Slow Horses (13 page)

‘A blog on their news pages. The link was posted there, along with the beheading threat. Then it mushroomed. It’ll be everywhere now.’

River had a sudden image of darkened rooms all over the country, all over the world; heads bent over monitors, studying iPhones, watching nothing happening, slowly. In some of the hearts of those watching would be the same sick dread he felt now; and in others, there’d be unholy joy.

‘Can we trace the link?’ Sid asked. ‘The IPS, I mean? Where it’s being broadcast from?’

He said, ‘Depends. If they’re clever, no. If they’re stupid …’

But both knew that this wasn’t going to end as swiftly and satisfactorily as that.

Sid said, ‘He pissed you off, didn’t he? More than usual, I mean?’

River didn’t need to ask. She meant Jackson Lamb.

He said, ‘How long have you been here now?’

‘Just a few months.’

‘I meant exactly.’

‘I don’t know exactly. Since August sometime.’

About two months.

He said, ‘I’ve been here eight months, two weeks and four days.’

Sid Baker was quiet a few moments, then said, ‘Okay. But hardly worth a long-service medal.’

‘You don’t get it, do you? Being here means I have to sit watching this like everybody else. That’s not what I joined the Service for.’

‘Maybe we’ll be needed.’

‘No. That’s what being in Slough House means. It means not being needed.’

‘If you hate it so much, why don’t you quit?’

‘And do what?’

‘Well, I don’t know. Whatever you like.’

‘Banking?’ he said. ‘Insurance?’

She fell silent.

‘The law? Property sales?’

‘Now you’re taking the piss.’

‘This is what I’m for,’ he said. He pointed at the screen, on which a hooded boy sat on a chair in a cellar. ‘To make things like this not happen. Or when they happen, make them stop. That’s what it is, Sidonie. I don’t want to do anything else.’

He couldn’t remember he’d ever called her that before.

She said, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘What for?’

She turned away. Then shook her head. ‘Sorry you feel that way. But one mistake doesn’t mean your career’s over. You’ll get another chance.’

‘What did you do?’ he asked.

‘Do?’

‘To deserve Slough House.’

Sid said, ‘What we’re doing is useful. It has to be done.’

‘And could be done by a bunch of trained monkeys.’

‘Thanks a lot.’

‘It’s true.’

‘Yesterday morning? Taking Hobden’s files?’

‘Yeah, okay, you got to—’

‘I’m not rubbing it in. I’m simply pointing out, maybe things are changing. Maybe Slough House isn’t such a dead end. I did something real. You went out too—’

‘To bring the rubbish in.’

‘Okay. A monkey could have done that.’

River laughed. Then shook his head. On his monitor, nothing had changed. The laugh turned sour in the air.

‘This poor sod needs more than monkeys on his side,’ he said.

Sid nodded.

River’s hand dropped to his thigh, and he felt the hard nub of the memory stick in his trouser pocket.

She meant well, he supposed, but her predecessor here had quit the Service, ground into submission by routine tasks. As had his own; a man called Black, who had lasted only six months, and left before River arrived. That was the true purpose of Slough House. It was a way of losing people without having to get rid of them, sidestepping legal hassle and tribunal threats. And it occurred to him that maybe that was the point of Sid’s presence: that her youth and freshness were meant as a counterpoint to the slow horses’ failure, rendering it more pungent. He could smell it now. Looking at this hooded boy on his screen, River could smell failure on his own skin. He couldn’t help this kid. Whatever the Service did, it would do without River’s assistance.

‘What is it?’

He turned back to Sid. ‘What’s what?’

‘You look like something occurred to you.’

He shook his head. ‘No. Nothing.’

On his desk was a fresh pile of transcripts. Catherine Standish must have delivered them before the news broke. He picked up the topmost, then dropped it. That small slapping noise was as much impact as it would ever have; he could spend the next hour writing a report on another chunk of chattering from another supposed hot spot, and all it would earn would be a cursory once-over from Regent’s Park. Sid said something else, River didn’t catch what. Instead, he locked his eyes on the computer screen; on the boy in the hood who was going to be executed for some reason, or no reason at all, in less than forty-eight hours, and if the newspaper he held was to be believed, this was happening here in the UK.

Bombs on trains were bad enough. Something like this, the press would go intercontinental.

Whatever it was Sidonie Baker had said, she now said again. Something about gloves. ‘Why do you think he’s wearing gloves?’

‘I don’t know.’ It was a good question. But River had no answer.

What he mostly knew was that he needed to do something real, something useful. Something more than paper-shuffling.

He felt the hard nub of the memory stick once more.

Whatever it held, it was in River’s pocket. Was the fruit of a real-live op.

If viewing its contents was crossing a line, River was ready to cross it.

* * *

At Max’s, the coffee was bad and the papers dull. Robert Hobden leafed through
The Times
without troubling his notebook, and was contemplating today’s front-page blonde on the
Telegraph
when he became aware of background mutter. He looked up. Max was at the counter with a customer, both staring at the TV on its corner plinth. Usually, Hobden insisted they lower the volume. Today he turned the world upside down, and insisted they raise it.

‘… has yet claimed responsibility, and nor has anyone appeared onscreen other than the young man pictured, but according to an anonymous post that appeared on the BBC’s current affairs blog at four o’clock this morning, the young man you’re watching is to be executed within forty-eight hours …’

Max said, ‘Do you believe this shit?’

The customer said, ‘They’re monsters. Plain monsters. They want shooting, the lot of them.’

But Hobden was barely hearing it.

Sometimes you knew you had a story, and were just waiting for its fin to show above the waves of the everyday news.

And here it was. Breaking surface.

Max said again, ‘Do you believe this?’

But Hobden was back at his table, gathering up keys, mobile, wallet, pen and notebook; tucking everything into his bag, except the newspapers.

Those, he left where they lay.

It wasn’t long after nine. A watery sunshine spilt over London; a hint of good weather to come, if you were in an optimistic mood.

On a large white building near Regent’s Park, it fell like a promise that this was as good as things might get.

Diana Taverner had a top-floor office. Once she’d enjoyed an expensive view, but post-7/7, senior staff had been moved away from external walls, and her only window now was the large pane of glass through which she could keep an eye on her team, and through which they in their turn could cast glances her way, keeping an eye on her keeping an eye on them. There were no windows on the hub either, but the light that rained on it was gentle and blue and, according to some report or other—it would be on file; labelled and archived and retrievable on request—was the closest electricity could come to natural sunlight.

Taverner approved. She didn’t begrudge a younger generation the prizes her own had won for them. There was no sense fighting the same battles twice.

Her apprenticeship had been served in the fag-end of the Cold War, and it sometimes felt like that was the easy part. The Service had a long and honourable tradition of women dying behind enemy lines, but was less enthusiastic about placing them behind important desks. Taverner—Lady Di everywhere but to her face—had done her best to shake that particular tree, and if she’d been told ten years ago that a woman would be running the Service within the decade, she’d have assumed she’d be the woman in question.

History, though, had a way of throwing spanners in every direction. With Charles Partner’s death had come a feeling that new winds were blowing down the Service’s corridors; that a fresh outlook was required. ‘Troubled times’ was the recurring phrase. A safe pair of hands was needed, which turned out to belong to Ingrid Tearney. The fact that Tearney was a woman would have been a soothing balm to Taverner, if it hadn’t been a severe irritant instead.

Still, it was progress. It would have felt more like progress if it hadn’t involved someone else, but it was progress. And she, Taverner, was Second Desk, even if the new dispensation involved there being several Second Desks; and her team had spring-sunshine lighting and ergonomic chairs, and that was fine too. Because they also had young men with rucksack-bombs on tube trains. Anything that helped them do their jobs was fine by Taverner.

This morning, they also had an execution in progress.

The link had appeared on a BBC blog around 4 a.m., its accompanying message brief but effective:
we cut his head off forty-eight hours
. Unpunctuated. Short. Radical groups, especially your religious types, tended to sermonize: spawn of Satan, eternal fire, et cetera. That this wasn’t the case made it more disturbing. A hoax would have had claptrap attached.

And now, like all successful media events, it was playing on every screen in sight. Would be playing on every screen in the country, in fact: in homes and offices; above treadmills in gyms; on palm-pilots and iPhones; on the back seats of black cabs. And all round the globe, people would be catching up with it at the different times of their day, and their first reaction would be the same as that of the team on the hub: that
this couldn’t be happening in Britain
. Other parts of the world boasted outlaw lands aplenty. Tell your average Western citizen that they played polo with human heads in Kazakhstan, and you’d get a nod.
Yeah, I heard about that.
But even on the wildest of Britain’s inner city estates, they weren’t chopping heads off. Or not on the BBC, anyway.

And it wasn’t going to happen, Taverner told herself. This was not going to happen. Stopping it was going to be the highlight of her career, and would call time on a lousy era for the Service, years of dodgy dossiers, suspicious deaths. It was going to get them out of the doghouse: herself, her superiors, and all the boys and girls on the hub; the hardworking, underpaid guardians of the State who were first in line when duty called, and last to be celebrated when things went right … It wasn’t twelve months since her team had rolled up a terrorist cell that had mapped out a full-scale assault on the capital, and the arrests, the captured weaponry, had made for a two-day wonder. But at the trial, the main question was: how come the cell had thrived for so long? How come it had so nearly achieved its objective?

The anniversaries of failure were marked on the streets, with crowds emerging from offices to observe a silence for the innocent dead. Successes were lost in the wash; swept from the front pages by celebrity scandal and economic gloom.

Taverner checked her watch. There was a lot of paper heading her way: the first sit-rep was due on her desk any minute; there’d be a Crash Room meeting thirty seconds later; a briefing for the Minister before the hour was out; then Limitations. The press would want a statement of intent. Ingrid Tearney being in DC, Diana Taverner would deliver that too. Tearney would be relieved, actually. She’d want Taverner’s fingerprints on this in case it went tits up, and a citizen had his head cut off on live TV.

And before any of that happened there was someone at the door: Nick Duffy, Head Dog.

It didn’t matter which rung of the ladder you were on: when the Dogs appeared uninvited, your first reaction was guilt.

‘What is it?’

‘Something I thought you should know.’

‘I’m busy.’

‘Don’t doubt it for a minute, boss.’

‘Spit it out.’

‘I had a drink with an ex last night. Moody. Jed Moody.’

She said, ‘He got the boot after the Miro Weiss business. Isn’t he at Slough House?’

‘Yes. And not liking it.’

The door opened. A kid called Tom put a manila folder on Taverner’s desk. The first sit-rep. It looked implausibly thin.

Taverner nodded, and Tom left without speaking.

She said to Duffy, ‘I’m somewhere else in thirty seconds.’

‘Moody was talking about an op.’

‘He’s covered by the Act.’ She scooped up the folder. ‘If he’s running off about his glory days, bring him in and slap him round. Or get a tame policeman to do it. Am I really telling you how to do your job?’

‘He wasn’t talking about the past. He says Jackson Lamb’s running an op.’

She paused. Then said, ‘They don’t run ops from Slough House.’

‘Which is why I thought you should know.’

She stared past him for a second, through the glass at the crew on the hub. Then her focus shifted, and she was looking at her own image. She was forty-nine years old. Stress, hard work and Father bloody Time had done their worst, but still: she was heir to good bones, and blessed with a figure. She knew how to make the most of both, and today wore a dark suit over a pale pink blouse, the former picking up the colour of her shoulder-length hair. She was fine. A bit of maintenance between meetings, and she might make it to nightfall without looking like something dragged round a barnyard by pigs.

Provided she didn’t get many unexpected moments.

She said, ‘What shape did this op take?’

‘Someone I thought at the time was a bloke, but—’

‘Sidonie Baker,’ Taverner said. Her voice could have cut glass. ‘Jackson Lamb sicced her on a journalist. Robert Hobden.’

Nick Duffy nodded, but she’d put a hole in his morning. It was one thing to bring a bone to the boss. Another to find she’d buried it in the first place. He said, ‘Right. Sure. It was just—’

She gave him a steely look, but give him credit: he didn’t back down.

‘Well, you said yourself. They don’t run ops from Slough House.’