Slow Horses: Slough House Thriller 1

7

THE DREADFUL PUB across the road served food of sorts, and its sprawl promised undisturbed nooks. River’s lunch break was early enough to qualify as a late breakfast, but Slough House was absorbed by the morning’s news, and he didn’t suppose anyone would notice. He needed to do something which didn’t involve paperwork; he wanted a taste of what Spider Webb might be doing. He booted up his laptop and plugged in the memory stick. This was technically a criminal act, but River was pissed off. There are always moments in a young man’s life when that seems reason enough.

Ten minutes later, it seemed a lot less than that.

The bacon baguette he’d ordered sat ignored; the coffee was undrinkable filth. Cup to one side, plate to the other, laptop in the middle, he was working through the files Sid had stolen from Hobden. Except she couldn’t have, River decided. She couldn’t have, unless …

‘What you doing?’

River couldn’t have looked more guilty if he’d been caught with kiddie porn.

‘Working,’ he said.

Sid Baker sat down opposite. ‘We have an office for that.’

‘I was hungry.’

‘So I see.’ She eyed his untouched baguette.

‘What do you want, Sid?’

‘I thought you might be getting drunk.’

‘And?’

‘And I didn’t think that was a clever move.’

Closing the laptop, he said, ‘What’s happening?’

‘Ho says it’s a loop.’

‘I didn’t spot that.’

‘You’re not Ho. He says it’s running at thirty-something minutes, seven or eight.’

‘Not live, then.’

‘But this morning. Because of—’

‘Because of the newspaper, yeah, I got that. What about a location?’

‘Ho says not. They’ve bounced the transmission off PCs stretching halfway round the globe. By the time you’ve traced the next in the chain, it’s thirty machines ahead of you. This is Ho, mind. GCHQ might have a better shot.’

‘Too complicated to be a hoax?’

Sid said, ‘Until we know who the kid is, and who’s got him, nobody’s ruling anything out. But with the whole world watching, we’ve got to treat it as real.’

He leant back. ‘That was rousing. We?’

She flushed. ‘You know what I mean. And none of that answers my question, anyway. What are you doing here?’

‘Missing a pep-talk, apparently.’

‘Do you ever give a straight answer?’

‘Do you?’

‘Try me.’

‘How much research did you do on Hobden?’

Her eyes changed. ‘Not much.’

‘But enough to find out where he has breakfast.’

‘That’s not tricky, River.’

‘You don’t usually call me River.’

‘I don’t usually call anyone River. It’s not an everyday name.’

‘Blame my mother. She had a hippy phase. Did Lamb tell you to keep the job quiet?’

‘No, he told me to blog it. It’s on bloody stupid questions, dot gov, dot UK. My go. How much do you know about Hobden?’

‘Hotshot reporter back in the day. Firebrand leftie, moved right as he got older. Ended up doing why-oh-why columns for the little-England press, explaining why the country’s problems are all down to immigration, the welfare state and some bloke called Roy Jenkins.’

‘Labour Home Secretary in the sixties,’ Sid said sweetly.

‘History GCSE?’

‘Google.’

‘Fair enough. Anyway, it’s all standard retired-colonel stuff, except he had a few national newspapers to sound off in. The occasional pitch on Question Time.’

‘Beats holding forth at the vicar’s garden party,’ she said. ‘So that’s Robert Hobden, then. Angry young man to irritated old fogey in twenty years.’

‘A common trajectory.’

‘Except his was more severe than most. And when it turned out he was a fully paid-up member of the British Patriotic Party, that was his career shot to pieces.’

‘The nation’s last defence, as their website has it.’

‘Made up of those who thought the BNP had gone soft.’

River found he was enjoying this. ‘And who weren’t going to let a newfangled thing like political correctness get in the way of the old-time virtues.’

‘The direct approach, I think they called it,’ Sid said.

‘Paki-bashing is what they called it,’ River said.

‘You’d have thought he’d try to keep that quiet.’

‘Hard to do when the membership list turns up on the internet.’

And now they shared a smile.

River said, ‘And that was the end of an almost-glorious career.’ He remembered his grandfather’s words. Not because of his beliefs. But because there are some beliefs you’re supposed to keep under wraps if you don’t want to be excommunicated.

All of this from an hour’s web-research, on getting home last night.

‘Did the Service really leak the list?’

River shrugged. ‘Probably. Didn’t Lamb give any hint?’

‘I’m not supposed to discuss it.’

‘You’re not supposed to be in the pub.’

‘He gave no hint. No.’

‘You’d say that anyway.’

‘I’m sure that must be frustrating for you. You know, this is the longest conversation we’ve ever had?’

A record they’d broken twice today.

‘Did you really read Ashenden?’ he asked.

‘As in, the whole thing?’

‘That answers that.’

‘I do pub quizzes. I know the titles of a lot of books I’ve never read.’ Her focus shifted to his laptop. ‘What are you doing, anyway? Still on those transcripts?’

Before he could answer she’d reached out and turned the computer, opening its screen. The page of numbers he’d been staring at stared right back at her.

‘Pie,’ she said.

‘You’ll have to ask at the bar.’

‘Funny ha ha. Pi.’

‘I know.’

She scrolled down. ‘To what looks like a million places.’

‘I know.’

He turned the laptop back round, and closed the file. There were fifteen on the memory stick, and he’d only opened seven, but all contained nothing but pi. To what looked like a million places.

He’d bet his uneaten bacon sandwich that the remaining eight were the same.

Sid was waiting. She raised an eyebrow.

‘What?’

‘So what are you doing? Memorising it?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Right,’ she said. ‘Nothing.’

He folded the laptop shut.

‘Do you usually spend your lunchtimes in the pub?’ she asked.

‘Only when I want privacy.’

She shook her head. ‘Pub stands for public. Clue’s in the name.’ She checked her watch. ‘Well, you’re still among the living. I’d better get back.’

‘Did you really copy Hobden’s files?’

It was something the O.B. had told him. A lot of questions go unanswered because nobody thinks to ask.

‘We’ve been through that.’

‘Tell me again.’

She sighed. ‘He’s a man of habit. He has coffee at the same café every morning. First thing he does is empty the contents of his pocket on to the table. Which includes his memory stick.’ She waited, but he said nothing. ‘I caused a fuss by spilling some coffee. When he went off to fetch a cloth, I swapped his stick for a dummy and loaded it on to my own laptop. Later, I swapped it back.’ She paused. ‘The laptop’s the one you delivered to Regent’s Park.’

‘Did you look at the files?’

‘Of course not.’

There were ways of telling when someone was lying. The direction their eyes were pointing, for instance: left for memory, right for creation. But Sid’s eyes were directed straight at River’s. Which meant she wasn’t lying, or else was very good at it. They’d done the same courses, after all.

‘Okay, so—’

But she’d gone.

He shook his head, then returned to his laptop. It only took five minutes to confirm that all the files were the same; eternal strings of figures mapping one endless circle. Unless Hobden had taken pi places it had never been before, it seemed unlikely that this was what Regent’s Park had been after. So either Hobden was the kind of total paranoid who flaunted dummy back-ups of his real secrets, or Sid herself had pulled a fast one.

Or something else was going on, and River was in the dark.

That sounded plausible. That sounded entirely likely … Abandoning his sandwich, he headed back to Slough House.

Where there was communal activity again. When he reached the landing, Louisa Guy and Min Harper called him into Ho’s office, as if waiting for someone else to share the news with. ‘They’re showing a new film.’

‘A new one?’

‘A new one.’ This was Ho, in front of his monitor. The others were gathered around him, Sid among them. ‘The first was a loop,’ Ho said. There was no definite inflection to these words, but everyone caught the hidden meaning: the first had been a loop, which he had noticed and nobody else had. ‘Now there’s a new one. Also a loop.’

Stepping to one side, looking round the bodies clustered in his way, River got his first look at the screen.

‘And,’ Struan Loy said, ‘you’re not gunna believe this.’

But River was already believing it, because there it was on Ho’s monitor: same set-up as before, except this time the kid wasn’t wearing a hood. His face was plain to see, and it wasn’t a face they’d been expecting.

Somebody said, ‘It doesn’t mean it’s not Islamists. Who’ve got him, I mean.’

‘Depends on who the kid is.’

‘He’ll turn out to be a squaddie – a Muslim squaddie. Exactly the kind of victim they’re looking for.’

Sid Baker said, ‘He doesn’t look like a squaddie.’

He didn’t, it was true. He looked soft and dreamy. And scared stiff, and even a squaddie can be scared stiff, but it went deeper than that: his features had that untested gloss which is one of the first things squaddies get kicked out of them.

‘That’s why they had him wearing gloves,’ Sid said. ‘They were hiding his colour.’

‘How long’s the loop?’ River asked.

‘Twelve minutes. Twelve and a bit,’ Ho said.

‘Why are they doing that?’

‘A continuous feed would be easier to trace. Less impossible, anyway.’ Ho sighed. He liked people knowing he knew this stuff, but hated having to explain it. ‘You’d get little breaks in transmission every time they switched computer. If their network’s limited to a set number of proxies, that might give us an edge in tracking them.’

‘What’s that in the background?’ Catherine Standish said. River hadn’t noticed she was there.

‘What’s what?’

‘Over his left shoulder.’

Something leant against the wall a couple of yards behind the boy.

‘A piece of wood.’

‘A handle of some sort.’

‘I think it’s an axe,’ Catherine said.

‘Jesus …’

Loy was still worrying away at the kid’s identity. ‘If he’s not a squaddie, maybe he’s a name. Wonder who his parents are?’

‘Anyone missing on the diplomats’ list?’

‘Well, there might be. But it’s not like we’ll be told. Besides, if the kid was a name, the kidnappers would have said. Ups the box-office value.’

Sid said, ‘Okay, say he’s not a squaddie or an embassy snatch. Who is he?’

‘One of their own who they think’s been turned.’

‘Or they caught him with a tart.’

‘Or a half of bitter and a jazz mag,’ Loy put in.

River said, ‘Unless he’s not.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘Unless he’s some random kid who happened to be the right colour.’

Ho said, ‘He look the right colour to you?’

Sid said, ‘Depends on who’s got him. That’s your point, right?’

River nodded.

Ho said, ‘Didn’t we cover this? Swords of the Desert, Wrath of Allah. Doesn’t matter what they call themselves. They’re al-Qaeda.’

‘Unless they’re not,’ River said.

Without fanfare, Jackson Lamb appeared among them. He stared at the screen a full fifteen seconds, then said, ‘He’s Pakistani.’

Sid said, ‘Or Indian or Sri Lankan or—’

Lamb said, flatly, ‘He’s Pakistani.’

‘Do we have a name?’ River asked.

‘Fuck should I know? But it’s not al-Qaeda’s got him, is it?’

That he’d been about to say something similar didn’t stop River from countering this. ‘Doesn’t rule it out.’

‘Besides,’ Ho said. ‘Who else? Chopping a kid’s head off on prime-time? Nobody does that except—’

‘Idiots,’ said Lamb. ‘You’re all idiots.’

His slow gaze took them all in: River, Sid and Ho; Min Harper and Louisa Guy; Struan Loy and Kay White; Catherine Standish, on whom he seemed to focus with particular disdain. ‘It’s on the table now. Don’t you get it? They cut heads off, so can we. That’s the masterplan behind this piece of theatre. Somebody somewhere will be using the words fight fire with fire. Some other dickhead’ll be saying that what works in Karachi works just as well in Birmingham.’ He caught Loy’s mouth about to open. ‘Or wherever.’ Loy closed it. ‘Trust me, he’s Pakistani, because that’s the average numpty’s shorthand for Muslim. And whoever’s strapped him to that chair’s not al-Qaeda. They’ve strapped him to that chair because he’s al-Qaeda, or’ll do nicely until the real thing comes along. These aren’t Islamic fuckwits waging war on Satan’s poodle. They’re home-grown fuckwits who think they’re taking it back to the enemy.’

Nobody spoke.

‘I’m disappointed. Nobody think I’m off the wall?’

River would have pulled his own tongue out sooner than tell him he’d had the same thoughts. ‘If you’re right, why haven’t they said so? Why mask him until now?’

‘That’s the way I’d do it,’ Lamb said. ‘If I wanted maximum attention. I’d start off letting everybody think they knew what was happening. So by the time I got around to explaining the real deal, everyone would already have an opinion.’

And he was right, thought River. The fat bastard was probably right. Everywhere, everybody would be doing what Lamb had said: reconfiguring their earlier position that this was Islamist extremism. And he wondered how many of them would experience a brief hiccup before civilised outrage reasserted itself; a moment in which the thought would intrude that this foul threat, if neither fair nor just, was at least some kind of balancing.

Catherine said, ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ and left.

Lamb said, ‘Speaking of which, I assume this little gathering means you’ve all finished your current assignments? Because I want hard-copy updates by three. Along with a ten-bullet explanation of precisely why it’s crucial we get a six-month extension on each of them.’ He looked round. Nobody blinked. ‘Good. Because we don’t want to end up credit-crunched for looking like a bunch of useless tossers, do we?’

On Ho’s monitor, the slightest of flickers indicated that the loop had come to an end and the reel was beginning again. The boy’s face was still soft and glossy, but his eyes were shafts into the dark.

‘Where’s Moody, anyway?’ Lamb asked.

But nobody knew, or nobody said.