Мик Херрон - Real Tigers

Douglas could walk, kind of, or at least couldn’t prevent himself being half-dragged, which had the same effect. He was being taken towards a black van, which appeared suddenly out of the gloom: everything was dark now, and shapes were only slowly making themselves understood. Deep breath. And exhale. The trick of it, he was discovering, was not to try too hard: breathing was one of those things you could only manage if you thought about something else while doing it. The problem was, the only other topics he could think of involved being dragged towards this van, shoved into the back of it, its door being closed with a heavy ker-thunk . Then it was just him and the man with the balaclava, together in solid darkness, until the man did something which made a small electric lantern light up. The van was large: a windowless people-carrier with bench-seating around the sides, in proper military fashion. Douglas could still taste vomit on his tongue, and was worried he’d done something to his teeth on that concrete.

A small worry, though, compared to being here with this man.

Who said, “You okay now?”

Douglas nodded. Coughed. Nodded again.

“Sorry about that.”

Worry thinned, like fog becoming mist.

“The guys are overexcited, and you can’t blame them. Those are some serious bad actors you let into the facility. You want to tell me why you did that?”

“I’m—it’s—can’t. Classified.”

“Yeah, sure. Listen, son, you really don’t need to worry about that right now.” The man pulled the balaclava off, and became ordinary looking. “I’m from Regent’s Park, name’s Duffy. You can call me Nick. There’s been an incursion, we both know that. An unauthorised incursion into a Service facility. And you know what? It’s not the first time that’s happened today. So don’t worry about what you did or didn’t do, and whether protocols were observed, because we’re all feeling a little foolish at the moment, and all that matters is that this gets cleared up. So tell me, how many of them are there?”

“Four,” said Douglas.

“Good, that’s what we thought. And your crew, how many of your crew are down there?”

“Just me,” Douglas told him, and then said, “Shouldn’t you know that? If you’re from the Park?”

“Yeah, we’re not exactly on the same page today. You know how it gets. Tell me how that back entrance works. Some kind of hatchway?”

Douglas did so.

“And there’s no way of working it from the outside?”

“None. It’s totally secure.”

“Yeah, right, good. That’s also what I thought. Thank you, Douglas.”

Douglas nodded, and noticed that he was breathing normally again, which was a relief, though in the same instant became irrelevant. His body hitting the floor of the van made more noise than the gun. Duffy was pleased: he was using a Swiss-made suppressor, and hadn’t been entirely sure it was 100 percent effective, but there was no arguing with results. He knelt and pushed Douglas’s body under the bench. Given five minutes and a bucket of soapy water, he might have done something about the head-splash on the panels too, but time was what he didn’t have.

One down, he thought. Four to go.

Busy night.

He pulled his balaclava on, turned the lantern off, and stepped out into the gathering dark.

T he pub was offGreat Portland Street, and she remembered being here once before, a wake for a dead agent, Dieter Hess. The usual pious utterances, when the truth was, like most doubles, you could trust the man as far as you could chuck a ten-pound note: where it fell, he’d be waiting. But that was the nature of the beast. A spook threw shadows like a monkey puzzle tree’s; you could catch whiplash hearing one describe yesterday’s weather.

Diana Taverner was drinking Johnny Walker Black Label—a special occasion tipple—and trying to work out how special the occasion was.

That Dame Ingrid had heard the sound of one big penny dropping was beyond dispute. Whether she’d heard it in time to catch the penny on the bounce was another matter. If she had, Taverner’s career would probably not see out the week. It was one thing to plot and seethe in corners: that was what office life was about. But to actually set wheels in motion was a declaration of war, and the only war you could win against an enemy like Dame Ingrid was one that was over before the starting gun was fired.

But it had been too good to miss, this opportunity . . .

She sipped slowly, trying to ignore the sudden craving for a cigarette that alcohol inevitably spiked. Somewhere right this moment, under London’s crust, Sean Donovan was hunting down evidence that would not only ease Ingrid Tearney from her seat of power, it could result in her trial and imprisonment. That the evidence was in the archives was an odds-on certainty: she knew how Dame Ingrid’s mind worked. Ingrid was committee-clever, had boardroom smarts; ultimately, she thought like a civil servant. Which, she should have realised, was something of a liability when surrounded by civil servants. Burying documents within a tsunami of documents must have seemed like a no-brainer, because there were always documents—there were always documents. This was the saving grace, and ultimate downfall, of every civil servant. Because there were always budgets to balance and third parties to pacify; there were flight plans and requisition forms; there were waivers, contracts, guarantees—anything that took place outside the jurisdiction, you needed paperwork to cover your arse; anything that happened within it, you needed to sign the overtime chitty. And all the paperwork had to be initialled in triplicate and copied to file; stored against the day you were called to account for actions you didn’t remember performing . . . Paperwork was how the Service, like every corporation, ran. Paperwork, not clockwork, kept the wheels turning. And this happened because nobody had yet thought of a convincing way of stopping it happening; or not convincing enough to convince a civil servant. Who were notoriously set in their ways, and displayed all the flexibility of a rhinoceros in a corridor.

So the evidence was there, among the information recently relocated to a secure site off-grid, and while it was true that Diana might herself have gone rooting for it any time these past few years, that would have been to lay herself open to the risk that Donovan now faced on her behalf . . . Besides, leaked evidence would have resulted in a whitewash, or a Select Committee Inquiry as they were also known; the inevitable investigation would have focused on the leaker, not the leaked. Several whistle-blowers of the recent past served as object lessons to this effect: icons of the internet generation they may well be, but Diana Taverner saw no future for herself holed up in an embassy box room, or eking out an existence in a foreign capital. No, if the evidence surfaced through another’s machinations, that would allow her to watch in horror as her Head of Service’s corruption was revealed; to offer her support to a dumbstruck minister; to humbly accept a caretaker role until the dust settled . . . If she wanted to take on Ingrid Tearney, the way to do it was sideways. Which meant using someone like Sean Donovan, whom she could trust because he was no spook but a soldier, and held to a different notion of loyalty: one that involved revenging himself on a Service that had done him harm.

Of course, if he discovered that it was Taverner herself who was responsible for that, things might grow awkward . . .

She finished her drink, considered her immediate options, and decided she didn’t have any. The only course of action open to her was to have another drink.

It didn’t take her long to get served, because the bartender was male. When that stopped happening—Diana didn’t know what she would do when that stopped happening. It was like contemplating death. While he poured she glanced round the bar, then noticed her own reflection in the nearby mirror, and saw with horror what looked like a grey streak in her chestnut hair . . . It turned out to be a trick of the light, thank God, but underscored her current situation: time was stomping on regardless, and opportunities had to be seized. Better to go down in flames than timidly fade.