I saw him through the bars, but he wasn’t looking my way; in fact, he wasn’t looking anywhere but right ahead, and he was in a hurry.
There were no guards, only a small unmarked door that led outside, and he got into the driver’s seat of a car that was parked there.
Eldershott, it appeared, enjoyed quite a few unusual freedoms as a prisoner of Lubyanka.
My money and papers were still in the guards’ possession. It seemed that, when they’d dragged me in, they hadn’t expected me to claim them back.
They were right, though for the wrong reason.
I only had to walk a short distance to get a cab, and he was almost out of sight by then, so I asked the driver to step on it and she did, not saying a thing.
“He owes me money,” I said, which seemed to merely confirm her suspicions, so that she slowly nodded.
It was crunch time, bring him in before he gets away, but I was beginning to think Control weren’t that interested in that, perhaps, as much as in where he would go next, since everywhere he was, it seemed, Archangels died.
Which went for me as well. It wasn’t a thought I liked to contemplate.
He got out at Yaroslavski train station. I followed him to the cashier, the one that handled foreign visitors, and heard him get a ticket on train number four, for its entire journey, no stops, second class.
I bought a second class ticket to Ekaterinburg from the Russian counter, handing over the money in roubles. It would take me half of the way on the same train, and then....
“It’s me.”
No clicks on the phone, no little interruptions in the line, no static electricity in the background.
“Don’t worry, it’s safe.” And, “Have you got him?”
“Yes.”
“Have you made contact?”
“Not yet.”
“Good. Where are you now?”
“Getting on a train that’s going to Beijing.”
That seemed to throw him back a bit, but he soon returned with, “What do you need?”
Good man.
I told him what I wanted and could almost hear Seago nodding on the other side of the line, and he said, “Carry a copy of Pravda when you go onto the platform and leave it somewhere visible. You will be approached at Ekaterinburg.”
Click.
It was as hot on the train as it was cold outside; there was a samovar in the corner at the edge of the corridor, and a small wood fire burning underneath, heating up the water.
The cabin was empty, and I put down the small bag of necessities I’d bought at the station and sat down, incredibly weary, and closed my eyes, listening for the shrill cry of the engine and the rhythmic motion of the wheels as they began to move. Eldershott was in the same car, two cabins down; I waited until the train was in motion before walking past his cabin, and he was in, and there was nowhere to go; I intended to keep an eye on him, but right now I was simply too tired. I returned to my cabin, climbed up to the top bunk, stretched out, and slept.
My dreams were troubled, and took me back to Lubyanka, to the dark, small cell and the dark angel, Azrael, and that terrible voice saying, but I have.
I felt a soft hand caressing my neck, then moving down, and somehow I was freed of the shackles. I stood up and turned slowly, and faced Sophie Stockard.
Sophie Stockard: grey eyes like the calm before a storm, set like stones into a heart-shaped face devoid of all colour. Petite build, but muscular, which must have come from the dancing.
She was dressed in a simple shift, grey and featureless, and her arms were bare and as pale as her face.
“Where is my Johnny?” it was the dancer Sophie speaking, the one I had begun to suspect was hidden inside, but she was hushed by the other.
Azrael, she said, and there was a tone of amused malevolence in her voice. How good to see you again.
I looked at the angel, and that strange distortion of my sight began again, so that the cell seemed to stretch into a long, dark tube or corridor, Azrael standing at its end, unmoving and still.
Have you nothing to say for yourself? Sophie enquired with the same malevolent laughter. She began advancing down the corridor, and its walls pulsed and shifted as if they were somehow alive. Nothing to justify to me, to explain, to plead?
There was silence from the Archangel.
My poor, poor Azrael, said that terrible voice, as Sophie started to close the distance between she and the angel, her thin body seeming to grow as it moved further away.
Then the angel attacked.
Azrael’s dark body suddenly bloomed, those great black wings opening to their full span, and he flew at Sophie like a desperate animal, hands outstretched for her neck.
She hit him, her small fist connecting with his face with the impact of a rock thrown from a catapult, slamming him back against the wall, but Azrael recovered, lifted a wing and sliced, and the tip of those shimmering feathers cut through Sophie’s arm.
Droplets of bright red blood splattered the wall like tiny diamonds.
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 butterfly, 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 shimmer 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 bloody 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.