“You are a brave woman.”
He had a Russian accent, but the words were English and clearly pronounced. He sat by my bed with a mug of steaming tea in his left hand. His right arm was missing.
By the window, Seago shot him a warning glance. “No.”
“No what?” I said, my lips dry and my mouth tasting as if frogs had been mating inside it.
Seago ignored me. “Enough. I’m taking her out. We’ll send in someone else. Thornton and Kurt are waiting in Beijing.”
“No.” the Russian drank noisily from his mug, and I was getting pissed off at being ignored like this. “She is important. Like it or not, but she is linked to the nodus. It was she who killed Raphael, and how many people do you know who’ve killed an angel and are still alive?”
“She is not capable of continuing the mission.” Seago’s mouth was a thinly-drawn line in an angry face. He looked fatigued, and his voice was rough with cigarette smoke.
I tried to sit up and succeeded, though my vision clouded for a minute and I had to breathe hard before it abated.
At least I had their attention now.
“Where,” I said carefully, “am I?”
The Russian and Seago again exchanged glances.
“Welcome to Novosibirsk,” the Russian said finally. “I hope your journey was as pleasant as could be desired?”
I didn’t appreciate the attempt at a joke. “And who the hell are you?”
But memory came flooding back even as he spoke, and I remembered the arm that was no longer there, and knew where it had been lost.
“Colonel Sergei Abramovich, Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti at your service.”
Abramovich. KGB. The man they called The Hunter. His pursuit of escaped Nazis was legendary, as was their eventual fate. Abramovich was of the shoot first, ask later school of spying. The highest ranking Jew in the Directorate, he’d lost his arm capturing Eichmann in the jungles of Borneo in ’59.
“I thought you were dead.”
“No, just busy.”
He must have been over seventy, though you couldn’t tell that by looking at him.
They were both looking at me now, and I had to think fast because this changed the picture and I didn’t understand it. I was shot and I should have been in police custody now, if not KGB, and I wasn’t, at least not quite. I had Seago for local Control and he seemed comfortable enough in Abramovich’s presence, and that worried me because we’re not exactly buddies with the Russians and this had to be serious if they were somehow cooperating. So, instead of asking questions, I swung myself out of bed and stood up, shaking, and went to the bathroom where I was sick.
I had a quick shower and put on clothes that were waiting for me there, and when I got out I felt better, and I helped myself to a mug of tea from the samovar in the room.
“Brief me.”
They exchanged that look again but then Abramovich nodded and Seago said carefully, “Someone assassinated Behemoth at St. Paul’s and the Prime Minister is highly strung--”
I looked at him and he looked back, and he said, “He’s threatening to push the button, and the Russians are doing the same.”
I nodded. I said, “How?” meaning Behemoth, and he understood that and said, “We don’t know. There was a five-minute memory blackout in a mile-wide radius around the cathedral and now there’s no Behemoth and no St. Paul’s either.”
I closed my eyes, and an image came into my head, unbidden: Sophie Stockard--in that loose hospital nightgown and bare feet, and that inhuman voice coming out of that human mouth--walking up to the cathedral. Somehow, though, I didn’t understand how; I could see her, unhurried, calm, the grey eyes cold, bare feet over bare stone and the voice saying ashes to ashes, dust to dust, as Behemoth was reduced to nothing and was gone.
“Killarney? Killarney!”
Seago was shaking me, and I snapped up and said, “I know who did this,” but it didn’t seem to register, and they exchanged that look again, and I knew they were still arguing about me and I was going to have to put a stop to it there and then.
“I’m fine,” I said. “And I’m going to finish this.” I let that sink in, then added, “Now explain to me what the KGB is doing here, and in God’s name tell me you didn’t lose Eldershott.”
“Not the KGB, per se,” Abramovich said with a slight apologetic air, “I’m afraid my comrades in the service are less willing to consider all the relevant factors than I am. I was able to pull enough muscle to get you off that train and get you here, but I’m afraid once you leave this room, you’re on your own.”
“Eldershott got off at Novosibirsk,” Seago added. He was looking out of the window again as if searching for something in the pale greyness outside, something he’d lost long ago and still couldn’t find. “He wasn’t going to Beijing, Killarney. He was coming straight here, and he was picked up at the station by some old friends of Colonel Abramovich.”
A look of pure, unrestrained hatred flashed over Abramovich’s face for the briefest part of a second before his tight smile returned. But the hate remained in his eyes. I didn’t think it would ever leave them. “I regret to say my government was more tolerant of the Nazis than I first thought. At least, some Nazis. As it’s turned out, they brought quite a few of them back after the war.”
“So did the Americans,” Seago pointed out.
I remembered that. I said, “Scientists?”
Seago nodded. “Mainly. It seems friend Eldershott is quite chummy with them.”
“I don’t understand.”
Seago turned from the window. Whatever he was looking for out there, he still couldn’t find it. He had the look of a man who knew he never would. “I’m not sure we do, either. Eldershott was clean.”
I waited him out.
“We had him vetted,” he said. “At intervals. Standard procedure. He was clean.”
“Until Paris, then,” I said.
“Yes.” He sighed. “The most likely explanation is that they somehow turned him when he was in Paris, but we still don’t know why he’s important to them. He was just a cryptographer.”
“Working on angel-related problems?”
A shrug, conceding the point. The KGB man didn’t let go of his smile. Seago said, “Abramovich couldn’t find out quite what is going on. All we know is that there is a research facility that doesn’t officially exist, about a hundred and fifty miles out of Novosibirsk, and that Eldershott was taken there from the train.”
In the whiteness of the desert of ice, a building.... I shook my head, trying to dispel the sudden dizziness. When I opened my eyes, Seago and Abramovich seemed to have reached a sort of agreement between them.
Abramovich coughed, said “You need to, of course, recuperate from your injuries.” His one remaining hand was stroking a white beard and, apologetically, he said, as Seago nodded like an albatross by the window, “But we’d like you to penetrate that facility. At your earliest convenience, please.”