Nick Harkaway - Tigerman

Inside the cave, the Ukrainians didn’t yet know he was there. Then the head appeared, ghastly arachnoid fur and parasite mouth, apparently out of thin air. They fired, and a moment later Tigerman slithered into the room. The screen went white and he was gone again, only to reappear a moment later in the air as the cave exploded in flames, and then vanish again into the supernatural dark of the tunnel. You couldn’t see how it was possible, only that he did it, and he seemed almost disinterested, as if the whole thing was somehow a side issue.

He was replaced by a breathy anchorman with perfect teeth.

Dirac thumbed the remote and rewound the clip, sucking air between his teeth. They watched the whole thing again.

‘He’s good,’ Dirac muttered. ‘I mean, he’s a fucking lunatic, but we knew that from the hat, right? But that there,’ he paused the playback, ‘that could be free running or it could be Systema, that shit they teach Spetsnaz.’

‘Russians and Ukrainians,’ the Sergeant said, almost automatically.

‘For sure,’ Dirac muttered, ‘because those assholes do not live without complicating things. Connerie de merde! He blew them up and stamped on them. That is some shit.’

Yes, the Sergeant thought, it’s a Shit Creek tsunami, is what it is. Paddles are no longer the issue. But what worried him was what would come after the initial high tide. Inevitably, on the heels of the outcry, there would be a proper investigation conducted by someone who knew how to do the job.

It occurred to him to run; to go and pack and just disappear. There was nothing to stop him. There would be wars to fight in, some of them pretty close by, and no questions asked. He might even get rich. Otherwise, he could turn himself in, just walk into Kershaw’s office and explain everything, or throw himself on London’s mercy and await instructions. They’d ship him out immediately and patch things up. He wasn’t sure what would happen after that.

But he’d lose the boy, for ever. It did not seem likely that an adoption committee would look kindly on his desire to formalise a criminal partnership which had caused what would almost certainly be an international incident.

He could also stay here and stick to his programme. He could carry on being Lester Ferris. Chase petty villainies and — at the right moment — drop in on Kershaw and be absolutely amazed at what all had been going on. ‘Jesus, Jed, I thought you said it was a storm in a teacup! But that looks almost professional. And what the fuck is all that in the bundles? Is that heroin?’ He wondered if anyone would follow the other end of the thing, the drugs end. They must, surely, even if only as a show of willingness. At least some of the focus must head away from him, onto Pechorin and the others. Then again, Dirac had mentioned Spetsnaz. Would others make the same assumption? That would send them off down more blind alleys for a good long time. He could nudge them. A friendly word at the right time. It was plausible. And there was the distant possibility, if he were caught, that his silence would be purchased on the topic of the drugs with leniency.

So far, at least, he had not been caught. There was no hue and cry for Lester Ferris. Dirac had not been asked ‘Have you seen him?’ And there was a good chance he would not be. He was not about to repeat his outing as Tigerman, and if he returned to the scene of the crime he would do so legitimately, as an adviser. Meanwhile they must make do with evidence from the night before, evidence which was even now fading into the landscape or had been burned in the cave, the video footage notwithstanding. If he could hold the line, there was a solid chance he would walk away. He had beaten far worse odds and seen off far more unpleasant consequences. In those cases he had been fighting for his country.

There were problems with that: if he had left DNA traces and they found them; if the video footage included an image of him in the car before he put on his mask; if the satellites had been looking that way and the cloud cover had not been enough; if the footage was enough to use some sort of biometric recognition; if Pechorin had somehow recognised him. In any of these cases, he would be shat upon from a great height. Dismissal, disavowal, prison, even a quiet vanishing. Retribution in kind from the Ukrainians, up to and including murder, because this was Mancreu and something like that could happen easily enough.

All this, as he stood in Dirac’s sitting room and watched himself, over and over again.

The question was whether what he stood to gain here was worth the risk. And that was no question at all.

THE SERGEANT HAD been going to the Chapelle Sainte Roseline before he saw Tigerman on the news, and there was no reason to change his plans. In fact, there was every reason to stick to them. He mentioned his destination in passing as he bade farewell to Dirac, so that anyone who asked would know Lester Ferris was off on one of his daft detective projects, but the Frenchman was muttering, ‘Parkour? Silat? Ba Gua? Or, how is it called, that Indian stuff?’ and looking things up on what was apparently an achingly slow Internet connection, and might not entirely have heard. That was fine, too. Dirac would remember being told, would know it had been somewhere ridiculous and unrelated.

The Sergeant drove gratefully, letting the shock of the video footage wash away and taking solace in his decision to stick it out. Part of him yammered questions to which he had no answers, but the mountainsides were empty and endless, and the air was surprisingly cold. Whose footage was it? Why had they released it and was there more? Was he the target, or was Pechorin? Or NatProMan? Or the drug lords, assuming these were different people?

Away on the opposite mountainside was a figure, a shepherd or a hunter. Instinct told him it was a woman; something in the movement was female. She seemed at this distance quite unconcerned. Good for you, he thought. Live your way. Live and wander and do whatever you like . He inhaled, tasted pine, woodsmoke and rain, and when he looked again she was gone, she’d ducked into the trees. There was a limit, he had always found, to the number of times you could chase the same worries round your head. If you let them run, they wore themselves out, and then you could make your choices in the quiet. It helped to be a thousand feet higher than everything you were frightened of, alone in a landscape older than empires.

When the road dipped again, he regretfully turned the air conditioner back on, feeling mild claustrophobia.

Sainte Roseline was a proud stone building held in the crook of a small river. The waters rolled and gurgled from the foot of the mountain to the western shore without ever joining the hasty torrent beneath the Iron Bridge, content to take their time. The same patience hung over the old chapel itself, as if time within the cemetery gates was honeyed and heavy. Bees buzzed and flowers grew up tall around cracked old headstones. The graves here were not tended in the formal sense; the Mancreu people who interred their dead here saw no shame in life springing up from the site of burial. They did not mistake the corpse for the person. But the pathways were well trodden and small gifts rested on some of the stones: miniatures of whisky, sweets, and cigarettes. Somewhere there was a groundsman whose job was to wait a respectable time, then come along and see that these bounties were consumed or taken away, lest their continued presence serve as a reminder of decay.

The Sergeant parked the Land Rover at a respectable distance and walked along the path to the chapel doors, then let himself in.

The interior was dark and golden, beams and a peaked ceiling following the line of the roof. High windows streamed sunlight down towards the altar and the small pulpit. There was a font made of stone close by the entrance so that the mountain folk could anoint themselves as they entered and — so long as they were modest about it — take home a little blessed water for better protection of their homes from whatever kobolds might beset them. Over the altar there was a painting on board of Sainte Roseline being assumed into Heaven. She was petite and pretty, and her face was full of a childlike joy. Looking closer, he realised with a jolt that she was flanked by tigers. The nearer one scowled at him out of the image, and he felt the imprint of its silhouette across his chest, remembered the scent of musk and fur. White Raoul’s work, he would swear. He wondered what it had replaced, and why. Had the old piece been stolen? Or shipped out to save it from the coming fire? And, more importantly, when? He had heard nothing, but then he might not. This was a private place. He scented paint, and reached out hesitantly to touch the board.