Last Line (24 page)

“
Pochyemu
?”

“Why? That’s something you’ll have to work out for yourself, as the years go by. And you will. You’ll have to, or the world will always be a nonsense to you—random, a kaleidoscope. For now, what I’ve hidden from your memory is this. There was no Russian forest. No undercover work with me, no ashkeloi gypsies, no massacre.”

“
Na Piotr, Piotr Milosz
…”

“Oh, he was real. And he was an ashkeloi leader, an uncommonly brave one. But the closest you got to those firesides, those dark forest nights, was the inside of a cell under Oriel’s fortress. Deep, deep underground.”

Michael drew a breath. It came out as a sob, shaming him, and to his astonishment he felt John reach up and take a comforting hold of his wrist. “Anzhel, pochyemu?
Ya ne veryu
.”

“You do believe me. These are our first truths. Piotr Milosz was your fellow prisoner. You identified with him, wanted to help him, so I used his story to set up a scenario I could use to control you. He assisted, with a good deal of persuasion. He hadn’t the benefit of your training or nerve, and by the end of it he was broken. Very much our puppet, our man. When Oriel wanted to call you home, he sent Milosz. He knew the sight of him would begin to trigger your conditioning. And then you would be ready for me.”

“But you had to hunt down Oriel just as much as I did.”

“Yes. The fall of the fortress scattered us. It had been so long since I stood at his side. He had to test me again, and my task was to find you, then use you to help me locate him. To bring you to him. Your test…” Anzhel lowered his head. All traces of triumph were stripped from him, as if someone had plucked his wings. As if he were sick of the game. “You know your test. You have to come with me and complete the mission he set you. You have to kill your partner first.”

Michael stared down the tunnel of the years. He saw a white-tiled cell. In it, a perfectly beautiful man walked about. Sometimes he wore a white coat. Sometimes he was in camouflage fatigues, like a rebel soldier, and he had propped up beside him a weary, skeletal Russian Michael knew as Piotr Milosz. Anzhel was telling Milosz what to say. The scene changed, and Anzhel sat on the edge of a narrow bunk. He said, “
Sing me the song your mother taught you
,” and Michael obeyed. Michael was strapped to the bunk. It could be moved—set almost upright so you thought you could take your weight but not quite, or it could be tipped back so your head would be lower than your feet, and when the water came—just a little; Anzhel hadn’t always blindfolded him, and he could see how little it took—it would run straight up into your sinus cavities. Michael drowned, over and over again, and the song his mother had taught him played through speakers in the cell, and Anzhel talked.

Anzhel had been his torturer. The impact of this glanced off Michael’s mind and disappeared. He could see into the forest now, and he understood that all those people, all that darkness, frost, fire, and blood, all those lives, had existed only in the white-tiled confines of the cell. He said, clearly and in English, “I never killed anybody.”

“That’s right. I wanted you to know. To make you free of the guilt of it, and to show you that despite this recall, this revelation, you belong to Oriel still. You will still complete your mission. Mikhaili, do it now.”

Michael gathered John against his body. He could feel his breathing, low and tense. The controlled heave of his ribs that meant he was most frightened and most determined not to let it show. Unable to help the caress anymore than he could the tightening of his gun hand, Michael held him. “John, I never killed anyone.”

“I know.”

“Why doesn’t it make any difference? Why can’t I stop this?”

“Because of how hurt you were. In a way…” John tailed off, then drew a shuddering breath and continued, lifting his head in desperate, last-ditch pride. The movement made tears spill down his face, though his voice remained steady and calm. “In a way it doesn’t matter. I’m glad you didn’t kill those people, but it’s academic—to me, anyway—because I loved you even when I thought you had.”

“Griff—”

“Shut up and listen. I loved you then. I love you now, and I’m going to love you even when you pull that trigger. Even afterward, Mikey. Always. So go on and finish what you’re doing here, but when it’s over—when you’re sane again—you just bloody remember that, okay?
Remember
.”

Michael tasted water on his lips. He couldn’t account for it. Fear seized him, but the sensation wasn’t the suffocating rush of the waterboard. No—holy water, a cold clean ocean through his burned-out heart. His vision dimmed, then cleared to sudden acuity. The chains of his conditioning snapped and fell away. He was nothing but light, light in sun-shafted water.

Holding a pistol to the head of the man he loved. Who loved
him
. Michael jerked the gun away and pushed John to one side. He stepped around him quickly and interposed himself, his own flesh and bone, between him and Anzhel, who was straightening, astounded, snapping the catch off the weapon he’d taken from John. “Why?” Michael whispered. “Why the hell did you try to make me kill him?”

“I could try to make you understand. But it would take time, and it’s late, Mikhaili. So much later than you think, for all of us.”

“Put the gun down.”

“I can’t. You’re free, and that’s too dangerous. Oriel—”

“Oh, screw Oriel! He used you the same way he used me!”

A terrible smile contorted Anzhel’s face. “Are you saying you…
forgive
me?”

Michael drew a shaky breath. John, who would never settle for being human-shielded, was coming to his side. Michael could forgive anything. “Yes, if it matters to you. Drop the gun. If the bastard’s not dead already, help us hunt him down.”

“No. You know I can’t leave you alive. Not either of you.”

Michael shook his head. It was hard for him to be frightened of anything now, and Anzhel sounded barely convincing. Resigned, maybe. Tired. Nevertheless, he steadied the Walther, seemed to focus with an effort—and pulled the trigger.

He couldn’t have missed. Not Anzhel, who had shot John’s little nark like a goldfish in a barrel down a dark alley from impossible range. Michael registered the thud of the bullet driving into the door frame behind him. But time was moving for him at distorted crisis-speed. Comprehension came after the fact. Too late for Anzhel.
Too late for all of us
, resounded in Michael’s head as his hands came up almost without his volition and closed tight round the H&K, squeezing.
So much later than you think
. The shot rang out before the echo of Anzhel’s had died, and Anzhel jerked and fell.

* * *

John cradled the matted blond head in his lap. He hardly knew why he did so, except that, whatever this man had been to his partner, he wasn’t someone to be left dying alone on the floor. Michael, kneeling by his side, had wadded up tea towels and was making competent but hopeless efforts at wound pressure. The bullet had caught Anzhel square in the heart. John couldn’t understand why he was still alive, much less why now he looked more his old self than he had in the fraught half hour before. His debonair grin was back, and he was watching Michael’s desperate first aid with a kind of indulgence. “Mikhaili.”

Michael glanced up. “What?”

“Leave it.”

Michael glanced at his hands. They were bloodstained to the wrist. After a moment, he nodded and eased back. “My name is Michael.”

“I know. You insisted on that all the way through. No matter what I did to you.” His breath rattled. John lifted him a bit to try to ease it, and he managed a brief scarlet laugh. “And you, Agent Griffin—you didn’t like the names I called you either. A zaichik’s a lover-boy. A little soft one, perhaps: a bit of fluff.”

John met Michael’s eyes for a moment and brushed a strand of hair off Anzhel’s brow. “Oh, ta. Thanks for letting me know.”

“Turned out not to suit you after all. I’m sorry. Michael, I’m sorry I tortured you.”

“I told you before. It’s forgiven.”

“I don’t see how it can be, but… Listen. There’s no bomb. Oriel told me in the church before he gave you the detonator. He wanted to give your strings the hardest pull he could, that was all. There isn’t anything else I need to tell you, is there… Wait. One more thing. Look after the boy. He’s important, maybe more important than…”

His voice faded out. His skull became heavy in John’s lap, and his eyes fixed on an unknowable point beyond the farmhouse roof. John pressed a finger to the artery in his neck. “Mike, he’s gone.”

Michael swallowed audibly. “You’re sure?”

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

“Look, you’d better… Will you go and find Quin?”

John lowered Anzhel’s head gently onto the kitchen’s stone flags. He stood. He didn’t want to let Michael out of his sight for a second. But Michael was motionless, his gaze as fixed and unblinking as Anzhel’s, and Quin would be frightened.

The hallway was empty. John followed sounds of frantic searching into the living room. He found his brother flat on his back beneath the table, trainers sticking out, apparently checking the underside of a bookcase. At the creak of the door, he sat bolt upright, banging his head. “John! I thought…I thought you or Mike might have an extra gun somewhere.” He scrambled to his feet. “I heard two shots. I thought it was you and Mike. I thought—”

“You think too much,” John interrupted him gently. “Still, I suppose that’s mostly my fault, isn’t it?”

“Is Mike all right?”

“He will be.”

“But somebody got shot. Somebody died.”

“Yes. Anzhel. Were you going to come blasting in to save us?”

“Yes. Well no, because I couldn’t find a sodding gun.”

Quin’s voice broke over the last words. John put out an arm to him, but the kid just stared. John couldn’t blame him. They never touched. He’d left all that to Michael, watching with admiring envy how his partner hugged, chivvied, and shoulder-punched the brat into smiling humanity. It took an effort, didn’t it? It took not expecting a shy teenager to make the first move. “Come here a second.”

Quin obeyed. He didn’t exactly sink into his brother’s arms, but he came to stand close by his side, trembling and chilly. John asked, “Are you cold?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re probably in shock. You drove all the way here?”

“Mm-hm. I’m sorry.”

“No. It was the right thing. Look, I’ve got to go and see to Mike, and—well, there’s a corpse in the kitchen. I know you can cope, but I don’t want that in your memories. Do you understand?”

Quin nodded. “Yeah. Okay, I’ll make myself scarce.”

“Not too scarce. Just for a few minutes.”

“I’ll go and have a wash.”

“That would be good.”

John gave him a squeeze and let him go. Halfway through the door, he paused and looked back. “Quin, you’re okay, right? Anzhel didn’t hurt you?”

“No. He…pushed me around, like he does, but it didn’t hurt.”

“And—and Mike?”

Quin frowned while he worked out what his brother meant. Then his brow cleared, and he gave him a look that made John search all the way down to find undamaged roots for his own deeply shaken faith. “Of course not! He tried to help me. He wouldn’t let them take me hostage. And it was Anzhel that made him do all that stuff. It wasn’t him.”

“No.” John gave him what he hoped was a reassuring smile. He could still feel the impress of Mike’s gun muzzle at the back of his head. Something worse was still trying to gnaw into his heart. “It wasn’t. Thanks for helping him. Everything will be all right now.”

In the kitchen, he found Michael kneeling still at Anzhel’s side. The room was dark, only a faint blue trace of summer dawn beginning to gather in the windows.
Anzhel that made him do all that stuff
… Yes, John believed it. But for three weeks now, all he had seen were the things Anzhel had made Michael do. And, unseen, Michael had called or allowed Quin to come to him: Michael, who would kill anyone who hurt a hair on the boy’s head.

It wasn’t him
. John believed that. He wished he could be certain how much of Michael was left, now that Anzhel was subtracted from him, torn out of him and left dead on the kitchen floor. Michael in the pale dawn light was beautiful, a graveyard angel and about as human. About as much in need of human comfort. John began to turn away.

“Griff?”

It was nothing, a bare rasp. Blackbirds skittering on the roof would make more noise. But when John looked again, Michael was staring up at him. “Griff? What’ve I done?”

John had never seen anything so lonely. He went to him, dropped down, and knelt at his side. “You had to kill him.”

“Not to him. To you.”

John put out a hand. He brushed a fingertip touch to the side of Michael’s face, turning him to the light. Hungrily he examined him. Michael returned his gaze, and there was nothing in the wide dark eyes John hadn’t seen a thousand times before, seen and loved. It was just Mike. “I’m okay,” he said softly. “We’ll get over it.”

“I don’t even know why you’re still here.”

“Didn’t you hear me back there?”

Tears brimmed suddenly. “Yes. But you can’t love—”

“Shut up.” John took hold of Michael’s shoulders, tugging gently. Michael resisted for a second, then gave a choked, incredulous cry and surrendered. “Don’t tell me what I can’t bloody do,” John told him, catching him, gladly losing breath as Michael seized him, hands clenching so tight in the fabric of his shirt that the contact burned. He put a hand round the back of Michael’s skull as the first sob tore through him. The next was muffled on his shoulder, hot breath coming and going, a scald of tears. “It’s all right, love. It’s all right.”

Somewhere off at very far distance, the sound of an engine. John filtered it out, then recalled that he was not in London. No vehicle but the odd tractor came near the farmhouse at this hour. He had to struggle to make himself care. Mike was in his arms, and despite the hot tang of blood in the air, he felt as if he’d just stepped out of hell into sunlight.

The engine purr increased. It doubled itself, then trebled. In the gap between one racking sob and the next, Michael heard it too and stopped himself, choking. “John…”