The corpse's hands, wizened and claw-like, groped at its chest, sinking deep into the cavity where its organs had once been. After a second, they dropped to its sides.
Morgan's back pressed against the icy metal of the wall, as far away from the body on the table as he could possibly get.
"Don't worry, this thing won't kill you," the corpse said.
"Yeah?" Morgan's teeth started chattering audibly the moment he opened his mouth. If he hadn't met Tomas, he wondered if he would have thought he was hallucinating.
"Yes. In fact, it's the cold that will finish you off."
Morgan realised he knew that voice. Despite the mushy, awkward sound it made working round a half-decayed tongue, it was recognisably Raphael's.
"Is that book really worth dying for?" the old man asked.
"I don't know," Morgan said. "You tell me."
"Come out here, and I will."
"Tell me and I'll think about it."
There was a brief silence, then, "This isn't stalemate, Morgan. In less than two hours you will die, and the book will be mine anyway."
"Yeah? So why are you going to all this trouble to talk to me?"
The corpse shrugged, gaping the cavity of its chest open and shut. "Maybe I'm sentimental. Maybe I don't want to kill my old friend's son."
Morgan wondered if Raphael could see through the corpse's milky eyes. If he could, the old man would be able to read his expression of shock.
"I'm talking about Geraint Nicholson, of course," Raphael said after a moment. "Not whoever it was that raised you."
Morgan knew this must be a trap, a ruse to get him to give in, but he couldn't help asking the question. It was why he'd come here in the first place. "You're saying you knew my dad?"
The cadaver nodded, head flopping loosely on its neck. "I knew him very well." A brief, wet laugh. "Probably better than anyone. Who do you think taught him to control the dead?"
Morgan tried to make sense of it, but he felt like he was being given pieces to two entirely different puzzles. "That means you were part of the Hermetic Division, right?"
"I knew your father before he founded it. Do you want to know what kind of man he was? I expect you do. I don't imagine they've told you much, those people you're working for. Information is currency to them, and they've always been miserly with it."
"There's no way they could have told me about him, is there? Until today I didn't even know he existed." Morgan snapped his mouth shut at the corpse's smile, knowing he'd revealed more than he'd intended.
"So they've been keeping you in the dark, you who had more right to the truth than anyone. How very like them."
There was a long silence, and Morgan understood the old man's game. He was waiting for Morgan to ask a question, to admit that he wanted the information. Morgan wanted to resist, but the cold seemed to be closing in on him, squeezing the air out of his chest and freezing the thoughts in his head. Raphael had got it wrong. Morgan doubted he had two hours. Less than one, probably, before he was finished.
Fuck it. He did want to know. "All right then, what kind of man was he?"
"He was - "
The corpse fell back to the table, arms flopping brokenly against the metal. For a moment Morgan thought it was a trick, maybe a test of how badly Morgan wanted to know. But the seconds stretched on and the body didn't move. Raphael had gone, and the answers with him.
Whoever was inside hadn't locked the door. It burst inward to hit the wall with a muted ring like a cracked bell. The instant it was open Tomas leapt through, Anya and Belle close behind.
There were two men in the room, both holding guns. Tomas recognised the younger. It was Karamov's contact from the restaurant, with his round face and drooping, weak mouth. He kept darting nervous glances at his companion, as if waiting for instructions.
"Raphael?" Tomas guessed.
The old man frowned. "And I imagined the rash Mr Hewitt was on a solo mission."
"Where is he?"
Raphael didn't react, but the young man jerked an involuntary glance behind him, before looking back at Tomas.
Tomas took a careful step forward, watching the men's eyes and not their guns.
"In case you haven't noticed," Raphael said, "we are armed and you are not."
"I'm not afraid of your weapons," Tomas told him.
"Aren't you?"
Tomas shrugged. "Shoot me and see."
Raphael stared at him a second, then moved the angle of his muzzle a fraction. "And what about the ladies? Do they share your indifference to bullets?"
Tomas knew his expression had betrayed him when Raphael smiled.
"Hurt them and I'll kill you."
"Indeed," Raphael said. "And vice versa, naturally."
Tomas kept his eyes trained on Raphael and his underling, but he saw a swirl of movement in his peripheral vision and knew that Anya had moved to stand beside him. Hopeless - he couldn't shield her that way. But then there were two men with two guns; all they had to do was move apart. Raphael had him locked down and he knew it.
Still, stalemate went both ways. Tomas took three more paces forward. He felt the young man twitch the barrel of his gun round to track him, but Raphael never moved, keeping his own trained on Anya as he'd promised.
"That's quite close enough," the old man said.
Would he fire? Could he really kill a woman in cold blood? Tomas had a brief flash of memory: the pack of dogs tearing into Karamov's flesh as the fat Russian screamed and screamed. If Raphael had ordered that, he was capable of anything.
"I don't want to hurt you, I just want to find Morgan," Tomas said. He really did, though he wasn't quite sure why. His partner had been nothing but a pain in the arse since they'd started working together.
Raphael's lizard-thin lips twitched downward. "I have no idea who you're talking about."
Anya stirred beside Tomas and he spoke before she could say the wrong thing. "That's fine. Just let me look in that room behind you, and I'll go." He'd spotted the thick metal door as soon as he'd stepped nearer, and it didn't take a genius to figure out where the young man had been looking when Tomas mentioned Morgan.
It also didn't take a genius to work out that Morgan must still have Nicholson's book. Why else would Raphael be so worried about keeping Tomas away from him?
"I'll even let you have the book," Tomas said, "if you let Morgan go."
This time it was Raphael who couldn't control his reaction. His mask of elderly affability vanished, replaced by something much less wholesome. "The boy is more important to you than the book? I don't think so."
"We've already copied the entire thing," Tomas said. "You getting hold of the original is regrettable, but within mission parameters."
The old man studied him for a long moment. Finally, he shook his head. "No. Morgan said nothing about any copies."
Tomas kept his face impassive, but inside he was smiling. The old man was slipping, admitting that he had seen Morgan. "You think we'd tell a green operative like him what we were up to? Take the book, Raphael, and give me the boy."
"There are only two real choices here," Anya said. "Everyone walks out of here alive, or no one does. I know which I prefer."
Tomas saw it in the young man's face, the sudden realisation that he might die. He hadn't come here expecting a fight, and he wasn't ready for its consequences. For the first time his gun wavered, barrel shaking with his hand.
In that moment of irresolution, while Tomas was debating whether he could risk rushing the young man, and the young man was wavering in the face of his own mortality and Anya was backing carefully away, and everything seemed poised on a knife edge, something none of them had been expecting happened.
The metal door behind Raphael swung inward, letting out a blast of ice-cold air - and Morgan.
Morgan staggered, Raphael spun to face him, and Tomas finally moved. A bullet from the young man's gun took him in the chest, enough power in it to push him back, teetering on his heels, but he didn't
fall and he kept advancing.
The young man's eyes widened in horror as his mouth slackened in fear. And then Tomas was on him, bearing the slighter man's body to the ground with his own.
Too hard. The impact tightened his opponent's finger on the trigger, and Tomas felt a second bullet slam into him. The agony was searing, loosening his hands for a crucial second from around the other man's shoulders.
As soon as he was released, the young man rolled and rose. He could have shot Belle then. She was standing to the side of the action, utterly defenceless. But all he seemed to care about was escape. He didn't even look at Raphael as he bolted for the door.
Tomas didn't try to stop him. Raphael was the one he wanted. As he staggered to his feet, groaning at the pain of the bullet holes in his chest and gut, he saw the older man stumble to his knees, the gun falling from his hand.
It was Morgan. Tomas's partner looked dead on his feet, but his mouth was twisted in a snarl and his fist was still clenched from the blow he'd delivered. Why hadn't Raphael shot him? Slowed by age, maybe.
But not so slow that he couldn't lash out with his own fist to catch Tomas where the first bullet had gone in. Tomas's body curled helplessly around the pain. In the second that bought him, Raphael pressed a wrinkled hand underneath him and pushed himself unsteadily to his feet. Then he was up and running for the door.
Morgan moved to follow but fell to his knees instead, as if all his strength had suddenly given out. Anya crouched at his side, a steadying hand on his back. Tomas straightened with a yell of pain and ran in the old man's shadow.
Raphael was at the door before Tomas caught him. He grabbed Raphael's arm, his own hand so large it enclosed the frail wrist with a finger joint to spare.
"Leaving so soon?" he gasped, through the pain of wounds that should have been mortal.
"Don't worry, it's only a temporary parting." Improbably, Raphael smiled. He was still smiling as the knife he'd hidden in his other hand flashed up, and then down. The blade was surgically sharp, cutting clean through skin and muscle and tendons and finally bone.
The moment the tendon was severed Tomas's fingers loosened. He watched, helplessly, as his hand released Raphael's wrist and fell to the floor. He looked at it there, swimming in a pool of his own blood, like a fleshy pink spider drowning.
With an effort of will, he forced his attention back up to Raphael - and for just a second their gazes locked.
The old man's eyes were bright blue beneath the gumminess of age, and a light shone out of them which froze Tomas where he stood. He felt like something rank had touched him, something he'd never be able to wash away.
Then the door opened and shut, and Raphael was gone.
PART TWO
Things Fall Apart
CHAPTER EIGHT
Tomas felt Anya watching him as Belle sewed his hand to his wrist with precise, neat little stitches. The end of the girl's tongue poked between her teeth as she worked, a tiny pink point like a pimple in the whiteness. They'd booked two sleeper carriages for the four of them, but were crammed into just one of them now, a musty, leather-smelling space that jammed Belle's elbow against Morgan's stomach as she stitched, while Tomas bent his head to sit on the lower bed and Anya perched cross-legged on the top bunk above them.
Every stitch hurt as it went in, joining a deeper ache that somehow spread from his arm out towards his fingers, the vanguard of the feeling that returned to them as Belle sewed. He'd sneaked into the morgue after Raphael escaped and did what he had to do to ensure his wounds healed. It troubled Tomas how easy he now found it to accept what he'd become. His lifeless body didn't feel like the inert weight it once had, vibrating with the rhythmic rattling of the train lines beneath them. He felt another note sounding inside him too, a buzzing tension which hadn't dissipated since they'd left Budapest three hours ago.
He would have liked to take a plane, fly straight back to London and ask all the questions that had been curdling in his mind since he'd first seen Nicholson's name on that book. But Anya had said no airport would let him through security looking the way he did, and she was right. Besides, Raphael was still out there. The airport was probably being watched. Instead, this train would take them overnight to Berlin, where Anya's colleagues in the BND had promised to share their files on Karamov and Raphael.
"You should be dead," Anya said suddenly. There was a flat, shell-shocked tone to her voice. "I knew. I mean, I'd been told. But to see it..."
"Join the club," Morgan said. They'd bandaged the flesh wound in his side, but he still looked unwell, a grey tinge to his brown skin.
If Morgan had been hoping to focus Anya's attention on Tomas, he'd made a tactical error. She turned to look at Morgan, eyes blazing. "You've got some explaining to do."
Morgan's full mouth turned down, and though his eyes remained blank Tomas could guess what was going on behind them. Thinking up excuses.
Before Morgan could try one of them, Tomas said, "You hoped Raphael would be able to translate the book for you."
After a moment, Morgan nodded.
Anya frowned. "Or, alternatively, Morgan was working for him all along."
"Don't be absurd!" Tomas snapped. "People don't generally leave their associates to freeze to death in locked morgues. Even Raphael wouldn't do that - or at least not while Morgan still had the book he wanted."
"I'd never even heard of Raphael before I read about him in your file," Morgan said. "And yeah, I wanted to know what the book said."
"Why did you care?" That was Belle, speaking with a slight lisp as she bit through the end of the thread.
Tomas pulled his sleeve down before Anya could see the way his flesh was already beginning to knit together around the tiny black stitches.
Morgan's fingers played around his mouth, as if he wanted to filter his words before they came out. "Because I don't know why the hell I was sent on this mission. And I don't know why..." He looked at Tomas, then away. "Either the world's gone crazy, or I have. This book is the only thing we've got that might have an explanation in it, and you wanted to just give it away."
"I want to know what Nicholson's book was doing in Karamov's hands, too," Tomas said. "And what it's got to do with the Ragnarok artefacts."
"How very democratic the Hermetic Division must be," Anya said. "All its agents questioning their orders all the time." The sun was setting outside the train window, a blood-red glow on the horizon that accentuated the scarlet of her hair and brought a blush of life to her pale cheeks. "You had a mission, and you fucked it up. Both of you. If you want to side with him, Tomas, that's fine, but don't expect me to carry on working with either of you."
"Please don't argue," Belle said. Her small face looked pinched and tired. "When you get angry I can feel him inside me, smiling and enjoying it. I think it makes him stronger. What's done is done - can't we leave it behind?"
"Leave behind the fact that Morgan nearly lost us the book? I don't think so. You need to give it to me, then we can all be sure it's safe." She reached an imperious hand to Morgan from her perch on the narrow bunk.
"I didn't give it to Raphael, did I? And I'm sure as hell not giving it to you."
Anya's reaching hand clenched into a fist. "How can we possibly trust you after what you did?"
"Don't trust me! I don't trust you. I don't trust anybody. Nobody's said a straight word to me since I started on this fucking mission!"
Anya frowned and cast a disapproving glance from Morgan to Belle. Morgan clamped his mouth shut, but his expression remained mulish.
Tomas sighed and ran a hand through his hair. "Let Morgan keep it. We can talk about this tomorrow morning when we've all had some sleep."
There wasn't as much to do on a train as Morgan had imagined when he'd watched Murder on the Orient Express one Sunday afternoon and thought that travelling this way must be pretty glamorous. The other passengers seemed disappointingly ordinary, a succession of smartly dressed businessmen and one big, blond-haired family with a co
llection of children so similar they looked like a set of Russian dolls.
Whenever Morgan leaned against the wall to watch them pass, the rectangular lump of his father's book dug into his back. It made him feel itchy and uncomfortable when he remembered how Tomas had defended him earlier. He tried to convince himself that he hadn't actually lied to his partner, but he knew he hadn't told him the whole truth either.
Morgan's stomach gurgled, loud enough for a passing guard to stifle a smile, and he realised he was starving. When had he last eaten, anyway?
The dining car was in the centre of the train, sparkling with glass and polished silver, exactly the kind of place he'd imagined as a child. But they'd stopped serving long ago, and the attendants looked round when Morgan stepped in, faces hardening in disapproval at his blood-stained t-shirt and army boots. He took a moment to stare them down, then backed out and away.
In another carriage there was a small canteen and he bought himself a ham roll and, after a moment's thought, a cheese sandwich for Tomas. After that there wasn't much else to do but head back to the sleeper cabin they were sharing.
It was dark when he pushed open the door, with only the pale light of the moon to illuminate the outlines of the bed and the small washbasin tucked against one wall. There was the humped shape of a body on the bottom bunk, and Morgan assumed Tomas must have drifted off to sleep already. But when he switched on the overhead light, he found the other man's eyes looking straight at him.
Morgan jerked back, breath catching in his throat. "Shit!"
"I don't need to sleep any more," Tomas said. "Not since..."
"Right. I brought you a sandwich, if you want to eat."
Tomas smiled crookedly. "I don't do that either."
Morgan ate both sandwiches in silence, spreading crumbs over the rectangle of old red carpet. When he'd finished, he wiped his mouth clean with his sleeve, then splashed water on his face from the cold tap.
Cold Warriors Page 11
