“And there’s no match-up,” Caroline finished.
Ho shook his head. “Must have seemed a fair bet at the time. These guys have papered over their early lives all you want. But it was pre-web, and they’d no way of knowing the paper would start to peel.”
She glanced at the printout. As well as Barnett, he’d run down Butterfield and Salmon and found similar gaps in their histories. And there’d be more, there’d be flaws in the others’ lives too. It was all true, then. A Soviet sleeper cell had taken root in a tiny English village. Perhaps because it no longer had a purpose. Or perhaps for some other reason they had yet to fathom.
“This is good, Roddy.”
“Yeah.”
And maybe she’d been hanging round Lamb too much, because she added: “Makes a change from just surfing the net.”
“Yeah, well.” He looked away, colour rising. “All that archive crap, I could pull an all-nighter, get it finished in a sitting. This is different.”
She waited until his gaze met hers again. “Good point,” she said. “Thanks.” She glanced at her watch. It was nine. Louisa and Marcus would be on their way to pick up Arkady Pashkin, which reminded her: “Did you do the background on Pashkin?”
And now his expression became the more familiar put-upon scowl. Spending a life among computers had a way of prolonging adolescence. There was probably a study on it. It was probably online. “Been kind of busy?”
“Yes. But do it now.”
Shame to leave him on a sour note, but Roddy Ho had a way of sticking to his own script.
They met near the hotel, a little after nine. The tubes had been full, the streets crowded; there was a huge police presence, not to mention camera crews, news trucks, rubberneckers. Crowds were gathering in Hyde Park, from where the smells of a hundred variations on breakfast drifted. Instructions booming from a loudhailer,
“Looks like someone’s out for trouble,” was Marcus’s greeting. He gestured at a group of twentysomethings heading for the park, a banner reading
“They’re pissed off citizens,” Louisa said. “That’s all. You ready?”
“Of course.” Today he wore a grey suit, a salmon-pink tie, neat shades: he looked good, she noticed, the same way she might notice any other irrelevant detail. “You?”
“I’m fine.”
“Sure?”
“Just said so, didn’t I?”
They turned the corner.
He said, “Look, Louisa, what I said last night—”
His mobile rang.
You couldn’t call it sleep. Call it overload: pain, stress; all of it tumbling over and over like an argument trapped in a washing machine; over and over until its rhythm rocked River out of consciousness and dropped him down a well of his own making. In that circular darkness the same half-chewed facts nipped at him like vermin: the fertiliser loaded on the plane, which Kelly would be soaring away in this morning; the sketch she’d drawn of the cityscape, with that lightning bolt smiting that tall building. An aeroplane was already a bomb, but that wasn’t the first thing you thought of when you looked at one. It was only when you loaded it with bags of nitrogen-rich fertiliser that you underlined its essential explosiveness.
And over and over in his tumbling mind, the image repeated itself; of Kelly Tropper—why?—steering her pride and joy into London’s tallest building; searing a new Ground Zero into the eyeballs of the world.
Over and over, until at last River lost his grip on the here and now, and—having long since bellowed himself dry—slipped out of his mind.
While Marcus was on the phone Louisa watched the rally assembling. It was like seeing a hive mind being born; all these different particles coming together, out of which one consciousness would arise. Marcus was probably right. There’d be trouble later. But that was a sideshow, another part of the ignorable background. She wondered if last night would turn out to be her only chance of getting Pashkin on his own. If he’d jet away as soon as the talks were done, leaving her forever ignorant of the reason Min had died.
Marcus said, “Sorry about that.”
“Finished? We’re on a job, not an outing.”
“It won’t ring again,” he said. “And you’re not throwing Pashkin out of any high windows, right?”
She didn’t answer.
“Right?”
“Lamb put you up to this?”
“I don’t know Lamb as well as you. But it doesn’t strike me his team’s welfare is his top priority.”
“Oh, you’re looking out for my welfare, are you?”
“Those gorillas Pashkin has? They’re not for show. Make a move on their boss and they’ll take you apart.”
“Like they did Min.”
