She sighed. ‘He’s a man of habit. He has coffee at the same café every morning. First thing he does is empty the contents of his pocket on to the table. Which includes his memory stick.’ She waited, but he said nothing. ‘I caused a fuss by spilling some coffee. When he went off to fetch a cloth, I swapped his stick for a dummy and loaded it on to my own laptop. Later, I swapped it back.’ She paused. ‘The laptop’s the one you delivered to Regent’s Park.’
‘Did you look at the files?’
‘Of course not.’
There were ways of telling when someone was lying. The direction their eyes were pointing, for instance: left for memory, right for creation. But Sid’s eyes were directed straight at River’s. Which meant she wasn’t lying, or else was very good at it. They’d done the same courses, after all.
‘Okay, so—’
But she’d gone.
He shook his head, then returned to his laptop. It only took five minutes to confirm that all the files were the same; eternal strings of figures mapping one endless circle. Unless Hobden had taken pi places it had never been before, it seemed unlikely that this was what Regent’s Park had been after. So either Hobden was the kind of total paranoid who flaunted dummy back-ups of his real secrets, or Sid herself had pulled a fast one.
Or something else was going on, and River was in the dark.
That sounded plausible. That sounded entirely likely … Abandoning his sandwich, he headed back to Slough House.
Where there was communal activity again. When he reached the landing, Louisa Guy and Min Harper called him into Ho’s office, as if waiting for someone else to share the news with. ‘They’re showing a new film.’
‘A new one?’
‘A new one.’ This was Ho, in front of his monitor. The others were gathered around him, Sid among them. ‘The first was a loop,’ Ho said. There was no definite inflection to these words, but everyone caught the hidden meaning: the first had been a loop, which he had noticed and nobody else had. ‘Now there’s a new one. Also a loop.’
Stepping to one side, looking round the bodies clustered in his way, River got his first look at the screen.
‘And,’ Struan Loy said, ‘you’re not gunna believe this.’
But River was already believing it, because there it was on Ho’s monitor: same set-up as before, except this time the kid wasn’t wearing a hood. His face was plain to see, and it wasn’t a face they’d been expecting.
Somebody said, ‘It doesn’t mean it’s not Islamists. Who’ve got him, I mean.’
‘Depends on who the kid is.’
‘He’ll turn out to be a squaddie—a Muslim squaddie. Exactly the kind of victim they’re looking for.’
Sid Baker said, ‘He doesn’t look like a squaddie.’
He didn’t, it was true. He looked soft and dreamy. And scared stiff, and even a squaddie can be scared stiff, but it went deeper than that: his features had that untested gloss which is one of the first things squaddies get kicked out of them.
‘That’s why they had him wearing gloves,’ Sid said. ‘They were hiding his colour.’
‘How long’s the loop?’ River asked.
‘Twelve minutes. Twelve and a bit,’ Ho said.
‘Why are they doing that?’
‘A continuous feed would be easier to trace. Less impossible, anyway.’ Ho sighed. He liked people knowing he knew this stuff, but hated having to explain it. ‘You’d get little breaks in transmission every time they switched computer. If their network’s limited to a set number of proxies, that might give us an edge in tracking them.’
‘What’s that in the background?’ Catherine Standish said. River hadn’t noticed she was there.
‘What’s what?’
‘Over his left shoulder.’
Something leant against the wall a couple of yards behind the boy.
‘A piece of wood.’
‘A handle of some sort.’
‘I think it’s an axe,’ Catherine said.
‘Jesus …’
Loy was still worrying away at the kid’s identity. ‘If he’s not a squaddie, maybe he’s a name. Wonder who his parents are?’
‘Anyone missing on the diplomats’ list?’
‘Well, there might be. But it’s not like we’ll be told. Besides, if the kid was a name, the kidnappers would have said. Ups the box-office value.’
Sid said, ‘Okay, say he’s not a squaddie or an embassy snatch. Who is he?’
‘One of their own who they think’s been turned.’
‘Or they caught him with a tart.’
‘Or a half of bitter and a jazz mag,’ Loy put in.
River said, ‘Unless he’s not.’
‘Meaning what?’
‘Unless he’s some random kid who happened to be the right colour.’
Ho said, ‘He look the right colour to you?’
Sid said, ‘Depends on who’s got him. That’s your point, right?’
River nodded.
Ho said, ‘Didn’t we cover this? Swords of the Desert, Wrath of Allah. Doesn’t matter what they call themselves. They’re Al Qaeda.’
‘Unless they’re not,’ River said.
Without fanfare, Jackson Lamb appeared among them.
He stared at the screen a full fifteen seconds, then said, ‘He’s Pakistani.’
Sid said, ‘Or Indian or Sri Lankan or—’
Lamb said, flatly, ‘He’s Pakistani.’
‘Do we have a name?’ River asked.
‘Fuck should I know? But it’s not Al Qaeda’s got him, is it?’
That he’d been about to say something similar didn’t stop River from countering this. ‘Doesn’t rule it out.’
