Ник Харкуэй: Tigerman

At Brighton House he found a message from the boy: The Grande, side door, 7 p.m. It will be open. I am not invited. If there is trouble, I am off the books and off the hook. Do not lick anyone, they put drugs on their skin to make clients fall asleep .

PS I am serious.

PPS Bad Jack is an end-of-level boss.

The Sergeant knew what an end-of-level boss was. He was the age to have played the original Space Invaders machines, the ten-pence-per-game uprights which had stood in pub corners and kebab shops, stained with grease and beer.

The end-of-level boss was the monster who came when you’d beaten all the easy ones and then all the hard ones: the kind no ordinary mortal could fight.

Kershaw made the announcement at four. Beauville would be evacuated first, any outlying settlements thereafter. The boats would arrive in three days. Everyone would receive instructions and an evac number. Luggage was strictly limited. Livestock would remain on the island. The risk of infection was unacceptable.

People shrugged. It was old news, and Kershaw’s authority seemed contingent now on the indulgence of the world, in a way it never had before. And the world was actually watching. There was no unrest. Instead, there was a curious anticipation, as if the people had done their part and now it was the island’s turn. There would be a Cloud before the evacuation was complete, and that was one thing, but even more than that: Mancreu had decided not to give up. In the street of the card-players there were fresh flowers in the pots. The sweeper was back, hobbling and directing a small army of younger women. The press pack photographed her endlessly until she chased them away. They, too, were waiting for something they could not describe, knew in their fingertips that it was coming.

Three days was a long time. Anything might happen.

The Grande had been Shola’s competition, at least up to a point. It was a not very grand sort of place at the other end of Beauville, close by the warehouse district and the road out along the coast. It was somewhere between a seafront bar and a brothel with a strong flavour of clip joint, but at the same time it was a real place which had regulars who drank and chatted. Dirac claimed, against all likelihood, that the wine was passable and the Thursday stew excellent.

The Sergeant had parked the Land Rover a few streets away and carried the mask in his pocket. He was wearing a long dark coat over his armour. He felt a little excited and a little absurd. The recollection of Inoue’s kiss was still with him, lifting his mood.

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.