Losing his way, he snapped a word at Piotr, who replied, “Trappings.”
“All these fancy trappings, they go up inside a month.”
Marcus said, “I gather they’re not overburdened with health and safety.”
In the suite, Pashkin strode round the table as if measuring it. He spoke several times in Russian: short blunt sentences Louisa guessed were questions, because to each Piotr or Kyril made an even shorter response. Meanwhile, Marcus stationed himself by the door, arms folded. He’d been ops, she reminded herself; would have worked on bigger jobs than this before losing his nerve, if that’s what had happened. For now, he seemed unfazed by the views, and was mostly watching Piotr and Kyril.
Pashkin stood with thumbs hooked into his jacket pockets, lips pursed. He might have been a prospective tenant, looking for an angle to hang a price reduction on. Nodding at the cameras affixed above the doors, he said, “I assume they are off.”
“Yes.”
“And there are no recording devices of any sort here.”
“None.”
As if following a mental checklist, he then said, “What happens in an emergency?”
“There are stairwells,” Louisa said. “North and south walls.”
She pointed, to be clear. “The lifts freeze, and won’t take passengers. The wells are reinforced, and all the doors are fireproof, obviously. They unlock automatically.”
He nodded. What kind of emergency was he expecting, she wondered? But then, the whole point about emergencies was you didn’t expect them.
It was difficult, once you’d embarked on such a chain of thought, not to become entangled in its linked banalities.
Pashkin said, “That’s a lot of stairs.”
“It could be worse,” she said. “You could be coming up them.”
He laughed at that; a deep laugh from the heart of his burly frame. “That’s a good point. What kind of emergency might that be, that would have you running up seventy-seven flights of stairs?”
Whatever kind it was, she thought, if it wasn’t serious to start with, it certainly would be before you reached the top.
The pair of them, and the other two Russians, crossed to the window. Last time she’d been here, she’d been overwhelmed by the space on offer; all that sky overlooking all that city. It was beautiful, but stank of wealth, which was what had been weighing on her that day: her need for money, her need for a better place for herself and Min; a bigger slice of all that space. And Min had been there, of course, in touching distance. They didn’t have much money, and didn’t have enough space, but they’d had a hell of a lot more than she had now.
An air-ambulance swam into view, carving up the distance between east and west. She watched its silent progress; an orange dragonfly, oblivious to its own ridiculous shape.
“Maybe,” Pashkin said, “we should try going down the stairs, yes? To see how well we’d cope with an emergency.”
She turned. Marcus had moved to the table, was leaning over it, his palms resting on its surface. She had the sense of interrupted movement, but his expression was unreadable.
“I’ve a better idea,” she said. “Let’s use the lift.”
In the
back of the cab Jackson Lamb opened the envelope Chapman had given him to find just two sheets of paper. He read them, then spent the rest of the journey so distracted he almost forgot to demand a receipt.
When he reached his office Standish was there, her cheeks tinted, as if she were the one who’d just climbed four flights of stairs. “Mr. B has a name,” she said.
“Oh god. You’ve been investigating.”
He shrugged off his coat and threw it. She caught it and folded it over one arm. “Andrei Chernitsky.” The words rolled off her tongue darkly. “He used a passport in that name when he flew out. It’s on the Park’s books.”
“Don’t tell me. Second-rate hood.” Running a hand through greasy thinning hair, Lamb parked himself behind his desk. “Not ranking KGB, but showed up in a supporting role when heavy lifting was needed.”
“You already knew?”
“I know the type. When did he leave?”
“The morning after he killed Dickie Bow.”
“I note the absence of ‘allegedly’. You starting to believe me, Standish?”
“I never didn’t believe you. I’m just not sure sending River out on his own is the right way to find out what’s going on.”
Lamb said, “Yeah, I could have prepared a report. Presented it to Roger Barrowby, who’s evidently running things these days. He’d have had three other people read it and make recommendations, and if they came up positive, he’d have formed an interim committee to investigate possible avenues of reaction. After which—”
“I get the point.”
“I’m so glad. I was beginning to bore myself. Do I take it you’ve recruited Ho to do your research? Or is he still playing computer games on the firm’s time?”
“I’m sure he’s hard at work on the archive,” Catherine said.
“And I’m sure he’s hard at work on my arse.” Lamb paused. “That didn’t work. Pretend I didn’t say it.”
“Andrei Chernitsky,” Catherine persisted. “Did you recognise him?”
“If I had, don’t you think I’d have mentioned it?”
“Depends on your mood,” she said. “But the reason I ask is, Dickie Bow obviously did. Which suggests Chernitsky did time in Berlin.”
“They didn’t call it the Spooks’ Zoo for nothing,” Lamb said. “Every tuppeny lowlife turned up there one time or another.” He found his cigarettes, and put one in his mouth. “You’ve got a theory, haven’t you?”
“Yes. I—”
“I didn’t say I wanted to hear it.” He lit up. The smell of fresh tobacco filled the room, displacing the smell of stale tobacco. “How’s the day job? Shouldn’t there be reports on my desk?”
She said, “When Dickie Bow was kidnapped—”
“We used to call it ‘bagging’.”
“When Dickie Bow was
bagged—
”
“I really have no choice but to hear this, do I?”
“—he said there were two of them. One called himself Alexander Popov.” Catherine batted away smoke with her hand. “I think Chernitsky was the other. Popov’s muscle. That’s why Bow dropped everything to follow him. This wasn’t some stray spook from the old days. It was someone Bow had a very specific memory of, someone he might even have wanted revenge on.”
Cigarette notwithstanding, Lamb appeared to be chewing.
Maybe it was his tongue. He said, “You realise what that would mean?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Uh-huh you do, or uh-huh, you’re making a noise so I’ll spell out what it means and you’ll pretend you knew all along?”
“They bagged him. They force-fed him alcohol. They let him go,” Catherine said. “There was no point to it at all, except that he get a look at them. So that one day they could swish a coat in his path, and he’d trot after it like a trained poodle.”
“Jesus.” Lamb breathed out grey air. “I’m not sure what disturbs me more. The thought that someone’s got a twenty-year plan, or the fact that you’d already worked that out.”
“Popov took a British spy off the streets twenty years ago with no motive except to use him as an alarm bell when the time was right.”
“Popov never existed,” Lamb reminded her.
“But whoever made him up did. And apparently this was part of his plan. Along with the cicadas. A sleeper cell.”
Lamb said, “Any plan a Soviet spook came up with two decades back is long past its sell-by date.”
“So maybe it’s not the same plan. Maybe it’s been adapted. But either way, it’s in play. This isn’t you chasing ghosts from your past any more. It’s a ghost from your past jumping up and down, shouting ‘look at me!’ ”
“And why’s that?”
“I haven’t a clue. But it demands a more coherent response than just letting River Cartwright off the leash. Chernitsky went to Upshott for a reason, and the only logical reason is that that’s where this network’s ringleader is. And whoever that is, you can bet your life they already know River’s not who he’s pretending to be.”
Lamb said thoughtfully, “Or I could bet River’s life. Which would be safer for me and more convenient.”
“It’s not a joke. I’ve been checking up on the names in River’s reports. None of them scream ‘Soviet agent’. But then, if any of them did, they’d not have successfully buried themselves all this time.”
“Are you still talking to me, or just thinking aloud?” Lamb took a final drag on his cigarette and dropped the stub into a coffee cup. “Bow was killed, yes. Sad, but shit happens. And the point of killing him was to lay a trail. Whatever that’s about, it’s not to set up River Cartwright. Someone wants one of us there for a reason. Sooner or later, probably sooner, we’ll find out who and why.”
“So we do nothing? That’s your plan?”
“Oh, don’t worry. There’s plenty to chew on in the meantime. The name Rebecca Mitchell ring a bell?”
“She’s the driver who ran down Min.”
“Yeah. Well, him being drunk and her a woman, it’s no surprise the Dogs signed off on it. But they shouldn’t have.” Pulling Bad Sam’s envelope from his pocket, he tossed it onto the desk. “They looked at her last ten years, during which she’s been a squeaky clean lady, if you leave aside her killing one of my team. Which they shouldn’t have done. What they should have done was to take her entire life and shake it in a high wind.”
“And find what?”
“And find she used to be a different kind of squeaky altogether. Back in the nineties she was bumping uglies with all sorts, and had a particular yen for your romantic Slav. Spent six months sharing a flat with a pair of charmers from Vladivostok, who set her up in her catering business before they buggered off. Though of course,” he added, “that’s just circumstantial, and she might be Snow White. What do you think?”
Catherine, who rarely stooped to profanity, swore.
“Indeed. Me also.” Lamb picked up the coffee cup, raised it to his lips, then noticed it was an ashtray. “As if I didn’t have
enough to be getting on with, it turns out whatever these shady Russian bastards of Spider Webb’s are up to, it’s dodgy enough to get Harper killed.” He put the cup back down. “Just one thing after another, isn’t it?”
They returned
the Russians to the hotel, then headed for the tube. Marcus suggested cabbing it; Louisa gestured at the traffic, which was sclerotic. She had a hidden agenda: in a taxi, she’d have little choice but to suffer Marcus’s conversation. On the tube, he’d be more likely to give it a rest. That was the theory. But as they headed into the underground he said, “What do you make of him?”
“Pashkin?”
“Who else?”
She said, “He’s the job,” and slapped her Oyster card on the platen. The gates opened and she slipped through.
One step behind her, Marcus said, “He’s a gangster.”
Webb had said as much. One-time Mafia. But these days he was establishment, or rich enough to pass, and she didn’t know how it worked in Russia, but in London, once you were rich, being a gangster was a minor offence, on a par with wearing a tie for a club you didn’t belong to.
“Nice suit, nice manners, and his English is better than mine. And he owns an oil company. But he’s a gangster.”
At the top of the escalators a poster warned of disruption to services during tomorrow’s rally. Being anti-bank, chances were the rally would be well attended and turn ugly.
She said, “Maybe. But Webb says we treat him like royalty, so that’s what we do.”
“Meaning what, we pimp him an underage masseuse? Or suck his dick for a wrap of coke?”
“Those probably weren’t the royals Webb was thinking of,” she said.
On the train Louisa closed her eyes. Part of her brain was juggling logistics: the rally would be a factor. You couldn’t dump a quarter million pissed-off citizens into the mix without complicating things. But these thoughts were an alibi, parading through her consciousness just in case anyone had developed a mind-reading machine. By tomorrow, details like their route to the Needle were going to be as useful as Christmas crackers.
Marcus Longridge was talking again. “Louisa?”
She opened her eyes.
“Our stop.”
“I know,” she told him, but he was giving her a quizzical look anyway. All the way up from platform to street, he was a step or two behind her. His attention took the form of a heat spot, back of her neck.
Forget about that. Forget about tomorrow. Tomorrow wasn’t going to happen.
Tonight was.
W
hen River stepped into
the pub, it was to greetings from two separate tables. He thought: you could spend years propping up the bar at your London local, and they wouldn’t know what name to put on the wreath. But maybe that was just him. Maybe the River who made friends easily was the one pretending to be someone else. He returned all greetings, and stopped at the Butterfields’ table: Stephen and Meg. Neither needed a drink. Kelly was at the bar, polishing a glass on a teatowel.
“How nice to see you,” she said.
Playing with him, definitely, but that was okay.
He ordered a mineral water, and she raised a mild eyebrow. “Celebrating?” While she fetched it, he felt a twinge he hoped wasn’t his conscience. If he’d met Kelly anywhere, he’d have done his best to end up exactly where he’d been that afternoon. So why was he certain that if she discovered he wasn’t who he claimed to be, she’d chop off his—
“Pickled eggs?”
“… Sorry?”
“Would you like a pickled egg with that? They’re a popular local delicacy.”
Carefully enunciated, as if inviting comparison with other local delicacies he might have recently enjoyed.
“Tempting, but I’ll give it a miss,” he said. “Flying club not in tonight?”
“Greg popped in earlier. Were you hoping to grab anyone in particular?”
“No one I haven’t already grabbed,” he said quietly.
“Walls have ears.”
“My lips are sealed.”
“That’s good,” she said. “We’ll make a spy of you yet.”
With that ringing in his ears, he made his way back to the Butterfields.
Stephen and Meg Butterfield. Parents of Damien, another member of the flying club. He was retired from publishing; she part-owned a boutique in Moreton-in-Marsh. In the country but not of the country, as Stephen put it; in the country, but happy to pop up to London twice a month to eat, visit friends, catch a play, “remember what civilisation feels like.” But happy too to wear a tweed cap, a green V-neck, and carry a silver-topped stick. In the country and blending in nicely, more like. He asked River: