Real Tigers

by Mick Herron

  The article had been intended to inspire shock, but Judd had barely managed surprise. That a delicacy for the pampered was acquired through brutality was hardly news. By any civilised standard, it was how luxury ought to be measured—wealth meant nothing if it didn’t create suffering. Because the standard liberal whine that the rich were cushioned from life’s harsh realities was laughable ignorance: the rich created those realities, and made sure they kept on happening. That was what kitchens were for, along with prisons, factories and public transport.

  So the rich, by which he meant the powerful, took messy violence in their stride—it was the cost of doing business—which was one of the reasons Peter Judd hadn’t wasted time grieving the loss of his school friend. The traditional press, hanging on Twitter’s coat-tails, was no doubt picking up the threads of the story now, and he’d be called on to comment: pointless to deny there was a delicious irony in an old chum of the Home Secretary falling victim to public savagery. But he’d never had difficulty in counterfeiting anger or remorse—appalling barbarism, whose perpetrators, I am confident, will feel the full might of British justice—so wasn’t fazed by the prospect, and wouldn’t lose sleep over Sly’s death either. People died. It happened. How Monteith’s dropping the ball affected his own game plan mattered more to Judd right now.

  Satisfied the bench was as clean as it was going to get, he sat. It was shaded by trees set in a railinged square, which wasn’t actually square at all but oblong: near Praed Street, not far from Paddington, and off the refined map. Hotels lined each side, but they were for downscale foreign tourists or out-of-town businessmen, neither of whom were likely to be haunting the area in the early afternoon. This made it a safe spot for a one-off meeting, and while waiting for this to happen, Judd paged through the Standard. As usual, he featured within, which was good news—the day the Mickey Mouse papers ignored him, he’d know his career was over. What it actually said didn’t matter. So long as it carried a photo, he was golden.

  He heard the clacking of her heels on the path a full minute before she appeared.

  Judd rolled the paper again, and used it to tap the space on the bench next to him. “It’s reasonably dirt-free,” he said. Then added, “The bench, I mean. Not this rag.”

  “I’d rather stand.”

  “Would you? Would you really? Well, how very nice for you.” His tone slipped from penthouse to pavement. “But when I say sit, you sit.”

  Diana Taverner sat.

  •••

  Sean Patrick Donovan.

  That was the name River found, a recent recruit to Black Arrow; hired as Chief Officer i/c Strategy-Operations, a suitably pseudo-military title for one of these outfits—River had no trouble imagining a bunch of Territorial Army vets, Prison Service rejects and ex-community coppers making up the ground crew. Probably unjust but he hurt almost everywhere, Nick Duffy’s blows having had the cartoon-like quality of spreading the pain of their impact outwards, until every available inch felt tender and ill-used. His grip on his mouse tightened, but he had to keep thoughts of vengeance at bay, focus on the task at hand—Sean Patrick Donovan.

  The name hadn’t been hard to come by: Sly Monteith had announced it in a release to the trade press back in February—delighted to announce and formidable experience in the armed forces, etc etc. A brief online trawl revealed that Donovan’s formidable experience included a stretch in a military prison prior to dishonourable discharge, a fact that received significantly less coverage. There was a photo, Donovan and another appointee, Benjamin Traynor, flanking their new boss, a champagne flute between two pint mugs. Neither of them cracking a smile, though Monteith’s superior expression more than made up. Look at my dancing bears, thought River. Well, he’d had that smirk wiped off his face good and proper.

  Ex-army; high rank; hard time. That ticked a lot of boxes as far as River was concerned: there might be other suspects, but this one would do to start with. He winced as another flash of pain lit up his body’s circuitry, bit down until it passed away, then emailed what he’d found to the other slow horses, yards away.

  Long past the hour Marcus Longridge mumbled something about getting lunch, and slipped out of the office pretending not to hear Shirley Dander’s response, which involved a chicken baguette. The yard smelled worse than ever; the street was hot as hell. In the bookies by the station he filled out a betting slip for the 3:20 at Towcester, which he’d diligently researched under cover of work, and while he waited stood and glared at the tin bastard of a roulette machine. It kind of looked alive, with a demon’s eyes and grinning mouth . . . Wrapped up in this, Marcus forgot to follow the race, and glanced up just in time to catch the closing moments, which was like being sucker-punched by a supermodel: a beautiful moment nearly like pain. £160, straight to his trouser pocket. A sweet return on twenty quid.

  He collected his winnings and patted the machine on his way out; insult to injury.

  Marcus could, and should, have gone straight back to Slough House, but he was buoyed by success. This was the turning point he’d been waiting for. And there was a row of Boris Bikes over the road . . . He thought: what the hell. Quicker than tubing it. Excavating his debit card from his newly thickened wallet, he released one from its rack. Regent’s Park, here he came.

  Louisa Guy tucked a lock of hair behind her ear, briefly tugged at her blouse to fan her skin; suffered a brief, unasked-for memory of last night’s stand—a bachelor pad in the worst sense, with month-old sheets and dishes in the sink, but still: enthusiastic and vigorous sex, leading to three hours’ dreamless oblivion—and shook her upper body once, refusing to allow Lamb’s gibe headspace.

  Here’s me thinking you’d been banging your brains out every night, and it turns out they’re still functioning.

  Which they were, but seriously, she didn’t need brains for the task Lamb had set her. She needed blind faith and the devil’s luck.

  Roderick Ho abhorred Google, Yahoo, Bing and all the other popular engines: they searched, he claimed, less than 0.5 percent of the internet’s contents, and he’d sooner eat a vegan pizza than use them. But since Louisa would sooner bake him one than ask him for a tutorial on the Dark Web, they were all she had to rely on. Still, what else was she going to do? Sean Patrick Donovan was her target, if Cartwright’s guess was on the money. Closing down all other programs, in the hope this would free up enough space to allow her ancient machine some speed, she set to work.

  Conspiracy theorists, she knew, were paranoid by definition, and usually with good reason—they were indeed being watched, largely because they were standing on an upturned bucket, haranguing the sheeple about their wingnut delusions. For months the previous year she had monitored message boards for suggestions of terrorist activity, and while she’d never entirely thrown off the suspicion that every other poster she encountered was an undercover cop, she’d grown used to eavesdropping on tin-hat conversations, from how the government was controlling the weather to the thought-experiments carried out on anyone who rang HMRC help lines. And all of these philosophers, without exception, were convinced they were under surveillance, their every online foray or mobile chat recorded and stored for future use. That this was probably true was an irrelevance, of course; they were simply caught in the same net as everyone else. Louisa had never trapped a terrorist; never stopped a bomb. She’d read a lot of discussions about 9/11, obviously, but contributions from structural engineers had been conspicuous by their absence. And while the help-line thing was probably true, that was just the law of averages at work.

  And speaking of paranoia, how did Lamb know what she got up to outside work?

  It didn’t matter. Was just the law of averages again. Sod him, anyway.

  The point was, anonymity was the paranoid’s cloak—during her months treading those boards, Louisa hadn’t come across anything remotely resembling a real name. Donovan could be venting three times daily on a host of sites, an
d if his username was SpaceRanger69, she’d never know about it. But Lamb had spoken. So here she was.

  “Getting anywhere?”

  Jesus! How did he do that?

  Suppressing the start he’d given her, she said, “Give me a break. I’ve only been at it five minutes.”

  “Huh.” Lamb came into the office, sniffing the air suspiciously. “Why does this room smell of cheese?”

  “It doesn’t. What have you got Ho on?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Because you’d be better off him doing this.”

  “Shame he’s busy, then.” Lamb peered out the window at a passing bus, then rested his buttocks on the sill.

  “You going to watch me all afternoon?”

  “Is that how long it’s going to take?”

  “We don’t even know for sure it’s Donovan we’re after.”

  “No. But we’ll look stupid if we ignore him, and it turns out he took Catherine.”

  “What’s Ho working on?”

  “Above your pay grade.”

  “That reminds me.” Louisa found a receipt on her desktop. “Taxi fares from this morning.”

  “Yeah, you might have to wait a while. I’ve been getting grief about the expenses you lot claim.” He stood.

  She said, “Is this all on the level? Or is something going on we don’t know about?”

  “I think it’s safe to assume there’s always something going on you don’t know about,” Lamb said.

  He was nearly out the door when Louisa said, “Catherine.”

  “What about her?”

  “Nothing. You called her Catherine, that’s all.”

  “Huh.”

  Louisa settled back to her impossible task.

  Five minutes later, she’d cracked it.

  Do something, is what Longridge had said. You want to impress women, make a mark, you have to do something.

  So here he was: doing something.

  Just so long as it’s not sitting at a screen crunching . . . data.

  Well, okay, crunching data is what he was doing, but still: it was what the moment demanded.

  Roderick Ho paused to chug what was left of his Red Bull, then tossed the empty can at his wastepaper basket. It dropped neatly in, confirming what he already knew: that he was a superstar.

  Crunching data, Longridge had said. As if this was something just anyone could do.

  There were three properties registered to Black Arrow, one of which was a flat in Knightsbridge, clearly for Sylvester Monteith’s own use, not that Monteith needed much room any more. His next lodging would be about the size of a fridge. The other two properties were larger, functional: Google Earth showed Ho they were both on industrial estates, one on the outskirts of Swindon, the other in Stratford, East London. The day the images were captured, there were seven vans visible at the former; three at the latter. These were black, rugged-looking trucks, with windowless panels on which the firm’s logo was displayed, a black arrow in a yellow circle, and looked more substantial than the prefabbed buildings they were arrayed outside. Monteith chummed up to cabinet ministers, but his business didn’t look blue chip. Ho printed off screenshots, left them in the tray, and focused on Monteith’s personal life.

  All the things kept behind firewalls—bank accounts and mortgage details; shopping baskets, mailboxes, porn domains, insurance payments—they were all low-hanging fruit. Passwords were made to be captured, and a basic crossword-solving algorithm could lay bare a life’s secrets in the time it took to microwave what was left of a lunchtime pizza. So that’s what Ho did while his privacy-shredding program ran the numbers on everything Sylvester Monteith wasn’t using any more, beginning with where he’d kept his money, then running through what he’d spent it on. The pizza was a Four Seasons. Monteith’s life was an open book. He had his wife and children; he had his business; he took holidays; he kept a mistress. Discovering how much each had cost him was just a matter of parsing his credit card statements. Crunching . . . data—yeah, right. This was something, and here he was, doing it.

  And as he was doing it, Ho thought about what Lamb had said about Louisa banging her brains out. That had been cruel. Louisa was currently single. If she had a boyfriend, she’d talk about him: something Ho had learned not just from Mama Internet, but from listening to women talk—on tubes, on buses, in bars, on the streets. Granted they weren’t actually talking to Ho, but he had ears and facts were facts, and the ones with boyfriends never shut up about it . . . No, Lamb had been way off base, but Ho had to admit: the thought of Louisa banging her brains out was one he’d return to later, back home.

  Meanwhile, he was accessing hard intel.

  On one of Black Arrow’s business accounts nestled a reference to temp. prop.—a substantial payment two months back, and another for half that amount on the same day of the following month. A deposit plus rental, Ho surmised. Temporary property. Lots of reasons why a security firm might want temporary possession of a property, especially—this was a few moves later, back on Google Earth—especially one out in the long grass, somewhere north of High Wycombe; a three-storey building with a few barn-like structures nearby, and there, slap in the middle of a courtyard, what looked like—and indeed was—a double-decker London bus.

  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 rec
ently 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.”