Slow Horses (28 page)

What they had in mind was an internet execution.

Most people would have chickened out hearing that. Most people would have thought Simmonds was out of his mind. But Curly, because he knew Simmonds was expecting him to say something, and he hated doing what he was expected to do, just drank the lager Simmonds had been buying all evening, and waited.

Until Simmonds said: Thing was, they didn’t actually have to cut anyone’s head off. They just had to make it look like they were going to. Show the world it could be done. That was the point. Show they could do it if they wanted. That if there was a war, it would be fought on both sides. Was Curly in?

Curly thought about it, but not for long. He was in.

The only part he’d had trouble with was the bit about not actually doing it.

And because he didn’t know Larry or Moe, which meant he didn’t trust them, he’d played stupid in their company and kept in touch with Simmonds behind their back. Which was how he’d got the call forty minutes earlier, the Voice of Albion ringing him for a change, breathy and terrified.
Compromised
was the word he used. It had filtered down through a contact in the BPP. The mission was
compromised
. They should get out. They should disappear.

Simmonds didn’t use Larry’s name. Didn’t have to. If one of them was a spy, it had to be Larry, who’d managed to make every decision sound like his own.

‘Which way?’

Rising panic in his voice. Curly kept his own flat: ‘Just keep driving.’ They were still south of the river. But not turning back was the main thing.

He could have run when Simmonds’ call came through. He could have been down the stairs and out the front. The others didn’t know his real name. He could have been part of the nightlife in minutes, miles away.

Instead he’d stood and run a finger along the grimy bedroom wall. Adapted himself to the moment; let these new circumstances sink in. And then he’d left the room and walked downstairs and along the hallway into the kitchen.

The axe leant against the wall like a household tool. Wooden handle, red-and-grey blade, like in a cartoon. Curly had plucked it with his left hand in passing; tossed it into his right without breaking stride. Nice weight. Smooth in the hand. Soldiers felt like this, shouldering rifles.

In the kitchen Moe, at the table, half-turned at his approach. Larry was against the sink, can of Coke in hand. Both were same as always: Moe with a black tee-shirt, and that stupid goatee tickling his chin; Larry with his busy eyes and mildly fuzzed head, his rolled-up sleeves, smart jeans, new trainers. Looked like he was playing a role. As if this was a game,
not like we’re actually going to cut his head off
: Larry’s superior in-charge smile stuck to his jaw. The smile slipped when he saw Curly. Words were spoken:

What

Why

For fuck’s sake

They slipped past Curly; unimportant moments, swallowed by the business at hand.

He’d swung the axe in a sweeping motion that almost caught the ceiling, but instead carved a graceful slice from the air before slamming to a halt in his target’s back.

The force of the blow sent a shockwave up his arm.

Moe coughed blood and slammed facedown on to the table.

Larry had always done the talking. But Moe had been the thinker.

Now Curly said to Larry, ‘Not too slowly. Don’t draw attention.’

Larry, on whose face a superior in-charge smile wasn’t likely to reappear soon, upped their speed.

Curly could still feel it in the muscles in his arm. Not the swing of the axe, but the abrupt stop it had come to. He rubbed his elbow, which seemed to give off heat, like a newly extinguished lightbulb.

In the boot of the car, bound and gagged, Hassan clenched his body tight, as if this might hold his life in place.

‘Downstairs’ at Regent’s Park meant different things, depending on the context.
Downstairs
was where records were kept; downstairs was where the car park was. But there was another downstairs, much lower, and downstairs, in this context, took you lower than the building was high. This downstairs wasn’t anywhere you wanted to be.

In Central London, there’s almost as much city beneath the streets as above. Some of this is publicly available: the underground itself, of course, and certain sites of special interest, the War Rooms and various bomb shelters among them. And then there’s everywhere else. Sometimes, names leak into the public domain—Bastion, Rampart, Citadel, Pindar—but they remain off-limits; part of Fortress London, the complex of subterranean passages and tunnels—the ‘crisis management facilities’—that exist less to defend the capital itself than to protect its systems of government. If the worst happens, whether toxic, nuclear, natural or civil, these are the redoubts from which control will be reasserted. They are fundamental to London’s geography, and appear on no A—Z.

And then there are the other, less acknowledged hidden places, like those under Regent’s Park.

The elevator ran slowly, and this was deliberate. A long slow descent had a weakening effect on anyone here involuntarily, inducing in those who were conscious a nervous, vulnerable state. Diana Taverner passed the while checking her reflection. For a woman who’d had less than four hours’ sleep in the past thirty, she thought she looked pretty good. But then, she thrived on the dangerous edge. Even when life was on a smoother track, she took corners on two wheels: office/gym/office/wine bar/office/home was a typical day, and sleep was never high on her agenda. Sleep was ceding control. While you slept, anything might happen.

It might while you were awake, too. Her agent, Alan Black, was dead; killed by the Voice of Albion thugs. Any other operation, and that would be it: the whole house of cards would have folded. There’d be an inquiry. When an agent died, there was a ripple effect. Sometimes the splash was so big, careers were washed away.

But this had been run under Moscow rules, like a deep-cover op on foreign ground. As far as Black’s record showed, he’d quit the Service last year, and Taverner had had only one face-to-face with him since he’d gone under. The Voice of Albion was a below-the-radar bunch of Toytown fascists, consisting, until Black had stirred them up, of one man and his dog. None of the op details—the safe-house address, Black’s co-conspirators, the vehicles they’d used—existed anywhere on paper or, God forbid, the ether. And yesterday’s report to Limitations had kept the details scanty; a ‘watching brief’ fell far short of surveillance, and Taverner couldn’t be blamed if Albion had slipped the leash … It was patchy, but Taverner had sealed leakier ops. One watertight report was worth any amount of tradecraft.

The elevator eased to a halt. Diana Taverner stepped into a corridor markedly different from those above ground level; here was exposed brickwork and bare concrete floor, pitted and puddled like a temporary pavement. Water dripped. It was an atmosphere that required careful maintenance. To Taverner’s mind, it reeked of cliché, but tests had proved its effectiveness.

Nick Duffy waited, leaning against a door. The door had a peephole, but the cover had been slapped across it.

‘Any problems?’

His look answered that, but he said it anyway. ‘None at all.’

‘Good. Now fetch the rest.’

‘The rest?’

‘The slow horses. All of them.’

He said, ‘Fine,’ but didn’t move. Instead he said, ‘I know it’s not my place to ask. But what’s going on?’

‘You’re right. It’s not your place.’

‘Right. I’m on it.’

He headed for the lift now, but turned when she called. ‘Nick. I’m sorry. Things have gone arse over tit. You’ve probably noticed.’ The vulgarity startled Taverner almost as much as it did Duffy. ‘This kidnapping business—it’s not what it seemed.’

‘And Slough House is involved?’

She didn’t answer.

He said, ‘Jesus Christ.’

‘Bring them in. Separately. And Nick—I’m sorry. He was a friend, wasn’t he? Jed Moody.’

‘We worked together.’

‘Lamb’s story is he tripped over his own feet, broke his neck. But …’

‘But what?’

Taverner said, ‘It’s too soon to say. But take Lamb yourself. And watch him, Nick. He’s trickier than he looks.’

‘I know all about Jackson Lamb,’ Duffy assured her. ‘He put one of my men down earlier.’

‘Then know this too.’ She hesitated. ‘If he’s involved in this kidnapping, he’ll disappear sooner than be brought in. And he’s a streetfighter.’

Duffy waited.

‘I can’t give an instruction, Nick. But if people are going to get hurt, I’d rather it was them than us.’

‘Them and us?’

‘Nobody was expecting this. Go. The Queens’ll give you their mobile locations. Call in soon.’

Duffy caught the lift.

As Diana Taverner tapped the fingerpad to unlock the door he’d been leaning on, she thought briefly of Hassan Ahmed, who had ceased to be a priority. One of two things was going to happen to Hassan. He’d turn up on a street corner, unharmed, or his body would be dumped in a ditch. The latter was more likely. Having killed Black, the Albion crew weren’t likely to let Hassan live. In their shoes, Taverner wouldn’t wait. But maybe that was just her. She set a high priority on watching her own back.

The fingerpad buzzed. The door unlocked.

She stepped inside, prepared to break a slow horse.

There was silence from the boot. They’d have drugged the kid again, but it was Moe who’d had the chloroform, and if he’d had more, they’d not found it. Moe had been responsible for most things: choosing the target, finding the house, all the website stuff. Larry had thought he was in charge, but it was Moe all the time. Fucking spook.

‘We could dump him,’ Larry said suddenly.

‘Where?’

‘Anywhere. We could park and walk away.’

‘And then what?’

‘… Disappear.’

Right. But nobody ever disappeared. They just went somewhere else. ‘Keep driving,’ Curly told him.

It still powered through his arm, the force of that blow. The blade had half-disappeared in Moe’s back—it looked like he’d sprouted an extra limb—and then there was blood everywhere, some of it pounding through Curly’s ears. Larry’s mouth flapped, and maybe he’d shouted and maybe he hadn’t. It was hard to tell. It probably only lasted seconds. Moe coughed what remained of his life on to the kitchen table, and all through Curly’s arm the power sang.

But cutting his head off, leaving it there … Why had he done that?

Because it was legend.

Outside, rows of shops dawdled past. Even when their names weren’t familiar, they were knock-offs of ones that were: Kansas Fried Chicken, JJL Sports. Everywhere was like everywhere else, and this was the world he’d grown up in. Things used to be different. Gregory Simmonds, the Voice of Albion, was very clear on that point. Things used to be different, and if the natural children of these islands were to enjoy their birthright, they had to be that way again.

He checked behind him. There they were on the back seat: the digicam and its tripod; the laptop and all its cables. He wasn’t sure how that worked, but it didn’t matter. Getting it on film was the main thing. He’d work out how to post it to the web later.

The axe was there too, wrapped in a blanket. In videos he’d seen, they’d used swords; whacking great blades that sliced through bone like butter. Curly had an English axe. Different strokes for different folks.

A giggle escaped him.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. Keep your eyes on the road.’

Legend. In the pubs and on the estates, on the internet, in all the places where people still said what they thought and weren’t afraid of being locked up for saying it, they’d be heroes. It would be a life lived in the shadows, one step ahead of the cops. He’d be the conquering hero, Robin Hood, famous for dealing this mighty blow; showing the foreign fanatics that they weren’t the only ones who could draw blood, that not all Englishmen were too frightened to fight back. That there was a resistance. That resistance would win.

He looked sideways and recognized the fear Larry was trying to hide. That was okay. All Larry had to do was what he was told, and he’d do that because he wasn’t currently capable of independent thought.

If he was, it would have occurred to him that they’d stand a better chance of getting away if there was only one of them doing it.

But Larry kept driving.

Chapter 13

This darkness was smaller than the last. Hassan was hooded again, with a handkerchief stuffed in his mouth, his knees tucked up to his chest, and his hands bound.

When he flexed them, the cord dug into his wrists. But even if it snapped, what would he do? He was in the boot of a moving car. His captors still had him.
Two
captors, because one was dead. His head had been left on the table in that house.

They’d brought him up from the cellar, into the kitchen, and there it had been, on the table. A human head. It sat in a pool of blood. What else could he say about it? It had been a head, and Hassan had seen films in which severed heads had been displayed, and had laughed at how ‘unrealistic’ they were, without it ever occurring to him that he had no frame of reference for the level of realism achieved. And now he did. And all he could think was that a real severed head was little different from a movie severed head, with one critical difference: it was real. The blood was real. The hair and teeth were real. The whole thing was real. Which meant that what he’d been told,
We’re going to cut your head off and show it on the web
, was also real.
Fucking Paki
.

He had wet himself, and the jumpsuit clung to his legs. He wished he could remove it, and dry himself off. Wished he could have a shower, and change, and go to sleep, somewhere which wasn’t the boot of a moving car. If he were going to make wishes, perhaps that was the end he should start at. He should wish he were free and safe, and could worry about changing his trousers in his own sweet time.

The comedy voice in his head had fallen silent. There were issues that were not suitable for comedy. This argument had weekly been shot down in flames at the student stand-up society; try putting forward that point of view, and you’d be accused of fascism. Freedom of speech mattered more than notions of taste and propriety. Hassan Ahmed had agreed with that. How could he not? When the moment came, and he took his stand at the mic, it was all going to come out. Daring, edgy stuff. Nothing off-limits. That was the contract between stand-up and audience: they had to know you were baring your soul. Except now Hassan had encountered a severed head on a kitchen table, and had immediately understood that this was not something that could ever be the subject of a joke. And even if it could, it was not a joke that Hassan could make. Because it proved that the people holding him were capable of cutting off heads.