Taverner, for instance. He’d heard Taverner was desperate to alter the rules of the game; not so much change the pieces on the board as throw the board away and design a new one. But Taverner was Second Desk, not First, and even if she’d been in charge, there were Boards to answer to these days. No Service Head had been given free rein since Charles Partner: the first to die in office and the last to run the show. But then, Partner had been a Cold War warrior from his fur-lined collar to his fingerless gloves, and the Cold War had been simpler. Back then, it had been easier to pretend it was a matter of us and them.
All before River’s time, of course. Such fragments, he’d gleaned from the O.B. His grandfather was the soul of discretion, or so he liked to think; imagining that a lifetime’s sealed lips had left him close with a secret. This belief persevered despite the evident truth that he liked nothing better than Service gossip. Maybe this was what age did, thought River. Confirmed you in your image of yourself even while it unpicked the reality, leaving you the tattered remnant of the person you’d once been.
His hand hurt. He hoped it didn’t look too obvious. But there was nothing he could do about it now. He was minutes from Regent’s Park, and it wouldn’t look good if he was late.
In the lobby, a middle-aged woman with the face of a traffic warden made him wait ten minutes before issuing his visitor’s pass. The laptop, snug in its padded envelope, was passed through an X-ray machine, which left River wondering if its contents had been wiped. If he’d been Sid, would he have been kept waiting? Or had James Webb left instructions that River be kept hanging about until the obvious was hammered home: that a visitor’s pass was the best he’d ever get?
Where Spider was concerned, River easily got paranoid.
That ordeal over, he was allowed through the large wooden doors, where there was another desk, this one manned by a balding red-cheeked type who’d pass for an Oxford porter but was doubtless an ex-cop. He motioned River to a bench. Sore hand in pocket, River sat. He put the envelope next to him. There was a clock on the facing wall. It was depressing to watch the second-hand crawl round, but difficult not to.
Behind the desk, a staircase curved upwards. It wasn’t quite large enough to choreograph a dance sequence on, but it wasn’t far off. For one inexplicable moment, River had a vision of Sid coming down those stairs, heels clacking off the marble so loudly, everyone in earshot would stop and look.
When he blinked, the image vanished. The footsteps echoed for a moment, but they were made by other people.
He’d thought, first time he’d come into this building, that it resembled a gentlemen’s club. Now it occurred to him that the truth might be the other way round: that gentlemen’s clubs were like the Service, the way the Service used to be. Back when what it did was known as the Great Game.
At length another ex-cop showed up.
‘That’s for Webb?’
One proprietorial hand on the envelope, River nodded.
‘I’ll make sure he gets it.’
‘I’m supposed to give it to him myself.’
There was never going to be any doubt about this. He had a visitor’s pass and everything.
To give him credit, his new friend didn’t fight it. ‘This way, then.’
River said, ‘That’s okay. I know my way round,’ but only to get a rise.
He didn’t get one.
River was led, not up the stairs, but through a set of doors to the left of the desk, and into a corridor he’d not been in before. The padded envelope felt like a present he was bringing Spider, though that was an unlikely scenario.
Fuck you, Spider.
‘What was that?’
‘I didn’t say anything,’ River assured him.
At the end of the corridor, a set of fire doors opened on to a stairwell. Through a window, River saw a car turning down the ramp into the underground car park. He followed his guide up a flight of stairs, then another. On each landing a camera blinked, but he resisted the temptation to wave.
They went through another set of fire doors.
‘Are we nearly there yet?’
His guide offered him a sardonic look. Halfway along the corridor, he stopped and rapped twice on a door.
And River, all of a sudden, wished he’d left the parcel at reception. He’d not seen James Webb in eight months. For the year preceding that, they’d been all but inseparable. What made it a good idea to see him now?
Apart from anything else, the urge to deck the bastard might prove overwhelming.
From inside the room a voice called a welcome.
‘In you go, sir.’
In he went.
