Clown Town полностью

And she had to admit a certain attraction to Judd’s attitude, particularly when it came to glazing over reversals. She could do with a little of that herself. A career spent running Regent’s Park was inevitably more stained by failure than garlanded by success, because when a threat to the nation was stubbed out few got to hear about it, but when a bomb went off on a weekday bus, the whole world held its breath. Besides, success could shade into its opposite. The victory that had meant most to her—an under-the-bridge act of vengeance, funded with Judd’s help—had long since curdled, her triumph ruined by the discovery that Judd’s PR firm was bankrolled by Chinese money, meaning that Taverner herself was left holding one end of a chain of firecrackers which, if lit, would not only burn down her career but leave the Park a charred smoky ruin. In some circumstances, the knowledge that applying a match would destroy both parties might be a source of comfort, but the concept of mutually assured destruction didn’t apply when one of the two considered himself fireproof. The time would come when Judd would act. He didn’t even have to see advantage for himself in the prospect. He simply had to be bored.

That knowledge buzzed in Taverner’s background day and night. Like having a neighbour with a floorboard sander, and no boundaries.

Intermittently, though, since a recent email, the buzzing had faltered, as if she were either learning to live with it or starting to glimpse a way of pulling its plug.

The email—delivered to her personal address, known by few—had been anonymous, but not for long: While the principal reason for her being its recipient was that she was First Desk, its sender had evidently overlooked the fact that this gave her certain resources, and his attempts to cover his tracks gave little bother to Taverner’s IT crew. The attachment that came with it, though, she had kept to herself, and listening repeatedly to its scratchy recording of mostly forgotten voices, she had reflected on how often the past could blow a hole through a squeaky-clean future. The new government had set out its stall in what it claimed was a bright fresh marketplace, but the same sad song was on the jukebox. Meet the new gang. Same as the old gang.

On the desk in front of her lay a thin sheaf of papers: personnel files, printed from an unused workstation with a temporary password that expired at midnight, its usage-report deleted. It wouldn’t be impossible to determine that Taverner herself had accessed the material, but it would take active investigation, and it would be a foolhardy underling that attempted anything of that sort. Four of the files were labelled Inactive, but the fifth, though not the slenderest, was relatively recent: River Cartwright, one of Jackson Lamb’s slow horses. Already she was having doubts about this choice, but a new detail, appended since Cartwright’s medical misadventure, offered hope. A lesson of leadership she’d long since absorbed: Always read between the lines. Having done that, she dealt with the paperwork in the time-honoured way. There was constant chatter, in all lines of business, about what was truly the key to success: integrity, foresight, the ability to improvise. What nobody mentioned was a shredder.

Her phone chirruped with upcoming appointments: a meeting with the Limitations Committee, and an afternoon session with the Home Secretary—the daily round continued; she was calm, she was in control. It wasn’t so long since she’d contrived to have her bodyguard carry out an assassination, and she’d maintained that same air then, too. No one could know about the buzzing in her background, or guess the lengths she would go to silence it. And whatever way she found to do so, no trail would lead back to her.

“Paging River Cartwright.”

“. . . Huh?”

“Hate to disturb you. But I was wondering what planet you’re on.”

River blinked. Earth. He was on earth.

Not something he took for granted lately. When he’d put his hand on that toxic-swabbed door handle—how long ago was that?—he’d nearly crossed a graver threshold too, and joined his grandfather in the afterlife; not the one where you sat bathed in heavenly light while a choir hummed ecstasies in the background, but the one where you were buried in cold hard ground and that was that. In earth, rather than on it. A future that had brushed him on its way past, and would one day make good on its promise. This time, though, River’s death had been temporary: an induced coma lasting nine days, during which, he’d been told, his body had been a battleground on which medical science had slugged it out with the mad bastard variety, and thankfully won, though not without cost. He had a lost winter behind him; months off work, and an uphill struggle regaining his strength, not to mention his powers of concentration.