Real Tigers (Slough House, #3)

by Mick Herron

The only reason for the absence of a sign requiring entrants to abandon all hope is that, as every office worker knows, it’s not the hope that kills you. It’s knowing it’s the hope that kills you that kills you.

It used to be simpler. There was the Service, and there were the nation’s enemies. These changed identity every so often, depending on who’d been elected, deposed or assassinated, but by and large the boundaries were clear: you spied on your foes, kept tabs on the neutrals, and every so often got a chance to fuck up your friends in a plausibly deniable way. A bit like school, but with fewer rules. Nowadays, though, in between monitoring the nation’s phone calls and scanning the latest whistle-blower’s Twitter feed, geopolitics barely got a look-in. If asked to list the greatest threats to the nation’s security, Ingrid Tearney would start with ministers and colleagues. Working out precisely where Ansar al-Islam came seemed little more than academic.

Rain at last begins to fall, perhaps summoned by mention of an umbrella. A thick pattering on the windows at first, and then faster, and then everywhere; drumming off the roof, battering the walls. Aldersgate Street, like the rest of London, has long been waiting for this moment. If city streets could sigh, that’s what this one would be doing. And of course they can, and they do, and it is. This is the noise rain always masks; the grateful sighing of the pavements.