Part 9 (1/2)

Stop. Think. Breathe.

Execution time. I was entering the final phase of the operation and I knew it. Whatever plan the n.a.z.is had, they were putting it into operation now.

I had to stop them.

I was free and they didn't know it yet, and it would give me some room to manoeuvre. I had to follow Eldershott; somehow he was the key to all this but, at the same time, I had a score to settle, a very personal score with an elderly German scientist who should have been dead long ago.

I was going to help him on that road.

I tested my footing, performed a pirouette, didn't fall over. Decided it would have to do. I still had my suit on and that was good, but I needed weapons.

It turned out there were some in the other room.

I entered the lab area again; all around me broken angels cried through bars of ice. I didn't know what they could do; I didn't know if they were even capable of freedom, but they were my best chance and I took it. I went back to the operating room and grabbed some of Mengele's toys and brought them back with me.

A blowtorch. Good. The thought that he'd intended to use it on me just notched up another point on the score board. For now, I turned the blowtorch onto full power and began cutting the bars.

They steamed and broke, a strange material that was neither ice nor gla.s.s, and the angels stopped keening and stared at me with unreadable eyes through the broken bars of their cages.

”Come on!” I said. And ”Shoo!” I waved my hands at them, feeling somewhat at a loss.

Slowly, they began to stagger out of the cages, and I could see for the first time how hurt they were. Scars covered their bodies, oozing puss that dried uneasily in a cornucopia of colours; some had only half a wing or none at all, and ugly wounds sprouted from their shoulder blades; others had eyes missing, or ears. They looked like naked pieces of flesh at a butcher's shop.

I hoped they'd live. I hoped they would provide the diversion I needed, if one was still needed. At least they would add to the general mayhem. I could hear guns being fired in the distance, and screams, some of them human.

I kept the torch and left the angels. As I stepped into the corridor beyond the torture chamber, two soldiers stumbled into my path; they didn't even acknowledge my presence but kept on running, looking back in fear.

I headed in that direction. The direction of the screams.

The screaming intensified the further I moved; at last I reached a wide, circular hall and stopped, holding onto the blowtorch like a promise. The scene in the hall permeated my senses slowly, and then its full meaning finally sank in.

Chapter Twenty-Three.

The thing that was Sophie Stockard stood in the centre of the room, perfectly motionless. She looked like a figurine carved out of driftwood, a still and fragile thing in the middle of chaos.

Filling my vision was the structure. Crude swastikas were carved into it, and angels' wings; it was a circle of strange metal, and I should have been able to see through it to the wall behind but I couldn't. Instead, the air inside the circle vibrated and hummed, acting at times like a mirror, at others, like opaque gla.s.s. Rows of machinery were lined up on each side of the structure; Sophie faced the humming circle, and opposite her was Mengele.

He was holding a gun to Eldershott's head.

As I approached them, Sophie's head swivelled towards me and that horrible voice said, It is time. It was the voice I had heard in Paris when Metatron had died, the same as I'd heard in Lubyanka; the same, I was beginning to realise, as I'd heard in my dreams; the voice of the giant in the land of the angels.

And out of the same mouth came Sophie Stockard's own voice, piercing through the noise--”Help him! He mustn't die!”

Whatever Sophie had been doing had momentarily stopped, it seemed. Fallen blocks of ice and broken, smoking machinery paid witness to the powers she had unleashed.

There were men in smocks working on the machines, and more of the identical blond soldiers watching them, guns at the ready. The air in the giant mirror hummed and twisted in impossible ways.

”One more move from you and he's dead,” Mengele said. His voice carried in a suddenly silent hall.

He pushed Eldershott towards the bank of machines. The gun kept pointing at Eldershott's head. Mengele had surgeon's hands. They remained steady. ”You have to finish what you've started, Dr Eldershott. Please, you must open the gateway.” Behind him, soldiers began to stream into the room in silence, row upon row of blond, large men in uniforms on which the swastika and wings were clearly displayed.

Mengele's face twisted in sudden hatred. ”How many years?” he shouted at the unmoving Sophie. ”How many years since you brought your own petty war into ours? For years my people have worked to create a new, better world--before your creatures came. Your fallen angels. It is you who are responsible for the defeat we suffered, and it is you who will now pay the price.'

Sophie's face underwent a strange transformation as if two opposing forces were battling inside her, but neither of them seemed inclined to talk just then.

Mengele kept ranting. ”You thought you could dump your losers on us, that you could carry on living in savagery with no care in the world. How long has it been since heaven was last challenged?”

He didn't look as if he expected an answer. People like him so seldom did. But he got one.

The war lasted many eons, the terrible voice said through Sophie's lips. Those who challenged us were defeated. It seemed less cruel to send them to a physical prison than to have their essences snuffed out like candles made of human fat.

”I could have taught you a thing or two about that,” Mengele said.

I knew I had to do something quickly. I saw Eldershott begin to rock, Mengele's gun still trained on him. As he rocked harder, he began to sing. It was a high, reedy voice, the sound of a human sacrifice. The notes and the words made no sense, but I could feel their impact, see it in the gathering intensity of the s.h.i.+mmer that was the gate. I looked at Eldershott with new eyes. Thought back-- An academic, really, Turner had said, almost apologetically. Cryptography, though you couldn't tell to look at him, good solid work but he wasn't that important.

Cryptography. That, and an interest in angels. What code had he cracked? What door had he opened in the process?

The answer was before me now.

The gateway s.h.i.+mmered and changed. Beyond it, faintly, I could see pale blue skies, a whitewashed beach and in the distance, as small as birds, far-off angels in flight.

He had discovered the gateway to the world of the angels. Mengele had called it heaven, but I wondered if it really was. And if so, who was the giant who had visited me (or had I visited him?) in my dreams? The one who now seemed to possess Eldershott's girlfriend?

And what were the n.a.z.is planning? An occupation of heaven?

I was about to charge him, terminate Eldershott as I was supposed to, try and end this.

But then the Archangel Raphael materialised in the centre of the hall and everything stopped.

Chapter Twenty-Four.

You, the thing that was Sophie Stockard said.

And, ”Yes,” said Raphael, his voice a frozen river.

By the gate, Eldershott has stopped moving. The image in the gateway began, slowly, to fade.

I should have killed you myself.