Cold Warriors (11 page)

"We have to do it now, while his goons are out of the picture."

"He'll have kept some with him," Morgan objected.

"Only a couple," Belle said. "We can handle them."

Tomas saw Morgan shiver, and he couldn't say he liked the thought much himself. He hadn't enjoyed watching what the little girl did to Karamov's man - no one saw another man's secrets being ripped out of him without thinking of his own.

"And after we find Karamov?" Morgan asked.

Tomas shrugged. "We take the book back to the Division."

"Shouldn't we find out more about it first, work out what it says?"

"Karamov -"

"But he's not gonna tell us everything, is he?" Morgan cut across him. He was speaking quickly now, almost stumbling over his words. "It's not like we can get him to translate the whole thing for us, is it? And that's assuming he even knows how. How can we take the book back before we know what it really is? We risked our lives for the fucking thing - don't we deserve to know why?"

"We're not here for our own amusement!" Tomas snapped. "We completed the mission, now we take a bow and go home."

"What's the matter, more than your job's worth?" Morgan snarled. "Listen, if it's too much effort -"

"There's always your German contact, this Anya Friedman," Belle interrupted loudly. "She might have some information for you, right?"

Morgan looked suddenly alarmed. "Shit! Weren't we supposed to meet her an hour ago?"

Anya was still waiting for them when they finally entered the huge, rococo interior of the Café Gerbeaud. Her long red hair flamed a beacon across the room as they squeezed between tables filled with lounging tourists.

Tomas smiled as he approached her, but her sour expression didn't soften even slightly.

"What have you morons been playing at?" she said before they'd even sat down. She was quite a beautiful woman, Tomas thought, a few years younger than him, but her anger made her unattractive.

"And it's lovely to meet you too," Morgan said.

She ignored him. "I want an answer - what the hell did you think you were doing this morning?"

"There was a last-minute change of plan," Tomas said.

"No kidding."

Tomas saw Morgan twitch a smile, then quickly drop it when Anya glared at him.

"We had to act," Tomas said. "We were in danger of losing the... the target object."

Morgan's hands folded reflexively over the waistband of his jeans, where he'd tucked Nicholson's book before they left the labyrinth.

Anya saw the telltale rectangular bulge hidden beneath his t-shirt and frowned. "Did it not occur to any of you amateurs that we might already have Karamov under surveillance? That we might, in fact, be perfectly capable of acquiring the
target object
ourselves at a time and place of our choosing? Maybe somewhere a little safer - and a little less bloody conspicuous!"

Tomas shook his head. "We couldn't take the risk."

"Yes, clearly risk-reduction was a very high priority for you. You alerted Karamov to our presence, scared off his buyer and almost got yourselves killed into the bargain. You couldn't have made more of a mess of this if you'd tried!"

"On the plus side," Morgan said, "we got a free tour of Budapest's premiere subterranean tourist attraction."

Anya's face flushed red with suppressed rage. Tomas knew he should be trying to control Morgan, but a part of him was enjoying watching the young man push the German agent's buttons.

Anya clearly sensed that she was getting nowhere with Tomas and Morgan and turned to Belle instead. "And what," she said, "are
you
doing here?"

"I came to help, Miss Friedman." Belle offered her small hand over the table.

Anya rolled her eyes. "I'm sure you did. I'm sure the CIA are involved in an entirely charitable capacity."

"I've confirmed her role with London," Tomas said. "Giles spoke to Washington and it seems the Yanks have been following the same breadcrumbs we have. They've asked us to pool resources, at least until we locate Karamov's buyer."

Anya shook her head. "I don't trust the CIA. They always have their own agenda."

"I agree," Tomas said. "Which is why I'd rather have her where I can keep an eye on her, than running her own operation and potentially compromising ours."

"Don't mind me," Belle said. "Just pretend I'm not here."

"Look," Morgan said to Anya. "We're here now, and we've got the book - it doesn't really matter how. What can you tell us about it?"

"Book?" Anya said, and Morgan's face fell.

"Later," Tomas insisted, glancing casually round the café, too full of people, far too public for this conversation. "We were considering going back to Karamov, seeing if we can get anything out of him about his buyer. What do you have on him?"

Anya's lips, very wide and red, pulled thin with annoyance. Then she sighed and tossed a thick brown folder on the table. "We've been following Karamov for four months now - on another matter entirely, the bribing of some oil-industry officials - but he's not an easy man to pin down. Nothing definite on his buyer, though we've been tapping every phone number that's registered to him or any of his goons. But see for yourself - it's all in there." She nodded down at the file.

Morgan drew it eagerly towards him.

"My local connection followed Karamov after you left him," Anya said. "He's back at the Gellert for now, a few of his bodyguards with him, but chances are he'll be out of the country by the end of the day. If he heads to Russia, we're in trouble - his power base there is very strong."

"Sorry," Morgan interrupted, pushing his chair back with a dry rasp against the tiled floor. "I need a slash."

Anya shook her head at his departing back. "That's great. Perhaps he'll let us know how it went when he gets back. Tell me, Tomas, when did MI6 start recruiting teenagers?"

"He knows what he's doing," Tomas said, defending his partner on a long-ingrained reflex. But the truth was, Morgan
didn't
know what he was doing, not in this area. They'd told Tomas the younger man was there for any wetwork, and no doubt Morgan was very good at that sort of thing, but that wasn't really the point. Hermetic agents were generally recruited because of their interest in the occult. Richard had been conducting his own research long before he'd come on board, but Morgan seemed to have no affinity for their work at all - a positive dislike of it, in fact. Why had Giles picked him?

Tomas kept his worries to himself, chewing the problem over and finding nothing digestible in it, while Belle and Anya ordered
dobostorte
from their apple-cheeked young waiter.

Five minutes later, the cakes arrived, along with two silver teapots and some delicate china cups with the slightly faded picture of a rose on each of them.

A minute after that, Tomas was still staring at one undrunk, slowly cooling cup of tea. "Where's Morgan gone?" he said.

The weather had finally broken its oppressive heat as grey storm clouds moved in to glower over the city, but Morgan was still drenched with sweat. His heart raced, pounding against his chest with every beat.

He had to get a grip. He knew what he'd just done was extremely stupid. Best case scenario he'd be out of a job - worst case he'd become the Division's next target. But there was no way, just no way, that he was letting this book go before he found out what it meant. If it was written by his real father...

After his adopted mother had shown him his birth certificate, and before that day five weeks later when she'd taken him to the care home and told him he wouldn't be coming back, she'd let him ask her about his real parents.

Dead, she'd told him and he'd felt relieved. At least they didn't give him away because they didn't want him. He'd asked his mum to tell him everything she knew about them, these people he'd never heard of who turned out to be the most important people in his life.

"Your dad was an engineer," she'd said. "With BT, I think."

"And my mum?" he'd asked eagerly, but she'd just shrugged.

Had she been lying, or was she lied to herself? Why had no one ever told him what his father really did? Tomas hadn't said anything about Nicholson having any children. But then he hadn't said very much about him at all. Maybe Tomas had known who Morgan was all along.

Morgan couldn't stop snatching glances behind him to see if Tomas or the other two had followed. But he'd twisted and turned through side street after side street, and unless they already knew where he was going, they'd have a hard time catching up.

He took another look at the sheet of paper he'd lifted from Anya's file. It told him Karamov had made three calls to a Professor Raphael in the Faculty of Ancient Languages at Eotvos Lorand University. Morgan could only see one reason for a man like Karamov to be contacting this Raphael: he had hoped the professor would be able to translate Nicholson's book.

Morgan was hoping the same thing. The tourist map he'd bought from a street-corner vendor told him the Faculty of Ancient Languages was located behind Baha Lujza Square. He walked briskly across the wide space through crowds of locals weaving in and out of its tacky shops and smarter department stores. Most of the faces surrounding him bore the distinctive sharp cheekbones of Eastern Europe and all of them were white. He felt unpleasantly conspicuous.

Finally, on a narrow street behind a bank, he found the faculty. It was a marble-fronted building that might have looked grand if it hadn't been caked in grime, the black residue of the square's gridlocked traffic. A red-faced security guard lounging behind a low table stopped him just inside the entrance.

"I'm here to see Professor Raphael," Morgan told him.

The guard grunted something in Hungarian. Morgan mimed incomprehension and the man sighed and pointed up the stairs to his right, then held up three fingers.

Third floor, Morgan guessed, but when he reached it the place was a warren, narrow green-painted corridors snaking off in every direction. He wandered for a full ten minutes before he found Raphael's door, his name written on a small bronze plaque beneath two others.

Morgan froze, staring at the door. Was he really going to do this? But he'd already stolen the book. Tomas was unlikely to be any less pissed off if he backed out now. He took a deep breath, then knocked.

They'd spent a fruitless half hour hunting for Morgan in the busy streets surrounding the café. It had started to rain while they searched, warm, fat drops of it. When Tomas met up with the others again beside the café's elegant façade, Anya's long red hair was plastered to her scalp, two shades darker than it had been before.

"Well, this just gets better and better," she said grimly.

Even Belle was looking less perky, her white blouse almost see-through with moisture and the shine gone from her black patent shoes. "He seemed like such a nice boy," she said. "What the heck does he think he's doing?"

"Taking it back to Karamov?" Anya suggested.

Tomas shook his head. "He's no traitor. I don't know what he's playing at, but it isn't that."

"I don't care about the purity of his motives, we
have
to find him," Anya said. She looked like she was going to say something else, or maybe the same thing again, but then she broke off to reach inside her jacket, which was just the wrong shade of green to match her hair. When she pulled out one of those small portable phones, Tomas realised the grating pop song he'd heard was its ring tone.

"Yes!" she snapped. She listened a moment, then said, "OK, and where's he going?" There was another pause before she clicked the phone closed without saying goodbye.

"Someone's seen Morgan?" Tomas asked.

She shook her head. "Karamov. He's left the hotel, but it doesn't look like he's heading for the airport."

"Could he be going to meet Morgan?" Belle asked.

Anya shrugged. "Or maybe he's meeting the buyer, or just picking up some groceries. There's only one way to find out for sure."

Tomas hesitated. Following Karamov would mean giving up on Morgan. He pictured Morgan's face, soft-eyed and scared, and then the image in his head morphed into a different one, a little older, skin paler, hair a sandy brown. If this had been Richard, what would he have done?

Everyone knows the risks
, he could hear Richard saying.
We're not doing this out of the goodness of our hearts. We've all got some reason to be here.

Tomas found himself smiling, because Richard was the most cynical idealist he'd ever met. But he was also right.

"We go after Karamov," he said to Anya. "Morgan will have to wait."

Professor Raphael was so old, Morgan was afraid to take his offered hand, worried even the softest grip would crush the fragile bones inside it. After a moment's hesitation, he touched it with his fingertips, seeing the way the flesh gave beneath them and didn't spring back, all the elasticity of youth gone.

The man's face was bright with life, though. He had a surprisingly full mop of pure white hair, and his eyes glittered blue beneath the rheum.

He said something in Hungarian and then, when Morgan looked blank, "English, is it?"

Morgan nodded. Raphael spoke with almost no accent, and what there was Morgan didn't think was Hungarian.

"And what can I do for you, young man?" He sat back down at his desk, disappearing behind the stacks of books and paper piled high on top of it. The whole office was almost comically cluttered, every shelf overflowing with junk which had spilled over onto the floor, barely leaving Morgan room to stand. It was hard to imagine what some of the stuff was for - the half-finished child's jigsaw puzzle, a set of lace doilies, torn and grimy with age, a jar of what appeared to be rock salt, some of it spilling out onto the desk.

Morgan pulled his attention back to Raphael. "Karamov sent me. About the matter you discussed."

"Did he?" Raphael said, which told Morgan absolutely nothing.

Ignoring the voice inside him - probably Tomas's - hissing at him not to do it, Morgan pulled Nicholson's book from the waistband of his jeans. "He thought you'd be able to help us translate this."