Ник Харкуэй: Tigerman

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.

He realised that not long ago the idea would have seemed almost restful. He had not wanted to die – very much not – but the notion of being smoke, blowing over the island and chasing the wind, would have appealed to him in those strange endless days when he had been somehow absent from himself.

He placed his call to Kershaw, dropped hints about ‘possible non-allied East Asian involvement in the Mancreu theatre through proxies under cover of existing and legitimate false-flag water-based operations’ and hoped the intelligence analysts at NatProMan were creative enough and nervous enough to decide it was something to worry about. When they asked later, he thought, he could claim he had received information from a local source acquainted with activities in Mancreu’s shadow world – that would be Jack – and passed it on. If the tip was bad, well, that was informers for you.

Which meant he was as ready as he could be. Gear, diversion, storm, exit strategy. As long as Jack had good things to say about it all, even in a hurry.

Bad Jack, Bad Jack.

Jack is analogue.

Bad Jack. Jack Jack Jack. He muttered it over and over as he drove, glanced down at the paper in his hand. An address. A bad address, for Bad Jack.

The Hotel Vulcan.

The Vulcan was a big, empty slab of concrete like a parking structure, hard by an overhanging cliff. It had been intended as a bit of luxury, a stopover for the jet set. Break your cruise at the Vulcan. Party in absolute privacy, play in the casino, no paparazzi allowed. It had a James Bond look from back when Connery had had the role, as if it might at any moment unleash a space rocket into the atmosphere or gape to reveal a diamond raygun. And it was derelict, or supposed to be, because the money had run out almost before the thing was finished. A rockfall during one of Mancreu’s fiercer seismic events had sheered off one wall of the main structure – incidentally revealing that the contractors had not used specified materials and the whole thing was unsafe – making it into part of the island’s landscape as much as the empty chemical plant on the other side. In another place it would have been a spawning ground for Mancreu kids looking for somewhere to go crazy, but Beauville was filled with those and the Vulcan was genuinely inhospitable. So it was just there, like a backdrop.

There was a utility entrance halfway along the cliff road. When the Sergeant pressed his palm against it, the door swung open soundlessly. He made sure the mask was in place and went in. A light burned somewhere ahead, but the corridor was black.

You do love your underground hideouts, don’t you?

He felt the chill again, caught a flash of understanding as it surfaced in his mind. He reached for it. Corpse-white and alien, the idea slid away from him into the dark.

He went on.

The sound of his own breathing echoed, reassuringly vile, from the walls. He was careful, checking the path ahead for trips and plates, letting the sound and the airflow tell him there was no one sneaking up behind. The sharkpunch lay along his hand. But that wasn’t it. This wasn’t a trap. Not this.

He saw the monster again in his mind’s eye and let it flee, let the rhythm of his steps take him inside his own head. What are you afraid of? Where’s the dance going, that you don’t want to be?

Tigerman, the boy, Jack and Sandrine. Kershaw and Dirac and the Fleet. Inoue, but she wasn’t in it, she was near it, through him and not. Raoul. Mancreu, Beauville and dead dogs. The dogs were bad, but this place was worse. He didn’t know why, knew that he should. The Vulcan. Vulcans. Star Trek . Romans. Gods… None of that. Sean Connery, that was the heart of the problem. Sean was bad news. Sean and Vulcan and the underground hideout. Jack, and the photograph in the cave: the boy and Shola. Pechorin and the killers and Sean Connery in his dinner jacket. The missile. There’s always a missile, always a ticking clock, always a double agent and a beautiful girl who needs saving. Pechorin released by Arno. Pechorin, who might be undercover. I tell you another time . Where had he got the heroin? If it wasn’t his, had he seized it? Stolen it? And the photograph of Shola along with it? How had he known about it? Someone had told him, had let him know. Jack, of course, Jack who knew everything, setting up Pechorin as his cat’s paw. Jack, who used everyone, who was everywhere, who saw everything.

Pechorin, and the cave, and the night which had forced him to be Tigerman in earnest.

Which he had enjoyed, and been terrified by, and which he had wisely put away because it was mad. But someone had made it news and the press had come.

But then he’d had to do it again when the Quads came and he took in the refugees – and where had the Quads come from, with their shiny bikes? Just like Shola’s killers, out of nowhere. And he’d been a hero right in front of those cameras, and Mancreu was in the news again, right now, when it was dying.

And now Sandrine needed saving and here he was again, because it let him be who he needed to be. But he had not exactly chosen it, had he, more been chosen by it. Tigerman thrust upon him, oh, yes. Reluctantly made a hero. Helped along, every step of the way, his paths made obvious and unambiguous by love, and need. Helped, or herded.

The corridor broadened into the lobby. The lobby of the Hotel Vulcan.

Vulcan and Sean Connery. James Bond and the space-rocket hotel.

Bad Jack’s home. His secret base.

Secret Vulcan base.

No. Not quite.

His secret volcano base.

Oh, please, no.

He stepped into the room, and knew he was right.

The lobby was a huge open space, and along the inner edges it was still very much itself, a little cracked: gold chandeliers and a huge pop art rendering of Marilyn Monroe singing for Kennedy printed onto one wall. The outer section was gone, and the huge plate of stone which had cut it away made a tolerable seal against the concrete and rebar. The space was neatly kept, and forty yards along a side. The furniture from the casino had been dragged here, so half of that was roulette tables. The light was from looped industrial working lamps. A thick trunk of cable ran out beneath the cliff and was probably spliced into Mancreu’s power grid out at the main road.