Dead Lions (34 page)

She glanced at the printout. As well as Barnett, he’d run down Butterfield and Salmon and found similar gaps in their histories. And there’d be more, there’d be flaws in the others’ lives too. It was all true, then. A Soviet sleeper cell had taken root in a tiny English village. Perhaps because it no longer had a purpose. Or perhaps for some other reason they had yet to fathom.

“This is good, Roddy.”

“Yeah.”

And maybe she’d been hanging round Lamb too much, because she added: “Makes a change from just surfing the net.”

“Yeah, well.” He looked away, colour rising. “All that archive
crap, I could pull an all-nighter, get it finished in a sitting. This is different.”

She waited until his gaze met hers again. “Good point,” she said. “Thanks.” She glanced at her watch. It was nine. Louisa and Marcus would be on their way to pick up Arkady Pashkin, which reminded her: “Did you do the background on Pashkin?”

And now his expression became the more familiar put-upon scowl. Spending a life among computers had a way of prolonging adolescence. There was probably a study on it. It was probably online. “Been kind of busy?”

“Yes. But do it now.”

Shame to leave him on a sour note, but Roddy Ho had a way of sticking to his own script.

They met
near the hotel, a little after nine. The tubes had been full, the streets crowded; there was a huge police presence, not to mention camera crews, news trucks, rubberneckers. Crowds were gathering in Hyde Park, from where the smells of a hundred variations on breakfast drifted. Instructions booming from a loudhailer,
This is a CO11-notified event, which means that the police will be marshalling the route
, were drowned by music and chatter. The atmosphere was one of burgeoning excitement, as if the world’s biggest party was waiting for its DJ.

“Looks like someone’s out for trouble,” was Marcus’s greeting. He gestured at a group of twentysomethings heading for the park, a banner reading
Fuck the Banks
lofted above their heads.

“They’re pissed off citizens,” Louisa said. “That’s all. You ready?”

“Of course.” Today he wore a grey suit, a salmon-pink tie, neat shades: he looked good, she noticed, the same way she might notice any other irrelevant detail. “You?”

“I’m fine.”

“Sure?”

“Just said so, didn’t I?”

They turned the corner.

He said, “Look, Louisa, what I said last night—”

His mobile rang.

You couldn’t
call it sleep. Call it overload: pain, stress; all of it tumbling over and over like an argument trapped in a washing machine; over and over until its rhythm rocked River out of consciousness and dropped him down a well of his own making. In that circular darkness the same half-chewed facts nipped at him like vermin: the fertiliser loaded on the plane, which Kelly would be soaring away in this morning; the sketch she’d drawn of the cityscape, with that lightning bolt smiting that tall building. An aeroplane was already a bomb, but that wasn’t the first thing you thought of when you looked at one. It was only when you loaded it with bags of nitrogen-rich fertiliser that you underlined its essential explosiveness.

And over and over in his tumbling mind, the image repeated itself; of Kelly Tropper—why?—steering her pride and joy into London’s tallest building; searing a new Ground Zero into the eyeballs of the world.

Over and over, until at last River lost his grip on the here and now, and—having long since bellowed himself dry—slipped out of his mind.

While Marcus
was on the phone Louisa watched the rally assembling. It was like seeing a hive mind being born; all these different particles coming together, out of which one consciousness would arise. Marcus was probably right. There’d be trouble later. But that was a sideshow, another part of the ignorable background. She wondered if last night would turn out to be her only chance of getting Pashkin on his own. If he’d jet away as soon as the talks were done, leaving her forever ignorant of the reason Min had died.

Marcus said, “Sorry about that.”

“Finished? We’re on a job, not an outing.”

“It won’t ring again,” he said. “And you’re not throwing Pashkin out of any high windows, right?”

She didn’t answer.

“Right?”

“Lamb put you up to this?”

“I don’t know Lamb as well as you. But it doesn’t strike me his team’s welfare is his top priority.”

“Oh, you’re looking out for my welfare, are you?”

“Those gorillas Pashkin has? They’re not for show. Make a move on their boss and they’ll take you apart.”

“Like they did Min.”

“Whatever happened to Min, we’ll sort it. But there’s no point in revenge if it costs you everything, and believe me, what you’d planned last night would have cost just that. Anything Pashkin’s goons didn’t do to you, the Service would have done instead.”

A sudden outburst of chanting from across the road splintered into gales of laughter.

“Louisa?”

“Why are you with us?” She hadn’t known she was going to ask until she heard herself speak. “At Slough House?”

“That’s important?”

“You’re appointing yourself my handler, yes, it’s important. Because what I heard is, you lost your nerve. Couldn’t take the pressure. So maybe this concern for my well-being is just you making sure your life stays quiet, and I don’t rock your boat.”

Marcus stared for a moment over the top of his shades. Then he pushed the glasses into place. When he spoke, his tone was milder than his look had promised. “Well, that sounds plausible. Bullshit, but plausible.”

“So you didn’t lose your nerve.”

“Shit, no. I gamble, that’s all.”

Someone called
his name.

It sounded like his name. It wasn’t, but it sounded like it—it hauled River out of the darkness, and when he opened his eyes, daylight spackled through the branches overhead. The sky was wide-open, and he had to close his eyes again, scrunch them shut, as protection against its bright blueness.

“Walker? Jonny?”

Hands were on him and suddenly the tightness loosened and he could move properly, which brought fresh pain coursing through his limbs.

“Fuck, man. You’re a mess.”

His saviour was a blurry creature, fuzzy patches held together like a walking Rorschach test.

“Get you out of this shit.”

Arms pulled River upright and his body screamed, but felt good at the same time—aching its way out of cramp.

“Here.”

A bottle was pressed to his lips, and water poured into his mouth. River coughed and bent forward; spat; threw up almost. Then blindly reached for the bottle, grabbed it, and greedily gulped down the rest of its contents.

“Shit, man,” Griff Yates said. “You really are a fucking mess.”

“I gamble
, that’s all,” Marcus Longridge said.

“You what?”

“Gamble. Cards. Horses. You name it.”

Louisa stared. “That’s it?”

“Quite a big it, actually. Incompatible with efficient operational mode, apparently. Which is a joke. Ops can be the biggest gamble of all.”

“So why didn’t they just boot you out?”

“Tactical error. See, one of the HR bods decided I was suffering a form of addiction, and sat me down with a counsellor.”

“And?”

“He counselled.”

“And?”

Marcus said, “Well, I wouldn’t say it took, exactly. Not a hundred percent. That was a bookie just now, for instance.” He paused for a barrage of car-horns; an impromptu symphony likely to become the day’s soundtrack, as traffic found itself relegated to second-class status on the city’s streets. “But anyway, it turned out that once they’d given me a shrink, they couldn’t fire me. In case of legal hassle. So instead …”

So instead, he’d joined the slow horses.

Louisa glanced at the hotel, through whose big glass doors they’d be walking any moment. “Are you Taverner’s line into Slough House?”

“Nope. Why would she want one?”

“Catherine says she does.”

“Can’t see why,” Marcus said. “We’re basically the Park’s outside lav. If she wants to know anything, can’t she just ask Lamb?”

“Maybe she’d rather not.”

“Fair enough. But I’m nobody’s snitch, Louisa.”

“Okay.”

“That mean you believe me?”

“It means okay. And the gambling’s not a problem?”

“We had a fortnight in Rome last year, me and Cassie and the kids. Paid for by my, ah,
addiction
.” He pushed his shades up again. “So fuck ’em.”

It was the first time he’d mentioned his family in her hearing. She wondered if that was intended to win her confidence.

He looked at his watch.

“Okay,” Louisa said again, which this time meant he had a point: time was getting on. She led the way into the hotel lobby.

Since they were partnered, it was probably as well he was in full possession of his nerve, she thought.

But today was a babysit. It wasn’t like his ops experience would be needed.

Catherine called
River, got Number Unavailable; then Lamb, with the same result. Then studied paperwork. “All shoe and no footprint.” The more weight you carried, the deeper marks you made. But the early lives of these Upshott folk wouldn’t have left tracks in icing sugar.

Stephen Butterfield had owned a publishing company, and a quick dip online showed him numbered among the chattering class’s great and good: always ready to weigh in on the issues of the day, on Radio 4, in
The Observer
. He’d served on a Parliamentary Commission on illiteracy; was a trustee of a charity supplying schoolbooks to developing countries. But go back, and his early life dissolved into mist. The same went for the others Roddy had backgrounded: light- to middleweight persons of substance; embedded in an establishment that invited them to its high tables, to sup with captains of industry and cabinet ministers. Control was about influence …

With a start, she realised Ho was in her doorway. She had no idea how long he’d been standing there.

He said, “You’re kidding me, right?”

“Kidding you? What do you mean?”

He looked puzzled. “That you’re having a joke.”

Catherine had the ability to make it clear she was taking a deep breath without actually taking one. She did this now. “What am I kidding you about, Roddy?”

He told her.

“It was
meant to be a joke.”

Some joke.

“They never target the old houses. Once you know that, it’s kind of cool, actually.”

Once you know that
was the key phrase here.

“And I can’t believe Tommy would’ve …”

River ached all over, and couldn’t move as fast as he wanted—they were heading uphill. There was no signal in the dip.

He said, “And this was because of Kelly?”

Christ. He had the voice of a ninety-year-old.

Yates stopped. “You don’t get it, do you?”

“I get it,” River said. “I just don’t care.”

“She’s all I ever—”

“Grow up.” She makes her own choices, he nearly said, but the thought of Kelly’s choices killed the words. He tried his mobile again, his hands taking fat-finger to a new level. No signal yet. An engine drifted into earshot and he looked up, half-expecting to see Kelly zipping through the blue in her flying bomb—but if that’s what she was in, she wouldn’t be buzzing over Upshott.

She’d be in the air by now. He had to raise the alarm.

There’s a plane going to fly into the Needle—our very own 9/11
.

On the same day a Russian oligarch with political ambitions would be on the seventy-seventh floor.

Of course, if he was wrong, it would make crashing King’s Cross look like the pinnacle of his career.

And if he was right, and didn’t sound the warning in time, he’d spend the rest of his life grieving for innumerable dead.

“Come on.”

“That’s the wrong way,” Griff told him.

“No it isn’t.”

The hangar. He had to get to the hangar; see if he was right about the fertiliser.

Two steps more, and his phone buzzed in his hand. The signal was back.

A jeep crested a hillock in front of them.

When Pashkin
emerged from the lift, he gave no indication that last night had ever happened; or at least not to him, not to her. He wore a different suit today. Gleaming white shirt, open at the neck. A flash of a silver cufflink. A hint of cologne. He carried a briefcase.