Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (120 page)

“Richard, could you please relieve me of this nitwit? If you want to know anything, come in and I’ll tell you face-to-face but I am not talking to this ass for another minute.”

Within seconds, a tall man entered at the door with the stoic face of a professional spy handler. “Aubrey, you may leave. I will take over from here.”

Aubrey, knowing an unequivocal dismissal when he heard it, left, but not without considerable gritting of his teeth.

“Really, James, you were a bit hard on the boy,” Richard said, seating himself on the corner of the desk. It was a tactic he used occasionally to place himself at a casual advantage over the men and women who sat in the brown leather chair. But he did not fool himself for a minute into thinking he could intimidate the man who sat there now.

“Living in a gulag will shorten your patience for idiocy considerably.” Jamie said.

“Yes, I’m sorry about that. We wanted to extract you but the stars never seemed to align in a manner that allowed us to do that, without compromising other operations.”

“By which you mean that you have a Russian mole working for you and you couldn’t risk him in order to help me. Don’t think I will forget this, Richard. You might want to ask yourself about your other man in Russia too. Somebody told the Soviets where and when I would be over the border.”

Richard had already considered this possibility and had a very good idea who had done it. However, it was not something he could discuss with this man. At least not at the present moment with cameras running.

“I’ve been instructed to tell you that we will do everything within our power to make your return as comfortable and as easy as possible.”

“Richard, the only man who instructs you is the PM.”

“Well, he wants you to know that we are at your disposal as far as we are able.”

The green eyes narrowed. “I didn’t come back alone.” His voice was quiet. It carried like a scythe through sun-blistered wheat.

“Ah,” Richard tapped the blotter on his desk with a heavy gold pen. “So I heard. What exactly do you want?”

“Asylum and citizenship papers for my Russian friends, for whichever country they may choose to call home.”

“I think something can be arranged. For now though, you will find them waiting on the plane for you. Your secretary, who is a bit of a highhanded bastard if I do say so myself, sent your plane over to bring you home. What about the baby?” he asked, wondering if the man before him would answer truthfully.

“The child is my son and will therefore be a citizen of Northern Ireland. You know where to send the required papers.”

“Of course,” Richard said. They would do what this man asked for some time, he supposed. They owed him enough to fear him. “Your friend—I’m sorry. But we were right about what they had him doing?”

“Yes, you were. Satellite weaponry, fairly advanced. Keeping his knowledge in his head was the only thing staying his execution. But of course they will have their ways of prying it out of him now that he has nothing left to lose.”

The conversation that followed was brief. Richard asked what questions he could and Jamie either answered them or did not as he saw fit. All his answers consisted of a few words and hid far more than they revealed. Richard, however, was patient, and knew now was not the best time to get what they needed from this man. At the end of the interview—which might have been, Richard thought, quite the most barbed of his long career—His Lordship James Stuart Kirkpatrick stood, impeccable in a dark grey suit, well barbered and the epitome of a civilized gentleman. But when Richard looked into the green eyes, he saw something that bore no taint of civilization.

Jamie took something from his pocket and placed it on the desk in front of Richard. Two chess pieces—a white knight and a black knight.

“What you want is inside the pieces,” Jamie said. “Now, I really must go. It has been a pleasure but one I fear that we will be foregoing in the future, Richard. Because I quit.”

Richard sat watching the door long after it had closed behind Jamie. He understood the man’s anger. They would have to give him time and space in which to allow that anger to die down, but if he really thought he could just quit this particular job, he had, as the saying went, another think coming.

The direct line on his desk rang, interrupting his thoughts of the man who had just exited. The Prime Minister. He sighed. He would want answers but Richard had very few to give him just now.

Jamie stopped outside the great ugly tower
known as Century House and took a deep breath. It had started to snow while he was inside, just a flake or two drifting down through the air, silent and transitory but beautiful in their passing. It calmed the anger burning in his chest a little. He waved away the car they had provided and walked into the grey chill of a London afternoon. He started across Westminster Bridge and stopped midpoint to watch the river flow past. Snowflakes touched its grey surface like miniature dancers, and then disappeared.

He stood for a very long time while the light faded, the snow fell thicker and faster and the lights of London came on around him, their reflections glowing in the river like drowned stars.

He had a sense, as he had twice before in his life, of being cut free of the earth, adrift and unacquainted with his own self. Russia had changed him.He felt it in every cell and thought. It remained to be seen what the outlines of this new man, carved by the silver stylus of struggle and hardship, his charcoal swept away by the barbed feathers of Russia itself, would look like or how he would deal with the world he had left behind seemingly so long ago. The shading of his soul had been sifted fine, like smoke, darker in its folds and drifting corners, painted over and over in the shades of blood and loss: vermilion and cinnabar, ivory and black and the crumbling ends of charred bone.

But he thought, perhaps remaining somewhere, spindrift and often invisible, was the
azzuro oltre marino
, the blue of such depth that it was considered the most valuable color of all. The core of the soul as rendered by the artist.

It was time to go. There was a flight to catch and a home to return to and there were friends who had long required his presence. He began to walk, alone in the midst of millions of people, snow shrouding his shoulders and hair.

His feet were toward the West but his head turned one last time back to the East… because once he had a friend there in those snowy wastes. Once he had a friend…

Good night sweet prince;
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest…

There will always be and there will always not be
a world under, beyond the border of the maiden birches or at the bottom of the sea. There will always be and always not be a crone in the heart of the dark forest and sometimes she will be good and true and sometimes she will not. This is, after all, the way of the world. This is balance and the world ever seeks it.

There will always be and not be crumbling towers and damsels in distress who long to be unshackled. There will always be and not be birds with feathers of flame and plain-faced girls of cunning and wit and old men who roam the pathways of the forest and sea. There will always be and not be figures who are dark and lurk below the horizon. There will always be a castle and a woman who waits for a knight to crest the far hills. Sometimes he will arrive and sometimes he will not.

For this I know and tell you as the one truth of the world, both the over and the under—all things change. It is the one sure thing and happiness is not a natural state any more than misery, no matter how man might long for it to be so.

There will always be worlds within worlds and the suspension between the two. The priests call such places purgatory, but I know there will always be twilight borderlands, the edge places of this world and that. It is there you will find me, waiting for one who wanders too close to where the veil between worlds thins so fine you might pass a needle through it without so much as a whisper of protest. A needle or a man.

Write my name with ink upon paper and you will scent the smoke of my arrival. For I am the Crooked Man and I come by crooked ways.

About the Author

Cindy Brandner lives in the Interior of British Columbia with her husband and children and several animals. Flights of Angels is the third novel in the Exit Unicorns series.

www.exitunicorns.com

Praise for Exit Unicorns

Here is a riveting read filled with the politics of conflict, the drama of the human condition, the depth of character, and the story of mid-twentieth century Northern Ireland struggling from freedom and peace amidst the rubble of armed conflict and the politics of terrorism and suppression.

- Midwest Book Review

‘Exit Unicorns’, unlike many contemporary books on the subject, brings colour and energy to the Irish struggle... The reader is caught up in the intertwined lives of these characters, each of which pursues their own agenda in the struggle for personal, religious and cultural freedom.

- The Cariboo Observer

The contrast of these wonderful characters propels the one story forward from many interesting directions - book-smart and street-smart, rich and poor, old and young, Irish and American. Regardless, the dreams of freedom and equality remain the same. This is a story of passion and loyalty to one another, to ones heritage and to a country. Mix in a bit of warmth and humor, Celtic legends, exquisite poetry and you’ve got one hell of a book.

- Amazon reader reviews

Praise for Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears

‘Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears’ quickly immerses you into the vicious inner circle of 1969 Irish-American politics of South Boston, leaving you desperate for the shores of a gem across the Atlantic; those of the Emerald Isle. However, Ireland remains much the same as generations past, presenting beloved characters with trials and tribulations of love, life and fierce reality. Cindy Brandner skillfully plays an emotional tug-of-war with your heart strings on Irish and American shores, creating a roller coaster ride that you will not soon forget.

- Shannon Curtis, Shamrocks and Stones