Real Tigers (12 page)

“Maybe we can check that out,” he said. “But not anytime soon. You're going to be busy for a while yet.”

“Standish,” said River. “They have Catherine Standish.”

“Yeah, well. It's not like we were doing anything with her. And you're going to have one hell of a job persuading anyone she's worth the PM's vetting file.” Duffy ran his left index finger over the knuckles of his right hand. “Now get to your feet, and let's try again.”

Queasily, River managed to stand.

Duffy said, “Who were you planning on selling it to?”

River said, “They have Catherine Standish. Check my phone, you moron.”

This time, Duffy hit him in the stomach.

•••

“Sorry about
this,” the soldier began.

He didn't look sorry.

“But we're out of milk.”

He put the mug of tea he was carrying on the bedside table.

“Room service?” Catherine said.

“Well, we can hardly let you wander down to the kitchen at will. Security issues.”

“This is the weirdest kidnapping I've ever heard of,” she told him. “Not that I'm an expert. But seriously? Is this your first time?”

The soldier pursed a lip, as if giving it thought. “We've taken prisoners before. But the circumstances were different.”

“You're not going to kill me, then.”

“We're not animals.”

“Can I have that in writing?” She'd hoped for a chuckle, and when she didn't get one asked, “Where's Donovan?”

“Downstairs.”

No he wasn't. He'd left earlier, in the van. But it didn't hurt to pretend to believe him.

She said, “I could do with a change of clothing.”

“I said we weren't animals. I didn't say we were Marks and Spencer's.”

He turned to leave, and Catherine reached for a hook to hold him. She found it just as he was closing the door.

“Does he talk about her much?”

“. . . About who?”

“The girl who died.”

He paused. Then said, “She wasn't a
girl
. She was a captain in the armed forces.”

“My apologies. But she's still dead, right? Does he talk about her at all? I'm sure I would.”

Catherine could hear her own voice rising as she spoke—she rarely lost control of her tone, but she was desperate for him to stay, say more, cast light on why she was here, and what was happening elsewhere.

“If I'd been drunk-driving the car that killed her, I mean,” she finished.

He shook his head, sadly it seemed to her, and left the room, padlocking the door behind him.

After a while, Catherine reached for the tea.

Nick Duffy
splashed water onto his face, then gazed hard into the bathroom mirror, finding nothing out of the ordinary there. A morning's work. They weren't all like this—well, they couldn't be. It wasn't a police state.

After he'd dried himself on a paper towel, he checked on Cartwright through the two-way. He'd have expected the kid—not entirely a kid, but Duffy felt entitled—to have parked himself on the chair, which Duffy had left for that specific purpose, to make taking it away from him the next gambit. Cartwright, though, had remained upright. He was leaning against the wall, and if he didn't look happy—looked pale as a fish with stomach pains—he hadn't, Duffy noted, positioned himself out of view of the mirror. In fact, he raised a middle finger towards it at that moment, as if he knew Duffy was watching.

Could have been a lucky guess.

He moved away and released the phone from its hook on the wall. A three-digit extension got him Diana Taverner.

“He's not changing his story.”

“Remind me what his story was.”

Duffy ran through it: the photograph of Standish, the brief instruction. The man on the bridge who'd worn a suit and had a toff's accent.

“Sounded like he got up Cartwright's nose.”

“You believe him then?” Taverner asked.

Duffy looked at his free hand. Nothing about it suggested he'd done anything rougher that morning than carrying a hot coffee.

“I think he'd have changed his story if it wasn't true,” he said.

He was used to Lady Di's silences, which generally meant she was assimilating information, dividing it into pros and cons. This one, though, felt different, as if she already had a handle on what was going on.

In the room next door, Cartwright made the middle-finger gesture again. He was on a loop, Duffy decided. A cycle of defiance, because despite all that had happened to him in the past twenty minutes, he hadn't yet grasped the nature or the depth of the shit into which he'd stepped.

Taverner said, “Have you sent anyone looking for this man? The one on the bridge?”

“There was a man, in London, on a bridge, two hours ago,” Duffy said. “We could cordon the city off, I suppose.”

“Talk to me like that again,” Taverner said, without altering her tone, “and you'd happily swap places with Cartwright. What about the woman—Standish?”

“The photo's on his phone. Like he said.”

“And it came from where?”

“Her phone.”

“Of course it did . . . Any trace?”

“Not that I've heard.”

“How badly have you hurt him?”

“Hardly at all.”

“By your standards, or anyone's?”

“He might be a slow horse, but he's not a civilian. He'll live.”

“Just as well. Lamb can get . . . tetchy when his crew get damaged.”

“I thought he despised his crew.”

“That doesn't mean he likes other people messing with them. Okay, let Cartwright sweat for the moment. We'll get word from on high sooner or later.”

“On high?”

“Oh yes. Dame Ingrid's been summoned to the Home Office And you know how jolly that makes her.”

Cartwright was doing the thing with the finger again. He couldn't know Duffy was there, obviously, but it was still starting to get on his wick.

He said, “Look. That crack about cordoning off the city. I—”

“You'd just finished putting the leather to someone. It made you feel cocky. Made you feel invulnerable.”

“I guess . . . ”

“Trust me. You're not.”

Taverner hung up.

Duffy replaced the receiver and stood by the two-way a while longer. Every so often, River Cartwright repeated the finger gesture, but to Duffy's eye, it looked a little less convincing each time. What was it they used knackered horses for again?—oh yeah: dog food and glue. Give it a while, he'd pop next door and remind Cartwright of that. Meanwhile, he deserved a cup of coffee.

He left the room quietly so the kid wouldn't hear. The thought of him standing there, repeatedly offering the finger to an empty room, wasn't quite enough to wipe away the memory of Lady Di's parting shot, but it didn't hurt.

T
here were many thorns
in Ingrid Tearney's garden—the constant need for vigilance; the ever-present threat of terrorism; Diana Taverner—and here was another: a summons from the Home Secretary. Until recently, such phone calls had been a minor nuisance, requiring her to attend the minister's office and deliver platitudes while maintaining eye contact, as if soothing a worried puppy. But Peter Judd didn't look to her for reassurance, he sized her up for weaknesses. In company he claimed they got on like a house on fire, but it was clear which of them provided the petrol.

It was Dame Ingrid's habit to catch the tube into work, but she used her official ride for everything else. It took her now through streets that were wilting in the heat. When the freak weather had started it had splashed the capital in colour, but as hot days turned into baking weeks, brightness had faded like old paint. Greenery died, turning parks brown and lifeless. People scurried now from shadow to shadow, wearing the caved-in expressions of trauma survivors, and greeted rumours of rain like news of a lottery win. That the weather was
not normal
was a staple of internet traffic. The streets, meanwhile, were cruel reflections of an unforgiving sky, where everything dazzled and everything hurt.

But inside the car frosted air circulated, and to all outward appearance Ingrid Tearney was unruffled by heatwave or grim thoughts. Her summer outfit was new, the fruit of a recent upturn in her finances, and her mannish features were relaxed into a benevolent-seeming mask. She looked like the friendly grandmother, the one who offers oranges, but behind that mask steam valves hissed. Judd's telephone summons had come from the man himself instead of the usual lackey, but he'd given no clue as to what it was about. His tone, though, had reeked of triumph. Whatever game he was about to play, he'd been dealt a useful hand.

Still, let the chips fall. Dame Ingrid didn't negotiate with politicians.

Unless they had her by the throat.

At the minister's residence, the front door was opened by a pretty young man with the faintest hint of a lisp. Nobody doubted Judd's heterosexuality, which was as enthusiastic as it was indiscriminate, but his entourage tended towards the fey—Judd hadn't dubbed them his camp followers for nothing. It was always possible the quip had occurred to him first, and he'd chosen his retinue accordingly.

“Dame Ingrid,” he said now, as she entered his office.

“Home Secretary.”

“I've taken the liberty.”

Which sounded like a bullet-point summary of his Home Office tenure to date, but was in fact a reference to the tea tray on a nearby table.

Following his guide, she sat in an armchair. The room, she noted, remained much as it had done during his predecessor's ministry, which is to say that not only was it still walnut-panelled, book-lined and Turkish-rugged, but that Judd hadn't even bothered to have the art changed: some drab
nature morts
, a few sea battles, and a large and politically obsolete globe. Given Judd's tendency to leave his stamp on things, Tearney took this as a clue that he didn't expect to remain here long. Which had been true of his predecessor too, but for a diametrically opposite reason.

“Milk? Sugar?”

She shook her head.

Peter Judd poured, placed cup and saucer on a table by her elbow, and lowered himself into the chair opposite.

He was a bulky man, not fat, but large, and though he had turned fifty the previous year, retained the schoolboy looks and fluffy-haired manner that had endeared him to the British public and made him a staple on the less-challenging end of the TV spectrum: interviews conducted on sofas, by scripted comedians. Through persistence, connections and family wealth, he'd established a brand—“a loose cannon with a floppy fringe and a bicycle”—that set him head and shoulders above the rest of his party, and if the occasional colleague had attempted to lop that head off those shoulders in the interests of political unity, they'd yet to find the axe to do the job. Tearney's own file on him was long on speculation, short on facts. So clean of cobwebs, in fact, that she was sure he'd airbrushed his past of serious sins as carefully as he arranged his haystack of hair.

He was eyeing her now in a manner that suggested he was about to enjoy what followed.

“So, minister,” she said, never keen on being made to sign her own punishment slips. “What seems to be your problem today?”

“Oh, I have no problems. Only a bagful of solutions awaiting opportunities.”

She pretended not to sigh, or at least, pretended she didn't want him to notice her trying not to. “So this is social? It's always a pleasure, Minister, but I am somewhat busy.”

“So I gather. Bit of a rumpus over your way this morning, what?”

“Rumpus” was a favourite PJ-word; one he'd employed to describe a recent tabloid splash about his friendship with a lap dancer. It was also a term he'd used in reference to both 9/11 and the global recession.

“What sort of, ah, rumpus would this be?”

“An incursion.”

He meant the Cartwright business, she realised. Which was unimportant and without consequence, which meant there was something to it she wasn't yet aware of.

“I'd hardly call it an incursion,” she said. “An off-site agent lost his bearings. The Park can be disorienting.”

“So I recall.”

“Besides, the incident was done and dusted inside twenty minutes. When I left, the young man was being, ah, chided by our head of security.” She sipped again at her tea. “Are you sure such matters are worth your attention? I'd have thought there were weightier issues on your desk.”

Though the question of how he'd become aware of Cartwright's frolic almost before she had was a matter Dame Ingrid definitely didn't consider minor.

“I deem few things beneath my attention,” he said, adopting the plummier tones ex–public schoolboys use when bringing words like “deem” into play. “And certainly not those issues which call into question the integrity of our national Security Service.”

“‘Integrity,'” she said. “Really?”

He leaned back in his chair. “More tea?”

“I'm fine.”

“Sure? You don't mind if—?”

She shook her head.

He refreshed his cup, and stirred the contents slowly, not taking his eyes off her.

“Minister, precisely what is this about?”

“Well, it's quite simple, Dame Ingrid. Tell me, are you familiar with the term ‘tiger team'?”

Dame Ingrid lowered her teacup.

“Oh dear,” she said.

The taxi
left Monteith outside the multistorey car park. It was a drab, soulless building, precisely because of its function: if an architect ever designed a car park the sight of which lifted the heart, civilisation's job would be done. Monteith made a mental note to drop this aperçu into conversation next time he was with Peter Judd, and walked down the slope into the structure. Even with heat rising from the pavement, the lower storey carried a grave scent of damp earth and mildew. He stepped around an oil patch on the scabbed concrete, and pulled open the heavy door into the stairwell.

A different splash of odours, urine among them. Civilisation's job was one long uphill battle round here.

He took the stairs two at a time. Into his fifties, he remained proud of his physical condition: barely smoked, and then only good Cuban; never drank port or liqueurs; red wine just three evenings a week (white the rest). If this didn't precisely add up to a fitness regime, it gave him a head start. Besides, he was a leader, not a foot soldier. When River Cartwright had taken him by the lapels earlier, he'd felt no physical fear precisely because of that difference between them. Cartwright was a pawn, and didn't know it. Monteith's place was among the kings, and today's work would serve to consolidate that.

Pawns don't take kings. Basic rule of nature.

Donovan was waiting on the top storey, by the van. Another case in point, Monteith thought. Sean Donovan could have been wearing Monteith's shoes now, near as damn it, if he'd understood the game. But that was the problem with coming up through the ranks—there was a reason the phrase was officer
class
. It came with breeding, wasn't something they could drill into you.

None of that showed in his voice when he called out, “Donovan!”

Donovan didn't respond.

Another oil patch to skip around. The light was better up here; the sides open to the city, technically allowing for airflow. But the midday heat shunted around as if in blocks. Every time you encountered it, it was like walking into a wall.

He resisted the temptation to run a finger around his collar. Appearances: you kept tight hold of them.

“Donovan,” he said again when he was no more than a yard away. “Everything in order?”

“So far.”

When he'd pictured this moment, Sly Monteith realised, he'd imagined it as one of high-fiving celebration—a plan brought to fruition; the pair of them delighted with each other and themselves. But Sean Donovan seemed, if anything, even less inclined than usual to unbend.

It didn't matter. Monteith didn't need Donovan's approbation. The real celebrations would come later.

Because say what you like about Peter Judd, he knew how to mark a job well done.

“A tiger
team,” Ingrid Tearney said.

“A tiger team.”

“I know perfectly well what a tiger team is,” she told him.

That feeling she was getting now was of Judd's fingers round her throat.

Tiger teams were hired guns, essentially. Hired not to wipe out your enemies but to test the strength of your own defences. You set a tiger team to launch a simulated attack: recruited hackers to stress-test security systems, assigned a wet-squad to put a bodyguard team through its paces, and so on. Earlier that year, she had herself overseen a Service-propelled assault on one of the city's major utility providers, to verify concerns that the capital's infrastructure was dangerously vulnerable to attack. The results were mixed. It was, it turned out, surprisingly easy to cripple a large energy provider, but in the wake of recent price hikes, people seemed mostly in favour of doing so. Besides, the populace at large evidently regarded a global wine shortage as a more serious threat to its well-being than terrorism. In rather the same way, Dame Ingrid was now realising, that the greatest threat to the Service—and her own role within it—seemed to be emanating from the Home Secretary rather than its more traditional enemies: terrorists, rival security agencies, the
Guardian
.

“And this was your doing,” she said.

He nodded, pleased with himself. This was not in itself an unusual sight—being pleased with himself was Peter Judd's factory setting—but at this close distance, it made Tearney want to throw the teapot at him.

“Can I ask why?”

“Why are these things ever done? I wanted to reassure myself that the Service's protocols are in tip-top order. Not much point in relying on a security provider which can't secure itself, is there?”

“Then you'll have been relieved at the result,” she said. “No harm done.”

He wagged a finger at her. With most people this would have been a metaphor, but the Home Secretary's tendency towards pantomime ensured that an actual finger was involved. “One of your agents was taken off the street. Another was induced to attempt a data theft from your very own precincts.”

“And failed.”

“But shouldn't have got even that far. There are procedures, Dame Ingrid. The moment he was approached, your boy should have escalated the matter upwards. He didn't. That's a severe lapse by anyone's standards. And by the standards I expect to appertain while I am minister in charge, it's a shortcoming that requires action.”

After several years of dealing with a minister who could be reduced to jelly by the very thought of taking action, it was salutary to be reminded that not all politicians covered arse first and made decisions afterwards. It was galling that it had to happen on her watch, though.

“This . . . tiger team,” she said. “Who, precisely, are we talking about?”

“Chap called Sylvester Monteith.” Judd had the air of one explaining that he'd had a little man from the village round to prune his hedge. “He runs an outfit called Black Arrow. Ridiculous, really. Still, goes with the territory, I suppose.”

“Black Arrow.”

“No reason it should have crossed your radar. Mostly corporate security, to date. You know the kind of thing, give the company firewalls a rattle, see what's loose. All on home turf, mind. No foreign adventures.” Judd placed his cup and saucer on his left knee, which he'd crossed over his right. “Gave the Afghan shenanigans a wide berth, sensibly, if you want my opinion. Plenty of money in that line, of course, but the premiums are crippling.”

“How very distressing for all involved,” Tearney said. “And you're telling me you hired this man?”

“Damn reasonable rate, too. Are you sure I can't tempt you to more tea?”

“Yes. And I suppose this Sylvester Monteith is an old crony of yours.”

“He prefers Sly.”

“Which answers my question.”

“We both know how Westminster works, Ingrid. It's not called a village for nothing. Obviously we've crossed paths in the past.”

“Like I said. A crony.”

“That's not a useful term in my book. No successful business, no thriving corporation, can afford to ignore networking. It's how things get done.”

“Eton?”

“I'm not going to play this game.”

“Twenty seconds after leaving this office, I'll know his inside leg measurement.”

“Well then. Yes. As it happens.”

“Oxford?”

“No, actually.” He picked up his cup once more. “Well, yes, but St. Anne's for Christ's sake.”