Dead Lions (30 page)

“I found something,” he said.

Catherine appeared. If she’d been sleeping, too, she’d been less messy about it than Lamb, who was smeared with big red blotches. “What kind of something, Roddy?”

She was the only person who called him that. Ho couldn’t decide whether he liked it that way, or wished more people did.

He said, “Don’t know. But it’s
some
thing.”

“That wasn’t the best sleep I’ve ever had,” Lamb said. “But if you woke me to play twenty questions, you’ll be sharing a room with Cartwright when he gets back.”

“It’s the village. Upshott. The population spread.”

“It’s pretty tiny,” Catherine said.

Lamb said, “It’s bloody Toytown. With fewer amenities. You have any information we don’t already know?”

“Fewer amenities, exactly.” Ho was starting to feel confident again. Remembered he was a cyber warrior. “There’s nothing there. And even when there was, it was the Yank airbase, and none of the names on the list had anything to do with that.”

Lamb lit a cigarette. “First of the day,” he said, when Catherine flashed him a look. It was ten past midnight. “Look, Roddy.” This was said kindly. “All that crap I lay on you? The name-calling? The threats?”

“It’s okay,” Ho said. “I know you don’t mean it.”

“I mean every bloody word, my son. But it will all seem trivial compared to what’ll happen if you don’t start making sense sharpish. Capisce?”

The cyber warrior leaked away. “None of them were connected with the airbase. Something else must have attracted them to Upshott, but there’s nothing else there. So—”

“Urban flight?” Lamb asked. “It’s what happens in cities when too many undesirables turn up.” He paused. “No offence.”

“Except that’s a gradual thing,” Ho said. “And this wasn’t.”

The smoke from Lamb’s cigarette hung motionless in the air.

Catherine said, “What do you mean, Roddy?”

And here was his night’s triumph, though it involved fewer blondes than he’d wanted. “They moved into the village in the space of a few months. A whole bunch of them.”

“How many?” Lamb asked.

Handing his printout to Catherine, Ho said, “Seventeen of them. Seventeen families. And they all arrived in Upshott between March and June, nineteen ninety-one.”

And he had the satisfaction of seeing, for once, Lamb lost for an instant reply.

Stomping up
the slope Griff Yates had led him down earlier, River had to rest halfway. But the pounding in his head was fainter, and he was starting to notice he was alive, when he could easily have been sprayed across this landscape as a fine red mist.

The thought of encountering Griff again was starting to energise him too.

Redcap waited at the top. He was little more than a dark outline, but River’s brain was firing again, and a name popped into it. He said, “You’re Tommy Moult.” Outside the village shop, selling packets of seeds from his bike basket. That was where River knew him from, though they’d never spoken beyond a hello. “What are you doing here this time of night?”

“Picking up strays.” Tufts of white hair sprigged out from Moult’s cap. He must have been seventy: he had a well-lined face, and dressed like he lived under a hedge with an ancient tweed jacket that smelled of outdoors, and trousers that were knotted round his ankles. Makeshift bike clips, River supposed, though less sanitary possibilities occurred. His voice was a rough gargle: the local accent poured over pebbles. An unlikely saviour, but a saviour all the same.

“Well, thanks.”

Moult nodded, turned and walked. River followed. He had no idea which direction they were headed. His inner compass was spinning crazily.

Over his shoulder, Moult said, “You’d have been all right. They don’t target the buildings. If they did they’d be rubble, and those trees would be matchsticks. See the humps in the land back there?”

“No.”

“Well, they’re bronze age barrows. The military don’t plant ordnance on them. Draws criticism.”

“I suppose Griff knows that too.”

“He didn’t plan on you being blown to bits, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“I’ll bear that in mind next time I see him.”

“He just wanted to scare you shitless.” Moult halted so suddenly River nearly bumped into him. “What you probably ought to know is that Griff’s been in love with young Kelly Tropper since she took the stabilisers off her bike. So what with you and her being so friendly—and in the middle of the day—well, you can see he might take that amiss.”

“Jesus wept,” said River. “That was like—that was
this afternoon
.”

Tommy Moult glanced skywards.

“Yesterday afternoon. And he knows about it?
You
know about it?”

“You’re familiar with the phrase global village?”

River stared.

“Well, Upshott’s the village version of that. Everyone knows everything.”

“Bastard could have killed me.”

“I suppose, to his way of thinking, it wouldn’t have been him doing the killing.”

Moult tramped off. River followed. “It seems further than it did before,” he said after a while.

“Same distance it’s always been.”

A penny dropped. “We’re not heading back to the road, are we?”

“Be a shame,” Moult said, “to go to all this effort, not to mention having the poop scared out of you, and then just scoot home with your tail between your legs.”

“So where are we going?”

“To find the only thing round here worth finding,” Moult said. “Oh, and by the way? It’s top secret.”

River nodded, and they walked on into the dark.

“Okay,” Lamb
said at last. “That must be why I keep you round. Now back to your toys, button-boy. If they’re all sleepers then they’re long-term fakes, fakes being the operative word. Their
paperwork must be good, but there’ll be a chink of light somewhere. Find it.”

“It’s after midnight.”

“Thanks,” Lamb said. “My watch is fast. And when you’ve done that, do a background on Arkady Pashkin, which is spelt exactly like I’ve just said it.” He paused. “Is there a reason you’re still here?”

Catherine said, “That’s good work. Well done, Roddy.”

Ho left.

She said, “Would it kill you to tell him well done?”

“If he doesn’t do his job, he’s just taking up space.”

“He found this.” Catherine waved the printout. “And another thing—‘chink of light’?”

There was a moment’s silence.

“Christ, I’m getting old,” said Lamb. “Don’t ever tell him, but that was unintentional.”

She went out to the tiny kitchen, and put the kettle on. When she returned, he’d pushed his chair back and was staring at the ceiling, an unlit cigarette in his mouth. Catherine waited. At length, he spoke.

“What do you make of it?”

It appeared to be a genuine question.

She said, “I presume we’re ruling out coincidence.”

“Well, it’s not like Upshott had a sale on. And like Ho said, there’s no other reason to move there.”

“So an entire sleeper network just descended on a Cotswold village and, what, took it over?”

“Sounds like the
Twilight Zone
, doesn’t it?”

“To what end? It’s basically a retirement village.”

He didn’t reply.

The kettle boiled, and she went back out and made tea. Came back with two mugs, and put Lamb’s on his desk. He made no response.

She said: “It’s not even a dormitory town. No direct rail link to London, or anywhere else. It’s got a church, a shop and a few mail-order outlets. There’s a pottery. A pub. Stop me when it starts sounding like a target.”

“The base was still there when they moved in.”

“Which suggests that if their presence had anything to do with the base they’d have left by now. Or done whatever they meant to do while it was still operational. And who buys a house to carry out a covert op, for heaven’s sake? Half of them took out mortgages. That’s how Ho found them.”

Lamb said, “No, please, keep talking. I find silence oppressive.” Without shifting his gaze from the ceiling, he began fumbling for his lighter.

She said, “If you light that, I’m opening a window. It already stinks in here.”

Lamb removed the cigarette from his mouth and held it above his head. He rolled it between his fingers. She could hear him thinking.

He said, “Seventeen of them.”

“Seventeen families. Or some of them are families. Do you think the kids know?”

“How many we talking about?”

Catherine checked the printout. “About a dozen. Most of them well into their twenties, but at least five still have strong ties to the village. River says—” Lamb jerked upright and she paused, her thread broken. “What?”

“Why are we assuming they know about each other?”

She said, “Ah … Because they’ve all been there twenty years?”

“Yeah. It must come up at dinner parties all the time.” His voice rose a key. “Did I ever mention that Sebastian and I spy for the Kremlin? More Chablis?” He resumed his search for his lighter. “Sleepers operate solo. They don’t have handlers, just a
call-code. Do this. Over and out. Years can go by in-between, and they have no contact with anyone else.”

His face had assumed its bullfrog expression. He found the lighter and lit his cigarette but did so on auto-pilot. He didn’t even comment when Catherine crossed the room, raised the blind, and opened the window. Dark night air rushed in, eager to explore this brand new space.

He said, “Think about it. The Wall comes down. The USSR breaks up. Whatever the network was for, at this point it’s tits up. So maybe the mastermind running it, who we’re assuming’s the same guy who dreamed up Alexander Popov, decided to mothball it. But instead of calling them home, he sends them out to the sticks instead. Why not?”

Catherine jumped onto his train of thought. “They’ve spent years burrowing into English society. They’ve all got jobs, all successful in their own fields, and then they’re instructed to move out into the countryside, like countless other middle-class successes. Maybe they’re not sleeping any more. Maybe they’ve become who they’ve been pretending to be.”

“Living normal lives,” said Lamb.

“So I was right. It is a retirement village.”

“Though it seems someone plans to wake them up.”

“Either way,” said Catherine, “it might be an idea to let River know.”

Moult opened
the fridge and from its freezer compartment produced a bottle so frosted River couldn’t read its label. Finding glasses on a shelf, he set them on the workbench. Then he uncapped the bottle, filled each glass, and handed one to River.

“That’s it?” River said.

“You expected a slice of lemon?”

“We’ve walked seven miles across pitch-black moorland, and your top secret is, you know where there’s free booze?”

“It was barely two miles,” Moult pointed out. “And there’s a quarter moon.”

On the moor, they’d had to drop to the ground when a jeep passed, carving out chunks of the night, small parts of which glittered—insects, darting about like aerial shards of glass, and reflecting the security patrol’s headlights. Not long afterwards, they’d come through the fence, but not the same way Griff Yates had led River in; instead, they’d emerged onto a stretch of tarmac along which they’d been trekking for over a minute before River registered what it was: not a road but a landing strip. And then the building up ahead took shape, and it was the hangar where the flying club kept their aeroplane. Next to it was a smaller construction, the clubhouse itself, which turned out to be not much more than a garage with added amenities—the fridge Moult was raiding; a few chairs; an old desk cluttered with paperwork; a stack of cardboard boxes, half-covered by a plastic sheet. Light came from a bare overhead bulb. The key to all this treasure had been on a ledge above the door, which would have been the first place River looked, had Tommy Moult not already known it was there.

Tommy Moult, who was now looking at his empty glass as if trying to puzzle out how it had got that way.

River said, “I’m guessing you’re not actually a full member of the club?”

“It’s not a club as such,” Tommy said. “Not with rules and membership lists.”

“So that would be a no.”

He shrugged. “If they wanted their door locked, they’d keep the key where it couldn’t be found.”

There were photos magneted to the fridge. One was of Kelly in flying gear: jumpsuit, helmet, broad smile. Others, alongside bills and newspaper clippings, showed Kelly’s friends: Damian Butterfield, Jez Bradley, Celia and Dave Morden; others River couldn’t put names to. An older man standing by the neat aircraft
that was the flying club’s pride and joy looked very much the pilot in pressed trousers and silver-buttoned blazer. His white hair was immaculately tended; his shoes shined to perfection.

“That’s Ray Hadley, is it?”

“Aye,” Tommy said.

“How’d he afford his own plane?”

“Maybe he won the lottery.”

Hadley was the club’s founder, if a club that wasn’t a club could have a founder. Through his encouragement Kelly and Co had taken flying lessons; because of him, their lives had come to centre around this garage and the hangar next door.