Nick Harkaway - Tigerman

‘Do you have any ideas?’ the Sergeant asked. ‘About this?’

Arno shrugged. ‘I only just arrived,’ he said, ‘and I was supposed to investigate a guy in a costume blowing up opium.’

The Sergeant glanced sideways. ‘Dirac said you could see through walls.’

Arno barked a laugh. ‘I like that guy. I was sure there was something about him, but the more I looked, the more he was just this annoying Frenchman. You know him well?’ And yes, there was the laser vision: if you are like Dirac, then maybe what you are tells me about him. And vice versa.

The Sergeant stuck to his question as they passed into the street. ‘You didn’t come here without a briefing. You know who the players are. You probably know better than I do because your job is to understand more about that lot.’ He waved out at the sea. ‘So what in God’s name could induce them to blow up a bloody building?’

Arno shrugged. ‘Secrets. Politics. Government shit, intelligence operations. If it’s that, we may not get anywhere. What I can do stops at the water. I could know exactly inside a week and then that’s it. Strongly worded note of protest to the embassy of whatever. But you assume too much already, you know?’

‘I do?’

‘Sure. Suppose I’m a drug smuggler, I take a small boat and a shoulder-launched missile, fire it at the shore and use it to set off a car bomb, maybe.’

‘I saw it. It wasn’t like that.’

‘And probably you’re right. But now you’re remembering and you’ve already decided what you saw. When you remember things you also change them, each time you remember more what you think happened. Most likely we get over there and there’s one centre to the explosion, the chemical trace is right for military ordnance that is too large to be launched that way. Then it’s the Fleet. And if it is, that means something but we don’t know what until we dig. Dig like investigate, not with shovels. But this is very loud for guys like that, very stupid.’

‘Mancreu can do that to you. It makes you crazy. The more you think it doesn’t the more it does.’

Arno clicked his tongue. ‘Yes. I can see that.’ It was all the Sergeant could do not to twitch.

They were getting close to the explosion. He could feel the heat of the fire. NatProMan vehicles were arriving, military firefighters. There was a helicopter in the air and the sound reassured him, which made him want to shake his head in wonderment. ‘All right,’ he said instead. ‘Turn it around. Never mind who. Why?’

Arno shrugged. ‘Two reasons I can think of —’

Two?

‘— either someone in the prison knew something and someone didn’t want them to tell, or no one in the prison knew anything and someone wants us to think that they did.’

The Sergeant turned that around a few times, and made a mental note not to try to think ahead of this man. Bluff him, yes, that might work. Hide from him. But not deceive him directly, not outfox him, any more than you followed a tribesman into his own canyons. Lies are his hill country.

‘But you,’ Arno said, ‘you’re already investigating this Tiger Man?’ He hesitated a little bit over the name. Some insane part of the Sergeant was irritated by the separation of the title into two words. For God’s sake, you lot, it’s not Tiger Man, that’s not how you say it. Like you don’t say Mars Bar as if the bar actually comes from Mars. It’s Tigerman. One word. And he’s gone. Mission accomplished and he’s not coming back .

‘No,’ he replied. ‘I was holding the men who were killed. For the murder of a local, a café owner. I thought there was someone behind them.’ But you knew that. You must have read my file, too .

‘Shola Girard. He was your friend.’

‘Yes. I mean, Shola knew everyone, but I liked him. We boxed together.’

‘You know the island, Lester.’ Lay-stair. ‘So: you have a theory?’

‘More than one,’ the Sergeant heard himself saying. They had reached Mountbatten Street, where the refrigeration plant had stood. There was just nothing there: a perfect piece of explosive surgery. The empty cannery next door was almost undamaged. The firefighters were sluicing it anyway, keeping the fire contained, but there wasn’t even much of that. Shola’s murderers were deleted. Gone.

Over on the other side of the notional cordon created by two support vehicles were three figures. One of them hailed Arno. The Italian waved them to come around to a side street. He looked at the Sergeant and made an inviting face. ‘Theories?’

The Sergeant shrugged. Disengage. Step away slowly. ‘Just thoughts, really. Obvious ones, I suppose.’

‘That’s good. Start with what is apparent. And keep me honest.’

‘Well, what you said. But also, there was a burglary at the Xenobiology Institute. Months ago. Not much taken.’

‘You think it is related?’

‘Probably not.’ Not to Tigerman, for sure. Anything else — how would I know? ‘But Kaiko’s — Dr Inoue’s — report is the other thing that happened today.’ And now you’re going to wonder why I brought up something irrelevant and you’ll have to consider the possibility it’s because I didn’t want to talk about the thing we’re supposed to investigate until I had time to get my story straight.

But Arno seemed to approve. ‘Good. That is good. That is obvious but hard to see. All this,’ he gestured at the destruction, ‘this could be very distracting. If someone wished to focus our eyes on drugs and madmen and away from Inoue and. . whatever.’

‘What would they hide behind something like this?’

‘Exactly, Lester.’ Somehow this time he got the pronunciation quite right. ‘I think I will enjoy our relationship very much.’ He slapped the Sergeant on the arm, and trotted off to meet his team as they reached the crossroads.

The Sergeant looked after him, and then up at the misty midnight sky. He wanted very much to be back at Kershaw’s banquet, eating pulled pork with Kaiko Inoue. But Inoue was somewhere else now, doing competent Inoue things, and there were things he had to do too, duties and cares to be discharged.

For a moment he did not move, caught in the conflicting flow of events and priorities. He stared up at the Beauville night, the misty blue coloured now with orange flame and artificial light, and then he felt himself turn and begin to move, and knew that the night was far from over and the day beyond it would be just as full.

He did what sergeants do, but it felt heavier somehow, and slower.

SINCE ROCKET ATTACKS were an actual emergency, the Sergeant was back at Brighton House and sitting at the actual emergency desk when the call came in. He didn’t know what time it was because he’d been awake for long enough that the numbers on the clock didn’t make any sense. It was five, but he had no sense of what that actually meant. It could be breakfast, it could be dinner, it could be Wednesday. Being awake for long periods in a crisis was doable, he’d done it before for days. Being awake alone and in a crisis was harder: your mind stewed in adrenalin and fatigue and threw mad notions at you, random words and reveries, you lost touch with why you were awake, what you had to do. He knew intellectually that it must be morning, that he hadn’t been to sleep, but he’d been moving all that time, moving without thinking, first at the impact site with the rescue crews in the hope that someone might still be alive in the rubble, then after that with Arno’s team as they demanded of two shocked marines why they’d chosen exactly that moment to leave the building. ‘We were relieved,’ the marines kept saying. ‘We had orders.’ And Arno wanted to know from whom but it had become apparent that they really had no idea. Just from up the line. From someone, in the end, who had a NatProMan radio and knew what to say.