Slough House

Dead Lions / C15

Chapter 15

Book 2 Part Two 9049 words POV: Kelly Tropper, Roderick Ho, Louisa Guy, Narrator, Jackson Lamb, Marcus Longridge, River Cartwright, Shirley Dander

Summary

Katinsky’s scheme reaches its two climaxes at once. Kelly Tropper flies a leaflet-laden Skyhawk towards central London in radio silence, while below her the City is emptied by a terror alert her leaflets have provoked. At the Upshott airfield River works out that the alert exists to strip the Needle of its security, and races back to the village. On the seventy-seventh floor of the Needle, Piotr shoots Webb; Marcus produces a gun taped beneath the table, and the slow horses learn that Pashkin’s real target is a diamond merchant on the sixty-fifth floor and a Rumble prototype on the sixty-eighth. Louisa and Marcus fight downward, Ho and Shirley climb upward, and Marcus shoots Pashkin on the roof as Pashkin prepares to hijack an air ambulance. In St Johnno’s churchyard, Katinsky — once Tommy Moult — explains the cicada network he planted twenty years earlier and admits he is dying. His call to the sleepers goes unanswered, because the sleepers have become villagers, but one bomb is his own, and it brings down the church wall and the bell tower and kills him.

Beats

  • C15S01 · Kelly Tropper — Kelly Tropper flew east over London’s outskirts in a light aircraft with Damien Butterfield, ignoring radio demands that they identify themselves and return to their filed route. She reflected on Tommy Moult, who had told her there were ways of proving her bravery, and switched the radio off. Two more aircraft took off to the north-west.
  • C15S02 · Roderick Ho — Roderick Ho’s taxi dropped him outside the Needle, where he collided with Shirley Dander. Sirens erupted and suited workers poured from every building in the City; Shirley shoved through the emerging crowds into the tower while Ho protested that he was mostly research.
  • C15S03 · Louisa Guy — Piotr held a gun on Marcus, Louisa and Webb and made them lay their hands on the table while Pashkin shut his briefcase and told them they would be locked in. Kyril showed he spoke English, and when Webb began to protest, Piotr shot him.
  • C15S04 · Narrator — Across the City, workers evacuated every building at once as the alarms sounded, and orderly drills gave way to shoving and then to panic. Most of the resulting injuries, it was later calculated, happened in buildings containing bankers.
  • C15S05 · Jackson Lamb — Jackson Lamb crossed a Barbican highwalk towards Slough House and sat on a bench to finish his cigarette. The sound of fire engines and a police car broke through his abstraction, and he reached for his phone, wondering what Taverner had done.
  • C15S06 · Marcus Longridge — Webb fell as a shot sprayed blood across the carpet, and Marcus tore a gun from beneath the table and fired, hitting Kyril in the leg. Marcus found the double doors held shut by a U-lock and heard the two Russians entering the stairwell.
  • C15S07 · Narrator — News that the City was emptying turned the rally triumphalist, until armoured police blocked Cheapside and announced over a loudhailer that the march was cancelled. Bottles flew, masked protesters put their masks on, and the first fires were lit.
  • C15S08 · Jackson Lamb — Lamb argued with Taverner that a light aircraft was no credible threat and that Katinsky was a Cold War survivor rather than a barbarian, and warned her they had been led by the nose at every step. He asked what would happen when the Needle went into lockdown.
  • C15S09 · River Cartwright — In the flying club office River found the collapsed boxes had held leaflets reading “stop the city”, and used Griff Yates’s borrowed phone to tell Catherine Standish there was no bomb. Catherine told him his Code September had made the Park put the City on terror alert and evacuate the Needle.
  • C15S10 · Louisa Guy — Louisa found that neither her phone nor Marcus’s would work, and that Webb was alive but breathing shallowly. Marcus said he had taped the gun under the table to fix the odds, and Louisa pressed Kyril’s wounded leg for answers while Marcus went for the fireaxe.
  • C15S11 · River Cartwright — River talked one of the soldiers into driving him back to Upshott, and on the way Catherine told him the City was in chaos and that Pashkin was not real. River said the pilot had been played like the rest of them, and ran from the jeep at the church lychgate.
  • C15S12 · Louisa Guy — A plastic charge shook the floor below, and Louisa deduced the Russians meant to blow into Rumble and steal a prototype worth millions. Kyril admitted that Min had seen Pashkin when he was supposed to be in Moscow, and Marcus hacked through the doors with the axe.
  • C15S13 · Kelly Tropper — Flying in radio silence, Kelly dismissed Damien’s fears and told him they would be escorted home, arrested and fined. Beneath the engine she heard a deeper growl and briefly imagined a future in which she became an object lesson, before dismissing it as they flew on towards the heart of London.
  • C15S14 · River Cartwright — River found Tommy Moult, bald and holding an iPhone, on a bench in St Johnno’s graveyard, and named him as Nikolai Katinsky, the man who invented Alexander Popov. Katinsky explained that he and Pashkin had used Andrei Chernitsky to abduct Dickie Bow and build the Popov legend, and offered to tell River the punchline.
  • C15S15 · Roderick Ho — Halfway up the Needle’s stairwell Ho stopped on all fours and listed the things he did not care about, including Louisa and Marcus’s trouble. He remembered that Catherine Standish knew about the program he had written to fake his work pattern and had found it funny, and hauled himself upward.
  • C15S16 · Marcus Longridge — Marcus and Louisa came out on the sixty-eighth floor to find Rumble’s glass doors locked and its reception desk uncrewed. Louisa suggested Kyril had lied about the target, and asked which floor the diamond people were on.
  • C15S17 · Shirley Dander — Shirley climbed past the thirty-second floor with her legs like soup, hearing an explosion and then what might have been a gunshot above her. Catherine had told her the alarms were false, but she kept climbing rather than leave Guy and Longridge to stop Pashkin alone.
  • C15S18 · Louisa Guy — On the sixty-fifth floor Louisa and Marcus found de Koenig’s suite wrecked by the blast, its safe room blown open, a diamond on the floor and Piotr dead against the wall. Marcus went on down the stairs after Pashkin, and Louisa stayed behind to find an outside line.
  • C15S19 · River Cartwright — Katinsky told River the cicadas had been parked in Upshott to sleep, and that they probably did not know about one another. He admitted he had liver cancer and was tidying up, and River worked out that Upshott’s lack of any existence of its own was the point before naming ZT/53235.
  • C15S20 · Louisa Guy — Louisa got through to Slough House and told Catherine that Webb was alive and that Pashkin was on his way down with Marcus after him. Catherine said she would send a helicopter, and Louisa realised Pashkin meant to take the roof.
  • C15S21 · River Cartwright — Katinsky confirmed that Popov’s legend was built from his own past in ZT/53235, a town burned after River’s service planted false evidence of a spy there. He Tasered River, said the plane had been a decoy and that each cicada held a remotely detonated bomb, and began dialling numbers.
  • C15S22 · Louisa Guy — Louisa followed Kyril’s blood trail upward and went out onto the roof, where Pashkin called to her from behind the plant housings and warned he would kill her. She leapt between shelters, lost the axe to his bullet and was pinned under his boot when Marcus arrived and shot him.
  • C15S23 · River Cartwright — River waited for the village to detonate, but the sun came out, the blackbird resumed, and Katinsky stood staring at the phone in his hand. Katinsky conceded the sleepers had become villagers, then said one bomb was his own and dialled it, bringing down the church wall and the bell tower and killing himself.
  • C15S24 · Marcus Longridge — Marcus made sure Pashkin was dead and helped Louisa to her feet, explaining that Shirley had not passed him on the stairs so he had guessed at the roof. He said he had been made a slow horse for gambling rather than for being a fuck-up, and went to meet the landing helicopter.

People

  • Kelly Tropper — Flying club member piloting the leaflet-laden Skyhawk towards London.
  • Roderick Ho — Slough House researcher sent to the Needle, who climbs its stairwell.
  • Shirley Dander — Slow horse who pushes into the Needle and climbs after Pashkin.
  • Louisa Guy — Held at Pashkin’s meeting; interrogates Kyril and faces Pashkin on the roof.
  • Marcus Longridge — Ex-soldier who produces a hidden gun and kills Piotr and then Pashkin.
  • James Webb — MI5 officer shot in the chest by Piotr and left dying on the floor.
  • Arkady Pashkin — Gangster posing as a Russian oil magnate; robs de Koenig and tries to leave by helicopter.
  • Kyril — Pashkin’s man, wounded in the leg, who admits why Min Harper died.
  • Piotr — Pashkin’s gunman, shot dead in the de Koenig suite.
  • Jackson Lamb — Argues with Taverner by phone and identifies the misdirection.
  • Diana Taverner — Second Desk at Regent’s Park, on the phone, pushing Barrowby into authorising the City alert.
  • River Cartwright — Works out the leaflet trick at Upshott and confronts Katinsky in the churchyard.
  • Nikolai Katinsky — Dying ex-KGB officer living as Tommy Moult, author of the cicada network; killed by his own bomb.
  • Catherine Standish — Relays the Park’s alert from Slough House and sends help.

Places

  • The Needle — City skyscraper being evacuated; Pashkin’s meeting is on the seventy-seventh floor.
  • Upshott — Cotswold village where Katinsky’s sleepers were planted.

Lines worth keeping

“We’ve been led here, every step. Killing Dickie Bow, laying a trail to Upshott, they’ve lit a damn flare path.” — Jackson Lamb, telling Taverner they were played

“There’s no bomb. The plane’s not . . . It’s not a terror attack.” — River Cartwright, phoning Catherine from the airfield

“Toss the gun over here. That’ll knock a few years off your sentence.” — Louisa Guy, calling to Pashkin on roof

“Not all of the bombs were theirs. One was mine.” — Nikolai Katinsky, before detonating his own bomb

Threads

  • Plants: Katinsky says each cicada holds plastic explosive and has been told where to plant it.; River suspects ZT/53235 has been in his grandfather’s memory all along.; Louisa takes a fingernail-sized diamond from the de Koenig floor.; Kelly Tropper’s flight is being stalked by two interceptors.
  • Payoffs: Dickie Bow’s murder is explained: Katinsky and Chernitsky abducted him to seed the Popov legend.; Min Harper’s death is explained: he saw Pashkin when Pashkin should have been in Moscow.; The Code September alert is explained as a leaflet drop deliberately mistaken for a bomb.; Pashkin is killed on the Needle’s roof and his diamonds scattered.
  • Continuity: Tommy Moult is Nikolai Katinsky, and dies when the church wall and bell tower collapse on him.; Piotr is dead on the sixty-fifth floor; Kyril is wounded and left on the stairs.; Webb is shot in the chest but still alive when Louisa leaves him.; The Needle’s floors: de Koenig on sixty-five, Rumble on sixty-eight, Pashkin’s meeting on seventy-seven.; The plane carried leaflets, not a bomb, and was intercepted rather than shot down.

Characters

Places

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