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416 pages, Paperback
First published January 19, 2016
The public was like one of those huge Pacific jellyfish; one enormous, pulsating mass of indifference, drifting wherever the current carried it; an organism without a motive, ambition or original sin to call its own, but which somehow believed, in whatever passed for its brain, that it chose its own leaders and had a say in its own destiny.
[In] this “administrative oubliette,” as it was once dubbed, of the intelligence service ... 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 was why they'd join the Service in the first place: this sneaking suspicion that the whole damn world was hostile. The only one you could trust were those you worked alongside, and you couldn't trust them either, because there was no friend falser than another spook. Always, they'd stab you in the back, cut you off at the knees or just plain die.
There was always trouble, and he always rose from the resulting miasma looking a lovable scamp: lovable, anyway, to that gratifyingly large sector of the populace to whom he'd always be a figure of fun: breathing a bit of the old jolly into politics, and where's the harm in that, eh? As for those who hated him, they were never going to change their minds, and since he was in a better position to fuck them up than they were him, they didn't give him sleepless nights.
... but [Judd's] psychological assessment had been so damning ... that even now, old hands agreed, it cut both ways. On the downside, they were paying the price for having pissed off a narcissistic sociopath with family money, a power complex and a talent for bearing a grudge; but on the up, had Judd actually been allowed into the Service, he'd almost certainly have escalated the Cold War into a hot one...
“A birdy tells me you’ve got one of mine in your lock-up.”
“That would be River Cartwright.”
“Yes, but don’t blame me. I think his mother was a hippy.”
“Smoke a lot of dope while he was in the womb, did she? That might explain today’s dipshit behaviour. And I thought he was one of your cleverer boys.”
“Mind like a razor,” Lamb agreed. “Disposable.”
Jackson Lamb... for all his faults --and that wasn't a short list-- would walk through fire for a joe in peril ...
Nobody left Slough House at the end of a working day feeling like they'd contributed to the security of the nation. They left it feeling like their brains had been fed through a juicer.
"I need a team of good agents, but I just have the Slow Horses. - Jackson Lamb.
“Minister, precisely what is this about?”
“Well, it’s quite simple, Dame Ingrid. Tell me, are you familiar with the term ‘tiger team’?”
Dame Ingrid lowered her teacup.
“Oh dear,” she said.
... [later] ...
“A tiger team,” Ingrid Tearney said.
“A tiger team.”
“I know perfectly well what a tiger team is,” she told him.
That feeling she was getting now was of Judd’s fingers round her throat.
Tiger teams were hired guns, essentially. Hired not to wipe out your enemies but to test the strength of your own defences. You set a tiger team to launch a simulated attack: recruited hackers to stress-test security systems, assigned a wet-squad to put a bodyguard team through its paces, and so on. Earlier that year, she had herself overseen a Service-propelled assault on one of the city’s major utility providers, to verify concerns that the capital’s infrastructure was dangerously vulnerable to attack.
- excerpt from Real Tigers.
Lamb threw River’s phone back at him. “Monteith’s crew was a tiger team. Hired by Judd. And you, you moron, played right into his hands.”
Marcus said, “So who whacked him?”
“That’s the thing about tigers, isn’t it? Some of them turn out to be real.”
“So who were they testing?” River asked. “Us or the Park?”
Lamb stared at him for what felt like a full minute and, Lamb being Lamb, might well have been, before starting to laugh. Still being Lamb, this was a full-body exercise: his frame shook, and his guffaws filled the room. Head flung back, he looked like an evil clown. Where a shirt button had popped, a hairy patch of stomach winked at the room.
“Jesus wept,” he said at last. “Sorry, but that is just so fucking funny. Us or the Park. You’ll be wanting a licence to kill next.” He wiped his eyes on his sleeve, and humour vanished. “Do you seriously think Judd wants to test how effective or secure Slough House is? He wants this place packed into a skip, and when I say ‘this place,’ I’m including you comedians.” - excerpt from Real Tigers.