Мик Херрон - Real Tigers

Ex-army; high rank; hard time. That ticked a lot of boxes as far as River was concerned: there might be other suspects, but this one would do to start with. He winced as another flash of pain lit up his body’s circuitry, bit down until it passed away, then emailed what he’d found to the other slow horses, yards away.

Long pastthe hour Marcus Longridge mumbled something about getting lunch, and slipped out of the office pretending not to hear Shirley Dander’s response, which involved a chicken baguette. The yard smelled worse than ever; the street was hot as hell. In the bookies by the station he filled out a betting slip for the 3:20 at Towcester, which he’d diligently researched under cover of work, and while he waited stood and glared at the tin bastard of a roulette machine. It kind of looked alive, with a demon’s eyes and grinning mouth . . . Wrapped up in this, Marcus forgot to follow the race, and glanced up just in time to catch the closing moments, which was like being sucker-punched by a supermodel: a beautiful moment nearly like pain. £160, straight to his trouser pocket. A sweet return on twenty quid.

He collected his winnings and patted the machine on his way out; insult to injury.

Marcus could, and should, have gone straight back to Slough House, but he was buoyed by success. This was the turning point he’d been waiting for. And there was a row of Boris Bikes over the road . . . He thought: what the hell. Quicker than tubing it. Excavating his debit card from his newly thickened wallet, he released one from its rack. Regent’s Park, here he came.

Louisa Guytucked a lock of hair behind her ear, briefly tugged at her blouse to fan her skin; suffered a brief, unasked-for memory of last night’s stand—a bachelor pad in the worst sense, with month-old sheets and dishes in the sink, but still: enthusiastic and vigorous sex, leading to three hours’ dreamless oblivion—and shook her upper body once, refusing to allow Lamb’s gibe headspace.

Here’s me thinking you’d been banging your brains out every night, and it turns out they’re still functioning.

Which they were, but seriously, she didn’t need brains for the task Lamb had set her. She needed blind faith and the devil’s luck.

Roderick Ho abhorred Google, Yahoo, Bing and all the other popular engines: they searched, he claimed, less than 0.5 percent of the internet’s contents, and he’d sooner eat a vegan pizza than use them. But since Louisa would sooner bake him one than ask him for a tutorial on the Dark Web, they were all she had to rely on. Still, what else was she going to do? Sean Patrick Donovan was her target, if Cartwright’s guess was on the money. Closing down all other programs, in the hope this would free up enough space to allow her ancient machine some speed, she set to work.

Conspiracy theorists, she knew, were paranoid by definition, and usually with good reason—they were indeed being watched, largely because they were standing on an upturned bucket, haranguing the sheeple about their wingnut delusions. For months the previous year she had monitored message boards for suggestions of terrorist activity, and while she’d never entirely thrown off the suspicion that every other poster she encountered was an undercover cop, she’d grown used to eavesdropping on tin-hat conversations, from how the government was controlling the weather to the thought-experiments carried out on anyone who rang HMRC help lines. And all of these philosophers, without exception, were convinced they were under surveillance, their every online foray or mobile chat recorded and stored for future use. That this was probably true was an irrelevance, of course; they were simply caught in the same net as everyone else. Louisa had never trapped a terrorist; never stopped a bomb. She’d read a lot of discussions about 9/11, obviously, but contributions from structural engineers had been conspicuous by their absence. And while the help-line thing was probably true, that was just the law of averages at work.

And speaking of paranoia, how did Lamb know what she got up to outside work?

It didn’t matter. Was just the law of averages again. Sod him, anyway.

The point was, anonymity was the paranoid’s cloak—during her months treading those boards, Louisa hadn’t come across anything remotely resembling a real name. Donovan could be venting three times daily on a host of sites, and if his username was SpaceRanger69, she’d never know about it. But Lamb had spoken. So here she was.

“Getting anywhere?”

Jesus ! How did he do that?

Suppressing the start he’d given her, she said, “Give me a break. I’ve only been at it five minutes.”

“Huh.” Lamb came into the office, sniffing the air suspiciously. “Why does this room smell of cheese?”

“It doesn’t. What have you got Ho on?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because you’d be better off him doing this.”

“Shame he’s busy, then.” Lamb peered out the window at a passing bus, then rested his buttocks on the sill.

“You going to watch me all afternoon?”

“Is that how long it’s going to take?”

“We don’t even know for sure it’s Donovan we’re after.”

“No. But we’ll look stupid if we ignore him, and it turns out he took Catherine.”

“What’s Ho working on?”

“Above your pay grade.”

“That reminds me.” Louisa found a receipt on her desktop. “Taxi fares from this morning.”

“Yeah, you might have to wait a while. I’ve been getting grief about the expenses you lot claim.” He stood.

She said, “Is this all on the level? Or is something going on we don’t know about?”

“I think it’s safe to assume there’s always something going on you don’t know about,” Lamb said.

He was nearly out the door when Louisa said, “Catherine.”

“What about her?”

“Nothing. You called her Catherine, that’s all.”

“Huh.”

Louisa settled back to her impossible task.

Five minutes later, she’d cracked it.

Do something, is what Longridge had said. You want to impress women, make a mark, you have to do something .

So here he was: doing something.

Just so long as it’s not sitting at a screen crunching . . . data.

Well, okay, crunching data is what he was doing, but still: it was what the moment demanded.

Roderick Ho paused to chug what was left of his Red Bull, then tossed the empty can at his wastepaper basket. It dropped neatly in, confirming what he already knew: that he was a superstar.

Crunching data, Longridge had said. As if this was something just anyone could do.

There were three properties registered to Black Arrow, one of which was a flat in Knightsbridge, clearly for Sylvester Monteith’s own use, not that Monteith needed much room any more. His next lodging would be about the size of a fridge. The other two properties were larger, functional: Google Earth showed Ho they were both on industrial estates, one on the outskirts of Swindon, the other in Stratford, East London. The day the images were captured, there were seven vans visible at the former; three at the latter. These were black, rugged-looking trucks, with windowless panels on which the firm’s logo was displayed, a black arrow in a yellow circle, and looked more substantial than the prefabbed buildings they were arrayed outside. Monteith chummed up to cabinet ministers, but his business didn’t look blue chip. Ho printed off screenshots, left them in the tray, and focused on Monteith’s personal life.

All the things kept behind firewalls—bank accounts and mortgage details; shopping baskets, mailboxes, porn domains, insurance payments—they were all low-hanging fruit. Passwords were made to be captured, and a basic crossword-solving algorithm could lay bare a life’s secrets in the time it took to microwave what was left of a lunchtime pizza. So that’s what Ho did while his privacy-shredding program ran the numbers on everything Sylvester Monteith wasn’t using any more, beginning with where he’d kept his money, then running through what he’d spent it on. The pizza was a Four Seasons. Monteith’s life was an open book. He had his wife and children; he had his business; he took holidays; he kept a mistress. Discovering how much each had cost him was just a matter of parsing his credit card statements. Crunching . . . data —yeah, right. This was something, and here he was, doing it.