Real Tigers (29 page)

And now this.

More doors. She'd lost track of which corridor they were in, F or E, but that didn't matter because here they were, in the room they'd seen on the monitor, with its rows of newly assembled shelving, and crates packed in what looked like cages, as if the information they contained was savage, and needed to be kept behind bars. A lot of it probably was. At the far end of the room, visible along the aisle between the rows, Ben Traynor was by the far set of doors: he'd erected a barricade, and was standing on an overturned cabinet, sighting through a fraction of a porthole window. His gun hung loosely by his side, but on their arrival he spun round, aiming it in their direction.

River and Louisa leaped in opposite directions, taking cover behind caged crates.

Traynor lowered the gun. “What the hell are you doing?”

River emerged, hands raised to shoulder level. “Was about to ask you the same thing. Where's Donovan?”

The sound of a box file hitting the floor betrayed his position.

Traynor said, “I thought I told you to go.”

“And I thought you said you were after the Grey Books.”

Louisa joined River as he lowered his hands. “Are they showing signs of coming in?” she asked.

He hesitated. Then said, “There's a room a few yards down the corridor. They're in there at the moment. I imagine they're planning their next move.”

Which presumably involved all-out assault, thought Louisa. That or surrender, which didn't seem likely. “Have they got guns?”

“Maybe one or two of them. They haven't fired any yet.”

Another box file hit the floor.

River said, “If he's going through them one by one, we might be here a while.”

“We know what we're doing.”

“They won't need guns. They can just wait for the hinges to rust off the doors.”

Louisa moved down the aisle towards Traynor, and stopped when she reached the row where Donovan was. There was something incongruous about the scene: like watching Rocky play librarian. In his hands was a box file. Before she opened her mouth he'd dropped it and was reaching for the next one.

She said, “I found your online musings.”

“BigSeanD,” he said, without stopping what he was doing.

“BigSeanD has a thing about the weather,” she said. “He seems to think They've weaponised it.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Wasn't too clear on who
They
were.”

“I expect They're the same crowd putting chips in people's heads to track them when they're abducted by aliens.” He looked at her briefly. “They get up to creepy shit, They surely do.”

He'd reached the end of the row of box files; next up were manila folders, of varying thickness; some bound with ribbon, others paper-clipped closed. They had catalogue numbers stamped in red ink on the cover; Donovan checked each before unbowing the ribbon, discarding the paper clip. A quick glance at the top sheet seemed to be all he needed, and the folders joined the mess on the floor.

“You have to admit,” he said in a conversational tone, “it doesn't sound that far-fetched. If the weather's not being controlled yet, you can bet your life someone's trying to make it happen.”

“But you don't care about that, do you? You were just building a legend to get you access to this place.”

“What's the matter, don't I fit your image of a conspiracy nut? What have you been told we look like?”

“I gather they come in different sizes,” River said. He stood in the aisle, with a sight line on both Donovan and Traynor. “But whatever you really want, we can't let you take it.”

“Is that so?”

“Making a move now,” said Traynor.

“How many?” River asked.

“Six. More. I have limited vision here.”

Donovan looked unmoved. He said, “You might want to leave. One or two of them have real guns. They even know which way to point them.”

River said, “You took Catherine Standish. Sent me her photo.”

“I took her,” Donovan said. “But it was Monteith sent you the photo.” He plucked another folder from the shelf. “And I think you'll find he's outside your jurisdiction.”

A glance, the barest shrug. The folder hit the floor.

“You knew her from the old days,” Louisa said. “Back when she was at the Park.”

Donovan opened another folder. He looked at the front page, seemed about to drop it, then looked again, more closely.

“But what I want to know,” Louisa said, “is how come you knew about Slough House?”

Glass splintered, and she turned. Through the gap on the shelves left by Donovan's predations, she saw Traynor raise the gun to the window he'd just broken: two shots ricocheted down the corridor. In immediate response came a louder bang, and a flood of light which filled the room before receding, leaving a dark blur in its place. Traynor was thrown from the cabinet, which juddered across the floor with a heavy scraping sound. The doors bulged inwards, the left-hand one torn free of the wall by the blast, and the rows of shelving toppled like dominoes, as those nearest the blast collapsed onto their neighbours. Donovan dropped to the ground; Louisa followed when he pulled her arm, and the falling shelves spewed files and folders onto their heads. What had been an aisle was now a tunnel, and the overhead crashing continued until the last of the shelves came to rest on the first of the rows of crates. River had gone. For two seconds Louisa was blank confusion, her ears full of noise, her eyes full of light, and then a survival instinct kicked in: on her hands and knees, she scuttled through debris to what had been the central aisle, where she could make out figures pouring through what was now a hole in the wall where the doors had been. Scrambling upright, she found herself grabbed by a stranger, his features obscured by black wool. When she rapped his throat with the side of her hand he backed off two steps, comically choking for breath, and another man, identically clad, took his place. This time Louisa was flung to the floor, with something like a cosh swinging down towards her. It would have connected if a box file hadn't hit the man in the face first. He staggered sideways, then fell when River punched him in the head.

Louisa got to her feet. A light haze had filled the room, smoke, but mostly dust. Some of the Black Arrow crew didn't appear to know what to do now they'd broken through; a couple of others, more proactive, were sitting on Ben Traynor; had rolled him over and were cuffing his wrists. Sean Donovan emerged from behind her, and she saw him reach for the folder he'd been looking at when the doors had blown open. He tucked it inside his shirt before standing up.

River shouted. “You okay?”

She thought that's what he shouted. Her ears were still ringing.

He shouted, “Time to go,” and then his body went rigid and the light in his eyes went out.

The way he hit the floor, she was sure he was dead.

Shirley rolled
sideways, and the kick that should have taken her head off did no more than graze her ear. In the same movement she hooked her foot around her assailant's leg and brought him to the ground. From the corner of her eye, she saw the first man bring his truncheon down on Marcus's stomach, but that was yards away—another time zone—and she had her own enemy to worry about. She threw herself upon him, pinning his elbows with her hands. He was several stone heavier, and clad in combat-ready gear; she wore jeans, a tee and a jacket, but if she lacked a well-packed utility belt and a nightstick she at least had a hard head, and when she brought it down on his nose she heard the satisfying crunch of bone on bone. The coward screamed, and his stick went rattling across the concrete. Pushing herself semi-upright, Shirley punched him twice, very hard, in the exact same spot she'd just butted him. She'd have done so a third time, but had to throw herself sideways to avoid the first man's truncheon, which whistled so closely past her face she could taste it. She rolled over twice then sprang into launch position, like a racer waiting for the starting pistol. Facing her, he slapped the truncheon into his open palm, once, twice, like an invitation. The second man was wheezing heavily, bubbling with blood; Marcus was prone and didn't look like he'd be moving soon. And there were more people heading this way: she could hear the rustling of gear, the heavy tread of hot men. Another slap of the truncheon—
Come and get it
.

She could take him. Five seconds' untrammelled movement from her, and he'd spend the rest of the night removing that stick from his arse.

But there was more than just him to contend with. Before the noises got closer, she feinted left, moved right, spun on her heel and ran.

Sorry, Marcus.

Shadows swallowed her, and she vanished inside darkness.

She didn't see Marcus being gathered up and carried to the black van.

Dame Ingrid
sat in the aura of her standard lamp, and to an observer might have looked serene, saintly even, given the halo effect of her blonde wig. Though if the same observer had moved closer, ignoring the soft focus, she'd have noticed that any calm in Dame Ingrid's eyes was the kind that rocks contain, comprising a sublime indifference to the forces that produced her and a stubborn intention to endure, come what may.

There was no observer, but Ingrid Tearney rubbed her cheek anyway, as if disturbed by a stranger's breath, then patted her wig, assuring herself it remained in place. After today's events, she would not have been surprised to find strands of it falling about her shoulders, the way her real hair might, had it not been lost to her long ago. Today had been a day of surprises; of sandbaggings and sudden reversals. Peter Judd's plotting had not been unexpected: PJ was a known quantity—public buffoon and private velociraptor—and Dame Ingrid had been girding her loins for an attack since his elevation to the Home Office. Diana Taverner's machinations were hardly out of character either, but what startled Dame Ingrid was that Taverner's plan had evidently been germinating for years.

Half an hour's research had proved this much.

Sean Donovan was a name that would have rung bells, had Dame Ingrid ever concerned herself with the sharp end of operations. Donovan had been a career soldier, destined for laurels; his non-combat duties had included a session at the UN, where he'd advised on crushing resistance, or counter-insurgency as it was also known, depending on whose foot the boot was on. He'd been accompanied by a Captain Alison Dunn, who was engaged to Donovan's subordinate, Lieutenant Benjamin Traynor. All very cosy, and it didn't require much imagination to conjure up myriad ways in which things could have gone pear-shaped, but what actually happened wasn't romantic entanglement but political indiscretion. In a Midtown bar, Alison Dunn had been approached by a junior delegate from one of the former Soviet republics. Dunn had known enough to stay sober in this company; the junior delegate had either been unencumbered by such wisdom or was pretending to be drunker than he was to excuse his flapping tongue. Or possibly—you couldn't rule it out—his motives had been honourable. Either way, the information he passed on to Dunn had been alarming enough for her to submit a report to the Home Office, stamped
minister's eyes only
, on her return home.

That had proved to be something of an error.

Dame Ingrid pursed her lips, giving her the appearance, had she but known it, of a disappointed fish. Doubtless, in recruiting Donovan and Traynor, Diana had claimed that it was Ingrid herself who had been responsible for the death of Alison Dunn, and Donovan's consequent imprisonment; doubtless, too, she had provided them with precise instructions for laying hands on Virgil-quality documentation which would corroborate the story Alison Dunn had heard in New York. Information that would be more than enough to end Ingrid Tearney's career.

The Grey Books indeed . . . She should have seen straight through that decoy. Would have done, except that it came gift-wrapped: if Peter Judd's tiger team were a pair of reality-impaired conspiracy buffs, then they presented no real threat; an outcome so welcome Ingrid had accepted it without question. She sighed . . . She had been too willing to believe in others. It was an abiding weakness, her one great character flaw, and might prove her downfall if her eleventh-hour attempt to eliminate the whole pack of them proved unsuccessful.

Darkness was edging further into the room now, painting her lamplit corner brighter. Nothing to do but wait. And as she did so, she couldn't quite suppress a sneaking admiration for the tenacity with which Diana Taverner had pursued her aims.

Not the least audacious aspect of which, as far as Dame Ingrid was concerned, was that she had managed all this without paperwork.

A
tidy battlefield is
a good battlefield, thought Nick Duffy. He wasn't positive that particular gem appeared in those art of war texts City dickheads read on the tube, but it fitted his mood. From his current perspective, the fencing, the skip, the mounds of urban debris had transformed into landmarks: areas of cover for what was yet to come, which, ideally, wouldn't last more than a minute. The klieg lights were poised to turn the area outside the derelict factory into a stage, and once that happened, anyone treading the boards would find their dramatic career cut short. They called it dying when it happened on stage. They called it that when it happened elsewhere, too.

He was deep in the shadows of the building nearest the railway tracks, leaning against a pillar, and while he didn't know precisely what was happening in the complex below his feet, he had a calm feeling nevertheless; the sense of everything going to plan. Pulling the trigger on the red-headed kid had done that. You'd think it would push him in the opposite direction, that he'd have a hollowed-out feeling now, be all butterflies and shit, but that wasn't how it worked. How it worked was, everything was going to be okay, because the alternative, now he'd killed that kid, was unthinkable. And Nick Duffy didn't do unthinkable.

One of the Black Arrows approached, not even attempting to look stealthy. In a shaky voice, he said, “We've got a prisoner.”

For a second, Duffy thought he'd missed something. “They've come up?”

“No. He was spotted on the perimeter, checking us out.”

Perimeter, thought Duffy. These toy soldiers loved their vocabulary.

“He's a big guy, black. Thing is, there was someone with him.”

Duffy mentally ran through Slough House personnel. A big black guy would be Marcus Longridge; someone else was either Shirley Dander or Roderick Ho. His money was on Dander. Ho was a desk-jockey.

“And they got away.”

“Fuck. Anyone go after her?”

“She's in block one, far as we know.”

The Black Arrow gestured behind him, in case Duffy had forgotten which block was which.

“Thing is . . . ”

Another thing? Duffy said, “What?”

“They've put him in the van. Where we put the first prisoner?”

“Good.”

“Only . . . the first prisoner?”

“What about him?”

“He's dead.”

“And?”

“Jesus, I mean . . . ” From toy soldier to boy soldier: Duffy could tell that any moment now, his lower lip would wobble. “Nobody said there was going to be killing.”

Duffy nodded. The Black Arrow couldn't see his face, which was probably as well, because his expression wouldn't soothe worries away. He leaned in closer, and just to erase any ambiguity from the situation wrapped one gloved hand round the man's throat as he did so. “Well what the fuck did you think we were going to do? Tag them and release them into the community?” His voice had dropped an octave, a grace note he'd always found effective when explaining grim realities.

“But it's just—”

“It's just nothing. For the past six months your crappy little operation has been headed up by someone who today turns out to be an enemy of the state. Now there's two ways we can deal with this. We can have a nice tidy discussion followed by a full-scale investigation, after which none of you will have a job ever again. Not to mention having MI5 so far up your arses you'll spend the rest of your lives whistling when the wind blows. Or we can do it my way, which is quick, quiet and leaves no mess. If you're not man enough for that, say so. But get your head round this first. If you're not part of the solution you're part of the problem. Understand?”

The Arrow nodded.

“Didn't catch that, son.”

“. . . Yes.”

“Welcome aboard. This new prisoner, is he cuffed?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I'll deal with him. You get to your position. Anyone comes out that factory, the lights go on, and you bring them down. Understand?”

This time he didn't wait for an answer. Leaving the Arrow in the stench of the dying building, he headed for the van.

In Roddy
Ho's opinion, he wasn't being given enough credit for taking charge.
Think of something
, Lamb had told him.
Do something
, Marcus had said. Any way you looked at it, driving a bus through a front door was “something.” The fact that it turned out unnecessary was one of those wise-after-the-event outcomes it was hardly fair to pin on him.

In his mind's eye, it had played out differently. He'd rolled straight out of the driver's cabin, disarming the thug holding Lamb at gunpoint; bit of the old natural grace coming into play as he'd brought said thug to his knees with a quick
one-two
. . .

Later, with Louisa: “Really, Lamb said that? All I was doing was reacting, babes.”

“Jesus, Roddy, when someone calls you a hero, just accept it, yeah? Is that his gun in your pocket, by the way?”

“Hell's teeth. Did the impact fuck your hearing up or what?”

And this was Lamb, bringing Roddy Ho back to reality.

“Dunn. Alison Dunn. That was the name of the woman Donovan killed.”

Ho said, “Yes. No. I can't remember . . . ”

“Give me strength. If it was your brains I needed, we'd all be in trouble. All I want is your typing skills. Look her up. Is this guy related?”

For a moment, Ho couldn't lay hands on his smartphone, and his life flashed before his eyes. Most of it involved
Grand Theft Auto
. Then he located it—new holster attachment, duh—and keyed in his password for the Service intranet. Typing skills, typing skills. What Lamb didn't realise was how much more was involved than simple typing skills.

Alison Dunn, deceased. Military. Scroll down to find her surviving family.

“You know,” Lamb said, looking round at the mess the bus had made of the hallway, “when I first met you, I had you pegged as a waste of space.”

Busy as he was, Ho couldn't prevent a smirk. He recognised a third-act moment when he heard one. “And when did you change your mind?”

“When did I what?”

Catherine emerged from the room where they'd put Dunn. “As long as you've got your phone out, call an ambulance.”

“Like hell,” Lamb said. “We'll cuff him to a radiator and let the Dogs pick him up. Things are messy enough without a trip to A&E.”

“He's a civilian,” Catherine said. “Not our jurisdiction.”

Ho looked up from his phone. Standish was glaring at Lamb in a way that made him glad it wasn't happening to him.
Babes
, he told Louisa,
that lady can be mighty fierce, you hear what I'm saying?
Surviving family was her mother and a brother, Craig. There was a fiancé too, one Benjamin Traynor.

Traynor . . .

“Something else you should know,” he told Lamb.

Shirley found
a staircase, its fire door hanging by one hinge, and bounded up to the next level. Smells of piss and weed: you didn't have to abandon a building long before nature stepped in to reclaim it. Even here: not quite the heart of the city, but its appendix or something. Its bladder. She almost tripped at the top, but didn't; stepped out onto the first level, and ran lightly down a corridor with a view of the wasteground through its glassless windows. Bitching dark now, one big shadow, but Shirley could make out shapes. There was the Black Arrow van, where they'd have taken Marcus. She hoped it was where they'd taken Marcus. The alternative—that they weren't taking prisoners—didn't bear thinking about.

Because apart from anything else, there was at least one of them on her tail right now.

At the end of the corridor she swung a hard right: more windows, now with a view of the railway lines, behind a breeze block wall topped with lengths of wire, the topmost one barbed. A digger was parked against the wall, its tool semi-upright, angled like a stepladder. Those things were always yellow or red. This one was yellow.

An open doorway. She spun into it, dropped to a crouch. Waited. Private security operations aimed to hire the brightest and the best: they wanted fitness, smarts and enough nous not to go belting into the dark after an unknown subject without checking out the terrain. What they mostly got, though, were lumbering wannabes who thought duffing up a Goth in a pub car park made them Jason Statham. The one on Shirley's tail trundled past her wheezing like Thomas the Tank Engine, the gear on his utility belt slapping his thighs in cumbersome counterpoint, before erupting into a brief solo when she thudded into him waist height, sending him flying through the unglassed window. He didn't fall far—it was only the first floor—but he hit the ground like a sack of spanners. Shirley tried to remember how many Arrows Marcus claimed to have seen, but couldn't. One down, anyway.

Hearing more feet on the stairwell, she slipped back out of sight, noticing as she did so a strange sensation in her face; an unaccustomed tautening of muscles. She used her hand to check—yep. She appeared to be grinning.

Nothing like a drug-free high, she thought, and waited in the shadows for the next Black Arrow to make his move.

River wasn't
dead.

River might be dead, but act like River's not.

So: River wasn't dead.

That, or something like it, was the burden of Louisa's thoughts as she stood face-to-balaclava with the Arrow who'd just brought him down. Sometimes you can tell when a man in a mask wears a smirk. She wiped it off him by feinting a blow to his stomach, hindsight letting her know that a feint wasn't necessary—the blow might as well have landed for all his ability to parry it—then punching him in the throat instead, because that had worked well for her so far this evening. While he windmilled backwards, she stepped over River's prone body and took two lengthy strides down the aisle, towards the ruptured doorway.

Dive and ro-o-o-ollll
. . .

She could almost hear the instruction bellowed at her as it had been time and again one long day in hell, issuing from an instructor who looked like a sex doll: five foot nothing, curly blonde hair, ruby red lips never seen closed . . . But boy, could she bellow.
Dive and roll!
Anyone not diving, not rolling, to her satisfaction spent the next fifteen minutes doings squat thrusts. And like any good sex doll, she was never really satisfied; always wanted more.

But you learned to dive and roll all right, and it wasn't a skill you forgot in a hurry.

So Louisa dived and rolled, and when she came upright again she was holding the gun Traynor had spilled when he fell. First she shot the man who'd put River down, then the two who were securing Traynor. The rest had scattered by then, back through the ruptured doorway or behind collapsed shelving.

Two shots came back at her, but she was somewhere else already, pulling River's body behind cover.

“Fuck was that?” he drooled.

Not dead, then.

“That,” she told him, “was a Taser.”

“Not again . . . ”

“Good shooting,” someone said, and she almost proved his point by shooting him too.

It was Donovan.

“Where's Ben?”

Louisa pointed with the gun. Traynor was still where he'd been dropped and cuffed: in a heap ten yards away. Of the two bodies next to him, one was twitching and the other not.

“Alive?”

“Think so,” she said.

“How many?”

“We saw plenty on the monitor. Twelve? Fifteen? Three are down.”

River mumbled something,
fuckin Taser
, she thought it was.

Donovan had a gun too. “I've worked with these guys,” he said. “Some of them won't stop running until they reach the sea. And some will think Christmas just came early.”

Another shot was fired, the bullet hammering into a wooden crate, porcupining splinters from its side. Louisa briefly stood and fired twice in the direction the shot had come from, then dropped back under cover.

As if she hadn't moved, Donovan indicated River. “Is he okay?”

“He's been Tasered before,” Louisa said. “I think he kind of likes it.”

“You shot the man who did it.”

Louisa didn't reply.

“That's good soldiering in my book,” Donovan said.

“We're not on the same side.”

“Maybe not,” he said. “But I'd sooner have you as an enemy than these clowns as friends.”

One of the clowns took offence at that, and loosed another shot in their direction. Louisa flinched, but the bullet went wild.

River pushed himself up to a sitting position, and dry-retched. “. . . Jesus.”

“Keep your head down,” Louisa hissed. Then she nodded at Donovan's shirt front, where he'd tucked the folder he'd taken. “Whatever you've got there, someone definitely doesn't want you to have it.”

“That's right,” he said. “And whoever that is didn't send the cavalry, did you notice? They sent a bunch of mercenaries instead. You might want to think about that.”

“When we get out of here, I'm going to have to take it from you.”

“That's a discussion I'll look forward to. Meanwhile, cover me. I'm going for Ben.”

And without waiting for her reply, he was off.

The temptation
was to stay in the pub all evening. By the time she emerged, it would be over: Donovan and Traynor would have the evidence to bury Ingrid Tearney, or would be buried themselves in the caverns below Hayes. If the latter, Diana would have to prepare for Tearney's wrath. It was as well, she thought, that the Dame had no sense of humour. If she did, Diana might find herself facing exile to Slough House . . .

A knife in the back would be preferable. No metaphor intended.

The strange thing was, the event which had set all this in motion had been engineered for the good of the Service. It had been shortly after Dame Ingrid had taken up the reins, a post Diana Taverner hankered after, but had been clear-eyed enough to admit she wasn't ready for. Back then time had appeared to be on her side, and an unrocked boat was a sane and sensible course. So when a report had landed on the Home Secretary's desk which threatened to hole that boat beneath the waterline, Diana had acted.