He said, ‘Did you think the Batphone was about to go off, Lady Di shouting all hands on deck? No, we’ll watch it on telly like everyone else. But we won’t
Nobody said anything.
‘Now, you’ve got papers to shuffle. Why are we all in this room?’
So one by one everybody left, except Ho and Moody, whose room it was. Moody hung his raincoat on the back of the door. He didn’t speak, and Ho wouldn’t have answered if he had.
Lamb stood a moment longer. His upper lip was flecked with an almond croissant’s sugary dust, and as he watched the computer monitor, on which nothing happened that hadn’t been happening for the past several minutes, his tongue discovered this seam of sweetness and gathered it in. But his eyes remained oblivious of what his tongue was doing, and if Ho or Moody had turned his way, what they saw might have startled them.
For a short while, the overweight, greasy has-been burned with cold hard anger.
Then he turned, and plodded upstairs to his office.
In his own room River booted up, then sat silently cursing the time his computer took to flicker into life. He was barely aware of Sid Baker arriving, and jumped when she spoke:
‘Do you think—’
‘
Sid recovered first. ‘Well, sorry! Christ! It’s my office too, you know.’
‘I know, I know. I was … concentrating.’
‘Of course. Turning your PC on, that’s a tricky business. I can see it would take all your attention.’
‘Sid, I didn’t realize you’d come in. That’s all. What do you want?’
‘Forget it.’
She sat at her desk. River’s monitor, meanwhile, enjoyed its usual fake awakening; swimming into blue then reverting to black. Waiting, he glanced at Sid. She wore her hair tied back and seemed paler than usual, which might have been her black cashmere V-neck, or might have been the ten minutes she’d just spent watching a young man with a hood on his head, who’d apparently been condemned to death.
And she wasn’t wearing her silver locket. If he’d been asked if this was unusual he’d have said he had no idea, but the fact was Sid wore the locket about half the time, from which he drew the inference that it held no special emotional significance for her. But nobody was likely to ask him.
His computer emitted that high-pitched beep that always sounded impatient, as if he’d been keeping it waiting rather than the other way round.
He said, only half aware he was about to do so, ‘About yesterday. I’m sorry. It was stupid.’
‘It was.’
‘It felt like it might be funny at the time.’
‘Stupid things often do,’ Sid said.
‘Clearing it up was no fun, if it makes you feel any better.’
‘It would make me feel better if you’d done a proper job of it. There were still eggshells under my desk this morning.’
But she was half-smiling, so that probably drew a line under the episode.
Though the question of why Sid had been sent on an op in the first place continued to rankle.
His computer was awake now but in a familiarly human sort of way, which meant it would be another few minutes before it was up to speed. He clicked on the browser.
Sid spoke again: ‘You think Ho’s right? They’re Al Qaeda?’
About to make a smart remark, River bit it back. What was the point? He said, ‘What else? It’s not like we’ve not seen this before.’
Both fell silent, remembering similar broadcasts a few years earlier; of a hostage beheaded for the crime of being Western.
‘They’ll be on the radar,’ Sid said.
River nodded.
‘All this stuff we do, here and Regent’s Park, GCHQ—the lid’s on pretty tight. Once they establish who the kid is, and where it’s happening, they’ll run up a shortlist of suspects. Won’t they?’
He was online at last. ‘What was that link?’
‘Sec.’
A moment later an e-mail winked on to his screen. He clicked on the link it held, and the browser changed from a bland civil service logo to the now-familiar boy, hood, cellar.
Nothing had changed in the minutes since they’d left Ho’s room.
Again they sat in silence, but a different silence to the one that usually prevailed in their office. It was shared, rather than dictated by awkwardness.
But if either were hoping it would be broken by a voice from that cellar, they were disappointed.
At last, River said, ‘There’s a lot of time, effort and money been spent on covering extremist groups.’
Sid had forgotten she’d asked the question.
‘But there’s not a whole lot of live intel out there.’
‘Assets,’ she said.
Any other day, River might have scoffed. ‘Assets,’ he agreed. ‘Infiltrating extremist groups used to be an easier business.’
‘You sound like you know about this.’
‘I grew up with the stories.’
‘Your grandfather,’ she said. ‘He was David Cartwright, wasn’t he?’
‘He still is.’
‘I didn’t mean—’
‘He’s still alive. Very much so.’ He glanced round. She had pushed her chair from her desk, and was watching him rather than the screen. ‘And it’s not like he told me State secrets as bedtime stories.’
‘I wasn’t going to suggest that.’
