Мик Херрон - Real Tigers

She stood and took aim at the doorway, arms steady on the top of the cabinet, but nobody appeared there. River ran in a crab-like crouch for Donovan and Traynor, who were in a heap on the floor; when he pulled Donovan up his face was covered in blood.

But the blood was Benjamin Traynor’s, the back of whose head was missing.

Donovan had been hit too, but a good-guy wound—good guys get shot in the shoulder. His eyes were out of focus, though, and River struggled to get him off the ground. He half-dragged half-carried him back to the cover of the overturned cabinet, then dropped him, panting.

“They’re either mustering their forces or have no fucking clue what to do.”

“Or they’ve gone,” Louisa said. She was unbuttoning Donovan’s shirt; to check his wound, River assumed.

Donovan came awake, and he seized her by the wrist with his good hand. “Don’t.”

Louisa laid her gun aside, and unclamped his hand. “Your friend’s dead,” she said. “And an unknown number of hostiles are shooting at us. I think we can safely say your operation’s fucked.”

“Ben’s dead?”

“I’m sorry.”

He closed his eyes again, and she undid another button, then pulled free the folder he’d been carrying. An ordinary manila one, its top corner stained with his blood, or his friend’s.

She handed it to River. “Let’s keep this safe.”

“By which you don’t mean re-shelve it,” River said, tucking it inside his own shirt, jamming the unbloodied edge into the top of his jeans.

“No, well. It might repay study. Seeing as how people are trying to kill us.” She pulled Donovan’s shirt aside and looked at his wound. “This doesn’t look too bad,” she told him.

“Nice to know,” he said through gritted teeth. “How’s the other one looking?”

Uh-oh.

He’d been hit in the thigh, too; not so much a good-guy wound, with bone showing through his trousers.

River was peering round the edge of the cabinet. “There’s movement.”

“Oh good.”

“We might need a plan soon.”

“No offence,” Louisa said, “but I wish Marcus was here.”

“None taken,” River said. “I was thinking the same about Shirley.”

Something hard and round came flying through the shattered doorway, and bounced off the cabinet.

Then everything turned to white light.

Marcus Longridge’shands were secured behind him, with a pair of those plastic cuffs that were so popular these days, and he’d been similarly bound at the ankles. He lay on his side in the back of the Black Arrow van, and had clearly clocked that he wasn’t alone, and had registered the very former nature of his companion. A bullet to the head was a decisive punctuation mark. He couldn’t be in much doubt that he faced the same full stop.

What was odd, though, was that his damn baseball cap was still on his head.

Nick Duffy didn’t remove his balaclava because there were rules, and they kept you alive, but he knew Longridge had recognised him. Duffy had approached him once, in fact, before his fall, to see if he fancied a role with the Dogs: they could always use men with Marcus’s skills. The people they were sometimes called upon to apprehend often didn’t want to be apprehended, and were highly trained in methods of resisting said apprehension. So having people on your side even more highly trained in smacking heads off walls was a plus. Hence the offer.

To which Longridge had replied, “Does my ass smell like bacon to you?” which Duffy had paraphrased in his subsequent write-up, but hadn’t needed Google Translate to catch the drift of.

“Is that thing velcroed to your head?” Duffy asked now.

Longridge had taken some heavy blows, and been dragged a few hundred metres across rough ground; the sleeve had been ripped off his sweatshirt, and his right cheek was a mess. He should have lost his cap by now. Duffy leaned down and ripped it from his head. Not velcro but parcel tape, the thick brown kind. Partly fastening the cap to Longridge’s head, and partly securing his gun inside it: small revolver, sissy-looking piece, which frankly Longridge should have been ashamed to be carrying.

“You keep your gun in your hat ?”

“Didn’t look there, did they?” Marcus said.

“No, well. I swear, you just can’t get the help.”

“Fuck you, man. If you’re gonna do it, do it.”

“Okay.”

“Prick.”

“Thanks,” said Nick Duffy. “That makes it easier.”

T he motorway was quietin the way motorways sometimes are, its traffic-buzz little more than static, with only the occasional comet of oncoming headlights. Catherine sat in the front next to Ho; Lamb in the back. They’d left Craig Dunn at the farmhouse, having called—at Catherine’s insistence—an ambulance. Lamb was toying with a cigarette, rubbing the filtered end absent-mindedly against his cheek, occasionally losing it in his thinning mat of hair. Catherine had made it clear that if he lit it, he’d be dumped on the hard shoulder.

“This car already stinks like an eighties pub.”

“You could smoke in pubs then?” asked Ho.

Lamb sighed heavily, like an elephant deflating.

“It’s a revenge thing,” Catherine went on. “Must be. Dunn’s death wasn’t an accident.”

“That’s quite a leap,” said Lamb.

“Fine. Let’s think of another reason they’d be working together. Her brother, her fiancé, and the man supposedly responsible for her death.”

“Tribute band?”

“They must think it was some kind of conspiracy,” Ho said. “Whatever happened to Dunn. And that’s why they’re after the Grey Books.”

“Roddy,” said Catherine, before Lamb could speak. “They’re not really after the Grey Books. That was a ruse. To get them into the place where the Grey Books are kept.”

“. . . You sure?”

“Sean Donovan is a lot of things,” Catherine said, “but he was never a conspiracy nut. Whatever they’re looking for, it’s not in the Grey Books. They’re after proof she was murdered. Murdered by the Service, I mean.”

Lamb said, “They’ll be lucky. If it was a Service hit, there won’t be an order on file. Tearney’s a paper-pusher, but even she wouldn’t ask for a receipt for wet work.”

“Then what?”

Lamb stared out of the side window for two minutes, his face squashed into a scowl. When he spoke again, his voice was flat and final. “Tearney didn’t come up through the ranks. She’s a committee animal; she runs meetings, not joes. Dunn died six years ago. Back then, Tearney wouldn’t have known her way under the bridge, certainly not well enough to have someone bump off army personnel. Even just a captain.”

“You mean, it’s not Tearney they’re after?”

“I mean, if it’s Tearney they’re after, there’s someone else pulling their strings. How’d they know about Slough House, for a start?”

“Oh,” said Catherine.

“Yeah, right. Oh.”

“What?” said Ho.

“Above your pay grade,” Lamb said. “Stop at the next services.”

“We’re okay for petrol.”

“It’s not the car’s fuel I’m worried about,” said Lamb, putting his unlit cigarette in his mouth. “It’s mine.”

In theirears, nothing but ringing. In their eyes a shadow-show; everything silhouetted against everything else.

But it would have been a lot worse if the flash bomb had cleared the cabinet and landed on their side, instead of bouncing back the way it had come.

River, eyes screwed shut, reached out and felt for Louisa.

“Oy. Hands.”

“You okay?”

“Uh-huh. You?”

He nodded, then said, “Uh-huh.” The thing about a flash bomb was, it preceded an attack. But maybe that only happened when you threw it in the right direction.