“Brookwood cemetery,” Panin says quietly. He uses a pen torch to read his gazetteer. “The London necropolis, built in the nineteenth century. Eight square kilometers of graves and memorial chapels. Who would have thought it?” He clicks his tongue quietly and puts the torch away.
“What do you want me to do, sir?” asks Dmitry.
“Drive. Headlights off. Follow the card until you see a chapel ahead of you, then pull over.”
Dmitry nods, and switches off the headlights. The BMW has an infrared camera, projecting an image on the windscreen: he drives slowly. Behind them, the minivan douses its lights. Its driver has no such built-in luxuries-but military night-vision goggles are an adequate substitute.
Panin pulls a walkie-talkie from the back of the seat in front of him and keys it. There’s an answering burst of static.
“Rook One to Knight One. Closing on board now. We’ll dismount before proceeding. Over.”
“Knight One, understood, over.”
The big saloon ghosts along the winding way, past tree-shadowed gravestones and monuments that loom out of the darkness and fade behind with increasing frequency. Then it slows. Dmitry has spotted a car parked ahead, nearside wheels on the grassy verge, its tires and exhaust glowing luminous by infrared: it hasn’t been there long.
“That will be the target,” says Panin.
Dmitry kills the engine, and they coast to a silent halt. Doors open. Panin walks around the BMW, to stand behind it as the minivan pulls up behind. More doors open. Men climb out of the minivan: wiry men, clad in dark fatigues and balaclava helmets, moving fast. They deploy around the vehicles, weapons ready. Panin pulls his own goggles on over his thinning hair and flicks the switch. Then he drags a tiny, grotesque matrioshka doll on a loop of hemp string from one pocket and holds it high. Seen by twilight it appears to have a beard: and the beard is rippling. “Wards, everyone,” he says softly. “This is the target. Clear it. Spare none but the English agent-and don’t spare him either, if there’s any doubt.” He slides the loop of string over his head. “Sergeant Murametz, this is your show now.”
Murametz nods, then waves his men towards the building they can dimly discern in the distance. The Spetsnaz vanish into the night and shadows, searching for guards. Dmitry turns to his boss. “Sir-what now?”
“Now-we wait.” Panin frowns and checks his watch. “I hope we got here in time,” he murmurs. “We must finish before James and his men arrive.”
ANGLETON TURNS HIS HEAD SIDEWAYS TO WATCH MO. SHE LEANS against her seat back in the control room of the OCCULUS truck, eyes closed and face drawn. She clutches the violin case with both hands, as if it’s a lifesaver; the fingers of her left hand look bruised.
“I’m not infallible,” he repeats quietly.
She doesn’t open her eyes, but she shakes her head. “I didn’t say you were.”
(Up front, Major Barnes-who is navigating by means of a simple contagion link Angleton established for him-tells the driver to take the second left exit from a roundabout. The truck sways alarmingly, then settles on its suspension as it accelerates away.)
“I had a long list of suspects. She was very low down.”
“Angleton,” Mo says gently, “just shut up. To err is human.”
“It seems I have not been truly myself for a long time,” he says, barely whispering, a dry, papery sound like files shuffling in a dead document archive.
Mo is quiet for a long time. “Do you want to be yourself?” she asks, finally.
“It would be less-limiting.” He pauses for a few seconds. “Sometimes self-imposed limits make life more interesting, though.”
The engine roars as the truck accelerates up a gradient.
“What would you do, if you weren’t limited?”
“I would be terrible.” Angleton doesn’t smile. “You would look at me and your blood would freeze.” Something moves behind the skin of his face, as if the pale parchment is a thin layer stretched between the real world and something underneath it, something inhuman. “I have done terrible things,” he murmurs.
“We all do, eventually. Dying is terrible. So is killing. But I’ve killed people and survived. And as for dying-you don’t have to live with yourself afterwards.”
“Ah, but you can die. Have you considered what it might be like to be… undying?”
She opens her eyes, at that, and looks at him coldly. “Pick an innocent, if you’re looking to put the frighteners on someone.”
“You misunderstand.” Angleton’s eyes are luminous in the dark of the cab. “I can’t die, as long as I am bound to this flesh. Have you ever longed for death, girl? Have you ever yearned for it?”
Mo shakes her head. “What are you getting at?” she demands.
“I can feel my end. It’s still some distance away, but I can feel it. It’s coming for me, sometime soon.” He subsides. “So you’d better be ready to manage without me,” he adds, a trifle sourly.
Mo looks away: through the windscreen, at the onrushing darkness of the motorway, broken only by cats’ eyes and the headlight glare of oncoming cars on the other carriageway. “I hope we get there in time,” she murmurs. “Otherwise you’ll have to do more than die if you want me to forgive you for losing Bob.”
MY ARM HURTS, AND I’M FADING IN AND OUT OF CONSCIOUSNESS. There’s a foul taste in my mouth but I can’t spit it out because of the gag. Iris is singing. Her voice is a strangled falsetto, weird swooping trills that don’t seem to follow the chord progressions of any musical style I’m familiar with. I’m tied to an altar between two long-dead corpses as the Brotherhood choral society sing a dirge-like counterpoint to Iris’s diva and slowly walk around me, bearing candles that burn dark, sucking in the lamplight…
The distorted lines inscribed in the canopy above my head seem to blur and shimmer, cruel violet lines cutting into my retinas, surrounded by a pinprick of stars-or are they distant eyes?-as I keep up my lines. They don’t make much sense, translated into English: the sense is something like, for iterator count from zero to number of entropy sinks within ground state, hear ye, hear ye, I open the gates of starry time for ye that you may feel the ground beneath your feet and the air upon your skin; I invoke the method of Dee and the constructor of Pthagn, forever exit and collect all the garbage, amen. See? I said it didn’t make much sense. In a particularly corrupt Enochian dialect that allows one to string together arbitrary subjunctive tenses it’s another matter, though.
Standing before her altar Iris is recounting the myriad names of the Eater of Souls, and she’s also pumping energy into this system. She’s got twenty black-robed followers and the computational hardware I lack, and if I’m lucky I can piggyback on her invocation-
Uh. I don’t feel so good.
A wave of darkness sweeps over me. For a moment I can feel the bony bodies to either side of me in the bed, and they’re warm and flesh-covered, almost as if they were breathing a moment ago. The tomb-dust stink is the yeasty smell of bodies from which the life departed only seconds hence. But the really weird thing is that I feel light, and dry, and unspeakably thirsty, a mere shell of my former self. The lines on the canopy overhead are glowing like a gash in the rotten fabric of reality, and I seem to be rising towards it. It’s death magic, pure and simple. I can summon the feeders out of night, I can open the way for them to crawl into the empty vessels all around me, buried in the wall niches outside this temple and the holes in the ground above its ceiling, but only if I use myself as a sacrifice, thinning the wall and letting them feed on my mind. The reason cultists prize virgins as human sacrifices is nothing to do with sex and everything to do with innocence. Iris probably thought the morphine would fog me enough to lie back and gurgle at the pretty lights. Or that the training-to never, ever attempt magic in one’s own head-would hold. Or perhaps it simply didn’t occur to her that I’d take the Samson option. But be that as it may-