Ghost Dance (20 page)

Lahav didn't seem to. "Our countries are allies," he continued. "There's no reason we can't pursue the same aim. I can promise you what I do is no threat to Britain, or the Hermetic Division."

"That's for me to decide," she said. "Why don't you tell me what you're up to, and maybe I'll even agree with you."

Lahav's mouth clamped shut. Kate brushed her greying hair from her eyes as she turned to look at Morgan.

His eyes flicked between her and the Israeli, undecided. They finally settled on the Israeli. "Why can't we tell her?" Morgan asked. "Why can't the Hermetic Division and the - whatever the hell your lot are called - work together on this?"

The Mossad agent shook his head. "You have such faith in human nature, my friend. But it was your people who wanted the Ragnarok artefacts, objects with the power to end the world. They seek out secrets not to keep them, but to use them. And this secret mustn't be known."

"What secret?" Kate asked.

Morgan hesitated, then said, "Immortality."

"Immortality? That's what this is about?" There was something in her eyes, a spark of interest, and Morgan felt his stomach clench because he saw that Lahav was right. The Hermetic Division would want this.

"And why not?" he asked Lahav. "So what if the secret gets out? People stop dying. That's a good thing, isn't it?"

Lahav had manoeuvred so that his back was to the door, blocking any escape. Morgan saw Kate take note of it. The pulse in her neck flickered faster but she gave no other sign of distress. "You wouldn't hurt me," she said. "Morgan would never work with you then."

"No I wouldn't," Morgan said. He was certain about that, at least.

Lahav sighed. "A world without death - not a utopia, but
this
world without death. People still living and loving and making more people, and more, and then more, and none of them dying. A world without enough food for six billion people, with ten billion, twenty, a hundred billion. Starving skeletons walking a ravaged earth, praying for a death they have forever denied themselves. And ruling over this hell is Coby, a killer without conscience or pity. Surely you see why this secret has to be kept?"

Morgan did, but he didn't trust himself to be thinking straight. He
wanted
to believe the Mossad agent, because he wanted the chance to earn the reward the other man was offering. And if this explanation gave him a fig leaf to cover what would otherwise be naked treachery...

He looked at Kate and she looked back. She already knew what he intended. She barely struggled when he pushed her up against the wall, one forearm against her throat. She only began to twist in panic as unconsciousness approached.

"Shh," he told her, "it's OK, it's just for a little while, shhh."

Her eyes glazed and he felt all resistance melt out of her body as he lowered her to the floor. "Get something to tie her up and gag her," he snapped over his shoulder at Lahav.

The other man didn't move. "They'll find her soon. We will have very little time to get away."

"Tough," Morgan said. "It's this or nothing."

There was a moment's more hesitation, then Lahav did as he'd said. When he'd finished, he looked expectantly at Morgan and he understood the message in his eyes. Lahav had spared Kate, against his instincts. Now it was time for Morgan to fulfil his side of the bargain.

"John Dee talked about the shofar."

Lahav nodded and Morgan saw the sudden tension in his eyes. "And did he say where it could be found?"

"He said it was stolen from him and taken over the ocean, to the Queen's colony. He told me it was lost in the forests of the New World. And he said the people who took it disappeared, but they left a message behind."

"Croatoan," Lahav said.

Morgan narrowed his eyes. "You knew already?"

"No. But I understand now why I could never find it."

"And do you know where it is?"

Lahav smiled. "I know where we should look."

CHAPTER TWELVE

Alex walked ten blocks without stopping. She forced herself not to scan the crowd or look behind her for signs of pursuit. Her plan had worked, it must have. PD was trapped in Marriott's house with the Croatoans and the Agency believed she was imprisoned there too.

When she hit Market she finally stopped. She was beside a small row of shabby fast-food joints and cafes, the metal tracks of the MUNI scarring the road ahead of her. The sidewalk was crowded, mostly tourists waiting for the trains or crossing to explore the more picturesque streets of the Castro. Alex hesitated a moment, then joined the cluster at the MUNI stop. It was faster than walking, slower than a taxi. But it was anonymous, no driver who might remember her and report her destination to anyone with a badge who asked.

When the train came it was crowded and Alex was glad to lose herself in the sweating anonymity of the passengers. Raven stood beside her, his insubstantial body half over-lapping with a fat German woman. The sight made Alex feel sick and she shut her eyes.

Her heart was pounding and she felt a bitter taste in the back of her throat which she thought might be adrenaline. This was it; she was committed now. There was no going back, not just to the Agency but to the ordinary life she'd once yearned to return to. Her father was cold and distant, her mother self-obsessed and neglectful. But when she thought of never seeing them again, her chest ached and she felt the prickle of tears building in the corners of her eyes.

Her only option was to take the money and flee over the border. She vaguely recalled that Venezuela had no extradition treaty with the USA. She couldn't begin to image what her life there might be like, but... Live free or die trying, wasn't that what they said?

Her eyes jolted open when the mechanical voice announced Civic Centre. She pushed through a crowd of towering jocks and squeezed out of the door moments before it shut. Outside the station the crowds were thinner, dispersed through the wide, unwelcoming spaces between the buildings. Alex headed west, over grass littered with homeless men drinking beer from cans wrapped in brown paper bags.

The bank was beyond the Opera House, in the grimmer streets that sprawled around the government buildings. She felt her heart speed as she drew closer. Her mouth was so dry it hurt to swallow. Her footsteps echoed on the marble floor when she entered and she felt as if everyone was watching her. There must be cameras here, though she couldn't spot them. She could only hope no one who mattered was watching them.

There was no line this time and she found herself in front of the same teller she'd faced earlier. "Miss Keve," she said.

"Sarah," Alex said, reading from her name tag. "Is it ready?"

Sarah nodded a little jerkily. Alex felt the first stirrings of unease in her gut. But the spirit world showed her nothing dangerous. The woman's face was overlaid with her other self: a Labrador, gentle and loyal. She was no threat to Alex.

"If you could wait out here a second," Sarah said, "I'll need to go through a few formalities and the money's all yours."

Alex watched her walk to the back of the bank. Her blonde hair swayed with each stride, but her hips were stiff. Alex's stomach roiled. Something was wrong. She didn't need the spirit world to tell her that, only her instincts. They were screaming at her to run. But if she ran, it would be with nothing. And without the money to buy a new life over the border, where could she go?

She looked around instead, using both her inner vision and her outer. The security guard was just a lazy, fat old tom cat, whiskers twitching behind his crooked smile. There was a woman and her child, sulky and whining behind her. The woman was a robin, perky and quick, the child nothing at all, barely a whisper of life in the spirit world, too young to have learned who he was.

The other tellers were no more threatening than Sarah, all bent over their own work. But damn it, they were concentrating
too
hard on what they were doing. Not one of them looked up and caught her eye. It was as if they were afraid to.

There was no one else. Outside, the traffic grumbled and the sky was clear and blue and this had to work, it
had
to.

"You're a strange one," Raven said at her shoulder.

He was shaking his head, his mouth pulled down at the corners. She bit her lip to stop herself responding. The last thing she needed was to draw attention to herself by talking to thin air.

"I mean," he said, "you've worked out how to walk through walls, but you can't figure out how to
see
through them? That's like being able to run a four-minute mile but being incapable of walking to the bottom of the road. Preparing blow-fish flawlessly but being unable to boil an egg. A qualified pilot of the space shuttle, but when it comes to push bikes-"

"Jesus - I get it!" Alex snapped. The tellers to either side of her jerked quick looks up and away and she blushed, dropping her eyes to the floor. But Raven was right. This bank looked like it had been built in the last decade. No one lived here, no one loved here - and she had to assume no one had died here. In the other world, the place should barely exist.

She'd grown used to seeing both worlds, overlapping and bleeding into each other. To see through the walls she needed to blot out the real world, and the thought sent a jolt of fear through her. She'd be blinding herself to the mundane, and what if she could never get that vision back? No amount of money would help her then. She might as well return to the Agency.

She looked at her watch. Sarah had been gone two minutes and not a single other customer had entered the bank. The young man who'd been cashing a cheque to her left had already left and it looked at if the woman and her child were finishing up. When they were gone, Alex would be the only customer in the place.

Was that what they were waiting for? She gritted her teeth and prepared to let the mundane world fade away entirely.

Entering the spirit world was a release, a letting go of assumptions. It was almost a rush, and she let herself feel it. A euphoric sort of calm flowed through her as she looked at the marble walls of the bank and allowed herself to recognise that they weren't truly there, not in any way that really mattered. In the eyes of eternity, there was nothing in front of her but air.

She'd expected the walls to fade gradually, but it was like a blink - one moment solid, the next moment gone. And then she could see exactly what waited for her outside the bank, both in the spirit world and in the mundane.

The wolves were crouched ready to spring, scores to the front of the bank and more at every exit. In the spirit world she couldn't see their weapons, but she saw the glint of their teeth and the feral gleam in their eyes. They were hunters and they had cornered their prey.

There was no point pretending any more. She turned to Raven to ask for help and gasped as she saw him. His face was at once beautiful and subtly and terribly wrong. When he smiled it was more frightening than the leer of the wolves who waited for her outside the bank. And she understood that he was many things, but he would never be her friend.

His smile widened. It looked as if it could swallow her whole. "I never claimed to be other than I am," he said. "You can't blame me if you preferred to believe a comforting lie than see the dangerous truth."

"What
are
you?" she said.

He looked at the agents waiting for her beyond the transparent walls of the bank. "Do you really think this is the time to be asking?"

"No," she said. "I should have asked you the first time you gave me advice and before I was stupid enough to take it. But I'm asking now."

Outside, she could see that the CIA's wolves were moving closer. Any second now they'd move in. Raven held out his hand towards her, fingers loose as he wriggled them in a 'come here' gesture.

She stared at them and didn't move. "What are you?" she asked him again.

"Oh," he said. "I'm this and that. I'm neither one thing nor the other. I'm the joker in the deck, the one card that doesn't belong to any suit. I'm your only hope of getting out of here, Alex. Take my hand."

She took it, letting his warm fingers curl around hers.

"Now what?" she said.

He shrugged. "Now we walk out of here. To see the spirit world so clearly, you have to be in it. The wolves can see you but the men can't, and the men haven't learnt to listen to the wolves inside."

"But I'd already done that. I didn't need you." She tried to wrench her hand out of his.

"Too late now," he said and pulled her through the transparent walls of the bank.

He dropped her hand when they'd gone a block. She walked a little faster, letting him slip behind her until she couldn't see him even in her peripheral vision. But the prickle between her shoulder blades told her he was still there, and watching her.

The city burned and shook apart around her. Fully in the spirit world now, she could see only fragments of the modern city superimposed on the old. A splash of blood stained a concrete wall as a man slashed another man's throat and the writhing flesh in the house to her left shone through the flames. She wondered how long the place had been a brothel, and if it was the pleasure or the degradation that the spirit world remembered so clearly.

While she stayed in the spirit world, she was invisible to the agents pursuing her, but how long could she stay here? Could she eat here? She thought suddenly of the old Greek myth. Persephone had eaten seven pomegranate seeds while in the underworld and been condemned to spend the winter of every year in darkness.

Maybe she could stay in the spirit realm until she'd crossed the border, at least. That would be less than a day's travel by road, more if she had to walk, and she thought maybe she would. And then she'd need money. It all came back to that. If she wanted to live in the real world she'd need some real cash.

She waited until she was on Nob Hill, the city undulating towards the sea all around her, before she took out her iPhone. She hadn't known if it would travel into the spirit world with her, but it seemed solid enough in her hand as she switched the power back on. She wasn't sure what she was going to tell her father, but she would talk him into helping her. He was her
dad
. That was his job.