“I bet.” I tried to swallow.
“Yeah, a bit strange, that.” He rested his head back as the props kicked into life. “I’ve been here weeks walking around, and not a hint of threat. Not unless you count my shoes being shined to within an inch of their lives. Then…bam. They weren’t trying to grab my wallet; they were trying to take me down.”
We lurched into motion, and I was glad of the excuse to look nervous about takeoff and not to answer, because a horrible conviction had seized my guts and I felt quite nauseous. Roshana. Oh my God, Roshana. I told her you knew and were trying to stop us, and then… It must have been the day after, tops. She hired those guys.
‘A complication we don’t need’—that’s what she called you.
Would she really do that, knowing that I owed him my life? I had made that clear, hadn’t I? I’d told her I didn’t want Azazel to harm him. Oh Christ—would she really do that? Pay to have someone taken out? Pay to kill someone she knew I cared for?
The fact was that I knew very little about what Roshana’s conscience was capable of. Self-defense was one thing; this was something else again. But she’d survived five thousand years on her own in the face of implacable enmity; and thrived even. And that did not suggest any lack of ruthlessness. I just hoped Egan couldn’t recognize the guilt in my wide, averted eyes and my compressed lips.
I didn’t try to talk as we gained height. To be honest I’d never travelled in a plane this small and it really was hard to think about anything but how insecure it felt. Only when we’d levelled off and settled on a course did I raise my voice above the engine. “Where are we going then? Rome?”
I think there was a part of me that would have welcomed that. A part of me that felt I needed to pay for all the horror I’d wrought. I’d surrendered myself into the hands of the Catholic Church in order to escape incarceration, and now they could do what they liked with me.
I probably deserved it.
But Egan smiled and shook his head. “In this? No, we’re heading for Djibouti.”
I’d seen Djibouti on the map—a tiny country on the coast, east of Ethiopia. That was literally all I knew about it. “Why?”
“Because there’s a big-ass American military presence there, which means I can call in some favors and get the nice gentlemen to ship you home without passing Border Control.”
“Home?”
“Chicago. That’s what you want isn’t it? Safe and sound and free again?”
I swallowed, not daring to trust him. “Is this some sort of creepy Catholic lie-by-omission thing? D’you mean ‘safe and sound after my people torture you for everything you know and cut off your legs,’ or something?”
He actually winced. “No. I told you, I recused myself from any use of you against your will. It’s unconscionable to torture you to save others. ‘The greatest happiness of the greatest number’ is a humanist ethic, Milja—God isn’t counting.”
“Really? That’s what the Church thinks?”
He leaned on his good elbow. “Ah, you want to know the truth? The truth is that I’m acting well outside orders right now, and I’m going to be up to my neck in shite when they find out I’m doing this for you.”
That startled me, but I did my best not to show it. “Well I’m sure you can confess it all away with a few Hail Marys.”
He gnawed his lip. “Being with Azazel has made you a bit cruel, Milja.”
Oh, that stung. “No, it’s made me less tolerant of bullshit,” I said, but I knew the steel had gone out of my eyes. I didn’t want us to fight. “Your people don’t know where we’re heading?” I asked after a moment.
“They don’t know you’re here. They don’t actually know I’m here.” He fixed me with a droll squint. “Kill me right now and you’ve got away with full deniability.”
I couldn’t help snorting, following it up with a helpless set of giggles. Egan’s lips crooked in a smile that warmed his battered face and turned my defenses to matchsticks.
Oh God, how I’d missed that smile. It seemed to light up the air around us.
“You’re an idiot,” I told him, my grin shyer than his.
“Okay, we’re being honest, I get it.”
“I’m glad though. I’m glad you were there.”
He nodded, letting out a long sigh. “I have my uses. There’s some bottled water under your seat by the way—would you open one for me, please?”
I obliged, and we both drank. Egan wiped his damp brow with his sleeve and pressed the bottle to his forehead.
“Is it too hot in here?” he asked.
“No.” It was actually pretty cold in the cabin. I had gooseflesh creeping over my arms, which I showed Egan.
“Ah grand, I’m running a temperature,” he muttered. “Okay, no bullshit, no jokes now. I’m taking you home, Milja, and I wish to God you’d stay out of this mess because, win or lose, it is not safe for you, and my resources are going to dry up the moment someone spots how far I’ve gone off piste.”
“I see.”
“And I’m not forcing you to say anything, but I would sincerely appreciate it if you could tell me what actually happened in Lalibela, so that I know what on earth it is I’m going to be dealing with from here on.”
“Haven’t the priests told you?”
He snorted. “The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church tells the one true Church of Rome sweet feck-all, believe me. What I know is that the place is locked down and crawling with police and that His Holiness the Patriarch flew in to Lalibela yesterday. Whatever you did, it was really bad, I’m guessing.”
I pursed my lips. “Yeah.”
“Will you tell me?”
“So you’ve got a better idea how to capture the one I love?” My voice cracked on the last word, and I saw the hurt in his eyes.
But he kept his cool. “So I can try to save lives, Milja. Yours and others. You think a war of the heavenly powers is a good thing for any of us? Is the end of the world what you’re after? No? Maybe there’s a way out of it. Maybe there can be a negotiated solution—has your man there thought of that?”
Okay, that one sideswiped me. I stared at him, but all I could see was the blood that had been spilt. Blood on Roshana’s hands, and on her raw scalp. Those old priests, slaughtered. Father Velimir, burnt to ashes by Azazel’s blackest wrath. Blood around my cousin’s mouth where she’d cut off her own tongue. My father, collapsed on a hospital gurney.
I thought of little Emanuel and Menas. I wished I’d managed to get money to their mother before I left, and the fact that I’d walked out with my emergency cash still hidden in my belt made me feel sick with guilt. I didn’t want them to live in a prison. Nor did I want them to be butchered in some final Apocalypse as the Great Beast arose from the sea and the moon turned to blood and angel fought angel. Maybe that was part of the Divine Plan as promised, but I’d long since stopped subscribing to any plan like that, I realized now.
The blood on my hands and in my eyes seeped down to my throat and made my voice rusty. “If you know nothing, then how come you were even there? Why were you waiting for us?”
“Ah come on.” For a moment he looked pained. “A big naked guy appears from mid-air and steals the Lalibela Book of Enoch from a public art gallery in front of staff and CCTV? It was obvious you were gunning for the Watcher hidden under the churches. I was on a transatlantic flight by lunchtime. I’ve been here weeks—and I am so fed up of spiced food I cannot tell you.”
“You’ve been waiting for us?”
“I’ve been waiting for you, Milja. Your boyfriend’s bulletproof. Literally. You… I thought that maybe I could persuade you to keep out of danger. But I guess I was too late. What happened?”
I didn’t know whether to answer him or not. I felt like I was crumpling from within, just at the taste of those memories.
“Sure, shall I help a bit? We know it’s the Watcher Penemuel, the angel of the written word, down there. Did you manage to release him?”
“I don’t kn
ow. Penemuel was really badly wounded in the fight.” I could picture the spear thrust through her like a skewer and the thought made me sick. “Maybe dead, I don’t know. Can they die?”
“Fight?” he said, countering my question with his own.
“There are holy relics, aren’t there? You know that—like the Nails of the True Cross that you used on Azazel. They can hurt angels. Can they kill them?”
“Uh… I honestly don’t know the answer to that.” His voice was gentle. “Tell me what happened.”
I met his eyes, blue and bloody. “You want us to cut the BS? You want me to be honest and open with you? Well I know nothing about you. Nothing. If we’re going to talk, you have to start the ball rolling. Who are you? Who do you work for, really? What—” I lost all words, my hand flapping back forth to point at his chest and then my own.
What do you think is going on between us?
For a long time, he just looked at me. “Well, you know about my family,” he said softly. “My sisters, Siobhan and Brigit—I told you about them.”
“That’s not enough, Egan.”
He looked down at his free hand, into the crease of his open palm. “I had another sister, Mary. She’s dead now.”
“I’m sorry.” I meant it. “What happened?”
“Suicide.”
“Oh.”
“The others still live in Ireland. My father’s American, but he didn’t stay long with us; he went back home to New Mexico when I was six. We lived in Monaghan, up near the border with Northern Ireland—that’s the British bit. You don’t know much about Irish politics, I’m assuming?”
“No.”
“Doesn’t matter, really. My distant family had had some involvement in things back during the bad days, but the Good Friday peace agreement was signed in 1998 so the Troubles were over by the time I was a teenager. More or less, anyway. But the paramilitaries didn’t all just put down their guns and go back to watching the footie. Right so, when my sister got pregnant by this boy she’d met… You have to understand, where I come from you do not have a child out of wedlock. They were getting married before the birth, come hell or high water.”
“How old were you?” I asked when he lapsed into silence.
“I was sixteen. Mary was two years older than me.”
I grasped at the only thing I knew concerning Ireland. “Was the boy a Protestant?”
“No, but he was a bowsie bastard, ten years older than her, and he dealt heroin. There were plenty of people did not like that. The paramilitaries on both sides made a big show of being down on pushers, keeping the streets clean, you know. Anyway, my Ma was heartbroken but the wedding was organized. Mary was really happy, and no one cared whether that arsewipe of a boyfriend was happy or not, because he was going to do right by her whatever he wanted.
“So, we come to the wedding day and they’re walking out of the church after Mass, and this guy walks up and kneecaps him.”
“What does that mean?”
“Puts a shotgun round in both his legs. He’ll never walk properly again. Seems the local Direct Action Against Drugs organization wants to send a strong Just Say No message.”
“That’s…extreme.”
“They were a front for the Provos, everyone knew that—so business as usual, actually. I wouldn’t give a shite, except Mary is knocked over in the panic and falls on the steps, and she’s twenty weeks pregnant when she miscarries.” He sighed.
“I am sorry,” I whispered. He wasn’t looking at me.
“Fecks up her whole life. She’s got no baby but she’s married to this useless cripple bastard. She stuck it out a few years, but…” He drummed his fingers on the arm rest and swallowed hard. “Anyway, two months after the wedding, I get approached by this guy I’ve never met, and he introduces me to someone with an American accent, and they have a proposition for me. This guy represents an international Catholic educational charity, he says. They offer me a chance to go out to the States and finish my schooling there. Stay with my dad. Learn a trade before I come back home. They’ll pay a nice stipend to my family, as well as all my fees.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Charity my arse—he’s intelligence, FRU working with the Americans I suppose. They want a Catholic insider they can use when things get hot again in Ireland, and they want someone pissed off enough with the Provos to do it. Which I am.”
“These people recruit children?”
“Depends who your dad is, maybe.” His mouth twisted. “So I go to the US, which I’ve always dreamed of, and they put me through military school and some fairly specialist training, and when it turns out nothing much is actually kicking off back home—much to everyone’s amazement—they’re not going to waste their investment so they shift me into a unit that does odd jobs, all around the world. Sometimes under the NATO umbrella, sometimes UN, sometimes…not.”
That was very much the truncated version, I realized: no names or numbers. But given the bits of paper they’d have made him sign it was the most I was going to get.
I wasn’t quite right.
“So I end up in Central America, in territory belonging to one of our shittier allies. You realize this story goes nowhere else, don’t you, Milja?” For the first time since he’d started his story he looked into my face. His good eye looked weirdly dilated.
“Of course.”
“We’re detailed to look for an American Catholic Bishop, and his local counterpart that he’d been paying a nice cross-cultural visit to. Specifically, we’re looking for the insurgent cell who’ve abducted them. Leftover communists maybe… I don’t even know what the local political angle was. The news has not yet leaked to the press and we’re there to get it sorted before the American ends up on the front pages with his head hacked off. This is, thank God, in the days before people started doing it on YouTube.”
Again, his fingertips drum.
“It goes more-or-less to plan, to start with. We’ve got intel that the clergy are being held in this village in deep country, so we insert and we locate the target and we start picking off the insurgents on guard quietly because we don’t want the hostages killed or moved out. They’re amateurs; they’ve not even wired the perimeter. But they’ve been killing villagers, because we find a few bodies strung from the trees, heels up and heads down, their throats cut. Freaky. And I head on in the back with two other guys and we actually get into the house where they’re being held because someone’s in there already shouting at them, and nobody hears us.
“He’s this big guy, it turns out. I mean I get eyes-on and he’s huge, over seven foot and built, way taller than any of his men. He’s shouting at the hostages in English, really old-fashioned English like he learned it from some… God knows where he learned it, it’s all, ‘Wouldst thou defy me?’ and stuff. And then he suddenly knows I’m there, because he turns round and shouts ‘Mine foes art upon me!’ or somesuch shite.
“So we drop him.” Egan shook his head. “He dies just like anyone else would with several rounds in him, lies there flopping about on the floor—which is fine, autonomic nervous system and all that. I go over to see that the hostages are okay and not grenade-trapped or anything, and I don’t see there’s anything weird at first. Until one of my buddies calls a warning and I turn and I swear this cunt is trying to get up, like some fecking zombie, even though you could stick your fist into the hole in his chest. And I think that’s funny, but my buddy steps in to do the coup de grace with a headshot. Which works. All this is real noisy mind, so seven shades of shite are kicking off outside and now we have to get out before we’re looking at a full-on bloodbath.”
I sat there, pinned to my comfortable leather seat by his horrible story. The Egan I knew didn’t normally use obscenities. He didn’t clench his fist and boast about killing people. He didn’t talk about himself much at all, let’s face it.
“We drag the two bishops out of the hut and we’re laying down fire to clear a route to the tree-line. Then my buddy stag
gers back, looks around him all wild for a second, yells, ‘In the midst of my enemies I stand triumphant, for none is like unto me!’—and he opens fire with his M4 on everyone in sight. Including me. I go down with a hole through my pelvis here.” He pointed at his crotch and I recalled the scar there I’d seen in my dream, a long time back.
“I don’t understand,” I said very quietly.
“Do you know where possessing demons come from, Milja?”
Hell, I’d assumed. I shook my head.
“They’re not nearly as common as fuckwit evangelicals fear they are, but they do exist. If you kill one of the Nephilim their spirits are strong enough to take other bodies nearby.”
I didn’t say anything to that. A great cold hand seemed to clutch my insides.
“I’m still carrying my 9 mil, so I ice my buddy. I have to. Then that thing jumps into an insurgent soldier. And it keeps going. The whole situation’s a nightmare. Every time its body gets shredded it just moves on, and everyone is turning on everyone else, and I know it’s only a matter of time before it gets me.
“You understand, Milja—I’m a real angry young man back then. I’ve not been in a church since Mary killed herself and the bastards froze my whole family out. I’ve given up believing, so I thought. But right then I crack and I call on the Holy Virgin and Saint Michael to save me from the Devil, and it works. He comes to help.”
A year ago I might have been skeptical. Now I only nodded.
Egan laughed, wretchedly. “He looks like Lou Diamond Philips. Young Guns, you know… I’d seen that when I was a little kid. He wears this shiny armor like in the stained-glass windows, and carries a shining sword, just like I wanted him to. And when he kills the guy carrying the demon at that moment, Lieutenant Gill burns up like…like a match-head. It works. What can I say?”
I leaned forward in my seat and clasped his hand, unable to bear the darkness I saw in his staring eyes.
He blinked. “We get both bishops out. I get a medical discharge, and then a total mental breakdown to back it up. I spend a while in a psychiatric unit. And then…this man comes to see me. He’s flown in from Rome. He says he represents an institute within the Catholic Church, and that they might have a role for me if I want a job. So. There you are.”
In Bonds of the Earth (Book of the Watchers 2) Page 19
