The Watchers (54 page)

‘Try not to hurt yourself, monsieur.’

‘Cheers, and sorry about the water in the face thing. Old tricks being what they are and all.’

‘I thank you for the lesson, monsieur, rest assured I shall not forget it.’

Inspector Gobet signalled Mutt and Jeff to take positions in the hall, he entered the room and saw the damage.

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake. Officer Jannsen, please advise the concierge the windows of room 511 will need repair.’

‘
Oui, Inspecteur
.’

‘And draw another kill kit for yourself from stores.’

‘
Oui, merci
.’

She walked out, closed the door. The Inspector looked at Harper.

‘Not very gallant of you, Mr Harper. She’s not one of us, she’s a human partisan and she’s still in training.’

‘She seems tough enough.’

The Inspector removed his gloves, opened his cashmere coat and loosened his silk scarf, noticed the small mountain of papers and shredded photographs on the floor.

‘You weren’t planning to set fire to the room, were you? Bullets through windows are one thing, burning the Hôtel de la Paix to the ground might cause the locals to wonder just what is going on in their fair canton.’

‘Actually, I was … I don’t know what the hell I was doing, Inspector.’

Harper tossed the SIG and clips on the bed. He tossed the killing knife from hand to hand. The Inspector watched him.

‘You do remember how to use that thing?’

Harper held the killing knife to his eyes. Slightly curved, razor sharp on the long edge, serrated in the curve, tip shaped like a small fishhook. Designed to slice and rip open a throat in one quick move.

‘Sure, like riding a bicycle, isn’t it?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

Harper flipped the knife in the air and caught it by the handle, twisted it over the back of his hand and gripped it again to reverse the angle of attack.

‘Nice to see you in killing form then. We were losing hope you’d come around.’

‘How long was I out?’

‘Ninety years. But we only had six months to reanimate you in this form.’

‘Christ, no wonder I feel hungover as sin.’

‘Indeed. By the way, what was the roughty-toughty with Officer Jannsen?’

‘“Oranges and lemons”, she couldn’t finish it.’

‘Bit of the kettle calling the pot black, isn’t it? You couldn’t finish the same rhyme for Sœur Fabienne. She could have slaughtered you in the gift shop of Lausanne Cathedral.’

‘The little old nun is one of us?’

‘Old tricks being what they are and all, what? It was only the fact you asked for the maquette of the cathedral that spared you.’

‘Lucky me, saved by a cardboard cut-out.’

‘And for future reference we haven’t used the Oranges and Lemons code since the First World War. Sœur Fabienne only used it to try and snap you out of your stupor – to no effect unfortunately.’

‘I didn’t recognize her eyes.’

‘Not surprising, given your state. Retinal luminance recognition should return within the next forty-eight hours.’

‘Right.’ Harper held up his hand. He stared at it as if examining it. ‘And who’s this?’

‘British forces captain of the Special Reconnaissance Regiment. He was lost in a tribal region of Pakistan six months ago. He’d been captured by Taliban fighters and tortured for some time before managing to escape. His wounds and the exposure killed him. One of our cells snatched the body and got it to London for regenerative stasis. It was in fairly bad shape, I’m afraid. There’s still some rough spots in the lower chest.’

Harper felt the tenderness in his ribs and stomach.

‘Thought I’d fallen over while pissed.’

‘We planted that idea in the hippocampus region of your brain to keep you from asking too many questions. We also did a memory sweep before you took form. You will still sense phantom feelings of the man he was. Very much as the amputee senses the itch of a leg that’s no longer there.’

‘I know the drill, Inspector.’

‘Yes, well, there’s some concern you might find the sensations to be much more acute. London’s never turned around a body so quickly. But it was the form we needed for the mission and we’re under some pressure.’

Harper sat on the bed, rubbed the back of his neck.

‘He didn’t like heights.’

‘
Pardon?
’

‘Him, me. He didn’t like heights. Odd for someone in special ops, but he loved the job. And he loved … his wife, I think.’

‘He was listed, Mr Harper. He was finished with this body.’

‘No jumping the gun then, being as you were under pressure and all?’

‘The devouring of the human souls and theft of their still living forms are the tactics of the enemy, not us.’

Harper looked again at his hand.

‘Did his soul make it?’

‘For the record, Jay Michael Harper was comforted before he died. His soul has already been born into another life.’

The Inspector pulled his cigarette case from his cashmere coat, offered Harper a gold-tipped smoke.

‘More of that fine hand-rolled Moroccan tobacco, Inspector?’

‘Please, take one. An awakening can be something of a jolt. A good strong dose of radiance might be helpful in maintaining balance.’

‘As in keeping my eternal being separate from a dead man named Jay Michael Harper.’

‘That and clearing the cobwebs, what?’

Harper grabbed one and lit up, drew the smoke into his lungs, let it soak into his blood. He sat on the bed, looked down to the shreds of paper and photographs at his feet.

‘One more thing, for the record, Inspector?’

‘If I can.’

‘Alexander Yuriev. Our kind, or human partisan?’

‘Does it matter? Either way, he’s gone for ever.’

‘It matters.’

The Inspector took his own flash fags and lit up.

‘The real Alexander Yuriev drank himself to death shortly after returning to Russia. We’d been tracking him for many years as part of a long-term operation in Moscow.’

‘An operation that went belly-up, I take it, or you wouldn’t have had to pull a rush job with me.’

‘Yes, as a matter of fact. Yuriev and his operating cell of partisans were exposed by a mole in our Paris operation. All our partisans working with Yuriev were slaughtered and their souls fed to the devourers.’

‘You say “devourers” as if I’m missing something, Inspector.’

‘Since you were last here, the enemy has perfected the manipulation of half-breed DNA. What was once a mutation has become a swarm, following fast at the enemy’s heels, waiting to dine at the table of mass death.’

‘For they covered the face of the whole earth, so that the land was darkened; and they did eat every herb of the land.’

‘Indeed, Mister Harper. Except these monsters, unlike the locusts of Moses, devour the chemical substance of the human soul.’

Harper drew at his fag, remembering something from somewhere. History Channel, episodes on WW1 maybe. No, he’d seen it himself. He could still smell it. He’d been there. Lacerated fields where only death lived among the blackened stumps of trees and barbed wire and shell holes filled with bloodstained water. Slogging through fields of mass death, hunting down the devourers of souls. All the time hearing the cries of the dying ones begging to be saved.
What was once a mutation has become a swarm, bloody Christ
. The Inspector’s voice dragged Harper back to now.

‘Mister Harper?’

‘Yes, sir, I’m with you. Yuriev’s partisans were slaughtered in Moscow.’

‘His last message to us was that he’d make a dead drop at Lausanne Cathedral. That was twenty years ago.’

‘He knew the bad guys were after him. He went underground.’

‘Twenty years’ worth of deep, Mr Harper. Not once coming in from the cold for regenerative stasis, not once making contact with a partisan. The weight of his form must have crushed down on his being with excruciating pain. It was a rather remarkable feat that he found the strength to complete his mission. We had hoped you might bring him in, but Komarovsky and his half-breeds got to him first.’

Harper inhaled from the fag. The Inspector was right, a dose of radiance was swell for clearing the cobwebs. He looked down to the shredded papers at his feet. Yuriev’s eyes were still staring at him. Christ, Harper thought.
There’s only a handful of our kind left in this place
. Battle buddies from the time the cries of men reached the heavens, on a mission to save paradise from the bad guys. You were his last chance, and you let him down.

‘I should’ve been bloody faster off the mark, I might’ve saved him.’

‘Those are the phantoms of your form speaking, Mr Harper. I suggest you ignore them.’

‘He dropped that formula in my lap. If I’d been even half awake I would’ve known it was the enemy’s breeding formula, not some bloody performance-enhancing drug. He was begging me to recognize who he was … what he was.’

‘Mr Harper, if you remember, Yuriev didn’t drop the formula in your lap, I did. In the end the state of Yuriev’s being was all but lost, he could no longer separate his being from his human form. And every human partisan in Europe was trying to save him, that
is
their job, isn’t it? Fight with us, save
us
if they can. And they have, through the ages. But the sad fact is Yuriev was already dead but for the beating of his heart. Indeed, he had become what men call a paranoid schizophrenic.’

‘All the more reason to save him.’

‘Yes, well, in our line of work the same orders stand when it comes to saving anyone, or anything. It’s not our job. Our job is the mission. Are we clear?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Now, time is not on our side. Are you feeling reasonably up to speed?’

‘Monsieur Gabriel seems to have done the trick. And you did have me watching History Channel 24/7 for, what was it, six months? Clever the whole telly thing, communications embedded in the pictures.’

‘It’s proven somewhat more effective than the deciphering of nursery rhymes. Shall we begin the briefing and mission profile?’

Harper took another hit off his smoke. Radiance seeping deeper, the tumblers in his brain spinning again, another safe cracking open and a rush of light to the brain.
Ab uno disce omnes
…

‘Go ahead.’

The Inspector took a sizeable draw from his own smoke.

‘In the late 1950s, a half-breed rose to prominence as a member of the Soviet Politburo, ending up as the Minister of Public Construction. His primary work was the management of urban prisons and slave labour camps in Siberia. However, we learned of a plan within his ministry codenamed Firelight. The plan involved the rebuilding of Christ the Saviour Cathedral along the Moscow River just outside the Kremlin walls. It was to be an exact replica of the original, built on the very same site.’

Harper’s mind flashed through
Great Cathedrals of the World
on History Channel. Built in the late nineteenth century to commemorate Mother Russia’s victory over Napoleon. One of the largest cathedrals in the world till Comrade Stalin blew it to hell in 1931.

‘Bit odd in the mother ship of the Communist state, particularly as the Commies destroyed it.’

‘Precisely the thing that caught our attention. Obviously, the cathedral couldn’t be built under Communism, so the enemy had to bide its time until they could engineer the proper political climate. That time came with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and a new enemy cell emerged posing as a group of Russian businessmen.’

‘Enter Komarovsky.’

‘Indeed. He and his half-breeds flourished in the corrupt climate of the new Russia through a series of shell companies. He managed to gain control of the assets of the state-owned construction company outright. He then secured the contract for the excavations of the new cathedral. We activated Yuriev and, using his status as former hero of the Soviet Union, he secured a job as a labourer when the project broke ground. The excavation of the site went slowly and was often delayed due to mysterious equipment malfunctions.’

Harper drew from his smoke.

‘Let me guess, they were searching for something in the original cathedral foundations.’

‘A bit deeper than that. A tunnel, hand-cut, two and a half kilometres deep, leading to a cave deep beneath the Moscow River. It was in the cave Yuriev found the object he carried to Lausanne.’

‘What was it?’

‘I couldn’t tell you.’

‘Couldn’t or won’t?’

‘Same thing in the end, isn’t it?’

‘Fine, but the foundations of Christ the Saviour were built in 1839. The locals didn’t have the technology to dig a tunnel like that till the twentieth century. When was it built?’

‘Well spotted, Mr Harper. It was dug long before the dawn of man, long before our kind were sent here.’

‘How long before?’

‘Yuriev ran carbon-dating tests. It was built in the Miocene epoch, seven million years ago.’

Harper waited for the Inspector to spill with the rest. When he didn’t, Harper’s mind sorted through another episode of History Channel,
The Dawn of Man
.

‘The time of
Homo ergaster
. Humanoids became bipeds, learned to control fire and file stones into hand axes. Christ, they must have found the reason man evolved—’

‘At this point, I give you an official caution, Mr Harper. You are not to speculate on what the enemy may have found. Your mission is quite specific.’

‘You’re not going to tell me what it is.’

‘In truth, we don’t even know what it is. We only know Yuriev got it before the enemy and he sacrificed the eternity of his being to keep it from them.’

‘So where is this thing, whatever it is, Yuriev lifted from Moscow?’

‘You’re not cleared to know that information, I’m afraid.’

‘Not cleared to know what it is or where it is. So how do I bloody find it?’

‘You don’t find it. You were never meant to find it.’

‘Then what the hell am I doing here?’

‘You’re a warrior, Mr Harper, a killer. You know what you’re here to do. Leave the finding to us.’

Harper looked at the killing knife in his hand. Something didn’t feel right. Phantoms of his form rising maybe. He forced them down.