The Marylebone Drop by Mick Herron

Author:Mick Herron
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Crime Fiction
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2018-09-10T20:57:20+00:00

It was much later that Alec Wicinski checked his laptop for search results: he’d become caught up in several matters, each more urgent than a name-chase for an acquaintance. He wanted to get home: travel was going to be a bitch, with tube lines down because of the snow (why? Why did snow affect the underground?) and while he never minded walking, he didn’t have shoes for the weather. He texted Sara, confirming their dinner date, filled out his time sheets, then called up the search engines he’d set in motion and scanned the hits: six Peter Kahlmanns, the length and breadth of Europe. Which didn’t mean there weren’t more, and—allowing for fake IDs—didn’t mean there weren’t fewer, but it did mean there were six that fell within the parameters of the chosen engines. And this wouldn’t have been more than a passing observation were it not for something that rang a bad bell: loud and bastard clear.

One of the Peter Kahlmanns was flagged.

Flagging could have meant any number of things. It could have meant Peter Kahlmann was a friendly, an asset, a joe even; could have meant he was on a watch-list; could have meant he had diplomatic status, and was to be immediately released if he turned up under a hooker’s bed during a raid. But what it most definitely meant was, Alec would need a cast-iron reason for having looked him up in the first place. Running a search on a flagged target was like stepping on a tripwire: hard to tell whether you’d done any damage until you lifted your foot again. Everything might be okay, and the world go on as normal. Or you might find your leg blown to kingdom come. Life was full of surprises.

What was certain was that his favour for John Bachelor wasn’t a secret any more. When you ran up a flag, someone in the Park saluted.

He cursed under his breath, then closed all the engines down, not even bothering to examine the particular Peter Kahlmann who’d taken the starring role in his extracurricular trawl. Some things it was better not to know. The bright side was that if Alec had stepped into anything especially messy, he’d not be finding out about it now; he’d have been hauled away and given the treatment the minute he’d fed the name into the system. So with any luck it was a procedural mis-step, no more; one he’d answer for to Richard Pynne, his unlovable shift-manager, come their end of the week catch-up, but not one that had capsized an op. He hoped to God not, anyway. Nothing to do now but cross fingers and hope.

As for Bachelor, he could go whistle. There were favours you did for friends, and there were risks you took for family: Bachelor wasn’t the latter and barely qualified as the former. The best Bachelor could hope for was that Alec didn’t come looking for him. To point out the error of his ways.

He sighed, powered down and left.

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