Cold Warriors (30 page)

"How strange - I didn't realise it until I wrote it down, but it's true. I hate him. He makes me question myself, just when I need my certainty the most.

"I'm glad of the end we have in store for him. I hope it's as dreadful as it sounds."

Morgan swallowed and shut the book.

"Jesus," Anya said. "And Tomas never had any idea."

"Nicholson wasn't always like that," Morgan said, almost defensively. "When he started out he was just curious. He was excited by the stuff he was discovering. But the artefacts changed him somehow, just looking for them. He got obsessed and he stopped caring about anything else.
I think Richard was right - it's better if those things stay lost."

"No," she said. "Think about it. If they're so dangerous, what's worse? Getting them and keeping them safe, or leaving them out there for Raphael or someone like him to find?"

"You're saying they'd be safe with us, but I don't think they're safe with anyone. They're not safe
for
anyone. Look at what they did to my father."

Morgan's face was taut with strain, and Anya suddenly pictured the first time she met him, when she'd pulled him dripping and desperate from the Danube. She'd dived into the river to push him under, not pull him out. But the instant she'd touched his arm, she'd realised she wasn't the half of Anya which was capable of murder.

"I have to get the artefacts," she told him. "I
have
to."

"Why?"

There was no point lying, not any more. "Because I want to be whole again. The artefacts are supposed to be a source of tremendous power. And reversing what they did to me will require a huge amount of it - exactly as much as they released when they pulled me apart."

He squinted at her, puzzled. "What does it matter if there are two of you running around? And if you wanted to get rid of her, you could just kill her."

She shook her head. "You don't understand. She's half of me."

"Yeah, I get it. Like clones."

"No, not like that at all. There's only one way to split a person in two - along the fault lines that are already there."

"Fault lines?"

"You know what I mean, Morgan. Everyone does. We're all full of contradictions, impulses pulling in opposite directions. It's in every decision we make. Because if we weren't tempted by more than one option, why would we need to choose between them?"

"So you're saying it's like, I don't know, alternative realities? One of you is the part that wanted to make one decision, and the other you is the one that would've made the other."

"Yes, in a way. When they split me, they got rid of all my inconsistencies, all my second thoughts..." She trailed into silence, remembering the psychic agony of the process. The magic had crawled through her mind, searching for the parts of herself that shamed her, or scared her, all the aspects of herself she secretly hated, and then it had ripped them away.

"Everything inconsistent and every second thought went into the other you," Morgan said.

"Everything I am was divided between us, and now I'm only half a person. I've learned to fake the emotions I'm missing, but I can't feel them. I've forgotten how."

He frowned. For some reason, the expression always made him look younger. "If I could get rid of... There are parts of me, if I got rid of them, I wouldn't want them back."

"I didn't think I did, either. But sometimes the things you don't want, you still need. I remember how much I used to hate getting angry - how out of control it made me feel. But anger's a motivator, I can see that now. Rage gives you the power to stop people hurting you. Without it..." She shrugged.

"Maybe," he said. "Yeah, okay."

She could have left it at that. He would have let her. But the fear was a constant cold presence inside her. If she let it out into the light of day perhaps it would melt away.

"It's more than that, though," she told him. "When you split an atom, the two halves weigh less than the whole. That's where all the energy comes from - that missing matter."

"You told me that," he said.

"Well, when they split
me
it released energy too. Something was lost. And I think... and I wonder if it could be my soul."

Anya drove most of the final hundred miles to St Petersburg in silence. Morgan took the time to read the last of the book. It wasn't that there was any urgency about it, they'd already stopped to photocopy every page, something Raphael must surely have predicted. But through the diary he'd finally begun to know his father. He hated what he'd discovered, but he needed to know it all.

The final entry was dated 24 June, 1988. When he'd read it he sat still, thinking. An idea hovered at the back of his mind, fully formed but not quite visible yet. He caught Anya looking at him out of the side of her eye. She didn't say anything, but after a moment he sighed, then flicked back to the start.

"This is the end, and the beginning," he read. "The Omega and the Alpha."

"God is called the Alpha and the Omega in the Christian Bible," Anya told him. "He's probably referring to that."

"Except he's reversed it." Morgan remembered the upside-down cross in the desecrated church, an inversion of holiness. He read on:

"I made the decision long ago, but today I find out if I have the courage to go through with it. I have to leave soon to go to Tomas's burial - a plan that's finally come to fruition. I was sorry about Kate, but a small price to pay for getting what we want. Tomas is such a fool, such a romantic. He'd die for love - for just one person. The exchange rate for a human life can be so much higher than that. When I die today, it will be in return for everything.

"Like Jesus, in a way. What an absurd thought.

"Anyway, it's all arranged. Our moles have told us about the speech Gorbachev plans to give the Party Conference tomorrow. Another ending, or the beginning of one. Soon the Cold War will be over and the Hermetic Division with it. I've made sure that questions are already being asked - and Tomas's death and mine will be the final straw for those cowards in Whitehall, afraid of what the public will think if it comes out. The Division will be closed and Tomas will stay in the ground. I wonder if he'll sense the time passing, all those years he'll be waiting.

"I, at least, won't return as a monster. The immortality I've bought is of an entirely different kind. I ask myself one final time if it's been worth it. And the answer is still yes, though my reasons for giving it have changed. I serve Him now, whole-heartedly. No excuses any more. No pretence that there's some other agenda, that my service is just temporary, an alliance of convenience.

"I thought I wanted power for the sake of my country, in the interests of knowledge. I was lying to myself. I thought ends justified means. That was a lie, too. He showed me the truth. That I wanted power for its own sake. That the means are an end in themselves. I thought I could hide from the darkest parts of myself, but He taught me to embrace them.

"Yes, I can do this. And I will. My death will just be the beginning."

When Morgan had finished reading he looked across at Anya, almost afraid of what he'd see. She was scowling at the road ahead, eyes flicking from side to side as if reading a script inside her head. But when she looked at him her face softened. "I'm so sorry, Morgan. But you're not your father's son - not in any way that counts."

Morgan closed the diary and laid it square on his lap. "Then who else am I?"

The last few miles passed by in a blur of green-grey fields and blue sky. They were well inside the sprawling outskirts of the city when Anya steered the car to a halt at the side of the road. She pulled out the pay-as-you-go mobile they'd bought in a shop inside the Russian border and carefully stored a number in the memory.

"Mine," she said. "I'll be staying in the city, so you can get hold of me when you need me."

He nodded. "I'll let you know what's going on. And I won't give you away to the others unless I have to."

She looked momentarily taken aback, as if she hadn't expected his kindness. A strand of red hair had fallen across her cheek and he reached over to brush it away. He almost told her then, the thing he'd realised about the book. But she'd made it clear how much the artefacts meant to her, and if she knew... So instead he made himself smile and say, "It's a shame we didn't get one more night together."

She shook her head, eyes half closed in amusement. "I'm nearly a decade older than you."

His smile widened. "Yeah, but you're still hot, though."

"That wasn't actually the basis of my objection."

He shrugged, then hooked an arm around her neck and pulled her in for a kiss, holding it a bit too long to just be friendly.

"Take care of yourself," he said, sliding across to the driver's seat as she climbed out of the car.

"I'll do my best. And you take care of me too."

Tomas had chosen the Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad as their meeting point on one of the main roads into the city. At the heart of the vast, bleak Victory Square, its central obelisk towered over a concrete plaza busy enough that their group wouldn't attract attention, but not so crowded that they'd never find each other.

Looking at the monument as they waited for Morgan, Tomas thought about something his father used to say.
The Russians are lions led by monsters.
There was something monstrous about the monument. The square-jawed, heroic steel statues at its base seemed to remember the million and more people who had died here as symbols of something colder and more abstract than individual human lives.

"Where is he?" Anya grumbled irritably, her back to the statues as she scanned the network of roads which surrounded the square. "The exchange is supposed to take place in three hours, we can't risk being late."

Tomas shrugged. "It's a long drive."

"He'd better not lose the damn book before he gets here!"

"He knows how important it is." Tomas forbore to point out they wouldn't have the book at all if it weren't for Morgan. A sudden wave of lethargy swept over him, and he allowed himself to sink onto the steps leading to the monument, leaving Anya to continue impatiently eyeing the roads.

"I think - yes, that's him," she said, jarring Tomas out of a half-waking, formless grey dream.

He nodded and dragged himself to his feet. When they'd had to give up pursuing the boat that held Belle, something else had been lost to him. He thought it might be hope. Richard had abandoned him, Raphael had outmanoeuvred him. Kate had betrayed him, but not before he'd betrayed her. Now he was about give up the only victory they'd won.

But when he looked up and saw Morgan striding towards them, summoned by Anya's waving arm, he managed a smile. He was glad the young man was alive. That, he supposed, was a victory too.

"Bloody hell," Morgan said when he was close enough to see Tomas's face. "What happened to you, man?"

Tomas reached up a reflexive hand to touch his cheek. He knew it was scabbed with unhealed cuts, the legacy of their failed attempt to stop Raphael at sea. The bullet holes in his stomach still gaped open beneath his makeshift bandage. He forced a smile. "Flesh wounds."

"No kidding." Morgan studied him intently a moment more, then shrugged and turned away. "Hi, Anya."

She nodded, less than friendly. Tomas wasn't sure what it was she so disliked about Morgan. Maybe the fact that, with no discernable sense of humour herself, she could never quite tell when he was joking.

"Lovely to see you too," the younger man said. "Mind if I have a private word with Tomas?"

Anya scowled. "Yes."

Morgan sighed. "Why does no one accidentally drop dead when I actually want them to?" Despite Anya's protest, he slung an arm around Tomas's shoulder, pulling them both out of her earshot.

As soon as they were alone, all humour vanished from Morgan's expression. "Listen, there's two things I've got to tell you."

"You do still have the book, don't you?"

"Yeah." He patted his stomach, and Tomas saw the rectangular shape bulging out the thin material of his t-shirt. "But I sussed out how to read it. I
did
read it, all of it. And at the end..."

Tomas didn't like the expression on Morgan's face. It looked almost like pity. "Tell me."

"Nicholson - he planned for you to die. He arranged it somehow, and he also arranged for you not to get brought back."

Maybe if Tomas had felt better, he would have felt more. "And did he say why?"

"Not directly. But there's something else. The Japanese, they had this American bloke working with them."

"Richard. We used to be partners."

"Yeah, that makes sense. He's dead, I'm sorry."

Tomas felt grief twist a knife inside him, but he shook his head. "Don't be. He betrayed us."

"I guess." Morgan's eyes blanked for a moment, looking back into the past. Then they refocused on Tomas's face, a bright black. "Before he died, he told me something about the Ragnarok artefacts. He said you can't find them - that you have to make them."

Tomas froze into a long moment of stillness as he absorbed that. Then he laughed bitterly. "Of course. No wonder Nicholson was happy to let me search for them all those years. He knew I'd never find them."

"Yeah," Morgan said uncomfortably. "That's what he says in the book. It's Nicholson's diary, from the whole time he was running the Division. You should read it. But here's the thing. There was something else Richard said, about why Nicholson couldn't send Raphael the diary till he was dead -"

Tomas twitched and Morgan nodded, as if this was almost an irrelevance. "Oh yeah, they were working together. But what I'm saying is, I think it might be the diary."

"What might be?"

"The artefacts are supposed to be powerful, a big source of energy, right? And a soul is worth - well, it's worth a lot of that, isn't it? I've read the diary all the way through, and there's nothing in there about what the artefacts are or where they are. It's just the story of how Nicholson..." He laughed awkwardly. "It's him describing how he lost his soul."

"I see," Tomas said, and he thought that he finally did. "You're saying it's the diary, the diary itself, which is one of the artefacts."