Tigerman

The Fleet at rest was a glassy ædifice, smooth and unscaleable. The Fleet afraid was a chaos in which a single man with a clear understanding might do much.

  If only one knew when a storm was coming, or could create one.

  But then, the Mancreu Meteorology Station was an unmanned post a mile up the road, and the key was held in the offices of the former authority – the British Met Office, whose branch director had been a member of the consular staff. In other words, it was down the hall, on a hook.

  By the predawn the Sergeant had a plan. Since discovery was inevitable, he would provide the Elaine’s crew with too much to think about, too many confusing imperatives, splitting their attention in as many directions as possible. First the warning of a sudden storm, then some explosives in a dinghy or two floating among the ships. Everyone would be out on deck and nightblind, seeing patterns in the waves and shadows, seeing other ships moving in unanticipated ways. They would simply have too much to pay attention to. While they were overstretched, he would sneak onto the Elaine and taser anyone he met, flashbang any large groups, until he got Sandrine out and they could escape into the confusion. It would be nice to think that no one would shoot randomly into the water, but he thought they probably would, so he’d need to head away from the main body of the Fleet. Elaine was out on the edge, anyway.

  It was a bad plan. It was all he had. He would improvise the rest. He would need to be fresh for that.

  The crushing weight of fatigue landed on his shoulders all at once. He pushed it away again, found grit somewhere deep down and clawed his way back into his own head.

  Bad Jack. Arno. Kershaw. Pechorin. All and any of them might be added into the plan, for good or ill. Lies are his hill country. Quite. Not Arno.

  Pechorin, then? But he was with Arno now, and Kershaw would trust only so far.

  Which left Jack. Jack was in this. Back to Jack. He stared at the nest around the Elaine, the madman’s curve of string, and wondered if Jack would yield to the same analysis. Except that he didn’t have schematics for Jack. Jack wasn’t owned by London. Jack, who had been Shola’s boss. Who had been the target of the original attack. Jack who was everywhere. Jack Jack Jack.

  He whispered it as he walked through the house alone, hearing his voice echo on the black and white tiles, the wooden boards, the white walls, hearing it inside his own head like a whistle, seeing brown swirls and circles at the corners of his eyes. Sleep now. But he was moving too fast, still thinking. He poured milk from a bottle and made Ovaltine, still in his mind called Ovomaltine because that had been the name on the giant tub of it his mother had brought back from France when he was little. He stood in the conservatory and looked at the tomatoes, wondered if he was fighting them again, their impossible thicket of fibrous green.

  He drank deeply, tasted the dregs, felt the malted powder against his teeth. His father had been sparing with the contents of the tub, afterwards, where his mother had always been generous to a fault. In the end, guessing that this was more to do with an unwillingness to let the physical evidence of his wife disappear than with an actual preference, the young Lester Ferris had taken to buying refills and heaping them in when his father was watching television – but even with the tub mysteriously getting fuller with each month that passed, his father made the bedtime drink weaker and weaker. When Lester had moved out, he’d taken the tub with him. Still had it somewhere, back home.

  He put the cup in the kitchen and went to his bed. There was a faint light on in the boy’s room, the glimmer of a laptop screen. He paused, knocked. Should he explain about Shola? About death by IOU? No. Not now. Later it would be a final debt to be settled, but you did not burden your soldiers with side issues before the fight. That was how they died.

  ‘Yes?’ the boy said.

  ‘Got a minute?’

  The boy ushered him in, pointed him to the chair and sat cross-legged on the bed. His face was curious.

  The Sergeant sighed. ‘I need something and I don’t know where to get it. I can’t ask anyone else.’ The boy nodded cautiously.

  You’re not going to like this. He looked for a way to say it which wasn’t bad, couldn’t find one. ‘I need to talk to Jack,’ he said.

  ‘Talk to Jack?’

  ‘To Bad Jack. Yes.’

  The boy considered this for a long while, his eyes shuttered and perhaps a little dismayed. ‘Talk to Jack? Why, talk to Jack?’

  There were so many ways to put it, to soft-pedal what he needed. But he wanted to tell the truth. Finally he said: ‘Superhero team-up issue.’

  And saw the boy’s eyes open very wide. ‘Tigerman and Jack.’

  ‘Tigerman. And Jack.’

  The boy had gone off to work mojo. It was some pretty serious mojo, he said, and would need time. The Sergeant should go and do Sergeant things. ‘Go Wayne,’ the boy had said.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Wayne! Bruce Wayne. Be ordinary.’

  Ordinary people did not have days like this. The Sergeant slept a little, then woke and went to see Inoue, because he didn’t want to feel that he hadn’t when he put on the mask. It wasn’t good to have outstanding business.

  Inoue greeted him with a strained smile. ‘Did Kershaw ask you to come out?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Just doing my rounds.’ I came for you.

  She smiled bleakly. ‘There have been significant developments in my work.’

  ‘Significant.’

  ‘In two ways. The next eruption will come very soon. Three days, perhaps less. Kershaw is aware. They will announce the evacuation later. But here, we are already packing. And I am most particularly to bring my things and not . . . talk about my views. At all.’

  ‘You’re in trouble?’

  ‘Mm. Maybe not yet. But I am to understand that I can be if I want to experiment.’

  ‘Then don’t,’ he said earnestly. ‘There’s enough trouble coming out of this already.’

  She sighed. ‘They will not give me a choice, I think. I am urgently required on a project back home. A very good one, apparently. There will be no time for me to oversee the departure here, I am to board a light aircraft later today. My luggage will follow. It has the form of a promotion, all very flattering.’ Her tone made it clear she was not flattered.

  He stood in front of her and felt cheated. He had somehow assumed there would be time. Where that time was going to come from he had, in retrospect, no idea. There was never time. He stared at her helplessly.

  ‘Come,’ she said abruptly. ‘You must see the forecast data. It will help you understand.’

  ‘I probably won’t understand it, to be honest.’

  She snorted. ‘Don’t be absurd. I will explain.’

  She led him into the small, oblong room which was her private space. ‘Ichiro!’ she shouted into the hall. ‘I need the big chart in two minutes.’ The Sergeant heard an answering shout, and she shut the door. ‘Sit.’

  He sat.

  Inoue unrolled a piece of paper from a cardboard tube and weighted it down in front of him with a stapler and a pot of pens. Then she turned. ‘This is the pressure chart for the upper chamber,’ she said. ‘In the normal run of things I would now explain each spike and trough, and you would nod as if that meant anything outside of this building.’ She drew a breath. ‘But it is not a normal day and there is something I wish to make clear. I decline to go back home without doing so.’

  She took a quick step towards him and leaned in, held his head between her hands and pressed her mouth fiercely against his. Her lips were narrow and strong. Her tongue flirted, teased. She opened her mouth in a frankly wanton invitation and growled happily when he accepted it.

  And then she stepped back and it was as if the whole thing had been a dream. The door opened and Ichiro the genius came in, passed another tube to his chief and – with a rather approving expression – wandered out again.

  ‘The eruption is coming,’ Inoue said seriously. ‘A big one.’

  I should bloody think it is.

/>   But he nodded. ‘I understand.’

  She fixed him with a stern look. ‘“I understand, Kaiko. And I have always wanted to visit Japan. Perhaps, Kaiko, I might come and see you when I travel.”’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That.’

  ‘Good. You would be very welcome.’

  She loaded him with technical information and sent him away. They exchanged a formal handshake in parting, on the same gravel drive where poor Madame Duclos’s dog had landed on his car. All around, there was bustle and packing going on, and he drove back to Beauville feeling by turns elated and bewildered. How would he ever get to Japan? But on the other hand, why not? But what about the boy? And what if he was arrested? He couldn’t use chopsticks, that was a concern. He could learn, of course: it wasn’t like learning to play the violin. Japanese would be harder.

  He listened to this strange, unfamiliar yammer in his mind and asked himself how long it had been since he had been truly interested in a woman, in her thinking and her laughter rather than just her body. A long time. Perhaps never. Not that he wasn’t interested in her body. My God, he was interested. He couldn’t believe – he could, actually, readily believe it, but he was appalled at himself – that he had not explored her even a little in that frozen instant. He hadn’t wanted to grab. He suspected now that she would have been quite amenable to some grabbing, might well have grabbed back. Ichiro had been an alarm clock for her, he thought, as much as for him.

  At Brighton House he found a message from the boy: The Grande, side door, 7 p.m. It will be open. I am not invited. If there is trouble, I am off the books and off the hook. Do not lick anyone, they put drugs on their skin to make clients fall asleep.

  PS I am serious.

  PPS Bad Jack is an end-of-level boss.

  The Sergeant knew what an end-of-level boss was. He was the age to have played the original Space Invaders machines, the ten-pence-per-game uprights which had stood in pub corners and kebab shops, stained with grease and beer.

  The end-of-level boss was the monster who came when you’d beaten all the easy ones and then all the hard ones: the kind no ordinary mortal could fight.

  Kershaw made the announcement at four. Beauville would be evacuated first, any outlying settlements thereafter. The boats would arrive in three days. Everyone would receive instructions and an evac number. Luggage was strictly limited. Livestock would remain on the island. The risk of infection was unacceptable.

  People shrugged. It was old news, and Kershaw’s authority seemed contingent now on the indulgence of the world, in a way it never had before. And the world was actually watching. There was no unrest. Instead, there was a curious anticipation, as if the people had done their part and now it was the island’s turn. There would be a Cloud before the evacuation was complete, and that was one thing, but even more than that: Mancreu had decided not to give up. In the street of the card-players there were fresh flowers in the pots. The sweeper was back, hobbling and directing a small army of younger women. The press pack photographed her endlessly until she chased them away. They, too, were waiting for something they could not describe, knew in their fingertips that it was coming.

  Three days was a long time. Anything might happen.

  The Grande had been Shola’s competition, at least up to a point. It was a not very grand sort of place at the other end of Beauville, close by the warehouse district and the road out along the coast. It was somewhere between a seafront bar and a brothel with a strong flavour of clip joint, but at the same time it was a real place which had regulars who drank and chatted. Dirac claimed, against all likelihood, that the wine was passable and the Thursday stew excellent.

  The Sergeant had parked the Land Rover a few streets away and carried the mask in his pocket. He was wearing a long dark coat over his armour. He felt a little excited and a little absurd. The recollection of Inoue’s kiss was still with him, lifting his mood.

  He looked both ways and put on the mask, gasped a little at the smell of fear and exertion which clung to it, and at the sense of homecoming which burgeoned as he dipped his face into the dark. Always before he had to some extent been forced by circumstance. Now he felt he was choosing this, and with the choice came pride.

  What they are saying about Tigerman, they are saying about me. They’re wrong about all of it, but still.

  I am Tigerman.

  He felt it put authority into his step the way his uniform did. He rolled his shoulders and breathed out, letting the mask growl.

  The side door was unlocked.

  He went down a sloping corridor into a back room. The walls were dark red, and there were faded poles for the dancers, chrome flaking off them onto the illuminated disco floor. At the far end were two booths, one of them empty. A small fat man with no expression on his face gestured politely to the empty table. Perhaps he received guests in rubber masks all the time.

  There was a single glass and an unopened bottle of water waiting on the table. The Sergeant doubted he was expected to drink it. It just told him where to sit.

  The allotted seat would mean putting his back to a broad, still figure in a pea jacket at the next booth. He didn’t particularly want to sit at all, tangle himself in a table. Bad tactics. But the scene was obvious: they would sit back to back, and they would talk.

  Jack is analogue.

  He sat down and waited.

  ‘Good evening.’ The voice was distorted, gargling. You could buy things in toyshops now to make you sound like whatever monster was dominating children’s television this year. Godzilla. Vader. Voldemort. But under the growl it sounded almost affable.

  ‘Bonsalum,’ the Sergeant replied. ‘I should call you Jack?’ The mask’s buzz made him smile. They sounded almost the same.

  ‘Jack will be fine. What can I do for you, Monsieur Tiger?’

  ‘I understand Shola worked for you.’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘He was working for you when he died.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Didn’t that offend you?’ They were working from the same script: I am a knight, you are a monster. But I am not interested in you today.

  ‘It was commercial,’ Jack said, with just the right amount of hesitation.

  ‘Still. He was yours. He was killed.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘I might do something about it.’

  ‘I would not object.’

  ‘I have another piece of business that needs settling first.’

  ‘I would be interested to hear about it.’

  Just a flicker of intensity. Jack was in the mood to buy what the Sergeant was selling. Gotcha, you cold bastard. ‘I need someone to vanish from Mancreu and end up somewhere else with a new identity. And I need to make the Fleet very unhappy for twenty minutes.’

  Jack wheezed, and after a moment the Sergeant realised he was laughing. ‘If anyone can do that,’ Jack said, ‘it is you.’

  They both laughed then. It sounded like nails in an iron pipe.

  They talked for ten more minutes, and then Jack said he would look into what was possible. The Sergeant got to his feet and went to the door. He looked back over his shoulder and realised that the pea jacket had been thrown over a mannequin. He went back and poked at it curiously. A narrow speaking tube emerged from the wall and lay in the dummy’s lap. He shrugged a Tigerman shrug, and turned on his heel. The coat billowed around his calves in ironic salute. It was almost fun.

  When he went outside, there was a storm on the horizon: a great band of looming rain and lightning, two hours out at most.

  20. Admission

  IT HAPPENED SOMETIMES, and he had relied on that. No one would have questioned his meteorological fraud because it was a known risk, a pattern in the weather having to do with the Somali Current and the temperatures in the Persian Gulf. A monsoon wind calved from a bigger storm would spin off from Socotra and rebound south and east, then meet the wind blowing off the Indian Ocean and suddenly something like a cyclone blew up almost out of nowhere
.

  It happened. That was a given, indisputable. And it was happening now. He hoped Inoue was safely away, that she wasn’t flying into that. He saw her in his mind, drowning in the aisle of a tiny plane sucked down into the deep black water. Her fear. Her regret.

  He shook his head inside the mask, growled and heard it echo down the empty street.

  The Fleet would be preparing to move. Beneseffe would be scurrying to provide the ships with estimates and safe distances, dispositions and instructions. Exactly as planned. Except that everything was planned for tomorrow, and the thunderheads would not wait. What he had thought to fake was real, and jogging at his elbow, and he must keep up or be swept aside. Every plan was overtaken by events. Some few were overtaken before they had begun. He had chosen a plausible scenario to hide under, and here that scenario had come true. So. That was the world, and he was in it.

  He snatched the mask from his face and ran for the Land Rover, heard the tyres screech as he hit the accelerator, and let himself reconsider the plan as he hurled the car up the hill.

  There had been no time to seed paranoia in the Fleet captains. He weighed the pros and cons of a call to Kershaw quietly suggesting some outrageous betrayal, asking that Kershaw keep it under his hat until the Sergeant could confirm. The Chinese are coming to take North Africa for its oil. That would do. It was insane but not absurd. China was hungry for resources, had been buying rare earths and shale gas reserves everywhere. The American hawks would believe it. India and Pakistan had nightmares about Chinese expansion. The Chinese would know it wasn’t true but would worry about where it was coming from. The Europeans would try to cool things down, but individually each nation would be trying to gain advantage.

  And telling Kershaw was like whispering in the ear of the Fleet, talking too loudly at the next table. Although it might conceivably start a war somewhere, which would be a crime on a level for which the Sergeant did not have a word.

  The road was slick. He had to pull back from the urge to accelerate. Brighton House was seven minutes away, but it would be much longer if he went off the road. More haste, less speed. In his rear-view mirror, Beauville lay quiet against the sea and the hills. The warning howled in him, the bone-deep certainty: something is bad. Something is not as it should be.