Cold Warriors (3 page)

"Come on, man, come on!" Morgan lifted John's shoulders and shook him, shook him so hard that his teeth rattled. But there was no shaking the life back into him.

When Morgan got back to base, the brass couldn't get him out of the country fast enough. He closed himself off to the accusing eyes around him, but he already knew what they thought about any soldier responsible for a blue-on-blue death.

He was on a flight back to the UK before they'd even held John's memorial service. The coffin was empty, of course. Morgan had buried John's body under a few feet of sand. Only the bones of the men they'd killed would mark where he lay.

They put Morgan on a civilian aircraft, cattle class. You couldn't fly a man with no official status on a military plane, it buggered up the plausible deniability. His legs were cramped in the narrow space between the seats and the man next to him twitched and snored the whole way.

A rangy African man was waiting for him at Heathrow, holding up a hand-written sign that said "Hewitt". Morgan followed him without a word, through the dank underground car park and into his estate car. The rain was lashing down outside, smearing the windscreen with water, which almost made Morgan smile. He'd been knocking around the Middle East for so long he'd stopped believing rain like that actually happened.

He didn't ask where the car was taking him - his MI6 handlers always chose different locations for his debriefings - just stared out of the window at the suburban landscape scrolling by outside, like the backdrop to a bargain-basement racing game. When they drove underneath tunnels or bridges his reflection stared back at him for a brief moment of darkness, but it didn't seem to be thinking about anything in particular.

After an hour they passed into the centre of town and then out again, until they finally stopped somewhere in the joyless no-man's land between Vauxhall and Oval.

The driver jumped out to open the door for Morgan, he nodded his thanks, and the car drove off without giving him a chance to ask where, exactly, he was supposed to go. He'd been dropped off in front of a two-storey Victorian house, so after a second he shrugged and rang the bell.

The door opened before he'd taken his finger off the button. A dark-haired, smooth-faced man stared at him a moment, then stepped aside and gestured vaguely towards the back of the building. The whole place looked like it had been decorated in the fifties and allowed to slowly deteriorate ever since. Paisley wallpaper was peeling in the corners, red and brown like the rest of the décor.

Phillips, the man who'd first recruited him from the army to the agency, was waiting in the long, narrow sitting room, a frown squashing his bulldog face. "You're a bloody liability, you know that, Hewitt?" he barked. He was smoking a Silk Cut, filling the room with a blue, flavourless fog. He took another drag, then stubbed it out on the carpet. The burn mark was instantly lost in the lurid crimson-and-blue floral pattern.

Morgan pulled himself to attention. "Yes, sir."

"You do realise you're supposed to be killing the other side?"

Morgan's shoulders tightened. "I think it might've been in the mission briefing, yeah."

There was a small cough of suppressed laughter. Morgan saw that there was a stranger in the room - a neat little man just the wrong side of middle-age sitting in one of the high-backed wooden chairs.

"Don't get lippy with me, you little shit!" Phillips roared.

"It was an accident," Morgan said, but he couldn't look Phillips in the eye.

"So I hear. Just like that ricochet that went straight through Curtis's heart during basic. Or the supposedly defused IED that took off both of Perry's legs. Or... how did Brown die, I can't remember?"

"A septic cut. We got back to base too late to treat the blood poisoning," Morgan said.

"And how exactly did he get the cut?"

Morgan didn't bother replying. They both knew that a tent peg Morgan was hammering had skidded against a rock and straight into Brown's foot. Morgan still couldn't quite believe Brown had died from it.

"It's remarkable," Phillips said. "You're only twenty, and you've already notched up a British body count that would give any Al Qaeda operative a warm glow of satisfaction."

"Your sister died too, didn't she?" the other man asked suddenly, just when Morgan had begun to forget he was there.

Phillips shot him a look of irritation.

"When you were seven, I gather," the man continued, "and you chased her into a lake. Tragic, really. And you'd already lost both your mother and father, before you were even born. There's an Oscar Wilde quote about that - I can't quite remember how it goes, can you? Something about losing one parent being unfortunate, but losing both smacking of carelessness. What a lonely little boy you must have been."

"What is this, Trisha Goddard?" Morgan said, trying to keep his voice light.

The man smiled a secretive little smile that made Morgan want to punch him.

"Who the hell is he?" Morgan asked Phillips.

"Giles here is your get-out-of-jail-free card. If it was up to me, you'd never see active duty again."

Morgan felt his cheeks flood with a heat that was half shame, half anger.

"I, on the other hand," Giles said, "think you're far too useful to waste. You simply need to be handled with the appropriate caution."

"Like radioactive waste," Phillips muttered.

Giles laughed. "Yes, very much like that. Young Morgan certainly isn't a safe person to be around - it's almost as if he emits mortality, isn't it?"

"That's absurd," Phillips said.

"Isn't it just."

Phillips snorted. "No wonder they closed you lot down."

"Temporarily," Giles said amiably. "We're back in business now - extreme solutions for a dangerous world."

Phillips's lips pursed sourly around a fresh cigarette.

"If you're not MI6, who are you?" Morgan asked.

Giles shrugged. "A recently reformed department of the SIS - they used to call us the Hermetic Division, back in the day. You may consider yourself officially seconded."

Phillips nodded when Morgan looked back at him, though he didn't look happy about it.

Morgan didn't want to work for this smug little bastard, but it didn't look like he had a whole lot of choice. He couldn't go back to the army if the spooks decided they had no more use for him. The cover they'd created for him had seen to that: AWOL squaddies ended up in the Glasshouse in Colchester, not back on the front line.

"If I'm working for you," he said, "what is it you want me to do?"

Giles smiled demurely. "Oh, this and that. But unlike Mr Phillips here, I believe I can supply you with a partner even you can't kill."

A blink of time, and Tomas was back. He was in darkness, but sound had returned, a dull thumping somewhere above him. They were still burying him, then. He must have blacked out temporarily. Panic swelled in his chest, larger than the thing that was trying to contain it.

Don't breathe, don't breathe, you'll use up all the oxygen.
It was useless, of course. If he hadn't been gasping so hard he would have been screaming. And the sounds were getting louder.

Louder. That meant nearer, which had to mean they were digging him up, not burying him under. Had something gone wrong with the ceremony? He heard, quite clearly now, the sound of a shovel scraping against the wood of his coffin, and he was suddenly furious.

He'd reached a decision, the hardest one he'd ever made, and they were taking it back from him. He didn't know if he'd have the strength to put himself through this all over again.

He was expecting darkness when they prised off the coffin lid and he winced and shielded his eyes from the sudden, unexpected light. He felt the flap of fabric against his wrist, and there was a pungent smell that wasn't quite unpleasant.

A moment later he squeezed his eyes open. There was something wrong with his shirt. It had been fresh on that morning, but now the cuff looked dark and frayed - almost rotten. When he tore it away in disgust the rip travelled all the way down his arm. The whole thing fell off him in strips of decaying cotton.

He pushed himself to his knees and tried to get to his feet, but his legs had cramped and he stumbled over the lip of the coffin to sprawl on the freshly dug earth. His shoulder shuddered away from the rubbery flesh of a worm as it dived back into the ground.

Finally, he staggered to his feet and looked around. The sun was hot and high overhead, nowhere near the horizon. He frowned, disoriented and not able to make sense of it.

The gravediggers stood in a loose ring around him. He looked at them, but he didn't recognise any of the faces, all of them young men. He understood their expressions, though: shock and revulsion. They backed away when he stepped towards them.

"Shit," one of them said. "I didn't think... shit."

Another one bent over, hands on his knees, and vomited.

Could three days have passed already in that uncounted blink of time? His eyes finally found their focus and he could see that he was exactly where he'd started. The graveyard was tucked behind a long-abandoned church on the Yorkshire Moors. He could see the prickle of heather through the dry stone wall around it and smell the blossom on the warm breeze.

There was a man sitting on the furthest wall, looking out over the moors. Something about the way he held his body was familiar, and Tomas took a step towards him.

The man's head turned, as if he'd been keeping Tomas in the corner of his eye the whole time.

When Tomas saw his face, he felt an instant, wrenching sense of wrongness. He couldn't think why. It was perfectly normal, jowly and a little grooved with age, fringed by thinning brown hair. Only...

"Hello, Tomas," the man said.

Tomas froze. "Giles?"

The man smiled, and Tomas knew that look so well, the slightly supercilious twist to his mouth. "Yes, I thought you recognised me."

Tomas had a hundred memories of Giles: Giles at a desk, researching the operation that Tomas would soon be sent on, eyes smudged with shadows because he'd been working all night. Giles eyeing up Kate's legs when he thought Tomas wasn't looking. Giles stammering over a condolence when the stories about Kate first started to filter through. But in every memory he had, Giles was a young man, younger than Tomas.

"What
happened
?" The question felt too small for the size of all the things he wanted to know.

Giles spread his hands. "I hardly know where to begin. The Berlin Wall fell. The Cold War ended and the Hermetic Division was disbanded before you could be resurrected. I got married, then she left me for a Welsh schoolteacher. The Spice Girls broke up, then reformed, then broke up again."

"What?" Tomas said again. "In
three days
?"

Giles flipped over the newspaper in his lap so Tomas could read it. The headlines meant nothing to him, but after a moment Giles tapped a finger on the top of the page, and he saw the date: 16 June, 2009.

Tomas looked down at himself, and saw for the first time the way his clothes hung in rags from his chest. He touched himself there but felt nothing, not the faintest stirring of a heartbeat. "What happened to me?"

Giles smiled. "You died, Tomas, twenty years ago. Welcome back."

CHAPTER TWO

They'd kept Morgan's flat for him while he was away, a small bedsit in a tower block near the Elephant and Castle. They hadn't bothered to dust it, though, and he woke up with his sinuses clogged and a gritty, unclean feeling in the back of his throat.

The phone had been disconnected about two years ago, so he'd plugged in his mobile to charge last night. When he'd rolled out of bed and showered he picked it up and scrolled through the stored names. He had until five o'clock, Giles had told him.

But there just wasn't anyone he wanted to talk to. He thought about cleaning the flat, then decided he didn't want to do that either.

Daytime television was as mind-numbing as ever. He sat through two hours of it before he reached for the phone again to call headquarters and get a number for John's family. John hadn't been married, but he'd talked about his parents.

Morgan's thumb hovered over the dial button, then flipped the phone shut again. They wouldn't want to hear his apology. The only reason he'd be calling was to make himself feel better, not them. He knew it was true because that's what Perry's sister had said when he called her five months ago, and then she'd screamed down the phone at him for ten solid minutes and he'd felt obliged to keep listening. Maybe it actually had made her feel better, but Morgan couldn't face the same bitter accusations from John's family.

He flung the phone away from him in a jagged spike of rage. "Fuck!"

There was no food in the flat, so at lunchtime he went to the nearest greasy spoon, in the shadow of the squat red shopping centre, and ordered the full English. The traffic dawdled by outside, the people too, and it felt very strange to be home. He found himself looking at the country through foreign eyes. Too cool, too grey, too restrained.

When four-thirty crawled round, he was glad to start the walk down Kennington Park Road towards Oval. It felt good to stretch his legs, even though the air was heavy with traffic fumes and incipient rain. He hadn't thought it would be possible to miss the clean, furiously hot desert air.

This time he was left waiting thirty seconds at the door of the Victorian semi, but it was the same smooth-faced man who let him inside.

There was no Phillips today. Giles had someone else with him. The man was dressed neutrally, in jeans and a green t-shirt, but he looked uncomfortable in his clothes. His face was very serious, a little too bony under thick blond hair. He inclined his head, but didn't offer to shake hands. Warned him to be careful, had they? Morgan immediately bristled.

"My new partner?" he asked Giles.

The little man nodded. "Tomas Len, this is Morgan Hewitt. Tomas has been out of circulation for a little while, Morgan. You may need to bring him up to speed on a few things."

Tomas nodded a curt confirmation. His eyes were a very startling bright green, and Morgan found that he didn't want to spend too much time looking into them. He didn't want to get to know this man. Definitely didn't want to get to like him. He was done with that, it hurt too much every time.