Anzhel crouched at the top of a ridge ahead of him, gesturing for a halt. Michael dropped beside him. He must be careful to hide his confusion. If there was one clear certainty left to him, it was that he had to stick close to Anzhel Mattvei. Anzhel would lead him to Lukas Oriel, the nutcase dictator who’d taken over Zemelya in the wake of the Dorva nuclear blast. It had taken Michael nearly a year to infiltrate the paranoid religious right who followed him, three months after that to track down his bunker HQ in the forest. He couldn’t recall getting there, but that didn’t matter at the moment. Anzhel trusted him. Anzhel took him on missions like this one. Anzhel would lead him to Oriel, and then…
Then Michael’s work would be done. He could escape. Perhaps he could go home.
“How far now?” he whispered. The scent of resin and rich earth was making his head spin a little. He was very aware of Anzhel—the warmth emanating from him, the fresh enticing tang of his sweat. Michael remembered less and less about his life prior to being sent on the Zemelya job, but he did know he’d been fighting a losing battle against his lifelong, bone-deep attraction to other men. This would be a bad place to surrender. Disastrous, he knew, with Anzhel Mattvei, but the man was so beautiful. Warm and close, calling like a siren…
“Are you all right, Mikhaili?”
He jerked back to reality. Anzhel’s concerned gaze was on him, cobalt in the moonlight. “Yes. Fine.”
“It’s been a long run, I know. But you’ve done well. You move more quietly than I do now and faster than any of the others.” He paused, smiling, and Michael fought a childish rush of pride. “It’s not far. Look. Those are their fires over there.”
Fires between the trees, like heaped rubies and gold. Michael was much closer to them now. He shuddered in disorientation, reaching into the gap. He had been up on the ridge. And now he was down here, within fifty paces of those fires. He had to be careful. The Zemel insurgents, ruthless paramilitaries who opposed Oriel’s rise to power, were experts in forest warfare. Any number of snipers could be waiting, hidden among the pines. This peaceful campsite—the groups of brightly dressed women and children, clustering round the fires—could be a trap. Michael walked silently, taking his cue from Anzhel. For the first time, he was glad of the brutal GLOCK semi strapped to his belt.
Two men were sitting at the edge of the clearing. If they were on guard duty, it wasn’t serious. Both were unarmed, chatting, faces turned to the light. They scrambled to their feet at Anzhel’s approach, dropping chicken legs, raising their hands in surrender. One of them glanced over his shoulder. “Piotr!” he cried, then fell silent as the muzzle of Anzhel’s rifle dug into his chest.
A hush descended on the clearing. A few women reached for their kids, and then all movement ceased. Michael wanted to close his eyes. The dawning fear in all those faces weighed on him, bruised him. He was tired. “Anzhel,” he said. “These aren’t soldiers. They’re
ashkeloi
—gypsies.”
“That’s what they’d like you to believe,” Anzhel said pleasantly. “Insurgents hide out with the ashkeloi all the time. Like baby cuckoos in other birds’ nests.”
“Not here, they don’t!”
Anzhel and Michael both turned at the new voice. It belonged to a dark-clad man who had emerged from the crowd at his companion’s summoning cry. He was striding fearlessly toward them. Michael caught Anzhel’s curt nod and reluctantly raised his GLOCK. “These people are refugees,” the newcomer continued, not slowing. “Refugees from your war, if you’re Lukas Oriel’s soldiers. The ashkeloi camping grounds are clicking-hot toxic, so they’ve retreated here. How far would you have us go?”
“Me?” Anzhel’s voice was soft as ever. Reasonable, calm. “I’d have you gone entirely. That’s why we’re here. Isn’t it, Mikhaili?”
“What?” Michael glanced at him. Suddenly he felt as if chilly water were rising up over his chest. The world was tilting backward. “No,” he rasped. “You said they were terrorists, paramilitaries.”
“They’re different. They don’t belong to Father Lukas. That’s all you need to know.” Still holding his man at rifle point, Anzhel unhitched the pistol from his belt with his free hand. He gave Michael a compassionate look. “Here, it’s okay. I’ll show you what to do.”
The pistol barked. Michael watched—though his eyes didn’t feel like his own—as a hole burst open in the ashkeloi leader’s chest, and he dropped to his knees, then crashed facedown into the pine needles.
Time slowed. The cold water rose over Michael’s mouth. He choked against it, snatched a breath, and felt it come again. All round him a chaotic circus was unfolding, and he was unable to account for any part of it. Couldn’t account for himself. He was running in the midst of Anzhel’s men. Their guns were firing and his was too, though the spasm that had closed his grip on the trigger hadn’t been an effort of his will. The ashkeloi were scattering, falling. Their shrieks ripped the night.
Except for one. One woman, still sitting calmly by the fire. Her hands were folded in her lap and she was singing—a plaintive Zemel cradle song Michael had known all his life. Her face was hidden in the shadows of a brightly patterned shawl.
Michael tripped and fell at her feet. He landed on his back somehow, and at that point the sensation of drowning became unbearable. He tried to scream, but his lungs were full and no sound came.
He was strapped to a bench in an interrogation cell. He was being waterboarded. Intellectually he knew these things, just as he knew that whenever the torture stopped, the song that filled the room came from speakers. That the melody had been forcibly dug out from among his earliest memories—his mother’s lullaby, all he had left of her. These things were simple enough. He fought to the surface. “Fuck off, you bastards! Let me alone!”
The bench he was lying on dipped. Once his head was lower than his feet, someone—not Anzhel, some cold stranger with no scent at all—would pour water onto his face from a bucket or a hose. He couldn’t tell which. He was blindfolded, heavy wet cloth draped from his brow to his chin. The water, when it came, was never much. It didn’t have to be. Immediately it filled his nose and sinus cavities, triggering every reflex of drowning. As torture went, it was so subtle a form that the ink was still fresh on legislation classifying it as such, although the CIA agents who’d volunteered as test subjects had lasted fourteen seconds max.
Michael could do better than that. He could hold on long enough to dream a forest massacre. To believe in it too. He was breaking. The cold tide rose. His dive reflex, worn to fragments though it was, closed off his throat, hurling his whole body in bruising spasm against its restraints. This was the eighteenth time. Michael could withstand twenty or so before he lost consciousness. Not so very long to go…
He couldn’t bear it. Not this time; not another vision of firelight and blood. The water battering his face became a trickle and stopped, and the cloth was snatched away, letting him suck air and desperately cough his lungs clear. “Anzhel!” he choked out. “Stop it, for Christ’s sake. Please!”
The magic word
. In the silence that followed, Michael almost laughed. He forgot, from session to session, that all he had to do was beg. It was equally hard for him, every single time, to get to that point. “Please, Anzhel,” he repeated, loathing himself. Trying to reinforce the memory of what it took. There was a faint clatter, his unseen torturer setting down the bucket on the tiles. Footsteps retreated. A metal door clicked shut.
He was alone. And the cradle song started again.
“Oh, poor brave Mikhaili—it took you a long time today.”
Anzhel was there with him. There was another gap in his head, a cold blank sea between the shore of his last memory and this beach he was washed up on now, gasping painfully, head twisting to follow the new voice. “Anzhel. Untie me.”
“You know I can’t do that. I’ll take off your blindfold, though, if you lie still.”
Fingers at the back of his neck—knifing pain as the neon contracted his pupils to pinpricks. For a while he could see nothing but white. Then Anzhel’s face resolved itself out of the glare. Michael’s deprived vision sucked him in, and there was nothing—nothing at all—to distinguish his smile from the real thing. The puzzled concern on his brow was as real and as sweet as if Michael were his brother. “You know you’ve only got to ask me nicely for the games to stop,” he said. “Here. Let’s sit you up a bit.”
“Take these bloody straps off me.
Please
.”
Anzhel chuckled. “Ah, that doesn’t work for everything.” He reached to pull a lever over Michael’s head, and the bench tipped forward, bringing Michael almost upright. His legs wouldn’t bear his weight. The straps round his wrists snapped brutally tight as he slid downward. “Sorry,” Anzhel said, making a face of genuine compassion. “Someone will come along and release you soon enough. Feed you too, and get you warm and dressed. I need you out with me tonight.”
“Out…” Michael shivered, becoming aware of his nakedness. “Out where?”
“Another mission. Deep in the woods this time, farther than you’ve ever been.”
“But those are just…hallucinations. I don’t really go anywhere.”
Anzhel looked up at him enquiringly. He had produced a big white towel and was crouched at Michael’s feet, beginning a brisk rubbing motion. “Hallucinations? Why would I do that to you?”
“How the hell should I know?” Michael clenched his fists, tried to steel himself against the delicious warmth. Against the joy of being touched, after—how long alone on the bench in this desolate room? He’d lost all sense of time. “But I couldn’t do those things—not the things we do when we’re out in the forest. I couldn’t…”
“Kill all those people?”
“I couldn’t. They’re dreams.”
“But you’re different when you’re with me. Aren’t you?” Anzhel stroked the towel up over Michael’s knees and thighs. The movements began to restore his circulation, and he found that he could stand. “Don’t you remember the ashkeloi leader? And the woman who sang by the fire?”
Michael swallowed hard. He turned his head aside, squeezing his eyes closed. “No,” he rasped, and didn’t know if he was denying Anzhel’s knowledge of his dreams—which meant that they weren’t dreams at all—or the slow, terrible awakening of pleasure inside the curve of his tailbone. There between his balls and his anus—so deep, the fiery snake that could uncoil and blaze in spirals up and round his spine… “Stop. Get out of my head, Anzhel. Get your hands off me.”
“Just drying you.” Anzhel’s gaze focused, a grin of innocent mischief making it gleam. “Ah. Don’t tell me you don’t enjoy it.”
No
. Mortified, Michael writhed to be away. The towel was brushing his groin now. He knew the involuntary nature of male sexual response—that, correctly handled, he could get aroused and come in almost any circumstances.
But not here
. The voice inside him howled.
God, not in the hands of this smiling monster.
His feet slipped on the wet tiles. His wrists jerked down through the restraints, and pain like lightning bolts shot through him as the leather ripped skin off places already bleeding and bruised to the bone. He welcomed it—chased it, seeking its remedy to his helpless erection. Then Anzhel set the towel aside. “Mikhaili,” he said, sliding his warm hands round behind Michael, tenderly cupping his backside. “Don’t worry. It’s only because you’ve been tormented, and mine is the only kindly touch you’ve known. That’s all.”
He opened his mouth and engulfed Michael’s shaft. Shuddering, Michael pulled on his restraints, but this time the pain of it bonded to the unwanted pleasure, and he was lost. His mind closed down. For the first time since his capture, he wept, thrusting into Anzhel’s throat, coming almost instantly in a bitter rush that scoured him, destroyed him, wiped out the neon to black.
Chapter Two
West Kensington, London
2011
Covert Six headquarters—almost as anonymous as a bunker in the forest. Michael, half an hour early for his shift, stopped to lean on the railings of the dingy little West Ken square. Nothing much had changed since Victorian nannies had come here to wheel their charges in perambulators round the bushes. The redbrick walls of Guardian Chambers still loomed on all four sides, a pool of lingering night even at seven on a bright May morning.
A horrible place to work, really. The tide of regeneration that had swept through this part of the city had receded, leaving C6 beached, unrepentantly free of air conditioning, open plan, and natural daylight. Its corridors still smelled of dust. And, to the handful of men who worked there, it wasn’t known as C6 at all. It was Last Line.
The western wall—where Sir James Webb, Michael’s boss, kept his kingdom on the top three floors—was still punctuated by neon-lit windows. Sunshine seldom fought its way up there, even in the height of summer. Michael had no idea why the prospect of another day in its grim confines made him feel so bloody happy.
A window screeched—the sound of a sash being forced up past its dry rot and ancient paint. Casually Michael turned away to face the railings. He propped one trainer-clad foot on the low wall and began his stretches. His current flat was within jogging distance of Last Line, but only just. It was a hard run, and he’d need a shower—if he dared risk the clattering 1950s plumbing…
“Mike!”
Ducking his head, concealing a smile, Michael continued his little charade of oblivion. He wasn’t sure why. It was part of the same impulse that had stopped him outside the building in the first place. His life in the service of Sir James was often lived at white-hot speed. He didn’t often take the time to consider its miracles. Ordinary mornings. Deep dreamless sleep. His health, his sanity…
“Mike, come
on
. The sodding kettle’s bust again.”
John.
Michael straightened, letting the man leaning out of the window see that he could see him. Not an obvious miracle, John Griffin, with his hair still damp and his Merseyside baritone ringing off the redbrick. Impatient. Touchy as a wildcat until he got his caffeine fix, and somehow he was the kiss of death with electronics, leaving a trail of crashed computers and burned-out kitchenware behind him everywhere. He was a pain in the arse. He was also Michael’s partner, and—most ordinary miracle of all—his friend.