An Occupation of Angels Part 6

You will, it promised again. When the time comes, you must destroy the key.

I was being given nonsensical answers in a dream, and the reality of the place seemed diminished as if it were beginning to fade.

You will shortly wake up, back in your world. Remember this dream. When the time comes, you will know what to do.

Its shape began to shimmer like ice melting. Its last words were a lost whisper catching at the edge of consciousness. Fair well, Killarney. We shall meet again, before this is over.

My eyes snapped open.

Pain, my hand throbbing, multiple cuts on my upper body adding to my previous injuries. Broken bones, a cut-up face. At this rate I'll be dead before the next train stop, I thought, then realised the lull of the moving train was gone, that I was on solid ground, and that the face looking down at me without expression was human, not angelic.

It was Seago.

"What the h.e.l.l is going on?" I tried to say, but my mouth didn't work and I was drifting again, my eyes closing, seeing only white, icy and cold and, in the distance, the aerial dance of angels....

Chapter Fifteen.

"You are a brave woman."

He had a Russian accent, but the words were English and clearly p.r.o.nounced. He sat by my bed with a mug of steaming tea in his left hand. His right arm was missing.

By the window, Seago shot him a warning glance. "No."

"No what?" I said, my lips dry and my mouth tasting as if frogs had been mating inside it.

Seago ignored me. "Enough. I'm taking her out. We'll send in someone else. Thornton and Kurt are waiting in Beijing."

"No." the Russian drank noisily from his mug, and I was getting p.i.s.sed off at being ignored like this. "She is important. Like it or not, but she is linked to the nodus. It was she who killed Raphael, and how many people do you know who've killed an angel and are still alive?"

"She is not capable of continuing the mission." Seago's mouth was a thinly-drawn line in an angry face. He looked fatigued, and his voice was rough with cigarette smoke.

I tried to sit up and succeeded, though my vision clouded for a minute and I had to breathe hard before it abated.

At least I had their attention now.

"Where," I said carefully, "am I?"

The Russian and Seago again exchanged glances.

"Welcome to Novosibirsk," the Russian said finally. "I hope your journey was as pleasant as could be desired?"

I didn't appreciate the attempt at a joke. "And who the h.e.l.l are you?"

But memory came flooding back even as he spoke, and I remembered the arm that was no longer there, and knew where it had been lost.

"Colonel Sergei Abramovich, Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti at your service."

Abramovich. KGB. The man they called The Hunter. His pursuit of escaped n.a.z.is was legendary, as was their eventual fate. Abramovich was of the shoot first, ask later school of spying. The highest ranking Jew in the Directorate, he'd lost his arm capturing Eichmann in the jungles of Borneo in '59.

"I thought you were dead."

"No, just busy."

He must have been over seventy, though you couldn't tell that by looking at him.

They were both looking at me now, and I had to think fast because this changed the picture and I didn't understand it. I was shot and I should have been in police custody now, if not KGB, and I wasn't, at least not quite. I had Seago for local Control and he seemed comfortable enough in Abramovich's presence, and that worried me because we're not exactly buddies with the Russians and this had to be serious if they were somehow cooperating. So, instead of asking questions, I swung myself out of bed and stood up, shaking, and went to the bathroom where I was sick.

I had a quick shower and put on clothes that were waiting for me there, and when I got out I felt better, and I helped myself to a mug of tea from the samovar in the room.

"Brief me."

They exchanged that look again but then Abramovich nodded and Seago said carefully, "Someone a.s.sa.s.sinated Behemoth at St. Paul's and the Prime Minister is highly strung--"

I looked at him and he looked back, and he said, "He's threatening to push the b.u.t.ton, and the Russians are doing the same."

I nodded. I said, "How?" meaning Behemoth, and he understood that and said, "We don't know. There was a five-minute memory blackout in a mile-wide radius around the cathedral and now there's no Behemoth and no St. Paul's either."

I closed my eyes, and an image came into my head, unbidden: Sophie Stockard--in that loose hospital nightgown and bare feet, and that inhuman voice coming out of that human mouth--walking up to the cathedral. Somehow, though, I didn't understand how; I could see her, unhurried, calm, the grey eyes cold, bare feet over bare stone and the voice saying ashes to ashes, dust to dust, as Behemoth was reduced to nothing and was gone.

"Killarney? Killarney!"

Seago was shaking me, and I snapped up and said, "I know who did this," but it didn't seem to register, and they exchanged that look again, and I knew they were still arguing about me and I was going to have to put a stop to it there and then.

"I'm fine," I said. "And I'm going to finish this." I let that sink in, then added, "Now explain to me what the KGB is doing here, and in G.o.d's name tell me you didn't lose Eldershott."

"Not the KGB, per se," Abramovich said with a slight apologetic air, "I'm afraid my comrades in the service are less willing to consider all the relevant factors than I am. I was able to pull enough muscle to get you off that train and get you here, but I'm afraid once you leave this room, you're on your own."

"Eldershott got off at Novosibirsk," Seago added. He was looking out of the window again as if searching for something in the pale greyness outside, something he'd lost long ago and still couldn't find. "He wasn't going to Beijing, Killarney. He was coming straight here, and he was picked up at the station by some old friends of Colonel Abramovich."

A look of pure, unrestrained hatred flashed over Abramovich's face for the briefest part of a second before his tight smile returned. But the hate remained in his eyes. I didn't think it would ever leave them. "I regret to say my government was more tolerant of the n.a.z.is than I first thought. At least, some n.a.z.is. As it's turned out, they brought quite a few of them back after the war."

"So did the Americans," Seago pointed out.

I remembered that. I said, "Scientists?"

Seago nodded. "Mainly. It seems friend Eldershott is quite chummy with them."

"I don't understand."

Seago turned from the window. Whatever he was looking for out there, he still couldn't find it. He had the look of a man who knew he never would. "I'm not sure we do, either. Eldershott was clean."

I waited him out.

"We had him vetted," he said. "At intervals. Standard procedure. He was clean."

"Until Paris, then," I said.

"Yes." He sighed. "The most likely explanation is that they somehow turned him when he was in Paris, but we still don't know why he's important to them. He was just a cryptographer."

"Working on angel-related problems?"

A shrug, conceding the point. The KGB man didn't let go of his smile. Seago said, "Abramovich couldn't find out quite what is going on. All we know is that there is a research facility that doesn't officially exist, about a hundred and fifty miles out of Novosibirsk, and that Eldershott was taken there from the train."

In the whiteness of the desert of ice, a building.... I shook my head, trying to dispel the sudden dizziness. When I opened my eyes, Seago and Abramovich seemed to have reached a sort of agreement between them.

Abramovich coughed, said "You need to, of course, recuperate from your injuries." His one remaining hand was stroking a white beard and, apologetically, he said, as Seago nodded like an albatross by the window, "But we'd like you to penetrate that facility. At your earliest convenience, please."

Chapter Sixteen.

The sound of the engine filled the night like the buzz of a rusting chainsaw, and we were speeding along the tarmac and into the dark skies above.

There was no moon, and I sat back inside the Cessna whilst the pilot took us into the air, flying low over the frozen landscape. No moon, only the distant glow of thousands of stars, duplicated below in the ice in a ghostly reflection.

It took me six days to heal enough for me to be willing to do it. Six long days--and not nearly enough time for the bones to heal or the cuts to fade, but it was enough, and throughout those six days, Seago and Abramovich paced and worried, and Eldershott was invisible, hiding somewhere inside that place in the ice, the place that wasn't officially there.

On the seventh day I was ready.

Over that period there had been two more angel killings, the one in Rome and the other in Haifa, a port city in the south of Israel. There were only ever a few angels in America but, had one been a.s.sa.s.sinated, the Americans would have had to get involved, and the threat of a nuclear war would have become almost inevitable. But it was hard to find angels in America, thankfully.

Six long days: Seago smoked too many cigarettes; Abramovich drank too many cups of tea. I waited. Six days didn't seem like a long time if I thought of what waited at the end of them.

I tried not to, practiced killing in an empty room instead.

Meanwhile, nothing had been seen of Eldershott, and no word had come through any of the networks as to the purpose of the research facility. There was a big cloud of silence over that installation in the ice, a chasm where none should have been.

I was going to fall into that chasm. A part of me chafed at being inactive. I could grow bored very quickly trying to kill the air. The mission was entering its last, and most dangerous, stage, and I was ready to go, I was ready to finish it.

There was no word from any of the Archangels; they had kept silent about the killings as if trying to deny they had ever happened. The situation was getting tense, and the pressure was affecting Seago, who spent hours communicating on the radio with London every night, receiving information, giving none back, dead ash collecting at his feet like a grey Whitehall carpet. All London knew was that the mission was still active--the Bureau may have been compromised and Seago wasn't about to let them compromise the mission, what was left of it.

What was left of it was me.

We flew blind, on instruments and a certain amount of hope. It was a hundred and fifty miles to the target, but getting too close would be suicide and I would have to hike the last twenty-five alone.

This is what Abramovich had gathered: the facility employed a large number of ex-n.a.z.i scientists, most of them brought back after the war but some--so Abramovich said in a voice as devoid of emotion as a hastily-erected tombstone--were apparently brought later by ODESSA, the n.a.z.i network that saw so many wanted men slip away from the Allies and disappear, after the war.

"ODESSA," he had said. Were their agents the ones who had attacked me, the ones attempting to stop anyone on Eldershott's trail? We didn't know. Had the n.a.z.is infiltrated the Fourth Directorate of the KGB? The Kremlin? Or were the old scientists being used by someone else for purposes we didn't know and couldn't understand?

We didn't know. All Seago and Abramovich knew, joining forces reluctantly, was that they couldn't trust anyone else, not in Moscow, and not in London either.

It left them no-one but me. There was no-one else to send, not here, not now. It came down, simply, to me finishing the mission.

Which suited me fine. I always work alone.

The pilot shouted through the roar of the engine and signalled down with his thumb. I acknowledged it, released the seatbelt and forced the door open.

Wind blasted into the small aeroplane, bringing with it frost and the promise of worse to come. The temperature plummeted. I held onto the frame and pushed myself against the wind until it came at me like a fist and punched me loose, away from the plane and into the black and white Siberian night.

I fell, and as I did, the parachute opened and I breathed a sigh because I don't like parachuting. I do it only when I really have to; they're too easy to sabotage and I should know--I removed two senior members of the Romanian Securitate that way once.

It's not a nice way to go.

I dropped heavily onto solid ice and rolled with difficulty, my body flaming in pain once again. It would stop me if it could, but I wasn't going to let it. Instead, I collected the parachute and hid it under a pile of snow. Then I began to walk.

I was still about twenty-five miles from the target, and I had to get there fast. I unfolded the telescopic skis and attached them to my boots and then I took out the goggles Seago had given me, starlight vision, and I attached them and turned them on and twilight suddenly grew over the horizon.

It is a strange sensation, skiing in complete silence through a landscape that has nothing of the human in it. The goggles gave everything a pale aura and bathed the icy world with pale shadows. It was hypnotic, gliding on ice with nothing but the stars for company, and it made me think again of the dream I'd had, of that pale, sterile world of ice in which a giant being spoke to me in riddles....

Perhaps I had been going on for too long. I didn't know. I began seeing new shapes in the artificial shadows, vast and sharp like the outlines of wings, and grey chasms like Sophie's eyes, at once human and alien. There were white lights glowing behind the shadows, like milky pale eyes, watching me from their hiding places: ice and snow, the frozen siblings.

My speed escalated, and I felt as if I were being pushed by a giant hand across the fields of ice, gathering momentum.

It was strange and exhilarating, that silent race in the starlight, and I flew ahead, flying as if I, too, had wings, as if I, too, were--for just one tiny moment--an angel.

Then, like a fist coming out of the sky, the ice exploded around me and I was thrown, hard, landing awkwardly in a pile of hard snow.

Numbly, I stared up at the sky. I didn't know what had happened. Something had thrown me, but as to what it had been I could see no sign. All was quiet, and peaceful, and cold. Somewhere high above, movement like the pa.s.sing of giant wings....

I didn't know what had happened, but it had saved my life. I sensed rather than saw the movement in the distance. Coming closer.

They were too far away yet, and too well-trained, to betray themselves by sound. White shadows moving against white snow...and had I continued skiing, my trajectory would have delivered me straight into their laps.

Which was something I was quite eager to avoid.

Instead, I stood up, removed the skis and folded them away, and circled cautiously round them, giving the approaching party a wide berth. I saw them from a distance, crouching behind a boulder, the goggles--somehow still on my head, still working--showing them to me in starlight.

There was nothing distinct about them, just a group of soldiers wrapped up heavily, with guns slung over their shoulders. They didn't look tense, and I left them to it and walked on until, suddenly, I crested a small hill and found myself staring at the frozen monstrosity that was the research facility, and I thought, This is going to be a h.e.l.l of a lot more difficult than I thought.

Chapter Seventeen.