‘If you say so,’ said Lamb. ‘But I’d take them more seriously if they spent less time accessorising.’ He slipped the bottle into his coat pocket, and thrust his free hand out. Chester Smith made to clasp it in his own. ‘No, I need your lighter. Mine’s empty.’
Smith handed it over, then watched as Lamb crossed the room, the press of bodies parting for him without fuss. At the door he halted without looking back, though Smith had the sense he was checking the room out anyway. But whatever it was he’d been looking for he didn’t appear to have found, because a moment later he was gone, and the room seemed half as crowded for his absence.
‘Jackson Lamb,’ Smith murmured aloud, for no obvious reason. Then went to find someone new to talk to.
Judd sat next to Diana, satisfaction oozing from every pore, and she put a hand on his elbow. ‘I’m not too proud to admit it,’ she said. ‘I nearly got an erection there.’
‘Me too.’
‘And thank you for those kind words.’
‘Every syllable deserved.’
She was unused to praise from Peter Judd. Achievement, in other people, was not something he admired: it was like watching somebody walk around in shoes he’d planned to buy. On the other hand, he’d been running a PR company since leaving the political limelight. Perhaps he’d learned something, if only which lies to tell.
‘And it achieved the required response,’ he went on. ‘Rage and fury from the Kremlin, I gather. He’ll do such things, he knows not what they are, or something like that.
‘Quite possibly.’
‘Did it for A level. You think he’ll start a war?’
‘If I’d thought that,’ Diana said, ‘I’d not have green-lit the operation.’
‘Oh, come on. What’s life without a little risk?’
‘Longer?’
‘You never disappoint me, Diana.’
She said, ‘He won’t start a war. Because he broke the rules. Sanctioning a hit on a swapped spy, that’s not done. He should have known that.’
‘And now you’ve carried out a hit on the hitter we’re all square, or should be. But as you’ve already pointed out, he’s not playing by the rules.’
‘You’re aware that it wasn’t actually an agent who consigned the target to, as you put it, the dunghill?’
‘Heap,’ said Judd. Then: ‘No, I’d rather assumed you acquired the services of a soldier of fortune of some sort.’
She nodded.
‘But we’re here to inspire national pride, and if that means blurring the odd detail, so be it.’ He reached for his glass. ‘Besides, the underlying point remains. The good chaps here, they provided the wherewithal. Whether to a salaried operative or a freelance journeyman hardly matters. Our political overlords, so-called, fell at every available hurdle, but these good men and true stepped up. National pride was at stake. They heard the call, and opened their chequebooks.’
‘Now that’s a stirring image.’
‘Behave. You took their money. Don’t look down your nose.’
In other company she might have tried to look contrite, but Judd had as little time for social pieties as she did.
‘And you have to admit, it’s working nicely so far.’
It was. Or seemed to be.
It had been the tail end of winter when Judd had approached her with, as he’d termed it, an opportunity. These had felt few and far between at the time. An agent had died, in the snow, in Wales; one of Jackson Lamb’s crew – a slow horse – but it all went down on the books. A recently departed Park operative had been killed in the same debacle. The way it spun, no blame was laid at Diana’s door, but an odour had lingered; worse, this had happened shortly after her application for a root-and-branch overhaul of operational practices – effectively a plea for a major increase in spend – had been rejected. And that had been before the budgetary fallout from You-Know-What kicked in. The last full-scale retreat from Europe, by way of amateur armada, had seen defeat dressed up as victory; this latest version, a supposed triumph, might as well have been made on the
