Lamb’s sigh blasted like the mistral through his phone. “This is like giving instructions to a cat. You know why I chose you for this bit?”
“No.”
“Me neither. So don’t fuck it up.”
The ideal response to this was somewhere out in the ether, and River was still trying to access it when he crossed the river at Hammersmith, Lamb having hung up. Following that, he tried Sid again, and got her voicemail, again. Where she was now, he had no clue. Pulling up at last outside what satnav assured him was Judd’s house, light leeching from the sky, he put his phone in his pocket.
He checked his watch. It was 7:20.
Getting out of the car, he went to ring the bell.
“How’s your mouth?”
Lech ran his tongue around his teeth again. He might have been imagining the wobble. He wasn’t, though. “It fucking hurts.”
“Yeah, well. You know why that is?”
He said, “Okay, okay. You weren’t coked up. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“I was gunna say because when you feinted left, you might as well have sent an engraved invitation. But I accept your apology. And yes, I will have another of these.”
This being an unspeakable combination of Pernod and blackcurrant. Sometimes, Shirley drank like she was a sixth-former, aiming at sophistication while heading for oblivion.
They were in a pub on Whitecross Street—where Shirley was familiar enough that service was attentive but avoided eye contact—having arrived without conferring, but definitely needing drinks. Lamb had a plan, and it was even now rolling into motion, but they weren’t part of it. When even the slow horses didn’t need you, that’s when you knew you were surplus.
Their first round, they’d chinked glasses. Louisa. Ash. When you added up the empty spaces, all the desks at Slough House that had seen different riders, you stopped looking for words; you just let the pictures form in your head, then break and drift away like smoke. And while you were waiting for that to happen, you took yourself to the nearest drink, whether it was Pernod and bloody blackcurrant or neat vodka, a slice of lime hanging from the rim like a body slung on a battlement. It wasn’t the wisest response to a traumatic event, but they weren’t saints. Not even Lamb had ever accused them of that, thought Lech, paying for the drinks, looking across the bar, seeing Catherine raising a gin and tonic to her lips.
Ah shit, he thought, and for no special reason checked his watch. It was 7:25.
Thirty-seven.
Just another number.
And if there was one thing Roddy Ho knew
Most of them were putty in his hands. He wasn’t one to brag—what you’d get if you google-imaged “the Rodmeister” would be a cross between Steve Rogers and Peter Parker; your boyish, modest, less swaggering superhero—but facts and stats: He could make numbers turn cartwheels, line up in pairs, then lie down and spread their legs. It was one of the less trumpeted aspects of being a king of the keyboard. You didn’t hack the unhackable, you didn’t soar unsinged over mile-high firewalls like a flame-retardant acrobat, if you couldn’t do the maths. So Roddy could juggle three sets of numbers at once; he could pull up square roots with his bare hands, and do long division in his head—well, on his phone anyway, and he was as likely to go round without his phone as he was his head. He could, in a nutshell, add up. The other slow horses, throw a bunch of numbers at them, they’d all be at sixes and sevens. Roddy would catch them, crunch them, and toss them back neatly packaged; a sudoku master, a numerate ninja, forever in his prime.
So what the fuck was going on here, that’s what he wanted to know.
The deal was, there were thirty-seven CCTV cameras in the area he’d been tasked with rendering blind. Thirty-five of them were his for the taking—he was three keystrokes away from owning a sizeable chunk of Notting Hill. It was all so supercool, it wasn’t even funny; Roddy might not have the whole world in his hands, but he could pull the plug on a major chunk of real estate while ordering a pizza. Yippee-ki-yay, dumbchuckers. Except two of them—count them: two—two of them remained impervious to his charms. If numbers could be lesbians, he’d just met some.
Closed systems, that was the issue. These cameras, hanging over retail premises and focused on their own pavement aprons, weren’t part of larger networks—he only knew they were there because they showed up on other feeds. And chances were they posed no threat, unless you were actually waltzing past on foot, gurning up at the lenses. But Lamb wanted total blackout, which two stray cameras meant this wasn’t. Two stray cameras meant that whatever happened might show up on a screen somewhere, and that could be bad news. And if there was one kind of news Roddy knew Lamb didn’t like, it was the bad kind.
Roddy checked his watch. It was 7:30.
