CHAPTER THIRTEEN

 

The air in the underground office was thick with unspoken recriminations. Gunter was big and loud and smiling as ever, but his eyes were as accusing as everyone else's.

"Belle is definitely gone," he said, as they all took their seats. "Her colleagues in the CIA confirmed it."

"That's what the whole meeting was about," Tomas said bitterly. "Distract me so they could snatch her."

Anya nodded. "We questioned Heinrich, but he didn't have anything helpful to tell us."

Gunter rested his chin on a meaty fist. "What do you think he could tell us, if given the right incentive?"

"Nothing," Tomas said. "He was perfectly open about what he did, but he was never part of Raphael's organisation. He just saw an opportunity to screw me over and took it - phoned Raphael's contact after I'd been to visit and then did exactly what they told him. He said he didn't know they were going to take Belle, and I believe him."

"He actually seemed quite upset about it, claimed he wouldn't have helped if he'd known they were after the little girl," Anya added.

She looked disgusted, but Tomas didn't have the energy to be angry with the old man - he was too busy being furious with himself.

"Well," Gunter said. "Well, obviously we need to get her back. We can't let the CIA think we're incapable of organising a piss-up in a brewery. Even though the evidence would suggest that is, in fact, the case."

"The airports have all been alerted," Anya said. "There's no way he can get her out of the country by plane."

"If that's what he's trying to do." Tomas didn't want to think of the other uses a man like Raphael might have for Belle. The demon inside her was what he'd care about; the small child who contained it would be no more than an inconvenience.

Tomas shook his head to dispel the ugly thought, and realised that Gunter's eyes were on him, bright blue and troublingly perceptive.

"Who was that woman, Tomas?" the big German asked. "She must have been pretty important, for you to throw the whole operation for her sake."

Tomas didn't address the rebuke in the statement. It was too true to deny. "She was important to me," he told Gunter. "But she wasn't important in the great scheme of things, just another agent in the Division. She doesn't know anything about the Ragnarok artefacts, if that's what you're thinking. I'm certain of it."

"Really? Because apparently you were also certain she was dead."

Tomas's hands clenched into tight fists under the table. "You're right. I'm not sure about anything any more."

The two men stared at each other for a long moment, a test of wills, but Tomas didn't intend to tell Gunter any more than he already had. If Raphael had used his past against him, it was the outcome which mattered, not the personal agony of the details.

The silence was broken by a commotion at the door, someone trying to push his way in and those nearby trying to keep him out.

"Not now," Tomas heard one of the agents say, but the man at the door barged through anyway, his thin face pinched with worry. He was clutching a phone in his hand, a cordless.

"It's for Mr Len," the newcomer said.

Tomas looked at Gunter and then Anya, but Gunter shrugged and Anya shook her head. It could be headquarters in London, he supposed, but he'd already reported the failure of the operation to them and explained that he'd call back when he knew more. He took the proffered phone.

The buzzing on the other end sounded faint, as if it was coming from quite a distance, and there was a hint of an echo on the line.

"Yes?" Tomas said. "Who is this?"

"You can call me Raphael," a voice on the other end said. "That is, after all, how we were introduced."

Tomas froze. His eyes snapped to Anya and he mouthed the word Raphael to her. She gasped, then leaned in to Tomas to press her ear against his on the phone.

Gunter must have understood too, because his arms were waving and he was hissing instructions which silenced the rest of the room. Three men rushed out of it, and Tomas was sure they'd been sent to record the call, and try to put a trace on it. He was equally certain Raphael would have made that impossible.

Still, he knew his role. Keep the old man talking as long as possible, get as much information as he could and give the men time to do their work.

"Hello, Raphael," he said, "I thought we might be hearing from you, though perhaps not quite this soon."

"Did you?" Raphael sounded pleased. "No need for niceties, then. You know what this is about."

Tomas could feel Anya's breath, hot and moist against his ear. "She'd better be okay. At the moment you're just a person of interest to us. Hurt the girl and there won't be a place in the world that you're safe."

Raphael chuckled. "You care about her, then? You're concerned about her continuing good health? That's good. I was worried you might see her as expendable. After all, you left Kate in my hands, and you once claimed to have loved her."

"You want to trade Belle for the book," Tomas said, voice shaking only a little with anger.

Raphael hissed in a breath, which told Tomas he was right. But he'd already known that. The instant he'd heard the old man's voice on the phone, he'd realised what this was all about.

"Indeed," Raphael said after a brief pause. "The book is meaningless to you, and apparently the girl isn't. It should be an easy decision to make."

But there was something mocking in his tone. He knew the decision wasn't easy, and what that said about Tomas and the people he worked with. That they'd weigh up a child's life against an object and find they tipped the scales pretty evenly.

Gunter had a phone pressed to his own ear now, no doubt listening in to the conversation. He waved an arm at Tomas and nodded firmly when he caught his eye. He wanted Tomas to agree. They'd get no more information from Raphael unless he did.

"Fine," Tomas said. "Tell us how to make the exchange, and we'll arrange it."

"As easy as that?" Tomas heard Raphael shifting as if, somewhere across the world, he was leaning back, making himself comfortable. "The details can wait for later. But keep your German friends out of it - too many people involved will lead to unintended consequences. If you must bring a companion, take that boy you're working with."

There was something in Raphael's tone as he said the last, an off-handedness that was a little too studied. Tomas would worry about what that meant later. "And where will we bring the book?" he asked.

"To St Petersburg," Raphael said, ending the call the second the last syllable was out of his mouth.

Anya pulled away, her lips set in a thin line. Tomas listened to the buzzing dial tone for a moment, then handed the phone back to Gunter's man. Across the room, a middle-aged woman looked up from the electronic equipment she was crouched over and shook her head. They hadn't been able to trace the call.

"You couldn't have kept him talking longer?" Gunter asked.

"I didn't need to," Tomas said. "There's only one place his people could be going."

Gunter raised a sceptical eyebrow.

Tomas turned to one of the men clustered around the tracking device. "Get me a map."

At Gunter's nod, the man flipped open his computer, and a few keystrokes later, Germany was up on the screen.

"Bigger," Tomas said. "Something that shows all of Europe."

When it was there in front of him, he tapped his fingers against the screen, first on the blue dot that stood for Berlin, then on the red dot that was St Petersburg, 800 miles to the east. "If you can't fly, and it's too risky and slow to drive, what's the only way to get from here to here?"

Anya's eyes widened then narrowed. She rested her finger on the screen, a little above Tomas's. "Rostock."

Tomas nodded. "They're going by sea."

 

From the outside, the mines didn't look like much: a jumble of run-down and abandoned buildings, and a deep shaft leading down. The air was sticky with humidity, and after the coach ride from Krakow, some of the tourists around them weren't smelling too fresh.

Anya knew there were two reasons to doubt the wisdom of coming here. Firstly, there was no guarantee this was the place Morgan had dreamed about. And secondly, there was the idiocy of chasing after something from a dream in the first place.

She sighed, and looked across at the young man. The blazing sun brought a bronze sheen to his brown cheeks and flashed white from his teeth as he smiled politely at the tour guide. There was something fake in Morgan's expression, Anya had noticed that from the beginning. Some time in his life, he'd been taught to smile because it was expected, not because he felt it. When he laughed honestly - as he had after he'd crashed their car - he sounded slightly startled, as if he never expected to be happy.

And his smile wasn't the only deceptive thing about him. Anya knew damn well that he was hiding something about the book. It was in the guilty hunch of his body as he'd sat beside her in the car translating it, and only reading out half of what he'd deciphered.

She snorted, knowing there was a certain irony in her suspecting him of keeping secrets. But she still knew she was right. And her boss had clearly known more about Morgan than he was telling. She'd only ever been privy to half his plan - which was exactly why she was here now, with Morgan.

There was a stirring in the crowd around them as everyone moved towards the head of the mineshaft, ready to descend behind their tour guide, a dark-haired, over-made-up Polish woman. She was saying something about the age of the place - four hundred years? Eight hundred? Anya wasn't really listening - and then they were heading down, out of the daylight and into the darkness below.

Morgan hung back. Anya stayed beside him, allowing the rest of the group to overtake them. It was a long way down, stumbling uncertainly on the uneven surface of the tunnel, the white rock illuminated only by a string of lights running along the floor and the brighter lamp in the tour guide's hard hat. Anya could feel the press of all that earth and rock above, prickling the back of her neck.

Morgan seemed oblivious to it, his body thrumming with excitement beside her.

"This is it," he said. "I'm sure it is."

A hundred feet down, and they'd left the day's heat behind them, the damp in the air chilling rather than stifling. Now they were at the start of the mine workings, defunct but recreated for the benefit of tourists. Ten paces later, Anya saw the first carving - the head and shoulders of an ancient king, half hidden inside a nook in the wall. The king's beard wriggled from his chin in tentacle-like strands, and he was soot-stained and dark. But underneath the accumulated grime, Anya could see the glitter of salt crystals.

A little further on was a nativity scene, detailed and delicate. Morgan reached out a tentative finger to touch the horn of the bull leaning over Jesus's cot. "This is..." He shook his head.

"Amazing?" she suggested.

"You reckon? I think it's creepy. I keep imagining all those miners down here, spending years carving these things. Getting older and older, and never seeing the sun. Everything down here is black and white, have you noticed? They spent their whole lives in a place without any colour."

Anya flashed him a startled glance. He flushed, then shrugged. "I'm just saying, I don't think this is a very happy place."

She decided he was probably right. The air was fresh down here, circulated by some unseen ventilation mechanism, but it still smelled a little musty and over-used. And there was something else... something unclean she couldn't quite name.

They were deep underground now, the sound of their footsteps muffled as the pressure clogged up her ears until they cleared with a sharp pop. But now the tunnel was levelling out, and up ahead she could see a brighter light that seemed to come from a more open space. The other tourists were already there. She could hear their excited babble and see the repeated lightning strikes of camera flashes.

Then they were inside the church. The ceiling stretched high overhead, crystal chandeliers suspended from it which sprinkled the whole vast room with light. The walls were carved into a mockery of brickwork, and the floor beneath them into polished hexagonal tiles, but it was all an illusion. Everything - every inch of floor, every statue in every alcove in every wall - was made out of salt.

Beside her, Morgan breathed in sharply. He stopped only a few feet inside, frozen into immobility.

She put a tentative hand on his arm. "It's okay. Dreams are metaphorical. Whatever you saw in yours won't literally come true."

"No, it's not that." He laughed, a bitten-off sound. "This isn't the place. It's not the church I dreamed about."

 

Tomas and Anya used an unmarked car to carry them the hundred miles to the coast. Anya drove with a fierce frown of concentration on her face as she wove through the heavy mid-morning traffic. From the corner of his eye, Tomas saw a green road sign flash past, telling them they were fifteen kilometres from Rostock.

Tomas couldn't stop scrutinising the passengers of every car they passed, and twitching whenever he spotted a small blonde girl. It was ridiculous. The truth was, Raphael's people had a good hour's lead on them. There was every chance they were already on the water - if they'd even headed to Rostock in the first place. It was all just a toss of the dice.

Another five minutes of Anya's reckless driving and they'd hit the outskirts of the city, still the same dingy, run-down place Tomas remembered from previous visits.

"Do you know the way to the docks?" he asked her.

"I'm guessing they're next to the sea," she said curtly.

Tomas decided that meant yes. And maybe it was more by luck than judgement, but she was heading in the right direction. Drab residential neighbourhoods led to a picturesque, plaster-fronted town centre, which in turn quickly gave way to a zone of industrial warehouses, many of them boarded-up and long disused.

"This looks worse than when I was last here," Tomas said.

Anya nodded. "The trade mostly moved west after reunification. And there were racial problems a few years ago - riots."

The docks were clearly still working, though. Tomas heard a ship's horn as it entered the harbour. He could see its stacks looming over the warehouses and knew they must be close.

"Any idea how we're going to find him once we get there?" Anya asked, swerving so fast into a turn that she left a patina of rubber on the road behind them.

Tomas shrugged. "We ask around. Subtly. Tourists usually take the ferry, not a chartered ship. We have to hope a group like theirs will have drawn attention." He didn't say it, but he was sure that group must include Kate.

He didn't know what he was going to do when he saw her.

"We'll start at the harbourmaster's office, then," Anya said. "They weren't answering their phones earlier, but there might be someone there."

She slammed on the brakes, throwing Tomas against his seatbelt, and they skidded to a halt on a patch of concrete beside a small, box-like building. The pavement and the building were the same grey colour as the sea, breaking in choppy waves fifty yards away.

Only the sky was blue, cloudless above them as they headed into the building. Inside, a narrow corridor led to a small reception area, cluttered with cheap, production-line furniture that was already starting to fray. There was a low brown desk guarding a single door. The receptionist slouched behind it, a middle-aged woman with a severe haircut and a slack face. She didn't bother to look up as they came in, though she must have heard their footsteps in the cloistered silence.

Anya slapped a hand on the desk, jerking the woman's eyes upwards. "Harbourmaster?" she snapped.

The receptionist shook her head.

"Well, where is he?"

"Holiday," the woman said grudgingly, obviously not appreciating Anya's tone. "What is it you want?"

"We need a manifest of all the ships that have left here in the last three hours."

The woman opened her mouth to protest and Anya flashed ID at her. Tomas thought about reminding her they were supposed to be keeping a low profile, but he supposed it didn't matter.

The receptionist took her time studying the ID, gaze flipping repeatedly between the embossed photo and Anya's face, as if there might be some question it wasn't the same woman. "All our computers are down," she said eventually. "It may be a few hours before I can get the data for you."

Was she lying? Impossible to know and pointless to call her on it. "There must be workers out on the docks," Tomas said. "People who've actually seen the arrivals and departures. Maybe you could call them in to talk to us."

The receptionist sighed and Anya's expression tightened. Tomas could see she was ready to explode, and then they'd get no help from this woman at all.

"Please," he said. "We're aware it's an inconvenience, and we'll be happy to compensate you or the men for any lost work time." If she didn't respond to that, he'd head through the door behind her and see if he could roust out someone more helpful.

The receptionist must have sensed the direction of his thoughts, because she finally nodded and stood, levering herself up with two hands against the desk as if her knees were giving her trouble.

"Wait here," she said, closing the door firmly behind her.

"Unbelievable," Anya said.

And that, Tomas suddenly thought, was exactly right. Even once the woman had realised who they were, she hadn't seemed impressed - or terribly surprised. She hadn't asked why they were interested in the shipping manifest. It was as if she already knew.

Tomas shot a quick look around to make sure there were no surveillance cameras, then slipped behind the desk.

Nothing was obviously out of place. A handbag, overstuffed and broken-zipped, lay on its side underneath the chair. There was a collection of paperclips by a stack of notepads, and a switchboard with five green lights flashing. A chewed-up pen lid sat by a battered computer keyboard.

It was only as Tomas was heading back round that he noticed the desk itself and the little red mark on it. It was a thumbprint, exactly where the receptionist had rested her hand as she stood.

She didn't have bad knees. She was injured - maybe shot. And that mark was blood, Tomas could smell it now.

"She's with them," he whispered to Anya, indicating the bloodstain. "They probably left her here to make sure they weren't being followed."

Anya nodded, a red flush spreading across her cheeks. Probably angry she hadn't noticed it herself.

He motioned her to one side of the door, then put himself at the other, his back to the wall. The fake receptionist was almost certainly armed. He didn't know what had happened to the real one or to the harbourmaster, but he guessed it wasn't anything good.

He held up three fingers, then two, then one - and as he made a fist with one hand he wrenched the door open with the other.

The corridor behind was empty. There were two doors leading from it, and one of them was half open. Behind it, just sticking through the gap, he could see a motionless, trouser-covered leg. He doubted their quarry was in that room. Only the coldest sort of killer chose to hang around her victims, and she hadn't seemed the sort.

The other door then. He remained perfectly still for a moment, and in that moment of stillness, in his silent, lifeless body, he heard the woman breathing. It was a cautious whisper of breath in and out, the sound of someone trying not to be heard. She knew they were there. She was waiting for them.

Did she know what Tomas was? Probably. He signalled Anya to stay back, then flung himself at the door. There was no distance to get any momentum going, but he was a heavy man and the door was plywood on cheap brass hinges. The whole thing groaned and gave, tearing from the wall and falling into the room beneath Tomas's body.

The woman was trapped underneath him. For one brief moment, Tomas was looking into her eyes. They were wide and grey and very frightened. Then she pulled the trigger on the machine pistol in her hand.

The bullets chewed through the wood and into Tomas's body. The agony was overwhelming. It hollowed out his mind, leaving room for no other thought. The fear receded from the woman's eyes and the gun kept on firing, eating away at him.

Anya shouted his name and he knew he should be moving but he couldn't find the energy. Or maybe it was the will he was lacking. Maybe he wanted to die here, some way he couldn't come back.

Anya's shoe stamped into and past his field of vision. It thudded into the door, and he felt the wood shift beneath him. There was a sharp cry of pain and the gunfire finally stopped with a last, lethal rattle. Then Anya's hands were under his shoulders, trying to drag him away.

He hung in her arms, a limp and useless dead weight.

"Come on, Tomas," she hissed. "You've got to move - that bitch is still alive."

The woman's eyes were open. They were glazed and blank with pain, but she could start firing again at any moment. With a strangled gasp, Tomas levered himself up and away. He landed on his side and lay there, fighting to master the agony in his body while he watched Anya kick the door away. Her own gun never wavered as she kept it centred on the other woman's face.

The woman's arm was broken. Tomas could see white shards of bone poking through the skin near her wrist, and blood was already pooling beneath her. The machine pistol had dropped to the floor, out of reach of her spasming fingers. She whimpered helplessly as Anya motioned her to her feet. Anya grimaced and pressed the barrel of her gun into the sagging greyish flesh of the woman's cheek.

"Up," Anya said. "I won't ask again."

The woman groaned, her arm hanging uselessly at her side as she rose.

If she could get up, Tomas decided, so could he. He staggered as he found his feet.

Anya pressed the woman back against the wall, the muzzle of the gun against her throat now, angled so any shot would travel straight through her brain. It was a dangerous position, too easy to be disarmed if you got distracted, but the woman didn't look in much of a state to restart the fight. Her horrified gaze centred on Tomas's butchered chest as he approached. He could feel the blood trickling down his legs, soaking the fabric of his jeans. He kept a hand pressed against his stomach, where a coil of gut wanted to escape.

"Lord forgive me," the woman said. "I didn't know it was you."

"Should have got yourself something more substantial than a Stechkin APS if you wanted to stop me." Tomas had to struggle to keep his voice even. The pain was overwhelming, but the hunger was worse. He knew what it would take to heal him.

He thought maybe the woman did too. There was a flinch in her eyes as she said, "It's too late. You'll never catch them now."

"Why don't you tell us where they are and let us decide?" Anya said.

The woman raised her chin. "I'm not afraid of you."

"Yes you are," Tomas told her. He deliberately took his hand away from his stomach, allowing the inside to sag out, and watched as the woman's eyes widened in horror.

But her voice was unyielding as she said, "Your threats are meaningless to me."

"That's right," Anya said. "Because nothing we can do is as bad as what Raphael will do when he discovers you've betrayed him."

"I would never betray him," the woman said.

Tomas took a step nearer. "But you've already failed him. You were supposed to send us away without a clue, and instead here we are, absolutely certain that Belle did sail away from here, and not that long ago, either. How happy do you think he'll be when he finds out?"

The woman's tongue flicked against her lips. "I did my best."

Tomas managed a genuine smile at that. "If Raphael was your primary school teacher, he might be impressed. Tell us where Belle is and we'll stop him. Then you won't have to worry about his revenge."

She laughed, an ugly sound. "Stop him? Do you really think you can?"

"Yes. If you help us."

She looked at him, at the hole in his stomach, then back into his eyes. "It's funny, how important you are, and how little you understand."

Anya frowned. "What the hell does that mean?"

"It doesn't matter," the woman said to Tomas. "Your role in this is already written. The boat is called The Baltic Queen, a cod fisherman. They left less than an hour ago, heading for St Petersburg. It's as much as I know." Then, before Anya could react, she grabbed her hand and squeezed her finger against the trigger.

The woman's body jerked once, trembled, and then dropped. Only a red stain remained on the wall behind her.

 

Daylight crept deeper into the mine than Morgan had expected. The salt crystals in the rock glittered around them long before he could see the clear circle of blue marking the exit up ahead.

"Where now?" Anya said, the first words either of them had spoken on the long walk out.

Morgan shrugged. He felt limp with disappointment. He'd been so certain he'd find the church here. Now he was wondering if the dream had been anything but that.

Anya touched his arm as they stepped into the open air. "The guide said there were other salt mines. Other churches. We can keep looking."

Morgan shook his head impatiently, unable to explain why he knew that if it wasn't here, it wasn't anywhere. "It was a stupid idea. We ought to be getting the diary back to Germany. Tomas must be pulling his fucking hair out by now."

There was a twitch of emotion on Anya's face, too brief for Morgan to read it. "It's as safe here as anywhere. Safer, maybe. I imagine Raphael thinks the book's in Germany with Tomas and... the BND. That's where he'll be concentrating his efforts."

"And what about the Japanese?" Morgan asked, his voice suddenly tight. He grabbed Anya around the waist, pulling her against him and back into the shadowed entrance of the mine.

A finger to her lips stifled her protest. When he was sure she knew to be quiet he took it away and pointed at the parking lot fifty paces from the mine-head, where a new coach had arrived, spilling a fresh batch of tourists onto the concrete.

"Shit!" Anya said, and he knew she'd seen what he had. The man was keeping himself hidden in the cluster of other tourists, but his face had been engraved on Morgan's memory. It only took one glimpse to be certain. It was him, the thin-faced agent from the train who'd summoned the spirit of his dead sister.

"How the hell did he find us?" Morgan hissed.

"I've got no idea. We should have been safe underground."

"Why?"

She pulled him a little further into the mineshaft as the man's eyes swept the entrance. "Spirits can't travel through the earth, it's impervious to them. Why do you think we bury our dead? And the salt makes doubly certain."

Morgan instinctively clutched a hand to his stomach, where the diary was tucked under the waistband of his jeans. But the crushing fear he felt wasn't at the thought of losing it. He remembered his sister's eyes, venomous with hate as she stared at him through the mirror. And he remembered the feel of her small fingers on his foot, pulling him beneath the waters of the Danube. He couldn't face her again.

"Give me your phone," he said.

Anya kept staring fixedly at the crowd of tourists by the bus. The tour guide was already gathering them together. They'd be heading for the mineshaft any minute.

"The phone!" Morgan snapped. "We need back-up."

Anya shook her head. "They'd never get here in time."

"Got a better suggestion? Just give me the fucking phone, Anya!"

"No," she said quietly. "I can't do that."

Morgan reached out to grab her, but his fingers stuttered to a halt in the air. She was holding a small black Beretta in her right hand, and she was pointing it at him.