Tigerman

19. Fleet

NEXT TO THE comms room was a large high-ceilinged space which had been the operations section back when Mancreu still merited operations, and before that the map room of the colonial house. Victorian Mercator maps complete with sea serpents decorated one wall, but the other was a single blank space twice the height of a man. It was a perfect canvas, he thought, for making information visible and tangible. He fetched a stepladder.

By sunset he had covered the whole wall and was still working, pins and colour coding and lines of ribbon and tape making a webwork across the paint. On one side he had already been forced to create more space, bringing in a whiteboard and some Blu-Tack to continue the chain of inference and connection out into the room. Satellite images and actual schematics of different ships were piled at the foot of the whiteboard waiting their turn. He stretched lines of string and wire through the room and stapled the sheets together over the top so as to make a completely immersive experience. Finally, realising that he needed an actual chart of the ships and their relationship to one another, he turned to the map. The British Empire stretched pinkly across a great swathe of Africa and Asia.

This is all your fault, anyway.

He clutched up a brace of images of the merchant ship Young Eidolon and drove the pins in hard with his thumb. Who owned what. What went where, what did it do and why.

Pride of Shanghai II, liner, retired. Slave ship, bulk transfer rather than bespoke. Temporary goods warehouse. Somali registry.

Life of the Party, factory ship out of Delaware, converted in Newcastle. Pleasure yacht: an offshore brothel and drug den for an international clientele. Mostly what it seemed to be, occasional staging post for political rendition within Asia. Probably Chinese.

Champs Elysées, Very Large Crude Carrier, now a prison ship. Owned from the Horn of Africa, almost certainly a US proxy vessel, but they wouldn’t say, not even – or not especially – to the Brits. Unconventional interrogation and long-term detention for unreportable prisoners and persons too damaged to be tried in public. Oubliette.

Benthic Minogue, pocket dreadnought. Unsubtly disguised iron hand in the Fleet’s glove. Deterrent. Post-Soviet retcon.

The Reluctant Alice, hospital ship. Former whaler. Non-legal medical treatments, reconstructive surgery, organ harvesting and corpse disposal. Also chemical, electroshock and deep-brain stimulated questioning. Brainwashing. Owned by a transnational infrastructure and security company through a variety of cutouts. Parent entity in Iceland, kindly staff speaking good English with Canadian accents.

The paper forest grew up and up and out. More ships, more connections. There were always more, possibilities the Fleet itself probably had not understood. Did the German government realise it was paying two separate services to spy on one another from each end of the bay? Did the Japanese know that their drug-enforcement team was entirely in the pocket of a Kosovar smuggling ring pretending to be a French Interpol squad – and pretending so well that it had scored some notable successes against its own side? It was chaos. And in the chaos, here and there, was Bad Jack: doing favours, greasing the wheels, carrying water. Nothing worked properly without Jack. It must drive them all crazy, except that it was so convenient.

The Sergeant found he was surprised by none of it; suspected sickly that no one would be, that no one would care if he sent it to Channel 4 by overnight bag. A brief scandal, questions in the House of Commons and a lot of braying from the front-bench donkeys on either side of the aisle, and then on to the next thing. The exigencies of security in the post-9/11 world. A nod and a wink: you got caught, but of course we’d have done the same.

I could have known all this weeks ago. But it wouldn’t have helped. These were national secrets, and they were big and awful and dull. The small ones – who killed Shola and why? Who sold guns and bikes to the shore? – were too trivial to be written down.

But not to be spoken, he realised. Small secrets still had to be shared with those who needed to know them, and while there would be no transcript of those conversations, the fact of their occurrence would be noted.

He looked for signals traffic.

Found it.

There, at the time of Shola’s murder, jots and tittles of radio. But not one vessel, not one point of blame. No. A joint effort. He held the sheaf of papers in his hand, traced backwards in time, forwards, ran from one ship to the next with a red highlighter pen, scrawling along the wall. He had the feel of it. This was a favour, and so was this, and here a debt was discharged. Five, ten, fifteen small IOUs were traded, cancelled out. Someone took on the job. It needed doing, so it would get done. He drew more red lines. Four minutes before the shooting. Twenty minutes before. Twenty-five, thirty, thirty-one. Here, there, and everywhere, and look who’s very agitated when it goes wrong. The red marker circled back around and around. There was so much of it. Too much. He would find out, but it would take days. He didn’t have days. Shola’s ghost was jogging his elbow: ‘Lester, for God’s sake! I can wait, I’m already dead! Find her! Find Sandrine!’

But it had not been a waste of time. No, this was how it was done, this was exactly the way. Signals and contacts. The briefest touches. Who was interested when Inoue spoke? Who responded when the seismographs twitched? Who would steal a damaged woman from her son?

A copper’s first, last, and best question: who profits?

He ditched the red marker for a green one, started again. Endlessly and meticulously, he connected and pinned and sketched, knowing that to someone standing in the doorway he would look like a madman, a drooling Renfield hunting flies and spiders back and forth. Green ink zigzagged, looped. He discarded duplication and irrelevance, classified cables and incidentals, policy statements. Facts were everything, tangible and physical. Connect the dots. Here, across the plaster, there and back again. Numbers. Times. Signals. Ships. Over and over. His fingers cramped, tried to fail. He kept going.

Then there was nothing left in his hand. The files were empty.

He stepped back, and stared. And saw a monster’s nest or a cave, a dark blot woven into the fabric of his map.

In the midst of a scaffold of tape and rubber bands, picked out by a weird inward spiral of indirect requests and stark green lines, was a single ship: the Elaine. She was registered out of the Virgin Islands, and flagged in the orange cabinet’s files for special care and consideration. Some things are more invisible than others. Not owned, obviously, by the government or by any actual British firm, but by a shell company beneath a shell company beneath a corporate umbrella to keep off Liverpool’s abysmal rain: a specialist facility working in the field of contagion and containment, making use – according to the company’s relentlessly cheerful web page – of the Mancreu area for its ‘unparalleled opportunities for advanced biomedical research’. And in that enthusiastic admission, and in the schematics attached to the file, he saw Inoue’s tame team, unpacking her best efforts and recasting her conclusions: staving off Mancreu’s end, but retaining the threat and therefore the legal vacuum around the island because it was convenient. Because the shadow that hid the Black Fleet was so very useful in this morally complex time. Because if the Mancreu problem was not really soluble, then at least that insolubility could be useful for other things – for all that discreditable business good chaps do to keep us safe in our beds.

Sandrine.

The Sergeant stared at the images of the Elaine and wondered if it was even possible. How could he invade a ship amid a host of others without detection, find Sandrine, and take her away without being seen? Without being himself detained and exposed? Without drawing down the wrath of his nation on the head of the boy he hoped to bring under its protection?

Or without killing. He was treating this as something for Tigerman, because he could only perform it as Tigerman, in Tigerman’s mask. Lester Ferris must be a million miles away or the whole show was a dud. And Tigerman did not kill, or had not, and did not make his plans with killing in mind. The Sergeant, in the normal run of things, would expect to kill his way into this ship, loudly and messily, leaving no enemies behind him to close off escape. He would treat the whole thing as a building to be cleared, as a standard if dangerous tactical mission of a sort he had carried out countless times in the urban infighting of his other wars. And then being alone was just a matter of a bad ratio of friend to foe: move, clear, hold, repeat. Room by room, with the right equipment, the right ruthlessness and a following wind – and if he made the right guesses about security – he could hollow out the Elaine until it was just him and Sandrine. And then he would bring her home, leaving the ship a floating bloody hulk, in memory of its dishonourable service. The name of Tigerman would take on a sharper edge. Not just a crime fighter, but an avenging angel. He imagined the sticky slipperiness of the metal deck underfoot, and part of him made a mental note to choose the right shoes.

But that would end it all. Even in this pass, the boy would see the shift in him, in the fiction they had created together, from knight to dragon. He would shy away from a red-handed killer even in his gratitude. He had not seen Helmand or Baghdad. It would be new to him, and of all the things he had seen or heard about, it would most resemble Shola’s death, with the Sergeant forever changing sides.

Lester Ferris saw himself gunning down a ship full of cheerful barmen, saw them explode backwards, saw a dozen ridiculous shirts billow and split behind the heart.

He pushed the image away.

Tigerman, then. It had to be Tigerman, doing things Tigerman’s way. A famous victory, the Sergeant sighed to himself, not an infamous one.

He started again. What were the tools of Tigerman’s world? How did one hero take on the hordes of evil? With almost supernatural skill – and he’d have to do without that – and guile. Diversion. Twice, now, in his confrontations, he had relied on explosions to get everyone pointed the wrong way, then come in fast and hit them very hard. Yes, diversion. Then also: reputation. When he had fought Pechorin’s men, he had been let off the hook at that last minute because his enemy was scared of what he was reputed to be: a demon. And last night the rumour of his pursuit had run ahead of him, had somehow turned the mood of the riot until even the Quads had backed down. Reputation, momentum, and allies. He had had allies last night, sudden and unexpected: the crowd themselves, and then the boy’s stooges in their firefighting gear. Could he find allies for this, too, knowing or not?

He looked back at the Fleet, at the tangle of interests and lies, and felt a new understanding take hold of him. I saw the sky rolled up as if a scroll.

The Fleet was one thing, but it was also many things bound in an uneasy union. They were opposed and they distrusted one another, and they were right to do so. Their coexistence was convenient, not perpetual. That fatal missile had scared Kershaw, had done the same to the captains of the Fleet. He could read their dismay and their amazement on the wall by the door, and that dismay was not assuaged by the fact that every single one of them displayed it. One or more of them could be lying, almost certainly were. It was hardly paranoid to wonder about a false-flag operation when you lived in the middle of the largest, most public, most permanent such scheme that had ever existed.

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.

He looked both ways and put on the mask, gasped a little at the smell of fear and exertion which clung to it, and at the sense of homecoming which burgeoned as he dipped his face into the dark. Always before he had to some extent been forced by circumstance. Now he felt he was choosing this, and with the choice came pride.

What they are saying about Tigerman, they are saying about me. They’re wrong about all of it, but still.

I am Tigerman.

He felt it put authority into his step the way his uniform did. He rolled his shoulders and breathed out, letting the mask growl.

The side door was unlocked.

He went down a sloping corridor into a back room. The walls were dark red, and there were faded poles for the dancers, chrome flaking off them onto the illuminated disco floor. At the far end were two booths, one of them empty. A small fat man with no expression on his face gestured politely to the empty table. Perhaps he received guests in rubber masks all the time.

There was a single glass and an unopened bottle of water waiting on the table. The Sergeant doubted he was expected to drink it. It just told him where to sit.

The allotted seat would mean putting his back to a broad, still figure in a pea jacket at the next booth. He didn’t particularly want to sit at all, tangle himself in a table. Bad tactics. But the scene was obvious: they would sit back to back, and they would talk.

Jack is analogue.

He sat down and waited.

‘Good evening.’ The voice was distorted, gargling. You could buy things in toyshops now to make you sound like whatever monster was dominating children’s television this year. Godzilla. Vader. Voldemort. But under the growl it sounded almost affable.

‘Bonsalum,’ the Sergeant replied. ‘I should call you Jack?’ The mask’s buzz made him smile. They sounded almost the same.

‘Jack will be fine. What can I do for you, Monsieur Tiger?’

‘I understand Shola worked for you.’

‘Sometimes.’

‘He was working for you when he died.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Didn’t that offend you?’ They were working from the same script: I am a knight, you are a monster. But I am not interested in you today.

‘It was commercial,’ Jack said, with just the right amount of hesitation.

‘Still. He was yours. He was killed.’

‘True.’

‘I might do something about it.’

‘I would not object.’

‘I have another piece of business that needs settling first.’

‘I would be interested to hear about it.’

Just a flicker of intensity. Jack was in the mood to buy what the Sergeant was selling. Gotcha, you cold bastard. ‘I need someone to vanish from Mancreu and end up somewhere else with a new identity. And I need to make the Fleet very unhappy for twenty minutes.’

Jack wheezed, and after a moment the Sergeant realised he was laughing. ‘If anyone can do that,’ Jack said, ‘it is you.’

They both laughed then. It sounded like nails in an iron pipe.

They talked for ten more minutes, and then Jack said he would look into what was possible. The Sergeant got to his feet and went to the door. He looked back over his shoulder and realised that the pea jacket had been thrown over a mannequin. He went back and poked at it curiously. A narrow speaking tube emerged from the wall and lay in the dummy’s lap. He shrugged a Tigerman shrug, and turned on his heel. The coat billowed around his calves in ironic salute. It was almost fun.

When he went outside, there was a storm on the horizon: a great band of looming rain and lightning, two hours out at most.