Ho pulled Black’s personnel files, which had been downgraded since he quit, but remained live—in direct opposition to Black’s current status, though Ho didn’t say this aloud. He hadn’t liked Black, but still: they were all slow horses, which seemed to count for something this morning.
‘Is it really that simple to check our records?’
‘Can you see ours that easily?’
‘No,’ he replied to the first question, and ‘Yes’ to the second. If it was that easy, anyone could do it. But for Ho himself, yes, it was a piece of cake.
‘I thought they switched the settings regularly.’
‘They do.’
But since Ho had hacked the security settings rather than the database itself, and left himself a trapdoor, it didn’t matter how often they changed the codes. It was like they fitted new locks every month, but left the door hanging open.
He said: ‘Alan Black. Here we go. He worked embassy surveillance mostly.’
‘Cushy gig.’
‘Any undercover?’
‘Give me a sec!’
‘Sorry.’
‘Take your time.’
‘It’s just, we got the impression you were hot shit.’
Ho glanced up from his laptop to find three pairs of eyes sharing a joke. He said, ‘Yeah, well. Kind of fuck off, all right?’
But it felt sort of cool, all the same. Almost as if they’d called him Clint.
Catherine said, ‘As long as you’re there. How did he end up in Slough House?’
Ho said, ‘He shagged the Venezuelan ambassador’s wife.’
‘It says that?’
‘It jazzes up the language a bit.’
Catherine thought back to Alan Black, who’d lasted six months at Slough House. She didn’t have too clear a memory of him, beyond his slow-burn frustration at having been dead-ended, but that was true of all of them, except maybe Struan Loy. And herself, of course. He’d been overweight, average height, average looks—average personality, really. She couldn’t picture him as a successful adulterer. On the other hand, he hadn’t actually jacked it in; he’d been recruited by Taverner for her deep-cover op. So he’d obviously had something going for him.
Not that it had worked out happily in the end.
‘Okay, here it is.’ Ho looked up. ‘He was holding paper on the name Dermot Radcliffe. Full-dress cover.’
‘If he was working surveillance, why’d he need false ID?’
‘Surveillance can be up close and personal,’ Catherine said.
‘Yeah, tell that to the Venezuelan ambassador.’
Catherine ignored that. ‘And working the embassy crowd, you’d be expected to have papers. You’re on foreign soil, after all.’
‘Best not to use your own name when you’re on the job.’
‘Are you two going to giggle about this all morning?’
‘Sorry.’
Ho said, ‘Okay, we have plastic. We have an account number.’
‘But are they still live?’
Catherine said, ‘Like I say, legends don’t die. They don’t get wiped off the books. If he had any nous, he’d have kept the plastic and all the rest when he left the Park. As a failsafe.’
‘In case he ever needed to be somebody else, you mean.’
‘Or needed to remember what it was like being him,’ Catherine said.
‘Let’s check out Mr Radcliffe’s credit rating, shall we?’ Ho said, his fingers busy on his keyboard.
The voice sliced through the dark.
He knew whose it was. He just didn’t believe it.
He didn’t want to.
Hassan was emptying out. The open mic slot in his head had closed down; its spotlight faded to grey. In its place was darkness, and engine noise, and the vibrations of this metal coffin he’d been folded into.
He wasn’t sure he could. Choices were made by other people. Hassan Ahmed no longer had will or ability, and was growing smaller by the minute. Soon there’d be nothing of him left. It would be a relief.
But like it or not, he was being dragged back into the light.
He didn’t. He couldn’t. He resisted.
But from deep in his darkness, he wondered:
There was something different about Catherine Standish. This was what Louisa Guy decided as she watched Ho swing through the virtual jungle, a Second Life Tarzan. There was something different about all of them, probably, but it was Catherine who’d assumed the leader’s role. She’d been the Slough House ghost; shifting papers, tutting about mess, always there but virtually absent. A recovering alcoholic, because this was somehow common knowledge. Something about her spoke of loss; of an element missing. A blown bulb. But it had never before occurred to Louisa to wonder what Catherine must have been like at full wattage. She’d been Charles Partner’s PA, hadn’t she? Christ, that made her Miss Moneypenny.
Louisa should keep her mind on the job, though. Lamb thought they were useless. If they were, Hassan would die. If they weren’t, he might die anyway. The odds weren’t good.
