Cold Warriors

by Rebecca Levene

Tomas tugged on Belle's arm to draw her over to the other side of the museum and a large glass exhibit case holding photographs of those who'd tried to cross the Wall and failed. If Tomas stood behind it, he'd be able to keep an eye on Heinrich without being too obvious.

  "Any sense of who Raphael's man might be?" Tomas asked, peering at Heinrich through the glass. It made the old Stasi agent seem insubstantial, a shadowy remnant of who he used to be.

  "No one's leaping out at me." Belle was still scanning the room, a small frown on her forehead.

  "You might want to be a bit less obvious about that," Tomas whispered to her.

  "Little girls are supposed to be curious, Mr Len. It's in the manual."

  A flicker of shifting colour through the glass told Tomas that Heinrich was moving. Not deeper into the museum, but back towards the exit. "Damn him!" he muttered. If that bastard betrayed them now...

  "He's following someone," Belle said.

  Tomas studied the crowd, but he couldn't see who she meant. Too many people, and Heinrich was looking down at the floor, not at any one of them.

  "There," Belle said. "The lady in the red top. Kind of sad looking, with salt and pepper hair."

  Tomas let himself drift closer to Heinrich. All the while his eyes catalogued the crowd, and after a minute he saw the woman Belle was talking about. She was behind Heinrich now, with her back to Tomas. No doubt she'd already told the old man where to go. If Raphael's people knew their business, the real talking wouldn't take place at the original meet. They'd be relocating soon, and Belle and Tomas needed to make sure they were close enough to follow.

  Heinrich reached the exit, pushing through the small barrier on his way out. The woman lingered a little, obviously not wanting to look like she was with him. Her head turned slightly as her eyes scanned the room.

  Tomas automatically dropped his, feigning fascination with a display recounting the history of the Wall's construction.

  A second later, his mind processed his brief glimpse of the woman's face, and his head snapped back up again.

  The woman had gone by then, but it didn't matter. The image was so clear, so familiar. The round cheeks, sunk a little with age. The chestnut hair, streaked with grey as Belle had said. The eyes, such a unique, deep blue, almost violet. Tomas dropped Belle's hand without thinking, pushing past people to get to the exit, careless now about being noticed. That didn't matter. Nothing did. The only thing he cared about was finding that woman.

  Finding out if there was any way she really could be Kate.

  The car was ancient and its motor turned with a choking sound, like a terminal cough. They were travelling so slowly down the windy, tree-shaded road that it would probably have been faster to get out and walk. Morgan knew it was his fault. He'd insisted Anya break off both wing mirrors as well as the rear-view mirror before he'd get in. She was driving pretty much blind, but then the roads were almost entirely empty. They'd passed two cars in the last three hours. There was nothing here but the endless gloomy forest, and the strip of clear blue sky above the trees.

  It was beautiful, in a way. It was certainly a change from the deserts where Morgan had spent so much of his time. He glanced up at the scenery now and again, but most of his attention was focused on the book in his lap. He barely had to look at the runic alphabet any longer. He wasn't bothering to write it down, either, just translating straight from the page. That way, he didn't have to share what he found with Anya.

  She'd been pestering him for more about the Ragnarok artefacts, but after the first few weeks his father hadn't had much to say about them. Maybe the trail had gone cold. Or maybe - as Anya clearly thought - it had heated up, and Nicholson had been afraid to commit his findings to paper. Most of the entries were mundane, descriptions of meetings with secret service bureaucrats who wanted to shut down the Hermetic Division, or the failed missions with Tomas which were the reason for that. It didn't matter to Morgan. It all fascinated him.

  At times, he felt as if he didn't even need to look at the diary at all, that the words could somehow float from the page into his head. When he concentrated, he almost thought he could catch his father's voice in the air. The uncanny connection chilled him, yet a part of him yearned for it to deepen.

  May 7, 1981. It's hard to believe I've only been away for a week. So much has changed. Who'd have thought the most important moment of my life would take place in Bolivia? And all the trouble I had scaring up the funding to take us there! They even made us fly second-class, which did Tomas's long legs no good at all. He was limping for the whole of the first day we spent in La Paz, ten thousand feet above sea level and the air so thin you wondered if you'd forgotten how to breathe.

  The Bolivians are a short, dark bunch. Tomas and I stuck out like the proverbial sore thumbs. People would stop and stare at us, and children ran up just to touch us in the street. It drove me mad, but I don't think Tomas minded. He's always struck me as someone who feels a perpetual stranger, an outsider even in his own country. At least in Bolivia his difference was visible for everyone to see. In an odd way, I think it helped him relax.

  Personally, I didn't find the place relaxing at all. Nothing in that city is on the level. I spent two days feeling as if I was walking permanently uphill. We stayed just long enough to make sure we weren't chasing a phantom, then headed out in a borrowed car that looked like it was being held together with duct tape.

  The girl we were looking for lived a hundred miles away, in the Amazon. A hundred miles and nearly ten thousand feet straight down. There was snow on the high plains around La Paz, but when Tomas and I travelled down the unpaved, switch-backed road that led to the girl's village, we travelled into summer. The jungle was humid and bright, full of flowers and insects and the desperate screeching of monkeys. It was beautiful, but Tomas, a northern European to his bones, didn't care for it. Bright colours offend him. I think he thought they were vulgar.

  We were following a pretty flimsy lead, but we've been getting desperate these last few months. Of course, Tomas doesn't know that I've taken to falsifying my reports, suggesting we found more than we actually did. Hinting at that elusive, practical application lurking just around the next corner. Not very good form, I know, and bound to catch up with me eventually, but needs must.

  The village was deep in the jungle, by the banks of a muddy stream, an offshoot of the Amazon that was clogged with creepers and stank to high heaven. It was an Indian village, of course, but some of the men spoke English. The girl's father did, at least a few words, and he'd been told we were coming. They'd informed him we might be able to help his daughter. Highly unlikely, but I hadn't known how else to get us access.

  The elders were waiting for us in the centre of the village, a ragtag bunch dressed in a mixture of western clothes and traditional costume. They might have looked rather pitiable, if they hadn't been carrying enough guns to outfit a small army. A not inconsiderable proportion of them were pointed at us. Tomas, of course, acted like he didn't even notice them. I tried to fit myself in his shadow, and hoped they'd shoot him first.

  "We're here to help the girl," I said, when it didn't look like anyone else was going to say anything.

  Most of the faces surrounding us stared with dumb incomprehension, but one old man gestured towards a small hut, isolated from the others at the edge of the village. He must have had some kind of authority - maybe he was the girl's grandfather, who knows? - because the others let us through. They didn't drop their guns, but they at least stopped pointing them at us.

  My heart had been hammering with fear, but as I walked towards that hut it was excitement which kept it racing. Two weeks ago, an Inca mummy had been unearthed in the Andes, a young girl killed in a ritual sacrifice. And a day after that, in this village, a girl of exactly the same age had begun to speak Quechua, the language of the Incas, though she'd never heard a word of it before in her life. She insisted her parents were strangers, and asked where the mountains had gone.

  Or so the rumours c
laimed. It's not that unusual a narrative, of course. It crops up all over the world with alarming regularity, along with stories about statues weeping tears of blood and the Virgin Mary appearing in a potato. Why did we fly halfway across the globe to investigate this particular one? Because nobody here was trying to make any money out of it. In fact, after the initial feeding frenzy, the locals had done their best to keep the press away. They wanted to cure their daughter, not exploit her. That was highly suspicious.

  So we told them we wanted the same thing.

  When we walked into the hut, the girl was resting on a bed of twigs and reeds, her limbs as frail as the wood she was lying on. We could barely see her, the little hut was so full of smoke. God alone knows what they were burning, but the picture began to warp the moment I walked in there, the colours bending at the edge of my vision.

  Her eyes were closed when we came in, and her skin was more grey than brown. She looked at death's door, though the stories hadn't said anything about physical symptoms. I wondered what they'd been feeding her, to make her so ill. She was wailing, this thin, keening cry that was almost unbearable to hear. I could feel my hands twitching. I wanted to cover her mouth, squeeze her neck, anything to make that awful sound stop.

  Then her head turned and her eyes opened. I still can't say why I was so certain, but I knew it absolutely. For the first time in my life, I saw a dead person's spirit staring out of a living person's eyes.

  She said something, and they hadn't been making it up, she was speaking Quechua. She said - it's incredible, my hand's shaking as I write this - she said, "White devil, I know what it is you seek."

  I didn't quite believe it, not right away. It's the kind of thing those dreadful mediums say, isn't it? Waiting for you to fill in the blanks yourself. So I asked her, "And what's that, then?" My Quechua was pretty ropey, but she seemed to understand.

  "The End of the World Things," she said. That's a direct translation, but there was no doubting what she meant. The Ragnarok artefacts.

  If my heart had been racing before, I was on the point of a coronary then. "That's right," I said, and I know my voice was trembling. "Can you help me?"

  "Do you want help?" she said. "It's not too late to turn back, if you choose."

  "I want the artefacts," I told her. "If you know where they are, I'll give you anything you want in return."

  She looked sad. I think the spirit knew its body was dying. "That's not in your power to give," she said. "And the artefacts aren't within mine. They can be yours, but the price is high."

  "How high?" I asked.

  She closed her eyes. "Everything you love, and everything you are."

  Well, obviously that didn't sound good. But I've discovered that when it comes to the world beyond the world, words don't always mean what you think. It's like the Death card in the Tarot, which is really about transformation. She was saying getting the artefacts would change me, and that was okay. The search for them already had.

  "Then that's what I'll sacrifice," I told her.

  The girl opened her mouth and a sound came out like - I don't know how to describe it. Like a thousand people sighing all at once.

  Tomas grabbed my arm and shouted, "For god's sake think about what you're saying!"

  I shook him off. There's a time for caution, and a time to be bold. "Tell me everything," I said to the girl. And she grabbed my hand and pulled me down and whispered in my ear.

  And she told me, she finally told me, everything I'd wanted to know. I saw how wrong I'd been all along - and how right. I understood exactly why I'd started keeping this diary, why the Polish priest suggested it. And I knew why I'd recruited Tomas, all those years ago. When she'd finished, I straightened and looked at him with a sort of melancholy fondness. It's the way you look at someone you know you're going to lose.

  He didn't notice. He was watching the girl. Now she'd stopped speaking she'd started crying, a thin stream of water leaking silently out of her brown eyes, as if she didn't have the energy for anything more.

  "Poor mite," Tomas whispered. He looked a thousand-year-old spirit in the face, and that was all he had to say.

  He didn't understand what that moment meant. How could he? For all his intelligence, Tomas is basically a simple man. He believes in right and wrong and duty and country and all those things I moved beyond a long time ago. But that's just fine. He won't complain when I send him off on mission after mission to chase artefacts I now know he'll never find. And meanwhile I can continue with the real work, secret and unmolested.

  I'll play my part and - at the end - I'll make sure Tomas plays his. And Ragnarok will come, though Tomas won't live to see it.

  Morgan shut the book and shut his eyes, suddenly afraid to read more. He'd wanted to know about his father, and now he did. Be careful what you wish for, wasn't that what they said? But Morgan hadn't paid any more attention to the warning than his father had.

  With the rear-view mirror gone, Anya had to look across at him to read his face. "What is it?" she said. "What have you found out?"

  Morgan shook his head. "Nothing important."

  Tomas's shoulder ached where he'd flung himself too hard against the glass exit. He could hear someone shouting his name and vaguely registered that it was Belle. There was another voice, tinny and high, in his ear: Anya, asking what the hell he was doing. Tomas ignored them both.

  The woman was heading down Fredrichstrasse, head bent low, salt-and-pepper hair covering her face. Strands of it blew in the breeze from the passing traffic, but not enough to reveal the features beneath.

  The woman sped up, almost jogging now, and Tomas accelerated too, caring less and less whether she could tell he was following her. She probably could, because now she was running. He saw her elbow collide with a middle-aged businessman walking in the opposite direction, head down over his paper. The man yelled abuse at her retreating back as Tomas started running after.

  He heard the screech of brakes and blare of horns before he spotted the woman sprinting across the road, heedless of the heavy traffic. Belle's voice had been left far behind by now, but Anya's was growing louder in his ear. Her yelling was starting to distract him, so he tore out the earpiece and threw it to the ground. He heard the plastic crunch beneath a car's wheels as it swerved to avoid him. Then he was on the pavement again and the woman was only twenty paces in front of him.

  She turned at the next junction, then again, and again, veering wildly across the road whenever she needed to. Tomas knew Berlin well, but even he was becoming disorientated.

  He caught her beneath the eaves of a small bakery, where the smell of dough battled the traffic fumes. He could feel the pulse at her wrist, the evidence that she wasn't like him, that she really was alive. He wondered whether seeing her would be enough to shock him back into life too. But when she finally turned to face him, he felt a stutter in his chest that was more like his heart stopping.

  "Oh, Tomas," she said. "I'm so sorry." Her voice was breathy with exertion, one droplet of sweat winding down the side of her nose.

  It was Kate. Of course it was. He'd known it from the second he saw her in the museum. Not even twenty years of time, twenty years of life that Tomas hadn't lived, could disguise her from him.

  Tomas opened his mouth, but discovered he had nothing to say. And just like that, he wasn't baffled, or joyful, or astonished - he was furious. Kate was the reason he'd let them do this to him. It was because of Kate's death that he'd become a monster.

  Shoppers pushed impatiently past, in and out of the bakery. The sun shone through a narrow gap in the clouds, making a rainbow of the light rain. All around them, the world kept turning, even though for him, it had stopped on the day this woman died.

  "They told me it happened in Siberia," he said, finding the words at last. "They showed me pictures of your body. I even saw the autopsy report they smuggled out. A bullet to the back of the head. An execution." He laughed bitterly. "I asked them to bury the picture with me, but they told me th
ey needed it for the files."

  "I know," she said softly. She wasn't beautiful any more. Middle age had scored deep crows-feet round her violet eyes, and they'd dimmed with time, or maybe they'd just been over-bright in his memory. But her voice was still the same rich, deep contralto.

  "Was it all a lie?" he asked her.

  She nodded. "But not mine."

  "Whose then? Did you know what they told me about you? Did you let them say it, knowing how I'd feel?" He dropped her arm, suddenly unable to bear touching her.

  "I was a pawn too, Tomas. You have to believe me. And you need to trust me."

  "How can I?" She didn't say anything, and after a moment he added, "So you're working for Raphael now, is that it? You didn't die, you just switched sides?"

  Kate's eyes widened, as if she was shocked at the accusation. Tomas had a painful flash of memory. She'd always done this, when they argued. Made him feel bad for even suggesting that she could be in the wrong.

  "I didn't leave MI6, they left me."

  "Tell me, then. What did happen in Russia, twenty years ago?" He was desperate for an explanation that he could believe.

  "I was captured, that much was true. And yes, it was by Raphael, or at least the people he worked for. He was attached to the KGB back then, did you know that?"

  Tomas shook his head, but he guessed it made sense. The Russians had run their own equivalent of the Hermetic Division. They'd never had trouble believing in the occult. Living in their unforgiving country, it wasn't hard to believe in an essential darkness at the heart of it all.

  "They... questioned me," Kate said. "For weeks. I broke. Everyone does, don't they? Whatever they tell you, the human mind can only take so much. I told them everything I knew and a few things I was only making up, because I thought it was what they wanted to hear. But I didn't turn traitor." There was a long, painful silence, until finally she added, "I didn't do that until they told me what had happened to you." A single tear slipped from her eye to track down her face.