Real Tigers (21 page)

“Okay,” Lamb conceded. “Maybe not entirely without faults.” He held up one fat finger: “So. He has a Regent's Park connection.” And a second: “And he's a drinker. Well?”

Nobody offered a comment.

“Jesus, do I have to do everything? He didn't pick Standish at random. He already knew her.” He pointed at River. “How'd Sergeant Rock end up with Black Arrow?”

“Remember the Spider-Man incident?”

“Some idiot dressed as a cartoon fell off a building,” Lamb said.

This had happened back in the winter, not far from Slough House. It had made headlines for a few days, and had figured in a few comedy routines too, because the guy hadn't actually died and, well, had been dressed as Spider-Man.

“Was thrown off a building,” River said. “It was a demo, fathers for justice sort of thing. He was divorced, and had been denied his visiting rights.”

“Was he complaining or celebrating?”

River ignored that. “Name of Paul Lowell, one-time DI with the Middlesex Constabulary, and more recently Sylvester Monteith's second-in-command at Black Arrow. He never knew who threw him onto London Wall. They'd made contact through the Fair Deal for Fathers website, and whoever it was came dressed as Batman. He was never caught.”

“Well well well,” said Lamb. “Wonder who that could have been?”

“Donovan,” said Shirley.

“Yeah, that was rhetorical. Jesus, if I didn't know the answer to something, you think I'd ask you lot?”

When he was sure Lamb had finished, River said, “Monteith hired Sean Donovan the same week.”

“Nothing like creating a job vacancy. Hope none of you think that's the way to the top.”

“We'd never fit you through the window,” Louisa muttered.

Lamb rubbed the palm of his hand on his whiskery chin. Which he was scratching was open to question. “Okay, that's who he is. What's he want with the Grey Books? You.” He pointed at Louisa. “Go.”

Louisa said, “There's a number of message boards where conspiracy theorists gather to swap stories. We're not talking Dark Web here, this is all out in the open—well, they're passworded, obviously.”

“But we have the passwords.”

“We have the passwords.”

She listed some of the sites, to blank indifference from her audience, except Shirley, who nodded vigorously throughout.

“About a year ago, around when Donovan would have been released from prison, a poster calling himself BigSeanD crops up.”

“Is that what gave you the clue?” Lamb asked.

“Thanks, yes. That and hints at a military background. It's not unusual for online warriors to big themselves up, but he makes comments that chime with Donovan's experience. About the Balkans, and the UN.”

She talked them through it. To all appearances, “BigSeanD” fitted snugly into the online community, where the prevailing attitude resembled what you'd get if you spliced the DNA of an only child, a
Daily Mail
reader and a viciously toxic bacillus: an organism that was self-obsessed, full of pent-up rage, and sprayed poisonous shit everywhere. Symptoms included a tendency to lapse into
capitals
, the dismissal of all dissent as Establishment toadying, and a blinding ignorance of Occam's razor.

“So what's his bag?”

“It's the weather.”

“The what?”

Louisa said, “He's got a thing about the weather. He thinks it's being controlled by . . . someone. The government.
Them
.”

This was met with a moment's silence.

Then Lamb said, “Christ, and they let him carry weapons.”

“He posts a lot about Project Cumulus, a government operation in the fifties, which had military backing. It was all about cloud-seeding, artificial rainmaking.”

Lamb squinted towards the window, where the blind was doing a half-arsed job of keeping the sunlight out. “Yeah, that's working nicely.”

“In 1952 there was a serious flood in Lynmouth, in Devon. Thirty-five people died. There are those, BigSeanD among them, who think this was the work of Project Cumulus. What was meant to be a demonstration of rainmaking potential got out of hand.”

“Fifty-two's a long time ago,” Marcus observed.

“But the theories continue. There's an American outfit, military funded, called HAARP—something about high frequency transmissions—which is reckoned to be developing a weather-control system. Floods, hurricanes, tsunamis—a lot of big stuff has been laid at their door. Man-made climate change, according to the webheads, isn't a by-product of over-consumption. It's a deliberate attempt to interfere with weather patterns. Specifically, to weaponise them.”

Shirley said, “That's like . . . ”

What it was like escaped her.

Lamb said, “And there'll be stuff in the Grey Books relating to this?”

“Well, evidently they're a Looney Tunes jukebox. A one-stop shop for the conspiracy brigade. The Lynmouth flooding—there are still classified government documents on that one, the findings of a Select Committee investigation. If they're included, that'd be exactly the sort of thing Donovan's after. Apparently.”

“You don't sound convinced. You're not sure it's him?”

Louisa shrugged. “It fits the dates. Like I said, BigSeanD didn't start posting until Donovan came out of prison. I'm guessing they don't let you have the internet in a military chokey.”

“No, the brass band accompaniment is punishment enough.” Lamb leaned back in his chair, always a potential Buckaroo moment. But its springs held. Staring at the ceiling, he said, “Okay. Golden Boy finds his career derailed, gets banged up for five years, and develops an obsession with
X-Files
mumbo jumbo. And now we have to help him get his hands on it. Have you finished fizzing yet?”

“Has who finished whatting?” Shirley asked.

“Give me strength.”

Marcus said, “He's asking where they're kept. The Grey Books?”

“Oh, right, yeah, you know how I found out? It's actually on an email, one of those corporate-type Service catch-ups HR send round? With job vacancies and promotions and links to where you can find out about your pension—”

“Any time you feel like it, jump right in and shoot her,” Lamb said.

Marcus rested a hand on Shirley's shoulder. “Where? Are? The Grey Books?”

“I don't know, but a new off-site confidential info-storage facility has just gone operational where all Ops's quote non-key data unquote is now being housed so they're pretty likely to be there, wouldn't you think?”

“You want to be any more specific about where ‘there' is?”

Shirley said, “Out west of Hayes. That's still London, isn't it?”

“Depends whether you're an estate agent or a sentient being,” Lamb said. “But yeah. That's where they'll be, all right.”
You know what I've spent the past few months overseeing?
Diana Taverner had said.
Off-site storage for the whackjob files
. . . He surveyed his crew. “Jesus. An ex-soldier with a screw loose versus you lot. A bunch of losers with fewer moves than an arthritic tortoise. Wonder how this is going to pan out?”

“We can take him,” Marcus said.

“‘We' aren't taking anyone,” Lamb said. “Reason being, the whole point is to let him get away with it. Or did you forget that part when you were out pretending to be the Sundance Kid?”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, oh.”

“So I got a little practice in. Keeps me sharp.”

“No, what you got was out of order. Next time you take my name in vain, do it while you're sitting my medical. Meanwhile, when I give you a job to do, you do it. Even if it involves sitting in front of a monitor.”

“Hey, the job got done. Shirley just told you where the books are kept.”

“And I'm amazed she stopped talking long enough for us to make sense of what she was saying.” Lamb's gaze swung her way. “I've tasted what passes for coffee round here. And that's not what's got you buzzing.”

“We're technically outside of work hours,” Shirley muttered.

“Yeah, that was then,” said Lamb. “But as of now, you're just technically outside of work.”

Marcus and Shirley exchanged a puzzled look.

“Christ,” said Lamb. “It's getting so you can't sack anyone round here without a phrase book.”

River, Louisa and Roderick Ho unconsciously shuffled a little closer together.

Marcus glared at them, then at Lamb. “You can't do that.”

“I just did.”

“It's unfair dis—”

“You disobeyed a direct order, not to mention forging my name on a Park register. And her eyeballs are still spinning from whatever she's put up her nostrils. You seriously think you've a case for unfair dismissal?”

“You need us. Need me. How you gonna get Catherine back without—”

Lamb's coffee cup spun past Marcus's shoulder and shattered on the office wall, the spatter from its dregs Pollocking Marcus and Shirley en route. Marcus's words were swallowed by breaking crockery, and the sympathetic ringing of the windowpane.

When the noises faded away, Lamb's voice held more menace than the slow horses were used to.

“You went AWOL. She got stoned. Do you want to explain how that helps? Because you might have been hot shit once, but here and now you're just another fuck-up and I am
not
risking you being involved while I've got a joe behind the wall. So take your glove puppet here, clear your desks and fuck off out of my building. I'll deal with the paperwork tomorrow.”

For a long while Marcus stared at Lamb, whose eyes were cold as stone. On the wall, coffee dribbled a pattern between the cracks in the plaster; a new coastline being etched onto a map. Shirley snuffled once, a doglike noise, as if a thought had occurred to her, but she had yet to work out what it was. And then Marcus opened his mouth once, closed it again, and turned to leave.

“Watch yourselves,” he said to River and Louisa as he left.

He might have been talking to Ho too, of course.

Shirley said, “Yeah, fuck,” and disappeared in his wake.

River felt something uncomfortable wriggle down his spine: that sneaky feeling he'd just dodged a bullet.

An office door slammed downstairs, and a piece of furniture crashed to the floor.

Lamb produced a cigarette out of thin air, and waved it in their direction. “Leaving you two. And believe me, that says more about the alternative than it does about you.”

“There are three of us,” mumbled Ho.

“You still here?”

Louisa said, “Was that necessary? Donovan's a pro, and we already know he's not averse to violence. We—”

Lamb gave her the same basilisk stare he'd granted Shirley, and she faltered.

“We could have used Marcus,” River said. “That's all we're saying.”

A match flared, and Lamb's features shimmered in its heat.

They heard footsteps leaving Slough House, and the scratch and thump of the back door being prised open. They didn't hear it close. After a while, a warm draught climbed as high as the top floor, and curled around their ankles like a cat. Lamb smoked, and his office took on the blue-grey hue of late-night jazz piano. The light coming slantwards through the blind picked up motes and dust-spirals gyrating in the air. When you could see what it was you were breathing, River thought, it really was time to be somewhere else.

At length, he said, “Okay, it's just us. So what do we do now? Wait for Donovan to make contact?”

“I doubt we'll be waiting long,” said Lamb.

And because, as River later speculated, Lamb had long ago sold his soul in exchange for the occasional display of omniscience, River's phone chose that precise moment to chirrup.

Catherine, his caller display read.

But it was Donovan.

I
t was the violet
hour once more, and still the heat had not lifted. As River eased out of the car he felt his stomach muscles complaining, and before he was fully upright had reached into his jeans for the painkillers Louisa had given him. Four left. He popped them from their plastic sheath and dry swallowed. The last one stuck in his throat, which would keep him entertained for the next minute or so.

Louisa shut the door on the driver's side. “I think we were followed.”

“Yeah?”

“It was keeping back, three cars behind. And disappeared for a stretch. But it was there.”

River nodded, though he wasn't convinced. That kind of tail sounded professional, and if it was professional, he didn't think Louisa would have spotted it. But voicing that opinion might be dangerous, and his testicles hadn't fully recovered yet. “You should have said.”

“Yeah, well, I wasn't entirely sure.” She threw him a look which was a barely disguised challenge. “But I am now.”

“Okay,” said River. But if they'd been followed, whoever it was had now dropped off the radar.

They were within what Lamb would have called pissing distance of London's westbound railway lines, which ran alongside a corridor of airport parking, gas-holders, cement works and heavy plant depots, and had parked on a patch of wasteland surrounded on three sides by long low office blocks: low by the capital's standards, six storeys tall, and originally white. These were set at a higgledy-piggled angle, with gaps between wide enough to drive a car. Two, joined at third-storey level by a walkway, were derelict, glassless, tagged high and low with faded swirls of paint; the stuttering, repetitive squawks of urban discontent—
Tox
,
Mutant
,
Flume
. At ground level each was unwalled, with thick round pillars every few yards; these were scorched black where homeless wayfarers or partying teenagers had made camp, and the floors were strewn with bottleglass and random litter. Toilet smells drifted out to where they stood, on a pitted and rubbly patch of concrete, with thuggish plant-life sprouting from its cracks. River could feel its heat seeping up through the soles of his shoes, and the ground trembled as a high-speed train thundered past.

The third block looked to be in the process of being reclaimed, though how far advanced this was was open to question. Its paintwork, if not fresh, hadn't yet succumbed to distemper, and glass shimmered in its windows, but a distressed air hung over it, as if it had fallen into bad company, and knew things wouldn't end well. The fourth side of the more-or-less square was a disused factory—paint or vinyl, River thought—which had a squat, rectangular tower at one end, next to which a tall whitewashed chimney reached up to about the height of the nearby blocks. An extension had been added, long ago; a slant-roofed corrugated-iron and sheet-plastic construction, from whose guttering barbed wire dangled like an ill-fitting crown of thorns. Pictures of Alsatians were studded at intervals, indicating that trespassers would be eaten, or worse. A jagged hole in its wall at ground level suggested that this threat hadn't been taken entirely seriously.

Three fridges and a mattress formed a nearby cairn, next to which ten-foot lengths of metal fencing were stacked in a pile, chained to each other by their end-poles, and secured to the earth by an iron hoop. An orange skip lay on its side, like a Tonka toy cast off by a giant.

Louisa's car ticked, as if counting down to something ominous.

“I think I saw this place in a film once,” River said. “It involved zombies.”

“West of Ealing,” Louisa said. “It might have been a documentary.”

River's phone rang. It was Lamb.

“Why's your phone on?”

“It's on vibrate,” River lied. “We've just arrived. Place seems quiet.”

“Well, it was until your phone rang.”

River waited, Lamb's breathing rusty in his ear.

At length Lamb said, “These soldiers, Donovan and . . . ”

“Traynor.”

“Traynor. Once they've got what they want, back off. Don't try to follow them. Let them leave.”

“What about Catherine?”

“Just focus on your end,” said Lamb. “Remember, Ingrid Tearney's pulling the strings here. And when it suits her, she'll cut them.”

“We'll beware of falling puppets,” said River.

“Don't get cocky. You're desk drones, not the Dynamic Duo.”

“And we should know that by now,” River finished for him.

Lamb hung up.

Louisa said, “What's he want?”

“For us to be careful, believe it or not.” River tucked his phone away. “But he's run out of Enid Blyton analogies.”

Another train rumbled past, picking up speed out of Paddington, and sounded its whistle; an old-fashioned, reliably forlorn noise. A crow, picking at something near one of the abandoned fridges, looked up, emitted a sullen cough, and went back to its meal.

“There was definitely a car,” she said. “But I didn't get the make or colour.”

“Okay,” River said again.

He was saved saying anything more by the sight of two shadows emerging from behind a pillar in the nearest of the wrecked buildings.

Roderick Ho
was finding it quiet in Slough House, now the others had gone. This didn't usually bother him. Most days, he saw as little of anyone as he could manage, except for the moments he engineered in the kitchen with Louisa, who had given him a look before she left—an amused glance, telling him she'd rather stay behind than set off on a ludicrous exercise: babysitting a pair of ex-soldiers while they stole the X-Files. He'd mirrored this with a look of his own, a slight raising of an eyebrow meaning
You and me both, babes
, but she was out of the door before he'd delivered it. He needed to practise that look. If he'd been quicker off the mark she'd have caught it, no problem.

He powered his computers down, and cast a goodbye look around his kingdom. Now that Longridge and Dander were history, he ought to check out their office, see if they'd forgotten anything worth having. Longridge had a nice silk scarf; he wasn't likely to be wearing it in this heat, so might have left it on a hook. Ho got as far as the door before this plan underwent sudden revision.

“And where do we think we're going?”

“Uh . . . home?”

Lamb placed a paw in the centre of Ho's chest and kept walking. Ho shuffled backwards until the backs of his thighs met the edge of his desk. Then Lamb let his hand drop and went and stood by the window, his back to Ho.

The street outside was starting to droop. Traffic was heavy still, but tinged with exhaustion: poor sodding workers heading home from battle, rather than the go-getting warriors of the morning. Across the road, a woman stepped out of the dental laboratory, which had an industrial aspect, as if large-scale experiments took place within, rather than individual acts of dentistry. She shook her head, dispelling an unpleasant memory, and walked off towards the tube.

“High Wycombe,” Lamb said.

The farmhouse Ho had found. The one Sylvester Monteith had rented.

“Uh, yeah. A little way past it on the motorway. Satnav'll find it no problem.”

“I prefer natsav,” Lamb said.

“Huh?”

“Natural savvy. It allows me to avoid demeaning tasks when there are others to perform them for me.”

“Uh . . . Cup of tea?”

“Where's your car?” said Lamb.

Marcus was
driving a black SUV with tinted windows: a vehicle designed for urban military ops, but usually driven by harassed mums caught between the school run and Waitrose. Shirley had pointed this out to him in the past, but didn't think it was a good subject to bring up at the moment. When Marcus had stopped swearing about Lamb, it had only been so he could pick on her instead.

“You straight yet?”

“Are we back on that?”

“This is not a fucking joke, Dander. You were high earlier. Are you straight yet?”

Shirley thought about lying, but only for a second. “Jesus, it was one tiny toot. Didn't even kill the hunger pangs.”

“Fuck it, Dander.
Fuck
it.”

“Keep your hair on. Christ, half an hour, max. It was a half-hour lift, no more.”

“Did you forget what we said earlier?”

“No,
partner
. It was what kept me going all afternoon, after you'd disappeared on your jolly.”

They were in bad traffic, progress stalled by a breakdown up ahead, reducing the road to a single lane. This had not improved Marcus's temper.

“So now it's my fault?”

“Hey. I take responsibility for my own fuck-ups. I'm not carrying yours too.”

Marcus swore under his breath, and then swore out loud, and slapped his hands against the wheel. “
Hell!
Have you any idea what kind of shit I'm in?”

“Same kind I am,” Shirley said. “The kind where you haven't got a job and life sucks.”

“I have a family. You're aware of that, right? I've got mouths to feed and a mortgage to pay. I can
not
lose my job.”

“Good strategy, Marcus. Shame you didn't put it into action earlier.”

“Don't get gobby with me, girl. Or you can get out here and walk.”

“Call me girl again, you won't be
able
to walk.”

The pair seethed in silence while the SUV crawled past the broken-down vehicle, from whose windows a forlorn young woman stared.

“Just anywhere up here,” Shirley said at last. “Christ. I'd have been quicker on foot anyway.”

“Yeah, because you're in a real hurry, aren't you? No job, and nobody waiting at home.”

“Thanks for the update. But I hadn't actually forgotten my life was crap.”

“Look on the bright side. Maybe you'll find some crystal meth down the back of the sofa. You know, the way people find loose change—”

“Don't fucking judge me, Longridge. You don't catch me losing a week's salary to a one-armed bandit.”

“I don't do one-armed bandits!”

“And I don't do crystal meth!”

Marcus swerved abruptly into a parking space, and Shirley's head banged against the backrest.

“Shit!”

“Shit!”

They sat in silence, their anger trying out different shapes. Traffic rumbled past through almost visible heat, and the clock on the dashboard experimented with making time stand still, every second dragging itself over innumerable obstacles. Marcus was the first to surrender.

“So okay,” he said. “We both screwed up.”

Shirley seemed about to offer footnotes but changed her mind at the last moment. “Maybe.”

“You think that fucker Lamb'll change his mind?”

“He was mad.”

“I know.”

“Really mad.”

“I know,” said Marcus. “So now what?”

“I hear Black Arrow has vacancies.”

“Great.”

Their renewed silence was only slightly less uncomfortable; Shirley tugging at the strap of her seatbelt and letting it slap back into her chest; Marcus drumming his fingers on the steering wheel in a series of broken rhythms. At last he said, “Cassie knows I'm on a job tonight.”

“So?”

“So she's not expecting me back.”

Shirley let the seatbelt slap against her again, then said, “If you're about to make a pass, I'll peel your face with a spoon.”

“Jesus, Dander. No offence, but I've been sacked, not lobotomised.”

“Yeah, none taken. Only you're too old and baldy for me.”

He shifted in his seat. “This op of Lamb's.”

“The Grey Books.”

“It's looney tunes.”

“Well, duh.”

She pulled her seatbelt out again, but Marcus caught it before if slapped against her chest.

“Stop doing that. It's looney tunes, yeah, but what if it's not?”

“Meaning?”

Marcus said, “This Donovan. Before he was kicked out of the army, he was a high-flier, right?”

“You heard Cartwright,” Shirley said. “MoD attachments, UN committees, meetings at the Park. He wasn't a squaddie, that's for sure.”

“And he's got a thing about the weather.”

“Everyone's got a thing about the weather, Marcus. The weather's looney tunes too. Floods and heatwaves, Jesus. I'm just waiting for hurricane season.”

He ignored her. “So everyone thinks what he's after is worthless, and he only wants it because he's a headcase. But what if he's not? What if he knows something we don't? All that high-level Ministry of Defence stuff, he must have had access to a lot of black-bag ops. What was Louisa saying about that HAARP project?”

“I don't remember.”

“Well it was something about weather-manipulation. So what if Donovan's not as fucked-up as he's pretending? What if there's something in the Grey Books that actually matters? Proof these weather projects are really going on?”

Shirley shook her head, and looked across the street. In a bar opposite, a young man wearing denim cutoffs and a leather waistcoat was polishing tabletops. She wondered whether they needed cleaning, or if this was part of the floorshow.

Marcus said, “There's Select Committee reports in there too. Documentation, maybe other kinds of official paperwork.”

“So?”

“So Donovan was kicked out of the army, remember? Maybe this is payback. He's planning on going Assange on someone's ass.”

“Yeah, you might want to choose your words more carefully.” Shirley withdrew her attention from the barkeep. “Besides, what's it got to do with us? Unemployed, remember?”

“Maybe.”

“Right. That Lamb. What a kidder.”

“Seriously, Shirl. If Donovan's not the tin-hat he's made us think he is, then this isn't just a hand-holding operation. Because once he's got what he's after, he won't want to leave witnesses.”