Real Tigers (19 page)

Ho hit
print
again, and this time collected the results.

•••

Not far
from the Park was a recently renovated swimming baths, its façade now boasting a row of hoarding-sized photographs: kids splashing about, an old fellow with goggles that made him look like a beat poet, a mother holding a child while its eyes blazed with delight. All very wholesome. Round the back was a metal-studded fire door marked
not for public use
. Marcus flashed his Service card at the topmost stud, and there was a short pause before the door emitted a low buzzing noise and a click, then opened.

He let himself in. Technically, like the other slow horses, he wasn't allowed here, but he had an advantage over the rest of the Slough House crew in that he'd once kicked doors down and pointed guns at bad guys, the kind of CV that impressed those who manned exits at Service facilities. This particular example greeted Marcus with a complicated handshake topped off with a toothy grin, and let him sign the log with his usual squiggle, a barely decipherable
Jackson Lamb
.

The shooting gallery was seven levels below the surface, beneath the baths, the gyms, the changing rooms. Marcus felt pumped heading down. Money in his pocket; his skin glowing from his bike ride—his shirt was soaked through, but he felt good, his muscles moving in smooth rhythms. He took the stairs three at a time, enjoying the sense of separation that increased with every flight. You could spend too much time in the world. Every so often you needed to check out, and if you could do that somewhere with live ammunition, so much the better.

So in the gallery he glad-handed another old comrade and shared an ancient war story; stole a bottle of water from the staff-only fridge, and drained it in one unbroken swallow; then mopped his still-sweating upper body dry with a handful of paper towels. After that he donned safety goggles, wrapped a pair of ear protectors round his head, signed for a Heckler & Koch, and planted ten straight bullets into the outline bad-guy-torso target thirty yards down the shooting corridor.

Yeah, he thought. Turned a corner.

Back in control.

Peter Judd
said, “The way this was supposed to end, I'd have your boss's balls in my pocket. Instead, she's holding mine. Care to explain how that came about?”

“I know as much as you do,” Taverner said. “Sean Donovan—what can I say? He went off message.”

That earned respect. Monteith had suffered, Judd's best information suggested, a single massive blow to the head; chances were, he was dead before he hit the ground. He was certainly dead before he was tipped from a van in SW1. Either way, “off-message” was as pithy a summation of that process as Judd had recently encountered.

“You're sure it was Donovan?”

“No. But if it wasn't, he'd have come forward by now. He must know his boss has been murdered.”

Judd nodded, and pursed his lips. “Sly was a hero-fucker. He probably wet himself when Donovan applied for a job.” He tapped the newspaper against the bench. “When you brought this tiger team idea to me, you knew I'd use Monteith.”

Diana Taverner said, “It was
because
you had a contact in private security that I suggested it. You know that.”

“I know you told me that. It's hardly the same thing. Did you know Donovan then?”

She shook her head.

“I have this weakness. Call it a foible. I like people to use words when they answer questions. That way I know whether they're lying or not.”

Taverner looked him in the eye. “I'd never heard of Sean Donovan when I came up with the tiger team plan.”

Judd regarded her without speaking. It was rare for him to spend long with a woman without making a pass—and “long,” in those circumstances, could mean anything over a minute—but he knew how to prioritise. Besides, it was only postponing the inevitable, and the way things were going, when he did get round to bedding her it would be in the nature of a punishment, which suited him fine. Her too, if he read the signs aright. At last he said, “Tearney says whoever contacted her, who we assume's Donovan, is after the Grey Books. Is there anything damaging in them?”

“To national security?”

“To
me
.”

“Not that I'm aware of. Do you have reason to think there might be?”

“If I don't feature in the paranoid fantasies of the internet's bedsit warriors, I'm not doing my job properly. And as long as mud's being flung around, some of it'll stick. What do you think he intends doing with this nonsense once he's acquired it?”

“I have no idea.”

“You're supposed to be in Intelligence. Hazard a guess.”

“I can only suppose he's looking for confirmation of whatever pet theory he's adopted.”

“And we have no idea what that is?”

“Something military, I'd imagine. How important can it be? This is junk material. He might be researching a screenplay for all we know.”

“I do enjoy levity in its right place. Which does not include when I've just been fucking compromised by the head of my own security service.”

Diana Taverner knew enough not to respond to this.

Judd worked his way through a train of thought, carriage by carriage. At last he said, “Tearney will let Donovan get away because then I'm well and truly on her hook. As far as she's concerned, my scheme backfired and left one man dead and a mentalist with his hands full of Service secrets. The fact that they might as well be toilet paper's neither here nor there, because the press'd lap it up either way. So all I can do is kiss her arse and pretend I'm enjoying it.” He slapped the bench with the rolled-up paper, frightening a pair of pigeons into flight. “If, on the other hand, she finds out the tiger team was your idea, she'll skin you slowly and feed you to spiders. So I might be in her pocket, but you're in mine, Diana. Which means my interests are yours. I trust you'll keep that in mind.”

“Depend on it,” she said.

Without warning, he reached out and clasped her right breast with his free hand. He squeezed hard. “If I thought this was all part of some game you're playing, I'd be very disappointed. I hope you appreciate that.”

He'd expected fear, or at the least alarm. What he didn't expect was her hand on his crotch, and a reciprocal squeeze.

“Are you sure?” she said. “You don't feel disappointed to me.”

The returning pigeons fluttered away again at Judd's raucous, earthy burst of laughter.

Chicken baguette.
It wasn't much to ask.

But Marcus had been gone forty-five minutes, and it looked like lunch would have to be an office daydream: one of those brief reveries where you remember what it was like, last time you'd had something decent to eat. The past few weeks, supper had been whatever Shirley could scrape out of the fridge, eaten standing up. Drink: she was okay for drink—she couldn't remember the last time she hadn't had one of those. But food, she pretty much relied on getting something solid into her at lunchtime, which meant a local sandwich or a full-on takeaway. Unless Marcus came back with something pretty soon, she was going to faint with hunger.

Okay, so they'd been out earlier. But ice cream didn't count.

Bloody Marcus. He was supposed to be doing this: she was supposed to be watching.

Find out where the Grey Books are
, Lamb had said, waving a pudgy hand, as if evaporating the difficulty involved.

Like she had the inside track on where the Service kept its crap.

Shirley scrabbled around her desk drawer for a while, unearthing the used envelope she scribbled her passwords on from a snowdrift of credit card receipts and flyers for DJ nights. The Service intranet was a bland blue screen with a royal seal in the centre: she clicked on this, supplied her ID number and password (“inyourFACE”) then navigated to a staff list with direct email and extension numbers.

So far so good.

The Queens of the Database were her first bet: they knew everything, and more besides. Shirley didn't know for a fact they spent their downtime trawling through personnel folders for dirt, but you had to figure. Unfortunately they took most other aspects of having signed the Official Secrets Act to heart, which meant even the one she thought she'd had a good relationship with, back when they worked in the same building—the one with the cheekbones, and eyebrows so fine they disappeared in a good light—wasn't prepared to let her know something as basic as information storage facilities.

“More than my—”

“Jobsworth. Yeah, I know.”

“—Sweet thing. Are you having a torrid time over there? I hear Slough House positively
reeks
of disappointment.”

Shirley's password drifted into mind as she broke the connection.

She went to the kitchen in the hope of finding something loose in the fridge, but River Cartwright was there, so theft wasn't on the agenda. He was holding himself in a painful fashion, but then he'd been given a seeing to by the Dogs—never a happy experience, Shirley gathered.

“How far did you get?” she asked him, genuinely interested.

“Archive level,” he told her. He was drinking a glass of water, maybe checking for leaks.

“That's whatsername, right? The old bat with the wheels?”

“Molly Doran.”

Shirley remembered the name, though had never encountered the lady. Another of those Service legends dimly whispered about; the subject of semi-thrilled speculation. She stalked back to her PC still hungry, an imp dripping mischief in her ear—she had a wrap of coke in her bag, so tightly tied it resembled a scrap of paper. Nothing like a snort to drive away hunger pangs. Plus, it would sharpen her up nicely; give her an edge . . .

But Jesus, no. No. She'd turned up at work slightly glassy once or twice: who hadn't? But she wasn't going to turn a teatime break into a launch pad, for God's sake. She sipped water from the unsmeared side of the glass on her desk, and felt it all the way down. That would do for now. It would have to. She found Molly Doran's number on the staff-list, and called it.

Heading back
from the kitchen, River paused at Louisa's open door to watch her gazing intently at her PC, head unmoving. In the rare moments he saw her—actually saw her, as opposed to being aware of her presence—he was struck by how much she'd changed her appearance since Min's death: different hair, different clothes, as if she were systematically erasing the person she'd been. If he knew her better, he'd have talked to her about that. But this was Slough House.

He was about to move on when she spoke, her eyes still fixed on her screen.

“Was it true what Lamb said?”

“Sounds unlikely. Which bit?”

“About you visiting Webb. In hospital.”

River said, “Not sure you could call it visiting. Wouldn't he have to be aware of it to count as that?”

“But you go.”

“. . . Yeah.”

“Why?”

He didn't answer.

She said, “He's the reason you wound up in Slough House. More to the point, he's the reason for that mess last year. What happened to Min. And you're taking him flowers?”

Her voice cracked on the closing word.

River said, “I know all that. You think I don't? He's a backstabbing bastard, no question. I sometimes wonder if I'm only there to see if he's dead yet.”

“That's a punchline, not a reason.”

Now was the moment to leave, he thought; back to the safety of his room. He could ease into his chair, dose himself with aspirin, and hope they'd iron out his wrinkles before he was called upon to do anything energetic. But he couldn't, not while she was refusing to look at him. He'd always thought her borderline difficult, by which he meant she didn't take crap. Which in turn, he realised, meant he shouldn't offer her any.

“No . . . Yes, okay. It's not a reason.”

“So why do you do it?”

“I talk to him. About this.”
This
being Slough House. They both knew that. “About what it's like, day after day . . . About the gap between where we were and where we've ended up.” He let that hover for a while. She didn't reply. He said, “I doubt he hears me. But if he does, he'll get it. I mean, Christ. You think this is bad? He can't even see out the window.”

She redirected her gaze at last, and subjected him to a full quarter-minute's silence.

“So anyway,” he said at last. “It's not like I cheer him up. Other way round, if anything.”

He wasn't entirely sure that was the whole truth of it, but it felt as near as he could get.

After a while, Louisa said, “Got any painkillers?”

“I've got some aspirin. Want some?”

She shook her head, reached into her drawer, and tossed a packet at him. “Try those. They're stronger.”

He caught it. “Thanks.”

She looked back at her screen.

River returned to his office.

Marcus left
the Boris Bike at the baths and caught the underground back, and even the tube stalling at Farringdon—signalling problems: these were often caused by heat, when they weren't caused by cold, or by things being wet, or dry—couldn't ruin his mood. He circled Smithfield, popped into an Italian deli for a chicken baguette, then headed up to Slough House, ringing home to tell Cassie he'd be late, he had a
work thing
on—an established code.

“You haven't had one of those for a while.”

She didn't know about Slough House. She knew he'd been transferred, but not what that meant. He hadn't been able to bring himself to tell her.

“Yeah, well. It's not the kind of thing you schedule far in advance.”

“Be careful.”

“Always. Kiss the kids for me.”

He felt coordinated—one up on the world. This morning's blues were someone else's soundtrack.