Part 4 (1/2)

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 s.h.i.+mmer 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.