Last Line (12 page)

Nor had he ever been on the receiving end of his uncensored fury. Michael had accused him of holding back in their training fights, something he’d angrily denied. Just for an instant, Michael saw murder in his eyes, and a fear went through him—sweet, real, the cleanest thing he’d experienced in years. He balled up on instinct, just in time to avoid his pounce, choking and retching as his lungs tried to reinflate. He grabbed the arm of the sofa and hauled himself upright. “John—”

“Don’t you fucking
John
me. Stand up and look at me.”

Michael obeyed. He wanted to ask why but couldn’t get the word out. Then he didn’t have to. John would never hit a man when he was down, that was all. John was drawing back, not for a subtle piece of martial art but a roundhouse punch. His face was still immobile, but tears were streaming down it. Michael heard him sob before he swung. He didn’t flinch or try to block the blow—felt its impact with a wild relief, knocking him down onto the hearth.

Not quite hard enough to lay him out cold.
See, mate—you do hold back
, was the thought that made its way through the sparkling fog all around him as he pushed up onto his arms. He wished to God the punch had brought down the dark. He was waking now, the fugue of the night—which had wrapped him round like polythene, invisible, suffocating—falling away. He was beginning to feel. To be aware of what he’d done. “Oh God…”

John was lifting him by the armpits, helping him sit up. Michael had a moment of hope, but his partner was only checking him over, his touch impersonal as a medic’s. A touch to the head, looking for skull injuries. Chilly fingers under his jaw, lifting his face to the light to examine the side of his mouth.
Bleeding
, Michael wanted to tell him,
but no real damage done
. There was no need. John was clearly drawing the same conclusion, letting him go.

Michael curled up, bare backside going numb on the hearthstones. He lowered his brow to his knees. He felt the rough warmth of a blanket round his shoulders, curtly dropped there. Then the living room door slammed with a violence that brought plaster dust pattering down from the new-made ceiling, and the house fell silent.

* * *

Daylight. Bright and vivid now, filling the room without mercy. Groggily Michael lifted his head. Had he slept there, in his naked curl by the fire?

He wasn’t alone. Swiping a hand over his eyes, cautiously shifting his jaw to see if it still worked, he looked through the open kitchen door. His partner was moving briskly about in the sunlight. He was dressed in fresh clothes, barefoot, his hair damp from the shower. Michael heard the tap running, then saw John put the kettle on its stand and promptly snatch his hand back, swearing. Michael almost smiled. “John? There’s rubber gloves under the sink if that’s electrocuting you.”

John came to stand in the doorway. He looked at Michael coldly, as if he’d never seen him before. “It’s all right,” he said. “I’m getting used to it.”

The rowan tree that grew outside the kitchen window shifted in the breeze. In the altering light, Michael noticed a dusting of glass on the flagstones, and remembered. He had been sitting by the bath, John crouching anxiously beside him.
I broke your percolator jug
. He must have swept up and missed a few bits in the dark. “Mind your feet.”

“What?”

“There’s still some broken glass on the floor. There’s another coffee jug somewhere on top of those cupboards.”

“Oh. Right. I’m just making instant. There’s no time for fresh.”

“Why?” It occurred to Michael that he should be doing more than huddling like a refugee in his blanket, but he was too chilly and stiff to move. “What’s the hurry?”

“Webb wants us back in London.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. I found a voice mail from him at six o’clock.”

“Christ, does he never sleep?”

“Well, he called at five, so maybe not. My phone only picked it up in that clear patch halfway down the hall.” John turned away and went to take mugs out of the dresser. If he cared about broken glass, he gave no sign. Brusquely he spooned instant coffee into both mugs and sloshed the contents of the just-boiled kettle in on top. “Right,” he said, padding into the living room. He offered Michael one of the mugs at arm’s length, like a zookeeper charged with feeding a cranky tiger. “Drink that. I’m having mine, and then I’m off. I’ll field whatever it is he’s after until you catch me up.”

“Griff—”

John winced. “Just be quiet and listen. Make yourself another two or three of those once you’re done. Have a cold shower. Don’t go near your car until you’re properly awake.”

“I am awake. Why—”

“Are you?” John took a careful step back and sat on the arm of the sofa. He looked exhausted. “Awake enough to remember last night?”

Michael swallowed what felt like a rock. “Parts,” he admitted miserably.

“Parts. Okay. What about the part where you tried to shag me down on that rug?”

Oh Jesus
. Michael lowered his head. He raked his fingertips back through his hair as if he could reach through his skull and rip the memory out. It was one thing to flip out and lose a chunk of time, though that was frightening enough. He couldn’t bear the thought of these waking fugues—where he spoke, heard, and kept total recall, and was able to hurt his partner. He thought about lying, but the truth boiled up in him, burning like acid. “Yeah,” he said raggedly. “I remember.”

“You know what kills me about it? You could have had me, Mike—any time these last three years. With a word. With a
look
, for Christ’s sake. You didn’t need to—”

“Don’t!” Shuddering, Michael cupped a hand around the back of his skull. “We can’t do this anymore, Griff. I… I’m not fit to touch you. I can’t be with another man.”

He was distantly aware that John got to his feet. That John was standing over him. The morning sun was harsh. He cast a cool shadow, even at the height of his anger and disgust, like water on parched skin. “Last night I told you to stop,” he said bitterly. “And you fucking ignored me. You’re not fit to be with anyone.”

Chapter Nine

The rush hour was beginning by the time John hit the M3. After an hour or so of lane-swapping, tailgating, and short illegal dashes along the hard shoulder, the boiling anger in him began to abate. He wasn’t built to sustain much rage. A glance in the rearview revealed Mike’s BMW negotiating traffic behind him—a long way back but catching up fast, headlights on full beam. Either he’d skipped the coffees and the shower or, more likely, driven like a devil from hell through the narrow lanes to the motorway.

John almost smiled. Mike was so sedate within city limits when the trip wasn’t urgent. Such a nag as a passenger too, glancing across at John’s speedometer.
We’re still in a thirty zone, mate
. Watching him carve up a school bus now, John felt the familiar surge of amusement and affection.

Slaves get fucked, John. Prisoners
. John’s hands clamped tight on the wheel. He almost went into the back of a taxi and frantically slewed round. He couldn’t hang on to the anger, but pain could stay with him indefinitely, lodged like a thorn under his heart. His memory tried to replay for him the moment of terror and betrayal when he had said
stop
, and…

No. Whatever the fuck had happened back on the hearth rug in this day’s first light, John couldn’t think about it now. It was alien, impossible. The traffic began to thin as he passed the sticky Andover junction, and he got the Jag into a clear lane and up into fifth. After a minute he saw Mike gun the BMW into the fast lane beside him, and they flew toward the city wing to wing.

* * *

Shoulder to shoulder in James Webb’s office. The underground car park had been full, and they’d had to park up at different ends, had taken separate stairways to the top floor. But they’d met in the corridor with outward calm—not meeting one another’s eyes—and entered the dragon’s lair as they always did. Taken their usual seats when Webb, nose in a file, had distractedly waved at them to sit.

Webb put the file down. He rested his meaty fists on the surface of the desk. Hands like butcher’s blocks. John wondered how he managed to clutch a pen, let alone produce the small and elegant script that covered their fitness reports and tersely refused their expenses claims. Webb swung his head in Michael’s direction, a bull looking for its next matador. “What the devil,” he rumbled, Belfast brogue in full ascendant, “happened to you?”

John flinched. He hadn’t taken a good look at his partner’s face yet this morning. He’d remembered to pull his punch a bit at the very last instant, but…

“Some moron of a townie was letting his dog chase sheep,” Michael said smoothly. His shoulder was almost touching John’s. Those were the seats they took, the ones that let them imperceptibly touch, bracing one another no matter what the old man dished out. The half-inch gap between them felt to John like an abyss. “He didn’t like it when I stopped him.”

“You let a civilian bust your lip, Agent South?”

“You always tell us not to use our combat skills on civilians, sir.”

John repressed a snort. Webb gave a kind of growl that could indicate anything from amusement to disgust. “Well, you’re a disgrace. You too, Griffin, by the way. You look as if you haven’t slept in a week. Are you fit to be back at work?”

“What?”

“After your fall, man!”

“Oh.” John hadn’t given that a thought since the Glastonbury river bank. There were, as he’d discovered, far worse heights through which he could plummet. “Yes, sir. I’m fine.”

“You damned well oughtn’t be. That drop turned Piotr Milosz into raw steak.”

From the corner of his eye, John saw Michael give a galvanic twitch—saw him absorb it, not quite seamlessly, into an interested forward movement in his chair. “You got a name from him?” he asked. “I thought he died before he could talk.”

“No. He talked first.”

Webb’s words dropped into the morning sunlight like stones. In the silence that followed, John found himself listening to tiny, irrelevant stitches in its tapestry: phones ringing off down the corridor, the regular warning beep of a lorry reversing in an alleyway outside. He was sitting at Michael’s left hand. He thought he could hear the anguished thud of his heart. “Why didn’t you tell us?” he asked when it became clear that Michael wasn’t going to.

Webb didn’t glance at him. He kept his gaze fixed steadily on Michael. “Because what he gave me might not have been good,” he said. “No point in stirring up mud until I knew.”

“So…it
was
good,” Michael said drily, not as a question.

“It may be. He has links to a man named Lukas Oriel. Your target in Russia, Agent South, during the Zemel civil war.”

“That’s classified.”

John drew a quiet breath. No one snapped at James Webb. To his surprise, the old man only sat back a little, drumming his fingers on the file. “Spoken like a true spook,” he rumbled. “Believe it or not, MI5 did declassify
some
information when they handed you over.”

“Handed me… I left!”

“They let you go.”

John cleared his throat. His boss and his partner both turned to glare at him, their confrontation breaking. He inquired innocently, “Would you like me to leave the two of you alone?”

“No!”

A simultaneous bark from both of them. Webb’s was a command. In Michael’s there was a shadow of a plea that reached John’s heart despite everything. He tried to flicker him a reassuring smile. “Okay,” he said. “Who’s Lukas Oriel, and why do we care about him?”

Webb grunted. He waited until Michael had relaxed his combative tension and fixed his gaze at some point beyond the office window. “Oriel is a war criminal. After the nuclear…incident in the city of Dorva, he gathered together scientists and weapons men with a view to launching a vengeance attack on the West. He got quite a long way with his plans. When US and British forces invaded his stronghold in Zemelya, they found weapons of mass destruction in a state of advanced preparation.”

“Must’ve been a relief to Tony to find some somewhere. Wasn’t it a British jet that detonated the Dorva warhead?”

“Is that a particular concern of yours, Griffin?”

“No. I’m interested in the application of the term
war criminal
, that’s all.”

“Don’t be naive,” Webb snarled. “Or facetious, for that matter. Oriel set out to destroy everyone in Zemelya who didn’t share his point of view. He’s culpable of genocide. Further, when the coalition forces invaded, he was nowhere to be found. Intelligence told us he’d fled to the West, but all trails went cold.” He shifted his bulk in the chair, transferring the weight of his attention to Michael once more. “Until Piotr Milosz dropped out of the church rafters four days ago. He believes Oriel’s in London. Where, he didn’t have time to tell us.”

Michael left off his study of the rooftops opposite. When he responded, he sounded to John more like his old self than he had in days. Since before their call out to the bloody church, in fact. Cheerful and pragmatic, as if he’d made a decision. “Somewhere in London? That’s the best we’ve got?”

“Better than
somewhere in the West
, I’d have thought. You and Griffin have tracked men down on less.”

“Not this time, sir. I don’t know what line MI5 fed you, but I failed in my mission to Zemelya. I never found Oriel. Never got near him, in fact. I don’t know what he looks like, what his habits are, or—”

“No. I… I know all that, son.”

John stiffened. Webb had said it almost gently. If John didn’t know better, he’d have thought that some kindly impulse had passed through the old bastard’s stony heart. In John’s experience, that could only mean trouble.

“Which is why I’ve drafted some help for you.” Webb reached for his desk phone and stabbed the keypad with a thick forefinger. “Ms. Pearce? Is the Russian transfer here yet?”

The arid tones of Georgina Pearce, Webb’s longtime secretary, hissed back through the speaker. Last Line legend had it that she was a former mistress of Webb’s, put out to dignified grass in his employ, but John dismissed the idea. You couldn’t mate a bull with a spitting cobra, and even the old man could never have been that brave. “Yes, sir. He’s waiting.”