Cold Warriors

by Rebecca Levene

  There was a sound that might have been a sigh of relief. "Where are you?" Morgan looked at Anya, who shook her head. "I'm safe, and I'm on my way back. Expect me in two days." He closed the phone and handed it back to Anya before Tomas could ask anything else.

  She stopped, forcing him to do the same. The crowd buffeted them as it passed.

  "Two days?"

  "There's some research I want to do while we're here."

  "Anything you want to find out, we can do it in Berlin," Anya said. "I'll feel safer when that damn book is off our hands."

  Exactly. The book. There was no way Morgan was going to let anyone take it away before he'd had a better look at it. He could feel it now, a reassuring hard lump stuffed into the front of his jeans, hidden by the baggy t-shirt. "I'll feel safer when I know what the book is," Morgan insisted.

  He started walking again before she could reply. She caught up with him in an annoyed little half-jog, then grabbed his elbow to force him to face her. "We can't read the book. That's another reason we need to get it back to base."

  "Yeah?" Morgan said, snatching his arm back. "Haven't you ever heard of the internet?"

  He'd found what he was looking for. The café was run-down and overcrowded, but he could see the row of computers at the back, and at least one of them was free. A bell above the door jangled tunelessly as he opened it. "Mine's a tea, milk and three sugars," he told Anya, and went to sit in front of the free terminal.

  He glanced back briefly to see her rolling her eyes at him. After a second, she shook her head and went to the small counter to order.

  It took him a few goes to figure out the keyboard. Stupid of him to assume it would use the English alphabet. Still, it was close enough, and it didn't take him too long to navigate to Google. He glanced around surreptitiously, then pulled out the book and put it beside the keyboard, open at a random page. A runic Hungarian alphabet, Raphael had said.

  By the time Anya came over with his tea, he'd found what he was looking for.

  "It's the same alphabet," Anya said, looking between the book and the screen.

  Morgan nodded. "Do I or do I not rule?"

  Anya huffed what might have been a laugh and pulled across another chair to squeeze in beside him. "Where did you find it?"

  "Wikipedia," Morgan admitted.

  Anya definitely was laughing this time. "Bet Nicholson didn't imagine that would be possible when he wrote the thing."

  "Raphael told me the language was almost forgotten," Morgan said. "But as it turns out, he was a lying bastard."

  "You'll still need a dictionary to translate it."

  "Well yeah, if it's actually Hungarian like Raphael said. But don't you think it's more likely he was just using it as some sort of code - you know, what's it called? A cypher."

  For the first time since he'd met her, Anya looked impressed. "You really aren't as stupid as you look."

  Morgan grinned. "I know it's not meant that way, but I'm gonna take that as a compliment."

  Tomas could feel Anya twitching restlessly in the car seat beside him. He knew she wanted to debrief him, especially now Belle was temporarily out of the way, reporting to her CIA handlers at an undisclosed location. Anya wanted to know more about Morgan, but there was nothing Tomas could tell. The phone the young man used to call hadn't transmitted its number, and there was no way for Tomas to call him back. Morgan could be anywhere, in any sort of trouble, and there was nothing Tomas could do about it.

  He pushed the futile worry from his mind, concentrating instead on the view outside the window. Berlin had been Tomas's second home, but it was a city he'd always found easier to admire than to love. Now it sparkled with all the new buildings, the spruced-up parks and smart commuters. It was like coming back from holiday to find that your wife had lost twenty pounds and had a face lift.

  The Wall fell. He'd known that intellectually, of course, but seeing the reality of it was still astonishing. It made him realise he'd dedicated his life to a battle he'd never really expected to win.

  BND headquarters were in Pullach, but it was their Berlin outpost which had been tracking Karamov, and that was where Anya told him they were heading. The building was on the west side of the city, but their driver had veered across the old border to avoid heavy traffic.

  There wasn't even a trace of cement where the Wall had once run, cutting so brutally across streets and sometimes even buildings. Tomas had expected at least the foundations to be left. Some kind of memorial.

  Anya saw him looking. "There's some of it still standing at Checkpoint Charlie," she told him. "It's a museum now."

  "A museum," he repeated in wonder.

  "You were around then, weren't you?" Anya asked him. "Back when the Cold War was still on."

  Tomas nodded. "I spent a lot of time in this place."

  "I should thank you then. I grew up in East Germany. It was your generation that bought mine its freedom."

  "I suppose so." It had never felt as though they were fighting for actual people, individuals. The war had been both more abstract and more concrete than that. It was about an ideology that had to be defeated, and about getting through the next two hours with the Stasi on your tail and no safe house within fifty miles.

  Five minutes later they'd arrived at a narrow office block faced with tinted glass that gave nothing away. Inside it was almost as characterless, several big open-plan rooms divided into worker-ant cubicles by beige screens. Anya led Tomas past them all and down to a basement room with only the corner of an upper window to give it any natural light. She flicked on a neon and took a seat at the small conference table.

  Tomas shrugged, and sat opposite her. "Someone else joining us?"

  "The agents who've been tracking Karamov for the last month. They tell me they've got some interesting news."

  "We've been fucking idiots, that's what the news is!" The speaker was a big barrel of a man, shouldering the door open to let two others through behind him. He had wiry blond hair and the palest skin Tomas had ever seen, almost albino.

  "Gunter," Anya said, and hurried round the table to hug him. Tomas blinked in surprise. Anya had never struck him as a person who liked anyone enough to progress beyond a limp handshake.

  "Anya, my sweet," Gunter said in German. Then, switching back to English, "And Tomas, of course." He offered his hand. "Well, we've buggered this one up spectacularly, and I don't mind admitting it."

  Tomas saw the other two men hiding their smiles as they sat down. He shook his head. "I'd say there's blame enough to go round. We were the ones who lost the book."

  "True, though I hear your partner now has it. Barring any further unforeseen cock-ups, it should be in our hands very soon."

  Tomas shifted uncomfortably under Gunter's scrutiny, sure the other man could sense his doubts. But Morgan would bring the book back. He must. "So what is this information you have for us?" Tomas asked when the silence had stretched.

  Gunter placed a small computer on the table in front of him, the thin silver looking too delicate in his meaty fingers as he flipped the lid open. "That's just what I'm saying. A balls-up of monumental proportions."

  The screen came to life as soon as it was open, and Tomas saw that Gunter had brought up a picture of a white-haired old man, thin to the point of angularity. The photo was black and white and taken from a high, oblique angle. Clearly surveillance footage. "That's Raphael," Tomas confirmed. "You've been tracking him?"

  Gunter shook his head. "No, but we have been tracking a German businessman by the name of Gabriel. Tracking him for quite a while, as it happens, so you'd think someone in this building might have pulled their brain out of their arse long enough to notice that it was the same fucking man."

  Anya leaned over to scroll through a few more photos. "You're saying Gabriel is Raphael? He's been working right here in Germany under a whole other alias?"

  "Give the woman a prize. If Raphael hadn't been such a minor figure in the Karamov investigation, we might have made
the connection sooner. Especially with the whole archangel thing - no one could accuse the man of being subtle."

  "If you were tracking Gabriel independently of Karamov," Tomas asked, "what had he done to put him on your radar?"

  "Nothing major," one of the other men said. His voice was whisper quiet, as if he felt the need to compensate for Gunter's hearty bark. "The corporation he runs is in the internet marketing business and squeaky clean. But some of his employees ran up flags, enough of them that we started to take notice."

  "Ex-Stasi," Gunter confirmed. "Low-level, mostly, but then we didn't have names for all their higher-level operatives. They destroyed their files when the Wall fell, you know."

  Tomas nodded. It didn't surprise him. The old East German secret service would have been afraid of war crimes prosecutions, and rightly so. "Any thoughts on why Raphael might be recruiting from that particular pool?"

  "Our best guess?" Gunter said. "It's those damn Ragnarok artefacts again."

  Tomas nodded. All the dots were slowly joining up, though the picture still wasn't clear. "Raphael thinks these agents might know something about their whereabouts?"

  "We always suspected the Stasi knew more than we did, but we could never get any of the cold-hearted cocksuckers to talk. Maybe Raphael came to the same conclusion - and had a better incentive to offer than immunity from prosecution."

  Anya tapped her fingers against the table, long nails clicking on the wood. "And do we have any idea what Raphael wants with the artefacts? Who is he working for?"

  Tomas frowned. "It could be any country - or maybe just himself. Nicholson's book might tell us. That might be why Raphael went to so much trouble to acquire it. Nicholson knew all there was to know about the artefacts, including who else was searching for them."

  "But did he know how to use them?" Gunter asked. "If indeed they really had a use."

  Tomas realised he was tapping his own fingers as he thought. He clenched his hand into a tight fist to still them. "OK. Sometimes the direct approach is the best. I say we bring in the agents Raphael hired and question them."

  "Mm," Gunter said. "We thought so too. Unfortunately, it turns out that every single one of them has disappeared off the face of the earth."

  "Disappeared?" Tomas said. "You've got to be joking!"

  Gunter raised his hands in a mime of apology. "I did tell you this whole op was an epic cluster fuck. We think Raphael must have taken them somewhere discreet to mine them for information."

  "Or he's already got the information," Anya said gloomily, "and now he's disposed of the only other people who knew it."

  Gunter nodded. "Yes, that is another possibility. The worst case scenario, in fact, because it means we've reached a dead end."

  "You've got a list somewhere, haven't you?" Tomas asked. "Of Gabriel's employees, I mean. Let me look at it."

  Gunter's big fingers clattered nimbly over the computer keyboard, and a moment later a list was on the screen. Tomas took a second to marvel at this new technology, so far in advance of anything he could have imagined. Then he shook his head and scanned the names. It had only been a small company and it didn't take him long to go through them. "He isn't there," he said with satisfaction.

  Anya's head cocked at a questioning angle.

  "Heinrich Stumpf," Tomas told her. "He used to be high up in the Stasi. Any information about the artefacts is likely to have gone through him - but it looks like he slipped through Raphael's net."

  Gunter studied Tomas. His eyes were such a pale blue they were almost silver. "You believe this man knows the location of the artefacts?"

  Tomas shrugged. "He's the only lead we've got. And he's weak. We... we managed to blackmail him once, get him to spill some fairly important secrets."

  One of the other men started tapping at his own keyboard. "Looks like Mr Stumpf is still around. He lives on Genter Strasse."

  Gunter rubbed his big hands together and smiled hugely. "Wonderful. At last, some news that doesn't make me want to blow my own brains out. Well, Tomas, I don't know about you, but I think you should pay your old friend a visit."

  Anya was sulking on the other bed. Morgan ignored her. He'd insisted they book a hotel to give him some time to translate the book, and short of trying to grab it from him and run, there hadn't been much Anya could do about it.

  "Don't mind me," she said. "I'll just lie here and entertain myself, shall I?"

  Morgan sighed. The book was balanced on his lap, a print-out of the runic alphabet on the plain orange bedspread beside him. "Give me a chance, I've only just started."

  It was painstaking work. The runes were very similar, and he kept having to look between the chart and the book to make sure he'd identified the right one. And Nicholson had left no gaps between letters, nothing to indicate where one word ended and another began. But after a few minutes Morgan looked up, eyes blazing with excitement.

  Anya caught his expression. "You were right, then - it is in English?"

  "Yeah." His voice was husky and he had to cough to clear it. "I think it might be a diary. The first thing it says is Seventh of August, 1978."

  She sat up, eyes widening. "That's right back near the start of the Hermetic Division. My god, if that book's a record of his time there, what he discovered... No wonder Raphael wanted it. What does it say?"

  "If you shut up a minute, I can tell you."

  She glowered but subsided, letting Morgan work on his translation in peace. After a few laborious minutes he found himself speeding up. He was learning to recognise the runic alphabet, but it was more than that. The words in the book began to take on the odd quality of something he already knew, but had temporarily forgotten.

  The sun had moved behind a building by the time he'd finished the first entry, leaving the room in gloomy twilight.

  "So what does he say?" Anya prompted, when Morgan finally looked up from the paper. "Is there anything there about the Ragnarok artefacts?"

  Morgan almost wanted to tell her it was none of her business. His father's diary felt like something extremely private. Of course, he didn't have a choice.

  "This is an absurd thing to do," Morgan read, glancing between the sheet of paper and Anya. "If the department had any idea I was keeping a diary, they'd skin me alive. 'Not good for security, old chap'."

  "He's right," Anya said. "Especially when the code's so easy to break."

  Morgan nodded and kept on reading. "It was the Polish priest who suggested it, when we met in Prague in '74. I don't know what made him say it, that our kind of work should be recorded for posterity. He was probably joking. Anyway, I hadn't thought about it - or about him, really - for a long time. But something today reminded me.

  "Tomas and I have been spinning our wheels for far too long. The head honchos are starting to get impatient. The trouble is, my little parlour trick with the mirror and the wandering spirit whetted their appetite, and now they're hungry for tangible results. We've tried, we really have, but so far we've chased nothing but shadows and rumours.

  "And that's all it was today, another rumour. We'd uncovered that copy of the Prose Edda weeks ago, but we hadn't bothered to read it. After all the fuss of getting it - those damn Norwegians seem to have wised up to what we're doing, and they were after it themselves. Anyway, after all that fuss, it didn't seem to contain anything new. But yesterday it came back from our translators.

  "They were almost as excited by it as I was. Ten new lines that aren't in any previous edition. They want to publish it, of course, which can't possibly be allowed. I suspect we're going to have to find some way of silencing them. The lines are in the Gylfaginning, and they're allusive and vague. Well, of course they are. The Norse myths have always been a terrible jumble, mixing up older traditions with Christian eschatology till you hardly know what's original and what's a far later addition. But these lines feel authentic to me, though I can't really explain why. There's no description in them, just a casual mention of something they call the 'Ragnarok artefacts'. T
hat's what made me think of the priest, I suppose. I'm sure he was the first person who ever told me those stories, late at night when we were hiding in some basement hoping the KGB wouldn't track us down. Anyway, it's not clear, but it seems these artefacts will have some role to play in bringing about the final end of things.

  "Could it be true? Could these artefacts really exist? It's absurd to believe it, just a myth after all. And yet. And yet. If it is true, if there's even the slightest chance, one thing is very clear. We have to find these things."

  "That's... that's fascinating," Anya said. Her face was almost glowing with excitement. "Any more translated beyond that?"

  "Only the first line," Morgan admitted. "And the date's a week later. There's no more for that entry."

  Anya got up to pace, her feet turning the nap of the carpet first one way, then the other. "This is great. But we need more - we need to find out exactly what he found out about the artefacts."

  "Yes," Morgan said, but that wasn't really what interested him. "Who do you think the Polish priest is?"

  "I imagine it's another code, a cipher within a cipher in case the first one was broken. It could be anyone. It might not even be a person."

  Morgan nodded, yet he didn't really believe she was right. He knew it was crazy and impossible - the diary had been started nearly ten years before he was born. But Morgan felt certain it had been written for him.

  Tomas emerged from the U-Bahn into the unbeautiful expanse of Alexanderplatz. The huge square was busier than he'd ever seen it, full of people who weren't looking over their shoulder to see who might be following them. Tomas hadn't needed to come to the square - there was a stop closer to where Heinrich lived - but he'd wanted a chance to walk through his old hunting ground.

  The sun was hidden behind lowering clouds, the atmosphere hot and damp with unshed rain. The city looked grey in this light - but then Tomas thought East Berlin looked grey in pretty much any light. Nobody spared him a glance, and why would they? The person he was about to visit was one of the few who might remember him.