Kulagin roared with pain. She pushed herself up, ramming her shoulder into Kulagin’s belly. He stumbled against the coffee table and crashed to the floor. Rachel reached for the duelling pistol on the table but a black tunnel swallowed her vision. When it cleared, the weapon was in Kulagin’s hand, pointed at her.
‘Very well done,’ Kulagin said. He was laughing, half-sitting, half-lying on the floor. He pressed his left hand against the torn wound in his side. Blood flowed freely between his fingers. ‘Oh, but that hurts. Very well done indeed!’
His laugh was interrupted by a coughing fit. His aim wavered, but before Rachel could move, he regained his composure.
‘I apologise for any discomfort I caused you, but I had to be sure. I recognise truth when I hear it. And so I am going to give you a gift, Mrs Moore, a double-edged gift. For the last two years, I have been running an agent called FELIX—a Section head in your Summer Court. He is a good lad, a little naive, a believer in the cause—more so than I, bless his soul.’
Rachel struggled to speak but her throat seized up.
‘I see you don’t believe me. Well, more detail may convince you. FELIX is called Peter Bloom.’
‘Bloom,’ Rachel said, her voice hoarse. She had served with him for a time, before he passed over. One of the Young Turks, although less dashing than the others: short, pudgy, with intense eyes and a sensual mouth. Quiet, polite, a little aloof. Promoted past her, of course, in spite of the fact that she had a decade of experience on him.
Kulagin coughed again. He lay in a spreading pool of dark crimson now.
‘My darling Peter was the golden goose I was going to be rewarded for. He belongs to you now.’
Rachel’s head spun. It was as if all the reason in the world was leaking out together with Kulagin’s blood.
‘Even if I believed you,’ she whispered, ‘what do you expect me to do?’
‘You weren’t listening,’ Kulagin said. ‘There is no one telling you what to do. Goodbye, Mrs Moore.’
In one smooth movement, as if downing a drink, he pushed the barrel of the pistol into his mouth and pulled the trigger.
The shot felt like a slap, blinding and deafening. When her vision cleared, Rachel could not bear to look at Kulagin’s ruined face.
She fled the room and slammed the door shut behind her.
‘We need a—we need a doctor here!’ she shouted at the top of her lungs, tearing the words from her battered throat. ‘Someone get a doctor!’
Then she sank to the floor. The name pulsed in her mind, crimson and vile and impossible like Kulagin’s blood on the carpet.
Peter Bloom.
Peter Bloom found himself haunting an ammunition truck while Madrid burned.
He could not see the flames. To a ghost, the material world was invisible, except for electricity and the soul-sparks of the living. Buildings and streets were skeletons of luminescent wiring. Human brains glowed like paper lanterns. Everything else was a pale grey mist. He would have been hopelessly lost if not for the beacon in his agent Inez Giral’s ectophone that had guided him here from Summerland for their meeting.
Now he hung on to the bright coils of the phone’s circuitry like a small boy gripping the hem of his mother’s dress, and listened to Inez describe the world of the living.
‘The Gran Vía rooftops are on fire,’ she said. ‘And the bombs, they fall like black pears. Big ones first, to knock buildings down. Incendiaries to light them. Shrapnel to keep the firemen away. Same thing every night. Soon there will be nothing left to burn.’
For a woman driving a truck loaded with high explosives through a city being firebombed at night, her voice was remarkably calm.
‘During the day, when we try to sleep, the planes drop leaflets on us, like seagulls shitting. Propaganda and Tickets to Franco’s fake paradise. The Fascists are losing, so they try to kill us all and lure our souls into their false Heaven.’
Peter heard distant thunderclaps.
‘What is that noise?’ he asked.
‘They are firing at the Telefónica again.’
‘A reporter told me the Fascists are using it for target practice.’
The Telefónica was a solidly built skyscraper standing on the highest spot in Madrid. To Peter’s hypersight, it was a stick figure, all wire and gossamer. He could imagine an artillery officer’s delight in knocking it down, like he used to demolish the card fortifications he built for his war games as a child.
‘Let them,’ Inez said. ‘It shrugs off shells.’
She might have been talking about the Spanish Republic itself. Two years ago, a mining rebellion and anger against a Church no longer able to offer answers about death had created a strange, Utopian state on the Iberian Peninsula. A coalition of generals led by Francisco Franco had decided to restore the natural order of things. Reluctantly, Britain had supported Franco. In turn, the Soviet Union had thrown its weight behind the Republic’s Communist factions. And so Spain had become a petri dish of war, a miniature of greater conflicts to come.
That was why Peter was here. Franco was losing. The SIS needed to understand why. They needed more Republic intelligence assets like Inez.
The problem was that he had no idea what she needed.
They drove through the ghost city in silence. He tried to picture what she looked like. BRIAR, the local SIS recruiter she knew as Comrade Eric, had wired him a photograph. A fierce young woman in neat blue coveralls, with pencil-line eyebrows and a striking wide mouth. She did not look like she suffered fools gladly.
He cleared his immaterial throat—the habits of the living were hard to break.
‘Señorita—’
‘Just comrade, like everybody else. Although we are not really comrades, are we?’
‘I hope we can be,’ Peter said. ‘It’s a very brave thing you are doing.’
Inez laughed a short, bitter laugh. ‘You flatter me, Comrade Ghost. Bravery is for mortals. I have a Ticket to our Republic’s Heaven, to the Heaven of the people. Every night I memorise it, all the weird little shapes that tickle my brain, like I’m saying paternoster. If I get hit by a shell, the Ticket will take me where all the good revolutionaries go.’
Her voice was flat. Peter considered her soul-spark, itself a miniature city of flame: a glowing flower the size of his hand, with intertwined petals of blue and red. He wished he had more experience in soul-reading. The only hues he recognised in Inez’s mind were anger and frustration.
‘That was not what I meant,’ he said. ‘Just talking to me could get you in worse trouble than being killed. It is a brave thing to risk your soul for peace.’
Inez spat. Through the microphone, it sounded like a muffled gunshot. Her soul-spark flashed cherry-red.
‘Who says I want peace? Let the Fascists light the city. The fire will make us pure, and they will burn in hotter flames in Hell. When Comrade Eric says to talk to you and gave me the phone, I say why not, I get bored when I drive, I can talk and drive at the same time, no? But I don’t like listening to lies. So don’t talk to me about peace. Maybe I will decide I prefer the sound of guns to your voice.’
Peter swore. Clearly, BRIAR had misjudged Inez and failed to develop her properly. His report had described her frustration with how the Republic treated the Church, but that was not enough. She was not ready to be handled yet.
‘Inez,’ he said, ‘please listen to me. Comrade Eric was right. We can just talk, about anything you want. Just—’