Nick Harkaway - Tigerman

Instead, he approached the corpse with a view to removing it. He couldn’t work out how. If he just embraced it he could get it off the car, but then he’d have nowhere to put it short of dumping it on the dirt and he’d get covered in blood and viscera into the bargain. He stood there with his arms wide, then stepped back again and grunted.

A moment later the dog was being rolled onto a pallet and whisked away. Of all people, Ichiro the genius, weeping, had emptied a stationery trolley and pressed himself into service as mortician’s porter. Inoue shouted something after him in Japanese, by its tone both shocked and approving, then turned.

‘Will she want it back? The old lady?’ There was anger in her voice, and she was peering at him, seeking the fury he had already controlled. It’s on a chain , he wanted to tell her. Because I’m not a proper copper. My real skills aren’t about keeping the peace .

He could feel them waking in him, all the same. Not the battlefield, not yet — if the fight at Shola’s place hadn’t done that, this wasn’t going to. Just that same questing curiosity which saw the land and the people and took a little bit of them away so as to deliver intuitions and warnings. Hypervigilance, that was the word. The curious gift of perception granted to the very abused, the endangered, and the pursued. In war, the soldiers from hard corners — from ganglands and sink estates, from bad families and badly run care homes — they had a touch with traps and deceptions. They could see a thing out of place, spot a liar even when he was speaking a language they didn’t know. They saw through walls. The best of them could hone and grow the skill within themselves, and an NCO who got one of those, or better yet, who was one, he could keep his boys alive when everyone else was going home in boxes. The Sergeant’s gift in that regard was limited, found late and small, but he had a sight of a different sort, born of another sort of trouble. It was less immediate and more haunting: a sense of narrative which was part empathy and part strategy, which told him when something was coming down and when it was overdue. His boys said he could hear the enemy whispering to one another from ten miles away, that he could smell the mortars before they were fired. They called him a warlock, but from the inside it was more like flirting than magic. He watched the smoke and the mountainsides, the faces of local people and the way they held their shoulders, knew when they wanted to dance or disappear, knew what that meant even when they didn’t. He read the world, and in exchange he got a few hours’ grace before the sky fell on him.

He had thought himself fully engaged with that faculty, here on Mancreu. He realised now that it had been idling in him, pooling at his feet, and that he had been ignoring it.

He made a circuit of the horizon with his eyes, but knew he didn’t need to, knew that if there was more to this it would already have happened. There would be no second attack. There would not even — though he would assume he was at risk all the same — be a landmine waiting for him along the road. This didn’t have that flavour. It was a come-on, a taunt. Notice me.

Well, all right. I will. And don’t say I didn’t warn you.

He was raging inside. It was old anger as well as new, a long way down in a sealed chamber, and on the whole everyone would be better off if it stayed there. At the same time he was in the grip of Mancreu’s end, the deep, dark brown taste of doom and gallows celebration. It was in all of them, in Beneseffe and the crab fishers and in the NatProMan troops. It had been in Shola, it was in Dirac and it must be in him, too. They were all a little bit mad and getting more so, and most of all the ones who appeared to be holding it together. Inoue and her friends had it, with their admirable, ridiculous makeshift pikes and their readiness to do battle with thugs. The Witch had it.

The boy had it in spades.

But beyond that there was something else: a watchful something which seemed to squat just out of sight and which plucked at all his old familiar fear. I am observed . . No. More than that: I am targeted . His hands twitched, remembering the burning pain of the tomato sap, feeling the thing wriggling under his skin. Something diffuse, yet close, a monster waiting in the closet. Thugs at Shola’s table. Madame Duclos’s dog. Notice me . It had a stink of bad endings about it, and his every instinct said to get out from under or strike hard, and strike first, but it was so ubiquitous, so faint and yet so present, that he had no idea how to do either. Devil’s footsteps on my spine .

Inoue touched him on the shoulder and he lurched away from her, hands almost coming up in a fighter’s guard, but he restrained the impulse and waved away his own reaction with a sharp ‘Sorry’. A moment later he was running to the Xeno Centre to do what he should have done five minutes ago: he called Jed Kershaw and told him he’d been the victim of a direct and possibly politically motivated minor assault on the property of the UN-sanctioned Japanese scientific mission. If Kershaw had any assets which might reasonably be brought to bear on the situation — any American satellites or high-altitude drones doing atmospheric research or weather balloons which just happened to have a camera pointing at the ground — now would be the time for that happy accident to be shared with the mother country in the name of brotherly love and the avoidance of a Total Goatfuck. He saw Inoue watching from the doorway and realised that she was seeing him as he had earlier seen her, doing something that actually came naturally, that was his strength. She smiled in recognition of the same truth, then took her cue from him and went to boss her swots in whatever direction she felt best.

Kershaw told him to stay the fuck where he was. A rapid reaction force arrived twenty minutes later and secured the perimeter while insisting that everyone sit tight and await reinforcements. Privately the Sergeant found this was a little bit funny and a perfect example of what happened when you put a civilian in charge of military personnel.

The full force took four hours to arrive, by which time it was getting dark, so the drive back across the island was a stern, halogen-lit convoy with the Sergeant’s bloodied Land Rover occupying a slightly off-centre position in the traffic. The Sergeant wasn’t allowed to travel in it in case the vehicle was marked out for follow-up attack. According to NatProMan’s standard operating procedure, the possible object of guerrilla activity — there had never actually been any before — was to be protected both by ‘direct target obscuration’, which meant ‘getting in the way’, and deception. He told Kershaw’s myrmidons that no formal escort was necessary. The officer in charge, who was all the blond, muscular things a Pennsylvania Dutch quarterback should be, told him that he knew that — of course he did — but that Jed Kershaw had been pretty agitated and would the Sergeant consent this one time to being treated like he was made of glass? Because just between the officer and the Sergeant, who was a pro and that’s why the officer could lay it out like this and not screw around — it would sure as hell make life that much easier.

Having used a similar form of words himself from time to time, the Sergeant recognised this as soldier-to-VIP speak for ‘get your fucking arse in the car and quit pretending you’re bulletproof so we can all go home’, and so he did, wondering greatly at a universe in which he could be on the receiving end of such polite flannel. They made their way rapidly along the boring coastal route, outriders ahead ushering the few other cars off the road. The searchlights scoured the countryside around, making a small circle of effective daylight two hundred metres across and a penumbra beyond it of mottled day and dark which was almost harder to resolve than ordinary night. Mancreu looked, by this scorching illumination, all the more desolate and sorrowful: the stark actinic glare picked out old farm equipment, crumbling houses and rusted automobiles, jagged trees and lonely, deserted livestock. Nothing happened to justify the extreme caution, and they arrived at Brighton House in an hour with no more serious injury than a foggy motion sickness which came from rounding corners at speed. The Sergeant politely but firmly declined a NatProMan guard and invoked his status as Brevet-Consul of a friendly nation to make the rejection stick. The cavalcade rolled away, reluctantly extinguishing the big lights as they headed down towards the town.