by P. W. Child
“Nina.” Purdue’s tone was as matter of fact as always, but even he could not completely repress the hint of anger that sharpened the edge of his voice. “I have not broached the subject of our relationship until now. I wanted to leave it in your hands, to let you come back to me when you were ready, when you had recovered from the strains of our time in America.”
“You neglected the part where you disappeared for two years, Purdue. The part where I was not significant enough for you to even let me know if you were alive! I lived in your house, slept in our bed and yet no word from you to set me at ease. I’m not coming back,” Nina said with more courage than she felt.
“No?”
“No.”
Purdue’s eyes bored into hers. “Very well. I cannot force you to do anything you do not choose to do. I shall simply wait for you to change your mind. When you do, I shall be waiting.”
He opened his mouth to say more, but thought better of it. He turned and stalked out of the room, leaving Nina by herself. As she heard his footsteps retreating her hands began to relax, unclenching her fists and leaving deep pink semi-circular marks of her nails in her palms.
Chapter Forty- Five
“You will not hear anything, Sam,” Alexandr said. “Her room is much too far along the corridor, almost at the other end of the house.”
Sam had not even realized that he had inched closer to the door and tilted his head towards it. Quickly he righted himself and shuffled back to his original position. “You’re sure that’s where they went?” he asked. “I’m just a bit on edge here, after everything that’s happened – I just want to know that she’s alright.”
“If we are to judge by the look on Purdue’s face, she will be perfectly safe with him. That was not the expression of a man who was about to hand her over to anyone else. Sam, why do you look like that? You must face it bravely, my friend – it is a hard thing when a woman chooses another man, but that is what she has done, is it not?”
Sam nearly choked. “What? No! I mean… It’s not like that. Nina and I, we were never… There was never anything between us. She didn’t have to choose between me and Purdue, we were always just friends.” Alexandr’s eyebrow slowly rose, pulling the corner of his lip inexorably along with it.
“Really! Why does everyone think that?” Sam protested, lying as best as he could.
“If you say so, Sam,” Alexandr held up his hands in a gesture of submission, but Sam could tell that he had not convinced him. “You are just friends. You are a very caring, very concerned friend of hers. That’s all. I understand. I have had many such friends during my life. Why, when I was a young man, my first time living in Sevastopol, I had a friend there whom I will never forget for all my days… Ekaterina was her name. How can I describe her to you, Sam? Such a woman! Red hair to her waist, green eyes like you have never seen on any mortal woman… and a husband a full head taller than me, broad-shouldered and my direct superior! Yes, Sam, you should believe me when I tell you that Ekaterina and I made certain that everyone knew we were nothing more than friends…”
And he was off, describing at length his secret love affair during his time working in the submarine base at Balaklava. Knowing the unstoppable nature of Alexandr’s stories, Sam stretched out on the floor and relaxed, his feet resting on the narrow brass bed. After their mad dash to England it was a relief to sit still for a while, and although there was still plenty to worry about, it was all far beyond his control. Better to enjoy the down time while it lasted and allow himself to become lost in Alexandr’s exaggerated, fantastical stories.
True to form, once the Russian had begun to tell his tales he found it difficult to stop. After he had described the end of his romance with Ekaterina, cut short by the fall of the Soviet Union and her husband being sent to oversee the decommissioning of Kraterny, he launched straight into the story of the woman who had consoled him. Once again, she was beautiful, unforgettable, possibly supernatural, and once again the affair had come to a premature end. So he had wandered from job to job, city to city, woman to woman. Some adventures he alluded to, others he explained in some detail while the two men shared cigarettes and nips from the flask.
“So what’s the state of affairs now?” Sam asked, blowing a lazy sequence of smoke rings. “Anyone on the go?”
“Da,” Alexandr replied with a gratified smirk. “When Renata ordered me to come here I was certain that I would be bored, more bored than I could imagine. What could there be for me here in this nice, safe city? I am meant for wild, inhospitable places. That is why they recruited me in the first place! That is my purpose, danger and adventure. To come here, where there are clean streets, no mountains, no oceans, no glaciers… This is halfway to death, for me. Or so I thought. But since I have been here, things have been more interesting than I would ever have expected. The woman I met here, she is not like the unworldly beauties of my home, but she has great courage and spirit. She is by far the most interesting person I have met within the Order of the Black Sun. She is a woman with whom I can enjoy my time here.” He took a deep puff on his thin roll-up. “Perhaps will take her back to Siberia with me.”
“What’s her name?”
“Axelle.”
The cold, plunging sensation hit Sam suddenly in the stomach. ‘It can’t be her,’ he thought, ‘it can’t be the same woman. There must be more than one Axelle… Is it a common name here? Maybe it is. I hope it is.’ The nightmare image of blood-soaked blonde curls filled Sam’s mind and imprinted itself on the inside of his eyelids. He pushed his fists against his closed eyes as if that might drive the thoughts out.
“Sam? Are you alright?”
“Yes,” he gasped. “I mean… I don’t know. Tell me what Axelle looks like.”
Alexandr’s gravelly voice washed over Sam, drowning him in the rising waters of certainty and despair as he described the woman whom Sam had known so briefly. The short stature, the full figure, the sweet, heart-shaped face with its earnest blue eyes, the snub nose and the spiraling curls of her blonde hair.
“To look at her,” he said, “not a soul would believe that she is capable of the things she does. Try to picture a woman who is an expert in breaking codes. Go on, try it! The first image that comes to mind – it is not the woman I have described, not for you. It is someone a little like Nina, is it not? Yes, I can see that I am not mistaken! Now try to picture a woman who drives fearlessly, as fast as if the Devil himself were pursuing her.”
‘That would definitely be Axelle,’ Sam thought, casting his mind back to that terrifying ride through the streets of Bruges with the motorcyclist in pursuit. ‘How do I tell him? How am I supposed to tell him that she’s dead? Why does he not know?’ He wondered whether Renata was aware of Alexandr and Axelle’s relationship. Was it possible that she was, and this was all part of some greater power play? Or, if she was not, would she regret giving that order when she found out? Or was acceptance of that kind of collateral damage just part of life within the Order? Somehow he could not imagine that Alexandr would accept the news calmly.
“Alexandr…” he began uncertainly then stopped, at a complete loss for words. After a pause too long to pass off as an ordinary hesitation, he soldiered on. “I… think I met Axelle. Briefly. We certainly met someone who looked like her and had that name. And she seemed like a really extraordinary woman in the short time that I knew her. But I got the impression that she was having some kind of power struggle with the Order. Does that sound right?”
Alexandr’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “It is possible,” he said. “Sam, what do you know? What has she said?”
Sam wondered whether he should just come clean, land the blow swiftly, but his courage deserted him. “Just a few things about how we shouldn’t trust Purdue, and how the Order would take us in if we did particular things but we should still be careful of it. Nothing too concrete. The way she spoke about things was just… out of the ordinary, that’s all.” ‘There could be all sorts of things going on here th
at I’m not aware of,’ Sam thought. ‘He needs to hear it from someone who isn’t me, someone with a better grasp on all of this stuff…’ He sighed deeply and clapped a hand on Alexandr’s shoulder. “Look, I think you’d better go and have a word with Renata. There’s a lot that I don’t understand.”
Slowly, never taking his eyes from Sam’s face, Alexandr capped his flask and put it away. He stubbed out what little remained of his cigarette and stood up, his demeanor unusually grave. “What is wrong, Sam? Something has happened to Axelle?”
Words deserted Sam completely. He remembered being given the news after the shootout, the hellish news that confirmed what he knew and robbed him of the sweet hope that seeing Trish die might have been nothing but a nightmare. He could see the alarm rising in Alexandr, but he could not bear to be the one to remove his hope. Especially when he was in no position to explain the situation clearly. “You just… need to go and talk to Renata, all right? Please.”
With a quizzical nod and a promise to return later, Alexandr took Sam’s suggestion. He laid his hand against the plate by the door and slipped out. Sam dropped down onto his bed and pressed his cheek against the cool pillow, breathing a long, disheartened sigh across the smooth cotton.
‘Poor Alexandr,’ he thought. ‘What he’s about to experience, I wouldn’t wish on anyone.’
Chapt er Forty-Six
Above the steeply-slanted window in Nina’s room, a handful of stars glimmered in the dark sky alongside a sliver of moon. She lay in the dark and stared up at them. Try as she might, she could not concentrate on anything but the words she had just heard from Purdue and what they might mean.
‘I could have kept us out of all of this,’ she thought, twisting the corner of her pillowcase between her fingers. ‘If what he says is true… If I had just said no all the way along, if I hadn’t said yes to dinner that night… We wouldn’t be here now. Or if I had said yes sooner – no, that’s a pointless road to go down. I couldn’t see any of this coming. I’d have stayed well out of the way if I had. Might as well say that we could have avoided this if I’d never studied history, or German, or if I’d taken up the offer to go to Cambridge instead of Edinburgh. Any of those things would have meant that Purdue and I never crossed paths.’
She tried to imagine what her mother would say if she could talk to her. ‘She’d probably tell me to marry him. I’d imagine there are quite a lot of people who’d tell me that. If I’d had any sense, maybe I would… That would get us out of here, surely? If I told him I’d go back. It would get me out, at least, and then we’d only have to worry about freeing Sam.’ She switched the light on. ‘Maybe it’s worth a try…’
Stepping into the cold little bathroom, she examined her face in the mirror. It was pale and drawn, and she looked very nearly as fearful as she felt. She had looked better, she knew. Still, she would look more relaxed and perhaps more appealing after a shower. She set the water running and pushed the door shut.
A suit bag hung from the hook on the back of the door. She stared at it. She had not seen it before. The clothes that Steven had brought were stacked in neat piles under the bed, for want of a suitcase or a chest of drawers in which to organize them, but there had been nothing in a bag like this. Curious, wary, she unhooked it and opened it up. A river of dark blue velvet cascaded from the bag, and she nearly threw it across the room.
“Steven Lehmann, you bastard,” she hissed. This was the dress that Nina had been wearing at dinner the night that Steven had finally confessed to being married. It had been a gift from him for her birthday, a few weeks earlier. When he had dropped his bombshell she had ripped it off so that she could put on something more suitable for travelling. A quick inspection showed that it was definitely the same dress and had not been mended, the zip had detached from the velvet where she had tugged at it and the hook that held the clasp together at the nape of the neck was bent out of shape.
The worst thing was that she knew it had looked good on her. She had felt so glamorous with it on… ‘The only pretty thing I have here,’ she thought, remembering the piles of plain t-shirts and trousers under the bed, and the flat, sturdy boots on her feet that she had worn daily since just after their arrival in Florence. ‘And also the ugliest. There’s no way I’m wearing that. Steven and his little mind games can fuck off.’ She bundled the dress back in to the bag, zipped it up and hung it back on the door, but its presence annoyed her even when she could not see it. It reminded her of how long it had been since she had last been able to dress like herself.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she told herself. ‘Or at least, it shouldn’t. I’m just so sick of feeling like I’m not on solid ground.’ Not knowing what else to do, she began to pull off the offending plain shirt and get ready to shower.
“Nina?” A soft knock on the door followed the call. Quickly she pulled her top back on and dashed through to the bedroom.
“Who’s there?”
“Professor Lehmann.”
Nina sighed in relief. “You can come in,” she called, and waited as he went through the rigmarole of verifying his identity to gain entrance. “I didn’t think I would be allowed visitors,” she said as he limped into the room, more heavily dependent on his cane than ever.
“Strictly speaking I suspect you are not,” he grimaced. “May I sit down? Thank you.” He lowered himself painfully onto the edge of the bed. “In fact, I was told quite specifically that no-one was to go near you. But there are some rules that must be disobeyed.” He looked up at her with a grave expression on his face. “Nina, has anyone spoken to you about a further mission?”
“No,” she said, “nobody’s spoken to me at all. Nobody but Purdue, but he didn’t say anything like that.”
“Then let me warn you, and then let both of us attempt to warn Mr. Cleave if we can. My son informs me that while safety may be offered to one of you, the other will be told that they must prove themselves further and given the opportunity to do so by means of a new mission. It is codenamed Longinus.”
The word rang a bell. Nina thought hard for a moment. “Wait, Longinus as in the Spear of Destiny?” The professor nodded.
So many thoughts flooded Nina’s mind at the mention of the cursed artefact that almost cost her and Sam their lives, the subsequent seizure thereof by Purdue to impress his Black Sun consorts during that fateful meeting on Deep Sea One. Thus far she elected to ignore the fact the Spear of Destiny in Purdue’s possession was the very reason she first acquiesced to his advances.
Months had gone by without Purdue even as much as mentioning the Spear of Destiny. That night, before Sam agreed to join her in the quest for Valhalla, she had actually admitted to him that the whereabouts of the missing Lance, finding out where it was, was her reason for fucking Purdue, as she so eloquently put it. Nina’s heart raced at the thought of the wicked relic, but she kept her poker face on.
“Yes, I am quite familiar with the relic, Professor,” she blinked profusely. “The Heilige Lanze.”
“The very same, though whether the mission has anything to do with the artefact itself I do not know. What I do know is that whoever undertakes the mission will be dispatched to the Russian/Mongolian border, somewhere near Mönkh Saridag, straight into an extremely dangerous situation. I sincerely doubt that whoever goes will return alive.”
“Why is that?”
“Because in the vicinity of Mönkh Saridag is the base of a company of renegades who would kill anyone they believe to be from the Order. It is my belief that this is what both Renata and Steven are relying on, though they may have different targets in mind. Nina, it is imperative, imperative, that you do not allow yourself to be sent on this mission. No matter what the alternative, take it.”
“It’s been made pretty clear to me that the only alternative to doing what these people ask is death.” Nina’s tone was flat. She understood what Professor Lehmann was saying. The words made sense. She grasped the concept. But she could not internalize it. She could not feel anything, no
t fear, not hurt, not even anger. All she could find within herself was numbness and resignation, a sense of being outmaneuvered before she could even attempt to save herself.
Professor Lehmann reached out and took her hand. He squeezed it gently. “Then take it,” he said softly. “Nina, you know how fond I am of you. I would never want any harm to come to you. But if it comes down to a choice between a swift death here or the fate that might await you at Mönkh Saridag… Steven once told me of a man who was kept alive for months, being tortured for information. What if the same thing were to happen to you? Considering how little you know, how little you would be able to tell them even if you chose to; can you imagine how long your suffering might last before they eventually allowed you to die?” The old man dropped his head into his hands, letting his walking stick fall to the floor with a clatter.
Nina sat beside him on the bed and slipped a comforting arm around his shoulders. “All my life I have been in thrall to these people,” he whispered. “I have tried to fight them quietly, by subverting their aims and denying some of my own abilities. I thought that it might be possible to fly under their radar… And it might have been, it might have been, were it not for my son and his ridiculous determination… We didn’t know what we were letting ourselves in for, you know. A barracks full of impressionable young men at Peenemunde, all thinking that we were going to change the world and set it right, and then the best and brightest of us were invited to join the Order. We thought it was going to be something like the Freemasons. Such stupidity, such naivety… It was inexcusable.”