Tigerman (31 page)

The Sergeant tutted, apologising in advance. ‘The bay,’ he said. ‘Maybe the Fleet. Couldn’t see. Jed, one more thing: I’ve heard rumours of Fleet people coming shoreside for fun. I wouldn’t have bothered you with it until this.’

Kershaw stared at him for fully a count of ten, then nodded and shut his eyes. His lips moved. For a moment, the Sergeant thought he was praying, then realised he was rehearsing possibilities, seeing politics in his head. It got quiet in the room as the word spread.
The Fleet
. Because if partying on the shore was a technical transgression, blowing up the shore was something else again.

‘Colonel Arno,’ Kershaw said at last. ‘Consider your investigation expanded to include this matter.’ Arno was still sitting, dark eyes taking in the whole scene. The Sergeant wondered how much he had learned just watching all this, and thought: quite a lot. The Italian inclined his head in acknowledgement. ‘Work with Lester, please,’ Kershaw added.

Shoulder to shoulder with the man he most wanted to avoid, the X-ray Italian and all his myrmidons.
Oh, thank you, Jed.
On the other hand, he’d wanted to insert himself into the investigation, hadn’t he? And now here he was.

He traced Kershaw’s logic in his head. If Shola’s killers were in turn killed, then whoever killed them was involved in whatever Shola was involved in, and that too-loud action, contemptuous of the norms and whatever laws or conventions remained in place, implied urgency or alarm. Two things had changed on Mancreu in the last twenty-four hours to provoke the response: Inoue’s report and the footage of Tigerman at the cave. Of the two, the news story about drug smugglers and superheroes seemed the more likely to provoke fear in some red-lit covert battlebridge, which meant Arno and the Sergeant were investigating the same case from opposite ends.

‘Lester, I’m formally requesting the assistance of the United Kingdom’s representative, whose expertise and familiarity with local investigations may be of use to NatProMan at this time.’

The Sergeant’s instinct was to say ‘of course’ but this would constitute concluding a foreign alliance, even if only a temporary one, so he said, ‘I’ll talk to London right away,’ and tried to make his personal agreement clear by waggling his eyebrows. At the same time, he continued analysing the moment, because he couldn’t afford to let them get far enough ahead of him that he made a mistake. He was vulnerable because he had more information than they did about Tigerman and the cave. There was another strand of connection joining Pechorin and the heroin with Shola: the photograph, probably for target identification, that he had found last night. But what sort of target? Had Shola been a middleman, a smuggler, or victim as example? The connection was solid, anyway, one way or another. And there was one more possible contributing factor to the missile attack: the Sergeant had himself made it seem that the prisoners were talking about Jack. The marine had overheard that part of the discussion, would have reported it, which meant it was in the military system. He’d told Dirac the same lie, and anyone from Kershaw’s staff might have known about it, and relayed that to a contact in the Fleet.

The Sergeant felt a breath of air at his back. ‘I’m going to the impact site,’ Colonel Arno said. ‘We can talk on the way.’

‘I suppose you’ll need to call in some experts?’ the Sergeant suggested.

Arno shook his head. ‘Not call in. By now they are already there. Something explodes while we are investigating, they will want to know what it is. You mind if I call you Lester?’ He pronounced it ‘Lay-stair’. ‘And you call me Arno. It’s better, between allies in different chains of command. Nobody is confused.’
And no doubt it makes everyone feel relaxed and careless.
He could see Inoue ahead of him, escorted by two marines and a mini-squad of co-opted administrators for whom she had found work. She nodded regally as he waved, and then they were in the street and he could smell burning brickdust and the aftermath of high explosive.

‘Do you have any ideas?’ the Sergeant asked. ‘About this?’

Arno shrugged. ‘I only just arrived,’ he said, ‘and I was supposed to investigate a guy in a costume blowing up opium.’

The Sergeant glanced sideways. ‘Dirac said you could see through walls.’

Arno barked a laugh. ‘I like that guy. I was sure there was something about him, but the more I looked, the more he was just this annoying Frenchman. You know him well?’ And yes, there was the laser vision:
if you are like Dirac, then maybe what you are tells me about him. And vice versa.

The Sergeant stuck to his question as they passed into the street. ‘You didn’t come here without a briefing. You know who the players are. You probably know better than I do because your job is to understand more about that lot.’ He waved out at the sea. ‘So what in God’s name could induce them to blow up a bloody building?’

Arno shrugged. ‘Secrets. Politics. Government shit, intelligence operations. If it’s that, we may not get anywhere. What I can do stops at the water. I could know exactly inside a week and then that’s it. Strongly worded note of protest to the embassy of whatever. But you assume too much already, you know?’

‘I do?’

‘Sure. Suppose I’m a drug smuggler, I take a small boat and a shoulder-launched missile, fire it at the shore and use it to set off a car bomb, maybe.’

‘I saw it. It wasn’t like that.’

‘And probably you’re right. But now you’re remembering and you’ve already decided what you saw. When you remember things you also change them, each time you remember more what you think happened. Most likely we get over there and there’s one centre to the explosion, the chemical trace is right for military ordnance that is too large to be launched that way. Then it’s the Fleet. And if it is, that means something but we don’t know what until we dig. Dig like investigate, not with shovels. But this is very loud for guys like that, very stupid.’

‘Mancreu can do that to you. It makes you crazy. The more you think it doesn’t the more it does.’

Arno clicked his tongue. ‘Yes. I can see that.’ It was all the Sergeant could do not to twitch.

They were getting close to the explosion. He could feel the heat of the fire. NatProMan vehicles were arriving, military firefighters. There was a helicopter in the air and the sound reassured him, which made him want to shake his head in wonderment. ‘All right,’ he said instead. ‘Turn it around. Never mind who. Why?’

Arno shrugged. ‘Two reasons I can think of –’

Two?

‘– either someone in the prison knew something and someone didn’t want them to tell, or no one in the prison knew anything and someone wants us to think that they did.’

The Sergeant turned that around a few times, and made a mental note not to try to think ahead of this man. Bluff him, yes, that might work. Hide from him. But not deceive him directly, not outfox him, any more than you followed a tribesman into his own canyons.
Lies are his hill country.

‘But you,’ Arno said, ‘you’re already investigating this Tiger Man?’ He hesitated a little bit over the name. Some insane part of the Sergeant was irritated by the separation of the title into two words.
For God’s sake, you lot, it’s not Tiger Man, that’s not how you say it. Like you don’t say Mars Bar as if the bar actually comes from Mars. It’s Tigerman. One word. And he’s gone. Mission accomplished and he’s not coming back
.

‘No,’ he replied. ‘I was holding the men who were killed. For the murder of a local, a café owner. I thought there was someone behind them.’
But you knew that. You must have read my file, too
.

‘Shola Girard. He was your friend.’

‘Yes. I mean, Shola knew everyone, but I liked him. We boxed together.’

‘You know the island, Lester.’ Lay-stair. ‘So: you have a theory?’

‘More than one,’ the Sergeant heard himself saying. They had reached Mountbatten Street, where the refrigeration plant had stood. There was just nothing there: a perfect piece of explosive surgery. The empty cannery next door was almost undamaged. The firefighters were sluicing it anyway, keeping the fire contained, but there wasn’t even much of that. Shola’s murderers were deleted. Gone.

Over on the other side of the notional cordon created by two support vehicles were three figures. One of them hailed Arno. The Italian waved them to come around to a side street. He looked at the Sergeant and made an inviting face. ‘Theories?’

The Sergeant shrugged.
Disengage. Step away slowly.
‘Just thoughts, really. Obvious ones, I suppose.’

‘That’s good. Start with what is apparent. And keep me honest.’

‘Well, what you said. But also, there was a burglary at the Xenobiology Institute. Months ago. Not much taken.’

‘You think it is related?’

‘Probably not.’
Not to Tigerman, for sure. Anything else – how would I know?
‘But Kaiko’s – Dr Inoue’s – report is the other thing that happened today.’
And now you’re going to wonder why I brought up something irrelevant and you’ll have to consider the possibility it’s because I didn’t want to talk about the thing we’re supposed to investigate until I had time to get my story straight.

But Arno seemed to approve. ‘Good. That is good. That is obvious but hard to see. All this,’ he gestured at the destruction, ‘this could be very distracting. If someone wished to focus our eyes on drugs and madmen and away from Inoue and . . . whatever.’

‘What would they hide behind something like this?’

‘Exactly, Lester.’ Somehow this time he got the pronunciation quite right. ‘I think I will enjoy our relationship very much.’ He slapped the Sergeant on the arm, and trotted off to meet his team as they reached the crossroads.

The Sergeant looked after him, and then up at the misty midnight sky. He wanted very much to be back at Kershaw’s banquet, eating pulled pork with Kaiko Inoue. But Inoue was somewhere else now, doing competent Inoue things, and there were things he had to do too, duties and cares to be discharged.

For a moment he did not move, caught in the conflicting flow of events and priorities. He stared up at the Beauville night, the misty blue coloured now with orange flame and artificial light, and then he felt himself turn and begin to move, and knew that the night was far from over and the day beyond it would be just as full.

He did what sergeants do, but it felt heavier somehow, and slower.

SINCE ROCKET ATTACKS
were an actual emergency, the Sergeant was back at Brighton House and sitting at the actual emergency desk when the call came in. He didn’t know what time it was because he’d been awake for long enough that the numbers on the clock didn’t make any sense. It was five, but he had no sense of what that actually meant. It could be breakfast, it could be dinner, it could be Wednesday. Being awake for long periods in a crisis was doable, he’d done it before for days. Being awake alone and in a crisis was harder: your mind stewed in adrenalin and fatigue and threw mad notions at you, random words and reveries, you lost touch with why you were awake, what you had to do. He knew intellectually that it must be morning, that he hadn’t been to sleep, but he’d been moving all that time, moving without thinking, first at the impact site with the rescue crews in the hope that someone might still be alive in the rubble, then after that with Arno’s team as they demanded of two shocked marines why they’d chosen exactly that moment to leave the building. ‘We were relieved,’ the marines kept saying. ‘We had orders.’ And Arno wanted to know from whom but it had become apparent that they really had no idea. Just from up the line. From someone, in the end, who had a NatProMan radio and knew what to say.

Kershaw was growling at him down the white phone, the local one which he used for any outgoing calls. He said something about being in someone else’s shoes and the Sergeant realised he needed to go and burn his boots, and the rest of his Tigerman outfit, before Arno tripped over them. That was next on his list. He had been helpful and available for what felt like sixty hours, and now he had to look out for his own position. He would put it all in a dustbin and set the whole lot on fire, then throw the armour plates into the sea. Why had he put the stele on the disposable part of the uniform? Never going to wear it again, of course, never really expected to get shot, and that was just the backplate, the front one would still do, though that didn’t matter because he would never need it. He was going round in circles. Sleep would be good. A necessity, actually.

He wondered where the boy was. He would call him next, this all made that acceptable. Call him and ask him to come and help. He needed company.

‘—fucking journalists now, too,’ Kershaw said, and then there was a soft, piercing purr. The Sergeant looked around, and then realised what it was and that he had been waiting for it.

‘I’m going to have to call you back, Jed,’ he said gently.

‘Like fuck you are, Lester!’

‘It’s the red phone.’ And with a certain satisfaction –
my government trumps your government
– he hung up.

‘This is the phone which must not ring,’ the Consul had told him. ‘It’s the phone you keep an eye on in the joyful expectation that you will never actually see it do anything. If it does, by the way, if it actually rings, my general advice would be to seek cover under something and refuse to come out until it’s over. I’m not joking. I see that you think I am, but I’m not. You being a military man and so on I realise that you won’t listen to anything so craven, but in the interest of our shared humanity, conniving old sod to real man: don’t answer the bloody phone. By the time it rings, the situation is fucked up beyond all retrieval, anyway.’

‘Has it ever rung?’

‘I was in Iraq for a while. The one there never bloody stopped. People forever picking it up. IED in Fallujah, phone rings. British contractor taken by insurgents in Basra, phone rings. Please advise. Well, what do you say? Should have had a better bloody plan in the first place. Should have done what we said we were doing in Afghanistan and left Iraq alone. Should have given our troops the right gear and sent half a million more of them. Should have admitted we were doing Empire at the behest of the Family Bush and built an Iron Frame the way we did for India. A proper infrastructure. A decade or so of that and people actually do think you might be all right. In the end. Conduct oneself with a bit of dignity and don’t let the local staff get murdered. Avoid the sexual torture of prisoners, that’s always a good one. Make good on promises regarding amnesties and suchlike. It’s slow. It’s not bloody nation-building, it’s generation-building, and it takes decades, not months. But they don’t want to hear that, they want a magic solution involving the having and eating of cakes, and any talk of a zero-sum game is heresy. So as I say: let the sodding thing wail like a banshee, have a snifter, and await results. But if you must, the answer protocol is that you give your name and shove your thumb on the plate there. Biometric, they say, and unbeatable. My wife read in the
Telegraph
that you can defeat the system with a bag of jelly sweets. However, be that as it may.’