‘Thank you.’
‘And they might have dumped the sat nav, of course. Might have tossed it out of the window hours ago.’
Louisa said, ‘Assuming Black was the brains, they probably wouldn’t have thought of that.’
‘Let’s not underestimate them,’ Catherine said. ‘Black’s dead. They’re not. Where’s the sat nav now, Roddy?’
Ho coloured slightly, and his finger stroked the keyboard’s touchpad. An OS map sprouted on to the screen. Two more taps, and it had magnified twice over.
‘Epping Forest,’ he said.
Curly moved his boot away. Hassan pulled the handkerchief from his mouth, and tossed it as far as he was able. Then lay on the ground, sucking mouthfuls of cold damp air. He hadn’t realized how empty his lungs were. How foul it had been in that boot, with only his own stink to survive on.
He sat up, every part of his body protesting. Behind Curly stood Larry: taller than Curly, broader too, but somehow less substantial. He was holding what looked like a bundle of sticks. Hassan blinked. The world turned swimmy, then washed back into line. It was a tripod. And that matchbox in his other hand: that would be a camera.
Curly was holding something altogether different.
Hassan drew his knees up, leant forward, and pressed his hands to the cold earth. It felt reassuringly solid, and at the same time coldly alien. What did he know about the outdoors? He knew about city streets and supermarkets. He pushed himself unsteadily on to his feet. I wobble, he thought. I wobble. Here among these trees, which are so very big, I am small, and I hurt, and I wobble. But I’m alive.
He looked at Curly, and said, ‘This it, is it?’ His voice sounded strange, as if he were being played by an actor. Someone who’d never actually heard Hassan speak, but had worked out what he might sound like from a faded photograph.
‘Yeah,’ Curly told him. ‘This is it.’
The axe he was holding looked to Hassan like something from the Middle Ages. But then, it was something from the Middle Ages—a smoothly curved length of wood with a dull-grey metal head, sharpened to a killing edge. Used down the centuries, because it rarely went wrong. Sometimes the handle wore thin, and was replaced. Sometimes the blade grew blunt.
Joanna Lumley was long gone. Hassan’s inner comedian had not returned to the stage. But when he spoke again his own voice had returned to him, and for the first time in an age, he uttered the precise words he was feeling.
‘You fucking coward.’
Did Curly flinch? Was he not expecting that?
Curly said, ‘I’m a soldier.’
‘You? A soldier? You call this a battlefield? You’ve tied my hands, dragged me into a forest, and now you’re what? Gunna cut my head off? Some fucking soldier.’
‘It’s a holy war,’ Curly said. ‘And your lot started it.’
‘My lot? My lot sell soft furnishings.’ A wind stirred the woods, making a noise like an appreciative audience. Hassan felt blood run through his veins; felt fear build into a bubble in his chest. It might burst at any moment. Or might just float him away. He looked at Larry. ‘And you, right? You’re just gunna stand there and let him do what he wants? Another fucking soldier, right?’
‘Shut up.’
‘Yeah, right. Or what? You’ll cut my head off? Fuck the pair of you. You want to film this? Film me now, saying this. You’re both cowards and the BN fucking P are a bunch of fucking losers.’
‘We’re not BNP,’ Curly said.
Hassan threw his head back and laughed.
‘What’s so funny?’
He said, ‘You think I care? You think I care who you are? BNP or English Defence League or any other kind of stupid fucking Nazi, you think I care? You’re nothing. You’re nobodies. You’ll spend the rest of your lives in prison, and you know what? You’ll still be nobodies.’
Larry said, ‘Right. That’s it.’
Duffy arrived full-tilt, of course. He’d never been far away. He found a waste-paper basket rolling harmlessly across the carpet, and a glass wall showing no sign that violence had been offered. But Taverner was white-faced, and judging by Jackson Lamb’s expression, that counted as a result.
Lamb said, ‘A handler never burns his own joe. It’s the worst treachery of all. That’s what Partner was doing, using Standish as a shield. That’s what you’re doing now. Maybe I am old school. But I’m not watching that happen twice.’
Nick Duffy said, ‘Partner?’
‘Enough,’ Taverner said. Then: ‘He’s been running Slough House like a private army. He’s been running ops, for Christ’s sake. Take him downstairs.’
While she was speaking Lamb had found a loose cigarette in his overcoat pocket, and was now trying to straighten it. His expression suggested this was currently his major problem.
Duffy wasn’t armed. Didn’t need to be. He said, ‘Okay, Lamb. Put that down, and drop your coat on the floor.’
‘Okay.’
Duffy couldn’t help it: he glanced at Taverner. She was glancing right back.
‘Something you should know first, mind.’
And now they both looked at Lamb.
‘The SUV your guy just drove under the building? There’s a bomb on the back seat. A big one.’
A second passed.
Duffy said, ‘You’re kidding, right?’
‘Might not be.’ Lamb shrugged, then stared at Taverner. ‘I told you. I don’t do subtle.’
The desk guys weren’t as fond of Spider Webb as he thought, but everyone likes having information. Somebody had parked a Service car on the forecourt, and received the inevitable response: the security drones and a couple of Duffy’s boys, not long back from various errands. They’d surrounded the car until Duffy himself appeared.
‘Who was it?’
‘Jackson Lamb,’ the older desk guy said.
‘You sure?’
‘I’ve worked here twenty years. You get to know Jackson Lamb.’
The word sonny was all the more eloquent for remaining unspoken.
Lamb had come in under Duffy’s steam; was up on the hub. The desk guys’ monitors didn’t cover what happened there, but he hadn’t reappeared.
Spider chewed his lip. Whatever Lamb was up to, it didn’t involve the madwoman with the gun; or River, either. He mumbled his thanks to the desk guys, and didn’t see the look they shared as he headed back upstairs. On the landing he stopped by the window. Nothing was happening on the street. He blinked. Something was happening on the street. A black van screeched to a halt, and almost before it had stopped moving the back was open, allowing three, four, five black-clad shadows to pour like smoke into the morning. Then they were gone, headed into the underground car park.
The achievers, everyone called them. Spider Webb had always thought it a ridiculous name; a piece of jargon that shouldn’t have stuck, but had. They were the SWAT guys, who mostly did extractions and removals; he’d seen them in action, but only on drills. This hadn’t struck him as a drill.
He wondered if the building were under attack. But if so, there’d be alarms, and a lot more activity.
Through the window, the same nothing was happening again. Small disturbances only. A wind rearranged the trees over the road; a taxi passed. Nothing.
Webb shook his head; an unnecessarily dramatic gesture, given there was nobody to witness it. Story of his life. The joke was, last time he’d been close to anyone, it had been River Cartwright. Some of the courses they’d been on, you couldn’t get through without forming alliances; what people called friendships. More than once, he’d assumed that their futures would run on parallel lines, but something had prevented that, which was Spider’s slow-dawning realization that River was better than him at most things; so much so, he didn’t have to make a big show of it. Which was the sort of moment on which alliances foundered.