Slow Horses (17 page)

When he looked up, she fixed him with a stare that left no doubt who was in charge. ‘Here’s what’s going to happen,’ she said. ‘You’re going to do one or two favours for me. Off the books.’

‘Illegal.’

‘Yes. Which means that if for any reason things go even slightly wrong, and you end up in a small room being questioned by angry men, there’s no possibility I’ll pretend to have heard of you. Are we clear on that?’

Moody said, ‘Yes.’

‘And are we happy about it?’

Moody said, ‘Yes’ again, and she could tell this was the truth. Like other slow horses before him, he wanted to be back in the game.

From her bag, she produced a mobile phone, and handed it to him. ‘Incoming only,’ she said.

He nodded.

‘And dump the bug. Slough House may be a dead end, but it’s a branch of the Service. It gets out it’s been compromised, and your former mates from Internal Investigations’ll take you apart, bone by bone.’

She stood, but instead of moving straight off, she hovered a moment.

‘Oh, and Moody? Word of warning. Lamb’s a burn-out for a reason.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning when he was in the field, he had more to worry about than his expenses. Things like being caught, tortured and shot. He survived. You might want to bear that in mind.’

She left him sitting there, an asset bought and paid for. Some were cheaper than others. And she already knew to what use she could put him.

From the window River gazed down on the traffic backed up along Aldersgate, victims of the roadworks that had plagued the street forever. Sid was at her desk, her monitor still unreeling the twelve-minute loop of the boy in the cellar; the actual twelve minutes long swallowed by the passing day, but each loop nevertheless chopping away at the time left to him.

‘A far-right group,’ River said, and though it was a while since either had spoken, Sid Baker picked up the tune without missing a beat:

‘There’s more than one of them.’

He turned. ‘I’m aware of that. You want me to run through some of the more obscure—’

‘River—’

‘—nutjob circuses, in case any have slipped your mind?’

‘Don’t assume it’s Hobden’s crew. That’s all I’m saying.’

‘Because it’s more likely to be coincidence that he pops on to Five’s radar the day before this happens?’

‘He popped on to
yours
the day before this happened. I expect he’s been on Five’s a lot longer.’

River’s grandfather would have recognized the stubborn look on his face. Sid Baker pressed on regardless.

‘The British Patriotic Party are the usual bunch of shallow-enders, blaming their lack of prospects on the nearest victim group. Get them lagered up, and they’ll break windows and beat up a shopkeeper, sure. But this is out of their league.’

‘You don’t think Hobden’s got the nous to put this together?’

‘Nous, yes. But why would he want to? Besides, if Five thought he was behind this, you think they’d be stealing his files? They’d have him answering questions in a basement.’

River said, ‘Maybe. Or maybe he’s got enough friends in high places that he can’t be tossed into a van without people getting upset.’

‘You think? He’s spent the last couple of years being strung up in print by the rags he used to write for.’

‘Because they can’t afford to look like they support him.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake. They’ve strung him up because he deserves it. There’s no sympathy for views like his in the mainstream. Twenty years ago, perhaps. But times have changed.’

‘And keep changing. There’s a recession on, did you notice? Attitudes have hardened. But we’re off the point, anyway. What this is, we’ve a far-right group performing a terrorist act the same day we pull a data-theft on the highest-profile right-wing nutcase in the country. No way is that just one of those things.’

Sid turned back to her monitor. ‘You’re always saying we do nothing important here at Slough House. How does that fit in with us suddenly being on point for the whole damn Service? If Hobden’s behind this, and Five were checking him out, we wouldn’t know about it, would we?’

He had no answer for that.

‘He’ll be found. It’s not going to happen, River. This boy is not going to get his head chopped off on camera. Not tomorrow, not any other day.’

‘I hope you’re right. But—’

He bit the rest of his sentence off.

‘But what?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You were about to say something. Don’t pretend you weren’t.’

But I saw what you took from Hobden’s laptop, and it was gibberish. Whatever you were trying to steal, you didn’t get. Which means if he is involved in this, he’s at least one step ahead of Five, which means it’s not looking good for that kid right now …

‘Is this about what you were looking at in the pub?’

‘No.’

‘You’re lying.’

‘Okay, I’m lying. Thanks.’

‘Give me a break. I’d lie too if I’d come into possession of knowledge I shouldn’t have. I mean, given we’re spies and all.’

She was trying to get him to laugh, he realized. That was an odd feeling. He couldn’t recall the last time a woman had tried to get him to even smile.

Wasn’t going to work though. ‘It was nothing,’ he repeated. ‘Just some corrupted files.’

‘Weird form of corruption, translating everything into pi.’

‘Wasn’t it?’

‘Sounds more like some kind of security scrambling.’

‘Look, Sid, it was nothing important. And even if it was, it’s none of your business.’

Judging by the look on her face, it would be a while before she attempted to put a smile on his again.

‘Fine,’ she said at last. ‘Fine. Excuse me for breathing.’ She stood abruptly, and her chair toppled backwards. ‘And speaking of breathing, this room still stinks. Open a bloody window, can’t you?’

She left.

Instead of opening the window, River looked out of it again. The traffic hadn’t noticeably shifted. He could stand here the rest of the day, and that sentence wouldn’t need changing.

It’s not going to happen, River. That boy is not going to get his head chopped off on camera. Not tomorrow, not any other day.

He hoped she was right. But he wasn’t banking on it.

But the police found Hassan safe and sound.

It turned out there’d been a partial witness to the abduction; from her bedroom window, a woman had seen some lads ‘rough-housing’—her word—at the end of the lane opposite, then they’d all bundled into the back of a white van, a Ford, and headed east. She’d thought nothing of it at the time, but the news reports stirred her memory, so she took her snippet of information to the local cops. There were traffic lights in the direction the van had gone; over-hanging cameras monitored the junction. A partial number plate had been captured. This fragment was swiftly disseminated the length and breadth of the country; every force in the land matched it against recorded sightings of white Ford vans on motorways, in city centres, on garage forecourts. After that, it was only a matter of time. But it was a peculiar stroke of luck that broke the case wide open and brought armed-response cops bursting into Hassan’s cellar; it seemed that a local homeless man had.

Hassan opened his eyes. Darkness stared back. He closed them again. Armed-response cops burst in. He opened them. No they didn’t.

He hadn’t known time could crawl so slowly.

And hadn’t known this, either: that fear could take you away from yourself. Not simply out of time, but out of your body. Sitting in a hood and jumpsuit, like a patient in a surrealist’s waiting room, his grasp on the here-and-now slipped away, and that shrill voice at the back of his mind popped up, the one that delivered all his best riffs. Shaky, but recognizably his own, and trying to pretend none of this was happening; or that it had happened, but was now safely over; was now, moreover, material for the most scrotum-tightening stand-up routine ever. All those other hostages—the ones who’d spent years chained to radiators—they wrote their books, they made their documentaries, they hosted radio shows. But how many of them took it open-mic?

‘Let me tell you about my hood.’

Pause.

‘No, really. My
hood
.’

And then they’d get it, his audience; they’d get that he meant
hood
, the thing they’d put on his head. Not his ‘hood, where you couldn’t leave your car out overnight.

But that was as far as the shrill voice got. Because it wasn’t over. The stink was too foul for it to be over: the vomit, the shit, the piss; everything that fear had shifted out of its way when making space inside him. He was here. He didn’t have an audience. He’d never had an audience; every open-mic night at the Student U he’d been there, head full of material, stomach full of knots, but he’d never dared take the stage.

Funny thing was, he’d thought that had been fear. His dread of making a tit of himself in front of beered-up fellow students—he’d thought that had been fear. Like stubbing your toe on a railway sleeper, and hopping on the spot with the pain. Not seeing the train bearing down on you.

One minute, walking home. Next, bunged into a cellar, holding a newspaper for the camera.

Now that was fear.

And this, too was fear:
We’re going to cut your head off and show it on the web
.

He liked the internet. He liked the way it brought people closer. His generation had thrown its arms around the globe, tweeting and blogging to its heart’s content, and when you were chatting online with a user called PartyDog, you didn’t know if they were a boy or a girl let alone black or white, Muslim or atheist, young or old, and that had to be a good thing, didn’t it? …

Except that Hassan had once read about some toerag who’d seen a woman collapse in the street, and instead of trying to help, like a normal person—or hurrying past, like a normal person—he’d
pissed
on her, actually pissed on her, and filmed himself on his phone doing it, then posted it on the web for other toerags to laugh at. It was as if the internet validated certain actions … For a tiny moment it felt good to have something to blame for all this, even if what he was blaming was the internet, which could never be made to care.

And then that tiny moment too became another chip knocked off a block that was rapidly growing smaller; and the awareness that the moment had passed occupied the moment that followed it, and also the moment after that, and in neither of those moments, nor in any of those that came after it, did armed-response cops burst into the cellar, and find Hassan safe and sound.

The kitchen wasn’t anywhere you’d want to cook a meal. On the other hand, it wasn’t anywhere a meal had been cooked; its surfaces piled with takeaway containers and plastic cutlery, with greasy brown paper bags and pizza boxes, with empty soft drink bottles and discarded cigarette packets. Ashtrays had been made of anything that didn’t move. The lino curled at the corners, and a blackened patch by the back door suggested a small fire in the past.

In the centre of the room sat a formica-topped kitchen table, its red surface scarred with circular burns and razor-straight slashes. A laptop computer occupied the centre of this table, its lid currently closed. An assortment of cables snaked on top of it like electrical spaghetti, and next to these lay a folded tripod and a digicam about the size of a wallet. Once upon a time, you’d needed a building’s worth of hardware to reach the world, but ‘once upon a time’ was another way of saying the old days. Arranged around the table were four mismatched chairs, three of them occupied. The fourth was tilting at a crazy angle, held upright only by the pair of booted feet that were alternately pushing it away then hauling it back. Every other second it seemed the chair would topple, but it never did.

The feet’s owner was saying, ‘We should webcam it.’

‘… Why?’

‘Stick it on the intranet.’Stead of those clips. Let the whole world watch him crap himself start to finish.’

The other two shared a glance.

They were bulldog males, the three of them; different shapes and sizes, but with this much in common: they were bulldog males. You wouldn’t put your hand out to any of them and feel sure you’d get it back. Below them, in the cellar, Hassan Ahmed was calling them Larry, Curly and Moe, and if they’d formed a line-up for him, this was how it would have shaken down:

Larry was tallest, and had the most hair, though this wasn’t a fierce contest: where the other two were shaved to the bone, a mild fuzz covered Larry’s skull, somehow conferring on him an air of authority, as if he were wearing a hat in a room full of bareheaded men. He was thin-faced with restless eyes, which kept checking door and window, as if either might burst open at any moment. His white shirt had the sleeves rolled up; he wore black jeans and brand-new trainers. Moe, meanwhile, was the middle-man in every sense: shorter than one, taller than the other, and with a belly a black tee-shirt did nothing to minimize. Unwisely he sported a goatee he stroked constantly, as if checking it remained attached.

As for Curly—the owner of the feet—he seemed to be the stupid one.

Larry told him, ‘We don’t want a webcam.’

‘Why not?’

‘We just don’t.’

‘He’s stinking that room out like a rat inna trap. We should let the world see what they’re like. When they’re not clambering on to buses with rucksacks loaded with Semtex.’

Moe, his tone of voice suggesting this wasn’t the first time they’d had this conversation, said, ‘We set up a webcam, we double the chances of getting caught.’

‘We’re already putting the video clips out there.’

You could spend all day trying to drum simple stuff into Curly’s head, Larry thought, but sooner or later you were going to have to give up. If you wanted him to understand anything more complicated than a two-horse race, you’d either have to draw him a picture or just give him a cigarette and hope he’d forget about it.

But Moe persevered. ‘This stuff on the web, people are going to be trying to find where it’s coming from. There’s ways of hiding our tracks, and we’ve done all that. But we go live—we put a webcam down there, and it’ll be easier for them to trace us.’

‘And it’s the internet,’ Larry said. ‘By the way.’