Real Tigers

by Mick Herron

  This depressed him enough that he went ahead and lit his cigarette anyway.

  “It’s the kids I feel sorry for,” he went on, words he’d almost certainly never used before in a single sentence. “Growing up miles from civilisation. Learn to hot-wire a car, or you’re stuck here till they plant you.”

  “I can hot-wire a car.”

  “Huh. I always assumed it was Longridge had the criminal youth,” said Lamb. “Not to resort to stereotypes or anything. But he is, well . . . ” He paused. “You know.”

  “. . . Black?”

  “From the East End. Jesus, you immigrants are quick with the racist jibes, aren’t you?”

  “I—”

  “Where’d you learn to hot-wire, anyway? I thought all you did was exercise your wrists.” Lamb supplied a demonstrative gesture, halfway between working a keyboard and milking a cow, then leered. “One way or the other.”

  “The internet’s full of information,” Ho said. “That makes me an expert at lots of things.”

  “It’s full of pornography too,” Lamb observed. “Doesn’t make you Casanova. What’s your thingamajig say?”

  Ho checked his satnav. “Exit after next.”

  “Good. And I hope you’ve been working on a plan.” Lamb collapsed back into a Toad of Toad Hall slump. “Because I haven’t.”

  Ho grinned nervously, caught sight of Lamb’s face in the mirror, and stopped.

  It was somehow inevitable, Louisa thought, that the dustbin-voice, decoded, would belong to a man who looked like a broomstick: one of those straight-up straight-down bodies on whom elbows, wrists and knees look painful, as if grafted on in the aftermath of tragedy. He wore a short-sleeved white shirt buttoned to the neck over brown corduroy trousers, and was compensating for the thinness of his pale red hair by growing a moustache. It was impossible to tell how long he’d been working on this, and nearly as difficult to refrain from suggesting he stop. Even to Louisa’s mind, and men weren’t currently anywhere near the top of the list of things she cared about, the sparse carroty wisps on this one’s upper lip seemed like an act of self-harm.

  His name, he’d told them, once they’d opened the airlock-type hatchway and climbed down the metal ladder to the air-conditioned facility beneath, was Douglas.

  “First name or last?” she asked, as the hatchway door swung shut above them, and locked itself in response to a switch Douglas threw.

  “First.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m not going to tell you my last name.”

  “. . . Okay.”

  “Can’t be too careful,” he explained.

  Which was true enough, but it would be unkind to point out that that particular ship had sailed, where Douglas was concerned.

  The room was large and bright, most of its visible surfaces one type of shiny metal or another. Against one wall was a work console, its swivel chair bobbling jauntily now Douglas had vacated it, and the panel of monitors he’d been looking at were evidently CCTV, because Louisa recognised on one screen the chamber they’d just left. Others showed various angles of the wasteground outside, already looking gloomier than ten minutes ago; others still must have been internal, and displayed doors, corridors, and several warehouse-like spaces filled with industrial-sized shelving, on which were ranged rows of packing crates, boxes, and what looked like miles of paperwork in box files and cardboard folders. Among them, no doubt, the Grey Books. She wondered how the cataloguing worked—without a system, they could pick through that lot from now until Christmas, and never find what they were looking for.

  Still, at least she’d be cool . . . Louisa couldn’t help what she did next: she raised her arms, aeroplane mode, and allowed refrigerated air to creep under her blouse and stroke her skin.

  Douglas was watching her. “Your hair really has changed colour, you know,” he told her.

  “It was deliberate.”

  “Disguise, sort of thing?”

  “Yes,” she said. “That sort of thing.”

  River said, “How big’s your team down here?”

  Douglas gave him a superior look which fit him about as well as his moustache. “That’s classified.”

  “Classified,” said River. “Gotcha.” He paused. “Can I see your Service card?”

  “My what?”

  “Your Service card. To verify your security rating.”

  “. . . I don’t have a Service card.”

  “Right.”

  “I’m not Service. You already know that.”

  “Right,” River said. “But see, that’s where the whole classified thing gets complicated. Because my security rating’s higher than yours. You know, because you haven’t got one.”

  “I’ve been vetted,” Douglas said.

  “That’s obvious,” Louisa began, but ran so smoothly into her next sentence that River’s warning glance was unnecessary. “You’re in charge of this facility, you’ve got a lot of . . . equipment, there’s no way you got here without undergoing pretty vigorous assessment.” She tugged at her blouse again, allowing more air to circulate. “But we get ridden pretty hard too, Douglas, which is how come we’re cleared for the serious stuff. You know, the full-on hardcore action . . . Do you know what I mean, Douglas?”

  Douglas cleared his throat. “Ungh. I mean, I think so.”

  River seemed to having an allergic reaction to the chilled air: he’d put finger and thumb to his nose, and was squeezing hard.

  “That’s good, Douglas.” Louisa released her blouse, and ran a hand through her hair. “So that puts us on the same side, doesn’t it?”

  “. . . Um, yes. I guess so.”

  “That’s lovely. How many others are down here with you, Douglas?”

  “Er . . . right now? Or usually?”

  “Right now.”

  “None.”

  “How about usually?” River asked.

  “Well, usually . . . none.”

  “None,” said River.

  “Except there’s a walk-through once a week. My boss does a sweep, makes sure everything’s how it should be.” He raised a finger to his upper lip, checking on his moustache’s progress. “The rest of the time, we’re on our own.”

  “We?” said Louisa.

  “Me and Max.” Douglas coloured slightly. “It’s what I call my computer.”

  “You’ve given your computer a name,” Louisa said, without inflection.

  “It’s voice-responsive.”

  So was Louisa’s keyring, but she hadn’t formed a club with it.

  Douglas tugged at his collar, in unconscious imitation of Louisa’s cooling-down procedure. “So, er, what exactly is it you guys are after? Is it about that pair who were here earlier?”

  “Which pair’s that?” River asked.

  “Wandering around up there. Between the buildings.”

  “One in his fifties, grey hair, well built? The other one shave-headed?”

  “Yeah, that sounds like them. Only we get a lot of hobos up there, well, obviously. But these guys were different.”

  “Don’t worry,” Louisa told him. “They’re not a problem.”

  “We get film crews too sometimes. It’s a good place to blow up a car.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind.”

  “It’s funny, they’ll be out there making a movie, and here I am watching, and they don’t even know I’m here. It’s like . . . ” He meshed fingers, demonstrating the interconnected complication of real life and fantasy playing out in parallel, some of it above ground, some of it underneath. “I get a kick out of that.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Louisa.

  “Kids screwing in cars, too. That happens a lot.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Three years.”

  It was on the tip of Louisa’s tongue to a
sk how long the shifts were, but she decided she didn’t want to know. The possibility that Douglas had spent three years on his own here, without a break, was seeming likelier by the minute.

  River was looking at the bank of monitors, and the lifeless scenes they displayed. He indicated the one showing the warehoused crates and box files. “Is that the stuff that was delivered last month?”

  Douglas reluctantly shifted his gaze from Louisa. “Yeah. It took them two days.”

  “That must have been exciting,” Louisa said. “I mean, compared to . . . ”

  Absolutely bugger-all happening is what she meant, but Douglas begged to differ.

  “Oh, it’s always exciting. Nobody knows I’m here.”

  This last in a whisper, as if the surreptitious nature of his role extended to all discussion of it.

  “But it was pretty cool when the phone rang,” he admitted. “I thought it had actually, you know. Happened.”

  “. . . ‘Happened’?”

  “Yeah, you know. I mean, this place was designed as a survival facility. I thought maybe there’d been an . . . event.”

  A dirty bomb or a toxic splash, he meant; something to drive city dwellers underground. Or at least, those whose security clearances allowed them access to survival facilities.

  “But it turned out a false alarm.”

  “That must have been very disappointing.”

  “Yeah, well. Shit happens.”

  River said, “So how far away is it?”

  “The stuff they delivered? Other end of that corridor.” He pointed to a pair of doors on the far side of the room. “You need some of it back?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Yeah, well. I guess you got the clearance.”

  “Oh, and another thing,” Louisa said. “That pair you noticed earlier? Up in the world? They’re going to join us.”

  “They’re with you?”

  “They are,” said River.

  “No problem. All they have to do is show their passes, I’ll let ’em in.”

  “Yes, see, that’s where we go off-book,” Louisa explained.

  Douglas looked from one to the other, waiting for the punchline.

  “It’s okay, Douglas,” River assured him. “We’re from Slough House.”

  Evenings were long now, but hardly endless; shadows had crept across the scabbed and tacky concrete apron between the derelict buildings, and the trains that trundled past increasingly resembled boxes of light, more strongly outlined the darker it got. The two soldiers had followed the Slough House pair into the factory five minutes ago, and the phone in Nick Duffy’s hand was now a grenade. Dame Ingrid’s call—There’s been a change of plan—had primed it, and the calls he’d made since had set the timer running.

  To a few of the Dogs he could trust: those who knew how the real world worked, and how sometimes you had to tie a black ribbon round events without asking awkward questions.

  To a suit the website listed as a company director of Black Arrow, and who it didn’t take long to persuade to unleash his cut-price commandos.

  And to his girlfriend, cancelling their evening. That was the one he’d end up paying for, but nobody had ever pretended his job was an easy one.

  From his window on the third floor, Duffy tried to picture forthcoming events. There was no such thing as a watertight plan, and any operation had the potential to go tits up, but he’d had a clear go-ahead from Dame Ingrid: that the worst-case scenario involved Sean Donovan walking away. Whatever else, that wasn’t to happen.

  So: flood the area.

  Because if Black Arrow weren’t anyone’s idea of crack troops, there were at least plenty of them. Plus, they’d be fired up by notions of honour and revenge: Duffy had told the suit that tonight’s target was the man responsible for murdering Sly Monteith. We’ll be taking him off the board. They loved that talk, the deskbound warriors: they were all for pouring men onto the field of battle. Let’s do this thing, he’d replied, like a man buckling on a holster and heading for the OK Corral. It hadn’t worried him that his Black Arrow team were amateurs, barely kitted out for crowd control: truncheons, tear gas, maybe Tasers, a flash bomb or two. Still, they’d soak up whatever ammo the soldiers were packing. Then Duffy would step in with his handpicked pros and finish the job.

  He surveyed the ground through his binoculars again, getting a mental fix on lines of approach and areas of cover: the skip, that pile of fencing. The complex that lay beneath stretched way into the distance, but he’d factored that in: there was a main entrance a mile or so south, and a Black Arrow crew should be arriving there—he checked his watch—any minute now.

  Right on cue, his phone trembled in his breast pocket.

  “Can I speak to Alice?”

  “Sorry, wrong number,” said Duffy.

  If it had been Betty who was sought it would have meant things were Buggered, but Alice signified A-okay, meaning the other team was at the front entrance. There were fifteen of them, Black Arrow irregulars, plus two of his own. His pair were coordinating events, but the Black Arrows themselves would take out the security guards, which was only fair: security here, as at other low-priority Service posts, was outsourced, so it was one set of Dobbins against another.

  That done, they were essentially drain cleaner: they’d flush through the system, pushing the blockage towards the only other outlet: the hatchway in the dead factory down below. When Donovan and the others emerged back onto the wasteground, Duffy was here to make sure they got no further. Chances were, things wouldn’t go the distance: a bit of luck, there wouldn’t be bodies left in the open.

  Bodies there would be, though, and no one was getting a free pass. He mused briefly on River Cartwright and Louisa Guy. Cartwright was a pain in the neck, overdue an accident, but Duffy couldn’t help feel a niggle when he thought about Guy. It wasn’t so long ago her boyfriend was smeared across a road round Blackfriars way: something of a professional embarrassment for Duffy. So maybe that niggle was guilt, or maybe just irritation at a bad memory, but either way, wiping the slate clean tonight would put it behind him. So no hard feelings to Louisa Guy, but really, she should have made the effort to be luckier.

  “The Slough House crew too?” he’d asked Tearney.

  He hadn’t wanted any ambiguity hanging over this one.

  “All of them,” Tearney had said. And then, just to be clear, “The Slough House crew too.”

  So be it.

  Phone stowed in his pocket, Duffy continued his appraisal of the ground below, while light crept away, and shadows spilled out from their corners.

  Fourteen minutes by the clock on the dash, and Marcus was still on the pavement, arguing with the policeman. It would have been quicker to take the points, pay the fine, do a short jail sentence, but any of that would have involved admitting culpability: not something that came easily to a man who used to kick down doors, and would probably do so again, if aggravated enough. Which could happen, if the fourteen minutes stretched out much longer.

  Standard procedure, Shirley thought—watching from the passenger seat of the SUV—should have had her out there with him, because arguments with uniforms were one of the things she did best, even—especially—when her side didn’t have a leg to stand on. But cops have a sixth sense for naughtiness, and she didn’t want to face a drugs test: not for a couple of hours, or maybe a fortnight. Besides, Marcus could handle himself. Worse came to worst, he probably knew fifteen ways of killing an unarmed opponent. More, if he was allowed to use both hands.

  Such talents had been wasted in Slough House, of course. And even that was history now. Awareness of this was starting to penetrate: tomorrow, Shirley would wake up, groan at the thought of what the day held, then realise it didn’t any more. That what she’d become was worse than a slow horse: she was an ex–slow horse, with neither plans nor prospects.

&n
bsp; And if Marcus decked the policeman, he’d find out the hard way what being cut loose from the Service meant.

  The road was still busy, because other people still had occupations. Pedestrians slowed as they passed, lit by schadenfreude, and Marcus had folded his arms, which made Shirley want to adopt the crash position. If he blew his top, if he got arrested, they weren’t going anywhere, and if they weren’t going anywhere . . . It was a sentence that didn’t require completion.

  No, what they needed was for something bad to be going down, for River and Louisa to be in dire peril. What Shirley and Marcus needed was to turn up just in time to rescue them, or failing that, only very slightly too late—casualties would be acceptable, but only if Shirley and Marcus bagged the villains at the scene. Because any blood would be on Lamb’s hands: his operation, his disaster. And nothing would give Shirley greater pleasure than to rise like a phoenix from one of that bastard’s mattress fires; to stage the greatest comeback since Lazarus, and be welcomed home to Regent’s Park for averting a national security disaster. First thing she’d do would be send Lamb a postcard. Wish you were here? Ha-de-fucking-ha.

  But before any of that could happen, Marcus had to not blow his top.

  While she was waiting for him not to do that, Shirley bent to her smartphone and accessed the Service intranet. It was a damp-squib moment of relief to find her password hadn’t been cancelled, but that was Lamb all over: without Catherine Standish to keep him organised, it wouldn’t occur to him to follow through on his drive-by management decisions. Thanks for nothing, Shirley thought, navigating her way onto Citizens Records, the database the Service maintained on those it existed to protect, and who at the same time represented the greatest threat to national security: the people. This was one of those ironies you were encouraged to get over early in your spook career. One Snowden per generation was reckoned one too many.

  Trying to focus, trying not to feel the fizzy moments still coursing through her bloodstream—Jesus, one little taste: it’s not like Lamb didn’t hobble round on a nicotine crutch—she pulled up the file on Sean Donovan, and found everything just as River Cartwright had summarised: the military career, the MoD secondment, the UN posting. And then the night it went to hell, when he crashed a jeep on his way home from delivering a lecture to a bunch of cadets. His passenger, one Captain Alison Dunn, had died when the car rolled into a ditch; Donovan was reckoned lucky not to have written himself off too, though there’d doubtless been times since when he’d wished he had been. From international postings to a brick cage. That ever happened to Shirley, she’d find a way of offing herself. Or at any rate of hurting herself badly enough to be put on a morphine drip while her sentence played out.