Marcus could, and should, have gone straight back to Slough House, but he was buoyed by success. This was the turning point he’d been waiting for. And there was a row of Boris Bikes over the road . . . He thought: what the hell. Quicker than tubing it. Excavating his debit card from his newly thickened wallet, he released one from its rack. Regent’s Park, here he came.
Louisa Guy tucked a lock of hair behind her ear, briefly tugged at her blouse to fan her skin; suffered a brief, unasked-for memory of last night’s stand—a bachelor pad in the worst sense, with month-old sheets and dishes in the sink, but still: enthusiastic and vigorous sex, leading to three hours’ dreamless oblivion—and shook her upper body once, refusing to allow Lamb’s gibe headspace.
Which they were, but seriously, she didn’t need brains for the task Lamb had set her. She needed blind faith and the devil’s luck.
Roderick Ho abhorred Google, Yahoo, Bing and all the other popular engines: they searched, he claimed, less than 0.5 percent of the internet’s contents, and he’d sooner eat a vegan pizza than use them. But since Louisa would sooner bake him one than ask him for a tutorial on the Dark Web, they were all she had to rely on. Still, what else was she going to do? Sean Patrick Donovan was her target, if Cartwright’s guess was on the money. Closing down all other programs, in the hope this would free up enough space to allow her ancient machine some speed, she set to work.
Conspiracy theorists, she knew, were paranoid by definition, and usually with good reason—they were indeed being watched, largely because they were standing on an upturned bucket, haranguing the sheeple about their wingnut delusions. For months the previous year she had monitored message boards for suggestions of terrorist activity, and while she’d never entirely thrown off the suspicion that every other poster she encountered was an undercover cop, she’d grown used to eavesdropping on tin-hat conversations, from how the government was controlling the weather to the thought-experiments carried out on anyone who rang HMRC help lines. And all of these philosophers, without exception, were convinced they were under surveillance, their every online foray or mobile chat recorded and stored for future use. That this was probably true was an irrelevance, of course; they were simply caught in the same net as everyone else. Louisa had never trapped a terrorist; never stopped a bomb. She’d read a lot of discussions about 9/11, obviously, but contributions from structural engineers had been conspicuous by their absence. And while the help-line thing was probably true, that was just the law of averages at work.
And speaking of paranoia, how did Lamb know what she got up to outside work?
It didn’t matter. Was just the law of averages again. Sod him, anyway.
The point was, anonymity was the paranoid’s cloak—during her months treading those boards, Louisa hadn’t come across anything remotely resembling a real name. Donovan could be venting three times daily on a host of sites, and if his username was SpaceRanger69, she’d never know about it. But Lamb had spoken. So here she was.
“Getting anywhere?”
Suppressing the start he’d given her, she said, “Give me a break. I’ve only been at it five minutes.”
“Huh.” Lamb came into the office, sniffing the air suspiciously. “Why does this room smell of cheese?”
“It doesn’t. What have you got Ho on?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because you’d be better off him doing this.”
“Shame he’s busy, then.” Lamb peered out the window at a passing bus, then rested his buttocks on the sill.
“You going to watch me all afternoon?”
“Is that how long it’s going to take?”
“We don’t even know for sure it’s Donovan we’re after.”
“No. But we’ll look stupid if we ignore him, and it turns out he took Catherine.”
“What’s Ho working on?”
“Above your pay grade.”
“That reminds me.” Louisa found a receipt on her desktop. “Taxi fares from this morning.”
“Yeah, you might have to wait a while. I’ve been getting grief about the expenses you lot claim.” He stood.
She said, “Is this all on the level? Or is something going on we don’t know about?”
“I think it’s safe to assume there’s always something going on you don’t know about,” Lamb said.
He was nearly out the door when Louisa said, “Catherine.”
“What about her?”
“Nothing. You called her Catherine, that’s all.”
“Huh.”
Louisa settled back to her impossible task.
Five minutes later, she’d cracked it.
Do something, is what Longridge had said.
So here he was: doing something.
