He wondered if the building were under attack. But if so, there’d be alarms, and a lot more activity. Through the window, the same nothing was happening again. Small disturbances only. A wind rearranged the trees over the road; a taxi passed. Nothing. Webb shook his head; an unnecessarily dramatic gesture, given there was nobody to witness it. Story of his life. The joke was, last time he’d been close to anyone, it had been River Cartwright. Some of the courses they’d been on, you couldn’t get through without forming alliances; what people called friendships. More than once, he’d assumed that their futures would run on parallel lines, but something had prevented that, which was Spider’s slow-dawning realization that River was better than him at most things; so much so, he didn’t have to make a big show of it. Which was the sort of moment on which alliances foundered.
— Slow Horses (Mick Herron), Loc. 5455–62