An Occupation of Angels Part 2

Her eyes lost their focus for a second. Then the intensity was back. Behind her, I could see Metatron's gigantic appendages bursting out of the broken windows of the cathedral, thrashing in the air.

Johnny. Johnny. Johnny. Her voice echoed and pounded me. It sounded like a wail, but all that time she didn't move, didn't shift her gaze from me, only this voice coming out of nothing and into my head and b.l.o.o.d.y Metatron and the full moon and I thought, This is it, this is where death comes.

"Johnny was good to me," she said. It took me a moment to realise she had spoken that out loud. She spoke French with a southerner accent. Her voice had a petulant tone. She said, "He was a gentleman."

"There are so few," I said, and thought she might smile, but she didn't.

Johnny is gone. The voice came from her, too, I knew that, and yet it wasn't. Was she channelling? If she was, I didn't want to meet the thing on the other end.

"Johnny said we could go to the Bahamas," Sophie said. "He said he would buy us a house with coconut trees and I would only dance for him."

Fool, said the voice, and yet it had a mournful tone. And again, with that awful laughter, He dies.

I tried to move towards her but my perspective changed; the walls were melting around me in a swampy green; the ceiling dribbled and fell in drops to the floor, and where I stepped in it, it turned to blood.

"Who is dying?" I said. My voice came out thick and indistinct, as if I were speaking through water. The air felt alive around me, elastic, pliable.

"We were going to be so happy. Only he had to go off in a hurry. He said it will solve all of our problems. That this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, like something from heaven."

Shut up! The voice, raging, and I was falling into a vortex of dark colours, sucked into the floor.

Concentrate. Breathe. Control.

I opened my eyes and I was back in the hallway, standing the same distance away from Sophie. I didn't like what she was saying. An opportunity from heaven. I wondered if Eldershott knew what he had got himself into. I wondered if I did.

Can you feel it? said that awful voice, and there was terrible delight in it.

And I could, all of a sudden. Like an explosion of pain, humiliation, torment, fear--he was like a bear wounded and still struggling as its death was being carried out.

I could feel it, and it was terrible. And I watched it happen, and was unable to turn away.

There were cracks in the cathedral now and, as I watched, Metatron's body shuddered once, fracturing the entire building, and then he was gone, and Sophie turned around to me and the voice laughed and then she jumped out of the window.

It took me a fraction of a second to get to the window, but she was already in the air and then she disappeared, just disappeared in a final distortion that seemed to shake the world one last time, and she was gone and I was standing in an ordinary house, looking at an ordinary street, and Metatron's gigantic corpse flopped lifelessly through the broken windows of Notre Dame.

Chapter Six.

"Two pieces of luggage are permanently lost."

I was standing by the public phones, close to the Shakespeare and Co bookshop, looking over at Notre Dame. The place had an abandoned aura, the charm of the Archangel banished. It felt human again.

I didn't bother with a cipher, and one public phone is the same as the next. It was as secure as anything else right then and I was in a hurry.

"I am terribly sad to hear of your trouble." It was Berlyne again, on duty in the communications room. "How may we compensate you?"

Two pieces of luggage: a dancer and a bartender. "Oh," I said, as if the thought has just struck me, "there was a third piece of luggage I lost recently. It was very precious. Heavenly."

And an Archangel. Paris was yet again without a Presence.

"I see."

"I want a representative of the company to meet me in person," I said. "As soon as possible."

It took him quite a while to get back to me. In the square in front of the cathedral there was a crowd, held back less by police tape and more by several large policemen. I wondered how they were going to conduct this particular investigation.

"Tomorrow morning." he said.

"Now look--" I started, but he interrupted me to give me an address. "You can stay there tonight, if you like. On the company expense. We hope you accept it as partial compensation for your troubles."

He hung up.

I got a cab. Someone would have to inform Avis where I'd left the car and arrange for it to be returned. Right now, it seemed the safest bet for Anna Krojer to disappear.

The address I was given turned out to be a Moroccan restaurant near the Gare du Nord. As I went through the doors the smell of cooking hit me, and I realised how hungry I was, and how tired.

The organism needed to recharge, demanded fuel.

A short, olive-skinned man with a bald patch hurried towards me with open arms. "Mademoiselle! Please, come in, sit, please!" He ushered me to a corner table and I sat down, facing the door.

"My eldest son's wife." He said it with another big show of hands, speaking to the diners who were paying him no attention.

"Mohammed Giza," he said in a low voice, shaking my hand. "Don't worry, you're safe here."

"Could I have some food?"

He must have seen how hungry I was. "Of course."

In moments, a large tray of couscous with roast lamb and a thick vegetable stew was deposited on my table, together with a carafe of water.

Recharging. I concentrated on the taste of the food, drank gla.s.ses of water.

They brought me another carafe, and more lamb.

When I felt as if I were human again I sat back, and after a couple of minutes a small pot of thick, dark coffee was put in front of me, together with a plate of honeyed pastry.

I chewed on the sweet, flaking pastry and drank coffee and felt my mind return to something resembling functionality.

I had a cryptographer missing. I had his girlfriend, who seemed to have strange powers and two minds, and who was also, though more recently, missing. Finally, I had a dead Archangel--the second in as many months.

Could they be linked? Could my a.s.sa.s.sination of Raphael have played a part, however remotely, in Metatron's killing?

I didn't like the picture I was coming up with. I thought, They'd better send me someone I can work with; not Reynolds, he could get me killed; not Ramsey--he once let an executive fall to the Russians because he wanted to feed them misinformation--not Feltham, she has more dead Executives than a barrel of puppies. But there was nothing to gain by sitting there worrying about it, so I just sipped my coffee and watched the door and tried to put the pieces together and couldn't.

I slept badly that night. Visions of the Archangels kept plaguing my dreams. Raphael's coa.r.s.e, bloated figure as the blood hit it and consumed it; the monstrosity that was Metatron, shuddering in its body of ancient bricks, the way his huge form ceased to move, his limbs hanging limply from the broken windows.

And through it all, the face of Eldershott swam in my mind, the moustache and gla.s.ses hiding an unreadable expression. Eldershott, and, as I dreamt, those other eyes returned to haunt me, Sophie's grey, calm eyes and the inhuman voice that kept calling my name, Killarney, Killarney, Killarney....

"Killarney!"

Darkness. Pale light trying to edge in through the narrow windows. Foggy outside. The smell of raw garlic.

Seago was leaning against the door, hands folded on his chest like a neatly ironed shirt. Seago. I'd worked with him in Lebanon and the Gambia, and though he was a miserable b.a.s.t.a.r.d, he knew what he was doing, and he always got you out alive. If he could. He'd lost Pickin in the Iran thing, but everyone knew Pickin was already on his last leg, and he lost it when the Savak men came for him that final time. Went out in style, though--they said the explosion had demolished an entire street, though I suspect that was an exaggeration.

"When did you get here?"

Seago took out a packet of cigarettes, Gauloises, how's that for a bit of local colour? Not that Seago had any colour; he was as pale as a chalk mine, and as deep.

"Three days ago."

"What?" He's been here longer than I have. My suspicions were confirmed: they'd been building up to this for a long time and played me for the part, running me all the way, Turner, with his cold blood and his shrug that said, You could say no, knowing I wouldn't.

Seago saw my expression. "Didn't they tell you I was going to be your controller? I don't know what Turner was thinking."

I wondered if he was telling me the truth, but I let it pa.s.s. "Seago," I said, "go and light that cigarette outside. I'll meet you downstairs in five minutes."

He did, and I got up, went for a pee, brushed my teeth, got dressed, did all the normal things you do when you get up, regardless of espionage, the Cold War or Archangels.

It was a safe house, at least for now.

When I got downstairs, the restaurant was closed. Seago sat alone at a corner table, smoking. The stub of one cigarette was already in the ashtray.

"Coffee?" He didn't wait for an answer but poured the dark liquid into a small china cup and another helping into his own.

I sat opposite him, stretching out my legs. When I drank, the coffee rushed through my system, the organism gearing up, charged and ready to fight again. It felt good.

"Look, Killarney," Seago said, "I want you to know I didn't have anything to do with not briefing you beforehand. In fact, I think it was irresponsible. Turner a.s.sured me they had you for this mission over two weeks ago."

That was Seago, and I was grateful I had someone in local Control who I could trust to tell me the truth, if not all of it.

"So what's going on, Seago? Last night I saw an Archangel die, not to mention two people, one of whom I killed. This isn't a spy game, this is a G.o.d-d.a.m.ned full-on military a.s.sault."

"Killarney." He sipped his coffee. Instead of an answer, he offered me a question. "How do you think you got out of Warsaw?"

The same question had been bothering me. I levelled a stare at him. He looked back without any expression, ticked points on his fingers. "There was no-one guarding Raphael," he said. "Our mole planted the gun under the pillow without being detected. The Stasi didn't get you. And you and Ford had a clear run all the way home. Convenient?"

"Lucky," I said--admitted. Knowing there was no such thing as luck in this game.

He nodded. "It was a perfect mission. Perfectly planned, perfectly executed." He offered me a smile around his cigarette. "But there's no such thing as a perfect mission."

"So what was it?" I said. I was tired of sparring, and of partial truths, and we always get that way, deep into a mission and we're feeling our way in the dark. "You tell me."

"I don't know," he said. He also sounded tired. "It's one of the things we're trying to find out. We think someone is arranging the a.s.sa.s.sinations of the Archangels. We suspect they used the Bureau to do that with the Raphael killing, and we have to ask ourselves: who has the power to do something like that?" He lit another cigarette, a third, and the earlier one was still burning. I suddenly realised how weary he was, and how frightened Whitehall must be to find the opposition--whoever they were--had the power to reach so closely into our most secret places.

"You need to find Eldershott. He was one of our cryptographers with an interest in angels. He specialised in the field of angelic communication. Highly specialised." If it was a bad pun he didn't let on. "And now he's gone, and we've killed Raphael and someone killed Metatron, and now both the East and the West are one Archangel down and, as you said, Killareny, this isn't a cold war anymore; it's heating up and we have to stop it."

It was a long speech for him and it put me in the picture as much as they wanted to, which meant there were a h.e.l.l of a lot of questions I didn't have answers for.

"Now I'd like your report."

I told Seago everything, about finding Sophie and feeling Metatron die. He grimaced at that.

"You weren't the only one to feel it," he said. "I was in Bastille when it happened, like a tremor in the earth that you felt in your head. It was madness, after that."

I waited him out. I drank more coffee. The empty restaurant was quiet.

"We need you to leave Paris," he said at last. "We don't know who's behind this but let's put it this way, there can't be too many powers with the ability to pull it off."

The Americans were out. They'd meddled as much as they could in Europe, but they had a Church-led government and they wouldn't dare touch an angel, let alone an Archangel. If anything, they'd be worried someone was going to make an attempt on one of their own. The Chinese--possibly, there were no angels in China that we knew about, and they didn't like the Russians; but I doubted they had the kind of muscle to pull this off. It could have been another Archangel, but they have never, in all the thirty-five years since the Coming, killed one of their own. Humans, yes, when the need arose, but never each other.

"You suspect the Russians?"

He spoke carefully. "We think they might be behind this. Eldershott was approached by an agent of the KGB's Fourth Directorate the month before he disappeared."

s.h.i.t.

Angels were bad but the Fourth Directorate were worse, and I knew where this was heading even before he said it, and I cursed him inside, thinking, This is where it really gets hard.

They were sending me to Moscow.

Chapter Seven.

Snow covered the empty streets like a crystalline layer of dust. I drove through the streets of Moscow and wondered how much longer I could stay alive.

Name, Marija Zita, thirty-five, hair a dark brown and cut short. Serb, with the kind of accent one a.s.sociates with eating razorblades. Dress, business suit, a good cut but obviously worn, and I was shown through at the border post from Norway, you couldn't get any more remote than that, and I was inside the Soviet Union and on my way to a rendezvous with a very messy outcome, if I knew anything at all.

I picked up a flight at Leningrad and got off at Moscow in the middle of the night, the darkest part that comes an hour or two before sunrise, when everyone human was asleep and even the birds were still.

The car was waiting for me and I drove to the university, Moscow's People's Friendship University, and I thought, They must have every b.l.o.o.d.y room of this place bugged, and who the h.e.l.l came up with the idea, and I bet Seago sleeps somewhere decent.

I got there at four thirty in the morning. A sleepy-looking Chinese man let me in and pointed me to a room. I didn't think he was one of ours, so he could have been working for the PRC, which meant this was ma.s.sive; if Whitehall was talking to Beijing, then all h.e.l.l was riding on this mission, and so far I had nothing but two dead bodies and my own, which was almost keeling over.

I slept for four hours, getting up at nine and putting on a comfortable outfit, more third-world student than businesswoman, and got back in the car.