It wouldn’t soon be over.
“Extremism, Frank said. That was what was taking hold in the Middle East. All very true, we told him, but it’s not like they’re exporting the stuff, is it? And if they want to chop the hands off thieves, well, it probably keeps shoplifting to manageable levels in downtown Baghdad. Because we’d just won a war, you see? We didn’t want to hear about the next one, not yet.”
“I’m not sure you should be getting yourself into this state.”
“Frank, though, he thought we should be preparing ourselves. Because this wasn’t going to be over in a hurry, he said. When you have an enemy with nuclear capability, it could all be over in seconds. When your enemy’s armed with rocks and knives, they’ll come at you slowly. Raise their children to hate you. They’ll stare down through the generations, preparing for a war that lasts centuries.”
“I really don’t think—”
“And he already had a network, you see. A network impossible to imagine even a year earlier. A couple of KGB agents, and others from the Soviet satellite states. Some Germans, a Frenchman. He called them his rainbow coalition. Ha.” The laugh was a bark. “Combined experience, he said, these people knew more about counter-terrorism than any official service in the world, because they’d played both sides of the fence, do you see? Black ops. Give them the wherewithal, Frank said, and they’d establish a version of Cuckoo equipped to face the future. Fight fire with fire, that was the name of his game. You want to fight extremists, you have to raise extremists.”
He looked at the woman. She wasn’t writing any of this down.
She said, “And that’s what you authorised him to do?”
“Well, no, of course we didn’t,” David Cartwright said. “He was a lunatic. We told him to sling his hook.”
Coe dry-swallowed; coughed. Ever Mr. Empathy, Lamb poured himself another drink.
From the darkness, Catherine said, “For God’s sake, let him get some water.”
Lamb said, “Oh, is he thirsty? Are you thirsty? You should have said.”
“Speaking out’s not his forte,” Catherine said. “That’s rather the point.”
To his own surprise as much as anyone’s, Coe said, “I’m fine.”
“There you go,” said Lamb. “He’s fine.” He slumped even further into his chair. He already resembled a Dali portrait. “And as long as we keep the carving knives out of sight, he’ll stay that way.”
The words put a buzz in the air. Coe could hear it, and knew that if he shut his eyes he’d feel it happen: the sharp edge slicing through his soft belly, then the slither and slap of all he contained falling wetly to the floor.
“You’re not having a panic attack, are you?” Lamb asked kindly.
“No.”
“Does the thought of having one frighten you?”
“For Christ’s sake, Jackson, leave him alone.”
Coe said, “There were rumours. About Cuckoo.”
There were always rumours. Spooks love their stories: it’s why they’re spooks.
But Catherine said, “Where did they come from? These rumours?”
“One of the course teachers,” Coe said, after a moment’s thought. It felt strange, rummaging for memories from that part of his life when he was still whole. It was like poking round somebody else’s attic. “It was a scenario one of the games teams was presented with, back when the Wall came down.”
“The pointy heads,” said Chapman.
Lamb said, “Yeah. The ones who have consoles instead of ops. Tell me about this scenario.”
“The Park was approached by an American agent, a Company man, who wanted to tailor the Cuckoo idea. Instead of aiming it at specific national types, he wanted to see if it was possible to . . . to build an extremist. To raise a prototype fanatic. He was prescient, you’d have to give him that. He was thinking in terms of suicide bombers long before the West woke up to them.”
“And how,” said Chapman, “did he plan to go about building a fanatic?”
“Indoctrination. You bring children up in the right environment, they’ll be anything you want them to be. Catholic. Communist. Ballet dancer. Fanatic.”
Chapman looked at Lamb. “An American. Frank?”
“Les Arbres was the middle of France, not a training camp in the desert,” said Lamb. “They’d be more likely to raise a bunch of cheese-eating hippies than a suicide squad.”
From her shadows, Catherine said, “But this was never done, right? He was never given the go-ahead. Isn’t that why it was all rumour and story? Never on the syllabus?”
“Like I said, it turned out he wasn’t Company, he was ex,” Coe said. “Former CIA. He’d been burned for unreliability. Once they found that out, he was shown the door. So no, his Project Cuckoo never happened. It just became one of those anecdotes that get swapped after lights-out.”
“So what was going on at Les Arbres?” Chapman said.
Lamb said, “If he didn’t get official backing from his own team, and didn’t get it from the Park either, it looks like he went through the back door. And guess who was holding it open?”
“Cartwright?” Chapman said. “Oh, come on—Cartwright?”
“And all these years later, they’re trying to close it again,” Lamb said. “So yes—Cartwright.”
“Oh lord,” said Catherine.
“What’s up with you?”
“Why now?” she said. “Why try to bury it now, after all this time?”
Lamb’s eyes narrowed, and he squashed his cigarette into a coffee mug already half-full of dead-ends.
“What?” said Bad Sam.
“Don’t you see?” said Catherine. “Project Cuckoo. Purpose-built fanatics . . . ”
“Oh shit,” said JK Coe.
“Westacres,” said Lamb.
Many a tear has to fall, thought Claude Whelan obscurely; a lyric from a forgotten song, a moment from his past. Long-stemmed glasses on a starched tablecloth. A dining room with a view of the sea; the windowpanes spattered with rain. If he asked, Claire would know the precise holiday, month and year, the name of the hotel. He was hopeless with such details, his ability to memorise facts being reserved for his working life. Outside of that, he simply had the long view, like the one offered by those hotel windows, and the generic details that might have come from anywhere: the long-stemmed glasses, the pristine tablecloth.
He was in a stairwell, taking a moment away from the Hub. A brief opportunity to ring Claire, let her know he’d be late. She understood: of course she did. He was First Desk. The country was shaking at the knees, the tremors from Westacres still rocking the capital. She had fierce notions of loyalty. She would have been shocked had he suggested he’d be leaving soon.
“As long as it takes,” she’d said.
“Thank you, darling.”
“I’ll make up the spare bed.”
And now he was watching raindrops coursing down the windows, miles away from that holiday hotel, and brooding on loyalty, and how it pulled you in different directions. His first COBRA session this morning, and his Second Desk had made a liar of him. Her reasons had been oddly persuasive, but treachery always had its convincing side. And there was a way out of this, of course: do his job, catch the bad people, and the problem would disappear. And this was what he intended to do anyway, so really, where was the difficulty?
But he knew that Claire, with her damn-the-torpedoes approach to ethics, would take a different view: she’d expect him to be on the phone to the PM by now, offering his resignation—the Service had dropped the ball; hell, the Service had polished the ball with an oily rag, pumped it up and handed it to the opposition. Here you go. Do your worst. All before his time, but no matter. You didn’t have to be there when the ball was dropped. You just had to be standing in the wrong place when somebody noticed.