moscow rules

Who, by the way, have cleared off. They’ve not taken great pains to clean up after themselves–the bodies are gone, but that’s where it ends. 

Hence the descriptor. 

A fucking bloodbath. 

Pools of congealing red coat the concrete floor, thick as carpet. There are splatters on the walls, on the aforementioned pillars, even on the ceiling, which is easily seven metres up. 

And again, there’s the single body still left in the room. Warm body. 

Warm being evident from the way he’s shaking, like there’s a fucking electric current running through his body. 

Enough of that. 

“Oi!”

The body flinches, a reflex, then recognises the voice. 

River Cartwright slowly, painfully, uncurls himself. Terrified eyes, half-hidden behind a fringe of blood-matted hair, look up. 

“Well? Planning on lying there all night, are you?”

It’s nearly five in the morning, not that there’s any chance Cartwright knows that. 

A slow shake of the head. 

Cartwright gets himself to his feet with all the strength and grace of a newborn deer. If Jackson were a hunter, he’d put him out of his misery. 

Instead, he fishes a cigarette from the depths of his coat and lights up. 

He’s halfway through the thing by the time Cartwright is fully upright. Fully being a rather generous term for it. 

He knows the answer, but asks anyway, as much out of boredom as anything else. 

“They shoot you?”

A slow glance down the body–Christ, that’s the only speed Cartwright’s got, except for when it comes to running headlong into trouble–and a shake of the head. 

So it’s just the fucking trauma. Or whatever. 

Jackson does concede–only to himself, and only a bit–that it is a lot of fucking blood. Cartwright may as well have taken a shower in the stuff. But none of it’s his, or at least not much of it is, which is where Jackson’s involvement in the matter begins and ends. 

Only not really. 

“You shoot someone?”

It’d explain his state, anyhow. It’s not like Cartwright–the young one, just the young one–is a killer. Jackson doubts whether he’s got the bollocks to squash a particularly large spider, let alone a human being. 

Still. If a Slow Horse kills someone, he’s got to know. So that he knows what paperwork he isn’t going to fill out. 

But it’s another shake of the head. Drops of blood fly off the ends of his hair. Jackson idly wonders how much water it’ll take to get all that off. Probably more than he himself uses in a month. 

“You coming?”

Cartwright takes a step forward, experimental, hesitant, like he doesn’t know whether the ground’s about to slip out from beneath his feet. 

His shoes leave bloody footprints behind as he approaches Jackson, who turns and makes his way, smoking a second cigarette, to his car. 

His car. Listen, he’s no neat freak, but Cartwright’s about to wreck the ancient and irrevocably stained upholstery with blood. And a bloody passenger seat raises certain questions that one half-buried beneath empty takeaway containers and splattered with curry sauce does not. 

There’s an old newspaper in the footwell. It’s got melted chocolate on it–Jackson licks his fingers to confirm–but it’ll do. He spreads it over the seat and gestures inside. 

Cartwright stares blankly at him, then gets in the car silently.

Lord above, if he’d known this is all it would take to get the kid to shut up. 

He needs a debrief. Jackson can guess at about two-thirds of what happened, but this sort of thing wants a proper explanation. 

He’ll not be getting much out of Cartwright now, though. Jackson doubts whether he’d be capable of stringing a sentence together, let alone a blow-by-blow of the night’s events.

If he weren’t such a fuckup, mind, they’d be on their way to Slough House right now, and two hours later, the debrief would be down on paper, signed and stamped, to be filed away and forgotten about. 

But if he weren’t such a fuckup, they’d not be going to Slough House at all, and none of this would’ve happened in the first place. 

In any case, Slough House is not their destination. Jackson’s not totally heartless, after all. It’s clear Cartwright could use some help. 

He’ll foist him onto Guy, go home, and finish off the bottle of Talisker sitting on his kitchen counter. 

Finish off, of course also meaning, start in on. 

They’re still about fifteen minutes away from Guy’s address when Cartwright makes a noise. It’s a weird noise, but Jackson doesn’t have time to think about it because in his momentary distraction he nearly sails through a red light, slamming on the brakes hard enough that his body hits the steering wheel. 

He glances over at Cartwright, expecting an inane remark about the quality of his driving, but Cartwright is otherwise occupied by being sick. 

Fucking hell. 

Cartwright makes a truly pathetic noise, like a kicked puppy, and Jackson would throw him out of the car right now except he’s pretty sure he’d be charged with animal cruelty. 

“Ssss–” Cartwright says, sitting up a bit. It’s more than likely meant to be an apology but for obvious reasons doesn’t quite come off. 

Jackson steps on the gas rather more gently than he otherwise would have as the light goes green. 

“You’re be paying to have my car cleaned,” he says. It’d be a hell of a bill, the majority of it decidedly not the young Cartwright’s fault, and there’s no chance he’s actually going to be arsed to take the thing to a shop, but it’s something to say.

Cartwright sniffles. Jackson spares him a glance. 

He really does look fucking awful. Soaked in blood, skin pale as a ghost in the rare places where it’s visible. There are tracks of pink down his cheeks and there’s a bit of snot beneath his nose. 

Some MI5 agent. 

An image of a different empty building, with the blood of different people splattered across the walls and pooling on the floor, appears briefly in his mind’s eye, as clear as if it’d been yesterday. 

Then it fades. Jackson steers with a knee and lights another cigarette.