London Rules полностью

Which was Shin’s fault, and while it was not Danny’s place to offer criticism, it was becoming harder to hold his tongue. He had been in the country three years, and still the flabbiness of life in Britain startled him on a daily basis. There was no direction. No leadership. The newspapers – the media – delivered a chaotic medley of constant opinion: contradictory, mindless noise that was affecting them all. Since Abbotsfield, they had had more failures than successes; and of the latter, the Watering Hole bomb had been down to Danny alone: a simple, beautiful physical action, after which he had ghosted himself away, invisible to the shocked crowds around. But the target, Ho, had escaped unharmed twice, and the bomb on the train had been a humiliating debacle. There were two reasons for this that Danny could see. The first was Shin himself, who appeared to have no stomach for a leadership role. The second was the absence of uniform. Having shed their uniforms, they had let the chaos in.

Shin was looking at his phone now, his back against the side of the van they’d been living in for the past week, scrolling through Twitter feeds, through news headlines, as if consulting an oracle. Danny felt contempt worming through him: if Shin were to lead he should lead, not look for answers in the rubble of the internet. His resolve was weakening by the hour. He thought the best way of getting results was letting them know the plan they were working to, whereas a true commander would expect obedience to be blind, and deal with infraction severely. He had not even punished An when An failed to run the target over the previous morning. Was even now unable to draw a line between these two events: because An had failed yesterday, Joon was dead today.

He closed his eyes and tried to find the calm space. Their mission had stumbled, but had not been compromised. As for Shin, Danny would report him once it was over. There could be no other way. His leadership was a mistake, a disgrace, and he would understand that for himself had his head not been turned by the chaos. As for the rest of them – who had been four and now were three – they would keep their cool and see the plan through. That was the phrase he was after: keep their cool. It wasn’t, after all, the details that mattered; it was the simple fact of the plan’s implementation. This was the oldest of all stratagems, the lesson you delivered to your enemies: that the stronger they built their citadels, the more securely they sealed the instruments of their own destruction within.

All that Danny and his comrades needed was to remain … cool.

That was the phrase.

Cool cats.

RIVER PARKED IN A metered space, and was fumbling for change when he remembered – duh – that it was Ho’s car, so stopped. He looked around. Dusk was smudging distant outlines. Next to him, Coe was still plugged in. His eyes were open, but had an unfocused, glazed expression which in anyone else River would have taken to mean high.

Coe, he suspected, didn’t get high. Just reaching a level would be a stretch.

He made the get-your-earbuds-out gesture again, a necessary piece of sign language when dealing with Coe, and said, ‘It’s kind of funny, being in actual Slough.’

Coe stared.

‘I’ll explain later. You okay with this?’

‘No.’

‘Which part especially?’

Coe thought, then said, ‘All of it.’

‘Well, just so long as you don’t shoot anyone this time.’

‘I don’t have a gun.’

‘Yeah, I was hoping for commitment. Not just lack of means.’

It wasn’t that River thought it likely there’d be gunfire, violence, blood, but he figured at least one of them ought to raise the possibility, since they were, at least nominally, here to prevent a possible assassination. Or perhaps just interrupt one. But now the journey was over, that possibility had receded into the realms of the far-fetched. Nothing exciting ever happened to the slow horses. Well, okay, there’d been that gun battle a while back, and the psycho who shot up Slough House, but mostly it was just the daily grind. And that they were currently in the actual Slough only rubbed that in, somehow. The actual Slough wasn’t somewhere he’d been before, and all he knew about it was that it had managed to crawl this near to London and then given up. No ambition. There was also a poem about bombs, but he wasn’t reading too much into that.

‘We should check the place out,’ he said. ‘See what’s what.’

‘In case there’s a group wearing Team Abbotsfield T-shirts?’

River looked at him.

‘Or sitting in McDonald’s, enjoying a Happy Terrorist Meal?’

Well, it was better than nothing. ‘Yeah, something like that.’

‘Where’s the meeting?’