“Okay . . . So what’s the plan?”
“Plan?”
“Great,” said Lech. “Situation normal.”
Waving two fingers Louisa left him there, a hundred yards short of their destination, and—ignoring the car parked outside—disappeared through Rashford’s door.
“So your written assignment—”
“They call it a hand-in.”
“Hand-in, right.”
“I’ve no idea why.”
Because you handed it in, presumably. Which didn’t matter. Catherine said, “So your twenty-thousand-word hand-in was on Vassily Rasnokov.”
The hand-in was part of every fledgling spook’s first six-month assessment, regardless of whether their ambitions lay in field work or analysis. Most chose to critique an op from years gone by—a safe enough topic provided the career-blighting embarrassment of, say, picking an operation handled by Diana Taverner was avoided—and it had been some while since the straightforward biographical essay had been in vogue. This was largely because nothing boosted a mark like fresh information, and there was little chance of this being captured by a beginner.
Then again, there was fresh and fresh.
“I found a cross reference to a pre-digital source,” Ashley said. “A case report from the late seventies.”
“I didn’t know Rasnokov was KGB back then. Wouldn’t he have been a child?”
“A teenager,” said Ashley. “And he wasn’t official.”
Which was a detail missing from Rasnokov’s Service file: that prior to his recruitment, he’d carried a shovel on several KGB cases involving the harassment of known dissidents. The oversight was down to a misspelling—“Ronsakov” for Rasnokov—whose handwritten emendation had never been carried over to the master document. So a few small facts about his early career had been lost to history, buried in a cardboard folder deep in Molly Doran’s domain, to which baby spooks were granted access while completing their hand-ins.
“Good work,” Catherine said, meaning it. “That—well. It would have been noticed.”
If Ashley’s training wheels hadn’t come off altogether, that was. If she’d finished her hand-in and handed it in.
Roddy said, “Yeah, fascinating. But if this reference didn’t mention what he was doing the other night, it’s not much help, ya get me?”
The women shared a look.
Catherine said, “How many pieces of information did we have two minutes ago?”
He counted them in his head. “One?”
“And now we have more. How is that a hindrance?”
Something blipped: an incoming email.
“You’ve got a Zoom booked?” said Ashley, who was by Roddy’s desk now, with a partial view of his screens.
“No.”
“Because that looks like—”
“Yeah, right, it’s nothing.”
Catherine said, “Well in that case it won’t distract you.” She looked at Ashley. “I’m sure you won’t mind giving Roddy a hand.”
“Lamb says I’m not supposed to do anything.”
“He’ll make an exception for this,” Catherine said.
“You think? Because—”
“
Ashley paused, then nodded.
Roddy said, “Look, I’ve got this thing—”
“I’ll be back in half an hour,” said Catherine. She moved towards the door. “Play nicely,” she said, over her shoulder, and was gone.
It was all very courteous. They’d tarried on the rooftop while the more junior of the Dogs scraped the remains of Diana’s shattered mobile together and put them in an evidence bag, and then they’d processed back into the building: Dog One, then Diana, then Dog Two. Dog Three—whom Diana knew by name; Nicola Kelly—was waiting on the landing.
“Sorry about this, ma’am.”
Not as sorry as she would be, Diana’s answering smile promised.
She took Diana’s bag and rifled through it. Finding the envelope stuffed with cash, she raised an eyebrow at nobody in particular.
“I know how much is in there,” Diana said.
Kelly replaced the envelope in the bag, which she didn’t return.
On their way past the bar Diana looked for Nathan, but he wasn’t in sight. He’d be on the phone to Peter Judd, reporting her capture. And Judd would be unsurprised.
