Joe Country полностью

Lamb said, “You were burning a barn too, weren’t you, Martin? In a manner of speaking. To destroy evidence, or distract attention. Which is itself evidence, because it means you’re up to something and you don’t want anybody to know what it is. And you’re not worried about the Park. Bunch of kindergarteners, right? No, you’re worried what they’d say back home, which means you’ve gone over the edges, and when they discover what a bad boy you’ve been, well, your future might start looking as insalubrious as mine.”

He could feel the dampness of the bench seeping into his bones.

“They don’t even know about the stroke, do they? But they’ll find out.”

He thought about the sheer pleasure he’d taken in running Hannah.

“And then you’ll get to know what being out to grass feels like.”

The pain had subsided to a burnt-out filament. He said, “It’s nothing, Lamb. You’d laugh if I told you. It’s fun and games, that’s all.”

“I don’t care what it is. But you’ve run up a bill, and I’m calling it in.”

“I’m sorry about your joe. But I didn’t kill him.”

“It would be best if you didn’t talk about my joes right now.”

“What do you want?”

“I want you to get a message to someone. He used to be on your books.”

“My books?”

“The BND’s. I don’t really care whose fucking books they are, Martin, I just need to know you can still reach them from the shelf.”

“I carry weight, Jackson. More than you do, judging by your address.”

“We’ll talk about my problems once we’ve established whose bitch you are. You going to be my messenger boy? Or do I burn your playhouse down?”

Martin said, “I do that, and you bury this whole conversation? Me being Kahlmann? Running an op in London?”

“I don’t give a fuck what you’re up to.”

“Doesn’t that count as treason?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“It sounds like I’m getting off lightly.”

“You haven’t heard the message yet,” said Lamb.

“These events in Wales,” said Peter Judd.

“For the record,” Diana Taverner told him, “I’m not aware of any events having taken place in Wales. Or anywhere else.”

That morning had seen an ill-tempered Oversight meeting, during which Diana’s delivery of her planned showstopper—I applied for Fugue. I could have handled this. But I was turned down—failed to receive a standing ovation; Oliver Nash, in fact, going so far as to hint that her attempt to initiate the protocol had been made in bad faith, with precisely this result in mind: a potentially headline-grabbing car-wreck caused by someone else’s driving. Her intention being, he only just refrained from saying, to bolster her own case for a bigger, sturdier vehicle. But however it was spun, the deaths of two Service personnel—one recently resigned—and a known Annex-C mercenary, in Wales, made the Park look out of control, which hardly burnished the reputation of the woman supposedly at the wheel. The curious relish with which Nash kept repeating ‘in Wales’ suggested that he considered this an added aggravation, which might have tempted Diana to suggest that it was, if anything, a mitigating factor, had she not registered in time the presence of one Llewellyn Jones, a former Home Office minister who could usually be relied upon to be comatose by the ten-minute mark, but whose eyes had unglazed at the mention of his homeland as if a rugby squad had burst into the room bearing daffodils.

“In that case,” Judd said, “you’ll be pleased to hear that they didn’t happen anyway.”

She already knew this. The dead were still dead, of course, but that was a detail: one was a Slough House operative, so to all intents and purposes had been declared surplus to requirements, and if Emma Flyte’s name had caused raised eyebrows around the Committee table, the abruptness of her resignation, which Diana had allowed to be known was due to personal problems, allowed speculation to wander freely. Besides, Flyte had been known for her startlingly good looks. This lent credibility to her involvement in violent altercation, the potential for an unhappy ending being a recognised tax on female beauty. As for the merc, his obsequies boiled down to a red line through an entry on a database, and nobody was going to lose sleep over that.

For housekeeping purposes, the deaths had been ascribed to drug-related warfare between rival gangs, which sounded enough like a bad TV drama to satisfy most sections of the media.

So whatever had happened already hadn’t happened, but it was nice to have confirmation, so she simply said, “I’m pleased to hear it. Care to elucidate?”, elucidating being one of Judd’s preferred modes of discourse, there being, somehow, a lubricated quality to it.

He was happy to do so.