Lamb carried no torch. Torchlight in a darkened building screams burglary. Instead, he switched the anglepoise on, flooding the desk with cold yellow lamplight and puddling the rest of the room. Everything looked as it had on his previous visit. Same bookshelves holding the same thick catalogues; same paperwork littering the desk. He opened drawers and scuffled through papers. Most were bills, but a letter lay among them, handwritten, peeping from a coyly curling flap. A love letter, of all things; not even an explicit one, but expressing regret at parting. It seemed that Nikolai had seen fit to end an affair. Neither the fact that he had done so, nor that he had embarked upon an affair in the first place, surprised Lamb. What he did find curious was that Katinsky had left the letter in what amounted to plain view. All it took was for someone to break in and rifle his desk. Katinsky had never been a player—a cipher clerk, one among many; barely known to Regent’s Park before his defection—but still, Service life should have taught him Moscow Rules, and Moscow Rules should never be forgotten.
He replaced the letter. Examined a desk diary. No appointments had been noted for today. The remainder of the year was empty too: a string of blank days stretching ahead. Lamb flipped back and found annotations: brief reminders, initials, times and places. He put it down. In the small adjoining office was a filing cabinet which held clothing; in a mug on a shelf, a razor and toothbrush. A shirt hung on the back of the door. In a corner, a blue coolbox held tubs of olives and houmous, slices of ham and a chunk of mouldy bread. In a cupboard he found a stash of empty pill bottles, none with prescription labels. ‘Xemoflavin,’ one read. He dropped it in a pocket, then surveyed the tiny room once more. Katinsky lived here all right. He just wasn’t here now.
Lamb switched off the anglepoise and left, locking the door behind him.
London slept, but fitfully, its every other eye wide open. The ribbon of light atop the Telecom Tower unfurled again and again, traffic lights blinked through unvarying sequence, and electronic posters affixed to bus stops rotated and paused, rotated and paused, drawing an absent public’s attention to unbeatable mortgage deals. There were fewer cars, playing louder music, and the bass pulse that trailed in their wake pounded the road long after they’d gone. From the zoo leaked muffled shrieks and strangled growls. And on a pavement obscured by trees, leaning on a railing, a man smoked a cigarette, the light at its tip glowing brighter then dying, brighter then dying, as if he too were part of the city’s heartbeat, performing the same small actions over and over, all through the watches of the night.
Unseen eyes observed him. This stretch of pavement was never unregarded. What was curious was that he’d been allowed to stand there so long without interference. A half hour crawled by before a car turned up at last and purred to a halt. Its driver spoke through its rolled-down window. His tone was weary, though this might have had less to do with the time of night than with the man he was forced to address.
“Jackson Lamb,” he said.
Lamb tossed his cigarette over the railings. “Took your time,” he replied.
When River came round he was staring at the sky, and the ground was rolling beneath him. He was on a trolley. Doubtless the one he’d seen in the hangar. Was bound to it, in fact; with the same clothesline—was strapped like Gulliver: wrists, ankles, across the chest, across the throat. In his mouth a wadded-up handkerchief, secured in place by tape.
Pushing the trolley was Tommy Moult.
“Taser,” he said. “If you’re interested.”
River arched his back and flexed his wrists, but the line held firm. The only give came from his flesh.
“Or you could lie still,” Moult suggested. “Want to be Tasered again? I’m out of cartridges, but I can give you a contact blast. It’ll hurt.”
River lay still.
“Up to you.”
The one name not on Catherine’s list was Tommy Moult. It hadn’t occurred to him to wonder why Moult was here on a Tuesday night, when he was usually only seen at weekends.
A wheel hit a rock, and if River hadn’t been tied in place he’d have been thrown clear. The clothesline bit into his throat and he made an indecipherable noise: pain, fury, frustration, all muffled by the gag in his mouth.
“Whoops.” Moult stopped pushing and wiped his hands on his trousers. He said something else, but the wind dragged it away.
River twisted his head to ease the pressure on his throat. He was less than a foot from the ground. All he could see was black grass.
And he thought again of what he’d found in the hangar, packed onto the trolley he was tied to now. Which meant it wasn’t on the trolley any more.
He assumed it was on the aeroplane instead.
