And Whelan knew that this was not only the honourable course, it was probably the safest, but . . . but damn it, we’d be in lockdown, Claude. We’d have Special Branch going through every desk. It would make the Cambridge spies inquiry look like garden party chit-chat.
So, not only the shortest-lived First Desk ever, but one whose microscopic tenure had seen the Service hobbled and chained; an onlooker at its own court martial.
He removed his glasses and polished them on the sleeve of his jacket. At moments of weakness, he liked to recall the codename he’d gone by over the river: Galahad. All the weasels—yes, that’s what they were called—all the intelligence weasels were assigned codenames, largely so they’d reflect a little of the glamour of actual spooks. So: Galahad, and Claire had loved that. My knight in shining armour, she’d said. Had there really been such knights, or were they just a bunch of talented ruffians? It didn’t matter; remembering that he’d been Galahad buoyed him. He’d been made to change it on his elevation: he was RP1 now; functional, yes, but boring. And now he was no longer alone; one last polish of his glasses, and back on they went.
Diana Taverner had found him. “News,” she said.
He waited.
“Adam Lockhead. One of the . . . ”
“Properties,” he said.
Cold bodies.
“He’s turned up.”
A wave of relief flushed through Whelan. “Where?”
“On the Eurostar. His passport lit up coming through border control. His train arrives in five minutes.”
“You’ll have him arrested?”
“I’ve sent Flyte.” She paused. “It would be best if there were no . . . official chain of custody. Just in case.”
Whelan looked towards the windows again: at them, rather than through them. The raindrops were choosing zig-zaggy routes to the sill, as if this were the safest way of navigating glass.
Catch the bad people, he thought, and the problem goes away.
“Well,” he said at last. “Keep me in the picture.”
Coming through passport control before boarding the train, he’d had the sense of triggering a silent alarm. Have a good journey, sir, sure, thanks, but River read in the tightening of the chubbily pretty guard’s eyebrows as she handed him “his” passport that something had shown up on her screen. A red flag. But not so red they’d prevent him getting on the train.
Which might just mean they wanted him back in England with as little fuss as possible.
So on the train, while the grey winter landscape slipped into darkness, before the train itself disappeared beneath the sea, he’d wondered how big a hole he’d dug himself into. Travelling on someone else’s passport? Not great, though he could plausibly claim cover; he was a member of the security services, even if the claim would ring hollow to anyone who’d heard of Slough House. Travelling on someone else’s passport, though, who was recently dead, shot twice in the face? That might take more confidence than he’d faked for the guard.
In the end, he’d fallen asleep, and only woke when the train was pulling into London: it was early evening, and the weather still foul. With no luggage to fuss with River was first on the platform, joining the throng milling around St. Pancras in the uncoordinated way of crowds everywhere. The tube, he decided. He’d head for the tube. That would be the best way of shaking them off.
That there was someone to shake off, he had no doubt. He might not be in joe country any more, but he was definitely back on Spook Street.
Emma Flyte spotted him stepping off the train. Youngish, fairish, reasonably athletic-looking, no luggage: there’d be other candidates, but she felt confident this was the one. She had her phone to her ear, which was as good as a disguise, most places. She said to Devon Welles, “I think that’s him.”
“Gotcha,” Welles said. He’d just arrived back in the city when Emma had called, and was now on a stool outside a sushi joint. “Ready to play?”
“Soon as you like,” she suggested, slipping her phone into her pocket. Some jobs, you needed both hands free.
Sleep had left him spacey, off-kilter, and his unexpected trip to France felt distant already. More immediate were last night’s events—the weight of the gun as he’d obliterated dead Adam Lockhead’s face. The red smears on the wall and the top of the staircase; traces his grandfather had left on his way down to the kitchen, where River had found him on arrival.
I knew he wasn’t you.
But River was him now, or was using his passport. Adam Lockhead; also Bertrand, son of Frank. A French/American hybrid, using an English cover. He wondered what had happened at Les Arbres, and how much his grandfather knew about it; wondered, too, whether the blood on his grandfather’s hands went deeper than smears left on the furnishings. River had always known the O.B. was a spook, but some parts of the picture he’d purposefully left vague. His grandfather must have been responsible for many deaths: by omission, by sacrifice, by deliberate targeting. But he wondered how many times the O.B. had actually pulled a trigger. It would be ironic—though he wasn’t sure “ironic” was the word—if the only death David Cartwright had brought about with his own stained hands had been committed while no longer in his own right mind.
He was out of St. Pancras now, heading for the underground platforms it shared with King’s Cross. River could never be here without remembering the morning he’d crashed this place: a fucked-up training exercise during rush hour, a misidentified “terrorist”—blue shirt, white tee—and a projected hundred and twenty people killed or maimed; £2.5 billion in tourist revenue lost . . . He didn’t know how these figures had been reached, but it didn’t matter, because whichever way you added them up the bottom line came out the same: River was now a slow horse, King’s Cross the hurdle he’d fallen at. Being here was like having a toothpick jammed under a fingernail. If it was up to him he’d blow the damn place up, but that was what had got him into trouble in the first place.
Then there was someone too close behind him, and before he could turn, a rock-like hand had taken a grip on his upper arm.
“Adam Lockhead?”
It was a man who’d taken hold but a woman who was speaking; a strikingly attractive blonde.
“I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else,” he said.
“Well, we’ll soon find out, won’t we?”
In her hand she somehow had his passport—there were posters on every surface warning you to watch out for pickpockets, but none of them suggested that professional dips would get quite so in-your-face about it.
“No, that’s you,” she said, opening it. “Adam Lockhead. Or did you mishear?”
River found himself being steered out to the street, the three of them walking abreast like colleagues heading to a meeting. “I’m a member of the security services,” he said as they stepped into the grey evening.
“Excellent,” she said. “Because that gives me so much jurisdiction you wouldn’t believe it.”
Few things gave an honest copper as much satisfaction as making an arrest: it was only afterwards, once you got solicitors, the CPS, the whole judicial machinery involved that things siphoned off into paperwork and loopholes. She wasn’t a copper any more, and this wasn’t precisely an arrest, but Emma Flyte wasn’t above feeling a quiet hum of pleasure as she climbed into the back seat alongside the prisoner. Devon, too, was feeling the moment: she could read this by the set of his shoulders, and the way he carelessly tossed the parking ticket they’d received into the footwell.