Cold Warriors (17 page)

Morgan was only five feet away when the statue finally moved, leaping to its feet and spinning with startling agility. Morgan stood too, much less gracefully. His knees tensed with fear as the rocking of the train threatened to overthrow him.

The thief moved so fast, Morgan almost didn't see it. One second he was empty-handed, the next he had a shuriken in each fist. Morgan flung himself to the roof as the thief flung the stars. They passed harmlessly overhead, but by the time Morgan was on his feet again, the man had a thirty-foot lead on him. He leapt across the gap between carriages as if he barely noticed it was there.

Morgan sprinted in pursuit, every step jarring his side until the blood flowed in a steady stream.
Don't stop, don't stop, don't stop
, he told himself in time to the clattering of the train.

He was so focused on his own progress he didn't immediately register that the figure in front of him had stopped moving. Its outline thickened and shrank against the spatter of stars behind. The thief was kneeling down. Surely not resting?

The outline shrank still further, and Morgan saw that the thief was on his stomach, head hanging over the edge of the train. He must have been looking for something he didn't find, because a moment later he was on his feet and running again. But now Morgan was only ten feet behind.

He was almost within reach when the thief dropped again. It caught Morgan by surprise and he overshot, skidding to a halt and almost overbalancing, arms flailing wildly as he tried to check his momentum.

It was all the time the thief needed. Morgan didn't know what he'd been looking for but he must have found it, because this time he didn't stand back up. His hands gripped the edge of the train. Then, in a move of gymnastic virtuosity, he flipped himself into a backwards handstand, over and round and out of sight.

Morgan dropped to his stomach where the thief had been, bending his neck to look down. There was nothing but an open window below, and how in god's name had the thief got through that? How the hell was
Morgan
going to get through that? But he didn't have a choice. By the time he found any other way into the train, the thief would be long gone.

It was a desperate, inelegant scramble. He didn't attempt the thief's backflip, just hung down from fingers white with strain and swung his legs. They hit metal and then glass before finally moving through the void of the open window.

His fingernails felt like they were breaking off, and the top of the glass pressed the inside of his calves. This couldn't work. If he let go now he wouldn't go through the window, he'd tumble backwards off the train, probably snapping both his legs in the process. And he was about to let go. He couldn't help himself. There was only a thin strip of metal to anchor him to the train's roof, and it was already slick with sweat.

Not giving himself time to think about it, he swung his legs once, twice, fingers loosening their hold a little more each time - and on the third swing they finally let go. He felt himself falling, gravity wanting to pull him away from the train and down to his death. He fought it, pushed his body against the cold metal as he slid down, fingers finding what purchase they could. And somehow, incredibly, he was sliding through the window and down, scraping agonisingly at his wounded side as he went.

He fell to his knees inside the carriage, gasping with mingled exertion and pain.

It was bright, far brighter than he'd expected, and that probably saved his life. He saw the flicker of motion in the corner of his eye, rolled to the side without thinking, and the shuriken embedded itself in the wall where his head had been.

He finished the tumble and let it propel him to his feet. He couldn't afford to look around, but he knew where he was - the dining car. The room's bright halogen lights had been switched on, reflecting starkly from the floor-to-ceiling mirrors and the regimented silver rows of cutlery.

The thief stood immobile beside a table already set for breakfast. His hand was buried somewhere inside his black robes. Morgan braced himself, ready for another shuriken, but when the hand emerged it was empty. Morgan read something in the stiff lines of the thief's body that might have been consternation.

His weapons must have fallen out in his escape from the roof. Morgan smiled. Unarmed, he had the advantage here - bigger and stronger than his opponent.

"It's all right," a voice said behind him. "Throw it to me and get out."

Morgan spun round, caught a brief glimpse of a tall, sandy-haired man, then realised that he was letting the book out of his sight. He spun back to see it already arcing over his head as the thief sprinted out of the door. Morgan let him go, an irrelevance now that he no longer had the book, and turned back to face the newcomer.

The man's long, thin face darkened when he saw Morgan's. There was something in his expression that suggested recognition, though Morgan was certain they'd never met before. The man's left hand held the book. His right was empty. Improbably, he seemed to be unarmed.

"Give it to me," Morgan said, "and we can both walk out of here."

"Why do you want it?" His American accent was soft and confident, a man who didn't have to raise his voice to be heard.

Morgan took a sidling step nearer. "Why do
you
want it?"

"The people I'm working with," the man said. "think it's too dangerous to fall into enemy hands."

"But it's all right for you to have it? I don't think so."

"The Japanese aren't keen to use weapons of mass destruction. They're too familiar with the consequences."

He was talking about the atomic bomb, Morgan realised. Tomas had said the Ragnarok artefacts were the bomb's mystical equivalent.

"Last time I checked, we weren't at war with the Japanese." Morgan took another step nearer, and the man took one back in response, only to find himself pressed against the wall of the carriage.

"This book's a threat to everyone in the world. I can't let you have it."

"You're gonna have to," Morgan said - and even as he was speaking he pounced, gripping the man's wrist and squeezing the bones until he cried out in pain and the book dropped to the ground. Morgan kicked it behind him, backing up until he could safely stoop to pick it up.

It was a welcome weight in his hand, the mottled leather of its cover a pleasing texture underneath his fingers. "Sorry," he said. "I need that."

"Is that what they've told you, Morgan?"

He startled at the use of his name.

The man saw it and smiled, almost sadly. "I know who you are, probably better than you do. I know everything about you. Your birth, your family. You think you want this book? You don't. It holds nothing but death - and your ghosts are nearer than its pages."

Morgan took an involuntary step back, and felt his gaze grabbed by a flicker of motion in front of him. It was a reflection in the glass wall of the dining car that was neither himself nor the other man. Morgan cursed, stepped aside and spun, triangulating - the threat from the first man to his left, and the threat he'd glimpsed in the mirror to the right.

But there was nothing there, only another reflection in the glass. He moved just his eyes this time, searching for the source of
that
reflection. There was no one. There was nothing in the room but mirrors - and now every one of them was showing the same thing: the reflection of a person who wasn't there.

She was such a little girl, she couldn't have been older than five, her face still soft and unformed, unshaped by the personality which lived inside it.

Morgan tried hard not to recognise her. But although it had been a dozen years since he'd last seen her, hers was the one face he'd never forget.

"Mary?" he said.

Reflected in every mirror in the room, his long-dead sister's face looked back at him.

CHAPTER TEN

The blade of the knife passed over Belle's head, slicing clean through Anya's blue night-shirt and some of the skin beneath. A dark stain spread on the satin and Anya let out a gasp of pain. Only the train's automatic doors saved them, shutting tight on the assassin's weapon as he darted forward for the killing strike.

Belle knew that if she stayed with the German woman they'd both die. Belle's legs were too short. She just couldn't run that fast, and her arm felt like it was on the point of being dislocated, the shoulder wrenched out of its socket by Anya's desperate grasp. They couldn't carry on like this. If they separated, Anya at least would be able to get away while the assassin took care of Belle.

If they separated, the assassin would almost certainly follow Anya, and Belle at least would be safe.

The two thoughts merged in Belle's head into a chord whose separate notes were indistinguishable. One of them came from her, and one of them from
him
, but after all these years she could no longer tell which. It hardly mattered, anyway. They were both telling her to do the same thing.

Her CIA handlers had given her martial arts training - some aikido, a little krav maga - just enough to survive until she could bring her
real
weapon to bear. She used the aikido, twisting her hand to drive the hardest part of her wrist against the point where Anya's fingertips met her thumb. The older woman tried to hold on, but Belle kept pulling and in a second she was free.

She saw a quick flash of shocked betrayal on Anya's face, then she was through the door and she couldn't see the other woman any more.

"What the hell did you do?" Morgan said, backing away. The movement should have been reflected all around them, but in the mirror the little girl just smiled and waved.

"I opened the door," the other man said. "It's a talent I have, thanks to Nicholson."

The girl in the mirror was saying something too. Her mouth moved soundlessly, her whole image wavering slightly like a mirage, or something seen under shallow water. Her dark skin looked washed-out and pale, and the tight ringlets of her hair drooped over her forehead and into her eyes.

Morgan felt a hard, indigestible lump in his stomach. Guilt he'd never been able to swallow. "It wasn't my fault," he said. "I tried to save you."

But he had never accepted the excuse, and Mary didn't seem to either. She frowned. It astonished him how well he had remembered that expression, through all the years since he'd last seen it. It was the way she'd looked when he stole her sweets, then told on her for hitting him. It was the baffled look of a four-year-old girl, who couldn't understand how the older brother she adored had betrayed her so badly.

"Make her go away," he gasped. "Please."

The other man was looking at the mirrors too. "It isn't so easy to banish the spirits that haunt us. Nicholson taught me how to call them up, but not how to send them back. Like all his lessons, it would have been better unlearnt."

For just a second, the image in the mirror seemed to waver. Instead of Mary, Morgan saw a teenage boy, white, pimply and awkward in his own skin. His short hair was gelled into spikes, and his eyes blinked behind thick, wire-rimmed glasses.

Morgan snatched a glance at the other man, to see that his eyes were misted with unshed tears.

"I wanted to see him just one more time," he said thickly. "And now when I look in the mirror I never see anything else."

Then the image was gone, and Morgan could only see Mary. Her mood had darkened still further. She looked angry - furious. It was an expression Morgan couldn't ever remember seeing when she was alive. It spoke of emotions no four-year-old girl should understand.

"She wants the book," the other man said. "Give it to me and I can send her away."

Morgan's hand clutched the thick leather, fingernails denting the spine. He wanted to give it to her. He wanted to do whatever it took to send Mary back to the locked cellar of his past.

But the book was his past, too. It was the part of it that might make everything else make sense. If he gave it up, he'd never know who he was.

"No," he said. Then, more firmly, "This isn't real. You can't scare me with illusions."

The other man shook his head. "The past may be a shadow, but it's real enough to hurt us." He didn't take his eyes from the mirror as he spoke, and Morgan found his drawn back inexorably to the same place, like a scab he couldn't stop picking.

Mary's face was so twisted with hate that he wouldn't have recognised her if he hadn't already known who she was. Her mouth was still moving but now Morgan didn't want to know what she was saying. He backed away, hands raised to ward her off, until he was pressed against the far wall of the carriage.

Something brushed the small of his back where the material of his t-shirt had rucked up out of his trousers. He flinched instinctively at the cold clammy feel of it, but it was only when it touched him again that he turned to see what it was.

She was in that mirror too. Her face looked quite mad. There was a froth of saliva at the corners of her mouth, open wide in a silent scream of rage.

It was her hand which had touched him, reaching out
through
the glass. He stared at her small brown fingers in frozen incomprehension. They fumbled towards him, blind worms seeking the sun. Then she took a step forward.

The tip of her nose broke through first. The mirror rippled around it like pond water. Her eyebrows were next, and when her eyes followed Morgan knew that she could see him. Her fingers clawed and struck out, leaving five thin trails of blood on his abdomen.

Morgan snapped into movement, his fist lashing out to smash the mirror into shards. Mary let out a thin, horrible scream which ended in a sudden silence.

She wasn't gone. He could see her already in the next mirror along. She was moving faster now, both arms already free of it. He smashed that too and ran to the next one before she could reach it. His knuckles were cut to ribbons but he didn't care. He was more terrified than he'd ever been looking down the business end of a gun.

The floor was littered with shards of glass. He smashed another mirror, then another, and then he made the mistake of looking down at them. She was in every single shard. Her eyes blazed up at him, toxic with hatred.