Spook Street полностью

“. . . So?”

“So you know he’s somewhere far enough away that I couldn’t have got there and back in the time it took me to turn up at your door. Jesus, Standish. It’s not rocket science.”

“Not for someone with your twisted thought processes,” she conceded.

They sat in silence and stared at each other, as if this were just another phase of a game they’d both been playing for a long long time.

At last she said, “He hung his jacket over a chair. I went through his pockets while he was getting his grandfather settled.”

“That must have brought back memories. Didn’t you use to roll sailors, back in the day?”

She said, “He had a passport. British. Alex Lockhead, no, Adam. Adam Lockhead. And a Eurostar ticket, and some euros.”

Lamb groaned. “Oh, great. The idiot’s gone to France.”

“On someone else’s passport.” Catherine shook her head. “I didn’t think he’d get past border control.”

“Inside Europe? If the passport’s not on a watch-list, he could waltz through wearing falsies and a tutu. Though mind you, having a photo that actually resembles him might raise suspicion.” He sniffed. “Mine makes me look fat.”

“Imagine.”

“So he’s over the channel. But France is a big place. What’s he plan to do, stomp up and down the Champs Élysées, waving his arms in the air?”

“There was a café receipt.”

“Of course there was,” said Lamb.

There was a hold-up somewhere: a faulty traffic light, an accident, or—probably—a stretch of road being dug up, with a knock-on effect spreading ever outward. He’d seen a sign near some roadworks not long ago: two hundred yards of plastic mesh and bollards, not a workman in sight, and a notice reading: “We are currently examining the waterpipes in this area. At times, it will look like no work is being done.” Nothing like getting your alibi in first.

Claude Whelan chuckled, then abruptly stopped. Three days after the Westacres bomb, last thing he needed was a tabloid headline, Intelligence Chief enjoying a private joke. And you never knew when a lens was trained on you, even in the back seat of your smoke-screened official limousine.

He was being driven back from Downing Street. The COBRA session had been long, and last night sleepless; he had ended up in the spare bed, to avoid disturbing Claire. His first COBRA: no wonder he’d been nervous. Nobody had to tell Whelan his elevation had been unexpected. Dame Ingrid Tearney had cast a long shadow, and there were nooks and crannies of the Service still in darkness; after her—as he’d heard it called—over-managed tenure, there’d been an expectation that the mantle would pass back to Ops. After all, Charles Partner, the last head of the Service to have hailed from Operations, had overseen a successful, invigorating era that was looked on as a golden age. Had it been more widely known that he’d spent much of his career in the pay of the Soviets, this afterglow might have been tarnished somewhat; as it was, only his apparent suicide cast a retrospective taint of unreliability over his administration, and since this was ascribed by those not in the know to hidden trauma from his days as an Active, it had subsequently been decided that hands-on experience was a drawback, and Partner’s successors to date had achieved office mostly by dint of managerial cunning. But following Tearney there’d been rumours of impending “reform,” and while the word had long lost any association with notions of improvement, attaching itself instead to cost-cutting, it had nevertheless been mooted that a new direction might be in the offing, and Ops in the ascendancy once more. Diana Taverner would have been the obvious choice. But Tearney, when she went, had gone with the grace of a scuttled supertanker: it had taken ages, it had been very messy, and it left few onlookers with clean feathers. Reform had thus subsided into the usual face-saving reshuffle, and Whelan, recently gonged after twenty years’ service, and very much not associated with the Dame’s doings, had been helicoptered in from across the river: a safe pair of hands.