Мик Херрон - Real Tigers

River wasn’tdead.

River might be dead, but act like River’s not.

So: River wasn’t dead.

That, or something like it, was the burden of Louisa’s thoughts as she stood face-to-balaclava with the Arrow who’d just brought him down. Sometimes you can tell when a man in a mask wears a smirk. She wiped it off him by feinting a blow to his stomach, hindsight letting her know that a feint wasn’t necessary—the blow might as well have landed for all his ability to parry it—then punching him in the throat instead, because that had worked well for her so far this evening. While he windmilled backwards, she stepped over River’s prone body and took two lengthy strides down the aisle, towards the ruptured doorway.

Dive and ro-o-o-ollll . . .

She could almost hear the instruction bellowed at her as it had been time and again one long day in hell, issuing from an instructor who looked like a sex doll: five foot nothing, curly blonde hair, ruby red lips never seen closed . . . But boy, could she bellow. Dive and roll! Anyone not diving, not rolling, to her satisfaction spent the next fifteen minutes doings squat thrusts. And like any good sex doll, she was never really satisfied; always wanted more.

But you learned to dive and roll all right, and it wasn’t a skill you forgot in a hurry.

So Louisa dived and rolled, and when she came upright again she was holding the gun Traynor had spilled when he fell. First she shot the man who’d put River down, then the two who were securing Traynor. The rest had scattered by then, back through the ruptured doorway or behind collapsed shelving.

Two shots came back at her, but she was somewhere else already, pulling River’s body behind cover.

“Fuck was that?” he drooled.

Not dead, then.

“That,” she told him, “was a Taser.”

“Not again . . . ”

“Good shooting,” someone said, and she almost proved his point by shooting him too.

It was Donovan.

“Where’s Ben?”

Louisa pointed with the gun. Traynor was still where he’d been dropped and cuffed: in a heap ten yards away. Of the two bodies next to him, one was twitching and the other not.

“Alive?”

“Think so,” she said.

“How many?”

“We saw plenty on the monitor. Twelve? Fifteen? Three are down.”

River mumbled something, fuckin Taser , she thought it was.

Donovan had a gun too. “I’ve worked with these guys,” he said. “Some of them won’t stop running until they reach the sea. And some will think Christmas just came early.”

Another shot was fired, the bullet hammering into a wooden crate, porcupining splinters from its side. Louisa briefly stood and fired twice in the direction the shot had come from, then dropped back under cover.

As if she hadn’t moved, Donovan indicated River. “Is he okay?”

“He’s been Tasered before,” Louisa said. “I think he kind of likes it.”

“You shot the man who did it.”

Louisa didn’t reply.

“That’s good soldiering in my book,” Donovan said.

“We’re not on the same side.”

“Maybe not,” he said. “But I’d sooner have you as an enemy than these clowns as friends.”

One of the clowns took offence at that, and loosed another shot in their direction. Louisa flinched, but the bullet went wild.

River pushed himself up to a sitting position, and dry-retched. “. . . Jesus.”

“Keep your head down,” Louisa hissed. Then she nodded at Donovan’s shirt front, where he’d tucked the folder he’d taken. “Whatever you’ve got there, someone definitely doesn’t want you to have it.”

“That’s right,” he said. “And whoever that is didn’t send the cavalry, did you notice? They sent a bunch of mercenaries instead. You might want to think about that.”

“When we get out of here, I’m going to have to take it from you.”

“That’s a discussion I’ll look forward to. Meanwhile, cover me. I’m going for Ben.”

And without waiting for her reply, he was off.

The temptationwas to stay in the pub all evening. By the time she emerged, it would be over: Donovan and Traynor would have the evidence to bury Ingrid Tearney, or would be buried themselves in the caverns below Hayes. If the latter, Diana would have to prepare for Tearney’s wrath. It was as well, she thought, that the Dame had no sense of humour. If she did, Diana might find herself facing exile to Slough House . . .

A knife in the back would be preferable. No metaphor intended.

The strange thing was, the event which had set all this in motion had been engineered for the good of the Service. It had been shortly after Dame Ingrid had taken up the reins, a post Diana Taverner hankered after, but had been clear-eyed enough to admit she wasn’t ready for. Back then time had appeared to be on her side, and an unrocked boat was a sane and sensible course. So when a report had landed on the Home Secretary’s desk which threatened to hole that boat beneath the waterline, Diana had acted.

The minister at the time had been every senior spook’s wet dream: spineless, indecisive, terrified of bad press, and anxious never to be caught in the vicinity of a decelerating buck. Back then, before Ingrid Tearney had begun her programme of stripping power from the Second Desks, Diana had had weekly meetings with him: he liked to keep abreast of developments, he asserted, his choice of wording corroborated by his focus. But on that particular day, he’d been too rattled by the report he’d received to spare her bosom more than a wistful glance. This , he’d told her. Make this go away, can’t you? Which Diana had taken as carte blanche.

It was the kind of op that was under the bridge in all the right ways: no papertrail, no oversight; just a slush-fund payment to a pair of crash-squad near-retirees, eager to build a nest egg before leaving Spook Street for civilian life. The target being military, it was best to have her die in an accident; the combination of a spiked drink and tampered steering had done the trick. It wasn’t even Dunn’s drink they’d spiked—a bit of lateral thinking there. So in the eyes of the world, Sean Donovan had wound up responsible for Alison Dunn’s death, but then, as a soldier, he’d understand the nature of collateral damage. His protestations had been muted—impossible to deny he had a drink problem—and he’d disappeared into the military justice system, his once successful career a pair of skidmarks in the dark.

Diana left the pub. She did not notice the sleek-looking man in her wake. Outside, it had barely cooled with the going down of the sun; the pavements were sticky with heat, and the air hung in hot pockets. It required little imagination to think something was going on with the weather. A detail that had leaped to hand when concocting this new op’s legend . . .

Because in the years since dealing with Alison Dunn, Diana’s own career had stalled; not as spectacularly as Donovan’s, but just as decisively. Her role had become that of another middle-management drone, while Tearney’s crusade to transform the Service into a bland, national-security delivery system, with herself as CEO, had marched on relentlessly. Budget meetings. Corporate branding. The whittling away of power from individual departments until a more vertical structure was achieved; one in which the traditional routes to power—long service, qualifications, a willingness to crawl over the bleeding bodies piled up in front—had been rendered null. Little wonder Diana’s thoughts had turned to alternative methods of advancement. And she had always prided herself on the elegance of her schemes. When looking for an off-the-book joe, who better than one with a grudge and a skill set?