Мик Херрон - Real Tigers

He powered his computers down, and cast a goodbye look around his kingdom. Now that Longridge and Dander were history, he ought to check out their office, see if they’d forgotten anything worth having. Longridge had a nice silk scarf; he wasn’t likely to be wearing it in this heat, so might have left it on a hook. Ho got as far as the door before this plan underwent sudden revision.

“And where do we think we’re going?”

“Uh . . . home?”

Lamb placed a paw in the centre of Ho’s chest and kept walking. Ho shuffled backwards until the backs of his thighs met the edge of his desk. Then Lamb let his hand drop and went and stood by the window, his back to Ho.

The street outside was starting to droop. Traffic was heavy still, but tinged with exhaustion: poor sodding workers heading home from battle, rather than the go-getting warriors of the morning. Across the road, a woman stepped out of the dental laboratory, which had an industrial aspect, as if large-scale experiments took place within, rather than individual acts of dentistry. She shook her head, dispelling an unpleasant memory, and walked off towards the tube.

“High Wycombe,” Lamb said.

The farmhouse Ho had found. The one Sylvester Monteith had rented.

“Uh, yeah. A little way past it on the motorway. Satnav’ll find it no problem.”

“I prefer natsav,” Lamb said.

“Huh?”

“Natural savvy. It allows me to avoid demeaning tasks when there are others to perform them for me.”

“Uh . . . Cup of tea?”

“Where’s your car?” said Lamb.

Marcus wasdriving a black SUV with tinted windows: a vehicle designed for urban military ops, but usually driven by harassed mums caught between the school run and Waitrose. Shirley had pointed this out to him in the past, but didn’t think it was a good subject to bring up at the moment. When Marcus had stopped swearing about Lamb, it had only been so he could pick on her instead.

“You straight yet?”

“Are we back on that?”

“This is not a fucking joke, Dander. You were high earlier. Are you straight yet?”

Shirley thought about lying, but only for a second. “Jesus, it was one tiny toot. Didn’t even kill the hunger pangs.”

“Fuck it, Dander. Fuck it.”

“Keep your hair on. Christ, half an hour, max. It was a half-hour lift, no more.”

“Did you forget what we said earlier?”

“No, partner . It was what kept me going all afternoon, after you’d disappeared on your jolly.”

They were in bad traffic, progress stalled by a breakdown up ahead, reducing the road to a single lane. This had not improved Marcus’s temper.

“So now it’s my fault?”

“Hey. I take responsibility for my own fuck-ups. I’m not carrying yours too.”

Marcus swore under his breath, and then swore out loud, and slapped his hands against the wheel. “ Hell! Have you any idea what kind of shit I’m in?”

“Same kind I am,” Shirley said. “The kind where you haven’t got a job and life sucks.”

“I have a family. You’re aware of that, right? I’ve got mouths to feed and a mortgage to pay. I can not lose my job.”

“Good strategy, Marcus. Shame you didn’t put it into action earlier.”

“Don’t get gobby with me, girl. Or you can get out here and walk.”

“Call me girl again, you won’t be able to walk.”

The pair seethed in silence while the SUV crawled past the broken-down vehicle, from whose windows a forlorn young woman stared.

“Just anywhere up here,” Shirley said at last. “Christ. I’d have been quicker on foot anyway.”

“Yeah, because you’re in a real hurry, aren’t you? No job, and nobody waiting at home.”

“Thanks for the update. But I hadn’t actually forgotten my life was crap.”

“Look on the bright side. Maybe you’ll find some crystal meth down the back of the sofa. You know, the way people find loose change—”

“Don’t fucking judge me, Longridge. You don’t catch me losing a week’s salary to a one-armed bandit.”

“I don’t do one-armed bandits!”

“And I don’t do crystal meth!”

Marcus swerved abruptly into a parking space, and Shirley’s head banged against the backrest.

“Shit!”

“Shit!”

They sat in silence, their anger trying out different shapes. Traffic rumbled past through almost visible heat, and the clock on the dashboard experimented with making time stand still, every second dragging itself over innumerable obstacles. Marcus was the first to surrender.

“So okay,” he said. “We both screwed up.”

Shirley seemed about to offer footnotes but changed her mind at the last moment. “Maybe.”

“You think that fucker Lamb’ll change his mind?”

“He was mad.”

“I know.”

“Really mad.”

“I know,” said Marcus. “So now what?”

“I hear Black Arrow has vacancies.”

“Great.”

Their renewed silence was only slightly less uncomfortable; Shirley tugging at the strap of her seatbelt and letting it slap back into her chest; Marcus drumming his fingers on the steering wheel in a series of broken rhythms. At last he said, “Cassie knows I’m on a job tonight.”

“So?”

“So she’s not expecting me back.”

Shirley let the seatbelt slap against her again, then said, “If you’re about to make a pass, I’ll peel your face with a spoon.”

“Jesus, Dander. No offence, but I’ve been sacked, not lobotomised.”

“Yeah, none taken. Only you’re too old and baldy for me.”

He shifted in his seat. “This op of Lamb’s.”

“The Grey Books.”

“It’s looney tunes.”

“Well, duh.”

She pulled her seatbelt out again, but Marcus caught it before if slapped against her chest.

“Stop doing that. It’s looney tunes, yeah, but what if it’s not?”

“Meaning?”

Marcus said, “This Donovan. Before he was kicked out of the army, he was a high-flier, right?”

“You heard Cartwright,” Shirley said. “MoD attachments, UN committees, meetings at the Park. He wasn’t a squaddie, that’s for sure.”

“And he’s got a thing about the weather.”

“Everyone’s got a thing about the weather, Marcus. The weather’s looney tunes too. Floods and heatwaves, Jesus. I’m just waiting for hurricane season.”

He ignored her. “So everyone thinks what he’s after is worthless, and he only wants it because he’s a headcase. But what if he’s not? What if he knows something we don’t? All that high-level Ministry of Defence stuff, he must have had access to a lot of black-bag ops. What was Louisa saying about that HAARP project?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Well it was something about weather-manipulation. So what if Donovan’s not as fucked-up as he’s pretending? What if there’s something in the Grey Books that actually matters? Proof these weather projects are really going on?”

Shirley shook her head, and looked across the street. In a bar opposite, a young man wearing denim cutoffs and a leather waistcoat was polishing tabletops. She wondered whether they needed cleaning, or if this was part of the floorshow.

Marcus said, “There’s Select Committee reports in there too. Documentation, maybe other kinds of official paperwork.”

“So?”

“So Donovan was kicked out of the army, remember? Maybe this is payback. He’s planning on going Assange on someone’s ass.”

“Yeah, you might want to choose your words more carefully.” Shirley withdrew her attention from the barkeep. “Besides, what’s it got to do with us? Unemployed, remember?”

“Maybe.”

“Right. That Lamb. What a kidder.”