Part 3 (1/2)

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 flus.h.i.+ng 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 smas.h.i.+ng 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 brus.h.i.+ng 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?”