Nick Harkaway - Tigerman

Inoue’s team parted in front of her without fuss. They did not ask why she was bringing a clumping great sergeant into their hideaway. They didn’t ask anything at all, which as always suggested to him that they knew their jobs very well and were very professional people. They nodded to Inoue and to the Sergeant and got on with what they were doing, although in one case that seemed to involve drinking Coke and playing some sort of game involving elves. Inoue tutted. ‘Ichiro,’ she growled out of the side of her mouth. ‘A genius. I cannot come up with enough jobs to keep him busy, so I permitted the other interns to assign him their extra work.’

‘But he’s not working,’ the Sergeant said.

‘No,’ Inoue sighed. ‘He established a trading floor for basic tasks and cornered the market in coffee-making futures, and then the espresso machine very mysteriously broke down. So he is a task billionaire. He has calculated that if the others do all his chores and nothing else for seven thousand years, they will be free of the debt. And now he only works when something scientifically interesting is going on.’ She glanced at him. ‘Does this happen with soldiers?’

The Sergeant had been thinking of the boy, and wondering if he and Ichiro knew one another, and if they did, which of them acknowledged the other as the master. Or perhaps they were mortal foes. He shrugged. ‘Something like it, yes.’

‘And what do you do?’

‘I let it be known that I do not approve.’

Ichiro grinned at them, overhearing. He tapped the screen, and the elves were replaced by rows upon rows of data. He took his feet off the desk and leaned in, fascinated. Inoue nodded. ‘So long as the others have time for their academic work, I just keep him in information,’ she said, ‘and he is easy to live with. Come.’

Inoue led the way to the central desk, a round mica bench covered in paper and computer terminals which always made the Sergeant think of King Arthur, and leaned down over a keyboard. He kept his eyes to the front, looking over her back at a framed picture of a marmot on the wall so as not to appear interested in her bottom. It was small and well defined.

‘Lester,’ she said, drawing his gaze downwards to the screen.

On it was something he recognised as a false-colour image, a scan of some sort to which the computer was adding tints to differentiate shapes which otherwise would be indistinct. In his world that usually meant a night-vision camera, and a covert operation. This was different, all branches and fronds, blue and purple at the edges and angry red at the centre. He realised he was looking at the Mancreu Cauldron, a resonance image of the volcanic well from which the Discharge Clouds came, and there was really only one reason why she would show him that.

‘There’s a plume building, Lester,’ she said. ‘A very big one. I think they will finish this. I think this will frighten them.’

Around them the room was quiet. He wasn’t sure if it was quieter than it had been or if he was imagining it because it ought to be that way. He nodded, and then it occurred to him that he could ask her the big question about that, and she might actually know the answer, might tell him.

‘Will it work? Blowing up the island?’

‘No,’ Inoue replied. ‘It will scour the surface and if we are lucky a tectonic shift will seal the vents. But the bacteria will survive. That’s what they do. They already live in an extreme environment. They are protean. And it is possible that the vents will not seal and the bacteria will get into the sea. Again. So far they have not done well there, but that can change. If the chambers discharge directly into the ocean floor, for example, over time. . And the radioactivity will increase the likelihood of mutation. It is a very bad plan.’ She sighed. ‘Waiting and learning would be much better. But you can’t tell governments that, it is not a good soundbite. And they don’t like it when science doesn’t give them what they have decided it should say. They have a sort of. . a tame team, here somewhere, who tell them stories they do like. I may. . I may have to say something anyway, although it will make me not popular.’

She moved her hand through the air. In someone else it would have been a vague motion, but Inoue’s most unconsidered gestures were precise, so her fingers traced a sharp little arc, twisting like wingfeathers. ‘Lester, when this gets out it will be bad. The island people believe they are ready to hear this, but they are not. And I think they will need you, but I think you are not ready either. Are you?’

He ought to say yes, of course, but he needed to find out about El Hierro. And the boy, the evacuation plan: that wasn’t done, either, not halfway done. And there were places on Mancreu he still hadn’t seen. He should run the Lucretia River path again in the sun, it was amazing. He’d have to find ways to stay in touch with people. With Beneseffe and even Kershaw. With Inoue.

Outside he heard the sound of a car, high and snarling. It made him think of kids doing handbrake turns in a supermarket car park back home. He’d been one of those kids, actually. Never very good at it, but you had to show willing. If this was nostalgia, he was bad at it. He contemplated the end of Mancreu, newly real, while whoever it was roared around and around outside, mowing the lawn or cutting down a hedge in an endless grinding whine, and then they slowed down and he could speak, but realised that he didn’t know what to say.

He didn’t have to. Inoue was looking over his shoulder, and when he followed her gaze he saw a line of quad bikes, expensive toys for bored footballers on their estates along the A13 out of London to the coast, and on them a line of grubby men with scarves on their faces. An actual masked gang. When they had his attention — his, in particular — they revved their engines again and roared away, leaving Madame Duclos’s dead, fat dog on the bonnet of his car.

The Sergeant ran outside and realised that he was waving his arms and shouting ‘Oi!’ and that this was not, on the face of it, the best response. An authoritative military bark would be more to the point, a ‘Halt or I’ll open fire!’ though he did not know whether he would. He did have a weapon — since Shola’s death he had quietly added a small side arm to his kit, in a discreet holster which sat directly against his leg and could be accessed through the open-ended pocket on his right side — but getting it would require that he stopped running and if he stopped running they would be out of range. He shouted ‘Oi!’ again and knew that he really had to stop doing that because it made him sound like an old fart waving a newspaper, but at this moment that was probably all he was. The dust choked him, and then the enemy had retreated, tactical objective achieved. ‘Fuckers! It’s just a bloody dog! And it’s not even a proper dog, just an old lady’s floor-ornament. It never did anything to you!’

No. No, the dog was not the sinner here. This message was for him, and maybe for Her Majesty’s United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. He went back to see.

The dog lay in its own blood in an indentation on the bonnet of the Land Rover. They had opened it like a hog and thrown it, dying. The landing must have been agonising, though briefly. Had they known that he had once carried a man with a wound like this to safety behind the iron frame of a derelict Russian bus? Had they imagined that he would go into some sort of particular shock on seeing the tableau? Or was this just an average bit of brutality, lacking that greater understanding? Vile enough, in any case.

Inoue was standing at the point of a spear composed of irate Japanese geeks, and he was pleased to see that the principal reaction on her face was a fizzing, imperious outrage. She was brandishing a camera and he realised she must have used it to record footage of the gang’s departure. He wondered if she could now run it through some sort of computer the way they did on television and tell him who he was looking for, and knew she couldn’t. The assembled male and female members of the vulcanology department (they had a smoking mountain printed in white on their maroon hoodies) were carrying fence posts and looking meaningfully at the row of Hilux 4×4s to let him know they were in if he wanted to give chase. He pictured himself leading a posse of affronted eggheads across the wilds, their righteous fury ebbing as they rode to an uncertain reception, and concluded that the list of great British military follies did not need, even in the name of canine justice and international brotherhood, the addition of the Charge of the Mancreu Irregular Xenobiological Infantry and their non-commissioned officer.