I had to hurry at Omsk station because the train wouldn’t be stopping for very long, and I almost waved the copy of Pravda in the air before dropping it. I stuck to protocol, but it cost me.
The local agent was a short, skinny lad with nervous brown eyes, and I thought, They’re really scratching the bottom of the barrel here, though I could be wrong; you don’t get sent to Siberia unless you can handle it, and there aren’t that many agents who can.
“I need to see Seago,” I said. “Straight away.”
He blinked, and I said, “Did you get that?” my voice rough, and he blinked again and nodded without speaking. The next stop was Barabinsk but it wouldn’t do; it wouldn’t give Seago time to get there, so it had to be Novosibirsk and I had a bad feeling about that.
I had a bad feeling about the entire thing, and I was getting worried about Eldershott. He hadn’t come to the dining cart the next day, and when I’d looked into his cabin he was spewing black blood again, but when I tried to check him over his eyes opened and he pushed me away, not speaking, and wiped his mouth with a handkerchief as if nothing had happened. The handkerchief was stained with old blood.
He looked up at me. “What do you want?” he demanded, then saw my face and stopped still. “What happened to you?”
“I cut myself shaving.”
He didn’t know how to take that, and I looked at the dark blood on his handkerchief, and he followed my gaze and back. “Look, don’t come in here again, all right? I suffer from fatigue, and sometimes I black out.” He could see I didn’t believe him. He was like a dying man saying he’d never felt better.
“It’s nothing serious.”
I nodded, slowly, and it was evident something had shifted in our interaction, that he was wary of me, and that wasn’t good either, because he had no way of knowing who I was unless the opposition agents weren’t there to trail him, they were there to guard him and, if that was the case, he must have been unpleasantly surprised to see me in his cabin.
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 shirts, 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 pisspot 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 mass death occurred. I flicked through the illustrations 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 shit: 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 hell on earth; Metatron sprawling with all his massive bulk inside Notre Dame, where fools came to worship 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 glass hit 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.