Cold Warriors (19 page)

"He jumped. Or he was pushed - I don't know. I saw it from the window. But we were over the Danube at the time, he will have landed in the water."

"Can he swim?" Belle asked.

"If the fall didn't knock him unconscious," Tomas said grimly. "What's the next stop? We can get off there and go back for him."

"Forget it," Anya said. "You won't get there in time to pull him out of the river. Either he made it or he didn't. If he did, the BND has agents in Slovakia we can send for him - he can rejoin us in Berlin. With the book taken, we have to concentrate on tracking down Raphael's contacts there, before we lose him as well."

Tomas didn't like it, but he couldn't argue with the logic. After a moment he nodded. "OK then. I guess Morgan will just have to look after himself."

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Bratislava was like Budapest dialled down a notch. Anya told Morgan it was westernising fast, and he could see the signs of it in the smart restaurants and cheap bars, but it still felt like a place that had only recently remembered how to have a good time. He shouldered his way through a crowd of young men with Bradford accents and ignored them when they swore at him.

Anya followed behind, to a chorus of wolf whistles. Morgan could imagine her scowling. An increase in the noise from the lads suggested she might also have given them the finger.

She'd told him she wanted to get straight out of the city, hire a car and head to Berlin overland. The train wasn't coming through for another few hours and anyway, it was compromised. But she reckoned the journey would be almost as quick by road, and Morgan wasn't going to argue with her. He just didn't want to go
yet
.

Anya said something quietly behind him. When he turned he saw that she was talking into a mobile rather than to him. That, along with her credit card, had made it out of the river intact. Morgan pulled uncomfortably at the dry clothes she'd bought them both and wished she'd let him spend a bit more time shopping. The jeans were just about okay, but the baggy yellow t-shirt made him look like a middle-aged tourist. Her own shorts and muscle t-shirt ensemble was considerably more flattering. Morgan had to make an effort not to look at the way the material stretched over her breasts.

She spoke a couple more times, too quiet for him to hear over the chatter of the morning crowd, then snapped the phone shut and handed it to him.

Morgan raised an eyebrow.

"I've spoken to my people," she said. "Now you need to call Tomas and let him know you're okay - and that you've got the book."

Morgan nodded, entering the number he knew by heart, but she put her hand over his before he could dial. "Keep it short, and don't use any names. Someone could be listening."

When Tomas answered, Morgan could hear the sound of the train in the background, clacking over the tracks. "Who is this?" he said.

Morgan smiled, surprised at how glad he was to hear the other man had survived. "Its Mor -" He caught Anya's glare. "It's me. I'm fine. The... the thing's fine too."

There was a sound that might have been a sigh of relief. "Where are you?" Morgan looked at Anya, who shook her head. "I'm safe, and I'm on my way back. Expect me in two days." He closed the phone and handed it back to Anya before Tomas could ask anything else.

She stopped, forcing him to do the same. The crowd buffeted them as it passed.

"Two days?"

"There's some research I want to do while we're here."

"Anything you want to find out, we can do it in Berlin," Anya said. "I'll feel safer when that damn book is off our hands."

Exactly. The book. There was no way Morgan was going to let anyone take it away before he'd had a better look at it. He could feel it now, a reassuring hard lump stuffed into the front of his jeans, hidden by the baggy t-shirt. "
I'll
feel safer when I know what the book
is
," Morgan insisted.

He started walking again before she could reply. She caught up with him in an annoyed little half-jog, then grabbed his elbow to force him to face her. "We can't
read
the book. That's another reason we need to get it back to base."

"Yeah?" Morgan said, snatching his arm back. "Haven't you ever heard of the internet?"

He'd found what he was looking for. The café was run-down and overcrowded, but he could see the row of computers at the back, and at least one of them was free. A bell above the door jangled tunelessly as he opened it. "Mine's a tea, milk and three sugars," he told Anya, and went to sit in front of the free terminal.

He glanced back briefly to see her rolling her eyes at him. After a second, she shook her head and went to the small counter to order.

It took him a few goes to figure out the keyboard. Stupid of him to assume it would use the English alphabet. Still, it was close enough, and it didn't take him too long to navigate to Google. He glanced around surreptitiously, then pulled out the book and put it beside the keyboard, open at a random page. A runic Hungarian alphabet, Raphael had said.

By the time Anya came over with his tea, he'd found what he was looking for.

"It's the same alphabet," Anya said, looking between the book and the screen.

Morgan nodded. "Do I or do I not rule?"

Anya huffed what might have been a laugh and pulled across another chair to squeeze in beside him. "Where did you find it?"

"Wikipedia," Morgan admitted.

Anya definitely was laughing this time. "Bet Nicholson didn't imagine
that
would be possible when he wrote the thing."

"Raphael told me the language was almost forgotten," Morgan said. "But as it turns out, he was a lying bastard."

"You'll still need a dictionary to translate it."

"Well yeah, if it's actually Hungarian like Raphael said. But don't you think it's more likely he was just using it as some sort of code - you know, what's it called? A cypher."

For the first time since he'd met her, Anya looked impressed. "You really aren't as stupid as you look."

Morgan grinned. "I know it's not meant that way, but I'm gonna take that as a compliment."

Tomas could feel Anya twitching restlessly in the car seat beside him. He knew she wanted to debrief him, especially now Belle was temporarily out of the way, reporting to her CIA handlers at an undisclosed location. Anya wanted to know more about Morgan, but there was nothing Tomas could tell. The phone the young man used to call hadn't transmitted its number, and there was no way for Tomas to call him back. Morgan could be anywhere, in any sort of trouble, and there was nothing Tomas could do about it.

He pushed the futile worry from his mind, concentrating instead on the view outside the window. Berlin had been Tomas's second home, but it was a city he'd always found easier to admire than to love. Now it sparkled with all the new buildings, the spruced-up parks and smart commuters. It was like coming back from holiday to find that your wife had lost twenty pounds and had a face lift.

The Wall fell. He'd known that intellectually, of course, but seeing the reality of it was still astonishing. It made him realise he'd dedicated his life to a battle he'd never really expected to win.

BND headquarters were in Pullach, but it was their Berlin outpost which had been tracking Karamov, and that was where Anya told him they were heading. The building was on the west side of the city, but their driver had veered across the old border to avoid heavy traffic.

There wasn't even a trace of cement where the Wall had once run, cutting so brutally across streets and sometimes even buildings. Tomas had expected at least the foundations to be left. Some kind of memorial.

Anya saw him looking. "There's some of it still standing at Checkpoint Charlie," she told him. "It's a museum now."

"A museum," he repeated in wonder.

"You were around then, weren't you?" Anya asked him. "Back when the Cold War was still on."

Tomas nodded. "I spent a lot of time in this place."

"I should thank you then. I grew up in East Germany. It was your generation that bought mine its freedom."

"I suppose so." It had never felt as though they were fighting for actual people, individuals. The war had been both more abstract and more concrete than that. It was about an ideology that had to be defeated, and about getting through the next two hours with the Stasi on your tail and no safe house within fifty miles.

Five minutes later they'd arrived at a narrow office block faced with tinted glass that gave nothing away. Inside it was almost as characterless, several big open-plan rooms divided into worker-ant cubicles by beige screens. Anya led Tomas past them all and down to a basement room with only the corner of an upper window to give it any natural light. She flicked on a neon and took a seat at the small conference table.

Tomas shrugged, and sat opposite her. "Someone else joining us?"

"The agents who've been tracking Karamov for the last month. They tell me they've got some interesting news."

"We've been fucking idiots, that's what the news is!" The speaker was a big barrel of a man, shouldering the door open to let two others through behind him. He had wiry blond hair and the palest skin Tomas had ever seen, almost albino.

"Gunter," Anya said, and hurried round the table to hug him. Tomas blinked in surprise. Anya had never struck him as a person who liked anyone enough to progress beyond a limp handshake.

"Anya, my sweet," Gunter said in German. Then, switching back to English, "And Tomas, of course." He offered his hand. "Well, we've buggered this one up spectacularly, and I don't mind admitting it."

Tomas saw the other two men hiding their smiles as they sat down. He shook his head. "I'd say there's blame enough to go round. We were the ones who lost the book."

"True, though I hear your partner now has it. Barring any further unforeseen cock-ups, it should be in our hands very soon."

Tomas shifted uncomfortably under Gunter's scrutiny, sure the other man could sense his doubts. But Morgan would bring the book back. He must. "So what is this information you have for us?" Tomas asked when the silence had stretched.

Gunter placed a small computer on the table in front of him, the thin silver looking too delicate in his meaty fingers as he flipped the lid open. "That's just what I'm saying. A balls-up of monumental proportions."

The screen came to life as soon as it was open, and Tomas saw that Gunter had brought up a picture of a white-haired old man, thin to the point of angularity. The photo was black and white and taken from a high, oblique angle. Clearly surveillance footage. "That's Raphael," Tomas confirmed. "You've been tracking him?"

Gunter shook his head. "No, but we have been tracking a German businessman by the name of Gabriel. Tracking him for quite a while, as it happens, so you'd think someone in this building might have pulled their brain out of their arse long enough to notice that it was the same fucking man."

Anya leaned over to scroll through a few more photos. "You're saying Gabriel is Raphael? He's been working right here in Germany under a whole other alias?"

"Give the woman a prize. If Raphael hadn't been such a minor figure in the Karamov investigation, we might have made the connection sooner. Especially with the whole archangel thing - no one could accuse the man of being subtle."

"If you were tracking Gabriel independently of Karamov," Tomas asked, "what had he done to put him on your radar?"

"Nothing major," one of the other men said. His voice was whisper quiet, as if he felt the need to compensate for Gunter's hearty bark. "The corporation he runs is in the internet marketing business and squeaky clean. But some of his employees ran up flags, enough of them that we started to take notice."

"Ex-Stasi," Gunter confirmed. "Low-level, mostly, but then we didn't have names for all their higher-level operatives. They destroyed their files when the Wall fell, you know."

Tomas nodded. It didn't surprise him. The old East German secret service would have been afraid of war crimes prosecutions, and rightly so. "Any thoughts on why Raphael might be recruiting from that particular pool?"

"Our best guess?" Gunter said. "It's those damn Ragnarok artefacts again."

Tomas nodded. All the dots were slowly joining up, though the picture still wasn't clear. "Raphael thinks these agents might know something about their whereabouts?"

"We always suspected the Stasi knew more than we did, but we could never get any of the cold-hearted cocksuckers to talk. Maybe Raphael came to the same conclusion - and had a better incentive to offer than immunity from prosecution."

Anya tapped her fingers against the table, long nails clicking on the wood. "And do we have any idea what Raphael wants with the artefacts? Who is he working for?"

Tomas frowned. "It could be any country - or maybe just himself. Nicholson's book might tell us. That might be why Raphael went to so much trouble to acquire it. Nicholson knew all there was to know about the artefacts, including who else was searching for them."

"But did he know how to use them?" Gunter asked. "If indeed they really had a use."

Tomas realised he was tapping his own fingers as he thought. He clenched his hand into a tight fist to still them. "OK. Sometimes the direct approach is the best. I say we bring in the agents Raphael hired and question them."

"Mm," Gunter said. "We thought so too. Unfortunately, it turns out that every single one of them has disappeared off the face of the earth."

"Disappeared?" Tomas said. "You've got to be joking!"

Gunter raised his hands in a mime of apology. "I did tell you this whole op was an epic cluster fuck. We think Raphael must have taken them somewhere discreet to mine them for information."

"Or he's already got the information," Anya said gloomily, "and now he's disposed of the only other people who knew it."

Gunter nodded. "Yes, that is another possibility. The worst case scenario, in fact, because it means we've reached a dead end."

"You've got a list somewhere, haven't you?" Tomas asked. "Of Gabriel's employees, I mean. Let me look at it."