Мик Херрон - Real Tigers

Only sort of, thought River. He looked up at the monitors again. Armed or not, there were plenty of men out there. Probably more than enough to deal with two ex-soldiers.

Probably.

Douglas had thrown the lever that opened the overhead hatch.

“When you get up top,” River said, “Call your boss. Tell him there’s been an incursion. Tell him he needs to sound the alarm.”

“Her,” said Douglas.

“What?”

“My boss is a her.”

“Yeah, right. Whatever.” He looked at Louisa. “What about you?”

“I’m a her too.”

“Funny.” But it was as near as Louisa had come to the attempt in a good while, so River gave her a brief smile before saying, “You going up?”

“Are you?”

“I’m going to hang on here a while. I want to know what’s happening.”

“Yeah, well. So do I.”

Douglas was already halfway up the ladder. They watched as he disappeared through the hatch, then River threw the lever that locked it once more.

A moment later he was on the monitor that displayed the chamber overhead.

On one of the other screens the Black Arrow crew were approaching a set of doors, and making much use of hand signals and pointy fingers.

Watching them, Louisa said, “Remind me whose side we’re on?”

“That’ll be easier to work out once the shooting starts,” River said. “Anyone who’s not aiming at you.”

Together, they headed off through the swing doors, down the corridor.

The roomwas a long one, high too, and from the end Traynor entered seemed stacked nearly to the ceiling with crates, some of them in evidence cages, each neatly padlocked. But about halfway along, the crates gave way to rows of shelving, no more than two feet apart, with an aisle running down the centre as far as the next set of doors, in front of which a wide area had been left empty, though large metal filing units lined the walls either side. Sean Donovan was halfway along a shelf full of cardboard folders: he was plucking them one by one, checking the top sheet, then—like a dissatisfied library user—dropping them to his feet. The spillage ran right back to the aisle, so when Ben Traynor reached him, it looked like Donovan was wilfully sowing disorder; turning a neat expanse of ordered history into a snowstorm of confused event.

Without breaking off from this task, he said, “Problem?”

“We have company.”

“Who?”

Traynor was already past him, heading for the doors to E Corridor, slipping his belt off as he ran. Looping it through the door’s handles he pulled it tight, buckled it, then turned his attention to the filing cabinets.

Donovan emerged. “Who?” he said again.

“Monteith’s crew.”

Donovan thought for a moment, then shook his head. “They’re lightweights, Ben.”

“They don’t have to be good, they just have to be numerous,” Traynor said. “Give me a hand with this.”

Donovan helped him tip a cabinet onto its side, then slide it in front of the doors.

“That’s not going to hold them long,” Traynor said.

Donovan said, “I don’t know. Just opening a door is a stretch for some of them.” He was already heading back to the shelf he’d been working on.

Traynor peered through the fraction of porthole window unobscured by the cabinet and said, “They’re here already. We’d better go.”

“I’m not running from those clowns. Not till I get what we came for.”

“Sean, look around. This place is the size of a fucking church. You could spend all week and not find it.”

The older man shook his head: he was out of sight, between the shelves, but Traynor could tell that’s what he was doing. “The catalogue numbers tell you where to look. V for Virgil, plus Tearney’s initials. Then the date, then a four-figure reference. It’s between six and eight years back, so we only need to go through this section here. And I’m halfway done already.”

“What if all this is a set-up?”

“What would be the point, Ben? I was just out of prison, I was drinking myself half to death. And Taverner approached me, remember? It’s not like I was on a crusade.”

“I don’t trust her.”

“She’s a spook. You’d be mad to trust her. But she’s a spook with an agenda, and she wants to destroy Tearney as much as we do. For Alison, Ben. Remember?”

“. . . I’m not likely to forget.”

“So how long are you prepared to give this?”

Traynor said, “Okay, okay. As long as it takes.”

Gun in hand, he went back to the doors, observing fractured slices of motion from the crew outside through his paring of window. They looked like they were getting ready to mount an assault . . . He had been here before, it occurred to him, by which he meant not here but in just this scenario: hostiles two breaths away, and defences no thicker than a brick and plaster wall.

The difference was, the quality of the enemy.

He checked his gun again, though didn’t need to, and settled to wait. When they made a serious attempt on the door, he’d give them something to think about. But it was important to remember that they weren’t all clowns—one or two of the Black Arrow squad had been boots on the ground: Iraq, Afghanistan. If they were out there, he didn’t want to be loosing bullets in their direction, but that was a soldier’s life: you couldn’t always choose your enemies. Besides, Ben Traynor was no longer marching under a flag. The nearest he had was a photograph, of Captain Alison Dunn, and with the thought he kissed a finger and tapped his breast pocket. He could hear Donovan leafing through folders—plucking, glancing, discarding—but he let that sound fade into the background and focused on the world behind the blocked doors: alert, on duty, and tense as a trigger.

When Douglasemerged from the disused factory he stood blinking for a moment, like a rat freed from a maze, then froze as a train whistled past, as if becoming motionless would see the danger off. It appeared to work: the train was gone already, a bar of noise and light heading for the suburbs. Douglas looked up at the sky, in which stars had now appeared, shook his head in disapproval, then reached into his pocket for his mobile. He checked the screen, scrolled down for a number, but before he found it was flattened by one of the Black Arrows: an illegal tackle any way you looked at it, and the only way Douglas was looking at it was from underneath. With his mouth against the concrete he couldn’t shout, couldn’t scream: all the breath within him had been scattered into the dark. A voice barked harsh instructions into his ear, but Douglas couldn’t understand them: it wasn’t a foreign language, just a mode of experience he wasn’t accustomed to. A memory exploded in his head of watching while a middle-aged couple did the business, right out here in the open, folded over the back of their car. Knowing these things happened, invisibly observing them, had rendered Douglas untouchable, he thought. The things that people did were jokes to which he alone supplied the punchline. But now the joke was on him: he was being hauled upright, an arm around his throat. He hadn’t been in such close contact with another human since lifesaving lessons at his local pool—2007.

“Okay. I’ll take him.”

Him was Douglas; the speaker was a newcomer, not the man who’d flattened him.

Breath was trying to find its way back into his lungs now: the air out here was hot, and seemed even hotter as it forced its way inside him.

It seemed that he had thrown up, too.

“Can you walk?”

He nodded, though he was fairly sure he couldn’t.

The newcomer wore dark clothing, but not the paramilitary gear that the vicious bastard who’d just taken him down wore. He did, though, have a silky-looking black balaclava. “Come on then.”