“Two pieces of luggage are permanently lost.”
I was standing by the public phones, close to the Shakespeare and Co bookshop, looking over at Notre Dame. The place had an abandoned aura, the charm of the Archangel banished. It felt human again.
I didn’t bother with a cipher, and one public phone is the same as the next. It was as secure as anything else right then and I was in a hurry.
“I am terribly sad to hear of your trouble.” It was Berlyne again, on duty in the communications room. “How may we compensate you?”
Two pieces of luggage: a dancer and a bartender. “Oh,” I said, as if the thought has just struck me, “there was a third piece of luggage I lost recently. It was very precious. Heavenly.”
And an Archangel. Paris was yet again without a Presence.
“I see.”
“I want a representative of the company to meet me in person,” I said. “As soon as possible.”
It took him quite a while to get back to me. In the square in front of the cathedral there was a crowd, held back less by police tape and more by several large policemen. I wondered how they were going to conduct this particular investigation.
“Tomorrow morning.” he said.
“Now look--” I started, but he interrupted me to give me an address. “You can stay there tonight, if you like. On the company expense. We hope you accept it as partial compensation for your troubles.”
He hung up.
I got a cab. Someone would have to inform Avis where I’d left the car and arrange for it to be returned. Right now, it seemed the safest bet for Anna Krojer to disappear.
The address I was given turned out to be a Moroccan restaurant near the Gare du Nord. As I went through the doors the smell of cooking hit me, and I realised how hungry I was, and how tired.
The organism needed to recharge, demanded fuel.
A short, olive-skinned man with a bald patch hurried towards me with open arms. “Mademoiselle! Please, come in, sit, please!” He ushered me to a corner table and I sat down, facing the door.
“My eldest son’s wife.” He said it with another big show of hands, speaking to the diners who were paying him no attention.
“Mohammed Giza,” he said in a low voice, shaking my hand. “Don’t worry, you’re safe here.”
“Could I have some food?”
He must have seen how hungry I was. “Of course.”
In moments, a large tray of couscous with roast lamb and a thick vegetable stew was deposited on my table, together with a carafe of water.
Recharging. I concentrated on the taste of the food, drank glasses of water.
They brought me another carafe, and more lamb.
When I felt as if I were human again I sat back, and after a couple of minutes a small pot of thick, dark coffee was put in front of me, together with a plate of honeyed pastry.
I chewed on the sweet, flaking pastry and drank coffee and felt my mind return to something resembling functionality.
I had a cryptographer missing. I had his girlfriend, who seemed to have strange powers and two minds, and who was also, though more recently, missing. Finally, I had a dead Archangel--the second in as many months.
Could they be linked? Could my assassination of Raphael have played a part, however remotely, in Metatron’s killing?
I didn’t like the picture I was coming up with. I thought, They’d better send me someone I can work with; not Reynolds, he could get me killed; not Ramsey--he once let an executive fall to the Russians because he wanted to feed them misinformation--not Feltham, she has more dead Executives than a barrel of puppies. But there was nothing to gain by sitting there worrying about it, so I just sipped my coffee and watched the door and tried to put the pieces together and couldn’t.
I slept badly that night. Visions of the Archangels kept plaguing my dreams. Raphael’s coarse, bloated figure as the blood hit it and consumed it; the monstrosity that was Metatron, shuddering in its body of ancient bricks, the way his huge form ceased to move, his limbs hanging limply from the broken windows.
And through it all, the face of Eldershott swam in my mind, the moustache and glasses hiding an unreadable expression. Eldershott, and, as I dreamt, those other eyes returned to haunt me, Sophie’s grey, calm eyes and the inhuman voice that kept calling my name, Killarney, Killarney, Killarney....
“Killarney!”
Darkness. Pale light trying to edge in through the narrow windows. Foggy outside. The smell of raw garlic.
Seago was leaning against the door, hands folded on his chest like a neatly ironed shirt. Seago. I’d worked with him in Lebanon and the Gambia, and though he was a miserable bastard, he knew what he was doing, and he always got you out alive. If he could. He’d lost Pickin in the Iran thing, but everyone knew Pickin was already on his last leg, and he lost it when the Savak men came for him that final time. Went out in style, though--they said the explosion had demolished an entire street, though I suspect that was an exaggeration.
“When did you get here?”
Seago took out a packet of cigarettes, Gauloises, how’s that for a bit of local colour? Not that Seago had any colour; he was as pale as a chalk mine, and as deep.
“Three days ago.”
“What?” He’s been here longer than I have. My suspicions were confirmed: they’d been building up to this for a long time and played me for the part, running me all the way, Turner, with his cold blood and his shrug that said, You could say no, knowing I wouldn’t.
Seago saw my expression. “Didn’t they tell you I was going to be your controller? I don’t know what Turner was thinking.”
I wondered if he was telling me the truth, but I let it pass. “Seago,” I said, “go and light that cigarette outside. I’ll meet you downstairs in five minutes.”
He did, and I got up, went for a pee, brushed my teeth, got dressed, did all the normal things you do when you get up, regardless of espionage, the Cold War or Archangels.
It was a safe house, at least for now.
When I got downstairs, the restaurant was closed. Seago sat alone at a corner table, smoking. The stub of one cigarette was already in the ashtray.
“Coffee?” He didn’t wait for an answer but poured the dark liquid into a small china cup and another helping into his own.
I sat opposite him, stretching out my legs. When I drank, the coffee rushed through my system, the organism gearing up, charged and ready to fight again. It felt good.
“Look, Killarney,” Seago said, “I want you to know I didn’t have anything to do with not briefing you beforehand. In fact, I think it was irresponsible. Turner assured me they had you for this mission over two weeks ago.”
That was Seago, and I was grateful I had someone in local Control who I could trust to tell me the truth, if not all of it.
“So what’s going on, Seago? Last night I saw an Archangel die, not to mention two people, one of whom I killed. This isn’t a spy game, this is a God-damned full-on military assault.”
“Killarney.” He sipped his coffee. Instead of an answer, he offered me a question. “How do you think you got out of Warsaw?”
The same question had been bothering me. I levelled a stare at him. He looked back without any expression, ticked points on his fingers. “There was no-one guarding Raphael,” he said. “Our mole planted the gun under the pillow without being detected. The Stasi didn’t get you. And you and Ford had a clear run all the way home. Convenient?”
“Lucky,” I said--admitted. Knowing there was no such thing as luck in this game.
He nodded. “It was a perfect mission. Perfectly planned, perfectly executed.” He offered me a smile around his cigarette. “But there’s no such thing as a perfect mission.”
“So what was it?” I said. I was tired of sparring, and of partial truths, and we always get that way, deep into a mission and we’re feeling our way in the dark. “You tell me.”
“I don’t know,” he said. He also sounded tired. “It’s one of the things we’re trying to find out. We think someone is arranging the assassinations of the Archangels. We suspect they used the Bureau to do that with the Raphael killing, and we have to ask ourselves: who has the power to do something like that?” He lit another cigarette, a third, and the earlier one was still burning. I suddenly realised how weary he was, and how frightened Whitehall must be to find the opposition--whoever they were--had the power to reach so closely into our most secret places.
“You need to find Eldershott. He was one of our cryptographers with an interest in angels. He specialised in the field of angelic communication. Highly specialised.” If it was a bad pun he didn’t let on. “And now he’s gone, and we’ve killed Raphael and someone killed Metatron, and now both the East and the West are one Archangel down and, as you said, Killareny, this isn’t a cold war anymore; it’s heating up and we have to stop it.”
It was a long speech for him and it put me in the picture as much as they wanted to, which meant there were a hell of a lot of questions I didn’t have answers for.
“Now I’d like your report.”
I told Seago everything, about finding Sophie and feeling Metatron die. He grimaced at that.
“You weren’t the only one to feel it,” he said. “I was in Bastille when it happened, like a tremor in the earth that you felt in your head. It was madness, after that.”
I waited him out. I drank more coffee. The empty restaurant was quiet.
“We need you to leave Paris,” he said at last. “We don’t know who’s behind this but let’s put it this way, there can’t be too many powers with the ability to pull it off.”
The Americans were out. They’d meddled as much as they could in Europe, but they had a Church-led government and they wouldn’t dare touch an angel, let alone an Archangel. If anything, they’d be worried someone was going to make an attempt on one of their own. The Chinese--possibly, there were no angels in China that we knew about, and they didn’t like the Russians; but I doubted they had the kind of muscle to pull this off. It could have been another Archangel, but they have never, in all the thirty-five years since the Coming, killed one of their own. Humans, yes, when the need arose, but never each other.
“You suspect the Russians?”
He spoke carefully. “We think they might be behind this. Eldershott was approached by an agent of the KGB’s Fourth Directorate the month before he disappeared.”
Shit.
Angels were bad but the Fourth Directorate were worse, and I knew where this was heading even before he said it, and I cursed him inside, thinking, This is where it really gets hard.
They were sending me to Moscow.