With a gesture, he aimed his imaginary baton at Fairweather, around whose non-existent image a black circle was no doubt appearing.
“Fairweather was cautioned last June after being arrested at a party that got out of hand. The party was in a house belonging to the parents of another schoolfriend. They were away, and their son’s planned party ended up being tweeted about—initially by Fairweather—so the expected hundred-or-so guests morphed into a mob about two thousand strong. It made the national press, and brought the unfortunate parents storming back from holiday eager to press charges on ringleaders. Fairweather, like I say, was one of them, and while charges weren’t actually brought, he enjoyed fifteen minutes’ notoriety. And that, we think, is what attracted the attention of our bomber.”
Another pause. Perhaps the film moved forward a few jerky frames. Perhaps it remained frozen on the image of three youths, one of them carrying a large black holdall; all of them—boys, bag, futures—now blasted into nothingness.
“On the same morning the first tweet went out, Lucas Fairweather received a text message from a pay-as-you-go mobile. It read, ‘Lucas, want some laughs?’ He replied ‘Who U?’ ‘Friend,’ the stranger replied. And so it went on. The full transcript is in your folders. By the thirty-eighth exchange, Lucas Fairweather and the stranger, who was calling himself Dwight Passenger, were the best of friends. And Passenger had persuaded Lucas to provide the music for the flash-mob. Excuse me.”
Claude Whelan took a sip of water from the glass on the table in front of him. Then said:
“Another little taste of notoriety for Lucas Fairweather. Presumably he enjoyed the attention. But it’s clear he had no idea what he and his friends were stepping into.”
A wave of the hand to indicate that the film should roll forward again.
“So. The music starts, and everyone strips off their coats and starts dancing. In the corner of the frame, you can see our security guard, Mr. Chatterjee, who, ah, stood down, as it were, once it seemed that nothing worse than an impromptu dance was in the offing. And for the next two and a half minutes, that’s all it was. A flash mob. They were briefly popular in the mid-noughties, bit of a nuisance if you were caught in one, but just youthful high spirits really. If only this one was—well. We all know it wasn’t. Because meanwhile, this man appears, at 3:04 pm, two and a half minutes after the music starts. And while everyone around him is dancing, he unbuttons his overcoat and—”
A phone rang.
“Christ. Sorry, Claude. Sorry sorry sorry. Really better take this.”
“That’s okay, Diana.”
“Really sorry. I’ll just be a mo.”
And Diana Taverner slipped out of the meeting room, mobile in hand, leaving Claude Whelan on his own, mentally rehearsing the remainder of the talk he’d be delivering to the PM’s COBRA session in just over an hour’s time.
It was a mostly one-sided conversation that took place in the corridor: Taverner—Lady Di, though not to her face—listening, nodding, asking questions. There were no windows here, but a set of glass doors offered a reflection, and she adjusted the fit of her jacket as she listened, brushed lint from her lapel. Her hair was chestnut brown, naturally curly, shorter than ever. The odd grey stranger had been making an appearance, and she found them easier to weed out of a neater crop. Just one of life’s many battles.
The grey hairs, she assumed, were not unconnected to the career-frightening developments of last year, when the internal power struggles common to any high-stakes operation had accidentally triggered a small war in one of the Service’s off-post facilities west of the city. A lot of the shooting had taken place underground, and the area itself was notable mainly for the number of residents who jumped under trains leaving Paddington, but stilclass="underline" you can only let so many bodies fall before someone notices the thumps. It was the excuse several of the big-chins on the Limitations Committee had been waiting for; revenge for having seen one of their own ground into mince, after being caught with his hand in the till. Criminal, yes; treasonous even, if you wanted to split hairs, but the chap was stripped of his knighthood for pity’s sake. Could hardly show his face in his club once he’d served his three months, less time off for having been at Harrow.
So the bloodbath out near Hayes was mirrored by a more serious one in Regent’s Park, and while Diana Taverner had survived the cull, it had been a close-run thing. Favours had been called in, and blackmail threats made good on. It was a rocky road to tread—she knew where a lot of bodies were buried, but, having put a number of them in the ground herself, it wasn’t wise to draw attention to the fact—and her long-held ambition of settling behind First Desk was one of the bargaining chips she’d had to surrender, or at least pretend to. So now she was back where it was starting to feel like she’d always been: Second-desking Ops, and offering ungrudging, whole-hearted support to the interloper who’d stolen her job. This time round, one Claude Whelan, from over the river, where the intelligence weasels lived.
She said, “Okay, Emma. It’s a mess we don’t need, but let’s not go to panic stations. If it’s not on Twitter, the press’ll never know it happened. So get the local Noddies on board. They can beat the bushes or the shrubbery or whatever they have down there until the old man turns up. Meanwhile, have one of our legals put the word to whoever’s in charge. Let them know it’s a security issue, and that Cartwright’s ours when they have him. Stress that it’s unrelated to the Westacres event. That’ll make them think it is related, and be more likely to cooperate. Update me in an hour. And try not to step on anyone’s toes.”
She ended the call.
The weasels from over the river dealt in data rather than human assets: feeding intelligence into gaming programs to assess real-world outcomes; running long-distance psychiatric evaluations of foreign notables; stress-testing domestic security systems for loopholes, all of which meant they spent more time with a mouse in their hands than they did interacting with humans, so it was no surprise they were all fucking weird. Whelan, though, seemed level-headed and socialised, which made him either an outlier or a born politician, and for the time being she was his go-to-guy; the only lifebelt he’d find in the notoriously treacherous waters of Regent’s Park.
She stepped back into the room. “Sorry about that.”
Whelan was gathering his papers into a pile, slipping them inside a cardboard folder. “Serious?”
“Not Westacres. A former agent—David Cartwright?”
“Of course. I never met him, but I know who you mean.”
“Yes, well, there’s been an incident at his home. It looks like the old boy shot an intruder and disappeared.”
“Good lord!”
“It gets worse. The ‘intruder’ was his grandson, who’s a current member of the Service. Bit of a mess all round. But Emma Flyte’s on the scene. She’ll lock it down.”
“The grandson. Is he—dead?”
“Very. Do you want to run through the rest of your debrief?”
Her switchblade turn took him aback. “. . . Not sure we have time. Any feedback so far?”
Taverner said, “You’re going to have to speed it up, especially at the beginning. Everybody knows it was a damn tragedy, and the PM gets his rhetoric from his scriptwriters. All he wants from you is fresh info he can dripfeed the media, plus something he can withhold for later dissemination when it all dries up. Which it will. This is going to be long, hard and cold. You want to get that across too, though nobody will listen. They’ll still expect answers tomorrow.”
“Okay. Anything else?”