Dead Lions (33 page)

Molly Doran sipped her tea.

“Okay,” Lamb said at last. It was quiet in Records, but grew quieter still now, as Molly held her breath. “What if he’s not a minnow? What if he’s a big fish pretending to be a minnow? How would that have worked, Molly?”

“A strange thing to do. Why would anyone hide their light? Run the risk of being chucked back with the rubbish?”

“Strange,” Lamb agreed. “But could he have done it?”

“Faked a cipher clerk? Yes. He could have done it. If he was a big fish, he could have done it.”

They shared a look.

“You think he was one of the missing, don’t you?” Molly said. “One of those we lost sight of when the USSR collapsed.”

Of whom there’d been more than a few. Some had probably found their way into shallow graves; others, they suspected, had reinvented themselves and flourished even now in different guises.

“He might have been. He might have been one of those Kremlin brains who gave us so much trouble. Who wanted out when the war was lost, but not to spend the rest of his life being poked at by the winners.”

Molly said, “It would have meant placing that name on the rota years in advance. He couldn’t have been sure we’d even see it.” And then checked herself. “Oh—”

“Yeah,” Lamb agreed. “Oh. Any idea how it came our way?”

“I could run it down,” Molly said doubtfully. “Possibly.”

He shook his head. “Not a top priority. Not right now.”

“My point stands though. He’d have had to do it years before he could know he needed it. December seventy-four? Nobody saw the end coming. Not that far in advance.”

“You didn’t have to see it coming,” Lamb said. “You just had to know it might.” He looked at the biro in his hand, as if wondering how it got there. “There’s nothing a joe likes more than knowing he’s got his exits covered.”

“There’s something else, isn’t there? You’ve got the look.”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “There’s more.”

Tommy Moult’s
breathing had slowed to normal. He’d wheeled the trolley over the rubble that had once been the house’s floor, a bone-wrecking distance for River, who was starting to feel his teeth loosen. He continued to tremble even now they’d come to a halt. Where his bonds cut into him he burned, and his ears throbbed in time to pounding blood. What was holding him together was rage; rage at himself for being so stupid twice in one night. And because he’d had a glimmer of what Moult was planning, and couldn’t believe it, but couldn’t disbelieve it either.

The tape was ripped from his mouth. The handkerchief was pulled free. Suddenly River was gulping mouthfuls of night air, making up for the night’s thin rations, breathing so deeply he almost gagged. Moult said, “You needed that.”

River could almost talk. “What the. Fuck. Are you doing?”

“I think you already know, Walker. Jonathan Walker, by the way? Bit of a tired old name.”

“It’s mine.”

“No. It’ll be the one Jackson Lamb gave you. Still, won’t be needing it much longer, will you?”

He knew Lamb; knew River was a spook. There was little point feigning innocence. River said, “I’m supposed to check in. An hour ago. They’ll come looking.”

“Really? Miss one call and they send out the coastguards?” Moult pulled his red cap off. His hair disappeared with it; those white tufts that had sprigged from underneath. He was bald, or
nearly bald, with only a fringe stubbling his ears. “Miss tomorrow’s, and maybe they’ll get worried. Though by then they’ll have other things on their mind.”

“I saw what you had on the trolley, Moult.”

“Good. Give you something to think about.”

“Moult?”

But Moult had stepped out of River’s line of vision, and all he could hear was feet tracking over rough ground.

“Moult!”

Then not even that.

As carefully as he could, River moved his head to face the sky again. He took a deep breath and bellowed and at the same time arched his back, as though the same rage was trying to burst through his stomach. The trolley rattled, but the clothesline bit deeper, and River’s bellow became a scream that soared into the branches above, then howled around the broken walls surrounding him. And when it was done he was still secured in place, flat on his back on a trolley in the dark. He was nowhere near escape, and there was no one near to hear him.

And time, he’d come to realise, was running out.

Behind its
powder, laid thickly as butter on bread, Molly Doran’s face was immobile. Even once Lamb had finished she remained silent for upwards of a minute. Then: “And you think it was him. Katinsky. All those years ago, you think he was the one took Dickie Bow.”

“Yes.”

“And he’s waited all these years to make his second move.”

“No. Whatever the plan was then, it was rendered obsolete by the end of the Cold War. No, he’s up to something else now. But Dickie Bow came in handy.”

“And the cicadas? They’re real too?”

“The best disguise for any network is if the opposition think
they’re ghosts. Nobody went looking for Alexander Popov’s cell, because we thought it was a legend. Like Popov himself.”

“Who Katinsky invented.”

“Yes. Which to all intents and purposes,” Lamb said, “means that’s who he is. Nikolai Katinsky is Alexander Popov.”

“Oh Christ, Jackson. You’ve raised the bogeyman, haven’t you?”

Lamb leaned back. In the soft light, he looked younger, possibly because he was reliving ancient history.

Molly let him think. The shadows over the stacks had grown longer, here in this sunless cellar, and experience told her this was her mind playing tricks; adjusting her surroundings to the rhythms of a normal day. Outside, morning was coming. Regent’s Park, never entirely asleep, would soon be shaking off its night-creeps, those spidery sensations that occupy buildings when they’re dark. The day shift would have been alarmed to learn of their existence.

When Lamb stirred, she prodded him with a question. “So what’s he up to, then? Popov?”

“I don’t know. Don’t know what and don’t know why now.”

“Or why he grouped his network in Upshott.”

“That either.”

“Dead lions,” Molly said.

“What about them?”

“It’s a kids’ party game. You have to pretend to be dead. Lie still. Do nothing.”

“What happens when the game’s over?” Lamb asked.

“Oh,” she said. “I expect all hell breaks loose.”

His mobile
phone was in his pocket.

As information went, this was on a par with a knowledge of penguins’ mating habits: partly a comfort, partly a puzzle, but of no real practical value. The puzzle part was wondering why Moult
hadn’t taken it. But either way, it might as well have been lodged in a branch of the tree above him.

He’d stopped struggling, because this only brought pain. Instead, he was sorting through everything he knew, or thought he knew, about what Moult was up to, and however far and wide his speculation ranged, it always returned to the same point: the sacks of fertiliser he’d found stacked on the trolley in the hangar.

Why had Moult even taken him there, if it housed secrets he wanted to keep? And if Catherine’s information was accurate, and the village was packed with Soviet sleepers, where did Moult fit in anyway? Though as light seeped into the sky, these questions faded into the background, and the image of those sacks of chemical fertiliser took their place.

Fertiliser, which, under the right conditions, acted exactly like a bomb.

And which River had last seen stacked next to an aeroplane like so much luggage.

Lamb went
out for a smoke, but on the pavement remembered he’d finished his last cigarette earlier, so walked to the tube station and bought a packet at the 24-store. Back near Regent’s Park’s front door he lit a second from the stub of his first, and gazed up at a sky that was lightening by the minute. Traffic was now a constant hum. Days began like that now; a gradual accrual of detail. When he’d been younger, they’d started like a bell.

Nick Duffy appeared again, as he had earlier. He emerged from a parked car, and joined Lamb on the pavement.

“You smoke too much,” he said.

“Remind me what the right amount is?”

Across the way, trees stirred as if troubled by bad dreams. Duffy rubbed his chin. His knuckles were scraped red.

He said, “Every month she gets a cheque. Once in a while, a little job to do. Providing bed and board to someone passing through under the radar. Or being a post office, or an answering service. All low-key shit, the way she tells it.”

“Until Min Harper.”

“She got the call late. Whoever it is used the code she responds to. Bring your car, underground garage round back of Edgware Road.” Duffy had slipped into telegraphese, to spare himself unnecessary words. “Two of them plus, her words, a drunk bloke they’re carrying.”

“She ever see them before?”

“Says not.”

He paused again. Then told Lamb what Rebecca Mitchell had told him, eventually: that one of the pair had smashed Min Harper’s head against the concrete floor of the garage, while the other had backed Rebecca Mitchell’s car up. The next part had been like a kids’ game: balance the man on the bicycle, smack the car into him. Once they’d made sure his neck was broken, they’d loaded bike and body into their own car, and moved the scene somewhere else.

When he’d finished, Duffy stood staring at the trees, as if he suspected their rustling was a secret conversation, and what they were talking about was him.

Lamb said, “It should have been picked up.”

“They took photos. Laid the body and bike out the way they fell in the garage.”

“Still should’ve been picked up.” Lamb threw his cigarette away, and sparks burst. “You did a half-arsed job.”

“No excuses.”

“Damn right.” He wiped his face with a hand smelling of tobacco. “Was she keen to talk?”

“Not so much.”

Lamb grunted.

After a while, Duffy said, “He must have seen something he wasn’t supposed to see.”

Or someone, thought Lamb. He grunted again, then went back through the big door.

This time, stepping out of the lift, he was met by an overgrown boy in a sweatshirt with Property of Alcatraz stamped on it, and glasses with heavy black frames. “You’re Jackson Lamb?” he asked.

“What gave it away?”

“The coat, mostly.” He shook the pill bottle Lamb had given Duffy earlier. “You wanted to know what this is.”

“And?”

“It’s called Xemoflavin.”

“Right. Wish I’d thought of reading the label.”

“Basic research tool,” the kid said. “Name aside, it’s a whole lot of not much. Aspirin, mostly, in a sugarshell coating. Orange, if it matters.”

“Don’t tell me,” said Lamb. “They sell it on the internet.”

“Bingo.”

“As a cure for?”

“Liver cancer,” said the kid. “Doesn’t work, though.”

“There’s a surprise.”

The kid dropped the bottle into Lamb’s waiting hand, pushed his glasses up his nose, and stepped into the lift Lamb had vacated.

Lips pursed, Lamb wandered back into Molly Doran’s space.

She’d made herself more tea, and sat nursing it in her alcove. Steam rose in thin spirals and disappeared in the upper dark.

Lamb said, “I checked his diary, did I tell you? He has no plans for the future.”

Molly took a sip of tea.

“And he’s broken things off with the woman he was seeing.”

Molly placed her cup on the table.

“And he’s taking some quack cancer remedy.”

Molly said, “Oh dear.”

“Yeah,” said Lamb. He dropped the pill bottle into the wastepaper bin. “Whatever he’s up to, at least we know why. He’s dying. And this is his last hurrah.”

M
orning. Light. Surprisingly strong
, breaking through the curtains, but then it had been sunny lately; unseasonably warm. Summer in April, full of unreliable promise. If you turned your back on it too long, the temperature would drop.

Louisa didn’t so much wake as realise she’d been awake for some time. Eyes open, brain humming. Nothing especially coherent; just little mental Post-its of the day’s tasks, beginning with get up, shower, drink coffee. Then bigger things: leave the flat, meet Marcus, collect Pashkin. Everything else—like last night—was just a black mass boiling in the background, to be ignored as long as possible, like clouds on an unreliably sunny day.

She rose, showered, dressed, drank coffee. Then went out to meet Marcus.

Catherine was
back in Slough House so early it felt like she’d never left, but even so, she travelled there through a city whose fuse had been lit. The underground was full of people talking to each other. Some held placards—
STOP THE CITY
was a favourite. Another read
BANKERS
:
NO
. At Barbican station, someone lit a cigarette. Anarchy was in the air. There’d be glass broken today.

But early as she was, Roderick Ho had beaten her. This wasn’t unusual—Ho often seemed to live here: she suspected
he preferred his online activities to emanate from a Service address—but what was different was, he’d been working. As she passed his open door, he looked up. “Found some stuff,” he said.

“That list I gave you?”

“The Upshott people.” He brandished a printout. “Three of them, anyway. I’ve tracked them back as far as they go. And there’s paperwork, sure, they’ve paperwork coming out their ears, but the early stuff is all shoe and no footprint.”

“Which would be one of those internet expressions, yes?”

Ho flashed a sudden smile. This was even weirder than people chatting on the tube. “It is now.”

“And it means …?”

“Well, take Andrew Barnett. His CV’s got him attending St Leonard’s Grammar School in Chester in the early sixties. It’s a comp now, with a good IT department, and one of its projects is putting the school records online.”

“And there’s no match-up,” Caroline finished.

Ho shook his head. “Must have seemed a fair bet at the time. These guys have papered over their early lives all you want. But it was pre-web, and they’d no way of knowing the paper would start to peel.”