Sophie barked laughter and her arm came up, no longer bleeding, the cut disappearing as I watched, and she grabbed the angel"s wing the way a child might the wing of a b.u.t.terfly, with a detached interest, and dangled him up in the air. The great angel, suspended by a child"s hand.
The featureless bottom of the corridor started to shimmer and a hole of pure light began to grow, widening under the angel"s suspended form. His bright eyes looked down, then moved up and gazed straight into Sophie"s grey ones.
"One for sorrow," said Sophie, the other Sophie, in a numb, uneven voice. "Two for joy."
And three for a girl, the inhuman voice added, and Sophie took the angel and folded him, like a piece of origami, compacting the angel into a neat, small black cube.
She looked back at me and she was smiling, and there was nothing innocent or angelic or wholesome about that smile, and her eyes were pools in which I found myself drowning.
Then she dropped Azrael into the opening in the floor and the dark angel fell like a crumpled sheet of paper drifting down until it touched the light and brightness flared, and the angel was gone and the darkness was gone, and Sophie turned slowly round and said, "Watch my Johnny for me," and the other voice laughed, inhuman and cold, and she disappeared.
"No!"
I opened my eyes to the dim lighting of the cabin, a wide Slavic face peering with concern at me over the bunk. The train moved quietly underneath me.
"Vy chuvstvuete horosho?"
"Thank you, I"m fine," I said, also in Russian, and she let me be.
I sat up, then climbed down from the bunk to sit at the bottom one by the window. It was snowing heavily outside, the snow turning the landscape ghostly and pale and silent, and I tried to bring my breathing under control.
"Chaj?"
She came back into the cabin and I realised I hadn"t even noticed that she"d left, but she had a mug of steaming tea in her hand and so I said, "Spasibo," and accepted it from her.
It was dark and thick and sweet, and it was hot, boiling hot from the samovar in the corridor, and I sipped it gratefully, thinking, This mission isn"t going as well as could be hoped.
The train"s rhythmic motion and the heat of the tea were making me sleepy again; I finished the mug and gave it back to the woman, thanking her again, and climbed back up to the bunk and stretched.
When Sophie had disappeared, the door to the cell had been left open. When I"d gone out, cautiously, I"d found two guards asleep on the hard floor and, as I walked through the compound, I encountered more sleeping bodies. I checked each one, two fingers to test their pulse at the neck, but they were all alive and I wanted to get out of there fast, before they woke up.
I still had to find Eldershott. I didn"t expect to run into him there.
But there he had been, untroubled, it seemed, by anything around him, and I had followed him to the station and now I was on the number four train, direct to Beijing, six nights with almost no stops through Siberia and Mongolia, and it was the height of b.l.o.o.d.y winter.
I worried about what would be waiting at the other end of the journey, but then I thought, Well, hopefully there won"t be any angels there, not where we"re going, and I fell asleep and, if I dreamt, I don"t remember.
Chapter 10.
Seago had said Ekaterinburg, but they already had someone waiting down the line when the train pulled into Perm station at six-twenty in the evening, Moscow time, just under twenty-four hours since I"d left the Russian capital. Snow covered the platform like a sheet of ice and snowflakes rushed in the air and swirled in complex eddies. The grey building was lit, but poorly; there were only two hawkers on the platform, looking shrivelled and cold in oversized coats.
There were few travellers either coming or going. I joined the back of a group of pa.s.sengers going out for a stroll on the platform and bought noodles and peanuts and salami and bread; I didn"t want to show myself in the dining cart yet, my main aim right now was to disappear from view until we reached Ekaterinburg.
I didn"t bother with the Pravda, I didn"t want to make unnecessary contact, but I spotted him as soon as he showed up on the platform.
Una.s.suming. Ginger-haired, moustached Englishman--or possibly a Scot--mid to late forties. Probably an agricultural engineer doing low-level intelligence for MI6, now seconded to the Bureau for the sole purpose of greeting me on the platform.
He kept looking round, no doubt for the Pravda, and I packed up what I"d bought and hurried back onto the train, pa.s.sing by Eldershott"s cabin as I went. He was on the top bunk facing in the direction of travel, and he was reading a book. His cabin-mate was an elderly Mongolian who sat on the lower bunk and sneezed as he pinched snuff from a small bottle between forefinger and thumb and brought it up to his nose.
I went back to my cabin--the Russian woman sharing it with me had got off at one of the small, five-minute stops that were dotted in the snow like the sudden enclaves of naked wood, and I made sure no-one else would be coming in by bribing the babushka whose job it was to keep order in the car and fill up the samovar with water, as well as to keep its fire stoked. The Russian economy, I sometimes suspected, depended entirely on the elderly babushkas and their endless little jobs.
I closed the door and locked it, then opened the bag and took the meagre portions I"d purchased on the platform.
I hadn"t eaten properly since Paris, and I was starving.
I didn"t bother with the pleasantries. I tore a large chunk of bread (and say what you want, the Russians still make the best bread) and cut a large slab of salami and shoved both into my mouth.
I"d filled up the noodle pot with hot water on the way to the cabin, and now I waited for them to cook whilst eating more bread and salami.
I ate the noodles with my fingers, then drank the water like a soup. I felt better. I sat with the door closed as the train rocked away into the endless snow, enjoying the rare interlude this journey had offered. I ate the peanuts. Peanuts have all the nutrients the body needs. Their sh.e.l.ls gathered around me like the remnants of used mortar left behind from a long-ago war.
I had been on the Trans-Siberian once before, fleeing a deadly agent of the KGB"s Fourth Directorate, trying to stay alive and save the doc.u.ments Conroy had managed to get from Star City before they"d found him. Now, I was beginning to feel inexorably lax, as if somehow the greater fear of the Archangels was enough to mute any feeling of immediate danger from their human subordinates. They called it the Great Game, and it was played only partially by humans, and I began to wonder who was playing against whom in this strange new war that was wiping out angels from both East and West.
But for now the game I had to play was patience, and I played it as well as I could as the train moved evenly onwards, through snow blizzards and the coming of the steppes, the landscape through the window looking like a giant white mirror, the air itself composed of slivers of sharp, deadly ice.
Once or twice I thought I saw figures moving in the eddies of snow, pale and beautiful beyond measure, with wings that beat evenly through the storm; but they moved in and out of my perception, an illusion of snowflakes blowing in the wind, and as I fell asleep, still propped against the table with peanut casings all round me, they came and haunted my dreams: angels, melting away like quicksand when I tried to grasp at their true shape, flying and swirling in the white silent storm.
Chapter 11.
"What happened?" There were people shouting around her, and I was already moving away, Pravda under my arm.
"She must have fallen, the poor dear," someone said in English, voice raised in the excitement of the moment. "Imagine it happening when we are on the Trans-Siberian Express, yes dear, that"s right, the Trans-Siberian, this poor woman just fell from the train to the platform, and she almost died! I tell you, I was so frightened for her!" and I thought, I hope she lives, but she won"t be able to talk to anyone any time soon, or mention the Russian-speaking girl who paid her baksheesh on the train and disappeared in Ekaterinburg. It was past midnight, six hours after we"d left Perm.
I bought another Pravda on the train and wasn"t surprised to discover no mention of Azrael"s death, or Metatron"s either. It was obvious to me after being inside Lubyanka that the Russians were just as concerned as we were, and they were better at keeping unwelcome news quiet. Now I let the paper drop onto a bench, where it left a damp impression in the frost.
I walked away from the train, leaving the station, and felt rather than saw her following me under the arches.
I didn"t have a lot of time and, though she was good, she was a local agent, not Bureau, just another agriculturalist or horticulturalist specialist or whatever it is they find to do in their official capacity in those two-horse Siberian towns.
"Have you got everything I asked for?"
Her accent was pure Oxford and colder than the snow. "Yes. Come with me."
She led me across the road into the foyer of a hotel. It looked abandoned. "You have less than half an hour," she said, "so we"d better hurry."
She took me upstairs to a small room--if there were staff at the hotel they were long-asleep at this hour--and brought out the equipment I"d asked for.
I spent the next twenty minutes altering my clothes and my hair, amazed as always by the transformation these small changes could make, but also aware that it wouldn"t help deceive a trained operative.
Or an angel.
"I"ll get rid of your things as soon as you"re gone," she said.
I nodded. "Thanks."
She suddenly smiled. "No worries--it gets a bit boring down here. This is the most exciting thing I"ve had to do since the piping burst six months ago."
"Agriculture?"
"Irrigation. We"re trying to build a model drip network for...oh, forget it."
I smiled. "Got long to go?"
"Six more months. Then somewhere hot, I hope. Africa, or the Middle East."
"Hope they fly by," I said. I picked up the bulky rucksack and adjusted the straps. "Be seeing you."
"Good luck."
She came with me, a few paces behind, back to the station and conferred with a short man standing in the shadows. He nodded twice and, without turning, she waved her hand in the air.
Eldershott was still on board. I couldn"t acknowledge her--for one person to see me was enough, and her lookout made one too many--and I stepped onto the platform.
"h.e.l.lo!" I called in English, and waved. I wore a smile like a new summer dress. "Wait!" and the new concierge, a tall, pale man with a thick dark moustache standing by the folding metal stairs leading into the cabin, looked at me in puzzlement, then waved me in when he saw my ticket.
I had the same cabin, as I"d specified to Seago back in Moscow. Marija Zita got on the train at Yaroslavski train station and got off at Ekaterinburg.
And Janet Gordon, English, twenty-eight, with a short blonde bob and comfortable, expensive hiking gear got on in her place. The only person who would have noticed was gone, and though I felt sorry for it, I knew it was necessary. She was gone and all anyone else had seen, if they"d seen anything at all, was Marija Zita.
I had the cabin to myself; the other three seats-c.u.m-beds were reserved and wouldn"t be claimed. I could trust Seago with that, at least. I spent an hour familiarising myself with the new ident.i.ty before disposing of the dossier, keeping only the new ident.i.ty doc.u.ments. Then I headed to the dining cart.
He was sitting alone, at the furthest table in the corner of the cabin, eating Solyanka soup. The night outside was monochrome: white strips of land glaring in an inky dark. I took the only free table, sitting on the other side of the cabin from him and two tables down.
There were three Mongolians in heavy coats sitting by the door, smoking and drinking vodka and arguing. Next to them, a group of Western European tourists occupied three of the tables. I could hear German, Swedish and Dutch being spoken simultaneously, which would have been nauseating to follow, so I didn"t.
Behind me sat a couple of male backpackers whose gazes I could feel against my back. I"d pegged them down as soon as I"d gone in. Blond, a big build, clean-shaven, they could have been hikers but they looked too clean, too comfortable in their surroundings, and I knew I was going to have to a.s.sess them again, and if they didn"t check out, dispose of them.
"Da?"
"Oh, hi," I said, looking up at the waiter. My voice carried across the car and was noted. "Could I have a soup? I don"t know the name for it, but I had a really lovely soup in Moscow before we left the station, do you know?" Looking at the pockmarked, stoic face hopefully: "Do you speak English?"
Eldershott hadn"t risen to the bait, so I glanced back towards him, a hopeful expression on my face, then rose and went to him. "Excuse me, do you speak English?" I shook his shoulder, pointed down to his soup. To the waiter: "This is it!" Still pointing: "Could you bring me one of these please? How much is it?"
"Odin Solyanka." He noted it in his pad with a sort of grim determination and walked off.
There is a fine line you walk when you a.s.sume an ident.i.ty. It has to be a.s.sumed completely, worn like a second skin, absorbed and displayed to the world without fault. The moment you slip, the moment you fall out of character, the moment suspicion falls is your last. The operation had shifted since Moscow, a.s.sumed a new shape and a new aspect, and I had shifted with it, going into second gear and putting a new play into motion, and I let Killarney fade into the core and let Janet Gordon, loud and charming and naive, a master"s degree in archaeology, never before left England, everything new and wonderful, take over. I needed access to Eldershott, and Janet was desperate for some English conversation to re-live her exciting new experiences.
"What did he say?" I asked Eldershott, still holding him by the shoulder. He looked over at me, eyes narrowed behind unflattering gla.s.ses. It was the first time I"d seen him close and face to face, and I committed him to memory, etching his face, his clothes, his build into my memory.
Eldershott: dark hair and thinning on top, with a bushy moustache that tried to compensate, unsuccessfully, for the high forehead and the weak chin, eyes pale blue and smoky like haze over the North Sea. His fingers were blunt but well-kept, and he had hair growing on his knuckles. He looked at me without expression for a long moment before sighing loudly and saying, "One Solyanka. Solyanka is the name of the soup."
"Thank you."
He shook my hand off his shoulder and returned to his bowl, lifting up a spoon in silent determination, turning his back on me. Hoping I would go away.
I wouldn"t.
Check for weapons: none that I could see, and none on the two blond backpackers who were now obviously checking me whilst trying to look as though they weren"t.
That changed things. I had to think quickly, trying to figure out where they came from. They could have been Russian, but I had a feeling that, whilst Eldershott"s presence in Lubyanka was indeed thanks to the Fourth Directorate, him leaving it wasn"t. We went straight from the prison to the station and got on the train, there was no time for anyone to mount an operation and yet here they were, like two concrete blocks cast in the same mould, two big blond twins, and I knew that sooner or later it would come to a standoff between us.
I still didn"t know enough and I needed the information; I needed to understand Eldershott and who he was running from.
Or where he was running to.
"Are you English?" I tapped him on the shoulder again--Janet Gordon just trying to be friendly. "Do you mind if I sit with you? What"s that that you"re reading?" There was a rhythm to it, a kind of breathless excitement and a propensity for rapid-fire questions that didn"t require immediate answers.
"I really don"t think...." he began, but I was already in motion, sitting opposite him and waving to the waiter to signal my new location--as if he couldn"t tell--all the time keeping up a monologue directed at Eldershott. "Can I see the book? What is it? Oh, it"s old, isn"t it! It"s so lovely!" the last p.r.o.nounced as two separate words, a long accent on love and a slightly shorter one on the suffix.
As I spoke I picked up the book and examined it, running a finger along the pages to see if anything was laid inside the pages, which there wasn"t, and noting the t.i.tle and the name of the author.
Military History since the Coming.
A picture, possibly authentic but more likely a photo-realist later impression, of Allied soldiers dropping their guns on the muddy ground before the Archangel Metatron, as he manifested before them.
"You"re a historian?" My food finally arrived and I thanked the waiter with an awkward "Spasibo" that made Eldershott look at me again, suddenly.
"No," and, "Do you speak Russian?" The eyes narrowed again behind the gla.s.ses like clouds forming over a blue-grey sea.
"A little," I admitted. "My grandmother"s maiden name was Kobach. She often spoke it to me. When I was younger. Do you?"
"What?"
"Speak Russian."
"I speak quite a few languages," he said, stating a fact or trying to impress me, it didn"t matter; what did was that he had taken the bait now and was talking.
He had taken the bait and it was time to leave him to chew on it for a while, so I ignored him and concentrated on the food.
It came with a plate of the dark, sour bread only the Russians could make so well, and I scooped up a spoon of Solyanka--sausages, ham, onions, olives, there was little that didn"t make it into this soup--and I soaked up the sour cream and lemon broth with the rest of the bread and washed it down with water, and when I was done, I signalled the waiter for another.
"Oh, and dva peva!" I called after him.