Cold Warriors (29 page)

"You're not getting out," Morgan said.

"Morgan." Anya rested a hand against his gun arm. "He's right - we can deal with this later."

He grabbed her hand and used it to pull her back another ten paces, till Richard was at one end of the stretch of tunnel and he and Anya at the other. "There won't be a later if he comes with us," he said. "Look."

She frowned and he remembered that she couldn't see what he and Richard could. The ghosts clustered tight around the other man were invisible to her.

"It's him," Morgan said. "He's causing it."

"Don't be ridiculous - why would he do that?"

"He can't help it." He met Richard's eyes over the distance separating them. "Can you?"

Richard looked at the rock, cracked and splintering above him. At the ghosts, clustered to either side. Then he looked back at Morgan and smiled sadly. "No, it appears I can't."

"I'm sorry," Morgan said. He meant it.

The other man nodded. Then he staggered, as the floor shook beneath his feet. Where Morgan and Anya stood, it was motionless. He saw her eyes widen as she finally began to understand.

"Come on," Morgan said, turning away from the other man. "We can get out of here now."

"Wait!" Richard shouted.

Morgan didn't.

"Morgan!"

He ran another few steps, but his pace slowly dragged to a halt. He couldn't condemn the other man to death and refuse to even watch it.

Richard smiled when Morgan turned back to him. His face was tight and chalky with pain, and Morgan could see a deep gash in his cheek where a rock must have struck him, but he looked almost peaceful. "Do you know why there's evil in the world?" he said.

Morgan shook his head.

"Because God gave us a choice. Remember that, Morgan. You always have a choice."

Morgan would have liked to deny it. He wanted to say that he didn't, that it was all of them die or just Richard. But a choice between two terrible options was still that.

He opened his mouth to explain, and his words were drowned in the rending sound of stone tearing away from its foundations.

Richard didn't scream, just let out a choked gasp as the rocks hit him. Then he was lost to Morgan's sight, hidden behind a cloud of dust and salt.

Tomas couldn't believe the sea held so much life. It was seething with it, brown and green and silver bodies boiling to the surface in a mass of slick wet flesh.

Anya crouched on the deck, shaking with fear.

"They can't hurt us!" Tomas shouted, but he wasn't so sure.

He'd forgotten how
big
the things that lived in the deep ocean grew. And there were so many of them, their bodies were roiling above the surface. They'd drown in air within a few minutes, but it wasn't stopping them. Tomas felt the first pin-sharp bite of teeth in his foot as a wave of the creatures washed over the sides to slither onto the deck.

Tomas stamped on the soft body, killing it instantly. Anya was doing the same, letting out little, desperate gasps every time her foot came down. The deck was red with blood, but there were always more of them.

One leapt up in front of Tomas, jaws snapping shut around his knee. He swore and prised it off, leaving its teeth buried in his flesh. After that, he gave up stamping and started scooping the creatures up, flinging them over the side in great armfuls. Anya stooped to do the same, and he shouted at her to stop. He could take the damage, but she couldn't. Every armful left him with bleeding bite marks in his arms and chest, tearing into muscle and deep beyond where his chest wound still gaped open.

He bent down to gather another armful, and the boat veered sharply to starboard, staggering him. Another swerve back to port and this time it tumbled him to the deck. Now the creatures were within reach of his eyes. He clasped his hands tight over his face to shield them, but it left him no leverage to lift himself up. He could feel the creatures slithering above and below him. The fish stench of them was overpowering. They began to gnaw at his fingers and he could hear the grate of teeth against bone.

He'd have to risk his eyes if he wanted to save anything. He forced his body into a roll, crushing as many of them as he could. Then, before he could think better of it, he got his hands beneath him and levered himself up.

He didn't think he'd make it. The weight of creatures attached to his body by teeth and suckers dragged him down. It took all his strength not to fall straight back to the deck. He stumbled, braced himself, and rose with one final heave.

"Christ, Tomas!" Anya yelled.

He felt her fingers scraping at his face, and a moment later her hand came away with a small, snaggle-toothed creature that looked like it came from the dark depths of the ocean. In the second before she flung it over the side he saw a scrap of what might have been his eyelid clenched between its jaws.

Anya's face was covered in a fine tracery of blood from a jagged gash in her forehead. "The captain's dead," she gasped.

Tomas could see him through the glass wall of the cabin, slumped over the wheel. Without him to steer it, their boat was following a curving course, cutting a broad circle through the sea. The other boat was out of sight. But it had only been a few minutes and theirs was the faster vessel. They could still catch up.

Tomas began to wade through the carnage on deck towards the cabin. Upright, the fish could only slow, not stop him. He was halfway to the door when the first attack came from above.

The bird's dive was too steep for recovery. Its beak gouged a track through his cheek and then it struck the mass of creatures on the deck with a wet thump. The next one came seconds later, hitting his shoulder this time. When Tomas looked up he saw that the sky was dark with them, seagulls with their wickedly curved beaks and hateful black eyes.

He could feel the blood flowing freely from a thousand cuts and he knew even he couldn't survive this long. Behind him, he could hear Anya screaming. It was a horrible sound, but he dreaded still more the moment when it would stop. He reached back to pull her against his chest, curling his body around hers to shield it.

Their progress was agonisingly slow, an inelegant stumble that constantly threatened to spill them both to the deck and the heaving mass of life there. For a moment, Tomas saw the cold eye of an octopus glaring up at him. Its tentacle lashed out to dig suckers into the already exposed skin of his leg. He brought his other foot down on it bulbous body, bursting it. The tentacle tore away, still dangling from his leg as he took another dragging step nearer to the relative safety of the cabin.

By the time they reached it, his legs were a gaping mass of wounds. The floor was awash with creatures, a jumble of them blocking the door. He used his feet to kick them aside, then squashed the few that remained into a bloody pulp as he slammed it shut.

Instantly, a muffled series of bangs detonated above them. The birds were flinging themselves against the glass roof of the cabin, sacrificing themselves mindlessly in their hunger to reach them. As Tomas watched, a spider-web of cracks spread from the last point of impact.

He looked at Anya, and read the same defeat in her eyes. Then he grabbed the wheel and grimly turned it round, taking them back towards Germany.

When Morgan and Anya finally stumbled out of the mine, coated in rock dust and blood, the emergency services had already arrived. Morgan stood numbly compliant as a paramedic tended to his cuts. Once the sterile dressings were in place, the paramedic gestured towards the ambulance, miming that they should get in.

"We're fine," Morgan told him.

The man didn't looked convinced, but when Morgan pushed him gently away he shrugged and went to tend to someone else.

"We need to get out of here," Anya said, "before someone starts asking too many questions."

Morgan nodded, but he only walked as far as the nearest wall before collapsing to the ground at its foot. After a second, Anya sat down beside him.

"What did Richard mean," she said eventually, "that you were born out of Nicholson's death?"

He thought about lying, but he found he wanted to share this. He
needed
to. "I was adopted," he told her. "Never knew my real parents. Didn't know who they were - until we found that book, and I saw my dad's name written in the front."

She shifted to face him, jeans grating along the gravel. "Nicholson's your
father
?"

He nodded. "He died before I was born. I think that's what Richard was talking about."

"Christ. No wonder you were so keen to translate it."

"I wanted to understand why I'd been sent on this mission. Someone must have known about me and Nicholson, whoever got me assigned. It's too much of a coincidence otherwise, isn't it?"

"Probably." Her eyes studied him too keenly. "And you wanted to know your father, as any boy would. Somehow, I don't think you like what you've found."

"No." But that he couldn't bear to talk about. He levered himself to his feet. "We should phone Tomas."

Anya looked like she wanted to ask him more, but something in his face stopped her. She shrugged and handed him the phone.

Morgan let it ring and ring, but when it went to voicemail he snapped it shut.

Anya took the phone back and pressed some keys. "This is Anya's number," she told him. "It's probably better if
you
talk to her."

As she handed it back to him there was a crackle and then a voice saying, "Who is this?"

"Anya?" Morgan said. "It's me. Morgan."

There was a silence on the other end during which he could hear strained breathing and what sounded like the cries of seabirds. Then she said, "So you're alive. Do you have the book?"

"Yes." Morgan looked at
his
Anya, thinking of all the other things he could add to that. He sighed and said, "It's safe."

"Well," she said. "Then it looks like we're all going to St Petersburg."

PART THREE

The Evil Empire

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Morgan and Anya stopped for lunch in a nowhere town on the road to St Petersburg. They sat inside the one, run-down hotel, picking at a plate of meat and pickles. The food was copious but as brown and bland as the hotel itself. It looked as if it had been decorated on the assumption that no actual guests would ever be staying there.

Anya realised her hand was tugging nervously at her trousers, where her gun no longer sat beneath her waistband. They hadn't been able to take any weapons through the Russian border and she felt exposed without it. Maybe she should have listened to Morgan. He'd wanted to try sneaking past the border guards but she'd vetoed it, unwilling to risk capture and the diary being lost to them.

Morgan had the book on the table in front of him. Anya saw that he was reading it easily now, no longer needing to laboriously write down his translation, but after a while he shook his head wearily, something deeply unhappy lurking in the shadows beneath his eyes. Anya thought she knew what it was.

"You had to do it," she said. "And you saved my life as well as yours."

"I know." He didn't sound like it was much comfort.

"Richard wanted you dead, if it's any consolation." Morgan darted her a sharp look at that, and she added, "Did you never wonder what I was doing on the train, when Richard's people had already stolen the diary?"

His eyes narrowed, calculation replacing misery. "You were meant to kill me."

She nodded. "I was supposed to use the confusion to replace the other me. Then I could wait for an opportune moment to finish you and Tomas off."

"Did Richard say why?"

"No. And I never asked."

He looked at her a long moment, face unreadable. Then he sighed and looked away. She remembered that he'd been black ops before he transferred to the Division. He probably hadn't asked why his targets were marked for death either. "But you didn't do it," he said eventually.

She forced a smile. "Like I said, you won me over with your charm and good looks."

"I thought it was my brains."

"Well, those too."

He nodded down at the book. "Actually, you let me live because you thought I could get you what you wanted. But this isn't going to tell us where the artefacts are."

She tamped down the bitter disappointment. He had to be wrong. "You haven't finished it yet. How can you be sure?"

"Richard said the artefacts are something you make, not something you find. I think Nicholson
did
make them, and he let Tomas hunt for them to throw people off the scent."

"But why would he try to deceive his own side?"

The misery was back in his face. "They weren't his side any more, not to him."

"Then who was he working for?"

"Raphael." He opened the book, somewhere towards the back. "There's something you should hear. It's from 1987:

"Another interminable meeting in Whitehall. That idiot Hickman actually asked me what evidence I had for the existence of the artefacts. If only he knew! But I'm worried they're beginning to suspect me. Not of the things I've actually done - how could they imagine those? - but of being somewhat economical with the truth. I need to be more careful, because I absolutely can't let them shut down the Division. Not now, when we're so close.

"And then after the meeting, I saw Tomas. He's been away for three months, trudging round Jordan with Richard. I thought it was a wild goose chase, which was why I let them go, but they proved me wrong. We've only translated half the scrolls they brought back, and they're quite extraordinary. I've never found End Days prophecies which are so clear before.

"Does Tomas realise what they mean? I rather think not. But his mind works so differently from mine, sometimes I can't figure out what's going on behind his eyes. It's hard to imagine we once used to be friends.

"Does
he
suspect me? I don't think so either, but I can't be sure, and that's worrying. He's the only one who might be able to prevent it, and he would. Tomas doesn't understand the lure of power, or the joy of surrendering to one's baser urges. I loathe him.