Chapman had been Head Dog, long before Louisa’s time, and he’d left under a cloud whose rain had washed him up here: a third-rate agency specialising in evicting troublesome tenants, serving unwanted papers, and—Bad Sam’s own forte—finding runaways. The image on the web was of a shabby office resembling a minicab operation, but she supposed its low-rent appearance might play in its favour: if someone was lost among the rackety arcades, threadbare hostels and thrift-shop doorways of the city, this was the right sort of place to start looking. But anyway, they weren’t here to evaluate Elite Enquiries’ market position. They were here for Bad Sam.
“Okay,” Lamb had said. “Let’s bring him in.”
“On whose authority?” Louisa asked.
“I wasn’t suggesting you stuff him in the back of a van,” Lamb said. “Just ask him nicely.”
“And if he refuses?”
“Stuff him in the back of a van,” said Lamb.
“We haven’t got a van,” Shirley pointed out.
Lamb looked at Marcus.
“What? It’s not a van.”
But mere statement of fact wilted in the face of Lamb’s indifference.
So here they were, round the side of the church in Marcus’s suburban-warrior vehicle, the pair of them rendered featureless by its smoked glass windscreen. Marcus wore an earpiece, waiting for word from Slough House while they monitored the tube station entrance, its irregular heartbeat skew-whiffed by the drizzle: dribs and drabs of passengers scurrying in; larger groups reluctantly leaving every three minutes or so.
The pattering on the car roof sounded like mice changing places.
“I hope Ho doesn’t fuck up,” Marcus said at last.
“It’s computer stuff. He knows what he’s doing,” Louisa said.
“Maybe so, but he’s a little prick. And I hate relying on a little prick to get the job done.”
“Yeah, tell me about it,” said Louisa.
They didn’t know Chapman would be coming from the tube. They knew he was out because they’d called his office, but that was the extent of their knowledge: that he wasn’t in his office. It was, as neither had yet said out loud, a pretty half-arsed basis on which to start a surveillance, but it was all they had to go on until Ho came up with the goods. Meanwhile, Chapman might appear from the tube station; he might swoosh past in a taxi; he might be wandering up the road from the other direction. But there were only two of them, and neither of them wanted to get wet, so here they were.
Marcus said, “You’re pissed off with him, aren’t you?”
“With who?” Louisa said, though she knew who he meant.
“With Cartwright.”
“Why would I be?”
“’Cause he didn’t tell you he’s alive.”
“I’m not his keeper. He wants to go haring off on a wild goose chase, that’s his look-out.”
“You’d have had his back, though. If he’d asked.”
“We have a drink once in a while. We’re not Batman and Robin. We’re not even you and Shirley. You’re more of a team than me and Cartwright.”
Marcus shrugged. “Shirley’s my bro. But she can be hard work.”
“I didn’t want to be the one to say it,” Louisa said.
“River, though, he could have picked up a phone.”
“He’s in joe country,” she said. “Not on a city break.”
Marcus was about to reply, but his earpiece squawked in time to stop him.
Back in Slough House, Roderick Ho was sandwiched between monitors, a pair angled inwards so his face was washed in their glow. Some people—cowards—thought it was dangerous, getting too close to your screens. But they were the kind getting left behind by history, unless they were being abandoned by the future: Ho didn’t care which, those fools were fucked either way.
On one of his screens was a satellite map of South London, on a scale that made it look like a circuitry diagram. On the other was a magnified portion of the same map, its focus an unremarkable alleyway half a mile south of the Thames. If Ho hovered his cursor over it, the legend Elite Enquiries would appear, along with its post code and a link to “further information.” The amount of data broadband delivered, half a spook’s job was done for him, right there.
Course, if you wanted the rest sorted out, you looked to your Bonds, your Solos, your Hos.
Earlier, he’d jacked into the Park’s tracking system and put the finger on Sam Chapman’s mobile, “putting the finger” being, he had decided, a cool way of describing tagging. Kim—his girlfriend—liked hearing about this stuff, how Roddy slipped in and out of systems like a cyber-ghost. The only problem was, Chapman’s mobile wasn’t showing up, which might mean he’d deliberately gone dark, and removed his phone’s battery, or just that he was out of reach: in one of the capital’s grey areas, where the signal fizzled to a damp wick.
“Tag him, find him, bring him in,” had been Lamb’s instructions.
Sometimes, Ho wished he was like the rest of the Slough House crew. Dumb muscle got the easy jobs.
