Free Real Tigers by Mick Herron Page A

instructions: a class thing, River thought—the country still riddled with this, and especially London: walking talking suits, inflated by their own self-importance, each and every one of them asking for a good hard kick in the slats—
    This the beat in the background as he ran.
    Bond would have leaped from the bridge onto a passing bus, or drop-kicked a motorcyclist and hijacked his wheels. Bourne would have surfed the streets on car roofs, or slipped into parkour mode, bouncing off walls and wheelie bins, always knowing which alley to cut through . . .
    River threw a quick glance at the nearby row of Boris bikes, shook his head, and ran down into the tube station.
    Not far from Regent’s Park, below a recently renovated local authority swimming baths, lurk several subterranean levels unknown to the public. Here, Service members—joes and handlers alike; desk staff too, when their annual appraisals demand—undergo various forms of hand-to-hand combat training, partly to improve their chances of surviving assault by an armed opponent, should such circumstances arise, but largely to ensure they can maim an unsuspecting victim should the opportunity present itself. Pens, coffee cups, spectacles, pocket change: all and any can be used to inflict permanent damage on a potential enemy.
    How to do the same to a subordinate is a skill you pick up on the job.
    There were six of them at the meeting in the Park, five Second Desks and Dame Ingrid Tearney, but to all intents and purposes, four of them might have been the articles of furniture their informal designation suggested. Because, like most other meetings with this cast list, this was all about Tearney and Taverner: Dame Ingrid, who’d helmed the Service for the best part of a decade, and intended to carry on doing so until they gave her a state funeral or made her queen, and Diana Taverner—“Lady Di”—who was Second Desk (Ops), and ruled the hub at Regent’s Park, which gave her life-and-death control over joes in the field, but meant she had to hold doors open for the Dame.
    It was no secret that she coveted the top job. But, twelve years younger than Tearney, her window of opportunity was closing with every passing day.
    The meeting was about resources. Every meeting was about resources these days, whatever their agenda—the bumpy road of austerity having rattled the Service’s axles as much as anyone else’s—but this one was literally about resources, and how there were going to be fewer of them for the foreseeable future, even though there had already been fewer of them for the recent past. Cuts were in the interests of efficiency, according to a Treasury Department nobody was ever going to mistake for an embodiment of that virtue, and cuts were, more to the point, going to happen, so the Service might as well learn to live with them. Especially since, with the recent reshuffle, the Service had no defender Down the Corridor.
    Because their new boss—the new Home Secretary—was Regent’s Park’s loudest critic. The fact that, decades previously, Peter Judd’s application to join the Service had been given the thumbs down was widely held to have played no small part in fostering this antipathy, but his psychological assessment had been so damning—had basically been written in block capitals, using red ink—that even now, old hands agreed, it cut both ways. On the downside, they were paying the price for having pissed off a narcissistic sociopath with family money, a power complex and a talent for bearing a grudge; but on the up, had Judd actually been allowed into the Service, he’d almost certainly have escalated the Cold War into a hot one, if his intervening years in diplomatic roles were anything to go by. But failures in diplomacy often score highly with the public, and Judd’s star remained obstinately in the ascendant. For the moment at least, the Service would have to