Мик Херрон - Real Tigers

River shouted. “You okay?”

She thought that’s what he shouted. Her ears were still ringing.

He shouted, “Time to go,” and then his body went rigid and the light in his eyes went out.

The way he hit the floor, she was sure he was dead.

Shirley rolledsideways, and the kick that should have taken her head off did no more than graze her ear. In the same movement she hooked her foot around her assailant’s leg and brought him to the ground. From the corner of her eye, she saw the first man bring his truncheon down on Marcus’s stomach, but that was yards away—another time zone—and she had her own enemy to worry about. She threw herself upon him, pinning his elbows with her hands. He was several stone heavier, and clad in combat-ready gear; she wore jeans, a tee and a jacket, but if she lacked a well-packed utility belt and a nightstick she at least had a hard head, and when she brought it down on his nose she heard the satisfying crunch of bone on bone. The coward screamed, and his stick went rattling across the concrete. Pushing herself semi-upright, Shirley punched him twice, very hard, in the exact same spot she’d just butted him. She’d have done so a third time, but had to throw herself sideways to avoid the first man’s truncheon, which whistled so closely past her face she could taste it. She rolled over twice then sprang into launch position, like a racer waiting for the starting pistol. Facing her, he slapped the truncheon into his open palm, once, twice, like an invitation. The second man was wheezing heavily, bubbling with blood; Marcus was prone and didn’t look like he’d be moving soon. And there were more people heading this way: she could hear the rustling of gear, the heavy tread of hot men. Another slap of the truncheon— Come and get it .

She could take him. Five seconds’ untrammelled movement from her, and he’d spend the rest of the night removing that stick from his arse.

But there was more than just him to contend with. Before the noises got closer, she feinted left, moved right, spun on her heel and ran.

Sorry, Marcus.

Shadows swallowed her, and she vanished inside darkness.

She didn’t see Marcus being gathered up and carried to the black van.

Dame Ingridsat in the aura of her standard lamp, and to an observer might have looked serene, saintly even, given the halo effect of her blonde wig. Though if the same observer had moved closer, ignoring the soft focus, she’d have noticed that any calm in Dame Ingrid’s eyes was the kind that rocks contain, comprising a sublime indifference to the forces that produced her and a stubborn intention to endure, come what may.

There was no observer, but Ingrid Tearney rubbed her cheek anyway, as if disturbed by a stranger’s breath, then patted her wig, assuring herself it remained in place. After today’s events, she would not have been surprised to find strands of it falling about her shoulders, the way her real hair might, had it not been lost to her long ago. Today had been a day of surprises; of sandbaggings and sudden reversals. Peter Judd’s plotting had not been unexpected: PJ was a known quantity—public buffoon and private velociraptor—and Dame Ingrid had been girding her loins for an attack since his elevation to the Home Office. Diana Taverner’s machinations were hardly out of character either, but what startled Dame Ingrid was that Taverner’s plan had evidently been germinating for years.

Half an hour’s research had proved this much.

Sean Donovan was a name that would have rung bells, had Dame Ingrid ever concerned herself with the sharp end of operations. Donovan had been a career soldier, destined for laurels; his non-combat duties had included a session at the UN, where he’d advised on crushing resistance, or counter-insurgency as it was also known, depending on whose foot the boot was on. He’d been accompanied by a Captain Alison Dunn, who was engaged to Donovan’s subordinate, Lieutenant Benjamin Traynor. All very cosy, and it didn’t require much imagination to conjure up myriad ways in which things could have gone pear-shaped, but what actually happened wasn’t romantic entanglement but political indiscretion. In a Midtown bar, Alison Dunn had been approached by a junior delegate from one of the former Soviet republics. Dunn had known enough to stay sober in this company; the junior delegate had either been unencumbered by such wisdom or was pretending to be drunker than he was to excuse his flapping tongue. Or possibly—you couldn’t rule it out—his motives had been honourable. Either way, the information he passed on to Dunn had been alarming enough for her to submit a report to the Home Office, stamped minister’s eyes only, on her return home.

That had proved to be something of an error.

Dame Ingrid pursed her lips, giving her the appearance, had she but known it, of a disappointed fish. Doubtless, in recruiting Donovan and Traynor, Diana had claimed that it was Ingrid herself who had been responsible for the death of Alison Dunn, and Donovan’s consequent imprisonment; doubtless, too, she had provided them with precise instructions for laying hands on Virgil-quality documentation which would corroborate the story Alison Dunn had heard in New York. Information that would be more than enough to end Ingrid Tearney’s career.

The Grey Books indeed . . . She should have seen straight through that decoy. Would have done, except that it came gift-wrapped: if Peter Judd’s tiger team were a pair of reality-impaired conspiracy buffs, then they presented no real threat; an outcome so welcome Ingrid had accepted it without question. She sighed . . . She had been too willing to believe in others. It was an abiding weakness, her one great character flaw, and might prove her downfall if her eleventh-hour attempt to eliminate the whole pack of them proved unsuccessful.

Darkness was edging further into the room now, painting her lamplit corner brighter. Nothing to do but wait. And as she did so, she couldn’t quite suppress a sneaking admiration for the tenacity with which Diana Taverner had pursued her aims.

Not the least audacious aspect of which, as far as Dame Ingrid was concerned, was that she had managed all this without paperwork.

A tidy battlefield isa good battlefield, thought Nick Duffy. He wasn’t positive that particular gem appeared in those art of war texts City dickheads read on the tube, but it fitted his mood. From his current perspective, the fencing, the skip, the mounds of urban debris had transformed into landmarks: areas of cover for what was yet to come, which, ideally, wouldn’t last more than a minute. The klieg lights were poised to turn the area outside the derelict factory into a stage, and once that happened, anyone treading the boards would find their dramatic career cut short. They called it dying when it happened on stage. They called it that when it happened elsewhere, too.

He was deep in the shadows of the building nearest the railway tracks, leaning against a pillar, and while he didn’t know precisely what was happening in the complex below his feet, he had a calm feeling nevertheless; the sense of everything going to plan. Pulling the trigger on the red-headed kid had done that. You’d think it would push him in the opposite direction, that he’d have a hollowed-out feeling now, be all butterflies and shit, but that wasn’t how it worked. How it worked was, everything was going to be okay, because the alternative, now he’d killed that kid, was unthinkable. And Nick Duffy didn’t do unthinkable.

One of the Black Arrows approached, not even attempting to look stealthy. In a shaky voice, he said, “We’ve got a prisoner.”

For a second, Duffy thought he’d missed something. “They’ve come up?”