Part 7 (1/2)

He moved too slowly and besides, I came at him from behind; he didn't have a chance, and I cut his throat with a knife and caught him in my arms as he fell, dropping him gently to the ground.

Red mixed with white and I had a flash of memory, the red swastika tattoo and the wings on each side, promising death.

The research facility was a fortress carved in the ice. Icy turrets and frozen walkways and, behind the walls, the sense of an invisible presence. The beams of powerful searchlights criss-crossed the ice just beyond.

I had come on it almost by accident as if it had sprung, magic-castle-like, out of the ice where, a moment before, nothing had been. There were no fences, no battlements; they wouldn't have been necessary. There was only the castle, solid ice and impregnable to sight, squatting like a malevolent angel sculpted in snow and shadows; what lay behind its walls I could only guess at.

The place had an eerie silence about it, an absence of sound that didn't seem natural even in the midst of this quietude of ice. Consulting my wrist.w.a.tch--I thought it might have stopped at some point during my rush across the ice, but no, the entire journey had taken me less than half the time I had thought it would.

I worried that my speed, too, wasn't entirely natural.

I circled the facility from a safe distance, trying to a.s.sess its security.

Watchtowers, four, one on each corner; searchlights; what looked like identical sets of machine-gun arrays below each tower. Soldiers, indistinct shapes, moving in the dark. There were no obvious openings, but I could see, at the bottom of one tower, slight humps in the ice that suggested hidden guard outposts.

As I circled, the pattern repeated; what entry there was into the castle was likely underground.

I needed to somehow reach those guard posts without being detected, and then, somehow, force my way inside, find Eldershott, abort whatever operation it was the Germans were running there, in the middle of the Siberian desert of ice. There were too many somehows in the equation, too many random elements I couldn't control, and I knew I would simply have to risk it, rely on the organism to keep me alive, to keep me going until I could finish the mission, and hope it would be enough.

It was cold, the ice penetrating through my suit with its dead, cold bony fingers, and I knew I would have to move fast, that staying out here for too long was in itself a death.

And so I did: I moved fast, crawling on the ice towards the castle's walls. My suit blended in with the colour of the snow, as I crawled towards the edifice. I hugged snow and crawled and tried not to think of the pain.

It was only a short distance, really, but when you're on your belly it's different, crawling and knowing those searchlights could find you in a careless second, and that you wouldn't even know it when they did. The sniper's bullets would make sure of that.

I didn't dare stop; I had to keep going until I reached the relative safety of the walls. When I approached close enough for me to hear voices, what I heard wasn't good--the guards spoke German, not Russian--and that most likely meant the Russians had lost control of their own facility. I wondered if they knew it. I wondered if the remains of the Russian guards were buried somewhere in the snow, white bones resting in a sea of white ice. I wondered who was running the facility now, and for what purpose. I wondered what I was doing there, but then let that one go.

The first of them didn't even notice when I cut his throat, he just died, quietly and politely and without making a fuss, but the second turned, gun at the ready and about to shout and raise the alarm, and I threw the knife at him, the blade still wet with his partner's blood, and the knife missed his heart but got the hand holding the gun and he dropped it, and before he could shout for help, I was there with a swivel kick to the head, and a follow up as he fell. I'd been aiming for the throat and, in a moment, he didn't have enough of a windpipe left to breathe with.

The entrance to their post was hidden in the ice; it was a round hole, wide enough, with an iron ladder leading down. I pulled their bodies, one by one, and lay them against the wall and tried to cover them with snow; just enough to make it difficult to detect if you weren't specifically looking for them. Then I climbed down the ladder.

The atmosphere grew warmer as I went down, a hidden air-conditioning unit humming in the background, and when I reached the floor, I took off my gloves and my hat and pocketed the goggles.

It was quiet down there, a featureless corridor of ice leading away towards the facility, and not a person in sight. I guessed they didn't figure on the need for much security past that point, but it still had me worried. They didn't need the kind of security they had, not out here, not even for a nuclear facility, but they still had it.

I came to a three-way intersection and chose the middle path, continuing straight ahead, trying to feel for any gradual changes in the level of the corridor, but it wasn't sloping or climbing. It was a level pa.s.sageway, and there were no doors or windows, and no guards. I began to worry that this, too, was some kind of a trap, a maze of corridors leading nowhere, but then the level of the floor did change and I began moving downwards, deeper into the earth and, as I did, my perception began to change, and I could feel the strangeness I had felt before. It was slowly working its way into my mind.

In my double vision, the corridors a.s.sumed an eerie, ghostly second layer; hazy lines wavered almost beyond sight, resembling the anatomical representation of amputated angels' wings. My heart was beating faster, pus.h.i.+ng the blood around the body as if trying to pump it away, and I tried to calm it but it was no use; it was as if I were being administered adrenaline externally and it was now making its presence felt.

I descended gradually, and as I did the lights became brighter and the corridor expanded, and then it stopped at a small, white door that said, simply, LABORBEREICH, Laboratory Area, and I opened it, and then the screaming started.

Chapter Eighteen.

The cages were made of a strange, transparent material. They were arranged neatly around the room like kitchen utensils.

Inside the cages lay angels--or what remained of them.

The room was filled with cages occupied by angels. Torn wings, bodies convoluted in impossible ways, bloodied scars that ran from a few centimetres to the length of an entire body. Incisions, excisions, mutilations. The angels stared at me through bars, from faces beaten and empty, and their eyes were uncomprehending.

They screamed.

It was as if my presence alone was responsible for such fear in them, such agony that they could not unleash it in any other way. Their screams were terrible skull-piercing protestations of anger, fear and hate; they were both inhuman and awesome, grotesque and horrifying. The sound of their agony made me ill.

I nearly retched, their sound a violent, soul-tearing, penetrating knife, scoring blindly. There was no escaping that sound. I would have retched and stained that spotlessly clean floor if I hadn't spotted a pair of ear m.u.f.flers and reached for them, desperate, and put them on. They had been hanging on a hook above the door.

As soon as I put them on the sound ebbed. The angels continued to scream, but the tonal pain was being filtered out. I took a deep breath. It was a clean, well-lit place full of mutilated angels.

It was difficult to tear myself away from the sight; the once-majestic creatures, so arrogant in their dominance of our world, now crouched like beaten animals behind icy gla.s.s cages. And yet, as I examined them, I began to understand that there was something different about them, something different from the angels I had encountered before.

Perhaps it was simply the fact they were not, like Behemoth or Metatron had been, gigantic and obese. They were human-sized or smaller, but then so had Raphael been, so had the dark angel in Lubyanka.

Their feathers looked dishevelled and worn, and the wingtips less sharp somehow, less of a deadly weapon. Their faces looked less human than I thought they should, the inherent alien nature of them more p.r.o.nounced. I had a strange feeling these angels were unknown, that their names did not appear in any of the lists, but the idea was preposterous; the Coming began and ended after the Second World War, and no new angels had manifested since then, anywhere.

Or so I'd thought.

Cages, benches, and as I went through a door in the wall, an operating theatre. The table was crusted with blood and less easily identifiable body liquids, some congealed into a sort of grey sc.u.m. There were various instruments on display, screens currently turned off, an array of surgical implements, a sink with more blood stains on it, and the ma.s.sive table in the middle like a slab of ice that looked as if whatever patients were brought to lie on it did not get the chance to rise from it again.

It made me feel sick, and I remembered where I had seen things like this before: the German death camps in Poland where the n.a.z.is had experimented on countless victims in the name of science. That's what they looked like: the German laboratories.

There was a second door at the other end of the room and I opened it, glad to discover it led into another corridor, not another butcher's shop. I needed to locate Eldershott, and I needed to know what was being done in this place, or rather, to what purpose it was being done.

Fact: the entire facility was likely German. It looked as if the Russians had bitten off more than they could chew when they brought back n.a.z.i scientists to work for them. That the Americans, the Brits and even the Egyptians had done the same was not a welcome thought.

Fact: they were conducting experiments on angels. On angels. While angels could be killed--for example, human blood caused them damage, at least if delivered in the right way--and there were stories of internal killings, when angels fighting for the same territory might dispose of each other. No-one knew how angels died, or why they died at all. They never discussed much--not where they came from, not G.o.d, nor what their ultimate goal was, or even if they had one.

Fact: someone was killing angels around the world. Archangels.

Fact: they had probably set me up to a.s.sa.s.sinate Raphael.

Hypothesis: the Germans were behind the killings.

Somehow I wasn't convinced. The Germans, or their ODESSA agents, had tried to get rid of me three times already, and failed. Whoever the killer really was, I thought they were actually trying to help me.

It wasn't a comforting thought.

And then, how did Sophie fit into it? And how did Eldershott?

Fact: there was nothing in the briefing about missing angels, and I had to a.s.sume there weren't any.

Fact: I left behind me a room full of caged, broken angels. Unknown angels.