‘On two conditions,’ Roger said, smiling weakly.
‘Name them.’
‘I want all that in writing, signed by Symonds. And you are personally going to make me tea.’
* * *
In half an hour, after a call to Symonds, Roger was sipping dark builders’ tea—the only kind Helen stocked in the safe house—with his free hand.
‘I was given instructions to make sure Bloom got away,’ he said slowly, ‘so I had Kathleen call and warn him.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t know why, but I had my marching orders. The handlers are a couple. I am not sure where they are from, Netherlands, maybe. Otto and Nora. They are odd ducks. Volatile, especially the woman. They recruited me after Kulagin did his walk-in. They work for someone called Shpiegelglass who is higher up, and is apparently doing a bit of a witch hunt himself on their side. I get the impression Kulagin was tarnished, ideologically, and they were taking care of assets he might have polluted. That’s why they decided to sacrifice Bloom. But of course, that all went to shit.
‘I wasn’t privy to the whole extraction plan, but Bloom can’t hide in Summerland—the Summer Court could find his luz via thought-travel. And the Russians need some special equipment to send our boy to the Presence, so he is probably lying low somewhere. Otto and Nora have a facility I helped set up, for people they need to make disappear. If Bloom is still in the country, that’s where they will be keeping him, in some poor medium’s body like a sardine in a can. In any case, what you find there will not be chickenfeed.’
‘A crime hospital?’ Rachel asked.
There had been a few of those in Belfast. Summerland made getting away with murder difficult, and thus an entire criminal industry had sprung up around making people disappear—without killing them. The solution was crime hospitals where the still-living victims were kept comatose for months or years, alive but only barely, their souls trapped in their bodies.
‘Something like that.’ Roger grimaced. ‘I hope you are not afraid of the dark, Rachel.’
It was nearly dawn when Rachel White and her little squadron broke into the disused Tube station at Brompton Place.
Joan turned out to be surprisingly handy with a hacksaw and made short work of the lock securing the iron fence that blocked the entrance, while the rest of them stood guard. The street was empty, and the sky had the faintest tinge of orange.
The grinding sound of the saw grated in Rachel’s teeth, and she breathed a sigh of relief when the lock fell to the ground with a clatter. It might as well have landed in her gut: there was a leaden weight there, and a metallic taste of fear in her mouth.
They had prepared as best they could. Helen had disappeared for half an hour and returned with gear and weapons: torches, a small automatic pistol with lethal bullets for Rachel and an old but serviceable hunting rifle for Joe. Joan refused to take a weapon, so Rachel entrusted her with her ectophone, plus a few emergency numbers.
When pressed, Roger had drawn the supposed medium bunker’s location on a city map. He also noted down a few other bits of information, including the combination to the code lock of the bunker’s entrance, which was in a service tunnel you could get to from a disused Tube station.
Helen stayed behind with the handcuffed Roger, with instructions to march him to Wormwood Scrubs if she did not hear from the rest of them within two hours. Rachel had considered calling for reinforcements from the Service immediately but concluded that it was not an option. Bringing Roger in would throw the Service into internal convulsions that would last for days.
Joe pulled the folding fence aside and they entered the station. Their torches revealed wood-panelled walls and ceilings, shelves piled with yellowing, ragged leaflets and broken light bulbs. Joe took point with the rifle, Rachel just behind him, holding a torch and her gun.
It was chilly on the platform. The torch’s cone showed faded Ovaltine adverts and the familiar Underground symbol on a greenish-yellow mosaic wall. They climbed down from the platform and proceeded into the darkness of the tunnel. Rats scuttered away, fleeing the lights. The smell of musty damp was overpowering. The tunnel floor was uneven, and Rachel could not help imagining a ghost train suddenly rushing at them, the rusty third rail humming into life.
Suddenly, there was light in the tunnel ahead and the rails shuddered with the wheelbeat of a train. Rachel grabbed Joe’s hand, but they saw a glimpse of a well-lit tunnel orthogonal to the Brompton one, a flash of train cars going past.
‘That’s just the Piccadilly Line,’ Joan said, but in the pale light she looked shaken, too.
They found the entrance to the service tunnel a few dozen yards further ahead. Rachel held the torch while Joan opened the lock with a set of picks. The heavy metal door swung inwards, revealing a narrow staircase that led farther down. They filed in, with Joe at the front, and for a while no one spoke. The noise of the train grew more distant.
‘Look at this,’ Joe said, pointing at the wall where the cone of light from Rachel’s torch fell. Coppery wires glinted in the greenish wall tiles in an orderly spiderweb. ‘That’s Faraday wiring. This is no ordinary service tunnel, I’m betting.’
‘The facility should be right ahead,’ Rachel said. She asked Joan to test the ectophone, but there was only static.
The stairway ended at another thick door with a code lock. Rachel consulted Roger’s notes and turned the dials. The lock clicked open. Beyond, there was a faint smell of disinfectant.
They emerged on a balcony overlooking a cavernous space, fifty feet high or more, dimly lit by florescent lights in the arched ceiling.
It was full of hospital beds in neat rows, all occupied. At least a hundred people lay before them, unmoving. Next to each bed stood a shelving unit with complex machinery and an IV drip. The place resembled a sinister underground forest of thin-stemmed mushrooms with transparent, fluid-filled caps growing from unmoving human beings.
‘Bloody hell,’ Joe muttered.
‘Welcome to London’s crime hospital,’ Rachel said. ‘Joan.’ Rachel took the other woman’s arm. ‘Looks like Roger was actually telling the truth for once. You go back up and call Special Branch. Bring them down here with you if you have to drag them. We are going to see if Bloom is here.’
The small Scotswoman nodded wordlessly and headed back up to the tunnel.
Left and right, metal stepladders led down to the polished white floor. Rachel descended while Joe covered the room with his rifle.
She scanned the beds’ occupants in the pale green light. There were men and women of all ages. Most of the men had beards; some of the patients had clearly been there longer than others. Several had bedsores, and the smell of decay was overwhelming. The IV machines gurgled and muttered as she passed. A number of the patients had spirit crowns of strange design that covered their heads entirely, with thick wire umbilicals leading to the machines next to them.
Trapped spirits, Rachel realised. It was not just living people who were imprisoned here, comatose; it was spirits as well. This was where Bloom’s handlers had hidden him to wait for transportation to the Soviet Union? Of course, a spirit could only occupy a medium’s body for so long until both the original soul and the flesh started rejecting it—unless they were both kept in a coma.
‘We should get out of here, too, Rachel,’ Joe said. ‘I don’t like this at all.’
‘Neither do I,’ Rachel said. ‘But if Bloom is here, I want to find him before the Service does.’