Nick Harkaway - Tigerman

‘Lester,’ she responded gravely, ‘this is a Japanese science station. I have more flavours of encryption here than you can possibly imagine. I have a button I can push to delete the entire conversation from your mind after we have had it.’ It took him a moment to realise she was joking, and then he found he wanted very much to ask what she would say if she knew he would forget.

He said: ‘Oh. Erm.’ Very slick. Brings all the girls to the yard, that does.

Inoue gave a low snigger. ‘Now you are wondering if I really have such a button. Perhaps I do and I use it on you all the time. Maybe we have had many, many extraordinary conversations you do not remember.’

‘But you ’d remember them, right?’

‘In every detail, Lester. I have a very good memory.’

He had not really had time to regret the interruption of their rooftop dinner by a missile, but it had niggled at him between waking and sleeping, in rare moments of calm. Now he smiled. It seemed there might, after all, be other rooftops — though when and where? His smile faded.

She took pity on him. ‘Push your secure button, Lester. We will see if our wires are compatible.’

He did. He heard a click. Inoue spoke again, and for a moment she was some sort of duck or a coin falling down inside a metal pipe. Then: ‘Okay. Can you hear me?’

‘Yes.’

‘I can hear you. Go ahead and ask your question.’

‘What could you learn from a Discharge Cloud victim?’

‘What sort of victim? Like burns?’

He shook his head, realised she couldn’t see him. ‘No. Brain stuff. Language problems.’

‘But not a child from the Broca Cloud?’

‘No. An adult.’

‘Well, maybe a lot. If they were directly affected by the bacteria rather than just the Cloud, a great deal.’

He thought some more. ‘What would you need to do?’

‘Many examinations. MRI, for sure, lots of blood testing, EEG, maybe interviews.’

‘She can’t talk.’

Inoue stopped again. ‘This is not hypothetical. You have such a person.’ Her interest was sharp.

‘She’s gone now.’ He hoped she would not follow that thought. He hoped Arno wouldn’t happen to ask her about it.

‘How gone?’ Again the sharpness.

‘I don’t know exactly.’ He made a leap. ‘You said there was a tame team studying the Clouds. A political team. Would they want to see her?’

‘We all would. I know who this is. What she is. There was a rumour, but I could not find her. The woman who runs in the fields, dances in the waterfalls. They say she is always joyful, that everything is a mystery to her.’

Yes. Even her son. Even killing a man. He shook the thought away. ‘Would they, is there anything they could learn from,’ he didn’t want to say cutting her up, ‘her body?’

‘Of course,’ Inoue said immediately. Then, ‘Oh! You do not mean from a standard physical examination. You mean from vivisection and autopsy. Obduction.’

‘It is Mancreu,’ he said simply.

She made a non-committal noise, and he realised she did not wish to consider that a proper scientist, even a politically motivated one, would do such a thing. ‘No,’ she said finally. ‘Granting that it is a real possibility, which I must because the world is full of bad people and many of them are here: there is nothing to be gained, at least not for a long time, and much to lose. It would be wasteful and there would be no way to get another subject.’

Unless you were prepared to make more like her by hand, as it were, by exposing people to the Clouds at close range. But if you were prepared to do that, and if you could, there was no need to take Sandrine in the first place. Inoue’s instinct said no. ‘Do you know where the tame team is?’

‘Fleet,’ she said. ‘Of course.’

‘Of course,’ he echoed.

‘You are investigating this?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good,’ she said stoutly. ‘They are assholes. Go get ’em, Tiger.’

He felt the bottom drop out of his world, felt his knees turn to jelly and his feet to water, and realised before saying something totally insane that she had no idea, that she was just using a common idiom. ‘Thanks,’ he replied.

‘And after, come and have cookies. I may even make actual food.’

‘How’s your cooking?’

‘If I answer that, Lester, I have to use the forgetting button or you won’t come. Go now. I am a very important director scientist, and my minions get confused if I do not oversee their every action.’

‘Goodbye, Kaiko.’

‘ Au revoir , Lester.’

He dialled again.

‘Jed, it’s me.’

‘Hi there, Lester.’

‘I’m sorry I shouted.’

‘So am I. Shall we hug?’

‘Fortunately, the telephone does not yet afford us that option.’

‘I’m going to come up there and hug you.’

‘I would very much prefer not.’

‘You stone-faced British jackass! I am calling the car and I’m going to come up there and hug you until you squeak like a giant puppy!’

‘This is a consulate, Jed, you can’t come in unless I give you permission.’

Laughter. Then: ‘It’s possible that I got a little pissy back there, under stress. I can completely see where you were coming from. But you see what I was worried about, too.’

‘I do.’ I think you were wrong, but I do . He wondered what unsaid words were hanging in the air on Kershaw’s end.

‘I hear,’ Kershaw cleared his throat, ‘I hear you pretty much picked up our slack. Took in the wounded, that stuff.’

‘It was Dirac’s idea.’

‘I heard that, too. But it was a good thing, Lester. I can see all the politics of it. You could have sent them away. That would have played, too, in the long run. No one would have blamed you.’

‘Jed, I have a question. Feel free to tell me to get lost.’

‘Shoot.’

‘Who took the girl?’

‘What girl?’

‘In all the world, Jed, there is only one girl today.’

Kershaw didn’t respond immediately. The Sergeant thought he was probably nodding glumly, or pressing the heel of one hand against the middle of his head to ease a headache. ‘I don’t know, Lester.’

‘Off the record, between you and me? Not even a whisper?’

‘Cross my heart. It’s a mystery. It’s like all of a sudden there are these ghosts in the system, these crazy fucking events which are part of someone else’s shit and they are playing out in our town. The Tiger Man, for Christ’s sake! I’m living in a comic book. It was bad when he just uncovered drugs and beat up soldiers, then it was fine because he went away, then suddenly he’s chasing cars full of secret agents through a riot and then he fucking Gandhis the whole thing and everyone goes home! NatProMan is basically a primal-screaming therapy group right now. The Dutch called me this morning to yell at me. The Dutch! Do you have any idea how bad it has to get before the Dutch are pissed?’

‘Arno must be doing his nut.’

‘If that means what I think it means then yes, he is. All of a sudden no one’s taking his calls. He says they’re all worried they’re part of it and they haven’t realised. They’re scared they’re being manipulated, and they’re even more scared he’s part of the con.’

‘He released Pechorin. I thought that was odd.’

‘It was odder than fuck, Lester, and we had words about it, but he made funny faces at me which I assume were supposed to mean that Pechorin is either some kind of secret squirrel from Interpol or the King of Jackassistan’s one begotten son.’

‘He hardly seems the type.’ Please, oh, please let me not have beaten seven bells out of a policeman undercover.