With a start, she realised Ho was in her doorway. She had no idea how long he’d been standing there.
He said, “You’re kidding me, right?”
“Kidding you? What do you mean?”
He looked puzzled. “That you’re having a joke.”
Catherine had the ability to make it clear she was taking a deep breath without actually taking one. She did this now. “What am I kidding you about, Roddy?”
He told her.
“It was meant to be a joke.”
Some joke.
“They never target the old houses. Once you know that, it’s kind of cool, actually.”
“And I can’t believe Tommy would’ve …”
River ached all over, and couldn’t move as fast as he wanted—they were heading uphill. There was no signal in the dip.
He said, “And this was because of Kelly?”
Christ. He had the voice of a ninety-year-old.
Yates stopped. “You don’t get it, do you?”
“I get it,” River said. “I just don’t care.”
“She’s all I ever—”
“Grow up.” She makes her own choices, he nearly said, but the thought of Kelly’s choices killed the words. He tried his mobile again, his hands taking fat-finger to a new level. No signal yet. An engine drifted into earshot and he looked up, half-expecting to see Kelly zipping through the blue in her flying bomb—but if that’s what she was in, she wouldn’t be buzzing over Upshott.
She’d be in the air by now. He had to raise the alarm.
On the same day a Russian oligarch with political ambitions would be on the seventy-seventh floor.
Of course, if he was wrong, it would make crashing King’s Cross look like the pinnacle of his career.
And if he was right, and didn’t sound the warning in time, he’d spend the rest of his life grieving for innumerable dead.
“Come on.”
“That’s the wrong way,” Griff told him.
“No it isn’t.”
The hangar. He had to get to the hangar; see if he was right about the fertiliser.
Two steps more, and his phone buzzed in his hand. The signal was back.
A jeep crested a hillock in front of them.
When Pashkin emerged from the lift, he gave no indication that last night had ever happened; or at least not to him, not to her. He wore a different suit today. Gleaming white shirt, open at the neck. A flash of a silver cufflink. A hint of cologne. He carried a briefcase.
“Ms. Guy,” he said. “Mr. Longridge.”
The lobby echoed like a church.
“The car should be outside.”
And so it was. They sat in the same formation as the previous day, in similar slow-moving traffic. But what difference, Louisa wondered, would it make if they were ten minutes late? There was only Webb waiting. For a supposedly high-level summit, it was low key. She texted him anyway, to let him know they weren’t far off.
At a junction on the edge of the City, the car rolled past three police vans: black, with shaded windows. Figures lurked inside; human shapes distorted by uniform and helmet, like American football players, absurdly padded up for a kickabout.
Pashkin said, “Trouble is expected, then.”
Louisa didn’t trust her voice in his presence.
He said, “Your liberal values, they take a back seat when your banks and buildings are threatened.”
Marcus said, “I’m not sure I have liberal values.”
Pashkin looked at him, interested.
“And besides. A few troublemakers get their heads broken, or thrown in a cell overnight. We’re hardly talking Tiananmen.”
“Isn’t there a phrase for that? The thin end of the wedge?”
The police vans were behind them now, but a hefty cop presence remained on the pavements. Most were wearing high-visibility jackets, not battle armour. Officer Friendly was the first face shown. Sergeant Rock stayed indoors until things got hairy.
But these rallies had a habit of turning nasty, thought Louisa. It wasn’t just the banks the marchers were targeting. It was corporate greed in all its manifestations; all the visible symbols of the rich getting richer, while others had their salaries cut, their debt increased, their jobs rationalised, their benefits slashed.
Not her problem, though. Not today. She had her own battles to fight.
Piotr spoke, and Pashkin replied, in a language thick as treacle. Maybe her face asked the question. Either way, Pashkin chose now to address her directly. “He says it is nearly over.”
“Over?”
“We’re nearly there.”
She’d lost track. But here they were indeed, at the foot of the Needle; the car pulling into the root of its enormous shadow, then disappearing underneath it, to the car park below.
Their plate was registered as belonging to a contractor; officially, their party was meeting with the one of the hotel’s kitchen supervisors in a utilities room below the building’s lobby.
Their entry into the Needle itself would go unrecorded.
