Claude Whelan looked up from his laptop. Four viewings of the YouTube video now, and any further information it held wasn’t going to reveal itself on a fifth. The young man who’d brought it to Diana’s office had assured them it was being assessed by experts, its every pixel weighed and measured. Whether any knowledge thus acquired would help save Claude’s bacon, or ensure it was served extra crispy, would no doubt become clear in its own sweet time.
Diana said, “The other man in the car—the one who was using the Lockhead property—Flyte says it was River Cartwright.”
For a moment, Whelan’s mind didn’t bother taking this in. Then he said, “River Cartwright? He was supposed to be dead. What’s he doing with a cold body passport?”
“Let me think.”
He was happy to. As long as she was doing that, she wasn’t binding him more tightly inside this mad conspiracy which had just looped back on itself. The Cartwright mess—that’s what she’d called it this morning, back when he’d thought he was in charge round here—the Cartwright mess had nothing to do with Westacres. Cartwright was a Service legend who’d subsided into dementia, shot his grandson, and gone walkabout in Kent. Though apparently it hadn’t been his grandson after all . . .
The fact that it was Taverner doing the thinking didn’t prevent Claude from having ideas too.
He said, “David Cartwright.”
“Yes,” she said, already working the same seam.
“He was around at the right time. Twenty years ago.”
“He could have taken the properties. Nobody would have questioned anything he did. He was Charles Partner’s right hand.”
“But why?”
“Why anything? Money, power, sex—it doesn’t matter. If one of the cold bodies came to his door and ended up dead, you know what that means?”
“They’re cleaning house,” said Whelan.
Once, late at night in New York City, he’d sat with Claire in the back of a yellow cab as it tore down Broadway, and watched each set of traffic lights turn green at their approach. Sometimes, problems solved themselves: each question finding its own answer before you’d arrived at it.
He said, “Cartwright supplied the cold bodies to someone long ago. And now they’ve gone operational, they’re covering their tracks. With Cartwright dead, they’re secure.”
“Except,” Diana said. “You know what’s wrong with this picture? It’s hung backwards. If you’re a terror group planning a Westacres, you tie up your loose ends first. They should have come for Cartwright before the bombing.”
“But they didn’t. So maybe—”
“They didn’t know the bombing was going to happen,” Diana said.
Out on the hub, the work of the Service continued. There was a muted flatscreen on the wall whose rolling news channel remained fixated on Westacres. Relatives of the dead were fair game now, the three-day interval deemed long enough for mourning, and the transforming power of involvement in world-event had rendered several of them experts in counter-terrorism. One such was performing now, his head bobbing angrily as he explained the failings of the intelligence services, their laxity, their incompetence. Whelan could see him through the office’s glass wall. It must be of comfort, he thought, to pretend you had an understanding of how the world operated. Especially when it went wrong, and the result was carnage: broken bodies, torn flesh, and lives forever damaged.
He said, “I’m not sure which is worse. That someone planned this, or that it’s all some colossal fuck-up.”
“Welcome to Regent’s Park.”
“Let’s back up. Young Cartwright had Adam Lockhead’s passport. There was a body at Cartwright’s house. Ergo—”
“It was Adam Lockhead’s body,” Diana said.
“So young Cartwright turned up in time to foil the assassin, then went haring off across the channel on the killer’s passport. He was walking back the cat. Trying to find out who wanted to kill his grandfather.”
“Well, if nothing else, it shows the old man really does have dementia,” Diana Taverner said. “Otherwise he could have just asked him. Saved himself a journey.” Briefly she raised her fingers to her lips, and he understood that she was a smoker, unconsciously miming a nicotine hit. “So the question is, what did young Cartwright find out? How much does he know?”
“And who came after him?” Whelan said. He reached out and tapped the pad on his sleeping laptop, making the Pentonville Road video come to jerky life once more.
Taverner said, “The only thing that makes sense is, he’s the other cold body. Paul Wayne.”
“And he’s not rescuing Cartwright, he’s abducting him,” said Whelan. “So he can find out where the old man is now.”
His eyes flicked from the small screen in front of him to the larger one out on the hub. As if it were part of an installation, the recurrence of violent action in urban iconography, the YouTube film was playing on that one too now: more fodder for the debate on how the effort to keep the streets safe had fallen short. First Westacres, now this. Already, there’d be those straining to join the dots between the two. If anyone managed it, you’d hear the howls of outrage even while the screen remained mute.
Diana Taverner said, “You realise, the more complicated the situation gets, the simpler the solution becomes.”
“I’m not going to want to hear this.”
“I don’t care. As long as you’re First Desk, there are decisions you’ll have to make. Not for your own good, not for mine, not even for your wife’s—”
“Leave Claire out of this.”
“Of course. But I’m simply stating facts. Your choices are no longer about your own moral comfort. They’re about the greater good.”
“And the greater good, as you see it—”
“Is the survival of this Service.” She pointed out towards the hub. “Westacres happened. There’s nothing we can do about that. But we’ve stopped similar things happening in the past, and we’ll do so again in the future. Provided we’re allowed to. Provided we maintain what trust is still out there.”
“There’s not an awful lot of that about,” Whelan said, indicating the TV.
“There’ll always be those pointing fingers. But the vast majority? They trust us to keep them safe. Because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be doing what they do—getting on trains, walking down streets, visiting shops. They’d be holed up in their bedrooms, living off canned food and bottled water. That’s the measure of our success, Claude. That the country still leads a normal life, even while we bury the dead.”
“I’m not sure Marketing’ll approve that as a slogan.” He closed the laptop. It was good to have these visible punctuation marks: without them, conversations might go on forever. “What are you suggesting we do?”
“The obvious. We have an armed terrorist on the streets, accompanied by a rogue agent. They present a clear and present danger to the populace.”
“You want me to issue a shoot-to-kill order.”
“Well there’s no point shooting to wound. People would only get hurt.”
“Diana—”
“It’s what I’d be suggesting even if it weren’t for the . . . additional aspects of the situation.”
“But it would certainly suit our interests if this pair were dead, and unavailable for interrogation,” he said. “Except young Cartwright’s not exactly rogue, is he? I mean—”
“His actions have been unwarranted, unauthorised, and he’s been involved in a violent death. We can argue semantics if you like, but nothing he’s done today has improved his CV. Which was already less than exemplary.”
“Still—”
“And we have reason to believe his grandfather made possible one of the worst ever terrorist outrages on British soil.”