He froze. A single whistle had threaded up from the street. A summons, at once plaintive and challenging—like a bloody owl, John thought, declaring its territory over a springtime hill. Not that he’d ever heard such a thing until Michael had taken him out to walk through the moonlit fields by the Teal. “You said he wouldn’t come here.”
“I didn’t think… Oh God.”
“Mike, stay here. You don’t have to go to him.”
But Michael was already hauling himself to his feet. He leaned his hands on the windowsill and looked out into the dark. “I do. Just to find out what he wants. I’ll come back, John.”
* * *
Half an hour later, John heard the door of the room next to his
clic
k open and shut. The walls were paper-thin. He heard not only that but every word of the developing argument between his partner and Anzhel Mattvei.
Which, if it had been conducted in English, would probably have been quite enlightening to him. John lay on his back on the narrow bunk and tried not to listen in any case, because he could hear—from Michael, anyway—that they were trying to keep it down. The complex sibilants and rasping, purring consonants drew his attention against his will. The language had a music of its own. Weary, despite everything beginning to drift toward sleep, John draped an arm over his eyes. This was how his unknown Michael spoke, the stranger he’d first encountered the night after the Piotr Milosz op, the night after John had fallen and fallen and should have died, he knew, though his collision with the stranger had driven all that from his mind. It hadn’t occurred to John then that there was any aspect of Michael he couldn’t handle, not even in the cold morning, waking up to memories of scars and blood and pain. Letting the last few days melt from his mind, he imagined himself back to that state of innocence, imagined that Michael was speaking this beautiful impassioned language to him as they lay on a sunny hillside, their bodies moving in synchrony.
No. Too much distress in it. John had heard a lot of notes in Michael’s voice but never fear, never, thank God, that scrape of revulsion, not when Mike was talking to him. Waking, John rolled onto one elbow and lay poised, listening. He hadn’t undressed. He knew better now than to try to stage an intervention between his partner and Anzhel, but he’d wanted to be ready if Michael came to him.
It sounded as if Michael was about to walk out anyway. His volume had pitched up as he forgot the thin walls in his anger. The door handle rattled.
John shook his head. For a moment he thought his ears had started to sing. There was a sense of pressure in them, as if he’d forgotten to balance before a scuba dive, and then that cleared, and then he was somehow listening to music. No, not listening—immersed. Nothing like the thud of bass that had boomed all night in conflicting rhythms from up and down the street. Slowly he identified it as a human voice.
Then he questioned the word
human
. Rolling onto his stomach, clutching the flat little excuse of a pillow, John tried to free his mind from the unearthly bloody beauty of the sound. It seemed to come into him through his skin. He shuddered, tears stinging to his eyes. It filled up the space between this sordid room and the patch of moonlit sky he could see beyond the rooftops. He wanted it at once to stop and to go on forever.
Then his ears popped, and the spell broke. The symphony dropped away. It was nothing more or less than Anzhel Mattvei, softly singing and—weirdly—John knew the song. He had heard it a hundred times. Never in full, just passing fragments as Mike went about his business in his flat or the office. He sang it when he was distracted, contented, and John had loved to hear it, associating it in his mind with the pleasant routines of their day or…yes, food. Mike often sang it to himself while he was cooking.
John let go a huge pent-up breath and subsided onto the pillow. Other noises were beginning now, but they didn’t bother him. The bed on the far side of the wall thumped against it, but not hard, as if someone had gone down onto it gently, gone down without a fight. The vibration went through the bed where John lay—went through the marrow of his bones, it felt like—came again and again and settled into a delicate rhythm.
Whatever the hell Anzhel Mattvei was doing to Mike, it wasn’t hurting him now. That was enough for John. He buried his face in the crook of his elbow, trying not to listen, unable not to hear. But even his involuntary witnessing didn’t seem wrong. A whisper of Russian came through the wall, close and intimate as if it were at his own ear—as if he were there in the room by invitation, watching, or…
No. As if he and Michael were one flesh. That wasn’t new to him. He’d felt it on the streets, in moments of great fear or exaltation. A barrier would melt, and there he would be, burning with Michael’s fires, feeling in the same instant how Michael opened to welcome his own cool rush. From the outside it was nothing but one shared look or a hand closing tight on a shoulder. There was nothing strange, nothing alien to John, in the experience.
Nothing to stop him. No alarm bells rang when Mike began to moan in pleasure and the sensation of lift-off wrapped round John too. As if a big hand were under him, scooping him up. Arousal flooded him. His cock stiffened against the mattress, and he shifted awkwardly to accommodate its rise before remembering he was still trapped in his jeans. He thought about unbuttoning—fleetingly, about thrusting down, getting friction and a focus for the starry, glittering cloud of excitement—but somehow there wasn’t time. Somehow it wasn’t necessary, as if it were all being done for him, and all he had to do was lie there and let it happen. He had been so tired. Becoming so sick of the world, his heartbreak a disease he couldn’t have fought off for much longer, draining him. He needed this, needed exactly what he was getting—an escape, a wild ride on Anzhel’s wings.
The wrongness of it hit him too late. He was on the brink of a come so big he thought it might register on seismographs, but still he would have scrambled back. He was about to get off, like some kind of perv, on the sound of someone else’s sex. But suddenly the broken moaning from next door became words, became English, or one word of it anyway, hot and clear: “John! John, John…”
The lightning struck. Flat on his belly, hands convulsing on the pillow, John burned and fought and flashed to climax. He had an instant to recall that he had used to come like this when he was a kid—untouched, hitting the heights out of a dream, when the world was still new to him and his body a fantastic toy, capable of anything. Too much. His throat was too tight for a scream, but the sound he would have made ripped round inside him, scouring his lungs.
Then he began to fall. He choked in fright. It was such a long drop, and he wouldn’t survive this time, that was for sure.
But he was worn to the bone. The cold ground—the dirty mattress, the floorboards and ragged carpets of this place—wouldn’t stop him now. A deeper pit opened, his exhaustion coming to his rescue. He cried out softly in relief and let his fall become a dive, stretching out to meet the dark. He split the waters painlessly, shot down deep and deeper and was gone.
* * *
Daylight hadn’t made it to the hostel at seven the next morning. John was fairly sure it never would. He strode down the neon-lit corridor that led to the bathrooms. There were two, both communal, on this floor. Michael had just disappeared into the one on the right. An elderly gentleman in ragged dressing gown was shuffling the same way. Catching him up, John took him gently by the shoulders and steered him toward the door opposite. He went without a murmur, and John pulled open the other one.
Michael was splashing water into his face. He flinched and knocked his toothbrush and glass into the sink with a clatter. John saw at once that he was a mass of raw-nerved reflex, and tried not to care. “It’s just me,” he said, letting the door bang shut behind him. “Why? Will he follow you in here?”
“Morning to you too,” Michael responded, trying for a smile.
John looked him over. He had got dressed as far as his T-shirt and jeans from the day before—from the three days before, John reflected, skin twitching with distaste inside his own soiled clothes, in which he’d additionally spent a bizarre night, waking bewildered and stiff, glad his shirt was long enough to hide some of the damage. “You look like a panda,” he observed.
“Is it the…penchant for bamboo? Or the nonexistent sex life, because I thought I was getting away—”
“It’s certainly not the sex life.” John stepped up close to him, grieved that to do so felt like an effort of daring. He lifted a hand and brushed his fingertips over the shadows beneath Michael’s eyes—the briefest caress. “It’s these.”
“You’ve got them too.”
John bit back a moan. Michael’s attention was on him, as tenderly and diagnostically as if the last few days had never happened. It wasn’t real. John had to end it. “Never mind me,” he said. “Why didn’t you come back last night? Mike—tell me you
remember
that you didn’t come back.”
“Of course I do. I—”
“Don’t try and explain. Will you just listen for a minute?”
“Well, I need a pee and a shower, but…”
“Mike.”
“Okay. What’s up?”
And now John hardly knew how to tell him. But overnight his fear had hardened to a certainty. “You got hurt on that mission in Zemelya, right? Tortured. And as far as you remember, Anzhel was…just a comrade, another one of Oriel’s soldiers.”
Michael had gone pale. “I can’t imagine why we’re discussing it in a bathroom at seven in the morning,” he said. “But yes.”
“I think he was more than that. I think he was part of whatever hurt you. I think you were conditioned—programmed, whatever—and he had a hand in it.”
Michael actually grinned. He looked so ordinary that for a moment John was reassured. “Don’t be so daft,” he said, as if John had been trying to get some kind of April Fool’s gag over on him. “I’ve been picked apart by experts. You think they’d just…miss something like that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t going to show up until Anzhel did.
I
can’t miss it.”
The smile disappeared. Michael turned away and ran his fingers through his hair, looking past himself in the mirror to some unknowable distance. “You sure you’re reading this right, Griff?”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It’s gonna be hard on you, isn’t it? I didn’t mean for us…for you and me to start a thing together, and then for Anzhel to turn up. That must’ve been rough.”
John stared at his elegant, clear-cut profile. His lips were pressed together, his brow as smooth as if he’d never known a moment’s uncertainty in his life. “Wait a minute. You think I’m putting us both through this because I—I’m jealous?”
“No. Not you—not like that. But I know it’s screwed you over. I’m sorry.”
Nice work, Agent South
. John pulled himself back from his anger, seeing how neatly Mike had diverted him. He would trip up a witness like that during interrogation. “Thanks for the apology,” John said carefully. “You give me too much credit, though. I
am
bloody jealous. But I can manage that. What I can’t stand is watching you turn into a puppet every time Anzhel walks into the room. He controls you. As a matter of fact, he…” John stopped short. He knew how it would sound. But this was the thing that had terrified him most, that had made him aware he had strings of his own and that these could be tugged just as deftly as Michael’s. “He sings to you. To calm you down or to stop you from walking away. Why the fuck does he sing to you?”
“What?” Michael, who had picked up his toothbrush as if about to go on with his morning’s ablutions, laid it down.
John saw it gather on his face—the same look of fear that had haunted it that morning in the Acton church, after John’s fall and all the way into the hospital until it was established he wasn’t hiding any broken bones or internal bleeding.
“What are you talking about? Are…are you okay?”
Any second now he would put out a hand and feel John’s brow for a fever. “Of course I’m not,” John snarled, fierce in proportion with his longing for the touch. “He sings to you, and you obey him. There’s something not right about it. Oh, obviously, but it’s worse than… It’s fucking unearthly, okay? I heard him last night myself. It got to me too.”
“Bloody hell.” Michael’s pale mask of amazement was genuine; John could see that. And now the fear was definite. “Listen to yourself, Griff.”
And here came the hand—reaching not for his face but his shoulder, where it would fasten with a grip that could melt everything else in John’s world to dust and shadows. John jerked away, colliding hard with the tiled wall behind him. “Don’t.”
“I want you to knock off, okay? Go back to HQ and tell Webb you’re not well. Anzhel and I can manage for—”
“Oh, I’m going.” Hot tears of frustration stung John’s eyes. If they fell, so be it. He couldn’t risk the gesture of wiping them away. His stupid voice was cracking as it was, betraying him. “I know you two can manage. All I’ve done so far on this one is need to be translated for and rescued. But I’ve got to tell you, sunbeam. When I do see Webb, I’m going to tell him what I think.”
“What? That I’m playing out some kind of programming, and Anzhel’s controlling it?”
“Yeah. In those words exactly.”
“Don’t waste your time, mate. If he thinks it’ll get him Oriel, he won’t care.”
“Will it? Is that what all this is about?”
“John, get out of here. I don’t care why you’re going or what you tell Webb as long as you’re off the scene. Especially if you think I’m some sort of ticking bloody time bomb. Go.”
They stood for a moment, locked in silent confrontation. For a moment John felt as if the barricade between them was nothing—a thin film, the skin of a bubble. Something they’d dreamed up together out of fear, and one good shake would bring them out of it. John knew what he’d say.
Come home. This is stupid; we’ve got better things to do with our lives. I love you.
The bathroom door swung wide. A skinny kid with track marks wandered in, bestowed on them a look consistent with his neo-Nazi tattoos, and shouldered past them toward the showers. The bubble skin became a wire fence. “I’m not abandoning you,” John said hoarsely. “I’ll stay in touch. Do what I can from HQ.”