Alan Black
Who they are
Taverner’s agent inside the Voice of Albion, and the planner of the kidnapping. An ex-slow horse himself — sent to Slough House after sleeping with the Venezuelan ambassador’s wife — he ran the operation under the legend Dermot Radcliffe, with a credit card and a cover address kept live for verisimilitude.
Known to Hassan Ahmed only as “Moe”, the middle of three captors.
What they want
The operation to succeed as designed: a staged abduction that the Service can “rescue”, with the credit going to the Park and the favour banked with Mahmud Gul. When Curly turns it real, Black’s plan becomes the thing that kills him.
Book 1 — Slow Horses
- C10 — Found decapitated on the kitchen table at Roupell Street, the discovery that turns Slow Horses.
- C11 — Identified by Taverner as her own agent; she orders the body disappeared and the house burned.
- C14 — Lamb lays out the frame: Black was Taverner’s recruit, and the frame needs scapegoats.
- C15 — The horses reconstruct his fallback plan from his personnel file and the still-live legend.
Tells
The legend itself: a full-dress cover with a working card, because a man running an operation believes his own paperwork. He is Slow Horses’s warning about tradecraft without judgement.
Open questions
Whether he understood that Curly had gone rogue before he died, and who exactly gave Curly the warning call from Gregory Simmonds.