"It's gone, that's what matters. We both need to get it back. Does this mean you've got no more idea who's taken it than I have?"
Natasha rocked back on her heels. "Ah, so you don't know. That changes things, of course."
"You thought I had something to do with it?"
"Even you wouldn't be stupid enough to double-cross us. But we thought you might know who was responsible. Perhaps some enemy of yours."
"I don't have enemies. No living ones, anyway."
Natasha laughed. It was a horrible sound, a gloating gurgle, and even Karamov seemed to sense the danger in it. Anya saw him take a step back, releasing the woman's arm.
"You've got some enemies now," she said. "You know too much, and you're worth too little."
While he was still gathering himself to respond, she lifted something to her lips - and a piercing, unbearably high-pitched whistle screeched through Anya's headphones.
Over by the water tower, the woman smiled around the whistle as the note died. "And by the way," she said. "My name is Valeria, not Natasha."
There was a moment's silence, then another sound took the whistle's place - a high, inhuman howl. Anya couldn't find its source until she saw the man she'd noticed earlier, the tall man with the little dog. The animal was pulling so hard at its leash it actually dragged the man a pace or two. Its mouth was open, spittle hanging off its small white fangs, and suddenly it didn't look so funny.
As Anya watched, the little dog gave one final tug and its leash flew out of the man's hands. The moment it was free, the animal flew over the grass towards Karamov.
And behind it, from every corner of the park, a hundred other dogs raced after.
There was a moment of darkness, and then a dull clank as the lights came on, neon strips in the ceiling. It was Raphael who'd thrown the switch, a metal lever on the wall of the large, white-tiled room. The old man was smiling, still looking absent-mindedly amiable. But the hand holding the semi-automatic pointed at Morgan was absolutely steady.
Morgan spun round, knowing the door was right behind him.
So was another gun. A round-faced, thick-lipped young man waved it at him, the universal gesture for "take a step back".
Morgan stumbled a little as he complied, and saw the young man's finger twitch on the trigger, a sheen of nervous sweat glittering on his forehead.
"Easy, Vadim," Raphael snapped. "Morgan isn't going to do anything unwise, are you?"
Morgan shook his head as he backed away, all the while calculating distances and strategies. He was ten feet from Raphael, fifteen from Vadim. The old man was the obvious target, but Morgan knew that he was the real threat. The boy was unsure of himself. He was the one who could be tricked, maybe manoeuvred into a position where he was blocking Raphael's line of fire...
"Stay where you are please, Morgan," Raphael said, as if he'd read his thoughts.
Morgan nodded, holding his hands away from his sides as he let the tension in his body relax. The old man was too dangerous to play games with, at least until he'd got a better sense of what was going on. He took the chance to look around him instead.
The room might once have been a laboratory. Old, grooved benches and rickety stalls lined its walls, but they didn't seem to be serving their original purpose. The entire central area had been cleared to leave twenty square feet of dark wooden floorboards. At first Morgan took the patterns on them for dirt or decay, but after a second his eyes resolved them into elaborate runes written in chalk. The surrounding benches were crowded with junk. He spotted statues, elaborately carved in ivory, one a horned man, another of a heavily pregnant woman. Nearby, an old-fashioned telescope was resting against the skull of something that might have been a monkey or a man. A jar next to it held the pitiful, deformed remains of a human foetus.
Morgan managed a twisted grin at Raphael. "Doesn't look much like a library to me."
"Indeed," Raphael said. "Nor do you look very much like an employee of Karamov's to me."
"You were the buyer for the book, weren't you?"
Raphael nodded, smiling almost apologetically. But even when he lowered his head, he kept his eyes trained unblinkingly on Morgan, and his gun hand never wavered.
Morgan didn't need Tomas there to tell him he'd been an idiot.
Anya ran towards Karamov the second he started screaming. There were three dogs on him already, and more were streaming across the grass, howling as they charged.
When Anya was twenty paces away she saw him stamp his foot to crush the head of the smallest dog, the absurd little Pekingese. There was a splatter of gore, skull fragments and cloudy white brain tissue, but the blood on the dog's muzzle was Karamov's.
As Anya watched, ten paces away and closing, she saw an Alsatian leap forward to clamp its jaws around Karamov's knee. She heard the sound of cartilage crunching and a silver bell on the dog's collar swung in time to the shaking of its head.
There were six dogs on him, then seven. A bull terrier worried at his toes then fell back, three of them in its mouth. A small white poodle scratched its way up his calf to tear at his thigh. It must have caught something crucial in its teeth, because Karamov's leg suddenly gave. He fell to his knees, and now the dogs could reach his face and neck.
He wasn't the only one screaming. When Anya finally reached him she had to push her way through a ring of people. The dogs' owners watched, horrified, as their pets ripped a man to shreds.
Karamov's bodyguards had reached him too, but even they hesitated, watching the carnage in mute shock. Anya didn't want to get any closer either. She really didn't want to see the ragged mess the animals had made of Karamov's face, flaps of skin fluttering from his jaw like ribbons.
But he kept on screaming, and something essentially human in her couldn't hear that desperate noise and not respond. She tackled the poodle first, prising its jaws away from the wreckage of his leg with an effort that nearly tore her shoulder. When it was finally free, she took the little creature by its collar and dashed its head on the ground. Somewhere behind her there was a muted gasp of protest and a woman fell to her knees beside the animal's corpse.
Anya grabbed the Alsatian next - but it was much too strong. Even as she pulled at it, its jaws closed, severing Karamov's right leg below the knee.
The big Russian's face was grey and slack. He'd lost too much blood and suffered too much pain. Anya let the Alsatian go, knowing that nothing was going to save Karamov now.
His eyelids flickered, consciousness fading. Then for one brief moment his eyes opened and stared into hers, bright and clear. "Raphael," he gasped. "All the bastards I know - and he's the one to kill me."
Morgan knew he still had one thing Raphael wanted, the only thing that was keeping him safe. The book was tucked into the waistband of his jeans, hidden from the old man's view. Until Raphael had the book in his hands, Morgan didn't think he'd risk harming it by harming him.
Once he had the book, all bets were off.
"Give it to me," Raphael said.
Morgan backed away a step, towards the far side of the room where there was another door leading - who knew where? Out, and that was all that really mattered. "Why should I?" he said.
Raphael looked at his gun.
Morgan shook his head. "I meant, you know, morally."
"Morally?" Raphael laughed. "Because I paid for it. Because I know how to use it. I know what it is. Do you?"
"Obviously not. That's why I came to see you."
Vadim was looking between them, perplexed. His semi-automatic had drooped as his attention wandered, the barrel pointing down at the dark wood of the floor. Good. One less threat to worry about.
Raphael's tongue flicked out, pink and pointed, to moisten his lips. "If you give it to me, I will tell you what its purpose is."
"There's a flaw in that arrangement - I'm sure you can see it." Morgan took another step backwards.
Raphael's eyes narrowed. "Then let's return to the fact that I have a gun."
Another s
tep. "If you were going to shoot me, you'd have done it already."
Raphael's pale face flushed with anger, and Morgan instantly knew he was right. The old man didn't mean to kill him.
Morgan's heart was pounding against his ribs as if it wanted to break them, the confrontation too cold and calculated for battle fever to carry him through it. Death seemed real and imminent - but he had to take the one chance he had.
He took a last look at Raphael, making very sure that he'd judged him right, then turned his back and sprinted for the far end of the room.
One shot rang out, deafeningly loud in the confined space. The bullet shattered the white tiles on the wall ahead of him.
That had been Vadim, he was sure. And he could hear the clatter of hard leather heels on the floor behind him but also the old man shouting in a language Morgan didn't know. He could only hope he was saying "Don't fire!"
Maybe he was, but another shot rang out before Morgan could reach the far wall. It was better aimed this time and he felt a tearing at his side that left a searing pain behind. Every instinct told him to curl in and shield the wound. He compromised with a hand pressed against the blood oozing from beneath his ribs and kept on running.
Two more paces and he was at the door. It was made of a thick, silver metal and it opened with a wheel, not a handle. Morgan spun it desperately, working against stiff resistance.
The footsteps were right behind him now. As he felt a hand claw at his shoulder he kicked back and up, viciously hard. There was a whoosh of lost air and a tiny, almost sub-vocal squeak that in other circumstances might have been funny. Morgan felt the hand slide down his shoulder, fisting in his t-shirt for a moment of pain before slackening and falling off.
Two more twists of the wheel and the door was open. He flung himself through, dragging it shut behind him. There was another wheel on the inside, and he twisted that shut with the same frantic haste until it wouldn't turn any more.
Only one problem left - no lock.
The door had opened inward, though. It could be jammed. Morgan saw five metal tables lined up across the width of the room. He braced his shoulder against the nearest, heaving hard. The exertion forced a gush of blood from the wound in his side, and he wasn't sure he had the strength to lift it, but he had to try. He took a gulp of air, then let out a strangled yell as he strained upwards with everything he had.
The table rocked, lifted - and then it had all the momentum it needed as it swung up and toppled over to rest against the door. Gasping for breath now, Morgan forced himself to make one last effort, levering the table up so that it pressed against the door at an angle, the other end jabbing into the floor. A second later there was a clatter against the outside of the door, then the louder bang of something striking it repeatedly - probably Vadim's shoulder.
The door opened an inch as the table skidded across the floor. Then its corner ground to a halt, digging into the grouting between two tiles. Morgan flung himself prone onto the flat silver surface, and his weight pushed the table down, slamming the door shut and holding it fast.
There were more loud bangs against the outside, but this time the door didn't shift at all. Then there was the much louder retort of a gunshot. The metal didn't even shudder, far too thick for the bullets to pierce.
All the air seemed to finally go out of Morgan, and he sagged to the floor like a deflated balloon. His side hurt like hell. The bullet had missed anything vital but gouged out a thick slice of flesh on its journey in and out. Thankfully, the blood was already starting to clot in the profound cold.
The cold. For the first time Morgan actually looked at his surroundings. The air was so frigid he could see his breath in a cloud of white in front of him, floating towards the low, metal ceiling. The far wall was lined with metal too, even tessellations that looked like a honeycomb. After a moment Morgan realised they were drawers. The other two walls were entirely blank - no other doors leading out.
He crawled towards the far wall on his hands and knees, lacking the energy to stand up. His path took him between two of the other silver tables, the ones that were still upright. He felt something brush against his cheek and brushed it irritably away, only to have it swing back down and hit his face with more force.
It was a hand. There was a body on the table, arms and legs the discoloured yellow of elderly custard, the chest cut open and splayed out, the cavity empty of organs. Those were on a low bench at the side of the room, Morgan realised, the heart sitting on a set of electronic scales.
There were two other bodies on neighbouring tables, one of them a teenaged girl and almost whole, the other rendered down to its constituent limbs. Morgan suspected that the drawers at the end of the room held more corpses, if this was a morgue, and what the hell else could it be?
He shivered again and kept on shivering, the cold slowly seeping through his skin and into his bones. He took one last look around and then crawled back to the door, wondering if there was anywhere worse he could possibly have locked himself.
Anya had retreated to the far side of the water tower, away from the police who'd descended on the scene of Karamov's slaughter, and the shell-shocked dog owners who somehow had to explain what their pets had done.
The scene kept replaying in her mind, over and over on an endless loop, the white teeth tearing into the red flesh. But worse than that, worse than the sight of a man ripped to pieces in front of her, was how familiar it had all felt.
She'd seen Karamov torn apart and something inside her had said, that once happened to me. But of course it hadn't. How could it have? So why did she feel like there was a memory of pain as intense and brutalising as the Russian's, hidden somewhere in her past?
Her hands were shaking as she leafed through the folder, shoving pages aside impatiently when she failed to find what she was looking for. She could see that she was leaving red stains on the white paper but she managed to concentrate so hard on her search that she didn't have to think about what they were.
After a few minutes a hand rested on hers, stilling it.
It was Tomas, his grave face unusually gentle. "What happened back there?"
"Karamov's dead."
"We saw." That was Belle. The little girl hovered a few paces away, seemingly reluctant to come any closer.
Anya set the folder aside and batted Tomas's hand irritably from hers. "It was the girl, Natasha - or, I can't remember her real name. God, I really should remember her name..."
"Anya," Tomas said softly.
"What? Oh, the girl. She was the one who made it happen. She used some sort of whistle to summon the dogs. Some power in it, I don't know, I've never seen anything like it before. Sumerian, maybe, I've heard that they -"
"Working for Karamov's rivals?" Tomas cut across her. "He must have - have had - a lot of enemies."
"Not a rival. Raphael." She picked up the folder again and started to leaf through it, the pages swimming in and out of focus in front of her eyes. "He's in here somewhere, I know he is. Karamov had been phoning him and we couldn't figure out why. But it didn't occur to us - it just didn't seem probable - that he'd be the buyer."
Tomas tried to catch her eye again. "Why didn't it seem probable?"
"Damn it!" Anya shouted, throwing the folder to the ground. The wind riffled the paper then began to blow it away. "Where the hell has the briefing document gone!?"
Belle knelt to pick up the pages, stacking them into neat piles with her small white hands.
"Listen," Tomas said, more sternly this time. "You can fall apart later. Right now the trail is hot and we have to follow it. As soon as this Raphael hears the job's been done he'll have no more reason to stay here. Tell me what you know about him."
Anya nodded sharply, trying to jolt herself back to rationality. It seemed to work, because her voice was only shaking a little when she said, "He's a visiting professor at the university here. He specialises in linguistics, ancient languages mostly. Beyond that, we couldn't find out very much. At the time, we cou
ldn't fathom his connection to Karamov. But now -"
"He might want the book because he's the only person who can actually translate it," Belle suggested.
Anya nodded. "Which is why I need to figure out where the hell the briefing notes on him have got to!"
The same thought occurred to all three of them at once, but Tomas was the first to voice it: "Morgan."
Morgan knew the fact he wasn't shivering any more wasn't a good sign. The blood had stopped seeping from the hole in his side, which he'd plugged with scraps of cotton ripped from the bottom of his t-shirt, and he felt okay. Better than okay. He was in an almost euphoric haze.
That probably wasn't a good sign either.
When the pleasant drowsiness threatened to tip over into actual sleep, Morgan forced himself to stagger to his feet. The pain instantly registered again, along with the searing cold, and he was sorry he'd done it. There was no window in the thick metal door, which meant he had no way of knowing what Raphael and his goon were up to. For all he knew, they could have given up and left - but he doubted it.
He shuffled over to the back wall instead, to the honeycomb of drawers. Most of them were empty. The ones that weren't held corpses in greater states of decomposition than the ones on the tables. A stench of formaldehyde oozed out when he opened the last drawer and he hurriedly shut it, hiding away the blank white face and glassy blue eyes of the occupant.
A second after the metallic chink of the drawer closing there was another softer noise behind him. He spun round, a surge of adrenaline instantly washing away the haze blanketing his mind.
The door was still closed, the upended table wedged tight against it. But the sound came again, recognisable now as the soft whisper of fabric against metal, and this time Morgan realised that it was coming from inside the room.
It was the movement which finally drew his eye, the withered hands reaching out to press against the metal of the table as the corpse levered itself upright. There was a waft of cold air which stank of corruption.
Cold Warriors Page 10
