running off about his glory days, bring him in and slap him round. Or get a tame policeman to do it. Am I really telling you how to do your job?’
‘He wasn’t talking about the past. He says Jackson Lamb’s running an op.’
She paused. Then said, ‘They don’t run ops from Slough House.’
‘Which is why I thought you should know.’
She stared past him for a second, through the glass at the crew on the hub. Then her focus shifted, and she was looking at her own image. She was forty-nine years old. Stress, hard work and Father bloody Time had done their worst, but stilclass="underline" she was heir to good bones, and blessed with a figure. She knew how to make the most of both, and today wore a dark suit over a pale pink blouse, the former picking up the colour of her shoulder-length hair. She was fine. A bit of maintenance between meetings, and she might make it to nightfall without looking like something dragged round a barnyard by pigs.