Tigerman

by Nick Harkaway

  He stood, and – because the food smelled good – he gathered them a plate of sandwich materials. After a moment of consideration, Inoue scooped up the wine glasses, and they scurried away, to speculative glances from their nearer neighbours.

  The rooftop was cool but not cold, though the sea breeze could raise goosebumps on your skin. The Sergeant took off his jacket and hung it around Inoue’s shoulders. She smiled thanks, then shrugged into it and sat pensively looking out at the wide night-time sea. He knew she would talk when she wanted to, so he sat and set about building her a spectacular sandwich – food being in his experience the best cure for post-patrol funk, which he reckoned was close enough. Then he hesitated: Inoue was a small person. His usual strategy with sandwiches was to layer on as much as possible, but this might not be the best method here. He looked over at her mouth, bobbed his head to get a better view. Silvery lips quirked in a smile.

  ‘Are you actually measuring my bite, Lester?’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘That is . . .’ She flapped her arms. ‘That is ridiculous! You are a totally ridiculous man!’ She leaned over her knees and pecked him on the cheek. Her scent came with her, a curious mixture of fruit and tea and something deep which was surprisingly like coffee. ‘I am not a tiny person. I can perfectly well eat a normal sandwich. Tcha, you are putting too much pickle. Give it to me, or Kershaw will think you are a barbarian.’ She began combining the ingredients with practised proficiency. The Sergeant wondered how often Kershaw had made this dish, and for whom. The ghost of her cheek was still lingering on his face. He wondered if they were assuming, in the main hall, that he and Inoue had come up here to kiss. He watched her fingers, deft and sure. She grinned at him, then lifted the sandwich to her mouth and took a defiant bite. A surprisingly large chunk disappeared from the bread. She raised her eyebrows and passed the rest across.

  ‘Mmm! Pulled pork, pickle, red wine. Very good. And Lester Ferris to talk to. Also good. Then we will enjoy the view.’

  They ate, passing the makings of the sandwiches back and forth. Occasionally, fleetingly, he felt her nails graze the back of his hand as he yielded the pork platter, and vice versa when he took it back. The contact was not unpleasant, and neither of them shied from it. They ate, and then as Inoue had predicted – ordained? – they sat and looked out over the waterfront and the rooftops of Beauville. The old prison looked down on some fine colonial townhouses, narrow and elegant, and from one cluster of old streets in particular came a warm filigree light and the sound of bustle and chatter. The street of the card-players, the Sergeant realised, its inhabitants sitting out with some disreputable grappa and defying the world to move them. No doubt the old women were out, too, gamely chastising their husbands and peering in the candlelight at one another’s perfect white steps for spots of grease and dirt. It sounded as if someone – he suspected it was the street sweeper in her scarf – was playing the accordion. If the right song came along, he wondered if he should ask Inoue to dance.

  Over the bay, a gull and another bird got into an argument. The outrage of the parties was so recognisable that both the Sergeant and the doctor laughed aloud. The mirth cracked the moment slightly, brought them back to themselves.

  ‘Tomorrow, I’d like to ask you about—’ He gestured vaguely over his shoulder. About the end of the island.

  ‘We shall have breakfast,’ she agreed.

  ‘People will talk,’ he said automatically, and then couldn’t believe he had.

  Inoue grinned a feral smile. ‘Indeed, they will.’ She stood up and shrugged off his coat. For one moment he thought she was going to step onto his lap and kiss him. She had that look of intent, a wicked quirk in her lips. But then she looked over his shoulder and her expression changed and she said, quite inappropriately: ‘Oh! What the fuck?’

  He stared at her for a second and then turned sharply in his chair, the bruises on his back yowling in protest.

  Out above the Bay of the Cupped Hands, a single line of flame, narrow as a wire, was drawn across the water and the sky. For a moment he thought the world had gone mad and the destruction of the island had started, that they were all going to be sacrificed, that they were somehow infected and must be burned away. But there was only one trail, rising leisurely from somewhere in the mist. They watched it plot a bright curve in the darkness and then fall, seeming to increase in certainty and velocity as it neared the land. It was casual, effortless, even elegant. The sound reached them at last, a high wailing roar from the first moments of the launch, and then the impact flash as it reached its target and detonated. The Sergeant wrapped Kaiko Inoue in his arms and dropped to the floor, and the pulled pork sandwich and two glasses of wine flew over them as the shockwave hit. The chairs skittered away along the roof like brushwood in a gale. There was a huge, appalling noise, and then silence.

  Half a mile away, the building which had housed Shola’s murderers was ash.

  Civilians would have run around, but these people walked. They had procedures, and they’d been down this road before. There were people here, technically, who were not military, but there was no one who didn’t know about crisis. The Sergeant didn’t know where Inoue had seen this before, but he knew that she had, knew it from the way she moved and how she checked the compass points, the sky. Together they went back downstairs.

  In the main hall Kershaw was standing on a table shouting into his encrypted cellphone that he needed more information and he needed it about a fucking hour ago before some asshole blew up a part of his city – HIS fucking city – with a fucking (are you kidding me?) fucking (what the fuck?) Exocet FUCKING missile. In between expletives he was fending off two members of his close-protection team, who were absolutely determined that he should be evacuated but appeared not to know where to – because, the Sergeant suspected, the fallback location if the landside ones were compromised was out in the Fleet, and the Fleet was the source of the problem. But even this little drama was oddly restrained. In a full-on emergency they’d have carried him, knocked him out. They were drily amused to be swatted as they tried to get him to a more secure room, and Kershaw was shouting not because he was frightened but because shouting was what he did. If he’d been quiet the Sergeant would have demanded a side arm from one of the waiter-marines, and he’d have bloody got one. But as long as Jed was being profane and a little ridiculous, things were not at that point. This was an incident, not a war.

  Kershaw’s wildly wandering eye fell on the Sergeant. ‘Lester! (I’ll call you back, but get me some – yes, I will call you back and you will take the call or I will – yes – get me some answers because I cannot begin to fucking express – right. Then I won’t fucking express it, just find the fuck out. Yes. I. Will. Call. You. Back.) Lester! I need someone who is not an asshole and you’re it! Jesus Christ,’ Kershaw added to anyone near enough to hear, ‘that has to be one of the most fucked up things I’ve ever said.’

  ‘Here, Jed.’ The Sergeant let go of Inoue’s arm, glanced an apology. She waved him away. Go. There is work for you here. Also for me. She began gathering the few lost-looking people into one place. He could hear her gently assessing skills and resilience. Disaster-relief 101. And Japan seemed to attract more than its share of horrors.

  ‘Do you know what that was?’ Kershaw demanded.

  ‘One missile, surface-to-surface, maybe laser-guided from the ground, maybe fly-by-wire. Not huge, very deliberate.’

  ‘What did it hit?’

  The Sergeant sucked air between his teeth.

  ‘The refrigeration plant.’

  ‘Where the fuck did it come from?’

  The Sergeant tutted, apologising in advance. ‘The bay,’ he said. ‘Maybe the Fleet. Couldn’t see. Jed, one more thing: I’ve heard rumours of Fleet people coming shoreside for fun. I wouldn’t have bothered you with it until this.’

  Kershaw stared at him for fully a count of ten, then nodded and shut his eyes. His lips moved. For a moment, the Sergeant thought he was praying
, then realised he was rehearsing possibilities, seeing politics in his head. It got quiet in the room as the word spread. The Fleet. Because if partying on the shore was a technical transgression, blowing up the shore was something else again.

  ‘Colonel Arno,’ Kershaw said at last. ‘Consider your investigation expanded to include this matter.’ Arno was still sitting, dark eyes taking in the whole scene. The Sergeant wondered how much he had learned just watching all this, and thought: quite a lot. The Italian inclined his head in acknowledgement. ‘Work with Lester, please,’ Kershaw added.

  Shoulder to shoulder with the man he most wanted to avoid, the X-ray Italian and all his myrmidons. Oh, thank you, Jed. On the other hand, he’d wanted to insert himself into the investigation, hadn’t he? And now here he was.

  He traced Kershaw’s logic in his head. If Shola’s killers were in turn killed, then whoever killed them was involved in whatever Shola was involved in, and that too-loud action, contemptuous of the norms and whatever laws or conventions remained in place, implied urgency or alarm. Two things had changed on Mancreu in the last twenty-four hours to provoke the response: Inoue’s report and the footage of Tigerman at the cave. Of the two, the news story about drug smugglers and superheroes seemed the more likely to provoke fear in some red-lit covert battlebridge, which meant Arno and the Sergeant were investigating the same case from opposite ends.

  ‘Lester, I’m formally requesting the assistance of the United Kingdom’s representative, whose expertise and familiarity with local investigations may be of use to NatProMan at this time.’

  The Sergeant’s instinct was to say ‘of course’ but this would constitute concluding a foreign alliance, even if only a temporary one, so he said, ‘I’ll talk to London right away,’ and tried to make his personal agreement clear by waggling his eyebrows. At the same time, he continued analysing the moment, because he couldn’t afford to let them get far enough ahead of him that he made a mistake. He was vulnerable because he had more information than they did about Tigerman and the cave. There was another strand of connection joining Pechorin and the heroin with Shola: the photograph, probably for target identification, that he had found last night. But what sort of target? Had Shola been a middleman, a smuggler, or victim as example? The connection was solid, anyway, one way or another. And there was one more possible contributing factor to the missile attack: the Sergeant had himself made it seem that the prisoners were talking about Jack. The marine had overheard that part of the discussion, would have reported it, which meant it was in the military system. He’d told Dirac the same lie, and anyone from Kershaw’s staff might have known about it, and relayed that to a contact in the Fleet.

  The Sergeant felt a breath of air at his back. ‘I’m going to the impact site,’ Colonel Arno said. ‘We can talk on the way.’

  ‘I suppose you’ll need to call in some experts?’ the Sergeant suggested.

  Arno shook his head. ‘Not call in. By now they are already there. Something explodes while we are investigating, they will want to know what it is. You mind if I call you Lester?’ He pronounced it ‘Lay-stair’. ‘And you call me Arno. It’s better, between allies in different chains of command. Nobody is confused.’ And no doubt it makes everyone feel relaxed and careless. He could see Inoue ahead of him, escorted by two marines and a mini-squad of co-opted administrators for whom she had found work. She nodded regally as he waved, and then they were in the street and he could smell burning brickdust and the aftermath of high explosive.

  ‘Do you have any ideas?’ the Sergeant asked. ‘About this?’

  Arno shrugged. ‘I only just arrived,’ he said, ‘and I was supposed to investigate a guy in a costume blowing up opium.’

  The Sergeant glanced sideways. ‘Dirac said you could see through walls.’

  Arno barked a laugh. ‘I like that guy. I was sure there was something about him, but the more I looked, the more he was just this annoying Frenchman. You know him well?’ And yes, there was the laser vision: if you are like Dirac, then maybe what you are tells me about him. And vice versa.

  The Sergeant stuck to his question as they passed into the street. ‘You didn’t come here without a briefing. You know who the players are. You probably know better than I do because your job is to understand more about that lot.’ He waved out at the sea. ‘So what in God’s name could induce them to blow up a bloody building?’

  Arno shrugged. ‘Secrets. Politics. Government shit, intelligence operations. If it’s that, we may not get anywhere. What I can do stops at the water. I could know exactly inside a week and then that’s it. Strongly worded note of protest to the embassy of whatever. But you assume too much already, you know?’

  ‘I do?’

  ‘Sure. Suppose I’m a drug smuggler, I take a small boat and a shoulder-launched missile, fire it at the shore and use it to set off a car bomb, maybe.’

  ‘I saw it. It wasn’t like that.’

  ‘And probably you’re right. But now you’re remembering and you’ve already decided what you saw. When you remember things you also change them, each time you remember more what you think happened. Most likely we get over there and there’s one centre to the explosion, the chemical trace is right for military ordnance that is too large to be launched that way. Then it’s the Fleet. And if it is, that means something but we don’t know what until we dig. Dig like investigate, not with shovels. But this is very loud for guys like that, very stupid.’

  ‘Mancreu can do that to you. It makes you crazy. The more you think it doesn’t the more it does.’

  Arno clicked his tongue. ‘Yes. I can see that.’ It was all the Sergeant could do not to twitch.

  They were getting close to the explosion. He could feel the heat of the fire. NatProMan vehicles were arriving, military firefighters. There was a helicopter in the air and the sound reassured him, which made him want to shake his head in wonderment. ‘All right,’ he said instead. ‘Turn it around. Never mind who. Why?’

  Arno shrugged. ‘Two reasons I can think of –’

  Two?

  ‘– either someone in the prison knew something and someone didn’t want them to tell, or no one in the prison knew anything and someone wants us to think that they did.’

  The Sergeant turned that around a few times, and made a mental note not to try to think ahead of this man. Bluff him, yes, that might work. Hide from him. But not deceive him directly, not outfox him, any more than you followed a tribesman into his own canyons. Lies are his hill country.

  ‘But you,’ Arno said, ‘you’re already investigating this Tiger Man?’ He hesitated a little bit over the name. Some insane part of the Sergeant was irritated by the separation of the title into two words. For God’s sake, you lot, it’s not Tiger Man, that’s not how you say it. Like you don’t say Mars Bar as if the bar actually comes from Mars. It’s Tigerman. One word. And he’s gone. Mission accomplished and he’s not coming back.

  ‘No,’ he replied. ‘I was holding the men who were killed. For the murder of a local, a café owner. I thought there was someone behind them.’ But you knew that. You must have read my file, too.

  ‘Shola Girard. He was your friend.’

  ‘Yes. I mean, Shola knew everyone, but I liked him. We boxed together.’

  ‘You know the island, Lester.’ Lay-stair. ‘So: you have a theory?’

  ‘More than one,’ the Sergeant heard himself saying. They had reached Mountbatten Street, where the refrigeration plant had stood. There was just nothing there: a perfect piece of explosive surgery. The empty cannery next door was almost undamaged. The firefighters were sluicing it anyway, keeping the fire contained, but there wasn’t even much of that. Shola’s murderers were deleted. Gone.

  Over on the other side of the notional cordon created by two support vehicles were three figures. One of them hailed Arno. The Italian waved them to come around to a side street. He looked at the Sergeant and made an inviting face. ‘Theories?’

  The Sergeant shrugged. Disengage. Step a
way slowly. ‘Just thoughts, really. Obvious ones, I suppose.’

  ‘That’s good. Start with what is apparent. And keep me honest.’

  ‘Well, what you said. But also, there was a burglary at the Xenobiology Institute. Months ago. Not much taken.’

  ‘You think it is related?’

  ‘Probably not.’ Not to Tigerman, for sure. Anything else – how would I know? ‘But Kaiko’s – Dr Inoue’s – report is the other thing that happened today.’ And now you’re going to wonder why I brought up something irrelevant and you’ll have to consider the possibility it’s because I didn’t want to talk about the thing we’re supposed to investigate until I had time to get my story straight.

  But Arno seemed to approve. ‘Good. That is good. That is obvious but hard to see. All this,’ he gestured at the destruction, ‘this could be very distracting. If someone wished to focus our eyes on drugs and madmen and away from Inoue and . . . whatever.’

  ‘What would they hide behind something like this?’

  ‘Exactly, Lester.’ Somehow this time he got the pronunciation quite right. ‘I think I will enjoy our relationship very much.’ He slapped the Sergeant on the arm, and trotted off to meet his team as they reached the crossroads.

  The Sergeant looked after him, and then up at the misty midnight sky. He wanted very much to be back at Kershaw’s banquet, eating pulled pork with Kaiko Inoue. But Inoue was somewhere else now, doing competent Inoue things, and there were things he had to do too, duties and cares to be discharged.

  For a moment he did not move, caught in the conflicting flow of events and priorities. He stared up at the Beauville night, the misty blue coloured now with orange flame and artificial light, and then he felt himself turn and begin to move, and knew that the night was far from over and the day beyond it would be just as full.

  He did what sergeants do, but it felt heavier somehow, and slower.

  14. Crisis

  SINCE ROCKET ATTACKS were an actual emergency, the Sergeant was back at Brighton House and sitting at the actual emergency desk when the call came in. He didn’t know what time it was because he’d been awake for long enough that the numbers on the clock didn’t make any sense. It was five, but he had no sense of what that actually meant. It could be breakfast, it could be dinner, it could be Wednesday. Being awake for long periods in a crisis was doable, he’d done it before for days. Being awake alone and in a crisis was harder: your mind stewed in adrenalin and fatigue and threw mad notions at you, random words and reveries, you lost touch with why you were awake, what you had to do. He knew intellectually that it must be morning, that he hadn’t been to sleep, but he’d been moving all that time, moving without thinking, first at the impact site with the rescue crews in the hope that someone might still be alive in the rubble, then after that with Arno’s team as they demanded of two shocked marines why they’d chosen exactly that moment to leave the building. ‘We were relieved,’ the marines kept saying. ‘We had orders.’ And Arno wanted to know from whom but it had become apparent that they really had no idea. Just from up the line. From someone, in the end, who had a NatProMan radio and knew what to say.