Tigerman

18. Invisible

YESTERDAY, MANCREU HAD been a footnote. Today it was the world stage. If the press pack had been unprecedented before, now it threatened to sink the island with its weight. More journalists were arriving every hour. They had their own helicopters, their own boats. One of the big networks bought and reopened the Post House Hotel, bringing in generators and satellite dishes and even carpet, and Beauville looked suddenly as if it was enjoying a new heyday, its bars full and money flowing in.

There had been, indeed, cameras everywhere, small and mostly crappy but good enough for TV – good enough to give live news some real verisimilitude. And when you cut it together the way they had it was like a movie: Tigerman bursting from a burning building, smashing through a wall. He raised an army and faced down a gang. He chased a car on foot and near as dammit caught his prey. And then he vanished with the aid of his mysterious minions into the night, leaving his deeds unexplained and self-explanatory. Meat enough for a dozen stories and substories, for analyses and commentaries, and all of it allowed them to play that footage again, to show what one man – one hero – could do on a dark night in a town on the edge. And – despite all editorial efforts – the question was beginning to form in the unspoken and the tacit: how much did all this have to do with that cluster of dark ships glimpsed in the corner of the frame?

The boy reported – after the Sergeant had slept for a few hours, which was not nearly enough – that YouTube had actually gone down for ten minutes under the weight of traffic. The story was truly global, truly immense: not Obama, not Justin Bieber, not Psy and not Bin Laden had ever touched this, he said. Not Khaled Saeed and not Mohamed Bouazizi, either. If Pippa Middleton and Megan Fox had announced their intention to marry during a live theatrical production of 50 Shades of Grey starring Benedict Cumberbatch, and then taken off their clothes to reveal their bodies tattooed with the text of the eighth Harry Potter novel, they might just have approached this level of frenzy. But probably not, the boy said, because not everyone liked Benedict Cumberbatch. If you asked the boy, personally, he would say that Robert Downey Jr’s Sherlock Holmes possessed fractionally more win, although no one could replace Basil Rathbone because he was entirely the godhead.

‘The godhead,’ the boy repeated. And then: ‘I must go. Find out stuff. Do things. Mojo never sleeps.’ But perhaps the boy might, the Sergeant thought: the effervescent eyes were strained and red. Even this prodigious child was not endless.

As if in answer to this thought, the boy turned and very deliberately went into the guest room which was set aside for his occasional use and put his bag on the bed. ‘I will come back here,’ he said.

The Sergeant called Africa, but she was engaged elsewhere. The secretary promised he would have her ring back. It sounded very much as if he wouldn’t.

Kathy Hasp caught up with him in the main hall.

‘Fucker stole my motorbike,’ she said. ‘That is fucking cheeky, is what that is. But it’s also a great story, right?’

‘I suppose.’

‘So come on, Consul. What’s the word from on high?’

‘Oh, nothing. Carry on as usual. And it’s Brevet-Consul. I’m not a diplomat.’

She shrugged. You’re in the chair. ‘Well, okay, what do you think? You were pretty brave yourself, Lester. You were ready to have a real old siege here, face down the barbarians, hey?’

He realised she was interviewing him. ‘I’m afraid I can’t talk about it.’

‘But it was a pretty big deal. And what happened down there, that woman in the jeep, what was that about?’

‘I can’t talk about the kidnapping, either.’

She shrugged. ‘I suppose. But was it really a kidnapping if there’s no law?’

He growled. ‘Yes, it bloody was, and whoever did it should be in prison. That woman has a family.’ He shook his head. ‘Personal opinion, that is. Not official. All right?’

‘Personal opinion,’ she agreed, and wandered away again, humming. He stared after her for a moment, knowing he’d gone wrong and not knowing how, by what arcane rule of journalism she had won and he had put his foot in it.

Bugger.

The less seriously injured refugees drifted away to assist in the clean-up, and to see the sights. Tigerman’s Run had become an instant local pilgrimage. The more sorely hurt remained where they were, though the Witch was able to recruit some assistants to tend them and get some rest herself. White Raoul sat over her, watched her with his hand on her head, and she pressed against it as if plugging in. The scrivener eyed the Sergeant for a long moment, and then slowly nodded. The look on his face was not exactly approval. It was more that inevitability had arrived without as much pain as there could have been. You’re doing okay, Honest. But it’s still a terrible idea.

Except that the Sergeant wasn’t sure about that any more – and even if he had agreed, there was more work for him under the mask because Lester Ferris couldn’t retrieve Sandrine, and he had to try. He had made himself the sheriff in this town, and the bad men had come and done a bad thing right in front of him, and that was unacceptable. The more so, because Sandrine’s vanishing was convenient to himself, in his quest to make the boy his child, and he would always wonder if he did not go after her whether he had let her slip away last night so that he could steal her son. And the boy would wonder too, or might, and that would be appalling.

So he must have her back from them. From ‘them’. There was so much ‘them’ in all this, so many factions and shadows. Mancreu looked peaceful but was not. The quiet was war in deadlock all the time. A cold war, painted on a grain of rice.

Someone had taken the boy’s mother. Someone with resources, most particularly of information, and there were only so many someones of that description around here.

Who profits? The Who or the Why would tell me the Where.

Well, then: what was she that someone should take her away? A mother, a pretty woman, a civilian. She could not be political because she was barely human in her thinking. She was a poor and a dangerous hostage unless one proposed to threaten a child with his mother’s execution – again, to what profit? – and they had not released her in favour of someone else when they realised, as they must have, how public their action had become. Sandrine was important because she was Sandrine.

Because she was a victim of the Cloud? Was she special for that? A cure or a commodity? Or a guinea pig? And if the last: a subject to be healed, or a specimen to be dissected?

He considered very carefully how to ask the question, and then went to the comms room.

‘Kaiko, it’s Lester,’ the Sergeant said. ‘I have a professional query, so I am calling you on a secure line. Do you have an encrypt button?’ He did not say, ‘Sorry I haven’t been in touch.’ She would understand why not, and to imply otherwise would be rude.

‘Lester,’ she responded gravely, ‘this is a Japanese science station. I have more flavours of encryption here than you can possibly imagine. I have a button I can push to delete the entire conversation from your mind after we have had it.’ It took him a moment to realise she was joking, and then he found he wanted very much to ask what she would say if she knew he would forget.

He said: ‘Oh. Erm.’ Very slick. Brings all the girls to the yard, that does.

Inoue gave a low snigger. ‘Now you are wondering if I really have such a button. Perhaps I do and I use it on you all the time. Maybe we have had many, many extraordinary conversations you do not remember.’

‘But you’d remember them, right?’

‘In every detail, Lester. I have a very good memory.’

He had not really had time to regret the interruption of their rooftop dinner by a missile, but it had niggled at him between waking and sleeping, in rare moments of calm. Now he smiled. It seemed there might, after all, be other rooftops – though when and where? His smile faded.

She took pity on him. ‘Push your secure button, Lester. We will see if our wires are compatible.’

He did. He heard a click. Inoue spoke again, and for a moment she was some sort of duck or a coin falling down inside a metal pipe. Then: ‘Okay. Can you hear me?’

‘Yes.’

‘I can hear you. Go ahead and ask your question.’

‘What could you learn from a Discharge Cloud victim?’

‘What sort of victim? Like burns?’

He shook his head, realised she couldn’t see him. ‘No. Brain stuff. Language problems.’

‘But not a child from the Broca Cloud?’

‘No. An adult.’

‘Well, maybe a lot. If they were directly affected by the bacteria rather than just the Cloud, a great deal.’

He thought some more. ‘What would you need to do?’

‘Many examinations. MRI, for sure, lots of blood testing, EEG, maybe interviews.’

‘She can’t talk.’

Inoue stopped again. ‘This is not hypothetical. You have such a person.’ Her interest was sharp.

‘She’s gone now.’ He hoped she would not follow that thought. He hoped Arno wouldn’t happen to ask her about it.

‘How gone?’ Again the sharpness.

‘I don’t know exactly.’ He made a leap. ‘You said there was a tame team studying the Clouds. A political team. Would they want to see her?’

‘We all would. I know who this is. What she is. There was a rumour, but I could not find her. The woman who runs in the fields, dances in the waterfalls. They say she is always joyful, that everything is a mystery to her.’

Yes. Even her son. Even killing a man. He shook the thought away. ‘Would they, is there anything they could learn from,’ he didn’t want to say cutting her up, ‘her body?’

‘Of course,’ Inoue said immediately. Then, ‘Oh! You do not mean from a standard physical examination. You mean from vivisection and autopsy. Obduction.’

‘It is Mancreu,’ he said simply.

She made a non-committal noise, and he realised she did not wish to consider that a proper scientist, even a politically motivated one, would do such a thing. ‘No,’ she said finally. ‘Granting that it is a real possibility, which I must because the world is full of bad people and many of them are here: there is nothing to be gained, at least not for a long time, and much to lose. It would be wasteful and there would be no way to get another subject.’

Unless you were prepared to make more like her by hand, as it were, by exposing people to the Clouds at close range. But if you were prepared to do that, and if you could, there was no need to take Sandrine in the first place. Inoue’s instinct said no. ‘Do you know where the tame team is?’

‘Fleet,’ she said. ‘Of course.’

‘Of course,’ he echoed.

‘You are investigating this?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good,’ she said stoutly. ‘They are assholes. Go get ’em, Tiger.’

He felt the bottom drop out of his world, felt his knees turn to jelly and his feet to water, and realised before saying something totally insane that she had no idea, that she was just using a common idiom. ‘Thanks,’ he replied.

‘And after, come and have cookies. I may even make actual food.’

‘How’s your cooking?’

‘If I answer that, Lester, I have to use the forgetting button or you won’t come. Go now. I am a very important director scientist, and my minions get confused if I do not oversee their every action.’

‘Goodbye, Kaiko.’

‘Au revoir, Lester.’

He dialled again.

‘Jed, it’s me.’

‘Hi there, Lester.’

‘I’m sorry I shouted.’

‘So am I. Shall we hug?’

‘Fortunately, the telephone does not yet afford us that option.’

‘I’m going to come up there and hug you.’

‘I would very much prefer not.’

‘You stone-faced British jackass! I am calling the car and I’m going to come up there and hug you until you squeak like a giant puppy!’

‘This is a consulate, Jed, you can’t come in unless I give you permission.’

Laughter. Then: ‘It’s possible that I got a little pissy back there, under stress. I can completely see where you were coming from. But you see what I was worried about, too.’

‘I do.’ I think you were wrong, but I do. He wondered what unsaid words were hanging in the air on Kershaw’s end.

‘I hear,’ Kershaw cleared his throat, ‘I hear you pretty much picked up our slack. Took in the wounded, that stuff.’

‘It was Dirac’s idea.’

‘I heard that, too. But it was a good thing, Lester. I can see all the politics of it. You could have sent them away. That would have played, too, in the long run. No one would have blamed you.’

‘Jed, I have a question. Feel free to tell me to get lost.’

‘Shoot.’

‘Who took the girl?’

‘What girl?’

‘In all the world, Jed, there is only one girl today.’

Kershaw didn’t respond immediately. The Sergeant thought he was probably nodding glumly, or pressing the heel of one hand against the middle of his head to ease a headache. ‘I don’t know, Lester.’

‘Off the record, between you and me? Not even a whisper?’

‘Cross my heart. It’s a mystery. It’s like all of a sudden there are these ghosts in the system, these crazy fucking events which are part of someone else’s shit and they are playing out in our town. The Tiger Man, for Christ’s sake! I’m living in a comic book. It was bad when he just uncovered drugs and beat up soldiers, then it was fine because he went away, then suddenly he’s chasing cars full of secret agents through a riot and then he fucking Gandhis the whole thing and everyone goes home! NatProMan is basically a primal-screaming therapy group right now. The Dutch called me this morning to yell at me. The Dutch! Do you have any idea how bad it has to get before the Dutch are pissed?’

‘Arno must be doing his nut.’

‘If that means what I think it means then yes, he is. All of a sudden no one’s taking his calls. He says they’re all worried they’re part of it and they haven’t realised. They’re scared they’re being manipulated, and they’re even more scared he’s part of the con.’

‘He released Pechorin. I thought that was odd.’

‘It was odder than fuck, Lester, and we had words about it, but he made funny faces at me which I assume were supposed to mean that Pechorin is either some kind of secret squirrel from Interpol or the King of Jackassistan’s one begotten son.’

‘He hardly seems the type.’ Please, oh, please let me not have beaten seven bells out of a policeman undercover.

‘I know, all right? It’s post-Sov stuff,’ Kershaw grumbled. ‘There’s a real fine line between government and crooks over there at the best of times, and you did not hear me say that because I greatly respect my colleagues from Kiev and their massive integrity, even if they do occasionally poison the shit out of one another as part of the natural flow of democratic give and take. If there is anyone in the world more fucked in the head than you Brits, which I doubt, it’s those assholes. They would totally send a guy like that out into the real world. Although the other thing is, maybe Arno just didn’t want someone to blow up the hospital. And I would be totally fine with that logic right now.’

That was something the Sergeant had not even considered. Pechorin might be a target. He knew things, for sure, that the Sergeant wanted to know. I should have kept hold of him. But if he was disposed to tell me he would have, and if he wasn’t I’d be abducting an officer of NatProMan for a hostile interrogation, and London would not be standing foursquare behind me on that decision. Above my paygrade, outside my need to know.

He was really tired now. How long had it been since he’d slept through the night without fresh bruises? Since he’d just had a cup of tea and a slice of cake?

Kershaw’s tone changed, warmed. ‘You did good these nights, Lester. Really good. I’m writing a report. You know what Dirac did after he came to you?’

‘Sat around and drank booze, I think.’

‘Jesus, that guy. He’s like a rescue dog in reverse. Okay, I’ll put “probably stinko”.’

‘All right, Jed. I’ve got to go. Tell Arno I’m still around to consult if he’s got time. And thank him for me.’

‘Thank him?’

‘He did me a favour. Personal thing, but it meant a lot.’

‘I will. Oh, Lester?’

‘Yes?’

‘Is it possible that you are schtupping Kaiko Inoue?’

‘You mean Doctor Inoue?’

‘Oh, fine, be like that.’

The red phone rang just as he was getting up. He lifted it and the secretary said ‘Hold for Africa’ in a voice which suggested ‘Into Thy hands, O Lord’.

The Sergeant said, ‘Okay.’

Africa said: ‘Ferris.’

‘Here.’

‘Why have you pissed in my mead bowl?’

He had never heard this expression. ‘What?’

‘My mead bowl. My sweet ambrosia, if you prefer. My wine glass. It doesn’t really matter, Lester: what I want to know is why you have got up on the table, dropped your trousers, and pissed in it in front of my fucking face?’ He found it hard to understand that she had sworn at him. She was not that person. She must know those words, but that she might use them in anger had never occurred to him.

But there was no question that she had. Fury bubbled in her as she went on. ‘If that doesn’t clarify matters, let me rephrase the question: did I tell you not to talk to reporters?’

Oh.

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘And did you happen, in spite of this, to give an interview to an eel-faced little bitch called Hasp? About, I would imagine, twenty minutes ago? So it can’t have slipped your mind.’

‘I didn’t know she was interviewing me. And I said it was a personal opinion.’

‘You don’t have personal opinions, Lester! You’re standing in the house, wearing the bloody hat! You are Britain! Do you understand? You are your country, you are your uniform, and you are me!’

From nowhere, it rose in him, unexpected. ‘I thought you were Africa.’ He heard her hiss, hurried on. ‘I mentioned one issue which is not a major part of the picture here in response to a query I took to be off the record.’

‘She is a journalist, Sergeant Ferris. Nothing is off the record if she is within earshot. The interview is happening if she is in the room. The camera is always rolling. The microphone is always live. So now your interview is up. The audio is on the Internet. Your little informal chat is playing, on a loop, on her nasty little news channel. You have added to the burden of what was already shaping up to be a shitty day and I am unhappy with you. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘And with reference to this specific issue?’

‘Ma’am.’

‘It is a non-topic. You have no opinion on it, personal or otherwise. Like everything else on Mancreu, it is invisible. All things there are invisible but some things are more invisible than others. Like this. Is that clear?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Because if it’s not clear, Lester, then get a sewing kit and just stitch your fucking mouth closed for the duration. You can eat through a straw. All right?’

She hung up before he could say ‘Ma’am.’

More invisible than others.

He sat with the phone in his hands, and knew that he had reached the end of reasonable hesitation. There were two more things which might be permitted to him by integrity before he had to act, or not act, and bear the consequences of the choice. The first thing he might do was go to the headland and look out at the Bay of the Cupped Hands, really look, and see what it was he had ignored since his booted foot first touched the grimy dockside of Port de Beauville, since the Consul had met him and taken his hand.

‘It’s a good place,’ the man had said. ‘No, no, keep looking at me and pretend we’re exchanging information of towering importance. That’s it. Yes, as I say: you’ll like it here. But don’t get involved. The sheer appalling fuckup of it will eat you alive. Just sit on the veranda and finish the booze. I’ve laid in extra. That fellow Kershaw’s all right – you’ll meet him later. Looks like a rodent, but he knows what food should taste like. Don’t in the name of God let him talk to you about the war.’

‘Which one?’

‘Any of them, but most particularly the one with the Nazis. He has that extraordinary idea that the Americans saved us out of the kindness of their hearts rather than us digging in for two long years while they tried to pretend they weren’t involved. Oh, no, don’t look at the ships out there, the locals consider it rude, just keep your eyes on me. That’s right.’

And he, bewildered and barely out of bed, had taken that at face value and never questioned it, had shaped his world around it because it was Mancreu’s underpinning, like the dog beneath the flea. Don’t look at the ships.

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.