Real Tigers

by Mick Herron

  “When you get up top,” River said, “Call your boss. Tell him there’s been an incursion. Tell him he needs to sound the alarm.”

  “Her,” said Douglas.

  “What?”

  “My boss is a her.”

  “Yeah, right. Whatever.” He looked at Louisa. “What about you?”

  “I’m a her too.”

  “Funny.” But it was as near as Louisa had come to the attempt in a good while, so River gave her a brief smile before saying, “You going up?”

  “Are you?”

  “I’m going to hang on here a while. I want to know what’s happening.”

  “Yeah, well. So do I.”

  Douglas was already halfway up the ladder. They watched as he disappeared through the hatch, then River threw the lever that locked it once more.

  A moment later he was on the monitor that displayed the chamber overhead.

  On one of the other screens the Black Arrow crew were approaching a set of doors, and making much use of hand signals and pointy fingers.

  Watching them, Louisa said, “Remind me whose side we’re on?”

  “That’ll be easier to work out once the shooting starts,” River said. “Anyone who’s not aiming at you.”

  Together, they headed off through the swing doors, down the corridor.

  The room was a long one, high too, and from the end Traynor entered seemed stacked nearly to the ceiling with crates, some of them in evidence cages, each neatly padlocked. But about halfway along, the crates gave way to rows of shelving, no more than two feet apart, with an aisle running down the centre as far as the next set of doors, in front of which a wide area had been left empty, though large metal filing units lined the walls either side. Sean Donovan was halfway along a shelf full of cardboard folders: he was plucking them one by one, checking the top sheet, then—like a dissatisfied library user—dropping them to his feet. The spillage ran right back to the aisle, so when Ben Traynor reached him, it looked like Donovan was wilfully sowing disorder; turning a neat expanse of ordered history into a snowstorm of confused event.

  Without breaking off from this task, he said, “Problem?”

  “We have company.”

  “Who?”

  Traynor was already past him, heading for the doors to E Corridor, slipping his belt off as he ran. Looping it through the door’s handles he pulled it tight, buckled it, then turned his attention to the filing cabinets.

  Donovan emerged. “Who?” he said again.

  “Monteith’s crew.”

  Donovan thought for a moment, then shook his head. “They’re lightweights, Ben.”

  “They don’t have to be good, they just have to be numerous,” Traynor said. “Give me a hand with this.”

  Donovan helped him tip a cabinet onto its side, then slide it in front of the doors.

  “That’s not going to hold them long,” Traynor said.

  Donovan said, “I don’t know. Just opening a door is a stretch for some of them.” He was already heading back to the shelf he’d been working on.

  Traynor peered through the fraction of porthole window unobscured by the cabinet and said, “They’re here already. We’d better go.”

  “I’m not running from those clowns. Not till I get what we came for.”

  “Sean, look around. This place is the size of a fucking church. You could spend all week and not find it.”

  The older man shook his head: he was out of sight, between the shelves, but Traynor could tell that’s what he was doing. “The catalogue numbers tell you where to look. V for Virgil, plus Tearney’s initials. Then the date, then a four-figure reference. It’s between six and eight years back, so we only need to go through this section here. And I’m halfway done already.”

  “What if all this is a set-up?”

  “What would be the point, Ben? I was just out of prison, I was drinking myself half to death. And Taverner approached me, remember? It’s not like I was on a crusade.”

  “I don’t trust her.”

  “She’s a spook. You’d be mad to trust her. But she’s a spook with an agenda, and she wants to destroy Tearney as much as we do. For Alison, Ben. Remember?”

  “. . . I’m not likely to forget.”

  “So how long are you prepared to give this?”

  Traynor said, “Okay, okay. As long as it takes.”

  Gun in hand, he went back to the doors, observing fractured slices of motion from the crew outside through his paring of window. They looked like they were getting ready to mount an assault . . . He had been here before, it occurred to him, by which he meant not here but in just this scenario: hostiles two breaths away, and defences no thicker than a brick and plaster wall.

  The difference was, the quality of the enemy.

  He checked his gun again, though didn’t need to, and settled to wait. When they made a serious attempt on the door, he’d give them something to think about. But it was important to remember that they weren’t all clowns—one or two of the Black Arrow squad had been boots on the ground: Iraq, Afghanistan. If they were out there, he didn’t want to be loosing bullets in their direction, but that was a soldier’s life: you couldn’t always choose your enemies. Besides, Ben Traynor was no longer marching under a flag. The nearest he had was a photograph, of Captain Alison Dunn, and with the thought he kissed a finger and tapped his breast pocket. He could hear Donovan leafing through folders—plucking, glancing, discarding—but he let that sound fade into the background and focused on the world behind the blocked doors: alert, on duty, and tense as a trigger.

  When Douglas emerged from the disused factory he stood blinking for a moment, like a rat freed from a maze, then froze as a train whistled past, as if becoming motionless would see the danger off. It appeared to work: the train was gone already, a bar of noise and light heading for the suburbs. Douglas looked up at the sky, in which stars had now appeared, shook his head in disapproval, then reached into his pocket for his mobile. He checked the screen, scrolled down for a number, but before he found it was flattened by one of the Black Arrows: an illegal tackle any way you looked at it, and the only way Douglas was looking at it was from underneath. With his mouth against the concrete he couldn’t shout, couldn’t scream: all the breath within him had been scattered into the dark. A voice barked harsh instructions into his ear, but Douglas couldn’t understand them: it wasn’t a foreign language, just a mode of experience he wasn’t accustomed to. A memory exploded in his head of watching while a middle-aged couple did the business, right out here in the open, folded over the back of their car. Knowing these things happened, invisibly observing them, had rendered Douglas untouchable, he thought. The things that people did were jokes to which he alone supplied the punchline. But now the joke was on him: he was being hauled upright, an arm around his throat. He hadn’t been in such close contact with another human since lifesaving lessons at his local pool—2007.

  “Okay. I’ll take him.”

  Him was Douglas; the speaker was a newcomer, not the man who’d flattened him.

  Breath was trying to find its way back into his lungs now: the air out here was hot, and seemed even hotter as it forced its way inside him.

  It seemed that he had thrown up, too.

  “Can you walk?”

  He nodded, though he was fairly sure he couldn’t.

  The newcomer wore dark clothing, but not the paramilitary gear that the vicious bastard who’d just taken him down wore. He did, though, have a silky-looking black balaclava. “Come on then.”

  Douglas could walk, kind of, or at least couldn’t prevent himself being half-dragged, which had the same effect. He was being taken towards a black van, which appeared suddenly out of the gloom: everything was dark now, and shapes were only slowly making themselves understood. Deep breath. And exhale. The trick of it, he was discovering, was not to try too hard: bre
athing was one of those things you could only manage if you thought about something else while doing it. The problem was, the only other topics he could think of involved being dragged towards this van, shoved into the back of it, its door being closed with a heavy ker-thunk. Then it was just him and the man with the balaclava, together in solid darkness, until the man did something which made a small electric lantern light up. The van was large: a windowless people-carrier with bench-seating around the sides, in proper military fashion. Douglas could still taste vomit on his tongue, and was worried he’d done something to his teeth on that concrete.

  A small worry, though, compared to being here with this man.

  Who said, “You okay now?”

  Douglas nodded. Coughed. Nodded again.

  “Sorry about that.”

  Worry thinned, like fog becoming mist.

  “The guys are overexcited, and you can’t blame them. Those are some serious bad actors you let into the facility. You want to tell me why you did that?”

  “I’m—it’s—can’t. Classified.”

  “Yeah, sure. Listen, son, you really don’t need to worry about that right now.” The man pulled the balaclava off, and became ordinary looking. “I’m from Regent’s Park, name’s Duffy. You can call me Nick. There’s been an incursion, we both know that. An unauthorised incursion into a Service facility. And you know what? It’s not the first time that’s happened today. So don’t worry about what you did or didn’t do, and whether protocols were observed, because we’re all feeling a little foolish at the moment, and all that matters is that this gets cleared up. So tell me, how many of them are there?”

  “Four,” said Douglas.

  “Good, that’s what we thought. And your crew, how many of your crew are down there?”

  “Just me,” Douglas told him, and then said, “Shouldn’t you know that? If you’re from the Park?”

  “Yeah, we’re not exactly on the same page today. You know how it gets. Tell me how that back entrance works. Some kind of hatchway?”

  Douglas did so.

  “And there’s no way of working it from the outside?”

  “None. It’s totally secure.”

  “Yeah, right, good. That’s also what I thought. Thank you, Douglas.”

  Douglas nodded, and noticed that he was breathing normally again, which was a relief, though in the same instant became irrelevant. His body hitting the floor of the van made more noise than the gun. Duffy was pleased: he was using a Swiss-made suppressor, and hadn’t been entirely sure it was 100 percent effective, but there was no arguing with results. He knelt and pushed Douglas’s body under the bench. Given five minutes and a bucket of soapy water, he might have done something about the head-splash on the panels too, but time was what he didn’t have.

  One down, he thought. Four to go.

  Busy night.

  He pulled his balaclava on, turned the lantern off, and stepped out into the gathering dark.

  The pub was off Great Portland Street, and she remembered being here once before, a wake for a dead agent, Dieter Hess. The usual pious utterances, when the truth was, like most doubles, you could trust the man as far as you could chuck a ten-pound note: where it fell, he’d be waiting. But that was the nature of the beast. A spook threw shadows like a monkey puzzle tree’s; you could catch whiplash hearing one describe yesterday’s weather.

  Diana Taverner was drinking Johnny Walker Black Label—a special occasion tipple—and trying to work out how special the occasion was.

  That Dame Ingrid had heard the sound of one big penny dropping was beyond dispute. Whether she’d heard it in time to catch the penny on the bounce was another matter. If she had, Taverner’s career would probably not see out the week. It was one thing to plot and seethe in corners: that was what office life was about. But to actually set wheels in motion was a declaration of war, and the only war you could win against an enemy like Dame Ingrid was one that was over before the starting gun was fired.

  But it had been too good to miss, this opportunity . . .

  She sipped slowly, trying to ignore the sudden craving for a cigarette that alcohol inevitably spiked. Somewhere right this moment, under London’s crust, Sean Donovan was hunting down evidence that would not only ease Ingrid Tearney from her seat of power, it could result in her trial and imprisonment. That the evidence was in the archives was an odds-on certainty: she knew how Dame Ingrid’s mind worked. Ingrid was committee-clever, had boardroom smarts; ultimately, she thought like a civil servant. Which, she should have realised, was something of a liability when surrounded by civil servants. Burying documents within a tsunami of documents must have seemed like a no-brainer, because there were always documents—there were always documents. This was the saving grace, and ultimate downfall, of every civil servant. Because there were always budgets to balance and third parties to pacify; there were flight plans and requisition forms; there were waivers, contracts, guarantees—anything that took place outside the jurisdiction, you needed paperwork to cover your arse; anything that happened within it, you needed to sign the overtime chitty. And all the paperwork had to be initialled in triplicate and copied to file; stored against the day you were called to account for actions you didn’t remember performing . . . Paperwork was how the Service, like every corporation, ran. Paperwork, not clockwork, kept the wheels turning. And this happened because nobody had yet thought of a convincing way of stopping it happening; or not convincing enough to convince a civil servant. Who were notoriously set in their ways, and displayed all the flexibility of a rhinoceros in a corridor.

  So the evidence was there, among the information recently relocated to a secure site off-grid, and while it was true that Diana might herself have gone rooting for it any time these past few years, that would have been to lay herself open to the risk that Donovan now faced on her behalf . . . Besides, leaked evidence would have resulted in a whitewash, or a Select Committee Inquiry as they were also known; the inevitable investigation would have focused on the leaker, not the leaked. Several whistle-blowers of the recent past served as object lessons to this effect: icons of the internet generation they may well be, but Diana Taverner saw no future for herself holed up in an embassy box room, or eking out an existence in a foreign capital. No, if the evidence surfaced through another’s machinations, that would allow her to watch in horror as her Head of Service’s corruption was revealed; to offer her support to a dumbstruck minister; to humbly accept a caretaker role until the dust settled . . . If she wanted to take on Ingrid Tearney, the way to do it was sideways. Which meant using someone like Sean Donovan, whom she could trust because he was no spook but a soldier, and held to a different notion of loyalty: one that involved revenging himself on a Service that had done him harm.

  Of course, if he discovered that it was Taverner herself who was responsible for that, things might grow awkward . . .

  She finished her drink, considered her immediate options, and decided she didn’t have any. The only course of action open to her was to have another drink.

  It didn’t take her long to get served, because the bartender was male. When that stopped happening—Diana didn’t know what she would do when that stopped happening. It was like contemplating death. While he poured she glanced round the bar, then noticed her own reflection in the nearby mirror, and saw with horror what looked like a grey streak in her chestnut hair . . . It turned out to be a trick of the light, thank God, but underscored her current situation: time was stomping on regardless, and opportunities had to be seized. Better to go down in flames than timidly fade.

  Thinking all this, she didn’t pay as much attention as she should have done to a figure in the corner; a smooth man—sleek even—with dark hair brushed back from a high forehead, and brown eyes. He had a newspaper spread in front of him, and appeared to be studying it, but what he was mostly doing was watching Diana Taverner.

  “I told you I could
hot-wire a car.”

  “Buses weren’t mentioned,” Lamb said.

  Ho had made tinder of the porch, and punched a sizable hole where the front door used to be, which, given the speed he’d been going at, said much for the durability of the good old London bus, and not much for whoever had put the house up. The hallway was littered with chunks of masonry, shattered glass, and splinters of wood. Part of the door frame was lying across Bailey’s back. If the bus had intruded much further, it would have flattened him like a bug.

  “I thought you might be in trouble.”

  “Yeah. Because crashing a bus would have been a big fucking help if I had been.”

  “He was doing his best,” Catherine said. “Thanks, Roddy. That was a good plan. Now go and fetch some water, would you?”

  “I’m not thirsty.”

  “No, well, it’s not for you. The kitchen’s back there somewhere.”

  “Try not to level it to the ground,” Lamb said.

  Ho moved sulkily off, just in time for a dinnerplate-sized chunk of plaster to drop from the ceiling and hit him on the head.

  Lamb tilted his chin heavenwards. “Owe you one.”

  Catherine bent over Bailey and brushed debris away. “Leave him alone. If you’d driven a bus through a wall, we’d never hear the end of it. What are the others doing?”

  “Cartwright and Guy are helping your pal Donovan out.”

  “Helping?”

  “Seems the Grey Books are in some off-site storage place near Hayes. Donovan needed Service help to get in.” Lamb was fiddling in his pocket while he spoke, and when his hand emerged, it was clutching the unwrapped flapjack. He bit it in half then said, “Well, that or he didn’t fancy Hayes on his tod.”

  “What about Marcus and Shirley?”

  “I incentivised them.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Lamb gave a long-suffering sigh. “Am I the only one who understands man-management round here?” He crammed the rest of the flapjack into his mouth, and a moment or so later said, “And when I say ‘man,’ I’m most definitely including Dander.”