She favoured park benches for off-the-books meetings—park benches or shady riverside stretches she was confident were unmonitored, but it was good to mix it up. So she’d told Claude to get out of the car and walk, to wait on the north-east corner of Oxford Circus. There were always crowds there, a good spot to check him for back-up. Maybe she didn’t have field savvy—running Ops was a desk job—but you didn’t have to know how to strip an engine to drive a car, and Claude Whelan had no clue how near she was until she put a hand on his elbow—almost.
He turned at the last moment. “Diana.”
“Sorry about the cloak and dagger.”
“No you’re not.”
“But some conversations are best kept out of the headlines.”
He was alone. His driver was still in a traffic jam, and tensions had to be running high before First Desk warranted an armed escort.
“What are you up to, Diana?”
“I want to catch a bus. This one will do.”
A bus ride up Oxford Street was a lengthy business at the best of times, and late morning wasn’t one of them. She paid cash, so there’d be no Oyster-card record, and they sat upstairs at the back like teenagers, except they weren’t texting. Whelan wore an amused expression, to cover whatever forebodings Taverner’s phone call had summoned, and she allowed him a minute to get used to where they were, assuming correctly that he hadn’t been on a bus in some time.
He’d noticed the flickering monitor on the lower deck. “You do realise there’s CCTV.”
“Which will be wiped tomorrow morning, provided no intervening event requires otherwise.”
“Well, let’s try to make sure that doesn’t happen. What’s going on, Diana?”
“We have a problem, Claude.”
“We do?”
“Well, technically you do. It seems you’ve supplied misinformation to a COBRA meeting. I don’t think that counts as actual treason, but—”
“Misinformation?”
“—it almost certainly amounts to dereliction of duty, and not in a small way, either. How long have you been in office now?”
“How long have I—Diana, what’s going on?”
“I’m just wondering if it’s a record, that’s all. Shortest serving First Desk.”
He said, “One of two things is going to happen. Either you start making sense, or I’m getting off this bus. And if it’s the latter, then the moment I’m back at the Park, I’ll be issuing a suspension notice. Have I made myself clear?”
“Crystal. What did you tell them about Winters?”
“You know what I told them about Winters. That we have his passport, for God’s sake. And that we’re ninety-nine per cent certain it’s the genuine article, which means it’s the key to unlocking everything else about him.”
“Yes, you see, that’s rather the problem.”
“What is?”
“Robert Winters’s passport.”
A bus going in the opposite direction jerked to a halt, and for a moment Whelan was looking past Taverner at another pair, another man and woman, sitting on a different top deck, heading somewhere else. Whoever they were—clandestine lovers, bored professionals—for a second he wished he were part of their conspiracy instead of this one. “What are you saying?” He hissed the words, his vehemence causing the nearest other passenger, a man four seats in front, to turn.
“Oh darling, don’t be like that,” Diana cooed, and the man smirked as he looked away. Lovers’ spat. Well, sometimes they did.
It occurred to Whelan that one reason she wanted this conversation to take place on a bus was to lessen the possibility he might strangle her.
She said, “Robert Winters—he’s one of ours.”
“He was an
“Not exactly.”
“An asset? Jesus—”
“Not an asset either. He’s what they call a cold body. You’re familiar with the term?”
“Stop spinning this out. Tell me what you know.”
So she did.
This triangulation shit, the way Marcus explained it, was pretty basic, and had Shirley never attended a standard training session? She probably had a head cold that day, she explained. Since “head cold” was accepted code for “cocaine hangover,” Marcus acknowledged the likelihood of this. So anyway, this triangulation shit:
“You’ve got two pieces of information, you can draw a straight line between them, no more. You’ve got three—”
“Okay, yeah, I get it.”
“—you can pinpoint—”
“I said I get it, okay?”
“Now you get it. A minute ago you knew nothing.”
“Yeah, well, I remembered.”
Marcus felt like saying more, but there was no sense poking a stick at Shirley when you didn’t need to. Any given day, the odds on her going postal were marginally in favour, and if she’d calmed down lately, that wasn’t—Marcus figured—on account of anything in particular getting better, but just things not getting appreciably worse. Everyone drew a line somewhere. And maybe the AFMs were helping. In fact, now he thought about it, it had been a while since she’d—
“
Okay. Maybe not that long.
He said, “What now?”
“Password’s expired.”
