The War in the Dark

by Nick Setchfield

  ‘This war,’ said Malykh, spreading his hands, expansively, ‘this war we fight at the edges, in darkness… for me it’s a private war.’

  He rose from his knees, keeping his gaze on the prisoners. Behind him the soldiers continued their preparations, standing around the altar.

  ‘I want them to be afraid of us,’ he declared. ‘I want them to tell tales of us to their bastard children. How we fight them. How we drag them into the light. And how they scream. We live our lives afraid of the dark. Let the dark be afraid of us.’

  Karina shook her head. ‘You’re about to tear this world open, Malykh. And when you do this war of yours won’t be at the edges anymore. You won’t be fighting them in the shadows.’

  Malykh nodded. ‘I will fight them wherever I must. It’s my duty.’

  ‘You are opening Hell!’ Karina retorted, spitting the words with a sudden anger. ‘You have no idea what you’ll bring into this world!’

  ‘I don’t,’ said Malykh, calmly, his face set. ‘But I know that I shall be standing there to meet it. I won’t be afraid, Karina. And the dark will have no hold over me.’

  * * *

  The sky was raw with dawn.

  Winter could see a vivid red daybreak through the high clerestory windows that rose above the nave. The clouds looked like bloodstained banks of snow. Soon a hazy, crimson-grey light filled the basilica’s interior. Morning began to touch the old stones. Some of the building’s shadows retreated but the chill of the last few hours persisted.

  The Russians had readied the place for some kind of ritual. Symbols were chalked on the walls above the altar. Winter recognised them as the runes from Karina’s book. He imagined they had been copied with meticulous precision. More chalk glyphs marked the broad columns extending the length of the nave arcade. As ever the symbols made no sense to him but their presence – their sheer quantity, the specific choice of runes to replicate – had an ominous sense of purpose.

  A casket of incense hung above the altar. A thread of smoke drifted upwards, thickly scented.

  A circle of bones had been laid upon the flagstones. The arms and legs marked the perimeter of the ring, femurs and fibulas forming a chain with the severed bones of the hands and feet. Fragments of the spinal column completed the skeletal arc. Within the circle was the skull, perched like a prize on top of the ribcage.

  These were no ordinary bones. They were grotesquely pretty, studded with gemstones and embroidered with gold. The ribs had been bound with pearls. Sapphires glared from the sockets of the skull. Bejewelled rings decorated every finger, some of them wedged together in pairs, while the mouldering teeth were capped with a gilt-edged grin. The effect was vulgar, macabre, almost fairground tacky.

  These were clearly the bones of Saint Cenric himself, plundered by the Russians from a concealed vault. Worshippers must have ornamented his remains centuries before. Winter had seen pictures of bones like this in the Sunday supplements – martyrs’ relics, they were called, displayed and venerated as a piece of medieval church theatre. No doubt the Russians had ransacked the old boy’s crypt in the night. The bones were almost comically gaudy but there was a very real, very violent sense of desecration in the way they had been torn apart and commandeered for this ritual.

  Winter exchanged a glance with Karina. There was nothing encouraging in her eyes. He saw the trooper standing behind her, felt the equally unwavering gun at his own back.

  Malykh stepped into the circle of bones. He carried a small black bowl that contained a thin layer of water. He was taking care to keep it level. It had to be some kind of scrying device, thought Winter, surprised at how quickly such terminology came to him now, as though he had always known it.

  Malykh set the bowl upon the floor, some inches from the skull. And then he stood back, unsheathing his knife with an air of ceremony. He grasped the black blade with both hands and raised it in front of his face, the obsidian length glinting as it caught the early light. The knife carved the air in a succession of quick, complex movements. Malykh was mirroring the runes, Winter realised, echoing the shapes and strokes of Dee and Kelly’s unearthly alphabet.

  The Russian began to chant as the blade swiped the incense-scented air. The sounds he made were guttural, indecipherable, more like grunts than words. The soldiers joined in, hesitantly at first, their voices rising from a murmur to a fierce, urgent clamour that echoed between the walls of the monastery.

  The water tremored on the surface of the bowl.

  Malykh’s chant built to a climax as sweat beaded on his forehead. And then, with vicious speed, he plunged the black blade into the remains of Saint Cenric. There was a sickening scrape of metal against bone until the knife rested in the jewelled ribcage. The sapphires embedded in the skull regarded this violation impassively.

  Malykh steadied his breathing. It was all that could be heard in the sudden silence of the nave.

  And then there was a sound. A flash of movement.

  Something had struck the flagstones with a hollow clatter.

  Winter glanced at the ground. He saw a chubby green cylinder roll across the floor of the basilica. It came to rest by his shoes, hissing vapour. In the second it took him to identify it as a standard British commando smoke grenade the thing had detonated. A choking fug billowed upwards, smelling like a bonfire.

  He hurried to cover his face. He could hear the clang and hiss of more grenades as they tumbled into the nave. As smoke filled his vision he saw muzzle flashes from the transept, heard the unmistakable stutter of Bren guns. The Russian trooper behind him returned fire over his shoulder. And then the man’s gun fell from his hands. Winter felt a spray of blood against the side of his head.

  He reeled, half blinded by the stinging smoke. It had found his eyes. Tears streamed out of his ducts. His throat burned.

  Winter groped his way through the smoke, making for Karina, the retort of automatic weapons splintering his eardrums. The world was a sudden chaos of darkness and fire, snatched between the slits of his eyes. Any relief that British forces had found the basilica was tempered by the thought that a bullet would probably rip through his body at any moment.

  He stumbled into a corpse, still warm on the floor. He felt rough khaki fabric and a slick of blood. It was the trooper that had been guarding Karina. She was gone.

  Winter kept moving, crouching low, forcing his eyes to open, to clear away the tears. The smoke was thinner on this side of the nave and he could just about see the blackclad British commandos. He had no idea how many they were but they were hugging the cover of the columns, emerging to loose rounds at the Russians. Their guns sputtered, the barrels of the Brens crackling, flashing fire. Bullets studded into ancient masonry. Winter ducked down, evading the hot quarrel of the crossfire.

  He saw Karina. She was facing Malykh, the knife back in her hand, seized from the table as the guards were distracted. He had the obsidian blade in his. They were baiting each other like circling animals, locked in the moment, matching hard, unblinking stares. The smoke around them glittered with muzzle flashes. Winter wanted to intervene but something in the way they were measuring up to one another told him this was a personal duel.

  Karina was the one who broke the impasse. She lunged, striking for Malykh’s chest. He parried the attack. There was a brief, bright flash of sparks. Malykh twisted his knife against hers, urging blade against blade. He flexed his forearm, forcing her wrist to contort at an agonising angle.

  She wrenched her blade away. And then, just as swiftly, she stabbed at him again. This time she aimed for his face. Once more Malykh expertly blocked her. He tore his knife upwards, smiling grimly as it stripped skin from her knuckles.

  Karina didn’t flinch. She bit down on her lip, matching his stance exactly, the two of them hunting for vulnerabilities, for a sliver of opportunity. Anything they could exploit.

  Another jab. Another deflection. The blades locked, scraped, sliced apart. The obsidian was sharper than the steel but Karina’s moves were nim
bler, less telegraphed.

  Malykh punched her in the face.

  The force of the blow knocked Karina to the ground. The knife fell out of her hand, hitting the flagstones. She scrabbled to retrieve it but Malykh’s boot was on her arm. He stamped on her wrist, making her fingers curl and clutch air. And then he reached down and locked his fist around her throat, his grip tightening until her veins bulged, blue and rigid. The black blade hovered in his other hand.

  ‘Brave little soldier girl,’ he murmured, smiling.

  Winter scrambled in the smoke for a gun.

  Karina had landed in the ritual circle, jewelled finger-bones scattered around her hair. Fighting for breath she managed to twist her head to the left. The skull glared back at her with its blind sapphires. The scrying glass lay inches away. She grabbed it with her free hand and swung it upwards, smashing the bowl into Malykh’s face. It was obsidian, just like his knife, and its serrated rim sliced into his temples with a whip of blood.

  Winter ripped a revolver from the holster of a dead trooper. He levelled the weapon, squinting into the smoke.

  Malykh staggered, loosening his hold on Karina’s throat. In that instant she rolled, reclaimed her knife and thrust it into his side. It pierced leather, khaki and flesh, sliding through his ribs to skewer his left lung. Grimacing, she urged the hilt of the blade deeper, as deep as it could go.

  ‘Karina…’

  Malykh swayed, looking down at her. There was accusation in his eyes but something else, too. Something like regret.

  ‘Don’t you want to see?’ he asked her, his words broken by snatches of breath. ‘Don’t you want to know?’

  Blood and saliva frothed in his mouth.

  ‘Don’t you want to show them… we’re not afraid?’

  There was a gunshot. A bullet thudded into Malykh. He tottered, fighting to stay on his feet, determined to deny its impact. And then another bullet came, puncturing his chest. He fell forward, his knees buckling, his legs collapsing, his life taken.

  It wasn’t Winter who had fired the shots. The gun he held was empty.

  A silver-haired man in a neat pinstriped suit stood behind the fallen Russian, a Webley & Scott pistol in his hand. He had grey, watery eyes and wore a paisley bow-tie.

  Winter looked at this newcomer in disbelief. It was impossible.

  The man standing there before him was Malcolm Hands.

  31

  Winter knew all about disorientation.

  He had experienced it in the field, long before the madness of the past few weeks. Sometimes it was deliberate, a calculated act of psychological warfare, intended to destabilise. The Red Chinese were particularly expert at it. He remembered that room in Peking in ’61, the one with altogether too many walls.

  Sometimes it felt like mental dislocation, sometimes purely physical. It was the same experience each time though, the moment flashing into absolute focus even as the gravity of reality fell away.

  Winter saw Malcolm standing there, alive, and he knew that familiar trapdoor sensation in his gut. In a moment this would make sense, he told himself. For now, however, he was reeling.

  The smoke had nearly dissipated. The door to the nave stood open, letting the dawn into the church. Only one Russian soldier was still alive, the youngest of the squad. A British commando nudged the barrel of a Bren gun against his ribs. The boy was bleeding from the mouth and he had lost his front teeth.

  Malcolm stepped through the broken circle of bones, kicking the skull of Saint Cenric out of his way with undisguised disdain. It rumbled across the flagstones, rolling to rest against the altar.

  ‘Bloody amateurs,’ he muttered.

  The SIS man acknowledged Winter with a crisp, brittle smile.

  ‘They claim that communism’s the future, don’t they? But by God they’re medieval peasants at heart.’ He glanced around him. ‘Just look at this carry-on. It’s a circus.’

  Winter stared at his old friend and colleague. He stared at every tiny, familiar detail, everything he had almost forgotten in the last few weeks. The birthmark beneath the left eye, the scattering of pockmarks on the right cheek. Winter nearly told himself it was like seeing a ghost. But then he had seen a ghost and ghosts had no sweat in their pores, no razor burn on their throat, no signature scent of Bell’s whisky. Malcolm Hands, it was clear, had never been remotely dead.

  There was only one word he could possibly form. ‘Malcolm?’

  This time the smile was warmer. ‘Hello, Christopher. How are you? You have done astonishingly well. I’ve always had faith in your talents but this has made me very proud. I never quite imagined you’d get this far.’

  Winter cut through the compliment. ‘Malcolm, what the hell’s going on? I saw your body in London. I thought you were dead.’

  ‘Tradecraft. Deception. Illusion. It’s our sordid little theatre, dear heart. You know that.’

  ‘I saw your body.’

  ‘You saw a body,’ Malcolm corrected, airily. ‘Some poor, half-barbecued bastard, recruited for the cause. A particularly bolshie political prisoner, as I recall. I’m told there was a resemblance. And to be fair, your judgement at that moment was hardly impeccable. You were very nearly concussed, were you not?’

  Winter remembered the fight on the stairs in Belgravia, the blinding impact of the headbutt from that thug in the regimental tie, brutal enough to knock his senses for six.

  ‘He worked for you? That man on the stairs?’

  ‘Muscle, nothing more. Come now, don’t be jealous. He has none of your remarkable initiative.’

  ‘Why would you do this?’ Winter demanded, a wounded edge to his voice now. ‘Why wouldn’t you tell me, Malcolm? We’re friends! Didn’t you trust me?’

  At the edge of his vision Winter saw Karina crouched by Malykh’s body as the men confronted each other. She slipped a hand inside the dead officer’s trenchcoat and extracted the book.

  ‘I trusted you enough to give you this mission,’ said Malcolm, briskly. ‘My methodology may be a tad unorthodox but then Faulkner would never have signed off on it. Just great, rolling cloudbanks of bureaucracy in that man’s mind. Precious little lightning. Far better for you to be outside the system. Much more useful.’

  ‘Useful for whom, Malcolm?’

  ‘For all of us, Christopher. But especially for you. You’re always at your best when you’re free of the apparatus. No sticky departmental politics, no checks and balances, no triplicate. None of that messy business of accountability. Pure forward momentum. The perfect, efficient instrument. And one given a certain fire in his heart by the fact of my death. We’re nothing without motivation, Christopher. I had to make it compelling, naturally.’

  Winter shook his head, still struggling to make sense of Malcolm’s presence, let alone his words.

  ‘You should have trusted me. I didn’t need to be deceived, Malcolm. That was a shitty thing to do.’

  Malcolm reproached him with a twinkle. ‘Come now, Christopher. We map shadows. We walk in mirrors. We are the architects of mazes. This is our calling. It’s what we do.’

  He turned to regard the captive Russian trooper. ‘And now, perhaps, we should start to take care of extraneous details. Keep it neat, keep it tidy.’

  Malcolm blithely shot the prisoner in the chest. The boy flailed as the bullet hit him. And then he sagged to the ground, his tunic darkening with blood.

  ‘He was unarmed,’ said Winter, appalled.

  ‘Well, naturally,’ smiled Malcolm. ‘If he’d been aiming a gun at my head I’d have already shot the little bastard.’

  He pivoted on his heel, shifting the pistol towards Karina. The charm was gone. ‘The book, if you please.’

  ‘She’s with me,’ said Winter, quickly. ‘She’s not a Russian operative, Malcolm. She was undercover.’

  ‘I don’t give a damn. She has what I need. And I’ll happily take it from her corpse if I must.’

  He levelled the gun, pragmatically. ‘The book. I shan’t ask again.’


  ‘Don’t shoot her, Malcolm!’

  ‘I trust she’s bright enough to ensure I don’t have to.’

  Karina glared at the pistol trained upon her chest. The commandos had also turned to target her. The barrels of the Bren guns hovered, anticipating the chance to fire. Resigned, she passed the book to Malcolm, resentment in her eyes.

  The SIS man snatched it from her hand. He turned the leather-bound pages, inspecting the glyphs. Curiosity mixed with satisfaction on his face.

  ‘Oh, this is excellent. Excellent. It’s all here, just as I hoped. What a remarkable achievement. Shall we consider it your legacy, dear girl, or does that sound premature?’

  Karina’s voice was composed. ‘If you use that book then the legacy is all yours, believe me.’

  She turned to Winter. ‘Perhaps you need to choose your friends with greater care, Christopher. This one doesn’t reflect well on you at all.’

  Winter watched as Malcolm paced the flagstones, leafing through Dee’s grimoire just as Malykh had done in Schattenturm. The parallel made him uneasy. A dozen or more questions pushed at his lips.

  ‘Look, Malcolm, what’s going on? Straight answer. No bullshit.’

  Malcolm closed the book with a snap of leather. ‘Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.’ There was a hint of something mischievous moving at the edges of his mouth. ‘I take it you remember your Milton?’

  ‘I said no bullshit, Malcolm.’

  ‘You do remember studying Milton, don’t you? Then again, perhaps you don’t. Perhaps all that you truly recall is the name of your school. Shrewsbury, wasn’t it? Or did we choose Dulwich?’

  ‘Dulwich,’ said Winter, instantly, automatically, unthinkingly.

  ‘Very good, Christopher. The essential framework is all there, of course. I imagine the finer details feel a little less defined. Fog and static where memories should be. But then you never dwell, do you? You barely glimpse the holes in your mind. They’re entirely natural, you tell yourself. That’s how we taught you to regard them. You’re all about forward momentum, after all. The perfect instrument. No place for nostalgia in an assassin’s life. No need to look back.’