Real Tigers (9 page)

Sean Donovan answered on the first ring. It sounded like he was driving.

“You're on your way?”

“Yes,” said Donovan.

Monteith paused to admire a passing jogger: her hair damp, her T-shirt tight, her head bobbing in rhythm to whatever was pulsing through her earphones.

“How's our guest?”

“How do you think? She's unharmed, a little nervous and very pissed off.”

“Well, she won't have to endure it much longer,” Monteith said. “Not that there's any harm in giving her a little scare in the meantime.”

Donovan was silent for a moment, then said, “That's what you want?”

“It is.” The jogger had gone, but the feeling she'd provoked still lingered: a wish to hear a woman squeal. The fact that Monteith wouldn't hear it mattered less than that he'd have caused it.

He said, “What's your ETA?”

“Thirty.”

“Don't be late,” Monteith said, and ended the call.

Collecting his empty cup, he dropped it into a bin, and paused to look once more at the tiles affixed to the shelter's walls; their fragments of story, each highlighting an ending, because there was nothing to the beginnings and middles that anyone would want to hear about. He shook his head. Then he left the little park and hailed a taxi.

River walked
back up the stairs. Behind him, the woman at the security desk called out.

He turned. “I forgot, I need Ms. Taverner's signature.” He mimed a scribble in the air. “I'll be one minute.”

“Come back down. I'll page her again.”

“She's just there.” He pointed towards the next landing, then waggled his laminated
v
isitor
badge. “One minute.” He reached the landing, and was out of sight of the desk.

Thirty minutes.

Maybe a little more, maybe a little less.

Truth to tell, Catherine Standish was no longer at the front of his mind. The op was the op. This was enemy territory, and the fact that it was also headquarters simply gave it an extra edge.

He pushed through a pair of swing doors. River was coasting on memory, an imperfect blueprint in his head, but there ought to be lifts here. Unclipping the laminate from his shirt, he stuffed it into a pocket, and yes, here they were, in a thankfully unpeopled lobby. What he'd have done had Lady Di been waiting was a question for another life.

Pressing the button, he fished his mobile out. Regent's Park's front desk was still in his contact list: unused for years, but still stored because . . .

Because you always hung onto the numbers, in case your old life was given back.

It was answered on the second ring.

“Security.”

“Possible threat,” he said, pitching his voice low.

“Who is this?”

“There's a couple in a car out front, twenty yards down the road. Making like a lovers' quarrel, but the male is armed. I repeat, the male is armed. Suggest immediate response.”

“Could I have your—”

“Immediate response,” River repeated, and ended the call.

That might keep everyone occupied for a little while.

The lift arrived and he stepped into it.

Sean Donovan
was entering London from the west. The van's air-con was unreliable, so until Monteith's call he'd been driving with the windows open, the twin blasts nearly cooling the interior. But now he closed them to ring Traynor, who answered in his usual way:

“Here.”

He didn't ask Traynor if everything was okay. Benjamin Traynor had served with him in hot places; crouched with him behind walls being pounded to dust above their heads. If Traynor couldn't handle one middle-aged woman in an attic, they should both reconsider their futures. Especially the next twenty-four hours.

He said, “I'm in the city. Everything's on schedule.”

“I'll pull out soon. Spoken to the . . . boss?”

Donovan said, “He'd like you to put a scare into the lady.”

“Put a scare into her.”

“His exact words. ‘No harm in giving her a little scare.'”

Traynor said, “Well, he's in charge.”

“Where's the kid?”

The kid, whom Catherine had dubbed “Bailey” for some reason.

“Out front. Just in case.”

“He's a tryer, isn't he?”

“Doesn't hurt to stay alert,” Traynor recited. All those hot places, all those pulverised walls, and he still kept an eye out for the newbies. Of course, he hadn't spent five years counting the bricks in a series of small rooms. “He's a good kid.”

“Like his sister,” Donovan said.

“Yeah. Like his sister.”

He ended the call and wound the windows down again. What came blasting into the cab was all petrol and scorched rubber, but anything that didn't taste of prison smelt like freedom. He glanced at his watch. Twenty minutes before meeting Monteith: a car park off the Euston Road. He'd make it with time to spare.

A lot could go wrong, but it wouldn't be this bit.

Some lifts
descended further than River wanted to go. This one didn't—it was standard, staff-for-the-use-of—but there were others which required top clearance and disappeared deep into London's bowels, offering access to secure crisis-management facilities, and even a rumoured top-secret underground transport system; a rumour River had regarded with scepticism until he'd learned that it had been officially denied. That there were other areas where deniable interrogations took place, he'd taken as read. Such were the foundations on which security is built.

But he was heading towards the level where the records rooms were.

He'd rarely had occasion to visit these in his time at Regent's Park, but knew from conversations with his grandfather, the O.B., that they'd long been in danger of reaching capacity, containing as they did hundreds of yards, miles even, of hard-copy information: reports and records, personnel files, transcripts and minutes of varying levels of sensitivity. River had affected surprise that physical documents remained the mainstay of the Park's archives, but only to give the O.B. the opportunity of riding one of his favourite hobby horses.

“Oh,” the Old Bastard, a purely affectionate monicker, said, “they had to rethink a lot of those early storage protocols, once they realised computers were like bank vaults. Nice and secure, safe as houses, right up to the moment someone blows the doors off and walks away with the loot.”

On the most recent occasion on which they'd had this conversation, it had been late evening: rain pattering on the windows, brandy splashing with almost as much regularity into their glasses.

“Because computers
talk
to each other, River—that's what they're for. Your generation can't boil an egg without going online, you rely on them for everything, but you tend to overlook their major function. Which is that they store information, but only in order to divulge it.”

Which River had known, of course. Knew that was why the Queens of the Database worked on air-gapped systems, their USB ports gummed up to prevent flash drives being inserted. The Queens had to skip from one row of computers to another to go online—internet and internot being the waggish coinage. Electronic poaching had replaced the nuclear threat as the Big Fear. The Service liked to steal, but it hated getting robbed.

Give a born thief like Roderick Ho five minutes with an internet connection, River thought, and he'd bring back the PM's vetting history, if it was out there to be snaffled.

Which was why the PM's vetting history wasn't held online, but stored in the Park's personnel archive, on the level River was heading to now.

It was
definitely a double-decker bus. One of the old-fashioned type, with a deck you could jump onto as it pulled away, if you didn't mind being shouted at by the conductor. It was open topped, its upper deck shrouded in canvas, and was parked head-on to the house, so Catherine could see its destination window, which read
hop aboard!
There were no other vehicles in sight. She'd been right about the outhouses, though; three smaller, bluntly functional buildings, flat-sided, windowless, with sloping roofs. Garages or storage units. Nothing looked currently in use. It was as if her captors had stumbled on this place as a vacant possession, and taken advantage. Except that stumbling on things didn't fit into Sean Donovan's worldview. Any mission he was on would be double-plotted; every detail stress-tested for the unexpected, the potential loose screw.

A sudden bitter thought flared.
A loose screw
—that's all I was to him then.

So what am I now?

She had been awake for hours; had barely slept. Too much confusion flying around her mind, and this question the biggest of them all:
What am I now?
A figure out of Donovan's past, snatched into his present—why? She couldn't pretend it was because of anything she meant to him; it had to be because of what she did. And what she did was nothing much; was only tangentially Secret Service. What she did was Jackson Lamb's paper-shuffling; organising the slow horses' ditchwater-dull number-crunching into what resembled reports, which she then parcelled off to Regent's Park so they could be officially ignored. If anything they'd done at Slough House lately warranted this kind of excitement, it had passed her by . . . Hours ago, lying on the narrow bed thinking all this, she'd heard the front door closing, and had reached the window in time to see Donovan climbing into the van they'd fetched her here in. He'd driven down the track, turned into the lane, and vanished from sight.

Whatever was happening, there was no stopping it now.

The light
on this corridor, three levels below where he'd been talking to Diana Taverner, was blue-tinted, as if replicating the effect of dusk in the outside world. It was mildly disorienting, stepping out of the lift: not only the light, but the blank white walls and tiled white floor. Below the surface, everything changed. Wood panelling and marbled surfaces were nowhere to be seen.

Behind him the lift door closed, and machinery murmured.

Twenty-eight minutes.

So far, no alarms. River had left his pass in the lift, in case it was chipped so Security could track him. He hoped they'd been distracted by the pair of armed terrorists down the road, but it wouldn't take long to shoot them and get back to work. And he had twenty-eight minutes, or twenty-seven, to retrieve the file the man in the suit wanted, so his thugs wouldn't vent their poor impulse control on Catherine.

“. . . Break into the Park? Seriously?”

“Do I look like I'm joking?”

The thing was, he almost had. It was that supercilious smirk he'd worn, the upper-class sneer.

“I'll keep it simple. You don't even have to steal it. Pictures will do fine.”

“They don't let you just walk in,” River had said, stupidly.

“We'd hardly have needed to take your colleague if they did.”

Through an open door down the corridor, a figure appeared.

She was quite round, with a messy cap of hair, and her face was a thick white mask of powder; a childish attempt to make up as a clown, was River's first thought. But there was nothing childish about her eyes, which were steely-grey as her hair; and nothing of the toy about her wheelchair, which was cherry-coloured, with thick wheels, and looked capable of powering itself over or through any manner of obstacle: a closed door, an enemy trench, River Cartwright.

And this was Molly Doran, of whom he'd heard much, some of it good.

She rolled towards him, head to one side. A faint ping from the closed shaft behind him was the lift stopping on another floor, but could as easily have been this woman beginning to speak: he'd not have been surprised if she vented in a series of pips and squeaks—nothing to do with the wheelchair (he told himself); everything to do with that doll-like face, its porcelain veneer.

But her voice, when she spoke, was standard-issue, no-nonsense, mid-morning BBC.

“One of Jackson's cubs, aren't you?”

“I . . . Yes. That's right.”

“What's he after this time?”

Without waiting for a response she reversed through the doorway she'd appeared from. River followed her, into a long room not unlike a library stack, or what he imagined a library stack looked like: row upon row of upright cabinets set on tracks which would allow for their being accordioned together when not in use, and each stuffed with cardboard files and folders. Somewhere along this lot was the file he'd been told to steal. No, keep it simple. He only had to photograph its contents.

Molly Doran slotted neatly into a cubbyhole designed to accommodate her wheelchair. Her legs were missing below the knee. For all the tales River had heard about her, not one had ever laid down the indisputable truth as to how she'd lost them. The only thing all accounts agreed on was that it was a loss—that she'd once had legs.

She said, “Maybe you didn't hear me. What's he after this time?”

“A file,” River said.

“A file. So you'll have the requisition form then.”

“Well. You know Jackson.”

“I certainly did.”

She was a bird of a woman, though not the usual bird people meant when they used that phrase. A penguin, perhaps; a short fat bird in squatting mode, head tipped to one side; her nose becoming beakish as her head jutted upward. “What did you say your name was?”

“Cartwright.”

“I thought so . . . You've the look of him. Your grandfather.”

He could feel himself becoming heavier, as if the time ticking past was accruing weight, loading him down with the consequences of its passing.

“It's around the eyes. The shape of them, mostly. How is he?”

“He's sprightly.”

“Sprightly. There's an old person's word if ever there was. Women are feisty and old people sprightly. Except when they're not, of course. What's this file Jackson's after?”