Spook Street полностью

“So anyway, he started rambling on, telling war stories. I got the feeling he liked playing the old sage, you know? The grizzled warrior, telling fireside tales.” Chapman paused to adjust the bag of ice. “So there was a fair bit of that. But towards the end, he was pretty far gone on the brandy, and making less sense, except there was one thing he repeated, said it twice. ‘Wish I’d never heard of the damn thing,’ he said. I asked what damn thing he meant. First time, he didn’t reply. But the second time . . . ”

Bad Sam paused again, moulding the icepack over his knee.

“For Christ’s sake,” said Lamb. “Stop milking it.”

“Project Cuckoo,” Sam said. “He said he wished he’d never heard of Project Cuckoo.”

“Cuckoo?” the O.B. said. “That what this is about? Project Cuckoo?”

Moira Tregorian said, “I’m sorry, I don’t . . . ”

The old man shook his head. Last thing he’d been expecting. But there it was. Things came back to bite you. There was a saying, wasn’t there, as easy as closing a door, meaning nothing simpler. Door shut, job done. He was sure there was a saying something like that. But what it didn’t mention was making sure you were on the right side of the door when it closed.

He didn’t know where he was. It seemed to him he’d climbed some stairs, but this wasn’t like any part of the upstairs he was used to. There should be more light—all the best rooms in the Park had views—but this was one of the secretarial chambers, judging by its size. Bit of a cheek, stuffing him in this poky hole and expecting him to sing for his supper, but he supposed there was something to be said for it, telling stories in the dark. Hadn’t he done this, time without number; telling stories to . . . Young lad. Keen as mustard. Found him in the garden, his scabby knees showing. Name would come back.

Cloudy as the present was, though, some things you didn’t forget.

He said, “Project Cuckoo. Right you are, then. You taking this down?”

And his voice sounded stronger now, because he knew which side of the door he needed to be on.

All he had to do was step through it, and close it behind him.

Cuckoo.

JK Coe said, “There was a Soviet village, or there were rumours, anyway. It might have been a legend. There were a lot of them about.”

In the gloomy light of Lamb’s room Coe might have been Marley’s ghost, draped in invisible chains. There was nowhere to sit, so he leaned against the door. Hanging on a hook was a raincoat—it could only be Lamb’s—from which ancient odours crept, released by Coe’s pressure; a mummy’s tomb of long-dead fragrances: cigarettes and whisky, and bus station waiting rooms, and damp desperate mornings, and death. Coe wondered if it was just him, or whether the others could smell it too: Lamb himself, and Catherine Standish, and the man called Chapman.

“Any time you feel like drifting off into dreamland,” Lamb suggested, “feel free to use my arse as a pillow.”

“Give him a chance, Jackson,” said the woman in the dark.

“I say Soviet, but the point was, it was anything but. What they did was create an American town, picket fence, Main Street and all, way out in Georgia, or wherever. Just like there’s an Afghan village on the Northumberland moors, in the military zone, except that’s for strategic purposes. But this was for people to live in. Be born in and live in. Learning American English, and watching American TV. Spending American dollars. A sort of finishing school. That was Project Cuckoo, USSR-style. They’d have a different name for it. But it was a means of breeding a perfect simulacrum of the enemy, so you could learn the way he thought, the way he dreamed, the way . . . well, everything.”

Coe had been Psych Eval, in what felt like a different life. One of the modules had been in Black Ops. That was a favourite with everyone, because you got to hear about the spooky shit. As in, this was the kind of shit spooks got up to once. But also as in, there was some seriously spooky shit out there.

“The theory was, if you wanted to plant a sleeper, that was the right kind of nursery to grow them in.”

Lamb growled, but it wasn’t clear if this was an objection, an agreement, or a digestive necessity.

“And do you think it ever really happened?” Catherine asked.

“There was another story,” Coe said, “that somewhere near the Red Sea, back in the sixties, there was a perfect replica of the White House. And the Sovs had someone living there for years, with a full staff, all English-speaking, and the point of him was, they’d initiate crises, and monitor his responses, and this would give them an insight into how the actual President might react to a given situation.”

“And do you think,” and it was Chapman this time, “that that ever really happened?”

“No,” said Coe. “You’d have to be insane to base strategic policy on how a puppet reacted to a fake crisis.”

“Yeah, that was the thing about the Cold War,” said Lamb. “Everyone kept their heads.”