He had time to buy a bread roll, packed with cheese, before the bus arrived. And then he was on his way to Poitiers, thence to Paris, and from there London: a journey he mostly slept through, though his dreams were of constant movement, and always with something swelling behind him; ready to pounce, ready to smother, ready to wash him away.
Back in the Park, on the hub, unfamiliarity had reimposed itself. Claude Whelan had been starting to feel he was settling in, but the conversation on the bus had thrust him back into the cold. He was the stranger again, the interloper, and no title he bore—First Desk, Chief Exec, God Albloodymighty—could bring him within the embrace of this chamber. And the glass wall of his office mocked the moment more.
Though it was always possible he was just feeling sorry for himself.
Diana had had coffee and sandwiches brought: a peace offering, Whelan thought, though again he might be overdramatising. It was, after all, lunchtime. She had been running him through the logistics of the cold body protocol. How it had been mothballed once the wardrobe department was wound up, and how—like everything else to do with the Civil Service—this had not meant that the stalled product was consigned to the furnace; simply that it had been packaged, sealed, labelled, stored.
“We’ve had problems with storage space,” she said.
“So I heard.”
The problems in question had culminated in a shooting war in one of the Service’s off-site facilities out beyond Paddington: “putting the wild into the west” as a wit on the Limitations Committee had phrased it. Like many local unpleasantnesses—the deployment of Service resources to personal ends; the unseemly wrangling over parking-spaces; the decades-long cover-up of the sexual abuse of children by Members of Parliament—this had been quietly swept under the carpet, with the usual result: not so much a tidy floor as an unsightly bulge, which sooner or later someone was going to trip over, and break their career.
“But ID product has always been kept on-site, in one of the secure rooms.”
Diana broke off to unwrap a crayfish sandwich, bending its packaging into a nest so that wayward flecks of mayonnaise wouldn’t soil her outfit. Then she removed the plastic lid from her coffee container and scraped the excess froth from it with a wooden paddle. Whelan watched, fascinated. The longer this went on, the less there’d be of the rest of his life, in which he had to cope with the dangerous stuff Diana was revealing.
But this wouldn’t do. He was in charge—First Desk, Chief Exec, God Albloodymighty.
“So, then. How, precisely, do we determine who was responsible for stealing these—”
“Product,” she said.
“Product?”
“We can’t keep calling them cold bodies, Claude. Apart from anything else, it might alert people to what we’re talking about.” She raised her cup to her lips and breathed in coffee fumes rather than sipped. “We are spies, remember?”
“Product, then. Do we have a list of suspects?”
“Well, there can’t have been many people in a position to walk out of a secure room with several box-files’ worth of high-clearance . . . product, but it was a long time ago. Whoever it was might have retired, moved on or dropped off the perch. Investigation would be a time-consuming business, and we don’t have time, and it would inevitably attract attention, and we don’t want any.”
“But apart from that,” he said.
“Apart from that,” she agreed, “we would like to know who was responsible.”
“To what end?”
She said, “I’m not sure I take your meaning, Claude.”
“I’m trying to determine what you regard as the best outcome,” he said. “That we apprehend whoever’s responsible in order to bring them to public justice. Or to make sure that nobody ever discovers the Service’s involvement in the Westacres bombing.”
“Aren’t you hungry?”
“I—what?”
“You haven’t eaten your sandwich.”
He was still clutching it, in its wedge-shaped container. Something with chorizo. He didn’t remember having been asked for a preference, or what he’d replied if he had been, but was pretty sure it wouldn’t have been chorizo, if only because chorizo was one of those foodstuffs whose existence he only recalled when it was actually in his presence. Like yellow peppers. He was hungry, though, so tore the strip off the container, and carefully eased one sandwich out, though not carefully enough to prevent a globule of mustard dripping onto his lapel.
“Can I fetch you a—”
“I’m fine,” he snapped.
“The Service had no involvement in the Westacres bombing,” she said, as if the intervening pantomime had not occurred. “Service product was misappropriated, and that’s regrettable. But the Service itself had no involvement. Let’s make sure we’re on the same page on that one, Claude.”
Nothing in her tone suggested that this was a subordinate offering counsel to her boss. He glanced at Claire’s photo, and it occurred to him that one of his first acts on taking up Dame Ingrid Tearney’s mantle had been to neutralise—or at least, marginalise—a potential source of danger. He’d thought himself a pretty fine player of the game at the time. But it had been like trapping a mouse and releasing it miles away, then returning home to find a dragon in the kitchen.
A mouse can cause untold irritation, but there’s nothing like the rain of fire a dragon can bring down.
Regaining an equable tone, he said, “I think you can trust me to have the Service’s best interests at heart, Diana.”
“Good.”
“Alongside those of the nation at large.”
“God, yes. The nation.”
He bit into his sandwich. The chorizo was spicy, and bit back. “The missing product, though. You have the details?”
She was nodding before he’d finished; had the look, Whelan decided, of a satisfied teacher. He didn’t care. Right this moment, he’d take anything he could get.
“If they’re currently in use, we find them,” he said. “We find them, and with their help, voluntary or otherwise, we discover who provided them with their identities in the first place. And then we draw a curtain over the whole dreadful episode.”
“Voluntary or otherwise,” she repeated. “Perhaps you have the makings of a First Desk after all, Claude.”
“What are the names?”
“Robert Winters we already know. He’s the only one to make a mark on the world so far.”
“And the others?”
“Paul Wayne,” she said. “And Adam Lockhead.”
“Wayne and Lockhead,” he murmured. The names meant nothing to him, and he hoped they never would. Not in the way their brother-in-fiction Robert Winters did.
“I’ve fed them into the system,” Diana said. “On a low priority.”
Whelan raised an eyebrow.
“Because the only high priority right now is Westacres,” she said. “And we can’t have anyone drawing a connection between those names and that event. Not until we’ve had a chance to . . . ensure the correct outcome.”
A safe pair of hands, he thought, nostalgically. That was supposed to be him. And almost without pause, his feet barely under First Desk, here he was: involved in what some—even Claire, he supposed—might consider a conspiracy. Almost unconsciously he reached out and adjusted his wife’s photo. Little moments of contact, that was all he asked.
“Well then,” he said. “Let’s make sure that the correct outcome is what we achieve.”
Part Two
Nothing like the Rain
Bad Sam Chapman put no trust in itchy feelings.
Bad Sam, though, didn’t have a lot of time for nicknames either, and his own had followed him like a hopeful puppy for years, its origins obscured by the passage of time, but probably something to do with an occasional irritability. He didn’t himself think he was that bad. Everyone had their moments.