Last Line (20 page)

“It’s okay,” Michael said gently. “I know, all right? Maybe things will be different from now.”

“How can they be? John—”

“John just wants the best for you. Have you contacted him?”

“What do you think?”

“I think the school will have told him you’re on the run again by now, and he’ll be driving round the countryside in a panic looking for you.”

Quin halted, his hand on the banister. He gave an incredulous snort. “John doesn’t panic.”

“Not on the surface, no. But you’d be surprised.” Michael gave him a little push ahead of him up the stairs. “So the first thing we do is call him, okay? Then I’ll give you my keys and—”

“Oh, Mikhaili, give the kid a break.”

Michael stopped dead. Automatically he wrapped a shielding arm around Quin. Anzhel was at the top of the stairs, beaming down at them. He was in his full glory. His voice seemed to open up the sordid walls around them and let in sweet summer air. He held out a hand, jogging down to meet them. “Quintus, I presume?”

“Quin,” the boy corrected him, but with none of his usual disgust at the sound of his full name. He was too busy staring.

Just for a moment, Michael almost breached surface. Paper chains of thought ran through his head, fragile and swift.
I brought my nephew here. I brought him to Anzhel. Dear God, get him out, get him out
… But Anzhel’s summer breezes blew the links away like confetti, and instead Michael watched Quin break into a charmed and charming smile and hold out a hand in return.

“Not going to perform the introduction, Mikhaili?”

“Oh. Sorry. Quin, this is Anzhel, my partner.”

A shadow crossed Quin’s face. But Michael was too lost to read it, and it was Anzhel who answered it, gently, smiling. “Not forever. Just for this one job, while your brother’s busy on another case. I tell you what; you should come with us today. You can stay in the background and see how things are done.”

Quin swallowed audibly. His hostility to John had never hidden—was perhaps based in—his desire to be as like him as possible. John, afraid for him, had kept the door shut too tight, forbidding Michael any shoptalk during the kid’s visits, evading his questions. He said faintly, “Are you kidding?”

“No, not at all,” Anzhel assured him, guiding him into the rented room with a comradely pat to the shoulder. “You should learn. You might be really good at this. You’re dressed the part, anyway.”

“Anzhel,” Michael whispered. His own voice wouldn’t come to him. His throat and skull felt packed with cotton wool, and he couldn’t remember when the hell he had told Anzhel the boy’s full name. “It’s not a good idea. He’ll be a liability.”

Quin heard. He broke off his curious inspection of the room and gave Michael a look of undisguised pain. “You—you asked me to come here.”

“I know. To collect my keys and go home, not—”

“You know, I’m not surprised you and John have trouble with him,” Anzhel interrupted. He put an easy hand on Quin’s shoulder. “A liability? He could be an asset. And all we’re doing today is hanging around talking to people, trying to pick up a scent. Don’t you even trust him to cope with that?”

It was strange. Michael could see exactly what Anzhel was doing. The mechanics of it were hardly subtle. Flattery, a soothing of the kid’s sore spots. Divide and conquer. Everything Michael and John had scrupulously avoided in their shared dealings with Quin. No, not subtle at all, and Quin was too bright to buy it wholesale either. He glanced up at his new advocate, suspicious, one eyebrow on the rise.

Anzhel shrugged. It was a leave-it-up-to-you gesture, and he strolled to the window and looked out, hands in his pockets, softly whistling.

Michael knew the tune. It put a kind of peace inside him—settled all his doubts. It left one channel only for his thoughts, and they ran down it smoothly. He ceased to notice that Anzhel was whistling at all, knew only that he loved him for taking away the noise and the struggle in his head. He loved Quin too. “Listen,” he said. “Come with us today. You—you’re an asset, not a liability, Quin, and we’re only talking to people. You can cope with that.”

“Mike, are you okay?”

Michael rubbed his eyes. Through their cobwebby blur, Quin could be John, asking him the question with his brother’s exact intonation. A longing to see him went through Michael, followed by intense relief that he was gone.
Far away from what I’ve become. Far away and safe
. “I’m fine,” he said and watched the anxiety clear from Quin’s face, replaced by the beaming grin of a kid hearing the answer to a prayer.

* * *

There were fourteen parish churches in Hounslow. Anzhel rejected all but the Catholic ones on grounds of Oriel’s love of showmanship and messianic tendencies, but that still left eight to be investigated, approached from the street by inconspicuous men whose questions, in local shops and parks, would set off no alarms. If the magic was wearing off for Quin by the time warm summer dark began to fall, he gave no sign. Michael had told him to stay in the background, to listen and remember, and that was exactly what he was doing. He was even, Michael noted with amusement, trying to blend with the brickwork and beginning to succeed. They had left his Oxford carrier bag behind. He looked like a street kid, hanging around with two older men for God knew what dire reasons. In the West London dusk, streetlights just beginning to flicker and glow, no one looked at him twice.

On the fifth try, Michael got them their lead. A tired, unshaven tramp looking out for a bed for the night, he settled on a park bench and pulled out a quart-sized bottle of scotch and opened it, waiting for its raw cheap fumes to alert the seat’s other occupant. In the distance, he could just make out Anzhel and Quin. Fear stirred in him. There were times and places in London’s parks where flesh was bought and sold, a silent network that shot out invisible tendrils to bring custom in. Looking at the boy and the man, Michael could see the possibilities. A pimp with his merchandise: it would be a good key, a good way in.

His stomach turned over, and he concentrated fiercely on his own chances. The lump beside him on the bench had stirred and reached out a hairy hand. Michael knocked it away and drew deeply on the bottle himself, grimly aware that he needed it. “Not a chance, mate,” he said hoarsely afterward. “Tell me where around here I can doss for the night, then maybe.”

“There’s a shelter on King Street. Costs a tenner, but—”

“Spent my tenner.” Michael swirled the contents of the bottle temptingly in the streetlight. “What about the church? Does the parish house take people in?” He gave his companion a leer. “Good Catholic, aren’t I?”

The tramp actually edged away from him. “Yeah, but there’s only one place and it’s taken.” Biting back his questions, Michael handed over the bottle and waited. The tramp took a pull, courteously wiped the bottle’s neck with one end of his scarf. “Priest’s a soft touch. Took in an illegal three months ago. He’s hiding him. Won’t let anyone else in.”

“Whatever. Where’s the church?”

The tramp looked at him oddly. And suddenly a shape resolved out of the fractal of tree branches Michael had been watching: a bulk, a looming triangle. The church was there. He had been sitting in its shadow.

Carefully he got to his feet. Automatically he stayed in character, letting his disorientation feed into the move, letting it be clumsy and tired. What he wanted was to kneel in front of this homeless stranger and ask for his mercy, for help, on the grounds of their shared humanity.
The church is waiting. For God’s sake, don’t let me go. Take this money and call my partner, call John.

“What the fuck is the matter with you?”

“Nothing.” The tramp was holding out the bottle, trying to offer it back. The fear reached its peak inside Michael and died away. Now he wished he could give help, not receive it. He glanced across at Anzhel, waiting like a statue in the trees. Anzhel would wait forever. Michael could never wear out his implacable patience. Could never escape.

A wave of pity went through him. The night was warm, but still no one should have to sleep outdoors in it, not on city streets. “Keep the rest of that,” he said, shoving his hands into his pockets. He wanted to be human in a human world, with all its griefs and sharp humiliations. Behind him, waiting under the trees, was something else. Something other than bloody human. He knew that now, but the revelation didn’t free him. It made him turn, as surely as if Anzhel had reached out and grabbed his shoulder.

Passively he crossed the expanse of grass between them. It was a beautiful night, he noted from great distance. He thought of the Glastonbury farmhouse, dreaming under the stars. Would he be free in its shelter? Or would he find himself a string-jerked puppet there too, on his own land, with Anzhel moving his limbs for him, bidding the very air when to move into and out of his lungs?

The boy was lost too. He didn’t react when Michael approached. His eyes were wide and fixed on some far horizon. He looked like a beautiful sketch of himself, poised at Anzhel’s side. Michael came to a halt in front of them. “The church is here,” he said. “Oriel’s here. He’s waiting.”

* * *

John, booting the XKR down a long straight road near the Prince William Academy in Hampshire, felt a sudden wave of vertigo. He shook his head, but the sensation persisted. His wheels hit the rumble strip, then the central cat’s eyes as he veered. Cold sweat broke on him, and he pulled off sharply into the next layby.

Briefly he thought he was going to puke or black out. But once the car was stationary, the dizziness ebbed. He put his hands on top of the wheel and rested his brow on their knuckles. He was tired, that was all, and his last meal had been a burger with Michael on the South Bank promenade.

He tried the two numbers again, the ones he had been keying on speed dial all the way from London. Once more both went straight to voice mail, as if the phones were out of range or dead.

A cold terror took him, so big it seemed to come from the darkness beyond the lurid Hampshire sunset. In his life so far, Quin had been first a nuisance, then an unknown quantity, and then a painful, unwanted weight. Michael he’d loved from the start. In this moment of conviction that he’d somehow lost both of them, John knew he loved his brother too. He called the school again. In the background, he could hear what he imagined headless chickens might sound like. The academy had never lost a child, the headmaster assured him. Police had been called, tracker dogs too.

Lost a child
. It echoed in John’s head as he cut the connection.
Lost child
. An anonymous baby when John left home, a stroppy teen by the time he came back, he had never thought of him as a child at all. John told himself that sixteen wasn’t a child—that it was way too late for the surge of protective anxiety trying to overwhelm him now.

But Quin—naive, sheltered, hothoused in his fancy schools—was a bloody young sixteen. John started the car and revved her engine, letting her roar carry off some of his fear. He had chosen the damn schools himself, hadn’t he? More or less ensured that Quin, bewildered by his own burgeoning intellect, wouldn’t know how to function in the world. No wonder the kid made a run for Michael whenever he could. Mike just treated him with ordinary love.

And sent him home with the imprint of his boot on his arse if he thought Quin was there without John’s permission. No, he’d have heard from Mike by now if…

John turned the car in the road and pointed her south. He’d been going to help with the search in the academy’s grounds, up trees and at the bottom of dragged lakes if necessary. But when he felt around the edges of his sickening terror for Mike, he found Quin’s image there too.

Go now, or you’ll lose them both
. John, who had never had a psychic flash in his life and would have laughed at the suggestion he was having one now, jammed his foot down and sent the Jag flying back in the direction of London.

Chapter Fourteen

The church lay deep underground. Michael was buried alive the second he stepped into it.

He swung round. Behind him the door stood open. Beyond it he could see the street—headlights, taillights, lights in shop windows. He could see men and women and a patch of tired city sky. Life went on out there. All Michael had to do was walk back into it.

High time he did. This op was over, their quarry run to earth. He knew how it should end. He should call for reinforcements—for Shaw and Skelton, anyway, his fellow assassins. He should call Webb, check there was no stay of execution, and go about his business. His mind found a grip on these rules and procedures and was briefly his own again. He took a step toward the door.

Anzhel was blocking his path. He pushed Quin gently ahead of him into the church and closed the door behind them.

Candlelight and the crush of tons of earth above Michael’s head. His memory of the ordinary street snuffed out the instant he could no longer see it. This was the underground church. This was his end point, his destination. The place he had been heading for during all his three years of illusory freedom. He was a murderer, wasn’t he? In John’s presence, he had forgotten. John was the cleansing rush of salt sea waves, bearing Michael’s sins away. John would have absolved him, but Michael was suddenly glad there was no need. His corruption had no place in the upper world. His only absolution lay here. It would finish him, and John could grieve for the man he thought he had known. Not the killer, not the stone-hearted MI5 cat’s paw who had somehow believed his mission and his cover precious enough to have joined in with a genocide.

No one else needed to die. In the shadows round the altar, the priest was going back and forth, preparing for mass. It was a peaceful scene. An old man dressed in clerical black, the verger, perhaps, or a brother priest, was sitting quietly in the fifth pew back. Michael could get both of them out of here before the endgame began. Anzhel—standing in the middle of the aisle, his hand on Quin’s shoulder, surveying the church as if he’d created it—would prevent anyone else from coming in.

Michael went to sit beside the old man in the pew. His boots made no sound on the tiles, and the priest—yes, from here Michael could see the pale gleam of the dog collar—didn’t move at his approach. Michael waited for a moment, letting his eyes adjust, making sure there was no one else in the church and that the old man would have a clear exit route. “Father,” he said gently. “I’m a police officer.” That was the official line, the way he and John always broke the ice with their civilians. People understood, and it was a hell of a lot shorter and simpler than the truth. “Don’t be scared, but the man living here as a refugee isn’t who he says he is. He’s dangerous. So I need you to get up and just leave quietly by the nearest door. Do you understand?”