An Occupation of Angels.
A Novella.
by Lavie Tidhar.
Chapter 1.
The gun was under the pillow and so I used it, emptying three bullets that tore through his torso before exploding, the crystal casing fragmenting and the blood inside hissing as it touched skin.
He was inhumanly large, and as I sent another bullet his way, I watched the blood--human blood, Whitehall volunteers, probably had a drop of mine in it, I hated to give blood, the needles and the smell of medical alcohol and the nurse watching you like a specimen--burn his skin away.
I turned at a sound like breaking gla.s.s but it was only a Chinese urn, Ming clay, they were suckers for Ming vases, and I turned back and shot him again, twice, once in each wing.
The blood exploded when it came in touch with the underside of his wing, and his feathers began to burn, the acrid stench making me gag.
Target reached and eliminated, or something like that. I waited as Raphael"s great bulk fought to stay corporeal and lost.
Raphael"s body shimmered and burnt, reducing to nothing. A halo of light expanded from it, white and clean-burning, almost reaching me.
Then his essence was gone, and it was time to get out of there.
Animal instincts taking over, I was out of the bedroom door and running, scanning for the hidden a.s.sa.s.sin who could get me at any moment, and then what would they say at the Bureau? We don"t talk about our work, and if Whitehall could help it, we wouldn"t be talking to each other at all, but sometimes you have to, if only to say, "Tomlin, yeah, I was with him in Tangiers, good man, imagine the East Germans cracking his network, stroke of bad luck," when what we mean is what we know in our hearts, that Tomlin might have been a good guy, but he blew the mission and there was nothing much left of him when they"d finished what they were doing and dumped him in the river, and that this could be us, me, next time, and it was pride, old stupid pride that kept me going as I ran through the mansion and out into the gardens, and continued to run until I reached the gate and opened it and jumped in a taxi and said, "Airport, please."
"Yes, Ma"am."
He hit the gas and we drove away from Raphael"s House of Horrors, now minus one, at least, and I could feel myself relax and that was wrong; that was dangerous, and when things seem too easy I get worried.
"Which airline do you need?" he said.
"North Western," I said, which was the agreed code, and he said, "Really? I prefer British Airways," the whole ridiculous affair remaining ridiculous until the second you forget to use it and it"s the knife in the kidney, the knife you didn"t see inside the wrong newspaper, or the poison-tipped umbrella scratching your leg because you let your guard down for just one second.
"We need to get you out of the country," he said, switching to English, but he didn"t take his eyes off the road and that was a good sign; the only thing that could get me out of Warsaw alive right now was a fast car on a one-way journey to the border. When you waste someone like Raphael, there are no doors, there are no holes through which you can escape, and they will hunt you. And don"t even think about flying.
But-- "Stop."
He wasn"t telling me anything I didn"t know, but there was one thing he didn"t understand, and it"s this: I work alone.
I relied on Control to get me a vehicle, but that was as far as it went, and so I told him to stop, and when he did I pushed him out, had to make a credible job of it, his face roughed up just enough so he would have a legitimate story to tell if he ran into them before he got back to the safe house, not that they like listening to stories, legit or otherwise, when they could just as easily kill you, or suck away the very core of you as you tried uselessly to struggle--it didn"t make any difference. They"d take the core of you out and cut it into nice, neat lines and let their disciples snort the remainder of your soul through a straw. If they caught you.
I didn"t intend to be caught.
I drove through a road block, and the nerves started playing up, but I was Merely Mary, I was innocent Mary Webb that day, an English teacher, thirty-one and working for VSO, and the soldier didn"t look more than twenty and cheerful, and his, "Doc.u.ments, please," was delivered with a smile, but still--they got Baggott in Iraq with a smile and left him with one, carved like a half-moon into his throat. I never liked the miserable b.a.s.t.a.r.d, but still.
The soldier at the checkpoint waved me through. I drove, foot to the accelerator, across barren cold fields.
"The guy you roughed up is going to need a doctor."
"Better that than ending up dead."
Ford waited at the rendezvous point, five kilometres from the East German border. When we"re in the field, we expect our Controller to work out the bigger picture, and Ford was good, a short thin man with a balding head and a pair of reading gla.s.ses, looking like a maths teacher or a Bible salesman, you"d lose him in a crowd--which is the whole point, really.
"Roads clear," I said.
Ford looked tired. "Not without a fair bit of muscle," he said. "We even had to activate a deep-cover mole, a sleeper. I don"t suppose she"ll live." He said that with a soft apologetic air, coughing, and, "Anderson on the Eastern Europe Desk is rather unhappy."
Which is Ford"s way of saying "Hopping mad", but I didn"t care. He wouldn"t say anything without a good reason, but if he meant to push me it didn"t work--you can"t be pushed past a certain point, and your entire being concentrates on one thing: survival.
So I said, "Can we get a move on?" and he said, "Yes," obviously, and if I was in such a hurry, and I got into the microlight, I"d sit Ford behind me; he was good but I wanted to survive, and when you do, there is only one person you trust.
I"d slid into a pair of overalls and now speeded up along the track road and then we were in the air and climbing, and I was grateful for the overalls. It gets cold quickly up there, and you need the insulation.
Flying blind and in fear of angels, the action is a strange dance, trying to keep between the two realms. There"s the human one below, the realm of the Sluzba Bezpieczestwa and Stasi, of dank cells and rats and beatings, blood in water--but I wasn"t going to think about that, I was going to think ahead, to safety, to getting away with it.
Just don"t fly too high.
There"s the human realm, and then there"s the heavenly one where the winged predators ruled.
We flew over the border into East Germany and I consulted the map as I let the microlight glide, una.s.sisted, then grabbed hold of the bars again and swooped north, Ford behind me--and I knew the thing with Raphael had been serious, they wouldn"t let someone like Ford out of bed for less than a revolution, nukes, or angels.
And they wouldn"t have asked for me.
Racing through cold clear air, waiting, the nerves on edge, piano wires stretched to snap.
But still we weren"t disturbed; the air remained clear and bright, no sign of unfriendly visitations, no sign of wings, and the ground, as much of it as I could see, remained clear of their agents, and we flew until I could smell the sea cutting like a blade against skin, salty and smoky at the same time, and a flare went up and I made an awkward landing, b.u.mpy, but we rode it until the microlight stopped and I got out and, not waiting for Ford to unstrap himself, jumped onto the deck of the boat without ceremony and commandeered the ladies bathrooms.
It gets cold up there.
At 04:15 we touched Dover and at 05:30 I was back in London, alive, and the adrenaline wearing off and needing release, and I went to find Ben and woke him up, which he didn"t mind at all.
Chapter 2.
There was chanting at Trafalgar Square, protesters walking up and down with plaques that said WHAT DO THEY WANT? THEY WANT POWER and A MANIFESTATION TOO MANY, and it started to rain, not the usual kind of drizzle but the temporary, great outpouring of the sky, and I cursed and flagged down a cab.
I"d been back in London for more than a month and I"d been getting restless.
They know that, and they play with you, trying to make sure that when they really need you, when they can"t find another poor fool, they have you. "Killarney," they say, in their cold quiet rooms. "Just the ticket, Killarney. The girl who won"t turn down the mission everyone else has turned down, and you know why, old boy? It"s pride, old obstinate pride because she wants to be the person who does it and gets it done and comes out again."
I got off a few streets before the Bureau--habit, really--and walked the rest of the way to the squat, brown office building and went inside, and the heaters didn"t work.
"You might want to come round when you have a moment." Oldham had called me at nine in the morning; outside the windows it still looked like midnight.
"Anything important?"
"Oh, not really, dear girl, might have something for you, never know."
"How"s the kid?"
"Doing well. She"s going to Oxford next year. Listen, Killarney, must dash, pop round if you have some time."
Click.
They wanted me and they didn"t want to let on. You don"t get calls from Oldham or anybody else at the Bureau asking you to come in unless they need you--but they were playing it very cool, and that had me worried.
I walked down the corridors and ran into Berlyne coming out of the cipher room. "Meta," went the speakers inside, a voice stretched almost to its breaking point, "Tron," the sequence repeating, "Meta, Tron, Meta Tron, Metatron," and I had to snap out of the hypnotic quality of the recording, and Berlyne shut the door, cutting off the noise.
"Metatron up to something?"
Berlyne just looked at me. "Metatron is always up to something, Killarney. Every Archangel is, at any given moment, up to something. Following which, unpleasant things inevitably happen." It seemed to cheer him up.
"So what"s going on, Berlyne? Any idea why I was called in?"
"Were you called in? Can"t imagine why. Place is as dead as a church. And the heaters don"t work." He rubbed his hands together as if warmed by the thought. "Might be an idea for you to see Turner though."
I left him there, still rubbing his hands, and I went to find Turner, thinking how casual, how debonair everyone suddenly seemed round here.
Malcolm, Turner"s personal a.s.sistant, was outside the door smoking a cigarette. He grinned and proffered his BH pack when I walked up.
I waved it away.
"Is he busy?"
"Be done in a minute. Meeting."
"Anything I should know about?" I was getting tired of asking questions, but I was edgy again, the fake calm serving to heighten my awareness that something was being put into motion behind the scenes and when it came out, more likely than not, I would be caught in the avalanche.
Malcolm shrugged. "Nothing much happening this time of year. We"re trying to get someone to come in and fix the heating but the union is on strike, can you believe it?"
I couldn"t believe any of it. Malcolm finished his cigarette and knocked on the door. "She"s here," he called, and opened the door for me, closing it behind me softly and leaving me in the room.
Turner perched at the end of an ancient desk like an owl in mourning. Rain streaked down the naked windows. A small, rusting electric heater, dark red like the colour of a used bullet, lay at his feet.
"Sit down."
They say his wife left him and then drowned herself, and that he never forgave himself, or her. Whatever the reason, Turner is cold; if you froze him in ice for a hundred years and then defrosted him, he"d just come alive again like those fish they found in Antarctica.
"Might have a little job for you," Turner said. He rubbed his hands in front of the electric bars.
"So I keep hearing." A flash of lightning outside, followed by thunder.
"We lost someone in Paris." He said it without emotion, as if offering a biscuit at tea time. "We"d like you to get him back."
I was going to say, "What do you mean, you lost someone in Paris?" but of course I didn"t because the Bureau doesn"t, doesn"t lose people, and what he meant was that, whoever the poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d was, he was probably dead by now, that or working for the other side.
"Who?"
He pulled out a thick file from the cabinet behind the table and lay it in front of me. It opened onto a series of black and white photographs showing a man in his middle thirties, pasty complexion, thick black moustache, round gla.s.ses, and I committed his face to memory because, from now on, that would be a face I"d be looking for.
"It"s nothing drastic, Killarney," Turner said, and I watched the reflection of the heated bars twist and melt in his gla.s.ses. "A man by the name of Eldershott. An academic, really." He said that almost apologetically. "Cryptography, though you couldn"t tell to look at him, good solid work but he wasn"t that important. He was on holiday in Paris, alone--he"s not married, seemed to lead a quiet life--and Paris is clean; it"s friendly ground. Then he just...disappeared." His hands raised in a shrug, palms open upwards as if to say, Such inconvenience.
"We had a couple of people watching him, and they swore he never left the hotel all night."
Playing a hunch: "What did the hotel say?"
Turner looked at me accusingly. "The hotel said he never checked in that night."
We locked stares. I broke contact first. I said, "KGB?"
Not SDECE, the French are friendlies, and not the Chinese, either--they don"t have angels, and since the Coming they mainly stick to themselves.
Turner smiled. The owl shaking its wings. "We were hoping you could find that out for us."
They were making every effort to put me at ease, and Paris, for Christ"s sake, that was almost home ground, and a part of you thinking maybe this one will be a breeze--which is when you cross that line, the one that keeps you alive. Keep thinking like that and the next thing is your brain is splattered on a pavement, a rifle shot hitting home, just like they did to Bergman, Bergman in Barcelona with the shorts and the beach hat and the funny sungla.s.ses, Bergman because he thought, this one"s going to be easy.
"You"ll be doing us a favour," Turner said, "Paris, you"ll be there in half a day, root round the city for a bit, see if you can dig up Eldershott from wherever he got himself to, get back." He shrugged again, offered me half a smile like a sliver of ice. "You could turn it down, of course."
Of course I could turn it down. We can always turn down the mission, and he"d only mentioned it to see if I"d take the bait, by offering me an exit line on what he tried so hard to describe as a routine mission. Only you didn"t just lose your own people on your home turf, and I knew that, and he knew that I knew.
And I didn"t care. It was a mission, and I was going to take it. Just like he knew I would.
"Paris?" I said. Fleeting thought: mussels in Bastille, red wine in Montmartre...
Turner nodded encouragingly. "Think of it as a holiday."
...and Metatron in Notre Dame, I thought, and a shudder ran through me.
Holiday my a.r.s.e.
Chapter 3.