Tigerman (43 page)

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 held 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.

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.