The corridors were on the building’s outer edges. The downstairs office was where the security shifts—himself and an edging-seventy ex-copper called Brian—kept their stuff; upstairs there was a techs’ room, where incoming was processed. And the rest of the facility was a labyrinth of storage rooms: apart from the number pasted above each doorway, the bastards all looked the same. Sounded the same, too: a constant humming. This was the noise information made when it was waiting to be used.
That was what he’d heard one of the techies say once.
He was halfway along the corridor when the lights went out.
“Never heard of him.”
“Oh, poppycock!”
Which was unlike the old man. Put it down, River thought, to being on his third glass. He said, “No, all these years you’ve been telling me spook stories, Alexander Popov’s never rated a mention.”
That earned him a sharp look. “I haven’t been telling stories, River. I’ve been educating you. At least, that’s always been my intention.”
Because if the O.B. ever learned he’d turned into an old gossip, it would destroy something deep inside him.
River said, “That’s what I meant. But Popov’s never formed part of my education. I’m guessing he was Moscow Centre, yes? One of their secret wizards, pulling levers?”
“Pay no attention to the man behind the Curtain,” the O.B. quoted. “That’s quite good, actually. But no. What he was was a bogeyman. Smoke and a whisper, nothing more. If information was hard currency, the best we had on Popov was an IOU. Nobody ever laid a finger on him, and that was because he didn’t exist.”
“So how come,” River began, and stopped himself.
The O.B. nodded approval. “He was a fictional spymaster, running his own fictional network. It was meant to have us tying ourselves in knots. We did something similar in the war. Operation Mincemeat. And one of the lessons we learned from that was you can discover an awful lot from the details you’re asked to believe. You know how the Service works, River. The boys and girls in Background prefer legends to the real thing. Truth walks a straight line. They like to peep round corners.”
River was used to ironing out the kinks in his grandfather’s conversation. “If the details you were being fed were fake, that didn’t mean they couldn’t tell you anything.”
“If Moscow Centre said ‘Look at this’, the sensible thing was to look in the opposite direction,” the O.B. agreed. And then said, “It was all a game, wasn’t it?” in a tone suggesting he’d fallen upon a long-hidden secret. “And they were still playing it when everything else they owned was up for grabs.”
The fire crackled, and the old man turned his attention to it. Watching him fondly, River thought what he often thought when they dwelt on such subjects: that he wished he’d been alive then. Had had a part to play. It was a wish that kept him at Slough House, jumping through hoops for Jackson Lamb. He said, “There was a file, then. On Alexander Popov. Even if it was full of fairy tales. What was in it?”
The O.B. said, “God, River, I haven’t given it a thought in decades. Let me see.” He peered into the fire again, as if expecting images to emerge from the flames. “It was patchwork. An old woman’s quilt. But we had his birthplace. Or what we were led to believe was his birthplace … But let’s not go round that bush again. The story was he came from one of the closed towns. You know about them?”
Vaguely.
“They were military research stations, served by civilian populations. His was in Georgia. Didn’t have a name, just a number. ZT/53235, or something like that. Population of maybe thirty, thirty-three thousand. The crème were scientific staff, with a service industry propping them up, and military to keep them under control. Like most of these places it was founded in the post-war years, when the Soviet nuclear programme was in overdrive. That’s what the town was about, you see. It was … not organic. It was purpose-built. A plutonium production plant.”
“ZT/53235?” said River, who liked to keep his memory sharp.
His grandfather looked at him. “Or something like that.” He turned back into the fire. “They all had names something like that.” Then he sat straighter, and got to his feet.
“Grandad?”
“It’s just a—it’s okay. Nothing.” Reaching into the log basket to the side of the fireplace, the old man pulled a long dry twig from the sheaf of kindling. “Come on, now,” he muttered. “Let’s be getting you out of there.” He held the twig into the flames.
