Slow Horses полностью

But watching Ho, Louisa realized that he wasn’t useless, anyway; that he might be a dick, but he knew his way round a keyboard. And as he pilfered information from the ether, then peered up at the three of them through the thick black frames of his glasses, it occurred to Louisa Guy that she wouldn’t want him turning his hacker’s gaze on to the private corners of her own life and career.

Though of course, he probably already had.

Regent’s Park—the building—was lit up: blue spotlights at ground level cast huge ovals across its façade, drawing attention to the fact that important stuff took place inside. Once upon a time, not many people knew what that was. These days, you could download job application forms from a website adorned with its picture.

Jackson Lamb parked the stolen SUV half on the pavement outside, and waited.

It didn’t take long. The vehicle was surrounded inside quarter of a minute.

‘Could you step out of the car, please, sir?’

There were no weapons in evidence. There didn’t need to be.

‘Sir?’

Lamb wound the window down. He was looking at a youngish man who evidently knew his way around a gym: taut muscles under a charcoal grey suit. A white cord coiled from his left ear to the suit’s lapel.

‘Step out of the car, sir,’ he repeated.

‘Fetch your boss, sonny,’ Lamb said pleasantly, and wound the window back up.

‘He hired a car,’ Ho said.

‘You have got to be kidding.’

‘Straight up. Triple-D Car Hire. Leeds address.’

‘He’s in the field? And he hired a car?’

Catherine said, ‘No. It makes sense.’

It was a measure of their changing relationship that they waited for her thoughts.

‘He’s in the field, sure. But let’s not forget, this wasn’t an op with a future. The boy was going to be rescued. Black didn’t have to worry about covering his tracks.’

‘So hiring a car was the simplest thing to do.’

‘Quite.’

‘Anyone got a phone?’ Ho asked.

‘Lamb made us trash them.’

‘There’s a payphone by the loos,’ Catherine said. ‘What’s the number?’

She scribbled it down as he read it off the screen; was heading for the phone a moment later.

‘It’s barely dawn. A car hire place’ll be open?’

‘Triple-D gives twenty-four-hour breakdown relief,’ Ho quoted.

‘A kid with a van and a spanner,’ Min reckoned.

‘Tenner says she blows it.’

‘I’ll take that,’ Louisa said.

‘Me too,’ Min added.

Ho looked alarmed. ‘What happened since yesterday? Everyone’s acting strange.’

‘Slough House went live,’ Min told him. ‘She’ll come back with something we can use.’

‘The lady’s got game,’ Louisa said.

James Webb, whose futile mission in life was to dissuade everyone from calling him Spider, was in his office. After Jackson Lamb had dumped him and Nick Duffy on the pavement—after he’d recovered from the shock of having a middle-aged woman point a gun at him: I’ll put a bullet through your foot. That’ll wipe the smirk off your face—they’d made their way back, Duffy barely speaking. Hey, Webb had wanted to tell him. It wasn’t my fault. But here he was anyway, back in his hutch, Duffy having no further use for him.

But then, Webb wasn’t one of Duffy’s Dogs. He’d come through the graduate channel; done his two years’ rotation; attended the seminars, taken the exams. Spent nights on various godforsaken moors, in with harsh weather, and undergone assessment exercises, staging posts on the fast track: arresting a putative suicide bomber outside Tate Modern, and acting as control when River Cartwright had spectacularly failed an exercise of his own. Along the way, he’d been taken under Taverner’s wing; which was why he, not Cartwright, was still in Regent’s Park.

And unlike River, he’d never wanted to be a field agent. Joes were pieces on the board; Webb’s ambition was to be a player at the table. His current role, interviewing graduates—HR, River had scoffed—was a step on the road to being the keeper of secrets, and if there was less glam to it than the streetwork, there was also less weather, less chance of finding out how well those interrogation-resistance lessons stood up in the field, and, theoretically, fewer opportunities for middle-aged women to point a gun at him. Suits and joes was an age-old opposition, but the game had changed in the last ten years, and intelligence was a business like any other. There would always be battlegrounds where things got bloody, but at boardroom level, today’s intelligence wars were fought the way Coke battled Pepsi. And that was a war Webb felt comfortable waging.