Tigerman (44 page)

He looked both ways and put on the mask, gasped a little at the smell of fear and exertion which clung to it, and at the sense of homecoming which burgeoned as he dipped his face into the dark. Always before he had to some extent been forced by circumstance. Now he felt he was choosing this, and with the choice came pride.

What they are saying about Tigerman, they are saying about me. They’re wrong about all of it, but still.

I am Tigerman.

He felt it put authority into his step the way his uniform did. He rolled his shoulders and breathed out, letting the mask growl.

The side door was unlocked.

He went down a sloping corridor into a back room. The walls were dark red, and there were faded poles for the dancers, chrome flaking off them onto the illuminated disco floor. At the far end were two booths, one of them empty. A small fat man with no expression on his face gestured politely to the empty table. Perhaps he received guests in rubber masks all the time.

There was a single glass and an unopened bottle of water waiting on the table. The Sergeant doubted he was expected to drink it. It just told him where to sit.

The allotted seat would mean putting his back to a broad, still figure in a pea jacket at the next booth. He didn’t particularly want to sit at all, tangle himself in a table. Bad tactics. But the scene was obvious: they would sit back to back, and they would talk.

Jack is analogue.

He sat down and waited.

‘Good evening.’ The voice was distorted, gargling. You could buy things in toyshops now to make you sound like whatever monster was dominating children’s television this year. Godzilla. Vader. Voldemort. But under the growl it sounded almost affable.

‘
Bonsalum
,’ the Sergeant replied. ‘I should call you Jack?’ The mask’s buzz made him smile. They sounded almost the same.

‘Jack will be fine. What can I do for you, Monsieur Tiger?’

‘I understand Shola worked for you.’

‘Sometimes.’

‘He was working for you when he died.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Didn’t that offend you?’ They were working from the same script:
I am a knight, you are a monster. But I am not interested in you today.

‘It was commercial,’ Jack said, with just the right amount of hesitation.

‘Still. He was yours. He was killed.’

‘True.’

‘I might do something about it.’

‘I would not object.’

‘I have another piece of business that needs settling first.’

‘I would be interested to hear about it.’

Just a flicker of intensity. Jack was in the mood to buy what the Sergeant was selling.
Gotcha, you cold bastard.
‘I need someone to vanish from Mancreu and end up somewhere else with a new identity. And I need to make the Fleet very unhappy for twenty minutes.’

Jack wheezed, and after a moment the Sergeant realised he was laughing. ‘If anyone can do that,’ Jack said, ‘it is you.’

They both laughed then. It sounded like nails in an iron pipe.

They talked for ten more minutes, and then Jack said he would look into what was possible. The Sergeant got to his feet and went to the door. He looked back over his shoulder and realised that the pea jacket had been thrown over a mannequin. He went back and poked at it curiously. A narrow speaking tube emerged from the wall and lay in the dummy’s lap. He shrugged a Tigerman shrug, and turned on his heel. The coat billowed around his calves in ironic salute. It was almost fun.

When he went outside, there was a storm on the horizon: a great band of looming rain and lightning, two hours out at most.

IT HAPPENED SOMETIMES,
and he had relied on that. No one would have questioned his meteorological fraud because it was a known risk, a pattern in the weather having to do with the Somali Current and the temperatures in the Persian Gulf. A monsoon wind calved from a bigger storm would spin off from Socotra and rebound south and east, then meet the wind blowing off the Indian Ocean and suddenly something like a cyclone blew up almost out of nowhere.

It happened. That was a given, indisputable. And it was happening now. He hoped Inoue was safely away, that she wasn’t flying into that. He saw her in his mind, drowning in the aisle of a tiny plane sucked down into the deep black water. Her fear. Her regret.

He shook his head inside the mask, growled and heard it echo down the empty street.

The Fleet would be preparing to move. Beneseffe would be scurrying to provide the ships with estimates and safe distances, dispositions and instructions. Exactly as planned. Except that everything was planned for tomorrow, and the thunderheads would not wait. What he had thought to fake was real, and jogging at his elbow, and he must keep up or be swept aside. Every plan was overtaken by events. Some few were overtaken before they had begun. He had chosen a plausible scenario to hide under, and here that scenario had come true. So. That was the world, and he was in it.

He snatched the mask from his face and ran for the Land Rover, heard the tyres screech as he hit the accelerator, and let himself reconsider the plan as he hurled the car up the hill.

There had been no time to seed paranoia in the Fleet captains. He weighed the pros and cons of a call to Kershaw quietly suggesting some outrageous betrayal, asking that Kershaw keep it under his hat until the Sergeant could confirm.
The Chinese are coming to take North Africa for its oil
. That would do. It was insane but not absurd. China was hungry for resources, had been buying rare earths and shale gas reserves everywhere. The American hawks would believe it. India and Pakistan had nightmares about Chinese expansion. The Chinese would know it wasn’t true but would worry about where it was coming from. The Europeans would try to cool things down, but individually each nation would be trying to gain advantage.

And telling Kershaw was like whispering in the ear of the Fleet, talking too loudly at the next table. Although it might conceivably start a war somewhere, which would be a crime on a level for which the Sergeant did not have a word.

The road was slick. He had to pull back from the urge to accelerate. Brighton House was seven minutes away, but it would be much longer if he went off the road. More haste, less speed. In his rear-view mirror, Beauville lay quiet against the sea and the hills. The warning howled in him, the bone-deep certainty: something is bad. Something is not as it should be.

I am holding the gun by its barrel.

He could feel the edges of it, knew it for a real thing. But until it was clear, he had to keep moving, keep advancing, because if he stopped now the window of opportunity would close – and the opportunity was there, he knew that, too.

Already the storm was ominously close. He needed to be in the water, sneaking between the ships. He needed to talk to Jack again, revise the plan. Half of him wanted to turn around and go back to the Grande, but the wiser part knew there would be no Jack. Jack did not hang around, could not afford to. Arafat, it was rumoured, had never slept twice in the same bed. Jack was more invisible, more cautious, in a smaller place and with a less loyal following. He was somewhere else by now, if he had ever been in the room at all. The speaking tube suggested that he had, but there might easily have been a radio on the other end.

Lester Ferris snarled and thumped the steering wheel. Everything was obvious. Nothing was simple. He was trying to hold it all together with his mind and his will but the pieces were not elastic and they were pulling away, coming apart in his fingers.

He had the gear, at least. He was getting through the armoury’s supplies, but he was nearly finished. God knew how he’d account for the wastage. The riots, perhaps, and some shipping errors. A timely fire. Opportunistic crooks among the refugees. Small potatoes for now. At worst, he’d just say he’d grown bored and tried the stuff out, offer to pay for it. It would be in character. So he had grenades, a couple of inflatables with outboards, remote detonators and flares for his diversion.

Which left Beneseffe. A bribe might be out of the question now, he might just have to go in there and stare him down. What if Beneseffe regarded his job as a sacred trust, or if he was more frightened of the Fleet than he was of Tigerman?

Will you make him afraid? And then trust him not to betray you when you have gone? Or will you tell him everything and hope he doesn’t sell you to Kershaw or Hasp?

Gravel crunched under the Land Rover’s wheels, and he put the handbrake on too hard, felt it complain and shudder, released the brake a little and ran for the door.

Inside the door he stopped cold. There was someone waiting for him, and it wasn’t the boy. He could tell from the feel of the place, the nature of the quiet. The refugees had moved to the far wings, and the house murmured with them, but his little space was still his own. None of them came here without asking. The boy did, but he was at home here and his presence was calm and unobtrusive. This was not him. It wasn’t soldiers, either, with an arrest warrant, or Kathy Hasp hoping for more indiscretions.

For one moment, the Sergeant thought it must be Jack, then he hoped it was Inoue, and then he was terrified it might be Inoue, because he would have to get rid of her or tell her everything and he could not get rid of her. Could not. If she was here she had chosen to miss her flight out, and something in him would not permit the vandalism in turning her away. It would – he was amazed and delighted to find – break his heart.

He had given himself most improvidently in these last weeks.

It was neither of them. He knew as soon as the other man moved. He could hear the breathing, the sigh of effort with each step.

White Raoul.

He was alone, and he had abandoned his crutch. Perhaps he no longer needed it, or perhaps for moments of great significance he rejected it. The Sergeant was amazed by the force of certainty that he carried. It was like meeting a general in your living room, an unexpected eminence too big for the space. He wondered how much courage it took for the man to stand there. The scrivener could tell the world, if he chose, who had made the Tigerman stele – and for whom. Was it courage or trust that let him stand there unafraid of the man who wore it and did mad things? Because surely men had been murdered for less dangerous knowledge.

There was no time for whatever this was, but the Sergeant was caught in it, and somehow it was of a piece, it was important.

‘I ain’t here to stop you, Honest,’ White Raoul said. ‘I think you’re crazy, but I ain’t going to tell you to stop. You done well enough, I guess.’

The Sergeant nodded.

‘And now you goin’ to do some other fool thing for that boy.’

‘Yes.’

‘Honest, you are a very strange man. You ever consider just telling him you love him like a son?’

Considered it every day.
But never done it, and it was hard to say exactly why. Well, no, it wasn’t. ‘Too scared, I think.’

White Raoul snorted. ‘Face down guns. Can’t talk to a boy.’

‘Seems funny when you put it that way.’

‘You need practice, is all.’ White Raoul eyed him. ‘Why don’t you tell me now? What you’d say to him if you weren’t too chicken. I’m his grandpappy, after all. If you die out there, someone oughta know.’

‘Not planning on it.’

‘Tcha. Whoever does?’

And this logic seemed abruptly unassailable. ‘I’d say . . . what would I say? I’d say he’s my friend. He’s not the sort needs a dad like a straightforward sort of dad, not any more. But he needs a place to hang his hat. He needs a bed and a roof and someone to dust him off when he falls, take him out for his first beer. He’s probably had his first beer, I suppose. But his first beer as a man. You know what I mean. And sort him out when he gets in a tangle over a girl. And teach him how to change a tyre, or . . . well, I suppose he can do that already too. And he knows computers, which I don’t.’ He was drying up. What exactly could he do that the boy couldn’t do for himself? Not much. ‘I can show him how to be the right sort of stupid. How to put your hand in the fire for someone you love. I can do that.’
I do that quite well, it turns out
. ‘But I think I just want him to know he doesn’t have to be alone. I don’t want to buy him, I want to give him whatever I can. Me. For a dad. For however much he needs me.’ He hung his head. It sounded very small. ‘I just want to be there to help. To be who we are. I don’t care where. Mancreu. London. Japan, even. I do wonder about Japan. He’d like Japan. They have ninjas there, and crazy blokes who go scuba diving to rescue their mothers-in-law, and temples and Zen and that. It’s been amazing being a superhero, by the way. It’s totally mad. But I don’t need it. I don’t want to be this . . . character. Not much. What I want . . . I want to be his dad. And that’s all.’

White Raoul gazed at him, then walked wordlessly past him to the front door. Shuffle, clump. Shuffle, clump.

‘Well?’ the Sergeant demanded. ‘You wanted to hear it. You said I needed practice. How did I do?’

White Raoul shrugged. ‘Lied about that,’ he said.

The Sergeant had no idea what he might mean. Lied about what? And then he felt his stomach vanish into his boots, felt an explosion pass through him from his chest to his fingertips, and, turning, saw the boy in the doorway of his room.

They stared at one another.
How did I do?

The boy swallowed. ‘The storm,’ he said. ‘You need to talk to Jack.’ He ran forward then, slammed into the Sergeant and embraced him. ‘You need to talk to Jack. Promise me!’ He pressed a square of paper into the Sergeant’s hand, then unwrapped his arms and stared in what looked like absolute despair at the man who said he wanted to be his father, and ran pell-mell from the house.

‘Follow him,’ White Raoul said.

But there was no time. Somehow, recently, there never was.

In preparation, the Sergeant put the gear in the back of the Land Rover and prayed with foxhole devotion that the car would not be struck by an errant bolt of lightning. Between the phosphorous flares, the gas and fuel for the inflatables and the box of ammunition and flashbangs he proposed to use to create a credible threat, he reckoned they’d maybe find the roll cage and the engine. But a human body at the heart of the fire would to all intents and purposes cease to exist.