So now he might go to the headland and say, ‘I see you.’ A formal declaration. He had done it before, elsewhere: stared into the dark or the mountains or the sand and made some sort of pledge, given himself a goal or issued a warning. ‘I will bring you home’; ‘I know you’re out there.’
But the Fleet would not hear him and in any case it wasn’t the ships out there he had to acknowledge. It was the ones here, in Brighton House, at the back of the comms room.
The comms room desk was a nasty, modern thing, more a trestle table with a laminate top. It was covered in a hotchpotch of digital technology: two phones, an actual one-time pad, a desktop computer and a large brick of plastic which was copier, scanner, fax and printer. The chair in front of it resembled some sort of gibbet or mechanical stork, but was surprisingly cosy with a fleecy airline blanket draped over it. Two desklamps sat at either end of the trestle like bookends, defining the world – and if you turned towards the door they threw a stark shadow from the reinforced lintel across the wall, reminding you that, yes, the comms room could withstand a significant amount of punishment before any hostile force gained entry, giving you time to destroy the files.
And what files would those be? What, on Mancreu, could still be important enough to worry about? The ones in the inappropriately cheery orange filing cabinet – with built-in hard drive and shock-protected battery power supply – in the far corner. The copies of the daily correspondence arriving by email and encrypted transfer, and occasionally by courier pouch, which the Sergeant routinely stamped and put away but did not ever read. The bureaucratic echo of the actual Fleet and the legal niceties surrounding it, all indexed and – there was no verb, he realised, or not one that he knew, for the modern process of tagging with keywords. Indexed, then, and categorised, and sitting there like a crab bloated with rotten fish and carrion.
He did not need to go to the headland to make his challenge. He could do it here. Must, indeed, because the headland was an evasion. This was the stinking corpse in his own house.
The second thing he might do – the only thing, in his adjusted perception – was talk to the boy.
Things were moving rapidly, but not nearly so fast as they would once he possessed himself of the knowledge in those folders and took direct action against a ship in the Bay of the Cupped Hands to retrieve Sandrine. Stumbling over the heroin in the cave had been bad, but it was in the worst event a defensible position. Trading in drugs was too embarrassing to make much of a fuss over in public. Launching a commando raid on a non-official but very much sanctioned intelligence operation would be another sort of thing. It was more than likely that he would fail, and in failing he would be revealed. He had undertaken missions like that before and been lucky, but you had to be clear about the odds and the consequences of failure. The political leadership had to be clear about the cost.
The boy was to all intents and purposes the political leadership. One could argue that he needed to know the extent of the Sergeant’s exposure, and what he might otherwise offer: a home, a name. A father.
But one might also say that the boy was a child and that it was the job of a father, for just a little longer, to spare his son this sort of choice: I can try to save your mother, but it may mean that I die or am taken from you. An absurd decision, grinding one desperation against another – the sort of dilemma beloved of the four-colour villains in the boy’s comic books. Forcing him to choose was a destruction in all directions: whatever answer he gave he must hate, and by extension hate to some degree the object of his love for pressing it upon him.
And then, too, it smacked of cowardice, of a request to be let off the hook – and laying that at the door of the boy wrapped in the guise of partnership was unconscionable.
So instead of going to the café or the docks to look for his friend, or using the phone to call a summit conference, he made a cup of tea in silence. In the tradition of sergeants he stewed it orange-brown and loaded the cup with sugar so that it was less tea than it was a rich liquid caramel filled with tannins and caffeine. You could have used it for caulking.
With this in hand, he returned to the comms room and rested his backside on the trestle table. He took a sip and winced at the sickly, too-hot stuff as it mixed with the saliva in his mouth. He swallowed. Seven cups of black tea a day increased your risk of prostate cancer, he’d read somewhere, and drinking liquids above a certain temperature did the same for the sort you got in your throat. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another.
He glowered at the filing cabinet, listened to the background hum of the hard drive.
‘I see you,’ he said.
He opened the top drawer, and began to read.
19. Fleet
NEXT TO THE comms room was a large high-ceilinged space which had been the operations section back when Mancreu still merited operations, and before that the map room of the colonial house. Victorian Mercator maps complete with sea serpents decorated one wall, but the other was a single blank space twice the height of a man. It was a perfect canvas, he thought, for making information visible and tangible. He fetched a stepladder.
By sunset he had covered the whole wall and was still working, pins and colour coding and lines of ribbon and tape making a webwork across the paint. On one side he had already been forced to create more space, bringing in a whiteboard and some Blu-Tack to continue the chain of inference and connection out into the room. Satellite images and actual schematics of different ships were piled at the foot of the whiteboard waiting their turn. He stretched lines of string and wire through the room and stapled the sheets together over the top so as to make a completely immersive experience. Finally, realising that he needed an actual chart of the ships and their relationship to one another, he turned to the map. The British Empire stretched pinkly across a great swathe of Africa and Asia.
This is all your fault, anyway.
He clutched up a brace of images of the merchant ship Young Eidolon and drove the pins in hard with his thumb. Who owned what. What went where, what did it do and why.
Pride of Shanghai II, liner, retired. Slave ship, bulk transfer rather than bespoke. Temporary goods warehouse. Somali registry.
Life of the Party, factory ship out of Delaware, converted in Newcastle. Pleasure yacht: an offshore brothel and drug den for an international clientele. Mostly what it seemed to be, occasional staging post for political rendition within Asia. Probably Chinese.
Champs Elysées, Very Large Crude Carrier, now a prison ship. Owned from the Horn of Africa, almost certainly a US proxy vessel, but they wouldn’t say, not even – or not especially – to the Brits. Unconventional interrogation and long-term detention for unreportable prisoners and persons too damaged to be tried in public. Oubliette.
Benthic Minogue, pocket dreadnought. Unsubtly disguised iron hand in the Fleet’s glove. Deterrent. Post-Soviet retcon.
The Reluctant Alice, hospital ship. Former whaler. Non-legal medical treatments, reconstructive surgery, organ harvesting and corpse disposal. Also chemical, electroshock and deep-brain stimulated questioning. Brainwashing. Owned by a transnational infrastructure and security company through a variety of cutouts. Parent entity in Iceland, kindly staff speaking good English with Canadian accents.
The paper forest grew up and up and out. More ships, more connections. There were always more, possibilities the Fleet itself probably had not understood. Did the German government realise it was paying two separate services to spy on one another from each end of the bay? Did the Japanese know that their drug-enforcement team was entirely in the pocket of a Kosovar smuggling ring pretending to be a French Interpol squad – and pretending so well that it had scored some notable successes against its own side? It was chaos. And in the chaos, here and there, was Bad Jack: doing favours, greasing the wheels, carrying water. Nothing worked properly without Jack. It must drive them all crazy, except that it was so convenient.
The Sergeant found he was surprised by none of it; suspected sickly that no one would be
, that no one would care if he sent it to Channel 4 by overnight bag. A brief scandal, questions in the House of Commons and a lot of braying from the front-bench donkeys on either side of the aisle, and then on to the next thing. The exigencies of security in the post-9/11 world. A nod and a wink: you got caught, but of course we’d have done the same.
I could have known all this weeks ago. But it wouldn’t have helped. These were national secrets, and they were big and awful and dull. The small ones – who killed Shola and why? Who sold guns and bikes to the shore? – were too trivial to be written down.
But not to be spoken, he realised. Small secrets still had to be shared with those who needed to know them, and while there would be no transcript of those conversations, the fact of their occurrence would be noted.
He looked for signals traffic.
Found it.
There, at the time of Shola’s murder, jots and tittles of radio. But not one vessel, not one point of blame. No. A joint effort. He held the sheaf of papers in his hand, traced backwards in time, forwards, ran from one ship to the next with a red highlighter pen, scrawling along the wall. He had the feel of it. This was a favour, and so was this, and here a debt was discharged. Five, ten, fifteen small IOUs were traded, cancelled out. Someone took on the job. It needed doing, so it would get done. He drew more red lines. Four minutes before the shooting. Twenty minutes before. Twenty-five, thirty, thirty-one. Here, there, and everywhere, and look who’s very agitated when it goes wrong. The red marker circled back around and around. There was so much of it. Too much. He would find out, but it would take days. He didn’t have days. Shola’s ghost was jogging his elbow: ‘Lester, for God’s sake! I can wait, I’m already dead! Find her! Find Sandrine!’
But it had not been a waste of time. No, this was how it was done, this was exactly the way. Signals and contacts. The briefest touches. Who was interested when Inoue spoke? Who responded when the seismographs twitched? Who would steal a damaged woman from her son?
A copper’s first, last, and best question: who profits?
He ditched the red marker for a green one, started again. Endlessly and meticulously, he connected and pinned and sketched, knowing that to someone standing in the doorway he would look like a madman, a drooling Renfield hunting flies and spiders back and forth. Green ink zigzagged, looped. He discarded duplication and irrelevance, classified cables and incidentals, policy statements. Facts were everything, tangible and physical. Connect the dots. Here, across the plaster, there and back again. Numbers. Times. Signals. Ships. Over and over. His fingers cramped, tried to fail. He kept going.
Then there was nothing left in his hand. The files were empty.
He stepped back, and stared. And saw a monster’s nest or a cave, a dark blot woven into the fabric of his map.
In the midst of a scaffold of tape and rubber bands, picked out by a weird inward spiral of indirect requests and stark green lines, was a single ship: the Elaine. She was registered out of the Virgin Islands, and flagged in the orange cabinet’s files for special care and consideration. Some things are more invisible than others. Not owned, obviously, by the government or by any actual British firm, but by a shell company beneath a shell company beneath a corporate umbrella to keep off Liverpool’s abysmal rain: a specialist facility working in the field of contagion and containment, making use – according to the company’s relentlessly cheerful web page – of the Mancreu area for its ‘unparalleled opportunities for advanced biomedical research’. And in that enthusiastic admission, and in the schematics attached to the file, he saw Inoue’s tame team, unpacking her best efforts and recasting her conclusions: staving off Mancreu’s end, but retaining the threat and therefore the legal vacuum around the island because it was convenient. Because the shadow that hid the Black Fleet was so very useful in this morally complex time. Because if the Mancreu problem was not really soluble, then at least that insolubility could be useful for other things – for all that discreditable business good chaps do to keep us safe in our beds.
Sandrine.
The Sergeant stared at the images of the Elaine and wondered if it was even possible. How could he invade a ship amid a host of others without detection, find Sandrine, and take her away without being seen? Without being himself detained and exposed? Without drawing down the wrath of his nation on the head of the boy he hoped to bring under its protection?
Or without killing. He was treating this as something for Tigerman, because he could only perform it as Tigerman, in Tigerman’s mask. Lester Ferris must be a million miles away or the whole show was a dud. And Tigerman did not kill, or had not, and did not make his plans with killing in mind. The Sergeant, in the normal run of things, would expect to kill his way into this ship, loudly and messily, leaving no enemies behind him to close off escape. He would treat the whole thing as a building to be cleared, as a standard if dangerous tactical mission of a sort he had carried out countless times in the urban infighting of his other wars. And then being alone was just a matter of a bad ratio of friend to foe: move, clear, hold, repeat. Room by room, with the right equipment, the right ruthlessness and a following wind – and if he made the right guesses about security – he could hollow out the Elaine until it was just him and Sandrine. And then he would bring her home, leaving the ship a floating bloody hulk, in memory of its dishonourable service. The name of Tigerman would take on a sharper edge. Not just a crime fighter, but an avenging angel. He imagined the sticky slipperiness of the metal deck underfoot, and part of him made a mental note to choose the right shoes.
But that would end it all. Even in this pass, the boy would see the shift in him, in the fiction they had created together, from knight to dragon. He would shy away from a red-handed killer even in his gratitude. He had not seen Helmand or Baghdad. It would be new to him, and of all the things he had seen or heard about, it would most resemble Shola’s death, with the Sergeant forever changing sides.
Lester Ferris saw himself gunning down a ship full of cheerful barmen, saw them explode backwards, saw a dozen ridiculous shirts billow and split behind the heart.
He pushed the image away.
Tigerman, then. It had to be Tigerman, doing things Tigerman’s way. A famous victory, the Sergeant sighed to himself, not an infamous one.
He started again. What were the tools of Tigerman’s world? How did one hero take on the hordes of evil? With almost supernatural skill – and he’d have to do without that – and guile. Diversion. Twice, now, in his confrontations, he had relied on explosions to get everyone pointed the wrong way, then come in fast and hit them very hard. Yes, diversion. Then also: reputation. When he had fought Pechorin’s men, he had been let off the hook at that last minute because his enemy was scared of what he was reputed to be: a demon. And last night the rumour of his pursuit had run ahead of him, had somehow turned the mood of the riot until even the Quads had backed down. Reputation, momentum, and allies. He had had allies last night, sudden and unexpected: the crowd themselves, and then the boy’s stooges in their firefighting gear. Could he find allies for this, too, knowing or not?
He looked back at the Fleet, at the tangle of interests and lies, and felt a new understanding take hold of him. I saw the sky rolled up as if a scroll.
The Fleet was one thing, but it was also many things bound in an uneasy union. They were opposed and they distrusted one another, and they were right to do so. Their coexistence was convenient, not perpetual. That fatal missile had scared Kershaw, had done the same to the captains of the Fleet. He could read their dismay and their amazement on the wall by the door, and that dismay was not assuaged by the fact that every single one of them displayed it. One or more of them could be lying, almost certainly were. It was hardly paranoid to wonder about a false-flag operation when you lived in the middle of the largest, most public, most permanent such scheme that had ever existed.
It was not that there were cracks in the alliance. There was no alliance, only a tenuous concert which lasted for as long as each ship he
ld its station and each nation turned its eyes away.
So long as each ship held its station.
Which in turn called one to consider under what circumstances a ship might do otherwise.
Each vessel took orders from its home authority, of course, by whatever devious backchannels had been established. But oper-ational control was passed to the individual captains so that local and immediate matters could be dealt with appropriately. It was bad practice to shackle your commander in the field to the whims and prohibitions of a faraway master.
If those captains were like soldiers on land they would be slow to waken when crisis struck after a long period of quiet, then overcompensate. They would mistrust one another because the likely source of any attack on a vessel of the Fleet was from within the Fleet. However good they were, these were the realities they lived with. They must ask: who is my friend? Who is a threat? and with so many players in the game in such close proximity, the ramifications of any change in the lines of power and alliance multiplied appallingly, possibilities and dangers expanding to every horizon in an instant. Every captain must ultimately accept paranoia, incomplete understanding or paralysis. The best would act decisively but with restraint. The others would dither and lash out, and in doing so they would further cloud the situation around them, each round of response and counter-response becoming more impossible to navigate.
One thing guaranteed a great movement of the ships in the Bay of the Cupped Hands: a storm. And if, during the preparations for such an event, when ties to the land were severed and all the many vessels must move out and around one another in accordance with the instructions of the Portmaster, one were able to inspire mistrust between them, and at the same time cause one or more to act in a manner which might be seen as a threat – say, by persuading the Portmaster to set them on what might appear to be a collision course – well, then, anything was possible.