Real Tigers

by Mick Herron

  “What?”

  “You’re late for the meeting,” Ho said.

  “So are you,” said Marcus. “Unless this is it.”

  “Where’ve you been?” asked Shirley.

  “Out.”

  “I had to do all the research on my own. You know what that’s like?”

  “If it’s like working, yeah. Here.” He handed her a paper bag of indeterminate shape.

  She squinted at it suspiciously. “Did this used to be a baguette?”

  “Do you want it or not?”

  “Whatever.”

  Louisa watched fascinated as Shirley tugged a squashed object from the paper bag, and peeled away its cellophane membrane. It was so much no longer baguette-shaped, she was able to eat it sideways.

  River asked Marcus, “You okay?”

  “Why?”

  “You look . . . peeved.”

  “‘Peeved’? What is this, Hogwarts?”

  “Pissed off, then.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “This is actually pretty tasty,” said Shirley, or so the others assumed. Her mouth was too full to be sure.

  “Good,” said River to Marcus. “Because you might want to be on your game tonight.”

  “Trust me, Cartwright. I get the opportunity to shoot anyone, I’ll be on my game.”

  “Nice to know.”

  “Not fussy who, either.”

  “I think they put paprika in it or something.”

  “Christ,” Louisa said. “Nobody said anything about shooting. We’re a glorified escort service, that’s all.”

  “For a crew who took Catherine,” said River.

  “Precisely. Until we know she’s safe, no one’s shooting anybody.”

  “I nearly asked you to get me a tuna, but I’m glad I didn’t now. Chicken’s definitely my favourite.”

  “I think we should go in,” said Ho.

  “I think you’re right,” said River, pushing him through the half-open door.

  Ho went sprawling onto the carpet.

  Without opening his eyes Lamb said, “You’re ten minutes late.”

  “Five,” said Ho.

  Lamb pointed at the clock on his shelf.

  “That’s fast,” Ho objected.

  “It’s always fast. Do I have to specify local time?” Lamb opened his eyes, and his tone changed to a roar. “Get in here.”

  They trooped in while Ho scrambled to his feet, shooting daggers at River.

  “Jesus,” said Lamb, wiping a paw across his face, blurring his features to a screaming pope’s. “One of these days I’m gonna wake up and it will all have been a bad dream.”

  “That happened to me once,” Shirley said, her mouth full.

  “What are you eating?”

  “. . . Chicken baguette.”

  “Give.”

  Shirley looked at what was left of her lunch, then at Lamb’s implacably outstretched hand. She glanced at Marcus for support, but he was having none of it.

  “Don’t look so glum,” said Lamb. “You could do with skipping a few.”

  “Are you even allowed to say stuff like that?” she complained, surrendering the sandwich.

  “Not sure. Haven’t read the manual.” He examined her offering suspiciously. “Did this get hit by a bus or what? You can buy them new, you know.” He took a bite out of it anyway, reducing it by about half. “All done your homework?”

  There was a muttered chorus of assent.

  “Right. Cartwright first. Sean Donovan. What have you got?”

  “Sean Donovan,” River said. “He’s a career soldier, a combat veteran. Sandhurst, tour of duty in Northern Ireland, then an attachment to the Ministry of Defence. After that, he served with the UN Protection Force in the Balkans, then with NATO during the Kosovo War. He was a lieutenant colonel once that was over, and reckoned to be in the running for higher things.”

  “How high?” Shirley asked, then giggled abruptly.

  Lamb stopped chewing to train a basilisk stare in her direction.

  River said, “He was well thought of at the MoD. Sat on some high-level commissions, including one on domestic terrorism which had Regent’s Park connections, and was on an advisory body to the UN in ’08. A newspaper profile of him that year called him the perfect modern soldier, part warrior, part diplomat.”

  “I do like a man without faults,” Lamb said, scrumpling greaseproof paper into a ball and tossing it over his shoulder. “Reminds me of me.”

  “Only he had a reputation for being a drinker.”

  “There you go,” said Lamb. “A real prince.”

  “What,” said Marcus, “he’s in the closet? In the arms trade? Or likes dressing up as a Nazi?”

  Lamb glared. “What’s your problem? You look like you’ve lost a fiver and found a button.”

  “. . . A button?”

  “Forgive my folksiness. Woodstock generation.”

  River trundled on. “Donovan’s career went to hell overnight. Not long after his UN stint he visited an army base in Somerset to give a lecture to an audience of cadets. Apparently there was a party afterwards, a knees-up in the mess, following which Donovan left the base in a car. He lost control, wrote the vehicle off, and his passenger, a Captain Alison Dunn, was killed. He was tried before a military court, and served five years, dishonourably discharged upon release. That was a year or so ago.”

  “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 uncomfortab
le 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.

  It 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.