Мик Херрон - Real Tigers

“It’s voice-responsive.”

So was Louisa’s keyring, but she hadn’t formed a club with it.

Douglas tugged at his collar, in unconscious imitation of Louisa’s cooling-down procedure. “So, er, what exactly is it you guys are after? Is it about that pair who were here earlier?”

“Which pair’s that?” River asked.

“Wandering around up there. Between the buildings.”

“One in his fifties, grey hair, well built? The other one shave-headed?”

“Yeah, that sounds like them. Only we get a lot of hobos up there, well, obviously. But these guys were different.”

“Don’t worry,” Louisa told him. “They’re not a problem.”

“We get film crews too sometimes. It’s a good place to blow up a car.”

“I’ll bear that in mind.”

“It’s funny, they’ll be out there making a movie, and here I am watching, and they don’t even know I’m here. It’s like . . . ” He meshed fingers, demonstrating the interconnected complication of real life and fantasy playing out in parallel, some of it above ground, some of it underneath. “I get a kick out of that.”

“Uh-huh,” said Louisa.

“Kids screwing in cars, too. That happens a lot.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Three years.”

It was on the tip of Louisa’s tongue to ask how long the shifts were, but she decided she didn’t want to know. The possibility that Douglas had spent three years on his own here, without a break, was seeming likelier by the minute.

River was looking at the bank of monitors, and the lifeless scenes they displayed. He indicated the one showing the warehoused crates and box files. “Is that the stuff that was delivered last month?”

Douglas reluctantly shifted his gaze from Louisa. “Yeah. It took them two days.”

“That must have been exciting,” Louisa said. “I mean, compared to . . . ”

Absolutely bugger-all happening is what she meant, but Douglas begged to differ.

“Oh, it’s always exciting. Nobody knows I’m here .”

This last in a whisper, as if the surreptitious nature of his role extended to all discussion of it.

“But it was pretty cool when the phone rang,” he admitted. “I thought it had actually, you know. Happened.”

“. . . ‘Happened’?”

“Yeah, you know. I mean, this place was designed as a survival facility. I thought maybe there’d been an . . . event.”

A dirty bomb or a toxic splash, he meant; something to drive city dwellers underground. Or at least, those whose security clearances allowed them access to survival facilities.

“But it turned out a false alarm.”

“That must have been very disappointing.”

“Yeah, well. Shit happens.”

River said, “So how far away is it?”

“The stuff they delivered? Other end of that corridor.” He pointed to a pair of doors on the far side of the room. “You need some of it back?”

“Something like that.”

“Yeah, well. I guess you got the clearance.”

“Oh, and another thing,” Louisa said. “That pair you noticed earlier? Up in the world? They’re going to join us.”

“They’re with you?”

“They are,” said River.

“No problem. All they have to do is show their passes, I’ll let ’em in.”

“Yes, see, that’s where we go off-book,” Louisa explained.

Douglas looked from one to the other, waiting for the punchline.

“It’s okay, Douglas,” River assured him. “We’re from Slough House.”

Evenings werelong now, but hardly endless; shadows had crept across the scabbed and tacky concrete apron between the derelict buildings, and the trains that trundled past increasingly resembled boxes of light, more strongly outlined the darker it got. The two soldiers had followed the Slough House pair into the factory five minutes ago, and the phone in Nick Duffy’s hand was now a grenade. Dame Ingrid’s call— There’s been a change of plan —had primed it, and the calls he’d made since had set the timer running.

To a few of the Dogs he could trust: those who knew how the real world worked, and how sometimes you had to tie a black ribbon round events without asking awkward questions.

To a suit the website listed as a company director of Black Arrow, and who it didn’t take long to persuade to unleash his cut-price commandos.

And to his girlfriend, cancelling their evening. That was the one he’d end up paying for, but nobody had ever pretended his job was an easy one.

From his window on the third floor, Duffy tried to picture forthcoming events. There was no such thing as a watertight plan, and any operation had the potential to go tits up, but he’d had a clear go-ahead from Dame Ingrid: that the worst-case scenario involved Sean Donovan walking away. Whatever else, that wasn’t to happen.

So: flood the area.

Because if Black Arrow weren’t anyone’s idea of crack troops, there were at least plenty of them. Plus, they’d be fired up by notions of honour and revenge: Duffy had told the suit that tonight’s target was the man responsible for murdering Sly Monteith. We’ll be taking him off the board. They loved that talk, the deskbound warriors: they were all for pouring men onto the field of battle. Let’s do this thing , he’d replied, like a man buckling on a holster and heading for the OK Corral. It hadn’t worried him that his Black Arrow team were amateurs, barely kitted out for crowd control: truncheons, tear gas, maybe Tasers, a flash bomb or two. Still, they’d soak up whatever ammo the soldiers were packing. Then Duffy would step in with his handpicked pros and finish the job.

He surveyed the ground through his binoculars again, getting a mental fix on lines of approach and areas of cover: the skip, that pile of fencing. The complex that lay beneath stretched way into the distance, but he’d factored that in: there was a main entrance a mile or so south, and a Black Arrow crew should be arriving there—he checked his watch—any minute now.

Right on cue, his phone trembled in his breast pocket.

“Can I speak to Alice?”

“Sorry, wrong number,” said Duffy.

If it had been Betty who was sought it would have meant things were Buggered, but Alice signified A-okay, meaning the other team was at the front entrance. There were fifteen of them, Black Arrow irregulars, plus two of his own. His pair were coordinating events, but the Black Arrows themselves would take out the security guards, which was only fair: security here, as at other low-priority Service posts, was outsourced, so it was one set of Dobbins against another.

That done, they were essentially drain cleaner: they’d flush through the system, pushing the blockage towards the only other outlet: the hatchway in the dead factory down below. When Donovan and the others emerged back onto the wasteground, Duffy was here to make sure they got no further. Chances were, things wouldn’t go the distance: a bit of luck, there wouldn’t be bodies left in the open.

Bodies there would be, though, and no one was getting a free pass. He mused briefly on River Cartwright and Louisa Guy. Cartwright was a pain in the neck, overdue an accident, but Duffy couldn’t help feel a niggle when he thought about Guy. It wasn’t so long ago her boyfriend was smeared across a road round Blackfriars way: something of a professional embarrassment for Duffy. So maybe that niggle was guilt, or maybe just irritation at a bad memory, but either way, wiping the slate clean tonight would put it behind him. So no hard feelings to Louisa Guy, but really, she should have made the effort to be luckier.

“The Slough House crew too?” he’d asked Tearney.

He hadn’t wanted any ambiguity hanging over this one.