Real Tigers полностью

At first sight, the wasteground was empty of people. The Black Arrow van was parked near a car which looked like Louisa’s, and there was a skip, various heaps of masonry, and a pile of tumbled-over fencing, but the crew they’d seen drive in had melted away.

“Where did they go?”

“Don’t look for people. Look for movement.”

It was like one of those children’s puzzles: you stare at a picture of a tree until you can make out the squirrels.

They were in shadow themselves, more tree than squirrel, and speaking in whispers. Shirley had buttoned her jacket up, to prevent white T-shirt showing; Marcus had pulled his cap low. They were huddled by the entrance to the mis-shaped quadrilateral formed by the buildings; a pole designed to block ingress had been fixed in an upright position, and a wooden sentry box where a car park attendant once lurked was empty, save for a heavy stink of piss. There were lights beyond the furthest building, signals for passing trains, but the sky overhead had given way to a thoughtful deep blue, and nothing shone in the foreground.

Then something shifted across the far side, between the pillars on ground level of the furthest building, and Shirley realised she was looking at a pair of Black Arrows.

“I see two.”

“I’ve got seven,” Marcus said.

“Show-off.”

“They’re not much good,” he said. “This kind of terrain, this much cover, I’d be invisible.”

“I can see you,” Shirley muttered. Then: “What are they? Are they klieg lights?”

There were two sets of them, scaffolding towers that loomed a few metres tall with searchlights affixed to the top: one by the Black Arrow van, and the other a few metres away, neither lit, but both aimed at a hole in the factory wall. They looked like outsized anglepoise lamps. They also looked like you could tip them over with a broomstick.

“Yeah, that’s exactly what—oh, Christ.”

“It’s a killing ground,” said Shirley.

“Looks like.”

“They’re gonna flush River and the others out of the facility. They come up, the lights go on—blam blam blam.”

“Hush.”

A figure emerged from the back of the van. A balaclava obscured his face, though he was too far away for that to make much difference. After a brief survey of the area, he trotted towards the block to their right.

“Eight,” said Marcus.

“Are you just gonna count, or do you have a plan?”

“Well, in situations like this I ask myself, ‘What would Nelson Mandela do?’”

“. . . Seriously?”

“Dude survived twenty-seven years in a maximum security prison,” Marcus said. “I’m pretty sure he could take care of himself.”

“Yeah, that’s not what most people think of when—oh, forget it. What would Nelson do?”

“He’d take those towers out before the lights came on. You up to that?”

Shirley was, and would have said so, but a figure appeared behind Marcus wielding a truncheon. The alarm in her eyes gave Marcus half a moment’s grace, and he moved just enough that the stick, instead of swinging into the side of his head, caught him on the neck. He bounced full body off the wall and hit the ground with a thud. Shirley had time to note that his baseball cap remained fixed in place; almost time to step forward and launch a chin-bound kick at his assailant; no time at all to do anything but fall flat on her face when her legs were taken out from under her by a second man. Roll, she thought, and took a mouthful of gravel as his kick came in to take her head off.

Running along the corridor, Louisa noticed her heart rate . . . It had been a while since she’d been conscious of the beating of her heart.

Two paces ahead, River barely slowed before launching himself through a set of swing doors; they banged off the walls and swang back at her, and she fended them off with her forearms. Any of the instructors they’d had, back before their fall, would have had seven kinds of fit watching this: they were more like schoolkids having a race than agents on an op . . . If that’s what they were. If that’s what this was.

What it mostly felt like was an unholy mess, but there was nothing unusual about that. Last year, she and Min had had the sniff of an op: little more than a handholding exercise, but it had made them feel more alive than at any time since being kicked out of the Park. As things turned out, they were playing someone else’s game: Min died, and all she’d had since was the daily grind of make-work and nightly stands with strange men; so many strange men, she was near to forgetting there was any other kind.

And now this.