“What makes you think I know?”
“Because you’re not a great liar. You’re good, but you’re not great.”
“Excuse me? When did I lie?”
“When you pretended to believe me when I told you he was dead.”
“. . . So?”
“So you know he’s somewhere far enough away that I couldn’t have got there and back in the time it took me to turn up at your door. Jesus, Standish. It’s not rocket science.”
“Not for someone with your twisted thought processes,” she conceded.
They sat in silence and stared at each other, as if this were just another phase of a game they’d both been playing for a long long time.
At last she said, “He hung his jacket over a chair. I went through his pockets while he was getting his grandfather settled.”
“That must have brought back memories. Didn’t you use to roll sailors, back in the day?”
She said, “He had a passport. British. Alex Lockhead, no, Adam. Adam Lockhead. And a Eurostar ticket, and some euros.”
Lamb groaned. “Oh, great. The idiot’s gone to France.”
“On someone else’s passport.” Catherine shook her head. “I didn’t think he’d get past border control.”
“Inside Europe? If the passport’s not on a watch-list, he could waltz through wearing falsies and a tutu. Though mind you, having a photo that actually resembles him might raise suspicion.” He sniffed. “Mine makes me look fat.”
“Imagine.”
“So he’s over the channel. But France is a big place. What’s he plan to do, stomp up and down the Champs Élysées, waving his arms in the air?”
“There was a café receipt.”
“Of course there was,” said Lamb.
There was a hold-up somewhere: a faulty traffic light, an accident, or—probably—a stretch of road being dug up, with a knock-on effect spreading ever outward. He’d seen a sign near some roadworks not long ago: two hundred yards of plastic mesh and bollards, not a workman in sight, and a notice reading: “We are currently examining the waterpipes in this area. At times, it will look like no work is being done.” Nothing like getting your alibi in first.
Claude Whelan chuckled, then abruptly stopped. Three days after the Westacres bomb, last thing he needed was a tabloid headline, Intelligence Chief enjoying a private joke. And you never knew when a lens was trained on you, even in the back seat of your smoke-screened official limousine.
He was being driven back from Downing Street. The COBRA session had been long, and last night sleepless; he had ended up in the spare bed, to avoid disturbing Claire. His first COBRA: no wonder he’d been nervous. Nobody had to tell Whelan his elevation had been unexpected. Dame Ingrid Tearney had cast a long shadow, and there were nooks and crannies of the Service still in darkness; after her—as he’d heard it called—over-managed tenure, there’d been an expectation that the mantle would pass back to Ops. After all, Charles Partner, the last head of the Service to have hailed from Operations, had overseen a successful, invigorating era that was looked on as a golden age. Had it been more widely known that he’d spent much of his career in the pay of the Soviets, this afterglow might have been tarnished somewhat; as it was, only his apparent suicide cast a retrospective taint of unreliability over his administration, and since this was ascribed by those not in the know to hidden trauma from his days as an Active, it had subsequently been decided that hands-on experience was a drawback, and Partner’s successors to date had achieved office mostly by dint of managerial cunning. But following Tearney there’d been rumours of impending “reform,” and while the word had long lost any association with notions of improvement, attaching itself instead to cost-cutting, it had nevertheless been mooted that a new direction might be in the offing, and Ops in the ascendancy once more. Diana Taverner would have been the obvious choice. But Tearney, when she went, had gone with the grace of a scuttled supertanker: it had taken ages, it had been very messy, and it left few onlookers with clean feathers. Reform had thus subsided into the usual face-saving reshuffle, and Whelan, recently gonged after twenty years’ service, and very much not associated with the Dame’s doings, had been helicoptered in from across the river: a safe pair of hands.
And any secret doubts he harboured about this he’d kept in check this morning. Having laid out the facts rehearsed with Diana Taverner, he’d forged on into the territory that was Robert Winters—the man caught on camera detonating himself in a crowded shopping centre; a made-in-Britain version of all those headlines, which had shrunk over the years to a page-seven sidebar, about events in distant marketplaces. Nothing brought the meaning of “suicide bomber” home quite so hard as familiar logos glimpsed through the rubble. So there he was—now you see him, now you don’t—and they owed his name to the brilliant work of the boys and girls of Regent’s Park, who had traced his passage backwards through the streets of London, courtesy of all that CCTV coverage the liberal tendency decried; as if putting a smashed clock together, they had reconstructed the minutes that had ticked down to zero, each stage of the journey rooting Robert Winters more fixedly into the life he had emerged from, and loosening him from the explosive manner in which he had ended it. Here he was in the underground, among crowds of the ignorantly blissful; here he was changing lines at Edgware Road, his blurry features by now more familiar to his watchers than those of their own children. And so it went, step after step, fragments of footage spliced together in reverse order, and if he was still a cipher at this point, assigned a random codename nobody paid attention to, because he was always he—him—they had known long before they pinned him down that this was the inevitable end of their quest. Nobody so hunted could remain uncaught. We will have him was the common refrain, and it became almost irrelevant that he was unhavable, that what was left of him could be weighed on a set of kitchen scales; no, they would have him—they would bring him back to life through digital magic, interrogate his spirit, undo his evil. And in the end they achieved this much: one final flicker of footage showing him emerging from a backpackers’ hotel in Earls Court, eighty-one minutes before the detonation in Westacres—stepping from a cheap and nasty dive into a grey damp January London; the skies barely distinguishable from the pavements; the pavements wet and littered; the litter pulped and mushy.
Two minutes later a net had dropped over it so thinly meshed an anorexic flea couldn’t have slipped through.
The Earls Court hostel was their crime scene, and it was here, in one of its grubby rooms, that he acquired an identity at last, for not only had Robert Winters registered under that name, he had left his passport under his pillow for them to find, alongside the pay-as-you-go he had used to text Lucas Fairweather; and—naturally—as much DNA as the boys and girls could wish for. An amateur error? Pointless to ask: when it comes to suicide bombers, everyone’s a first-timer. No, this was a cock being snooked from the other side of death; Robert Winters nailing down his place in history before setting off to create his own sunset. It would be a far far better thing if they buried the passport with his victims and claimed never to have found it. Cheat the bastard of posthumous fame, and in doing so reveal his true nature: that whatever blaze of infamy he’d sought to depart the planet in, he had been at heart a nobody, a nothing; not worth the moment it took to learn his name.
Which, philosophically, might have been appealing, but wasn’t an acceptable approach to take in a COBRA briefing.