CHAPTER SIX

 

Tomas spent a little longer flicking through the book, but it was futile. Whatever code Nicholson had used, it wasn't one Tomas recognised.

"We should skedaddle," Belle said. "Karamov's men are only lost in the maze, they haven't upped and disappeared."

"What about the book?" Morgan asked. His voice sounded shaky and Tomas wasn't surprised. At least when he'd first learned about the Hermetic Division and all it stood for, the veil had been drawn back slowly, giving him time to adjust to each new revelation. Morgan must feel as if the foundations of his world had been chipped away and replaced with quicksand.

It all came back to Nicholson - Nicholson, who was apparently dead. He'd always had such a vital presence, blazing with a passion nothing seemed able to quench. Tomas realised that he didn't find Nicholson's death upsetting so much as profoundly improbable. Men like Nicholson weren't meant to die.

"There's one gentleman who might be able to tell us why this book is so important," Belle said.

Morgan looked puzzled, but after a moment Tomas nodded. "Karamov."

"We have to do it now, while his goons are out of the picture."

"He'll have kept some with him," Morgan objected.

"Only a couple," Belle said. "We can handle them."

Tomas saw Morgan shiver, and he couldn't say he liked the thought much himself. He hadn't enjoyed watching what the little girl did to Karamov's man - no one saw another man's secrets being ripped out of him without thinking of his own.

"And after we find Karamov?" Morgan asked.

Tomas shrugged. "We take the book back to the Division."

"Shouldn't we find out more about it first, work out what it says?"

"Karamov -"

"But he's not gonna tell us everything, is he?" Morgan cut across him. He was speaking quickly now, almost stumbling over his words. "It's not like we can get him to translate the whole thing for us, is it? And that's assuming he even knows how. How can we take the book back before we know what it really is? We risked our lives for the fucking thing - don't we deserve to know why?"

"We're not here for our own amusement!" Tomas snapped. "We completed the mission, now we take a bow and go home."

"What's the matter, more than your job's worth?" Morgan snarled. "Listen, if it's too much effort -"

"There's always your German contact, this Anya Friedman," Belle interrupted loudly. "She might have some information for you, right?"

Morgan looked suddenly alarmed. "Shit! Weren't we supposed to meet her an hour ago?"

 

Anya was still waiting for them when they finally entered the huge, rococo interior of the Café Gerbeaud. Her long red hair flamed a beacon across the room as they squeezed between tables filled with lounging tourists.

Tomas smiled as he approached her, but her sour expression didn't soften even slightly.

"What have you morons been playing at?" she said before they'd even sat down. She was quite a beautiful woman, Tomas thought, a few years younger than him, but her anger made her unattractive.

"And it's lovely to meet you too," Morgan said.

She ignored him. "I want an answer - what the hell did you think you were doing this morning?"

"There was a last-minute change of plan," Tomas said.

"No kidding."

Tomas saw Morgan twitch a smile, then quickly drop it when Anya glared at him.

"We had to act," Tomas said. "We were in danger of losing the... the target object."

Morgan's hands folded reflexively over the waistband of his jeans, where he'd tucked Nicholson's book before they left the labyrinth.

Anya saw the telltale rectangular bulge hidden beneath his t-shirt and frowned. "Did it not occur to any of you amateurs that we might already have Karamov under surveillance? That we might, in fact, be perfectly capable of acquiring the target object ourselves at a time and place of our choosing? Maybe somewhere a little safer - and a little less bloody conspicuous!"

Tomas shook his head. "We couldn't take the risk."

"Yes, clearly risk-reduction was a very high priority for you. You alerted Karamov to our presence, scared off his buyer and almost got yourselves killed into the bargain. You couldn't have made more of a mess of this if you'd tried!"

"On the plus side," Morgan said, "we got a free tour of Budapest's premiere subterranean tourist attraction."

Anya's face flushed red with suppressed rage. Tomas knew he should be trying to control Morgan, but a part of him was enjoying watching the young man push the German agent's buttons.

Anya clearly sensed that she was getting nowhere with Tomas and Morgan and turned to Belle instead. "And what," she said, "are you doing here?"

"I came to help, Miss Friedman." Belle offered her small hand over the table.

Anya rolled her eyes. "I'm sure you did. I'm sure the CIA are involved in an entirely charitable capacity."

"I've confirmed her role with London," Tomas said. "Giles spoke to Washington and it seems the Yanks have been following the same breadcrumbs we have. They've asked us to pool resources, at least until we locate Karamov's buyer."

Anya shook her head. "I don't trust the CIA. They always have their own agenda."

"I agree," Tomas said. "Which is why I'd rather have her where I can keep an eye on her, than running her own operation and potentially compromising ours."

"Don't mind me," Belle said. "Just pretend I'm not here."

"Look," Morgan said to Anya. "We're here now, and we've got the book - it doesn't really matter how. What can you tell us about it?"

"Book?" Anya said, and Morgan's face fell.

"Later," Tomas insisted, glancing casually round the café, too full of people, far too public for this conversation. "We were considering going back to Karamov, seeing if we can get anything out of him about his buyer. What do you have on him?"

Anya's lips, very wide and red, pulled thin with annoyance. Then she sighed and tossed a thick brown folder on the table. "We've been following Karamov for four months now - on another matter entirely, the bribing of some oil-industry officials - but he's not an easy man to pin down. Nothing definite on his buyer, though we've been tapping every phone number that's registered to him or any of his goons. But see for yourself - it's all in there." She nodded down at the file.

Morgan drew it eagerly towards him.

"My local connection followed Karamov after you left him," Anya said. "He's back at the Gellert for now, a few of his bodyguards with him, but chances are he'll be out of the country by the end of the day. If he heads to Russia, we're in trouble - his power base there is very strong."

"Sorry," Morgan interrupted, pushing his chair back with a dry rasp against the tiled floor. "I need a slash."

Anya shook her head at his departing back. "That's great. Perhaps he'll let us know how it went when he gets back. Tell me, Tomas, when did MI6 start recruiting teenagers?"

"He knows what he's doing," Tomas said, defending his partner on a long-ingrained reflex. But the truth was, Morgan didn't know what he was doing, not in this area. They'd told Tomas the younger man was there for any wetwork, and no doubt Morgan was very good at that sort of thing, but that wasn't really the point. Hermetic agents were generally recruited because of their interest in the occult. Richard had been conducting his own research long before he'd come on board, but Morgan seemed to have no affinity for their work at all - a positive dislike of it, in fact. Why had Giles picked him?

Tomas kept his worries to himself, chewing the problem over and finding nothing digestible in it, while Belle and Anya ordered dobostorte from their apple-cheeked young waiter.

Five minutes later, the cakes arrived, along with two silver teapots and some delicate china cups with the slightly faded picture of a rose on each of them.

A minute after that, Tomas was still staring at one undrunk, slowly cooling cup of tea. "Where's Morgan gone?" he said.

 

The weather had finally broken its oppressive heat as grey storm clouds moved in to glower over the city, but Morgan was still drenched with sweat. His heart raced, pounding against his chest with every beat.

He had to get a grip. He knew what he'd just done was extremely stupid. Best case scenario he'd be out of a job - worst case he'd become the Division's next target. But there was no way, just no way, that he was letting this book go before he found out what it meant. If it was written by his real father...

After his adopted mother had shown him his birth certificate, and before that day five weeks later when she'd taken him to the care home and told him he wouldn't be coming back, she'd let him ask her about his real parents.

Dead, she'd told him and he'd felt relieved. At least they didn't give him away because they didn't want him. He'd asked his mum to tell him everything she knew about them, these people he'd never heard of who turned out to be the most important people in his life.

"Your dad was an engineer," she'd said. "With BT, I think."

"And my mum?" he'd asked eagerly, but she'd just shrugged.

Had she been lying, or was she lied to herself? Why had no one ever told him what his father really did? Tomas hadn't said anything about Nicholson having any children. But then he hadn't said very much about him at all. Maybe Tomas had known who Morgan was all along.

Morgan couldn't stop snatching glances behind him to see if Tomas or the other two had followed. But he'd twisted and turned through side street after side street, and unless they already knew where he was going, they'd have a hard time catching up.

He took another look at the sheet of paper he'd lifted from Anya's file. It told him Karamov had made three calls to a Professor Raphael in the Faculty of Ancient Languages at Eotvos Lorand University. Morgan could only see one reason for a man like Karamov to be contacting this Raphael: he had hoped the professor would be able to translate Nicholson's book.

Morgan was hoping the same thing. The tourist map he'd bought from a street-corner vendor told him the Faculty of Ancient Languages was located behind Baha Lujza Square. He walked briskly across the wide space through crowds of locals weaving in and out of its tacky shops and smarter department stores. Most of the faces surrounding him bore the distinctive sharp cheekbones of Eastern Europe and all of them were white. He felt unpleasantly conspicuous.

Finally, on a narrow street behind a bank, he found the faculty. It was a marble-fronted building that might have looked grand if it hadn't been caked in grime, the black residue of the square's gridlocked traffic. A red-faced security guard lounging behind a low table stopped him just inside the entrance.

"I'm here to see Professor Raphael," Morgan told him.

The guard grunted something in Hungarian. Morgan mimed incomprehension and the man sighed and pointed up the stairs to his right, then held up three fingers.

Third floor, Morgan guessed, but when he reached it the place was a warren, narrow green-painted corridors snaking off in every direction. He wandered for a full ten minutes before he found Raphael's door, his name written on a small bronze plaque beneath two others.

Morgan froze, staring at the door. Was he really going to do this? But he'd already stolen the book. Tomas was unlikely to be any less pissed off if he backed out now. He took a deep breath, then knocked.

 

They'd spent a fruitless half hour hunting for Morgan in the busy streets surrounding the café. It had started to rain while they searched, warm, fat drops of it. When Tomas met up with the others again beside the café's elegant façade, Anya's long red hair was plastered to her scalp, two shades darker than it had been before.

"Well, this just gets better and better," she said grimly.

Even Belle was looking less perky, her white blouse almost see-through with moisture and the shine gone from her black patent shoes. "He seemed like such a nice boy," she said. "What the heck does he think he's doing?"

"Taking it back to Karamov?" Anya suggested.

Tomas shook his head. "He's no traitor. I don't know what he's playing at, but it isn't that."

"I don't care about the purity of his motives, we have to find him," Anya said. She looked like she was going to say something else, or maybe the same thing again, but then she broke off to reach inside her jacket, which was just the wrong shade of green to match her hair. When she pulled out one of those small portable phones, Tomas realised the grating pop song he'd heard was its ring tone.

"Yes!" she snapped. She listened a moment, then said, "OK, and where's he going?" There was another pause before she clicked the phone closed without saying goodbye.

"Someone's seen Morgan?" Tomas asked.

She shook her head. "Karamov. He's left the hotel, but it doesn't look like he's heading for the airport."

"Could he be going to meet Morgan?" Belle asked.

Anya shrugged. "Or maybe he's meeting the buyer, or just picking up some groceries. There's only one way to find out for sure."

Tomas hesitated. Following Karamov would mean giving up on Morgan. He pictured Morgan's face, soft-eyed and scared, and then the image in his head morphed into a different one, a little older, skin paler, hair a sandy brown. If this had been Richard, what would he have done?

Everyone knows the risks, he could hear Richard saying. We're not doing this out of the goodness of our hearts. We've all got some reason to be here.

Tomas found himself smiling, because Richard was the most cynical idealist he'd ever met. But he was also right.

"We go after Karamov," he said to Anya. "Morgan will have to wait."

 

Professor Raphael was so old, Morgan was afraid to take his offered hand, worried even the softest grip would crush the fragile bones inside it. After a moment's hesitation, he touched it with his fingertips, seeing the way the flesh gave beneath them and didn't spring back, all the elasticity of youth gone.

The man's face was bright with life, though. He had a surprisingly full mop of pure white hair, and his eyes glittered blue beneath the rheum.

He said something in Hungarian and then, when Morgan looked blank, "English, is it?"

Morgan nodded. Raphael spoke with almost no accent, and what there was Morgan didn't think was Hungarian.

"And what can I do for you, young man?" He sat back down at his desk, disappearing behind the stacks of books and paper piled high on top of it. The whole office was almost comically cluttered, every shelf overflowing with junk which had spilled over onto the floor, barely leaving Morgan room to stand. It was hard to imagine what some of the stuff was for - the half-finished child's jigsaw puzzle, a set of lace doilies, torn and grimy with age, a jar of what appeared to be rock salt, some of it spilling out onto the desk.

Morgan pulled his attention back to Raphael. "Karamov sent me. About the matter you discussed."

"Did he?" Raphael said, which told Morgan absolutely nothing.

Ignoring the voice inside him - probably Tomas's - hissing at him not to do it, Morgan pulled Nicholson's book from the waistband of his jeans. "He thought you'd be able to help us translate this."

The professor peered at the book for a moment before reaching one of his blue-veined hands to take it. There was a second while they both had hold of it, Morgan suddenly reluctant to let the thing out of his grasp. Then he relinquished it to Raphael.

"So this is the book he spoke of." Raphael riffled slowly through the pages. "It's not as I imagined."

Morgan leaned forward eagerly. "But can you translate it?"

"Hmm." Raphael's head cocked to one side, birdlike. "It is not any currently spoken language, I can tell you that. Not Roman script, either, though it bears similarities."

"Are you saying you can't help?"

"No, no, let us not be hasty. It isn't a modern language, but I believe it has its roots in one. Tell me, what do you know about Hungarian?"

"That I can't speak it?"

Raphael smiled very slightly. "Unsurprising. It is one of Europe's most mysterious tongues, famously without roots in any nearby language."

"So this is a form of Hungarian?"

"A very ancient one, I think, yes - written in a long-forgotten runic alphabet."

"And there's, what, a dictionary for it somewhere?"

Raphael nodded. "With any luck, we should have the relevant texts in the library downstairs. I can take you there, if you'd like. It isn't normally open to non-students, but for a friend of Mr Karamov's I believe we can make an exception." He rose shakily to his feet, leaning a hand on the desk to steady himself.

"Did you know," he said, as Morgan held the door open for him, "there is an ancient Jewish legend which purports to explain the origin of Hungarian? It claims it was the language of Lilith, the demonic first wife of Adam. When God drove her from Eden to make room for Eve, he told her to take her tainted language with her. But to spite the Creator, who had first chosen her and then discarded her, Lilith went to secret corners of the earth, and whispered the language to Adam's children. And some of them, at least, have never forgotten it. It is an amusing story, is it not?"

Morgan smiled politely as he followed the professor down the gloomy corridor.

 

Margaret Island lay ahead of them, over a bridge that spanned the Danube in a series of squat arcs. It was their best guess for where Karamov was heading - and if they arrived ahead of him, there was less chance he'd notice the tail. Tomas would still have to keep out of sight, but Anya at least could stay in the open.

She mentally cursed the British operative for the thousandth time since she'd heard about his little stunt in the restaurant. Anger came so easily to her these days. She remembered a time when it hadn't been her first response to everything, but she couldn't seem to recapture it.

The bridge was long, the river broad and sluggish at this point, and the walk gave Anya too much time to think. She'd been sickening of the work for a while now, afraid it was changing her in ways she couldn't change back. She could even pinpoint the time when the transformation began, that trip to Japan chasing down a lead who turned out to be a phantom. It had been a trap, though she'd managed to escape it. But she'd come back a different woman - less trusting, and less happy. How would this mission change her? How long before she ceased to know herself at all?

"Which way?" Tomas asked when they stood on the shore, the island stretching out verdant in front of them, an oasis in the urban sprawl which lay on both sides of the river.

"No real way of knowing till he gets here," Belle said.

Anya frowned, thinking. "This is Karamov's first trip to Budapest."

"OK," Tomas said. "And..?"

"Do you have a tourist guide to the city?"

He shook his head, but Belle handed over a dog-eared copy of the Rough Guide, and Anya flicked through to the section on Margaret Island.

"I hardly think he's come here sightseeing," Tomas said.

Anya sighed, still looking down at the book. "But we think he's here to meet someone, maybe someone local. Karamov has probably never been to the island before. They'll have to pick a rendezvous point that's easy for a visitor to find."

The grim lines of Tomas's face relaxed. "You're right. So what are the options?"

"The Alfred Hajos swimming pool," Anya said, reading from the book.

Tomas and Belle shook their heads simultaneously. "Too busy," he said.

"There are some ruins at one end, an old Franciscan Priory."

Tomas took the book from her and peered at the photo, a small maze of low stone walls. "Maybe. But where exactly would they meet?" Then he spotted something on the facing page. "The water tower. That's in the park, isn't it?"

Anya read the description of the tall octagonal building that lay near the centre of the island. "Yes," she said. "That has to be it."

"But what if we're wrong?" Belle asked. "We could lose Karamov entirely."

Tomas smiled wryly. "What's life without a little risk?"

"Exactly the attitude," Anya said sourly, "which got us in this mess in the first place."

 

The library seemed to be buried deep in the bowels of the faculty building. Raphael walked more quickly than Morgan would have expected, leading him confidently through the maze of corridors, down four flights of stairs, across two large vaulted rooms and then into another dark warren until he had absolutely no idea where he was.

"It's a confusing place," he said as Raphael took them into another stairwell, dimly lit and dripping with rank-smelling water.

Raphael raised an eyebrow at him. "In a hurry? Don't worry - we've arrived." He unlocked the steel door in front of him with a rusty key, then swung it open onto blackness, stepping aside to beckon Morgan through.

"In there?" Morgan asked dubiously.

Raphael smiled, wrinkling his face into a thousand shallow crevices. "We are very security conscious here - some of our books are worth a great deal of money. After you, Morgan."

It was only when he heard the door slam shut behind him that Morgan remembered he'd never told the professor his name.