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.
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.