So on the train, while the grey winter landscape slipped into darkness, before the train itself disappeared beneath the sea, he’d wondered how big a hole he’d dug himself into. Travelling on someone else’s passport? Not great, though he could plausibly claim cover; he was a member of the security services, even if the claim would ring hollow to anyone who’d heard of Slough House. Travelling on someone else’s passport, though, who was recently dead, shot twice in the face? That might take more confidence than he’d faked for the guard.
In the end, he’d fallen asleep, and only woke when the train was pulling into London: it was early evening, and the weather still foul. With no luggage to fuss with River was first on the platform, joining the throng milling around St. Pancras in the uncoordinated way of crowds everywhere. The tube, he decided. He’d head for the tube. That would be the best way of shaking them off.
That there was someone to shake off, he had no doubt. He might not be in joe country any more, but he was definitely back on Spook Street.
Emma Flyte spotted him stepping off the train. Youngish, fairish, reasonably athletic-looking, no luggage: there’d be other candidates, but she felt confident this was the one. She had her phone to her ear, which was as good as a disguise, most places. She said to Devon Welles, “I think that’s him.”
“Gotcha,” Welles said. He’d just arrived back in the city when Emma had called, and was now on a stool outside a sushi joint. “Ready to play?”
“Soon as you like,” she suggested, slipping her phone into her pocket. Some jobs, you needed both hands free.
Sleep had left him spacey, off-kilter, and his unexpected trip to France felt distant already. More immediate were last night’s events—the weight of the gun as he’d obliterated dead Adam Lockhead’s face. The red smears on the wall and the top of the staircase; traces his grandfather had left on his way down to the kitchen, where River had found him on arrival.
But River was him now, or was using his passport. Adam Lockhead; also Bertrand, son of Frank. A French/American hybrid, using an English cover. He wondered what had happened at Les Arbres, and how much his grandfather knew about it; wondered, too, whether the blood on his grandfather’s hands went deeper than smears left on the furnishings. River had always known the O.B. was a spook, but some parts of the picture he’d purposefully left vague. His grandfather must have been responsible for many deaths: by omission, by sacrifice, by deliberate targeting. But he wondered how many times the O.B. had actually pulled a trigger. It would be ironic—though he wasn’t sure “ironic” was the word—if the only death David Cartwright had brought about with his own stained hands had been committed while no longer in his own right mind.
He was out of St. Pancras now, heading for the underground platforms it shared with King’s Cross. River could never be here without remembering the morning he’d crashed this place: a fucked-up training exercise during rush hour, a misidentified “terrorist”—
Then there was someone too close behind him, and before he could turn, a rock-like hand had taken a grip on his upper arm.
“Adam Lockhead?”
It was a man who’d taken hold but a woman who was speaking; a strikingly attractive blonde.
“I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else,” he said.
“Well, we’ll soon find out, won’t we?”
In her hand she somehow had his passport—there were posters on every surface warning you to watch out for pickpockets, but none of them suggested that professional dips would get quite so in-your-face about it.
“No, that’s you,” she said, opening it. “Adam Lockhead. Or did you mishear?”
River found himself being steered out to the street, the three of them walking abreast like colleagues heading to a meeting. “I’m a member of the security services,” he said as they stepped into the grey evening.
“Excellent,” she said. “Because that gives me so much jurisdiction you wouldn’t believe it.”
