And as if the afternoon wasn’t stressful enough, here came Catherine Standish, bearing gifts.
“Roddy,” she said, and placed a can of Red Bull on his desk.
Nodding suspiciously, Ho moved it a few inches to the left. Everything’s got its place.
Catherine settled herself behind the other desk. She’d brought a cup of coffee too, and cradled it in her hands. “Everything okay?” she asked.
He said, “You only come in here when you want something.”
An expression he didn’t recognise flickered across her face. “That’s not entirely true.”
He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. I’m busy, anyway. And besides …”
“Besides?”
“Lamb says I’m not to help you any more.”
(What Lamb had actually said: “I catch you freelancing again, I’ll pimp you out to IT support. Photocopier division.”)
“Lamb doesn’t have to know everything,” Catherine said.
“Have you told him that?” She didn’t reply. Taking this as proof of his unassailable rightness, Ho popped the tab on his Red Bull, and took a long swallow.
Watching him, Catherine sipped her coffee.
Ho thought: here we go again. Another older woman with designs. To be fair, she was after Ho’s skills rather than his bod, but it all came down to exploitation in the end. Good thing he was more than a match for her. He looked at his screen. Then back at Catherine. She was still watching him. He turned back to his screen. Studied it for half a minute, which is a lot longer than it sounds. When he risked another glance, she was still watching him.
“… What?”
She said, “How’s the archive going?”
The archive was an online Service resource; a “tool for correlating current events with historical precedents,” and thus of enormous strategical use, or so an interim Minister had decided a few years back. As was frequently the way with the Civil Service, a notion once decreed was difficult to countermand, and the Minister’s mid-morning brainwave had outlived his career by several administrations. And since Regent’s Park rarely encountered a makework task that couldn’t more usefully be done by a slow horse, archive maintenance and augmentation had long since ended up on Roderick Ho’s desk.
“… All right.”
Balancing her cup in one hand, Catherine dabbed her lips with a tissue held in the other. This was all wrong. This was his office, his space; its contents arranged according to the rightness of the places they occupied, even if, to the uninitiated, this might resemble chaos. There were spare cables and mouses, and the wispy envelopes CDs come in, and thick manuals on long superseded operating systems. And there was collateral damage in the shape of pizza boxes and energy drink cans, and that electric buzz that haunts the air around computers. It was his space. And it was wrong that Catherine Standish could just wander in and make like it was hers too.
Didn’t look like she was removing herself soon, either.
“Takes up a lot of your time, I’ll bet,” she said.
Working on the archive, she meant.
“Almost all of it,” said Ho. “It’s my top priority.”
“Must be handy, then, that fake tasklist you’ve rigged up,” Catherine went on. “You know, the one that shows anyone monitoring your logged-on activity how hard you’re working.”
Ho choked on his Red Bull.
Louisa said, “You could have been killed.”
“I was riding a bike, that’s all. Thousands of people do it every day. Most of them don’t get killed.”
“Most of them aren’t chasing cars.”
“I think they probably are,” Min said.
“And where did it get you?”
A mile and a half, he thought, which was pretty good going in London traffic. But what he said was, “I got the guys at the Troc to pick it up on Clerkenwell Road. They tracked—”
“
“Yeah yeah.
Louisa said, “You’d think Webb would have that stuff covered. Where the goons are staying, I mean. They’ve been in country how long? And they’re wandering round off the leash?”
Min thought he might have been given a bit more credit for slipping the leash back on them. Or at least working out where their kennel was. He said, “Like he told us. Over at the Park, they’re busy turning out their pockets for the bean counters. Haven’t got time for the, ah, hands-on stuff.”
“This isn’t trivial. It’s security. These guys have got guns … I mean, Jesus, we just let them wander round the capital tooled up? How’d they get them through Customs in the first place?”
“They probably didn’t,” Min said. “I can’t be certain about this, but I believe it’s possible to lay your hands on illegal weaponry in some parts of London.”
“Thanks for that.”
“Not the good parts. But a lot of places out east. And north.
And some parts west.”
“Are you finished?”
