In the circumstances, she had to admit, weary superiority wasn’t entirely without foundation.
Roddy reached for his energy drink.
“He might have been asleep,” he said.
“Yes,” Catherine agreed. “He certainly wasn’t watching TV or using wifi. But he ordered two bottles of The Balvenie from room service.”
Roddy looked blank.
“It’s a brand of whisky.”
“Yeah, I knew that.”
“The empties weren’t left in his room, and he didn’t take them back to Moscow.” Give her credit, Catherine delivered this information as if it were an important part of a soluble puzzle, and not, as it had appeared to her fifteen minutes previously, random facts plucked from an inconsequential blizzard. “So there’s a chance he met with someone. Because the Balvenie might have been intended as a present.”
“Balvenie?”
They turned. Ashley Khan was hovering on the threshold. She had her coat on, and her bag over her shoulder, but her departure had evidently snagged on the overheard word, so there she was, repeating it in the doorway.
“The Balvenie,” she said again. “That’s Vassily Rasnokov’s brand.”
The drone hovered insolently, and for a short while Diana saw the world from a different perspective—as one of the monitored, one of the watched—and in so doing understood the impulse the ordinary citizen has when confronted with the unceasing intrusions of daily life, “in the interests of security.” So she did what every ordinary citizen does, most often internally but in this case with a kind of slow-motion deliberation: she raised her middle finger, and invited the unseen watchers to go fuck themselves. Then she turned her back on it and put the sim card in her mouth.
The drone rose higher, its buzz-saw whine diminishing, allowing her to hear more noises: a door being forcibly opened; feet coming up a dark staircase. She dropped the mobile and ground it underfoot, and was just swallowing the sim card when the rooftop access door opened, and the first of the Dogs stepped out into cold sunshine.
“One with the car. Three on the stairs.”
“Stairs?” said Lech.
“There’s always stairs,” Louisa told him.
And there were always four Dogs, or that was how she remembered it. Though it was true that nobody kept Slough House up to date when procedures were modified.
They were on Cheapside, approaching Rashford’s, outside which a black SUV was parked. A man easily identifiable as Dog leaned against it, his gaze directed at the bar’s doorway. Lech was breathing hard, which was his own fault. No excuse for being out of shape.
Reading her thoughts, or perhaps her expression, Lech said, “I was run over a couple of days ago, remember?”
“At, what, ten miles an hour?”
“Still counts.”
“In which case, you’d better take it easy. You can have the driver.”
“In the sense of . . . ?”
“Keep him busy. So he’s not watching the doorway when I come back out.”
“Okay . . . So what’s the plan?”
“Plan?”
“Great,” said Lech. “Situation normal.”
Waving two fingers Louisa left him there, a hundred yards short of their destination, and—ignoring the car parked outside—disappeared through Rashford’s door.
“So your written assignment—”
“They call it a hand-in.”
“Hand-in, right.”
“I’ve no idea why.”
Because you handed it in, presumably. Which didn’t matter. Catherine said, “So your twenty-thousand-word hand-in was on Vassily Rasnokov.”
The hand-in was part of every fledgling spook’s first six-month assessment, regardless of whether their ambitions lay in field work or analysis. Most chose to critique an op from years gone by—a safe enough topic provided the career-blighting embarrassment of, say, picking an operation handled by Diana Taverner was avoided—and it had been some while since the straightforward biographical essay had been in vogue. This was largely because nothing boosted a mark like fresh information, and there was little chance of this being captured by a beginner.
Then again, there was fresh and fresh.
“I found a cross reference to a pre-digital source,” Ashley said. “A case report from the late seventies.”
“I didn’t know Rasnokov was KGB back then. Wouldn’t he have been a child?”
“A teenager,” said Ashley. “And he wasn’t official.”