Real Tigers (22 page)

“Lamb's not about to reinstate us just for looking keen.”

“Maybe not. But what else are we gonna do? You expected home? Because like I said, I'm not.”

Shirley gazed at her thumb for a while, as if contemplating biting it off. Without looking up, she mumbled something.

“Say what?”

“Say fuck it,” said Shirley, more audibly. “Fuck it, then. Let's go.”

Walking out
of the sunlight into the shadow of the crumbling office block was like stepping from a live oven into a dead one: the heat was dirtier, wrapped in all the stink of a derelict building—rot and mildew, beer and piss, overlaid by something sweet and sickly, which River suspected might be a dead animal. Random bits of brick and lead piping suggested local turf wars. The two men were waiting by a pillar, and something in the way they held themselves reminded him of Marcus. The bigger of the two, a broad-shouldered man with a grey crew cut and a boxer's nose, late fifties, stepped forward at their approach.

“Cartwright?”

An Irish note to his voice contained less warmth than the accent usually carries.

River nodded.

“So you're Guy.”

Louisa simply looked at him.

River said, “And you're Sean Donovan. Making you Ben Traynor.”

The second man was cut from the same wood as Donovan, but younger, and where Donovan was greying Traynor was mostly bald, his chevron of hair razored to a light stubble. He didn't respond to River's identification, seeming more interested in Louisa, who had come to a halt shoulder to shoulder with River.

“You know what we're after,” Donovan said.

Before River could reply, Louisa said, “We know what you say you're after.”

“Let's not get complicated. It's a straightforward collection job.”

Neither he nor Louisa had weapons, it occurred to River. Earlier, this had seemed a detail: the job wouldn't, shouldn't, require them to be armed. But in the face of the two Black Arrow operatives, the wouldn't/shouldn't aspect of the job lost ground to the might-just-possibly element. Because if these two weren't armed, he thought, they were breaking an ingrained habit.

Though calling them Black Arrow operatives was pushing it, he conceded. Killing the boss was definitely grounds for dismissal. Lamb reminded the slow horses of that on a weekly basis.

“How did you know about this place?”

Donovan regarded him without emotion. “Same way I know about Slough House. I do my homework, Cartwright. How about you? Or do you make a habit of setting off half-cocked?”

Since an honest response to that would be “Yes,” River left it unanswered.

Louisa said, “Where's Catherine?”

“She'll be released unharmed once the Grey Books are ours.”

“And we have your word for that,” she said flatly.

“Our word's good.” This was Traynor, speaking up at last.

“That what you told Sylvester Monteith?”

Donovan said, “Monteith signed up for it. He should have known the risks. Catherine's a non-combatant. She'll be released unharmed when we get what we want.”

“She'd better be.”

River said, “So how's this going to work?”

“You go in, make sure it's all as advertised. Once it's secure, you open the doors and we follow.”

“Sounds simple,” Louisa said.

“I gather you're the special needs crew. Anything more complicated than opening a door, I'd probably have looked elsewhere.”

River was getting tired of having the horses' lowly status underlined. “But maybe kidnapping an unarmed woman seemed the easiest option. Was it just the two of you, or did you have help?”

Donovan's smile didn't reach his eyes. “Feeling sparky now? There's a good lad. Time to chat up the doorman, right?”

It was on the tip of River's tongue to say he hoped they'd have a chance to continue this later, but it struck him he'd had this conversation once today already. So he just glanced at Louisa, nodded, and the pair of them walked back out into the sunlight, towards the old factory building.

Nick Duffy
watched their progress from the third floor of the other derelict block. Tailing them from the Barbican, he'd thought they'd spotted him, despite his car being an anonymous silver hatchback like every second set of wheels on the road; there'd been a definite phase when Louisa Guy had exhibited paranoid tendencies: slowing excessively for one amber light, pedal to the metal for another. When that happened, Duffy knew, you kept your cool; assumed that the usual traffic inhibitors would do their job, and a regular, even speed would bring the target back into focus at the next crowded junction. Failing that, you always had back-up.

Except, like now, when you didn't.

What he did have was the next best thing in the circumstances, which was knowing where they were headed, because Dame Ingrid Tearney had told him.

“They're aiding and abetting an ex-convict in the commission of a crime involving a breach of national security.”

This with her usual, unflappable delivery. Duffy suspected that if Tearney were ever to break news of imminent nuclear catastrophe, it would be in the same style, though in those circumstances she would no doubt resort to calling him “dear boy,” her invariable way of sweetening a pill.

“And you want me to stop them?”

“That won't be necessary.”

They were in Dame Ingrid's office, with its view that had once been green, but was now mostly brown: since the hosepipe ban, the plant life in the park opposite had been dying. This had happened before, but this time it was hard to believe that things would revert to normal. It was as if a tipping point had been reached, and the city, maybe the planet, was sliding into irreversible decline.

But since there was nothing he or anyone else could do about this, Duffy shrugged it off, and listened to Dame Ingrid's story of Sylvester Monteith's tiger team, and how it had turned on him and bitten his head off.

Since speaking to Lamb, Dame Ingrid had conducted a little research of her own, following the exact same path River had taken. One Sean Patrick Donovan, she explained to Duffy, was the chief suspect.

“Dumping the body in Central London,” he said. “Sounds like he was trying to make a point.”

And it explained what River Cartwright thought he'd been doing this morning. But the fact that Cartwright had walked away unaided indicated that whatever was happening now, it wasn't going to be written up on official notepaper.

That was fine by him. Duffy had been Head Dog long enough to know which end did the wagging. If Dame Ingrid needed something done under the bridge, then under the bridge he'd go.

“The files are of no consequence,” Tearney said. “Archived material of a rather lurid nature. I suspect that Mr. Donovan's wide range of experience, either in the military or in its house of correction, has left him somewhat paranoid. It's always a shame when a career goes so spectacularly awry.”

“But you're happy to let him get away with it?”

“When you get to my age, dear boy, you'll understand that nobody really gets away with anything. But in this very specific instance, yes, I'm happy for him to appear to have got away with this.”

The word
appear
swam between them for a moment or two, then vanished in its own slippery coils.

“I want you to track him to his lair, Mr. Duffy. To run him to earth. And ensure that his paranoia doesn't lead him into more serious misadventures.”

“I see.”

“I very much hoped you would. You're happy to undertake this without support?”

“Without back-up? Yes, Dame Ingrid. I'm happy to do that.”

Because acting without back-up broke every rule in the Service's code of practice, which meant she'd be putting a very big tick on his side of the ledger. And given his earlier run-in with Lady Di, Nick Duffy was feeling the need for a friend in high places.

Besides, this was what he was born for. Leaning on agents who stepped out of line was one thing. Squashing potential enemies of the state was entirely another.

When Cartwright and Guy disappeared through a side door into the abandoned factory, Duffy lowered his binoculars and wiped the sweat from his eyebrows. It wasn't dark yet, though shadows were lengthening on the wasteground below. Whatever played out here in the next short while, there was no danger he'd miss anything.

Nick Duffy, in fact, prided himself on missing very little.

“Where's your
car?” said Lamb.

“. . . Why?”

“Because I thought it might need a wax and polish. Jesus, answer the question.”

Ho pointed through the window, in the direction of the nearby estate. He had a local resident's parking permit in the name of an actual local resident, though as the resident in question was ninety-three and homebound, she was never likely to discover this. Come to think of it, she might be dead by now. Either way, there was probably a law said your boss couldn't make you lend him your car.

On the other hand, if such a law existed, it almost certainly didn't apply to Lamb.

“Good. I'll have a dump while I'm waiting.”

“. . . Waiting?”

“For you to fetch the car. Are you awake? Because sleeping on company time's a sackable offence.”

A glint in his eye suggested Lamb had acquired a taste for firing his staff.

Ho's reluctance to reach the obvious conclusion was being worn away by the inevitable. “You want to go to High Wycombe.”

“And to think your annual appraisal says you're slow on the uptake.” Lamb's melancholy headshake might have been more convincing if he wasn't responsible for the said appraisal.

“. . . And you want me to drive you?”

“Christ, no. But there's nobody else around.”

“Well, if you hadn't sacked . . . ”

Ho's voice tailed off in the face of Lamb's benign expression. “You go right ahead, son. I've always prided myself on being able to take criticism.”

“I just don't think I'll be much help.”

“Neither do I. So you'll have to prove us both wrong, won't you?” Lamb plucked a can of Red Bull from Ho's desk, and shook it to gauge its contents. There were none. He sighed, and dropped it. “Look. If you were kidnapped, would Standish help?”

Ho broke with his usual habit, and gave this question some thought. Standish called him Roddy, which nobody else did; she would occasionally praise him for his computer skills without immediately following this up with a request that he perform some digital task; and one lunchtime had presented him with a homemade salad in a Tupperware box because he “ate too much pizza,” whatever that meant. When his resentment had worn off, Ho found he was quite touched; so much so that he had disposed of it where she might not find it. And he thought, too, how of all the slow horses, she was the one most likely to be pleased when she found out about him and Louisa. Of course, there were fewer slow horses than there used to be, but that altered the percentages, not the facts.

Having thought all this, he muttered, “. . . I guess.”

“You'd better hope so. Because no other bugger round here will, I promise you that. Now go get your car. Chop chop.”

Ho was halfway down the stairs when Lamb called out, “Oh, and when I say ‘chop chop'? I hope you don't think I'm being racially insensitive.”

“. . . No.”

“Only you Chinkies can be pretty thin-skinned.”

It was going to be a long drive to High Wycombe.

The details
of the off-Park storage site were on the Service intranet, if you knew where to look; passwords were available to agents in good standing, which didn't include the slow horses, but applied to Jackson Lamb. Neither Louisa nor River had seen fit to pass comment on this back at Slough House while Ho had retrieved the relevant code. From the summary this accessed, they had learned that the facility was below the semi-derelict industrial estate; an underground complex that had started life as a bomb shelter in the thirties, and been refitted two decades later. At this time, it was hugely expanded to allow living room for a hundred and twenty local government officials, these being deemed, for reasons perhaps not unconnected with their having been involved in the planning, necessary to the survival of civilisation in the aftermath of a nuclear exchange. The subterranean network now stretched for more than a mile westwards from its originating point, its connecting corridors carved into abrupt dips and bends to avoid the underground line—the work had been passed off as maintenance. Here in this system of caves and caverns, the important work of means-testing and rates-assessment would carry on even as the world outside shivered through nuclear winter.

That had been the plan, anyway, but in the late seventies the site was repurposed and moved into Service hands. Given that armageddon was still on the cards then, council officials had evidently been downgraded to expendable, but little fuss was made. Natural wastage, generous early-retirement packages and the notoriously abbreviated attention span of local government officers had combined to allow the facility's existence to pass into the status of myth; and it was deep enough, and its walls thick enough, to pass undetected while the work of the industrial estate lumbered on overhead. And when that fell victim to the economic miracle that had transformed Britain into a service industry, the facility continued on its quiet course, upgraded by now to cope with more contemporary threats than a nuclear exchange: viral outbreaks, extreme weather events, and the righteous indignation of a pissed-off electorate.

It was hard not to think in terms of James Bond–type shit.

“You think there'll be crews wearing silver tracksuits?” River said as they made their way into the abandoned factory.

“You mean blondes,” Louisa said.

“Well, obviously blondes. But, you know. Redheads too.”