Part 5 (2/2)

I waited outside until he left the cabin and locked the door behind him and went to the bathrooms, and then I picked the lock. I had to be quick, but I went through his stuff methodically, searching under the mattresses, behind the loudspeakers that woke us each morning with shrill Russian programmes, finally through the small, dark leather bag that seemed to be his only possession.

Inventory: three pens, two black and one blue; three pairs of underwear, Woolworths; two s.h.i.+rts, Marks and Spencer; four pairs of socks from same, dark green; one book, Military History Since the Coming, the same one he'd had with him in the dining car. I went through the pages more thoroughly than I had been able to before, but there was still nothing hidden inside it.

Nothing else in the bag, nothing in his coat pockets either--and was that a commotion outside, had he tried to open the door and couldn't? I listened carefully but it was nothing, only my imagination playing up, and I knew I had to hurry.

No notes, no writing, nothing to indicate what he was doing here in the middle of Nowhere, Siberia, in the depths of winter.

I'd checked for the little traps we always leave on our stuff when we're in the field--the hair on the spine of a book, the clothes lined up at a specific angle, all the little things we do to see if anyone has been there, but there was none. Eldershott was clean; he wasn't a pro, or else he was so good that I couldn't detect it.

I didn't think he was that good. Whatever he was, he wasn't a field agent.

I made sure everything was left exactly as I'd found it.

Except for the book.

There was nothing to indicate it was anything but a normal book but there was something about it, maybe the way Eldershott tapped his fingers on it the whole time he sat in the dining car; he behaved as if the book was a lifeline and when they do that, it's usually because it is; it has some special significance for them. I thought it was a lifeline and I decided to cut it for him. I wanted him on the defensive; I wanted him nervous now, and I wanted to run him, not be run blindly myself.

I was back in my cabin when he finally got out of the bathroom and, afterwards, he was silent, and I began to read the book carefully, still searching for the hidden codes but I hadn't found them and I was getting edgy because I knew something had to be there.

Omsk, the train silent by the platform, the railway stretching into white fog like a gate into another world.

”Get in touch with Seago,” I said again, wondering where they'd got an agent from in Omsk, ”and tell him to be there at Novosibirsk when the train arrives. Tell him to meet me on the platform. Do you understand? And to be ready to activate whatever p.i.s.spot network we have operating down there.”

He nodded again, and I was getting irritated. It was important he got it right, and I made him repeat it before getting back on the train. There were still eight hours to Novosibirsk, and so I sat back in the cabin and opened Eldershott's little book and read, for the umpteenth time, the history of the world since the Coming of the Angels, back at the end of the Second World War.

It was an old story: how the angels began to materialise above the battlefields and death camps of Europe, appearing wherever blood was spilt and ma.s.s death occurred. I flicked through the ill.u.s.trations again: Azrael manifesting in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Raphael appearing in Normandy, Behemoth--the largest of all the Archangels, who now resided in St. Paul's--come into being in the midst of the Germans' aerial bombardment of London.

It was the same old s.h.i.+t: the end of the war, and the Coming of the Angels. They settled where they wished, and in the intervening years they played their curious games: Raphael and his drug cartel, Mafiya connections and gambling; Azrael in Lubyanka, turning the prison into a miniature h.e.l.l on earth; Metatron sprawling with all his ma.s.sive bulk inside Notre Dame, where fools came to wors.h.i.+p him.

Now all three were dead and I had to find out why.

I had nearly finished reading when the window exploded and a hot searing pain cut through my hand and fragments of broken gla.s.s. .h.i.t my body like tiny razorblades, and through foggy eyes I saw in very slow motion, my blood dripping onto the pages of the book, each drop suspended for a moment in the air, a frozen red ruby, and then everything sped up again and I rushed headlong into a cold ocean of darkness.

Chapter Fourteen.

The sky was the colour of freshly-washed linen and, between the low-lying clouds, angel wings beat a measured tempo.

I stood on a ground as white as the skies, a featureless expanse of paleness devoid of any signs of life. It was a clean place, an empty place, a sterile place, and my blood fell on the ground like the red petals of a flower and stained it like a wound.

I stood and watched angels fly on the high winds.

Angels: wings that stretched six or seven metres from tip to tip, razor-sharp white feathers cutting through the cold, clean air like heated knives. Angels: strangely human heads that swivelled this way and that, with eyes that were fathomless pools of mixed grey and milky whiteness, eyes that I could feel examine me from high up, from the cold clear winds of those enormous skies. Angels: circling on the wind like giant birds, swooping low and coming back up again, majestic and care-free and dangerous birds of prey.

I felt strangely devoid of urgency, as if I had stumbled into a dream world in which dream logic applied, where my wounds were only a detail of the dream; when I looked down, the bleeding had stopped and my injuries seemed to have suddenly disappeared.

I sat down on the ground and pulled my feet up under me, and watched the angels fly in the vast, featureless sky.

I remembered the window breaking, the pain in my hand. Someone must have been shooting at the train, shooting at the window, shooting at me.

And I must have been shot, and this was the result: that I was now hallucinating, that I was dreaming this place.

And yet I could feel the cold. That was real enough, the sort of cold that penetrates into the bone, that makes you want to claw your face to draw warm blood, anything to warm up. It felt very real, that aspect of it. It had the kind of coldness that shakes you awake.

And it had an alien essence about it, a strangeness and a wrongness that said I did not belong there, that this was not my world.

The shadows of the angels flittered on the ground like giant, s.h.i.+fting shapes. As I watched, the shadows congealed and came together into one ma.s.sive blotting of light, and as I sat and waited, a shape slowly appeared, t.i.tanic and yet indistinct, descending from the skies to land before me.

A giant head regarded me from a height. Eyes the size of lakes set in a craggy face, a face like a weathered mountainside where little grew or lived or breathed.

A vast mouth opened, and a sound like a hurricane emanated from it.

It was one word.

Just one word.

It was a name.

Killarney, the voice said.

”What are you?” I said, but even as I spoke, my voice dissipating in the cold, clean air, I knew the answer to my question.

As above, so below.

”I don't understand.”

You will, Killarney, the giant mouth said, and in its voice was the sound of leaves in autumn and the coming of snow. And: Too long have the Fallen escaped me.

”What shall I do?” I felt lost and small, a child amongst giants, seeking answers to questions I didn't even know to ask.

The man you follow is both more and less than a man. The cipher and the key.

The giant moved like an avalanche, and its breath carried down to me and brought with it images: snow and ice and loneliness, and in the whiteness of the desert of ice, a building, human-made and impregnable.

”I don't understand,” I said again.

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