Tigerman (16 page)

‘And what do you do?’

‘I let it be known that I do not approve.’

Ichiro grinned at them, overhearing. He tapped the screen, and the elves were replaced by rows upon rows of data. He took his feet off the desk and leaned in, fascinated. Inoue nodded. ‘So long as the others have time for their academic work, I just keep him in information,’ she said, ‘and he is easy to live with. Come.’

Inoue led the way to the central desk, a round mica bench covered in paper and computer terminals which always made the Sergeant think of King Arthur, and leaned down over a keyboard. He kept his eyes to the front, looking over her back at a framed picture of a marmot on the wall so as not to appear interested in her bottom. It was small and well defined.

‘Lester,’ she said, drawing his gaze downwards to the screen.

On it was something he recognised as a false-colour image, a scan of some sort to which the computer was adding tints to differentiate shapes which otherwise would be indistinct. In his world that usually meant a night-vision camera, and a covert operation. This was different, all branches and fronds, blue and purple at the edges and angry red at the centre. He realised he was looking at the Mancreu Cauldron, a resonance image of the volcanic well from which the Discharge Clouds came, and there was really only one reason why she would show him that.

‘There’s a plume building, Lester,’ she said. ‘A very big one. I think they will finish this. I think this will frighten them.’

Around them the room was quiet. He wasn’t sure if it was quieter than it had been or if he was imagining it because it ought to be that way. He nodded, and then it occurred to him that he could ask her the big question about that, and she might actually know the answer, might tell him.

‘Will it work? Blowing up the island?’

‘No,’ Inoue replied. ‘It will scour the surface and if we are lucky a tectonic shift will seal the vents. But the bacteria will survive. That’s what they do. They already live in an extreme environment. They are protean. And it is possible that the vents will not seal and the bacteria will get into the sea. Again. So far they have not done well there, but that can change. If the chambers discharge directly into the ocean floor, for example, over time . . . And the radioactivity will increase the likelihood of mutation. It is a very bad plan.’ She sighed. ‘Waiting and learning would be much better. But you can’t tell governments that, it is not a good soundbite. And they don’t like it when science doesn’t give them what they have decided it should say. They have a sort of . . . a tame team, here somewhere, who tell them stories they do like. I may . . . I may have to say something anyway, although it will make me not popular.’

She moved her hand through the air. In someone else it would have been a vague motion, but Inoue’s most unconsidered gestures were precise, so her fingers traced a sharp little arc, twisting like wingfeathers. ‘Lester, when this gets out it will be bad. The island people believe they are ready to hear this, but they are not. And I think they will need you, but I think you are not ready either. Are you?’

He ought to say yes, of course, but he needed to find out about El Hierro. And the boy, the evacuation plan: that wasn’t done, either, not halfway done. And there were places on Mancreu he still hadn’t seen. He should run the Lucretia River path again in the sun, it was amazing. He’d have to find ways to stay in touch with people. With Beneseffe and even Kershaw. With Inoue.

Outside he heard the sound of a car, high and snarling. It made him think of kids doing handbrake turns in a supermarket car park back home. He’d been one of those kids, actually. Never very good at it, but you had to show willing. If this was nostalgia, he was bad at it. He contemplated the end of Mancreu, newly real, while whoever it was roared around and around outside, mowing the lawn or cutting down a hedge in an endless grinding whine, and then they slowed down and he could speak, but realised that he didn’t know what to say.

He didn’t have to. Inoue was looking over his shoulder, and when he followed her gaze he saw a line of quad bikes, expensive toys for bored footballers on their estates along the A13 out of London to the coast, and on them a line of grubby men with scarves on their faces. An actual masked gang. When they had his attention – his, in particular – they revved their engines again and roared away, leaving Madame Duclos’s dead, fat dog on the bonnet of his car.

The Sergeant ran outside and realised that he was waving his arms and shouting ‘Oi!’ and that this was not, on the face of it, the best response. An authoritative military bark would be more to the point, a ‘Halt or I’ll open fire!’ though he did not know whether he would. He did have a weapon – since Shola’s death he had quietly added a small side arm to his kit, in a discreet holster which sat directly against his leg and could be accessed through the open-ended pocket on his right side – but getting it would require that he stopped running and if he stopped running they would be out of range. He shouted ‘Oi!’ again and knew that he really had to stop doing that because it made him sound like an old fart waving a newspaper, but at this moment that was probably all he was. The dust choked him, and then the enemy had retreated, tactical objective achieved. ‘Fuckers! It’s just a bloody dog! And it’s not even a proper dog, just an old lady’s floor-ornament. It never did anything to you!’

No. No, the dog was not the sinner here. This message was for him, and maybe for Her Majesty’s United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. He went back to see.

The dog lay in its own blood in an indentation on the bonnet of the Land Rover. They had opened it like a hog and thrown it, dying. The landing must have been agonising, though briefly. Had they known that he had once carried a man with a wound like this to safety behind the iron frame of a derelict Russian bus? Had they imagined that he would go into some sort of particular shock on seeing the tableau? Or was this just an average bit of brutality, lacking that greater understanding? Vile enough, in any case.

Inoue was standing at the point of a spear composed of irate Japanese geeks, and he was pleased to see that the principal reaction on her face was a fizzing, imperious outrage. She was brandishing a camera and he realised she must have used it to record footage of the gang’s departure. He wondered if she could now run it through some sort of computer the way they did on television and tell him who he was looking for, and knew she couldn’t. The assembled male and female members of the vulcanology department (they had a smoking mountain printed in white on their maroon hoodies) were carrying fence posts and looking meaningfully at the row of Hilux 4×4s to let him know they were in if he wanted to give chase. He pictured himself leading a posse of affronted eggheads across the wilds, their righteous fury ebbing as they rode to an uncertain reception, and concluded that the list of great British military follies did not need, even in the name of canine justice and international brotherhood, the addition of the Charge of the Mancreu Irregular Xenobiological Infantry and their non-commissioned officer.

Instead, he approached the corpse with a view to removing it. He couldn’t work out how. If he just embraced it he could get it off the car, but then he’d have nowhere to put it short of dumping it on the dirt and he’d get covered in blood and viscera into the bargain. He stood there with his arms wide, then stepped back again and grunted.

A moment later the dog was being rolled onto a pallet and whisked away. Of all people, Ichiro the genius, weeping, had emptied a stationery trolley and pressed himself into service as mortician’s porter. Inoue shouted something after him in Japanese, by its tone both shocked and approving, then turned.

‘Will she want it back? The old lady?’ There was anger in her voice, and she was peering at him, seeking the fury he had already controlled.
It’s on a chain
, he wanted to tell her.
Because I’m not a proper copper. My real skills aren’t about keeping the peace
.

He could feel them waking in him, all the same. Not the battlefield, not yet – if the fight at Shola’s place hadn’t done that, this wasn’t going to. Just that same questing curiosity which saw the land and the people and took a little bit of them away so as to deliver intuitions and warnings. Hypervigilance, that was the word. The curious gift of perception granted to the very abused, the endangered, and the pursued. In war, the soldiers from hard corners – from ganglands and sink estates, from bad families and badly run care homes – they had a touch with traps and deceptions. They could see a thing out of place, spot a liar even when he was speaking a language they didn’t know. They saw through walls. The best of them could hone and grow the skill within themselves, and an NCO who got one of those, or better yet, who was one, he could keep his boys alive when everyone else was going home in boxes. The Sergeant’s gift in that regard was limited, found late and small, but he had a sight of a different sort, born of another sort of trouble. It was less immediate and more haunting: a sense of narrative which was part empathy and part strategy, which told him when something was coming down and when it was overdue. His boys said he could hear the enemy whispering to one another from ten miles away, that he could smell the mortars before they were fired. They called him a warlock, but from the inside it was more like flirting than magic. He watched the smoke and the mountainsides, the faces of local people and the way they held their shoulders, knew when they wanted to dance or disappear, knew what that meant even when they didn’t. He read the world, and in exchange he got a few hours’ grace before the sky fell on him.

He had thought himself fully engaged with that faculty, here on Mancreu. He realised now that it had been idling in him, pooling at his feet, and that he had been ignoring it.

He made a circuit of the horizon with his eyes, but knew he didn’t need to, knew that if there was more to this it would already have happened. There would be no second attack. There would not even – though he would assume he was at risk all the same – be a landmine waiting for him along the road. This didn’t have that flavour. It was a come-on, a taunt.
Notice me.

Well, all right. I will. And don’t say I didn’t warn you.

He was raging inside. It was old anger as well as new, a long way down in a sealed chamber, and on the whole everyone would be better off if it stayed there. At the same time he was in the grip of Mancreu’s end, the deep, dark brown taste of doom and gallows celebration. It was in all of them, in Beneseffe and the crab fishers and in the NatProMan troops. It had been in Shola, it was in Dirac and it must be in him, too. They were all a little bit mad and getting more so, and most of all the ones who appeared to be holding it together. Inoue and her friends had it, with their admirable, ridiculous makeshift pikes and their readiness to do battle with thugs. The Witch had it.

The boy had it in spades.

But beyond that there was something else: a watchful something which seemed to squat just out of sight and which plucked at all his old familiar fear.
I am observed
. . . No. More than that:
I am targeted
. His hands twitched, remembering the burning pain of the tomato sap, feeling the thing wriggling under his skin. Something diffuse, yet close, a monster waiting in the closet. Thugs at Shola’s table. Madame Duclos’s dog.
Notice me
. It had a stink of bad endings about it, and his every instinct said to get out from under or strike hard, and strike first, but it was so ubiquitous, so faint and yet so present, that he had no idea how to do either.
Devil’s footsteps on my spine
.

Inoue touched him on the shoulder and he lurched away from her, hands almost coming up in a fighter’s guard, but he restrained the impulse and waved away his own reaction with a sharp ‘Sorry’. A moment later he was running to the Xeno Centre to do what he should have done five minutes ago: he called Jed Kershaw and told him he’d been the victim of a direct and possibly politically motivated minor assault on the property of the UN-sanctioned Japanese scientific mission. If Kershaw had any assets which might reasonably be brought to bear on the situation – any American satellites or high-altitude drones doing atmospheric research or weather balloons which just happened to have a camera pointing at the ground – now would be the time for that happy accident to be shared with the mother country in the name of brotherly love and the avoidance of a Total Goatfuck. He saw Inoue watching from the doorway and realised that she was seeing him as he had earlier seen her, doing something that actually came naturally, that was his strength. She smiled in recognition of the same truth, then took her cue from him and went to boss her swots in whatever direction she felt best.

Kershaw told him to stay the fuck where he was. A rapid reaction force arrived twenty minutes later and secured the perimeter while insisting that everyone sit tight and await reinforcements. Privately the Sergeant found this was a little bit funny and a perfect example of what happened when you put a civilian in charge of military personnel.

The full force took four hours to arrive, by which time it was getting dark, so the drive back across the island was a stern, halogen-lit convoy with the Sergeant’s bloodied Land Rover occupying a slightly off-centre position in the traffic. The Sergeant wasn’t allowed to travel in it in case the vehicle was marked out for follow-up attack. According to NatProMan’s standard operating procedure, the possible object of guerrilla activity – there had never actually been any before – was to be protected both by ‘direct target obscuration’, which meant ‘getting in the way’, and deception. He told Kershaw’s myrmidons that no formal escort was necessary. The officer in charge, who was all the blond, muscular things a Pennsylvania Dutch quarterback should be, told him that he knew that – of course he did – but that Jed Kershaw had been pretty agitated and would the Sergeant consent this one time to being treated like he was made of glass? Because just between the officer and the Sergeant, who was a pro and that’s why the officer could lay it out like this and not screw around – it would sure as hell make life that much easier.