“I’m doing the actual surveillance.”
“Oh, yeah, forgot. Men don’t multitask.” She glanced at her notes. “Okay, so. Eleven no matches of any kind. Seven around eighty per cent sure, all the possibles being middle-ranking business types with no security flags. Three tripped warning bells, they’re probably FSB. That foursome who turned up in a van? They’re a string quartet from Bath. The woman with the squint is a quite well-regarded poet, and you should let Lamb know that, because I suspect Lamb’s really interested in poetry. As for the mystery man, and he’s my favourite, the one you only got the back of the head of? I’ve got slightly more than twenty-three hundred possible matches.” She slapped the notes down on his desk. “See, the thing is, you need a recognisable characteristic or two before the program does its stuff. Just having a head does not count.”
“He was avoiding the cameras.”
“You think?”
“It’s pretty obv—”
“Don’t send any more. It’s boring, and the program keeps freezing.”
Lech wandered in. “This the Russian Embassy gig?”
“Yeah, wonderboy here had me putting names to faces.”
“I’d have told wonderboy to get stuffed.” He noted the Pringles tube and the crumpled chocolate wrapper. “Which he seems to have done anyway.”
“Sod off, hashtag features.”
“That was my plan,” said Louisa. “But Lamb wanted a list.”
“He always wants lists. I think he’s smoking them.” Lech glanced at the cardboard shroud around the window by his desk, and said to Roddy, “I see you’ve installed air-con.”
“Yeah, well, I see you’ve installed . . .”
They waited.
“。 . . Stupid marks on your face.”
“I can’t work out,” said Louisa, “whether he’s better at repartee or driving.”
Recalling Roddy’s driving talents, Lech rubbed a bruise or two before picking up the topmost of Louisa’s printouts. “They have these three or four times a year,” he said. “They bring in some lecturer from the homeland, who bores the locals rigid for a couple of hours, then everyone gets pissed. Taverner has half the hub watching the footage in case any celebrities show.”
“Does that ever happen?”
“Molly Doran got excited once. Some living waxwork turned up, she said he’d debriefed Philby back in the day.”
“She’s collecting the set. One hundred spooks you must see before you die.”
“Before they die, more like.”
Roddy said, “You think that’s Lamb’s plan?”
They looked at him.
He said, “All these old spooks.” He raised one eyebrow, or thought he did. He was actually raising both. “You think Lamb’s bumping them off?”
Louisa approached Roddy’s desk, leaned across it and stage-whispered into his ear. “You’re not supposed to know about that.”
“。 . . Okay.”
“Best to pretend you never said it. You with me, Rodster?”
“。 . . I’m with you.”
She patted his cheek softly. “Smart boy.”
“。 . . Uh, Louisa?”
“What?”
He nodded at the nearest monitor. “Black car.”
Louisa looked at the screen, looked at Roddy, looked back at the screen, and then looked at Roddy again. “Keep up the good work,” she told him, and left the office, followed by Lech.
Home again, Whelan found the landline handset winking at him, but when he checked it was a cold caller, concerned about his financial arrangements. It was nice that someone cared. He pressed delete anyway.
After a protracted vigil in Briefing Two—an antiseptic chamber whose chief feature was the number of available sockets: they studded the walls, and lurked beneath little trapdoors in the floor—he’d been startled by the almost noiseless appearance of, inevitably, Josie-from-the-hub. I tried not to have favourites. It didn’t make for a comfortable working environment. He knew all the horror stories about male bosses and their PAs but it hadn’t been like that; he’d been aware Josie had a soft spot for him, but he’d never acted upon it. He was old enough to be her . . . Not that that mattered. He’d been, still was, married.
“Lord, Josie, my dear, how are you—”
And then that excruciating moment when he’d leaned for a hug, and she’d pulled back to the same degree.