Grimly, she studied the rows of unconscious faces. Who were they? she wondered. Victims of crime, obstacles to Soviet operations, or both? The only face she vaguely recognised was a handsome man she was sure had attended a Harris soirée at one point. In any case, she had no hope of figuring out which body Bloom was in.
Then she noticed there were charts attached to each bed, with body temperatures and dates: it looked as if the place was run like an actual hospital.
‘Joe,’ she called out. ‘Look for people with yesterday’s date on the chart.’
Joe nodded, and together they criss-crossed the grid of beds, inspecting the pencilled digits on each sheet. Some of the patients had been down here for months.
‘Here’s one,’ Joe called out, waving Rachel over to a middle-aged, tallow-faced man with scraggly hair and grey stubble, his rangy legs sticking out from beneath the white sheet. A birdcage-like spirit crown hummed on his head.
‘Let us see if we can wake him up,’ Rachel said. Carefully, she extracted the IV drip from the man’s arm and rummaged through the shelf unit next to the bed. There had to be situations where crime hospital nurses needed to wake up the victims quickly. She found a vial of diprenorphine—an opioid antagonist—and a syringe.
‘Get ready,’ she told Joe. He took a step back and aimed his rifle at the unconscious man. Then Rachel emptied the syringe into the spirit-crowned man’s swollen blue vein.
The man jerked up like a puppet, so suddenly that Rachel dropped the syringe. His eyes popped open, showing the whites, and his face twitched. He let out a long, hollow scream, seized the spirit crown on his head and rattled it.
Rachel swore.
‘Help me hold him down,’ she said, grabbing the man’s arm. Joe leaned his rifle on a bed and took the other. They held the man down as he thrashed.
‘Listen to me,’ Rachel said. ‘Listen. What is your name?’
‘Rachel?’ the man said hoarsely. The voice was Bloom’s.
* * *
The events of the previous day and night flashed past Peter Bloom’s eyes.
After his escape, Otto and Nora had debriefed him in the underground hospital. It was cold, his temporary medium body was malnourished and a poor fit, and the clunky spirit crown model that held him in it was the most uncomfortable he had ever used. Only the certainty of his approaching final end allowed him to bear it.
He found his case officers’ intense questioning slightly odd, given that he was about to join the Presence as soon as arrangements could be made for him to rendezvous with an illegal like Shpiegelglass with the necessary equipment. Of course, anything could happen in the meantime, so it made sense to ensure the intelligence he had obtained was secure. Still, the way Nora probed and pushed for every single detail struck Peter as overzealous.
After a celebratory drink of dark Dutch beer, Otto briefly turned off the spirit crown to allow Peter to transfer the Zöllner images of West’s letter and the CAMLANN cipher key back to aether-sensitive photographic plates before they decayed in his memory. The entire space they were in was a Faraday cage, Peter realised: it warped the aether and prevented all spirits within from descending into Summerland, much like a giant spirit crown.
During the unpleasant process of memory transfer—much like picking out pieces of broken glass stuck to one’s skin—he could not help glancing at his handler’s soul-sparks. He had only ever met the twosome in the flesh. As expected, Otto’s mind was guarded and grey, a dull polygon. Nora’s thought-forms, on the other hand, were a blaze of emotion, a yellow spark beneath fanning petals of crimson and blue.
Suddenly, she reminded him of Rachel White. Just like Rachel, it looked like Nora was covering up something she did not want Peter to see.
The feeling nagged him even after he returned to the medium’s body. There was a strange hunger in Nora’s eyes when she looked at him. Still, her tone was less brusque than before when she made him recount every detail of the events leading up to his escape, taking careful notes. After a while, Otto left them to decipher the CAMLANN file, retrieved earlier from Rachel’s Cresswell safe deposit locker.
After two more hours, they were finally done, and sat in silence for a while. He remembered the last time he had sat there, Nora’s chisel in his neck. Suddenly, Shpiegelglass’s words rang in his mind. She has exhibited bold work in Rotterdam. What did that remind him of?
‘Did you say you were from Rotterdam?’ he asked.
She brushed a blond ringlet from her forehead. ‘It is a place. Now I go where the Presence sends me. I envy you, FELIX—or I suppose I can call you Peter now. You will be a part of him soon.’ She smiled, licked her lips and leaned forward. ‘Would you like to take a memory of me with you?’
‘But Otto—‘
‘Otto will understand.’ She stood up and walked over to Peter, crouched in front of him and ran her hands along his thighs. Her touch felt electric.
‘There—there is still one thing I don’t understand,’ Peter said. ‘Who warned Dzugashvili? No one except the Special Committee knew about the operation.’
‘Are you still working?’ Nora asked. ‘I thought we were finished working.’ She cradled Peter’s hand between hers and slowly licked his forefinger.
She is distracting me, Peter thought, breathing in her flowery perfume. What was it about Rotterdam?
Suddenly, Otto brushed aside the green curtain and entered, carrying a thin stack of typewritten papers. He saw Nora in front of Peter, but his expression did not change. When he spoke, his voice was thin.
‘It’s all true,’ he said. ‘The Cullers. Everything.’
Nora’s blue eyes widened. Then she stood up and smiled, cheeks red and dimpled, like a little girl’s doll. ‘That’s wonderful,’ she said, walked over to Otto and kissed him passionately.
The hidden emotion Peter had seen in her mind was joy, pure, unadulterated joy. With the realisation, a fragment from his briefing for the Special Committee leapt into his consciousness. Over the last decade, Dzhugashvili has been creating a network of agents and counter-revolutionary cells all over Europe, notably in Paris, Prague and Rotterdam—
Peter stared at his handlers and tried to stand up. The charter-body was terribly weak.
‘Let me get you another drink, Peter,’ Nora said. ‘You more than deserve it.’
Peter grabbed his spirit crown, determined to tear it off, then remembered the Faraday cage. He struggled to his feet.
‘The Presence will not let you—’ he croaked.
‘The Presence will be gone soon,’ Nora interrupted. ‘All we need is a war in Spain to wake the Cullers. Oh, Peter. This could have been so much more pleasant.’ There was a zapper in her hand.
Peter rushed towards them, felt a sharp sting in his chest, and then lightning took his consciousness away.
* * *
‘Just stay nice and quiet, lad,’ Joe said harshly, grabbed his rifle and took a bead on Bloom’s chest.
‘It’s all right, Joe,’ Rachel said. ‘Peter. It’s over now. We are taking you in. You are going to answer for what you did.’
Bloom inhaled a long, ragged breath.
‘You don’t understand. I was betrayed.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘My handlers. Otto and Nora. They are double agents. They work for Dzhugashvili.’
‘They are Stalinists?’
Rachel stared at Bloom’s caged face.
The Service had long speculated that there were Dzhugashvili supporters amongst the more senior ‘illegals’—unofficial Russian agents operating in foreign countries under false identities. Kulagin had exhibited a lot of the signs, now that she thought about it.
‘They were assigned to take over George’s—Kulagin’s—network after he defected and expand it if possible. Instead, they decided to exploit it to support Stalinist goals. They used me to get to CAMLANN.’ Bloom’s breathing was laboured. ‘What did you do to me?’