Cold Warriors (26 page)

"Shit!" Anya said, and he knew she'd seen what he had. The man was keeping himself hidden in the cluster of other tourists, but his face had been engraved on Morgan's memory. It only took one glimpse to be certain. It was him, the thin-faced agent from the train who'd summoned the spirit of his dead sister.

"How the hell did he find us?" Morgan hissed.

"I've got no idea. We should have been safe underground."

"Why?"

She pulled him a little further into the mineshaft as the man's eyes swept the entrance. "Spirits can't travel through the earth, it's impervious to them. Why do you think we bury our dead? And the salt makes doubly certain."

Morgan instinctively clutched a hand to his stomach, where the diary was tucked under the waistband of his jeans. But the crushing fear he felt wasn't at the thought of losing it. He remembered his sister's eyes, venomous with hate as she stared at him through the mirror. And he remembered the feel of her small fingers on his foot, pulling him beneath the waters of the Danube. He couldn't face her again.

"Give me your phone," he said.

Anya kept staring fixedly at the crowd of tourists by the bus. The tour guide was already gathering them together. They'd be heading for the mineshaft any minute.

"The phone!" Morgan snapped. "We need back-up."

Anya shook her head. "They'd never get here in time."

"Got a better suggestion? Just give me the fucking phone, Anya!"

"No," she said quietly. "I can't do that."

Morgan reached out to grab her, but his fingers stuttered to a halt in the air. She was holding a small black Beretta in her right hand, and she was pointing it at him.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Morgan kept a hand against the wall as he backed into the mine, the light fading in front of him as he went deeper. Anya held the Beretta centred on his chest. She remained a careful ten paces apart, slowing every time he did. She was a pro and she knew what she was doing. Rushing her was too risky, too likely to get him shot.

"You're working for Raphael," Morgan said, but Anya shook her head. She waved the gun sideways, a signal to get moving, and Morgan speeded up. He knew she could hear the same thing he did: voices at the mouth of the tunnel. The latest tour group was about to descend.

"I could have killed you while you slept if all I wanted was the book. Think, Morgan."

She was right. She couldn't be with Raphael, it didn't make sense. And she didn't seem to be with the Japanese either. "So you want it for yourself."

"Stop," she said. "Go left."

They'd reached a fork in the tunnel, the left-hand turning leading away from the route they'd followed earlier. A 'no entry' sign strung on a metal chain blocked the way, but Morgan stepped over it easily.

"We'll get lost," Morgan said after they'd turned left twice more, and then right.

"Maybe," Anya said, "but so will they."

It was far darker here, the electronic lighting long gone, replaced by the weak illumination of Anya's torch. It swept across a floor that was rough and uneven, beam diffused by the choking cloud of rock dust churned up by their feet. The dust coated Morgan's throat and nostrils, leaving behind the thirsty tang of salt as it dissolved.

He stopped so abruptly that Anya almost stepped within reach before pulling quickly back. She centred the gun's barrel on his chest again, but he ignored it. It occurred to him for the first time that she didn't have a plan. She hadn't expected the Japanese agents to find them and now she had no idea what to do. And something else occurred to him too.

"Why didn't you let me phone Tomas?" he said. "Does he know you're a traitor? But why didn't he tell me before?"

Anya laughed, high and strained. "You want to know why I couldn't let you speak to anyone in Germany? Because there's a chance you'd have spoken to Anya."

Morgan worked the sentence over twice in his mind, but it still came out the same. "So... you're
not
Anya." He studied her face in the reflected glow of her torch, but it still looked exactly like her. And before, when they'd travelled in the car together - no disguise could be that good.

"I
am
Anya," she said. "I'm Anya too."

"You're her twin?" That was possible, he supposed. It explained why she'd behaved so differently since leaving the train. Smiling where previously she'd always been so dour, sympathetic rather than accusing. Except no one called a pair of twins the same name. "No, that's not what you mean, is it?

He could see the bunch of tensed shoulders beneath her t-shirt. "Your partner's a man who died twenty years ago. You're working with a forty-year-old girl of eleven with a demon trapped inside her. What do you think I mean?"

"Exactly what you say. There are two of you, and you're both Anya."

"Yes. We're two halves of a whole person."

"The other half, the other Anya, does she know?"

She shook her head.

"And has it always been that way? Were you born like this?"

She looked amused. "Morgan, if two babies came out, that
would
make us twins."

He punched the wall in a sudden flare of rage. "Don't act like I'm supposed to know this shit! Three days ago I though the world was a totally normal place!"

His voice reverberated in the long tunnels. When the echoes died they left behind the shuffling sound of footsteps, somewhere behind Anya.

Without needing to be asked, Morgan started walking again, almost running. They were well away from the tourist route now. Those footsteps could only be the American man and his Japanese assassins. Morgan had lost count of the turnings about ten minutes ago. He had no idea where they were, only that they were deep in the mine, maybe deeper than they'd been on the first trip down.

Anya was beside him now, Beretta loose in her hand. Careless, but maybe she knew he had no intention of taking it from her. He didn't want to risk stopping the flow of information.

"I'm sorry," she said. "It's probably my fault Richard and his people have found us."

Morgan froze a moment, then kept on walking. "Richard's the man from the train, right? And you know his name because...?"

"I used to work with him."

Morgan flicked her a quick glance, but her expression gave nothing away. "When did you stop?"

"Oh, about thirty hours ago."

Paradoxically, the admission relaxed Morgan. It would have been far easier to lie. "So what changed?"

"You did."

"My charm and good looks won you over?"

"Actually, your brains."

"That's a first." He took a moment to puzzle it out. "OK, you want the diary. You thought you needed what's his name - Richard - to translate it. And when you realised I could do it..."

"Yes, that pretty much covers it."

"Still doesn't explain what you are. Why there are two of you."

"The Japanese made me."

"
Made
you?"

"They figured out a way to divide a person - to split a personality in two. It's simpler than you might think, though highly exothermic."

He shook his head, baffled.

"Magic is no different from chemistry, Morgan. Nothing is ever destroyed, only transformed. Splitting a personality is like splitting an atom: the two halves are less than the whole. Whatever it is that's lost comes out as heat, a whole lot of it. The explosion when they did it was the size of a small tactical nuke."

"But why? What would be the point of doing it? If you want more people, just make them the old-fashioned way."

"Because of the Ragnarok artefacts."

"Yeah, of course. Because that's all anybody cares about." His teeth were chattering. They were so deep in the mine it was like they'd walked into winter. Icy water dripped from the ceiling into his short hair, drying slowly to leave it stiff with salt.

Anya's hair looked blood-red in the low light, hanging in lank strands around her cheeks. "The Japanese are obsessed with them, with getting hold of them. It isn't just the Japanese, though. Pretty much every country wants them. When Nicholson led the Hermetic Division, tracking down the artefacts was its primary mission. And he got further than anyone else - rumour has it he'd located all three, though that was never confirmed."

"And you're hoping his diary will tell you where they are." Morgan was glad he hadn't told her everything his father wrote.

She nodded. "The Japanese wanted the artefacts and they wanted the diary, and they knew the BND were closing in on both. They tried to turn some of the German agents, but they didn't get anywhere with anyone high enough to be useful."

"So instead of turning you, they copied you." Morgan took a moment to absorb that. It made a demented sort of sense. "They sent the original back, and kept the copy to work for them."

Anya's eyes flared. "There's no copy, no original. We're both Anya. But yes, that's right. I am - was - the BND's top agent assigned to search for the artefacts. When they made me the Japanese got access to all my knowledge - and a chance to infiltrate the German network, too. If I go in to BND headquarters when the other half of me isn't there, or talk to any of her sources, who'd ever suspect I wasn't who I said I was?"

She'd drawn a little ahead of him, but now she suddenly stopped. A moment later Morgan saw why. The tunnel was a dead end, the way ahead blocked by a stout wooden gate fastened with a padlock. Anya shrugged and turned round.

Morgan put a hand on her arm, stilling her. In the silence that followed he could hear their breathing, Anya's a little faster than his, both of them wheezing slightly with all the dust. And beyond that, quite clearly, the sound of approaching footsteps.

The Baltic was never calm, not even in summer. The surface of the water was broken by choppy little waves which juddered the small boat from side to side. Tomas had never been a good sailor, and he was discovering that his dead body was still quite capable of feeling that it wanted to puke.

The coast guards Anya had co-opted were taking care of the steering, leaving Tomas nothing to do but stare over the water. There was no sign of their quarry yet, but theirs was the faster vessel. And thanks to the information Raphael's agent had given them, they'd been able to lock onto the other boat's transponder signal. When they'd set out an hour ago, they'd been twenty miles behind. Now they were only five and closing fast.

Thinking about Raphael's agent brought a different sensation to Tomas's stomach, a hunger profound enough to overpower the nausea. Anya had left him alone in the room with the agent's corpse while she'd gone to find them a boat. He knew why. He knew what she'd expected him to do. And god knows he'd wanted to.

And yet he hadn't. Every time he imagined eating, he pictured Kate watching him. He saw the horror in her eyes at the monster he'd become and his hunger twisted into self-disgust.

He could see Anya shooting glances at him. While she was out of the room he'd torn strips from the dead woman's clothing to bandage the terrible wound in his gut, unhealed because he hadn't fed. Then he'd hidden it beneath a fresh t-shirt pilfered from one of the woman's victims. But the gnawing pain of it left him weak, so that he staggered with every shift of the boat. He had to repress a groan as they lurched to starboard, jarring him onto his right foot and loosening something in his belly he was glad he couldn't see.

"They're likely to be heavily armed," Anya said, watching the distant horizon. The day was hot but overcast and the grey light that filtered through the clouds made her face look as lifeless as his.

He nodded. "Catching them's only the start of the battle."

"If they've got Belle with them, they can use her as a hostage. Threaten her and they've got us over a barrel."

"Maybe. But if they kill her they lose the only bargaining chip they've got, and they know it." He also wanted to believe that Kate wasn't capable of killing a child, but he wasn't sure enough to say it.

Anya's eyes flicked to him, narrowed under brows squeezed together with tension. "It's a very big risk to take with a little girl's life."

"You think I don't know it?" Tomas found he was too weary to be angry. "We have to try. Once Raphael finds out we don't have the diary, she'll be shark meat anyway."

"Morgan said he was bringing it back. If you trust him, of course." It was clear she didn't.

He had a sudden memory of Morgan smiling one of his rare smiles. Tomas
did
trust him, he always had. Maybe it was because Morgan was untainted by a past which was turning out to be so much more complicated than Tomas had anticipated. But they hadn't heard from him all day, and Tomas had to fight not to imagine the worst.

He turned away from Anya as one of the coast guards rushed out of the boat's small cabin, excitement written on his coarse face. "We've got them hull-up on the horizon!"

The light was too diffuse to see anything clearly, but Tomas thought he could make out a blur that might have been another boat. It looked big, considerably larger than theirs.

"How long till we catch them?" Anya asked.

The coast guard leaned forward, as if he could personally speed the chase. "Half hour, maybe an hour if they see us and put on some speed. They're only making about twelve knots at present, trying not to attract too much attention."

"Do you think they've seen us?" Tomas asked.

The man shrugged, but Anya said, "Their agent was probably supposed to report in at regular intervals. When she didn't... We have to reckon they're expecting us."

Tomas nodded as he kept his eyes on the shape ahead, now recognisably a boat.

Half an hour, maybe an hour, until he saw Kate again.

Morgan hit the padlock with the largest rock he could find. It didn't break, just rang loudly enough to let everyone in a five-hundred-yard radius know they were there.

"Great," Anya said. "So much for stealth."

"It's not like we'd be able to sneak past them," Morgan snapped. "There's only one way out, and they're blocking it. Give me the gun."

She rolled her eyes at him, then lifted the Beretta and shot out the lock herself.