Spook Street полностью

And if he said as much to Kim, she’d laugh, pointing out that the Rodster was a lot of things, but dumb wasn’t ever going to be one of them. Except he couldn’t say that to Kim, because he hadn’t actually told her he was a spook—that was one of the first things they taught you, that it was the secret service. So he’d made it sound like he was private sector, working out of Canary Wharf, those huge glass canyons reeking of money and power: plenty of scope for a dude like the Rod-man, and really, was it such a bad idea? The crew here got called the slow horses, and Roddy Ho felt tainted by association. It’d break Lamb’s heart if he upped sticks, obviously, but sometimes a man had to—

A red dot pulsed into life.

Behind him, Shirley said, “What’s that? Is that Bad Sam?”

Patrice spotted the target the moment he emerged onto the pavement. The key to tailing someone was knowing where they’d end up: for two hours, he’d been sitting by a window in the public library, nursing an Americano from the coffee concession, and blending with the computer users, the students, the people with nowhere to go. It was a handy spot, shielded by scaffolding, passing traffic and a general air of gloom, but all he had to do was step outside for Chapman to see him and take flight. To bring a pigeon down, first you set it on the wing. He’d learned to shoot in the fields round Les Arbres, and appreciated a moving target.

Thinking these thoughts he was already on his feet, skirting the coffee booth, trotting down the risers to the exit ramp—

“Watch where you’re going!”

He tried to step past, but the newcomer, a burly man in a mobile fug of stale beer, caught his jacket.

“I said watch where you’re going—”

Patrice put him on the floor relatively gently, and it only took half a second, but he was in full view of the issue desk behind him.

“Hey! Hey! You can’t do that!”

He could, and had, but he didn’t want to hang around to discuss his abilities. Stepping over one nuisance, ignoring the other, he moved towards the doors, which obligingly parted, but not before someone had appeared between them, coming in from the street. He was wide and black and uniformed, and his face clouded suspiciously when he saw the man on the floor, and heard the growing commotion.

There was, thought Patrice, always something.

Shirley said, “Is that Bad Sam?”

“It’s his mobile,” Ho said.

“So it’s Bad Sam.”

“Unless someone else has his mobile.”

“So it’s Bad Sam.”

Ho snorted, but yeah, it was Bad Sam. Who let somebody else have their mobile?

Shirley said into her own phone, “He’s heading down the High Street. If he’s going to his office, he’ll take the one, two, third on his left. It’s an alleyway.”

“One, two, third?” Marcus said.

“I was counting. Can you see him?”

“Wait a sec.”

A muffled voice was Louisa, talking to Marcus.

Marcus said, “Yeah, we have him. Over the road.”

“There, that was easy, wasn’t it?” Shirley said. “Pick him up and bring him in.”

“You’re the boss all of a sudden?”

“You’re gunna let him go just ’cause I said to pick him up?”

Marcus had a brilliant answer for that, but before he could deliver it Louisa was tapping his arm.

“He’s turning off,” she told him, at the exact moment Roderick Ho said the same to Shirley.

Crossing the junction Bad Sam heard a crash, something heavy going through glass, and changed plans on the instant: there were always noises somewhere, and not all of them had to do with him, but he’d be an idiot to ignore the possibility, with those itchy feelings still scratching at his spine. So he slipped off the High Street before his turning, and headed down a narrow alley, where the ground was mushy with fag ends and the air smokily visible. Some of this was pumping from a vent set in the wall next to an open door, against which an olive-skinned man in a kitchen-worker’s smock was smoking a joint.

“Yo, Sam,” he said. “Sammity Sam.”

He always said that, and it always wasn’t funny. But Bad Sam always laughed, because you never knew when you might need a favour.

“Hey, Miguel,” he said. “You didn’t see me, and I wasn’t here, right?”

“Never here,” Miguel agreed as Bad Sam slipped past him, and through the kitchen, and out of the café’s front door onto another street entirely.

Here’s a thing about men in uniform: they go through a window as easily as any other kind.

Turned out it was only a traffic warden, but that wasn’t Patrice’s fault. And it made no difference to the way the glass rained down around him, the fingernail-sized nuggets of it used in bus-stops and windscreens. Libraries, too, were prepared for sudden impact. Probably wise, given the cuts.

But there was no time to dwell on that, because people would have phones out soon, and then there’d be more uniforms coming, the serious kind. In the two-second grace that follows unexpected violence, Patrice turned his collar up and strode through the obliging doors to see, on the other side of the road, the target turning down an alleyway not his own.