CHAPTER THREE

 

Morgan froze, prone on the warm concrete, as the men stared silently at them. The blunt pieces of metal in their hands were the only statement they needed.

They knew they had Tomas and Morgan outnumbered and outgunned and they weren't expecting any resistance. When Tomas leapt straight towards them, there was a moment's hesitation before their fingers could tighten on their triggers.

Morgan opened his mouth to shout at Tomas to stop, for fuck's sake come back - but it was already too late. The bullet grazed Tomas's arm as he barrelled into the nearest man, tumbling him to the ground and carrying Tomas behind the other three. The sound of the shot echoed very loudly in the silent alley.

Something switched off in Morgan's mind, the rational analytical part of him that was no use in battle. And something more primal switched on. Their assailants had all spun to face Tomas, the immediate threat. They'd eliminated Morgan from their calculations, and he needed to make them regret it.

Keeping himself low and slow-moving, he belly-crawled over the concrete between him and the first of the men, ten yards in front of him. Further back, the one Tomas had knocked down rolled and rose again, fluid as a gymnast. Pros then, Morgan thought, and factored that into his equations.

Tomas was still moving, never still long enough for the bullets to touch him. Morgan saw him wrap both arms around the shoulders of another man and hook an ankle behind his knee. The two of them tumbled to the ground together, but Tomas was on top and at least twenty pounds heavier.

Two more shots ploughed into the pavement inches from where Tomas had just been. In the strobe light of the muzzle flashes, Morgan saw Tomas's hands grasp the neck of the man pinned underneath him. A wrench left and a snap back right and it was broken. The man slumped bonelessly and Tomas released him and rolled away, narrowly avoiding three more bullets.

And as the dead man's comrades watched in shock and disbelief, their attention entirely focused on Tomas, Morgan finally reached them. He grasped the ankles of the nearest and jerked backwards. The man went down too fast to break his fall. His head smashed straight into the pavement and stayed there, a halo of blood spreading around it.

The others heard the muffled gasp and the crack of impact as their companion fell. Instinctively, their heads snapped round to face the new enemy. But they were expecting a standing target. The first sweep of their eyes passed over Morgan's head.

He needed a weapon, anything. A gun. The fallen man's gun, trapped underneath his body. As Morgan strained to roll him over, fingers fumbling beneath his chest, he saw the eyes of one of the others, black behind their mask, slide down to him.

Morgan's hand brushed against the cold metal of the gun just as the other man's weapon swung towards him. Morgan's line of sight led straight up the barrel and he knew the shot would take him right between the eyes. He shut them, not wanting to see it coming.

A second of silence later he flicked them open again, and there was Tomas, arms around the assassin's chest. Morgan saw the fabric of the man's black mask shift as his mouth opened beneath it in a scream that was soundless because Tomas was squeezing all the air out of him.

Tomas's face was pale and impassive, no flush of anger or exertion.

Morgan's fingers finally closed around the gun and he raised it to finish off the man Tomas held imprisoned. His line was true, straight to the assassin's head - until the man beneath him gave one final, unexpected shudder. As Morgan's finger tightened on the trigger, his arm jerked sideways and the bullet he'd meant for his enemy found Tomas's heart instead.

Horrified, Morgan waited for Tomas's body to crumple and fall, for the spurt of blood that was always darker than you imagined. But there was only the smallest stain around the bullet hole in Tomas's t-shirt, black in the moonlight. And Tomas was still standing, his arms squeezing tighter and tighter.

The man he held let out a horrible, gurgling gasp as the gore rose up in his throat to spill red and brown through the material of his mask. The hands that had been clawing uselessly at Tomas's arms splayed in a spasm of pain and then slackened for good. And still Tomas kept on squeezing, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he himself was mortally wounded.

"Let him go, man," Morgan gasped. "It's over."

It was. Tomas must have taken down their final attacker while Morgan was grappling with his. Morgan could see the man's body tossed ten feet away, one arm half torn from the socket of his shoulder, and his neck twisted so far round it looked like his head had been put on back to front.

Tomas nodded and let the body in his arms drop. It slumped to the ground and Morgan suddenly smelt the acid of piss. The man must have lost control of his bladder when he knew he was dying.

Then Tomas turned to one side, and Morgan glimpsed the exit wound in his back, as large as a fist. Inside he could see meaty muscle and the white of bone beneath it.

Tomas noticed Morgan staring. His hands drifted up, probing around the lethal hole in his chest.

Except it wasn't lethal, was it? Because Tomas was still standing.

"We need a hospital. I think you're in shock," Morgan said.

Tomas's lashes flicked downwards a moment, as if he was about to pass out, but then he looked back at Morgan and Morgan realised he'd simply been deciding what to say. "I'm absolutely fine."

Morgan laughed in a way that he knew was near hysterical. "You're a long fucking way from being fine."

Tomas glanced down at the man he'd just killed, and Morgan saw a look pass across his face that he couldn't read but didn't like. "You're right," he whispered. When he looked back at Morgan his expression was suddenly savage. "Turn around," he snarled.

Morgan shook his head. "We need to search the bodies. Quick, and then get out of here. Anyone could have heard those shots."

"In a minute." Tomas raised his hands and Morgan saw that they were shaking. "Turn around. Now. And don't look back until I tell you."

Morgan didn't understand what was happening. Was Tomas's wound finally catching up with him? Would he turn back to find his partner dead, before the mission had really begun?

"Turn. Around." Tomas said, his voice as chilly and brittle as ice. Morgan caught the look in his eyes and spun round as fast as he could, turning his back on the murderous expression there.

He stared into the distance, through the narrow gap between the warehouses, willing his eyes to penetrate the darkness. There could be more of them out there, a mop-up crew in case the first team failed. The local police could be on their way, and the last thing he and Tomas were supposed to do was get noticed. They needed to get out of there. But he didn't move and didn't look round. There was a sound behind him, very quiet but so familiar he had to exert an effort of will not to notice how much it sounded like somebody eating.

Morgan felt cold, nothing like the usual drained aftershock of battle. He watched his bullet going into Tomas, over and over in his mind, as if replaying the scene enough times might give it a different ending. He attempted explanations that could make any sense of it. Tomas could have been wearing a Kevlar vest. He could have been in league with their attackers - their guns might have been loaded with blanks.

Very clearly, another tape replayed in Morgan's head. He heard Giles saying that they were going to find him a partner even he couldn't kill.

"You can turn round now," Tomas said.

Morgan hesitated.

"Come over here. You were right, we need to search them and get out."

Morgan heard Tomas fumbling behind him, still unable to make himself turn back. "Morgan - look at this," Tomas said sharply.

Finally, Morgan turned round. And it was - fine. Tomas was leaning over one of the corpses and had stripped the black cloth from his face. Even in the darkness, Morgan could see that the features weren't European.

"Japanese, I think," Tomas said. "No ID though."

Morgan nodded and walked to another of the bodies, reflexively turning his head away from the one Tomas was crouched over. He didn't want to examine the new wounds on it, the dark stain which spread beneath its legs and arms, even though Tomas had squeezed the man to death and there shouldn't have been any cuts at all.

He looked down at the body in front of him instead. The black cloth was wound round several times and tied off under the chin. He had to lift the head gently by its hair to pull the cloth off. It felt uncomfortably intimate and he was glad this was one of the men Tomas had killed and not the one whose skull Morgan had cracked open.

This man was Japanese too, his hair spiky and dark, the remnants of hair gel still in it. Morgan wondered why he'd bother when he was going out dressed like some kind of ninja assassin. But maybe he'd meant to go to a bar afterwards, pull some birds. Morgan looked at the man's face, a little too round and snub-nosed to be handsome, and had the sudden uncomfortable knowledge that this wasn't just a dead body, it was a dead person.

He shivered and looked away as he searched the man's clothes - ordinary black jeans, a plain dark t-shirt - but he wasn't carrying any papers or cards. "Nothing," he told Tomas.

"They knew we were coming," Tomas said.

Morgan couldn't stop staring at the dark marks around his lips. There was a second of silence, then Tomas seemed to realise what Morgan was looking at. He scrubbed a quick hand over his mouth and the marks were gone.

"Yeah, but how did they know which cab we were going to get?" Morgan said after a moment.

"I'm guessing they didn't. They probably bribed all the cabbies in the rank, or offered a reward for whoever brought us to them."

"They've got money to spend, then?"

Tomas nodded.

"But Karamov's Russian, right? And these guys... aren't."

Tomas shrugged - then tilted his head suddenly, at a noise on the humid breeze.

A second later Morgan heard it too. Sirens. "Shit. We've got to get out of here." He looked longingly at the gun he'd picked up, but Giles had been pretty clear: no weapons. He wiped the muzzle and the grip with his t-shirt to clean off any prints, then dropped it next to the hand of the guy he'd killed. With any luck, the authorities might think this lot had taken care of each other.

Tomas pulled Morgan to his feet as soon as he'd finished and they both ran away from the approaching wail of the police cars, into the deep darkness between two of the warehouses.

The place was a warren, filled with collapsed brick walls and abrupt drops into water-filled trenches. There was broken glass everywhere. Tomas took the lead, running without any apparent effort. Morgan couldn't even hear him breathing hard. And Tomas shouldn't have been able to run at all, but Morgan was trying not to think about that.

They fled for about ten minutes, until they could no longer hear the sound of sirens and the warehouse district had begun to merge into a more residential area. Ahead, Morgan could see a pavement with streetlights along it. Their orange glow pierced the darkness where he and Tomas were hiding. It caught bright highlights in Tomas's fair hair, and Tomas would have just run straight out into it, but Morgan grabbed his arm.

Tomas turned to face him, frowning. He tried to pull himself free but Morgan wouldn't release him.

"You can't just walk down the street looking like that."

"Looking like what?"

Morgan lifted his hand to point at the hole in Tomas's chest, the gaping exit wound in his back. His fingers froze in mid air.

There were two holes in Tomas's t-shirt, a small one in front and a larger one behind. But the skin underneath was completely unblemished. Morgan snapped his eyes up to meet Tomas's and there was a second when it looked like the other man might say something. Then he just shrugged and walked into the light.

 

The hotel stood on the banks of the Danube, floodlit yellow. The lights reflected in the water beside them, broken up and blurred. Tomas paused a moment on the bridge to look at the building, a little too ornate and pretty to be entirely dignified.

Morgan was looking at Tomas rather than the hotel, but he didn't say anything. He hadn't spoken at all on the long walk back from Pest, except to suggest that they get a cab and then nod when Tomas told him it wasn't safe. Tomas knew he was going to have to give Morgan an explanation some time, but he was glad it wasn't now.

Karamov was supposed to be staying in this hotel. When they'd got themselves settled in and slept they'd have to try and find him. There was no point doing it now. Sneaking around worked better in daylight, when even shiftiness seemed honest. Everyone looked at everyone else askance after midnight.

The receptionist behind the grand entrance desk smiled at Tomas when he told her they had a room booked under the name of "Jones". A porter, slightly sheepish in a stiff uniform, led them up to what was probably - if Tomas knew Giles - the cheapest room in the hotel.

He went into the bathroom with his rucksack to get ready for bed. When he was naked he ran his fingers over the place where the bullet had gone in, and where there was now smooth skin. There was no sign of damage, but it had hurt - worse than he could have imagined. And he'd thought that it wouldn't hurt at all. That had been the point of dying, hadn't it? Not to feel anything any more.

And as for the way he'd healed himself... They hadn't told him about that. Maybe they hadn't known. But when he'd looked down at the body of the man he'd killed, blank eyes staring up at stars he couldn't see, Tomas knew what he needed to do. His mouth had flooded with saliva and an impulse stronger than disgust or conscience dropped him to his knees beside the corpse.

Human teeth weren't meant for ripping raw meat from the bone. It had taken Tomas two tentative tries before the skin broke and gave him access to the flesh beneath. Steak tartare he'd told himself and shut his eyes so he wouldn't have to see what he was doing.

He closed his eyes now and tried not to remember the rich coppery taste of raw meat in his mouth and, much worse than that, how delicious he'd found it.

He wanted more. The vague uneasiness he'd been feeling since he came back had a name now. It was hunger.

He pulled a clean t-shirt on over his boxers, brushed his teeth to clean the taste of blood out of his mouth, and went back to the other room. Morgan was already asleep, in his clothes on top of the covers. Tomas thought about waking him up and making him get changed, then decided that he wasn't the man's mother.

He flipped off the light switch and climbed into bed, staring up at the ceiling for a moment before shutting his eyes. He knew he didn't need sleep, but he wanted it. There was too much going on in his head.

Sleep wouldn't come, though. Morgan's wide eyes when he'd seen the healed wounds on Tomas's chest and thigh brought back older memories - the first time Tomas himself had glimpsed the occluded world.

It had been 1975, he'd only been a few years older than Morgan was now, and Space Oddity had been at number one. He remembered that, because he'd been watching Bowie on Top of the Pops when the call came to report to headquarters.

He'd been pissed off as he climbed the steps leading to the drab Edwardian mansion where his section chief was based. He'd only just got back from three months in Poland, and it had been a tough job - the extraction of a defector who, when Tomas finally found him, decided he wasn't that keen on defecting after all. Tomas had been lucky to make it out in one piece, and he'd been looking forward to some down-time. Was owed it, in fact.

His expression must have given away how he was feeling, because his old boss, Davenport, grimaced when he walked in the room. "Sorry," the old man said, scratching at the greying beard he insisted on growing, even though it only came through in scrubby, diseased-looking patches.

Tomas shrugged, unwilling to be mollified quite yet.

"Wouldn't have called you, only Nicholson here was rather keen to meet."

Nicholson had only been about thirty then, face unlined and toothy smile charming beneath his shock of wiry ginger hair. "I'm pleased to meet you, Tomas," he said. He had a faint Welsh accent which made it sound like a question.

"Listen," Tomas said, "I've only been back here three days -"

Nicholson held up a hand. "It's okay, we're not sending you straight into the field again."

"Really?"

"Honestly. You're being reassigned. The Hermetic Division."

"Never heard of it."

Nicholson smiled. "No wonder. We only thought up the name yesterday. Do you like it?"

"It's very...Crowleyan," Tomas said.

Nicholson's smile widened. "Precisely. Which is why you are our first recruit."

"Because I like the name?" Tomas asked, baffled.

"No," Nicholson said. "Because you know what it means."

 

Nicholson drove Tomas to the Hermetic Division headquarters himself. "You've been fascinated by mythology since you were a child," Nicholson told him, as if Tomas might have forgotten.

Tomas shrugged. "I've always liked poetry. Poems are full of myths and I wanted to understand them."

"Very admirable. And you didn't come to enjoy the legends in their own right?"

"Someone once described myths as poetic truth. I suppose I agree with that."

Nicholson pulled on the handbrake, then clapped Tomas on the shoulder. "Or maybe they're just the literal truth." He climbed out of the car before Tomas could reply.

They'd stopped outside a small sixties block even more down-at-heel than the Edwardian mansion they'd come from. It gave Tomas some sense of the status the new Hermetic Division enjoyed. Which meant this was a demotion of sorts - but despite himself, he was intrigued.

Nicholson took him up in a vandalised lift and to the second flat on the left. The paint on its door was flaking leprously. Inside, a short hallway led through to the brown and yellow kitchen. Nicholson gestured Tomas to sit as he set about made him a cup of tea, adding milk and two sugars without needing to ask. Tomas barely noticed - he'd had three years to stop being unnerved by working with people who knew his school nickname and what colour boxers he preferred.

"You'll have heard about what the Yanks have been up to, I bet," Nicholson said as he handed Tomas his mug and took a quick sip from his own.

"What haven't they been up to?" Tomas said.

"The remote viewing experiments, I mean. Using psychics to look inside Russian missile silos."

Tomas snorted, then felt his face fall as he realised the Hermetic Division might be British intelligence's answer to that.

"Don't worry, we're not planning any of that nonsense," Nicholson said, reading Tomas's expression. "We're going to do something that actually works." He was pulling things out of his bag as he spoke, carefully placing them on the mottled formica of the kitchen table: a knife, a piece of chalk, a fragment of mirror, a small eyeless cloth doll.

Tomas looked at them warily, shifting on his plastic chair. "The Hermetic Division isn't concerned with the paranormal?"

"Was Crowley's Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn interested in the paranormal?"

"Not really. More the supernatural."

Nicholson's eyes caught Tomas's suddenly, a red-tinted brown that went with his ginger hair. "Exactly."

"The supernatural?" Tomas laughed, as if that could turn it into a joke. He watched Nicholson arrange all the objects at the five corners of a pentagram he'd scribbled on the table with his chalk.

"It's been thirty years of Cold War," Nicholson said. "And no end in sight. I don't need to tell you what Europe will be like if the Soviets win, you've seen it yourself. A boot stamping on a face forever. We've stockpiled missiles that can destroy the world a thousand times over, and so have they. We came minutes away from doing it, back in 1962. I remember sitting in my house, listening to the radio and waiting for the mushroom cloud - don't you? And needs must where the devil drives. We've made alliances with countries whose human rights records would have made the Nazis blush, all to stop the greater menace. Don't you think, in a war like this, an existential war, we should use any help we can find?"

"Yes," Tomas said. "Of course I think that. That's why I took this job. I took it to do something useful, not something that can't possibly work!" He realised that he'd shouted the last words, half-rising to his feet. With an effort of will he clenched his fists and sat back down.

Nicholson didn't seem bothered. He just tapped his finger in the centre of the pentagram he'd drawn, a half-rhythm that wasn't quite a beat. "And what if it really did work? What then?"

Tomas found his eyes drawn to the pentagram, where the nail of Nicholson's index finger was tap-tap-tapping against the shard of mirror. Nicholson was saying something else now, but the words were in a language Tomas didn't understand and all his attention was focused on that small piece of silvered glass.

It wasn't really very interesting. There was nothing reflected in it except the pale cream of the ceiling, with a small water stain right in centre. Only, was it really a stain? The longer Tomas stared at it, the more it looked like a face.

"Do you see her?" Nicholson asked.

And yes, Tomas did. She must have been about fifty. Her face was pudgy and white and probably hadn't been pretty even when she was younger and thinner. Tomas looked up, half expecting to see Nicholson holding some kind of photo over the mirror, but his fingers were still tapping away on the edge of the glass, and the reflection seemed to be coming from absolutely nowhere.

"What is this?" Tomas whispered.

"She died here nine years ago. Murdered, actually, which is why this is possible. That kind of violence leaves an... echo of itself."

In the mirror, the woman's reflection seemed to nod in agreement.

"It's a trick," Tomas said, tearing his eyes away from the glass to stare at Nicholson. "I don't know how, but -"

"No trick. How do you think I persuaded them to set up the Hermetic Division?" Nicholson pulled out a yellowed scrap of newspaper from his pocket. HOUSEWIFE SLAUGHTERED IN OWN FLAT said the headline. And even though the picture was grainy, Tomas instantly recognised it as the woman he'd seen in the mirror.

"Death isn't a wall," Nicholson said. "It's a veil, and it can be drawn aside. Do you want to help me figure out how?"

Tomas realised his hands were shaking and carefully clasped them in his lap. "But why?"

"Because we can use this. Because it's our duty to our country to develop every weapon we can. And because if we don't, somebody else will. Aren't those reasons good enough?"

As Tomas stared up at the ceiling of the Hotel Gellert, where the water stain really was just that, he wondered what else he could have said to Nicholson. Some things are best left unlearnt? Some weapons should never be used? Instead he'd just said "yes," and now here he was. He closed his eyes, though he guessed that sleep would never come - that it was something he'd sacrificed twenty years ago along with everything else.