“He did.” Panin nods. “We share a common interest. Other agencies of our two great nations continue to bicker like bad-tempered children, but we must rise above, perforce. Alas, all is not always clear-cut.” He reaches into his inside pocket and brings out a wallet, then produces a small portrait photo. “Do you recognize this man?”
Mo stares at the frozen face for several seconds, then raises her eyes to meet Panin’s gaze.
“I’m not going to start by lying to you,” she says.
Panin relaxes minutely-it is not evident in his face, but the tension in his shoulders slackens slightly. “He left a widow and two young children behind,” he says quietly. “But he was dead before you met him.”
“Before…?”
“He was one of ours. I emphasize, was. Abducted two weeks ago, not thereafter seen until he appeared on your doorstep, possessed and controlled-we would say превратилась, turned-a tool of the enemy.”
“Whose enemy?”
Panin gives her a look. “Yours. And mine. James advised me to tell you that I have been involved in CLUB ZERO from another angle. The Black Brotherhood do not only fish in British waters.”
“That’s not news. Nevertheless, I hope you will excuse me for saying that if your illegals are taken while working overseas, blaming the local authorities is not-”
“He disappeared in St. Petersburg.”
“Oh. Oh, my sympathies.”
“I take it you can see the problem?”
“Yes.” Mo takes a sip of lemonade, looks apprehensive. “I’d be very grateful if you could tell me everything you know about this particular incident. Did Ang-James-explain why it’s of particular interest to us right now?”
“One of your mid-level controllers has been taken, no?”
“Not definitely, yet.” Her fingers tense on the glass. “But he’s out of contact, and there are indications that something has gone badly wrong, very recently. We’ve got searchers looking for him right now. Anything you can tell me before I brief the extraction team…”
“You are briefing-” Panin’s eyes unconsciously flicker towards her violin case. “Oh, I see.” He eyes her warily. “What do you know of the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh?”
“As much as anybody on the outside-not enough. Let’s see: the current group first surfaced in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia after the establishment of the monarchy there, but their roots diverge: White Russian émigré radicals, freemasons from Trieste, Austrian banking families with secrets buried in their family chapels. All extreme conservatives, reactionaries even, with a basket of odd beliefs. They’re the ones who reorganized the Brotherhood and got it back in operation after the hammering it took in the late nineteenth century. They’re not based in Serbia anymore, of course, but many of them fled to the United States immediately before the outbreak of war; that’s the trouble with these cults, they fragment and grow back when you hit them.”
“Let me jog your memory. In America, they infiltrated-some say, founded-the Free Church of the Universal Kingdom as a local cover organization. They do that everywhere, taking over a splinter of a larger, more respectable organization; in Egypt they use some of the more extreme mosques of the Muslim Brotherhood. In America… the Free Church is a small, exclusionary brethren who are so far out of the mainstream that even the Assembly of Quiverful Providentialist Ministries, from whom they originally sprang, have denounced them for heretical practices. Some of the Church elders are in fact initiates of the first order of the Black Brotherhood; the followers are a mixture of Christian believers, who they see as dupes, and dependents and postulants of the Brotherhood. The Church is mostly based in the United States-it is very hard to move against a church over there, even if it is suspected of fronting for another organization, they take their religious freedom too seriously-but it has missions in many countries. Not Russia, I hasten to add. The nature of the Church doctrine makes the personal cost of membership very high-they tend to be poor, with large families-and discourages defection from the ranks; additionally, the Brotherhood may use low-level glamours to keep the sheep centered in the flock. We hear little more than rumors about the Brotherhood itself; despite fifty years of attempted insertions, we’ve been unable to penetrate them. Their discipline is terrifying. We have heard stories about ritual murder, incest, and cannibalism. I would normally discount these-the blood libel is very old and very ugly-but complicity in war crimes has been repeatedly used to bind child soldiers into armies in the Congo, and I have some evidence that those practices were originally suggested by a Brotherhood missionary…”
Mo shudders. “Whether they eat their own children or not, they have no problem eating somebody else’s.”
“You have evidence of this?” Panin leans towards her eagerly.
“I’ve seen it.” Panin flinches at the vehemence of her response. “Although they may not have been strictly human anymore, by that point-they had been thoroughly possessed-”
“That was the Amsterdam business, was it not?”
Mo freezes for several seconds. Then she takes another deep breath, and a hasty mouthful of lemonade, then wipes her mouth. “Yes.”
“Cannibalism is a very powerful tool, you know. The transgression of any strong taboo-it can be used for a variety of purposes, bindings, and geases. The greatest taboo, murder, provides two kinds of power, of course, both the life of the victim and the murderer’s own will to violate-”
Mo shakes her head, raises a hand. “I don’t need that lecture right now.”
“All right.” Panin sips at his wine. “Excuse me, but-there is a personal connection?”
“What?”
“You appear unduly upset…”
“Yes.” She looks at her hands. “The missing officer is my husband.”
Panin puts his glass down and leans back, very slowly, with the extreme self-control of a man who has just realized he is sharing a table with a large, ticking bomb. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Yes.” She raises her glass and drains it, then puts it back on the table with a hard clack. “You can tell me anything you’re at liberty to say, about why the Free Church attracted your attention. And what you think they’re doing.” She glances round. “Now might be a good time to check your wards.” The bar is filling up, but the other after-hours drinkers are all crowding away from the table Mo and Panin share, as if a glass sphere encloses them.
Panin nods. “The ward is adequate,” he assures her. “As for the Church, I need to tell you a story of the Revolution.
“During our civil war-the war that split families and slew the spirit of a nation, ending with Lenin’s victory in 1922-many factions fought against the Reds; and as the traditional White leadership collapsed, strange opportunists sprang to prominence. In Siberia, there was a very strange, very wicked man, a Baron by birth, of German ancestry: Roman Von Ungern Sternberg, or Ungern Von Sternberg as he styled himself. Sternberg was a monster. An early obsession with Eastern mysticism warped his mind permanently, and then he found something… He was a personal friend of the Bogd Khan, a mass poisoner and coincidentally the Mongolian equivalent of the Dalai Lama. During the civil war, Sternberg ran an extermination camp near Dauria, east of Lake Baikal. The Whites used to send the death trains to Sternberg, and he used their cargo for his own horrible ends. It’s said that there was a hillside in the woods above Dauria where his men used to kill their Red prisoners by tying them to saplings and quartering them alive. In summer, Sternberg used to go to that hill and camp there under the stars, surrounded by the bones and dismembered bloody pieces of his enemies. It was said by his soldiers that it was the only time he was at peace. He was a terrible man, even by the standards of a time of terror.”