On his desk was a fresh pile of transcripts. Catherine Standish must have delivered them before the news broke. He picked up the topmost, then dropped it. That small slapping noise was as much impact as it would ever have; he could spend the next hour writing a report on another chunk of chattering from another supposed hot spot, and all it would earn would be a cursory once-over from Regent’s Park. Sid said something else, River didn’t catch what. Instead, he locked his eyes on the computer screen; on the boy in the hood who was going to be executed for some reason, or no reason at all, in less than forty-eight hours, and if the newspaper he held was to be believed, this was happening here in the UK.
Bombs on trains were bad enough. Something like this, the press would go intercontinental.
Whatever it was Sidonie Baker had said, she now said again. Something about gloves. ‘Why do you think he’s wearing gloves?’
‘I don’t know.’ It was a good question. But River had no answer.
What he mostly knew was that he needed to do something real, something useful. Something more than paper-shuffling.
He felt the hard nub of the memory stick once more.
Whatever it held, it was in River’s pocket. Was the fruit of a real-live op.
If viewing its contents was crossing a line, River was ready to cross it.
At Max’s, the coffee was bad and the papers dull. Robert Hobden leafed through
‘… has yet claimed responsibility, and nor has anyone appeared onscreen other than the young man pictured, but according to an anonymous post that appeared on the BBC’s current affairs blog at four o’clock this morning, the young man you’re watching is to be executed within forty-eight hours …’
Max said, ‘Do you believe this shit?’
The customer said, ‘They’re monsters. Plain monsters. They want shooting, the lot of them.’
But Hobden was barely hearing it.
And here it was. Breaking surface.
Max said again, ‘Do you believe this?’
But Hobden was back at his table, gathering up keys, mobile, wallet, pen and notebook; tucking everything into his bag, except the newspapers.
Those, he left where they lay.
It wasn’t long after nine. A watery sunshine spilt over London; a hint of good weather to come, if you were in an optimistic mood.
On a large white building near Regent’s Park, it fell like a promise that this was as good as things might get.
Diana Taverner had a top-floor office. Once she’d enjoyed an expensive view, but post-7/7, senior staff had been moved away from external walls, and her only window now was the large pane of glass through which she could keep an eye on her team, and through which they in their turn could cast glances her way, keeping an eye on her keeping an eye on them. There were no windows on the hub either, but the light that rained on it was gentle and blue and, according to some report or other—it would be on file; labelled and archived and retrievable on request—was the closest electricity could come to natural sunlight.
Taverner approved. She didn’t begrudge a younger generation the prizes her own had won for them. There was no sense fighting the same battles twice.
Her apprenticeship had been served in the fag-end of the Cold War, and it sometimes felt like that was the easy part. The Service had a long and honourable tradition of women dying behind enemy lines, but was less enthusiastic about placing them behind important desks. Taverner—Lady Di everywhere but to her face—had done her best to shake that particular tree, and if she’d been told ten years ago that a woman would be running the Service within the decade, she’d have assumed she’d be the woman in question.
History, though, had a way of throwing spanners in every direction. With Charles Partner’s death had come a feeling that new winds were blowing down the Service’s corridors; that a fresh outlook was required. ‘Troubled times’ was the recurring phrase. A safe pair of hands was needed, which turned out to belong to Ingrid Tearney. The fact that Tearney was a woman would have been a soothing balm to Taverner, if it hadn’t been a severe irritant instead.
