“I can picture it,” said Louisa. “You and Mr. Lightning. On the dark side.”
Roddy could tell she was doing just that. She had a turned-on gleam in her eyes. “So you’re Team Rodster,” he said. “Good to know.”
“Whereas me,” said Lech, “I have to say, I’m sceptical.”
“Yeah, whatever.”
“But then, I’ve seen Mr. Lightning in action.”
“He’s got moves,” Roddy said. “Makes a good wingman. But it’s like Goose and Maverick. Only one Top Gun.”
“That is a good way of putting it,” said Louisa. “A really good way.” She touched her lips with her index finger. “Wonder how we could arrange for the pair of you to go head to head?”
“Can’t do it in real time,” Lech said, giving it thought. “They’d shit bricks on the hub if we roped in Mr. Lightning just to watch him trounce Roddy.”
“But maybe we could devise something,” Louisa said. “Come up with some insanely difficult piece of data for them both to retrieve—”
“What, and time them doing it? That’s brilliant.”
“Just need to work out what . . .”
Lech screwed his face up, trying to recapture a distant memory. “Here’s something,” he said. “Friend was telling me about a KGB colonel he saw once, a woman, in Bonn. This would have been . . . ’88 or thereabouts.”
“Be realistic,” said Louisa. “We want difficult, not impossible.”
Lech shrugged. “Sounds like you’re worried you’re backing Goose.”
“No, I just meant—”
Roddy said, “That’s it? A KGB colonel in Bonn?”
“At a meeting. David Cartwright was there. 1988.”
Roddy Ho cracked his knuckles. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “Start your watches.”
A quarter of an hour later Lech and Louisa were back upstairs with a printout, comparing the photograph of Colonel Alexa Chaikovskaya with one of Sophie de Greer they’d downloaded from the Guardian.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Don’t know? Come on. They’re practically identical.”
“Lots of people look practically identical.”
“And de Greer’s history’s a blank. She could be a plant.”
“You’ve sold yourself on this, haven’t you? Yes, okay, they look alike. Mother-and-daughter alike. But what are the odds? That a KGB colonel’s daughter is being used in some kind of undercover play decades after mum was on the scene?”
Lech said, “David Cartwright was a big wheel at the Park, and remind me what his grandson ended up doing?”
Louisa said nothing.
“Sometimes it’s a family business.”
“Okay,” she said. “But you can’t know for sure this de Greer woman’s a blank page. Just because a newspaper comes up short on intel.”
“Well I suppose I could ask Mr. Lightning to check her out.”
“LOL.”
“But either way, you have to admit. Not necessarily that there’s something dodgy going on. But that there is a distinct possibility that there’s something dodgy going on. Back on the hub—”
“Don’t.”
“Back on the hub, we’d follow this through. It’s way over the credibility line.”
“So take it to the hub.”
“It may be over the credibility line, but I’m not.”
“Lamb’ll listen.”
“Lamb can take a fucking walk. Anyway, what would he do? He’d send us out to watch her. You and me.”
“You’re very sure of that.”
“Well he’s hardly going to send Shirley and Ho.”
“You’ve not known him as long as I have. Anyway, aren’t you forgetting someone?”
“Who, Ash? She’s not been here ten minutes. He had me chained to my desk the first two months.”
“Which would be all the reason he needs.” Louisa looked at the two photos again, side by side. Mother and daughter? Caught cold, she might even have thought them the same woman. Colonel Alexa Chaikovskaya was uniformed, her hair tied back, her expression severe; Doctor Sophie de Greer wore glasses, and had softer hair, but the eyes were the same. They might have been options on a dating site: here’s me as stern librarian; me as the Red beside your bed. God, where did that come from? She should get out more. She said to Lech, “So what are you suggesting? That I give up my evening and spend it watching your supposed ringer, waiting for her handler to make contact?”