An Occupation of Angels Part 3

Even from a distance, you could see Gor'el, and feel him even before you saw anything. His gigantic bulk stuck out of the smashed windows of the GUM department store, and beside him, Sorel's own monstrous appendages stuck out of St. Basil's Church.

Two of the three.

Then I went round a corner and the Kremlin came into view, and the power of the three Archangels. .h.i.t me like a punch to the ribs and I almost swerved because the Archangel Michael was in residence, and the body of the Kremlin looked like it was suddenly made of pliable mud as Michael hid his inhuman bulk inside it.

Red Square. AKA The Square of the Three Archangels.

It was a curious sensation, but once you set foot in the Square itself, the awesome influence of the Archangels almost ceased as if the three somehow cancelled each other out.

I met Seago by Lenin's tomb. A queue snaked outside into the cold; maybe they wanted to make sure he was dead.

Seago looked almost as bad as Lenin.

"He's being held inside," he said.

I should have known--and it was suddenly much colder.

"We want you to get into Lubyanka."

Being this close to the Archangels made me nervous, but not nearly as much as the thought of Lubyanka did; Gordon had died there, and Philpot had been as good as dead when they'd sent him back like an unwanted holiday present still wrapped up in blood and puss.

I'd been inside, once. And I'd got out. I guess that made me somewhat unique.

"How do you know?" It was blunt, but I was getting tired of being kept in the dark, and restless to finish what I had to do and get out of there as soon as was humanly possible.

There was the sound of a blast and a new crack appeared in GUM's side.

"The angels are restless," Seago said, and I knew that was all the answer I was going to get. The Bureau was playing the game and playing me, which was fine, but now I didn't know if they were being played themselves, and that was a thought I didn't like.

"How do I get in?" I asked, and Seago handed me one of his brown envelopes and then went to join the queue to see Lenin.

I was glad to be away from there, away from the Archangels. I wondered if one or more of them would be executed as their counterparts in Poland and France had been, if they'd find another human patsy to pull the trigger.

Discovered I didn't much care.

Lubyanka was a short way away by foot from Red Square, and I stood in the shadow of an adjacent building and watched that great black cube that sucked in life and left only broken, useless bones. Light and sound seemed to diminish around it.

No wonder we had so much trouble keeping the Russians at bay; they had guardian angels coming out of their a.r.s.es, and they had Azrael inside Lubyanka. No-one had ever admitted to seeing him after the first day of the Coming. They say he loved Lubyanka too much to leave; it provided him with everything he wished for.

I got rid of the brown envelope in the first ten minutes, reading it in the public bathrooms and tearing and flushing the papers immediately afterwards.

So they knew where Eldershott was being held. Interesting. Something didn't gel, but I wasn't sure what it was. The Bureau seemed simultaneously dead worried and quietly confident. If they had this kind of information, they needn't have worried and the fact they did helped to unbalance me, and I began taking short, controlled breaths as I examined the building in more detail, noting hidden guards, possible entries, all the time the thought running through my head that something wasn't right.

Time was a factor. Seago didn't say it outright, he knew better than to push me, but I could tell it in his face, the way he acted, and it came through in the notes, objective: get captive out at all cost, and do it b.l.o.o.d.y quickly, or words to that effect, and I thought I'd better get a move on, and when a car pulled up I grabbed a metal bar. It was a rusting window frame, broken, and I began smashing the car whilst the guy inside it started screaming at me. They came out of the building then, as I'd known they would, six or seven of them, young, dressed all in black, no insignia, like the building. They had truncheons in their hands, and guns, and they tried to grab me and I tried to fight, forgetting everything I knew and just using street punches, and they had me pinned to the ground and then I was being taken inside and, as they were carrying me, something heavy connected with the back of my head and I lost consciousness.

Chapter 8.

When tortured, every person has a breaking point, an edge at the end of consciousness beyond which they're lost. A good torturer knows this and tries to keep you on the safe side of the chasm. They can't use you when you break.

When tortured, there are two types of people. Those who crack before getting to the chasm, and those who can try and ride the line that separates tortured sanity from madness, those who find within themselves a core of--of stubbornness, perhaps--that makes them try and defy the torturer until they are beyond the chasm, at which point they are no longer useful as information sources--or anything else.

A good torturer knows this.

I was sitting in a small, windowless room. Sitting on a metal chair, my hands and feet tied to the chair with rough, metal wires that dug into the flesh. There was a bucket of water in the corner.

"Pochemu Vy napadali na avtomobil?" She was in her middle thirties, white lab coat and soft, German-made shoes that must have cost a month's salary for the average comrade.

Why were you attacking the car?

"Ja ne ponimaju." I tried to sound frightened, which wasn't difficult. She was a professional, and they are the people we usually encounter if we're unlucky enough, or stupid enough, to fall into the hands of the opposition--at that level you don't get many amateurs.

I don't understand.

They didn't know who I was, and it would take them too long to connect Marija Zita with Anna Krojer; as far as she was concerned, I was a Serb student who'd suddenly gone a little crazy, but they were taking no chances, and I was counting on that to get me into Lubyanka, and it had worked, and now came the hard part.

Someone somewhere flipped a switch and I was dying, the current tearing through my flesh like a shoal of piranhas swimming in my blood, and I screamed.

She must have switched it off because the pain was gone as suddenly as it had appeared, and she regarded me with an expression that said, quite clearly: you're not getting out of here alive unless you satisfy my curiosity, which is considerable.

"Chego angely bojatsja?" I said to her, and I saw her flinch. What do angels fear?

She blinked twice, and then she left me there and locked the door and I was left in the cell, breathing, relaxing the muscles, trying to get rid of the taste of bile in my mouth.

What do angels fear, I'd asked her, and I'd seen the question penetrate. It had been the wriggling worm at the end of the hook and she had taken it.

I waited. There was no sound in that place, and yet it seemed to me I could, if not hear, nevertheless feel the world around me, a dark, pervasive presence that infused the silent walls with an unnatural menace.

A darkness deeper than the absence of light detached itself from the wall and stood in front of me then. Dark eyes regarded me in silence.

His wing span was over two metres, the feathers obsidian black and as sharp as razorblades. The face was an indistinct darkness, a blur of still movement. He was full of paradoxes and even more of threat, and suddenly I thought, I didn't bargain for this, and then Azrael moved until his face was almost upon my own, his lips brushing mine, and he spoke in a whisper that ran down my spine like poisoned wine. "Angels fear nothing. Nothing. Nothing."

I felt his hand on my throat, a caress that turned into a strangle; his eyes threatened to draw me out of myself and be absorbed. His eyes burned like a multicoloured flower drenched in kerosene and set on fire. The air around us hummed, charged with electricity, and I could feel the walls moving in and out of my perception as if the prison itself was gasping for breath.

For the tortured there is a fine line, a knife edge, which is their breaking point. The secret is to live on the edge.

With Azrael, I stayed there for a long time.

It was less an interrogation than an expression of rage, and it made my resistance easier, h.o.a.rding away all the little dirty secrets of the trade in my mind, thinking of nothing, keeping the Bureau safe.

It's the only way to survive.

"What," I said, through teeth that were clenched around the little air I had, "are angels afraid of, Archangel? Chego angely bojatsja?"

He let me go then, and left me to gain control of my breath as he pondered me from a distance, a huge puddle of darkness in the room. His next words came slowly, oozing like rivulets of revulsion. "Have you come to kill me?"

He came near again and bent down, looking at me. His wings rustled and I could feel his breath, faintly sweet against my face.

"You have traces of angel on you." His voice had changed, as if he were performing an autopsy, speaking into a tape recorder. Dry. Emotionless. "And the scent of Paris on your body. Raphael and Metatron." He sounded as if he had almost resigned himself to my answer. "Have you come to kill me?"

"No," I said. "I haven't."

I thought he was going to speak to me then, perhaps to confide, perhaps only to resume his interrogation, but then somebody turned on the light and an awfully familiar voice said, echoing in the darkness, But I have

Chapter 9.

I saw him through the bars, but he wasn't looking my way; in fact, he wasn't looking anywhere but right ahead, and he was in a hurry.

There were no guards, only a small unmarked door that led outside, and he got into the driver's seat of a car that was parked there.

Eldershott, it appeared, enjoyed quite a few unusual freedoms as a prisoner of Lubyanka.

My money and papers were still in the guards' possession. It seemed that, when they'd dragged me in, they hadn't expected me to claim them back.

They were right, though for the wrong reason.

I only had to walk a short distance to get a cab, and he was almost out of sight by then, so I asked the driver to step on it and she did, not saying a thing.

"He owes me money," I said, which seemed to merely confirm her suspicions, so that she slowly nodded.

It was crunch time, bring him in before he gets away, but I was beginning to think Control weren't that interested in that, perhaps, as much as in where he would go next, since everywhere he was, it seemed, Archangels died.

Which went for me as well. It wasn't a thought I liked to contemplate.

He got out at Yaroslavski train station. I followed him to the cashier, the one that handled foreign visitors, and heard him get a ticket on train number four, for its entire journey, no stops, second cla.s.s.

I bought a second cla.s.s ticket to Ekaterinburg from the Russian counter, handing over the money in roubles. It would take me half of the way on the same train, and then....

"It's me."

No clicks on the phone, no little interruptions in the line, no static electricity in the background.

"Don't worry, it's safe." And, "Have you got him?"

"Yes."

"Have you made contact?"

"Not yet."

"Good. Where are you now?"

"Getting on a train that's going to Beijing."

That seemed to throw him back a bit, but he soon returned with, "What do you need?"

Good man.

I told him what I wanted and could almost hear Seago nodding on the other side of the line, and he said, "Carry a copy of Pravda when you go onto the platform and leave it somewhere visible. You will be approached at Ekaterinburg."

Click.

It was as hot on the train as it was cold outside; there was a samovar in the corner at the edge of the corridor, and a small wood fire burning underneath, heating up the water.

The cabin was empty, and I put down the small bag of necessities I'd bought at the station and sat down, incredibly weary, and closed my eyes, listening for the shrill cry of the engine and the rhythmic motion of the wheels as they began to move. Eldershott was in the same car, two cabins down; I waited until the train was in motion before walking past his cabin, and he was in, and there was nowhere to go; I intended to keep an eye on him, but right now I was simply too tired. I returned to my cabin, climbed up to the top bunk, stretched out, and slept.

My dreams were troubled, and took me back to Lubyanka, to the dark, small cell and the dark angel, Azrael, and that terrible voice saying, but I have.

I felt a soft hand caressing my neck, then moving down, and somehow I was freed of the shackles. I stood up and turned slowly, and faced Sophie Stockard.

Sophie Stockard: grey eyes like the calm before a storm, set like stones into a heart-shaped face devoid of all colour. Pet.i.te build, but muscular, which must have come from the dancing.

She was dressed in a simple shift, grey and featureless, and her arms were bare and as pale as her face.

"Where is my Johnny?" it was the dancer Sophie speaking, the one I had begun to suspect was hidden inside, but she was hushed by the other.

Azrael, she said, and there was a tone of amused malevolence in her voice. How good to see you again.

I looked at the angel, and that strange distortion of my sight began again, so that the cell seemed to stretch into a long, dark tube or corridor, Azrael standing at its end, unmoving and still.

Have you nothing to say for yourself? Sophie enquired with the same malevolent laughter. She began advancing down the corridor, and its walls pulsed and shifted as if they were somehow alive. Nothing to justify to me, to explain, to plead?

There was silence from the Archangel.

My poor, poor Azrael, said that terrible voice, as Sophie started to close the distance between she and the angel, her thin body seeming to grow as it moved further away.

Then the angel attacked.

Azrael's dark body suddenly bloomed, those great black wings opening to their full span, and he flew at Sophie like a desperate animal, hands outstretched for her neck.

She hit him, her small fist connecting with his face with the impact of a rock thrown from a catapult, slamming him back against the wall, but Azrael recovered, lifted a wing and sliced, and the tip of those shimmering feathers cut through Sophie's arm.

Droplets of bright red blood splattered the wall like tiny diamonds.