An Occupation of Angels Part 7

He moved too slowly and besides, I came at him from behind; he didn't have a chance, and I cut his throat with a knife and caught him in my arms as he fell, dropping him gently to the ground.

Red mixed with white and I had a flash of memory, the red swastika tattoo and the wings on each side, promising death.

The research facility was a fortress carved in the ice. Icy turrets and frozen walkways and, behind the walls, the sense of an invisible presence. The beams of powerful searchlights criss-crossed the ice just beyond.

I had come on it almost by accident as if it had sprung, magic-castle-like, out of the ice where, a moment before, nothing had been. There were no fences, no battlements; they wouldn't have been necessary. There was only the castle, solid ice and impregnable to sight, squatting like a malevolent angel sculpted in snow and shadows; what lay behind its walls I could only guess at.

The place had an eerie silence about it, an absence of sound that didn't seem natural even in the midst of this quietude of ice. Consulting my wrist.w.a.tch--I thought it might have stopped at some point during my rush across the ice, but no, the entire journey had taken me less than half the time I had thought it would.

I worried that my speed, too, wasn't entirely natural.

I circled the facility from a safe distance, trying to a.s.sess its security.

Watchtowers, four, one on each corner; searchlights; what looked like identical sets of machine-gun arrays below each tower. Soldiers, indistinct shapes, moving in the dark. There were no obvious openings, but I could see, at the bottom of one tower, slight humps in the ice that suggested hidden guard outposts.

As I circled, the pattern repeated; what entry there was into the castle was likely underground.

I needed to somehow reach those guard posts without being detected, and then, somehow, force my way inside, find Eldershott, abort whatever operation it was the Germans were running there, in the middle of the Siberian desert of ice. There were too many somehows in the equation, too many random elements I couldn't control, and I knew I would simply have to risk it, rely on the organism to keep me alive, to keep me going until I could finish the mission, and hope it would be enough.

It was cold, the ice penetrating through my suit with its dead, cold bony fingers, and I knew I would have to move fast, that staying out here for too long was in itself a death.

And so I did: I moved fast, crawling on the ice towards the castle's walls. My suit blended in with the colour of the snow, as I crawled towards the edifice. I hugged snow and crawled and tried not to think of the pain.

It was only a short distance, really, but when you're on your belly it's different, crawling and knowing those searchlights could find you in a careless second, and that you wouldn't even know it when they did. The sniper's bullets would make sure of that.

I didn't dare stop; I had to keep going until I reached the relative safety of the walls. When I approached close enough for me to hear voices, what I heard wasn't good--the guards spoke German, not Russian--and that most likely meant the Russians had lost control of their own facility. I wondered if they knew it. I wondered if the remains of the Russian guards were buried somewhere in the snow, white bones resting in a sea of white ice. I wondered who was running the facility now, and for what purpose. I wondered what I was doing there, but then let that one go.

The first of them didn't even notice when I cut his throat, he just died, quietly and politely and without making a fuss, but the second turned, gun at the ready and about to shout and raise the alarm, and I threw the knife at him, the blade still wet with his partner's blood, and the knife missed his heart but got the hand holding the gun and he dropped it, and before he could shout for help, I was there with a swivel kick to the head, and a follow up as he fell. I'd been aiming for the throat and, in a moment, he didn't have enough of a windpipe left to breathe with.

The entrance to their post was hidden in the ice; it was a round hole, wide enough, with an iron ladder leading down. I pulled their bodies, one by one, and lay them against the wall and tried to cover them with snow; just enough to make it difficult to detect if you weren't specifically looking for them. Then I climbed down the ladder.

The atmosphere grew warmer as I went down, a hidden air-conditioning unit humming in the background, and when I reached the floor, I took off my gloves and my hat and pocketed the goggles.

It was quiet down there, a featureless corridor of ice leading away towards the facility, and not a person in sight. I guessed they didn't figure on the need for much security past that point, but it still had me worried. They didn't need the kind of security they had, not out here, not even for a nuclear facility, but they still had it.

I came to a three-way intersection and chose the middle path, continuing straight ahead, trying to feel for any gradual changes in the level of the corridor, but it wasn't sloping or climbing. It was a level pa.s.sageway, and there were no doors or windows, and no guards. I began to worry that this, too, was some kind of a trap, a maze of corridors leading nowhere, but then the level of the floor did change and I began moving downwards, deeper into the earth and, as I did, my perception began to change, and I could feel the strangeness I had felt before. It was slowly working its way into my mind.

In my double vision, the corridors a.s.sumed an eerie, ghostly second layer; hazy lines wavered almost beyond sight, resembling the anatomical representation of amputated angels' wings. My heart was beating faster, pushing the blood around the body as if trying to pump it away, and I tried to calm it but it was no use; it was as if I were being administered adrenaline externally and it was now making its presence felt.

I descended gradually, and as I did the lights became brighter and the corridor expanded, and then it stopped at a small, white door that said, simply, LABORBEREICH, Laboratory Area, and I opened it, and then the screaming started.

Chapter Eighteen.

The cages were made of a strange, transparent material. They were arranged neatly around the room like kitchen utensils.

Inside the cages lay angels--or what remained of them.

The room was filled with cages occupied by angels. Torn wings, bodies convoluted in impossible ways, bloodied scars that ran from a few centimetres to the length of an entire body. Incisions, excisions, mutilations. The angels stared at me through bars, from faces beaten and empty, and their eyes were uncomprehending.

They screamed.

It was as if my presence alone was responsible for such fear in them, such agony that they could not unleash it in any other way. Their screams were terrible skull-piercing protestations of anger, fear and hate; they were both inhuman and awesome, grotesque and horrifying. The sound of their agony made me ill.

I nearly retched, their sound a violent, soul-tearing, penetrating knife, scoring blindly. There was no escaping that sound. I would have retched and stained that spotlessly clean floor if I hadn't spotted a pair of ear m.u.f.flers and reached for them, desperate, and put them on. They had been hanging on a hook above the door.

As soon as I put them on the sound ebbed. The angels continued to scream, but the tonal pain was being filtered out. I took a deep breath. It was a clean, well-lit place full of mutilated angels.

It was difficult to tear myself away from the sight; the once-majestic creatures, so arrogant in their dominance of our world, now crouched like beaten animals behind icy gla.s.s cages. And yet, as I examined them, I began to understand that there was something different about them, something different from the angels I had encountered before.

Perhaps it was simply the fact they were not, like Behemoth or Metatron had been, gigantic and obese. They were human-sized or smaller, but then so had Raphael been, so had the dark angel in Lubyanka.

Their feathers looked dishevelled and worn, and the wingtips less sharp somehow, less of a deadly weapon. Their faces looked less human than I thought they should, the inherent alien nature of them more p.r.o.nounced. I had a strange feeling these angels were unknown, that their names did not appear in any of the lists, but the idea was preposterous; the Coming began and ended after the Second World War, and no new angels had manifested since then, anywhere.

Or so I'd thought.

Cages, benches, and as I went through a door in the wall, an operating theatre. The table was crusted with blood and less easily identifiable body liquids, some congealed into a sort of grey sc.u.m. There were various instruments on display, screens currently turned off, an array of surgical implements, a sink with more blood stains on it, and the ma.s.sive table in the middle like a slab of ice that looked as if whatever patients were brought to lie on it did not get the chance to rise from it again.

It made me feel sick, and I remembered where I had seen things like this before: the German death camps in Poland where the n.a.z.is had experimented on countless victims in the name of science. That's what they looked like: the German laboratories.

There was a second door at the other end of the room and I opened it, glad to discover it led into another corridor, not another butcher's shop. I needed to locate Eldershott, and I needed to know what was being done in this place, or rather, to what purpose it was being done.

Fact: the entire facility was likely German. It looked as if the Russians had bitten off more than they could chew when they brought back n.a.z.i scientists to work for them. That the Americans, the Brits and even the Egyptians had done the same was not a welcome thought.

Fact: they were conducting experiments on angels. On angels. While angels could be killed--for example, human blood caused them damage, at least if delivered in the right way--and there were stories of internal killings, when angels fighting for the same territory might dispose of each other. No-one knew how angels died, or why they died at all. They never discussed much--not where they came from, not G.o.d, nor what their ultimate goal was, or even if they had one.

Fact: someone was killing angels around the world. Archangels.

Fact: they had probably set me up to a.s.sa.s.sinate Raphael.

Hypothesis: the Germans were behind the killings.

Somehow I wasn't convinced. The Germans, or their ODESSA agents, had tried to get rid of me three times already, and failed. Whoever the killer really was, I thought they were actually trying to help me.

It wasn't a comforting thought.

And then, how did Sophie fit into it? And how did Eldershott?

Fact: there was nothing in the briefing about missing angels, and I had to a.s.sume there weren't any.

Fact: I left behind me a room full of caged, broken angels. Unknown angels.

Question: where had they come from?

I remembered my dream again, the white, sterile land and, high above, angels flying on the winds.

Was that their real home? Had I somehow stumbled, in my dreams, on...on heaven?

Or had I been taken there for a reason?

And another question, working its way slowly into my mind like a thin drizzle of black water: Had the n.a.z.is somehow found a way into it?

That would explain the captured angels.

But then, why hadn't the Archangels done anything about it?

There were too many questions, and the time to ask them was running out. I needed some answers. I needed to reach the core of this operation and break it apart. I took off the m.u.f.flers and left them behind me, and walked away to the sound of the diminishing screams, choosing paths almost at random, with a strange belief they would lead me to my destination.

I traversed the corridors of pale silent ice, meeting no-one. I was entering that same dream state as I had on the way here, and I tried to fight it, to wrest control of my mind from this alien intrusion. It was all about control, and always has been--but the influence over me was growing, leading me across a blank icy map as if it intimately knew the layout of this underground complex. It was a chessboard, and I was a p.a.w.n, and a hidden player was pushing me to the edge of that board towards checkmate.

It was about control, because that's what I have to have when the mission is in its final phase. I had to be in control of my actions, the organism shutting down all unimportant routines and concentrating on one thing: survival. I was losing that control and I knew I would have to break it if I wanted to survive.

The feeling had a more sinister quality to it than the one I'd had on the skis. I tried to turn back, to choose a different path, but my body disobeyed me as if the instructions from my brain were not reaching their destination, and I tried to fight that and the apathy that was stealing over me.

It wouldn't go away and then I punched the wall of ice on my left, hard, and again, and again, until blood came out and the pain exploded in bright shards of ice, cold, dead, distant stars shimmering before my eyes.

When I stopped, my hand was caked in blood and slivers of ice, and there was a small crater in the wall where it had cracked.

I tried to move in the opposite direction to the pull and succeeded, my movements my own again, and then I ran, ran in the opposite direction, and as I did I heard the great gushing sound of water behind me and knew they had flooded the corridor and that, unless I reached higher ground, and fast, I would very soon become a sculpture of cold, dead ice.

Chapter Nineteen.

"It is nice of you to join us." He spoke German and, as he did, a horsewhip tapped against his leather boots, tap, tap, tap, in time to a rhythm only he could hear.

It was pointless to disseminate; there was no cover story here, no Anna Krojer or Marija Zita or Janet Gordon to hide behind, this was ground zero and there was nowhere else to go.

Nevertheless.... "I'm sorry," I said, spreading my hands slowly, "I don't understand...?" I said it in English but it didn't seem to make much of an impression on him, and he smiled, showing teeth. There was a file by his side and I knew it was mine. They would have known who I was--or what I was, at the very least.

"I was under the impression you spoke German fluently," he said, still in the same language, still smiling. He had very bright, white teeth. He probably polished them every night as if they were gemstones.

Tap. Tap.

"Perhaps we can test it by cutting off one of your small fingers and see how you react?"

One of his bodyguards was standing on my right, a little back. I saw him reach for one of the surgical knives and knew they would happily do it, and that what I had do was to try and lengthen the time until they did decide to get rid of me, and try and make my move before then. It wasn't much of a plan but it was all I had.

"That," I said, carefully and in German, "won't be necessary." I let my hands drop to my sides and felt them relax, just a little, behind me.

He was immaculately dressed in a grey uniform without insignia. Riding boots, a horsewhip. Greying hair, a sensitive face grown podgy, eyes that could make the cold outside seem like a holiday in the sun, somewhere hot where they serve drinks with little umbrellas and play soothing music. His eyes said there would never be any more drinks with little umbrellas, that I would never see the sun. They were quite eloquent, for eyes.

The smile didn't leave his face. It was like a growth that couldn't be removed. He said, "Excellent. You are a remarkable woman, Shadow Executive Killarney. That is your codename, isn't it? Killarney? Our friends in the Fourth Directorate have quite a large file on you." He tapped the table. "As you can see."

"And you are?" I said, letting it ride.

I felt them shifting again behind me. Nervous b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. There was one on either side of me, two more covering the door. And Herr Doktor, tap-tap-b.l.o.o.d.y-tap. They were all standard muscle boys, in fact, a little too standard: blond, blue-eyed, large, they all looked exactly like the pair I had killed on the train, as if Herr Doktor had found himself a way of manufacturing perfect Arians.

"Is the name really important?" he asked, still smiling. Still tapping. Tap. Tap.

Tap.

"The work will live on after the name is forgotten, after all."

"And your work involves torturing angels?" I had to keep him talking, keep thinking of a way out of this.

When the water came rushing into the corridor I was already running, the organism taking over completely, using up all available resources, have to get out of this, run faster, find a way up or a way out, and hurry up because the water is nearly there, touching you....

There had been a shuddering sound and a part of the floor dropped away behind me with a sickening thud. I stumbled but kept running as, behind me, more of the floor dropped away. Icicles flew in the air and one or two hit me, their edges as sharp as blades.

There was only one way to do it and I took it, putting the gloves back on and praying it would work, and then I jumped, a three-hundred-and-sixty degrees jump shortened to a hundred and eighty as the boots caught on the ceiling, spikes extending, and I broke the arc and swung the other way, catching the ceiling with my hands, the gloves extending and catching at the ice, the needles driving in hard, and I held on as, underneath me, the water rushed, too low to touch me.

There was a ventilation shaft only a short distance from me--if I could reach it. I wasn't convinced of the efficiency of the suit. I knew every second the contact with the ice could weaken and I could fall into the frozen waters below. I inched my way towards the ventilation shaft, clawing at the ice, and reached it just as the floor fell beneath me and I was left staring at a drop that was a guaranteed kill, hanging upside down from the ceiling of ice.

There was nothing else to do. I reached out, carefully, carefully, hooked the grill and pulled; it dropped away from the ceiling and crashed below. I thought I'd made it. I reached through the hole and found purchase and tried to pull myself up.

Then two sets of arms grabbed me and pulled me up, and I knew the game was up and that I was the piece most likely to be off the board next.

They lifted me up and I couldn't help but breathe in relief. It's not easy hanging upside-down on a wall of ice when the floor drops below you, and whatever the alternative, at that moment I was pleased to be back on something solid.

There were two of them in the small s.p.a.ce, and they gave me a fright until I realised they were not the two I had killed on the train. One had a gun trained on me but fighting would have been useless anyway; they had me and I was too exhausted to fight, not right then at any point. I'd have to work out the best time for that later. If there was a later.

They led me away. It was some sort of s.p.a.ce between s.p.a.ces, but not a crawls.p.a.ce as I'd thought. It was another corridor, with grills in the floor through which I glimpsed the ruined corridor below, and it ended with a door.

We stepped through it, pa.s.sed through another set of corridors, and then we were in a plush office and the n.a.z.i with the horsewhip was greeting me with that smile. I'd made a mental note to erase that smile sometime in the near future, using as violent a means as was available to me.

"What you must understand," he said, "is that we do not torture angels. We study them. And what fascinating creatures they are! Such interesting powers. We knew you were approaching long before you did, you see. They have such useful powers; if they can only be harnessed. I was quite amazed when you fought back against their influence--if you hadn't fought, you would have been standing here some time ago with none of the unpleasantness of the flood. Still--" he looked thoughtful for a moment "--it certainly provided me with some interesting data on you."

"Who are you?" I said again but, as I did, a suspicion was already forming in my mind; how many crazed n.a.z.i doctors were this ruthless, and still at large? I thought of the cages of angels, the operating theatre, the precision, the fastidiousness. Who was there who could do those things?

He could read it in my face, and the smile never wavered; he nodded once as if confirming my thoughts.