It was Yari who spotted the Other.
‘Look!’
There was a Light Magician standing at a counter near the way out to the departure gates, drinking coffee from a small, dark-green cup. And there was a half-empty travel bag lying beside his bar stool.
Yari and Raivo studied the Light One’s aura for a while – he was perfectly composed and completely in control of his emotions. He must have noticed them, but he didn’t give any sign.
‘When are they ever going to leave us in peace?’ Raivo sighed.
‘Do you think he’s following us?’
‘Of course,’ Raivo said with conviction. ‘We have to present ourselves at a session of the Tribunal. And the Moscow Night Watch has to be certain that the witnesses they released have left for Prague. You’ll see, he’ll follow us all the way to the boarding ramp.’
‘But there’s almost five hours left until our flight!’
‘The Other’s in no hurry. He’s working.’
Yukha joined them with the tickets. There was a faint breath of magic from him – of course there hadn’t been any tickets left for today’s flight, so he’d had some taken out of the special reserve by influencing both the girl at the desk and the airport manager.
‘Here, take them,’ he began, but suddenly broke off. He looked closely at the other Brothers and asked: ‘What’s wrong?’
‘A spy. Over there at the counter, drinking coffee.’
Yukha looked and saw the Light Other.
And just at that moment a murky red stripe cut across the even azure tone of the spy’s aura.
‘Something’s upset him,’ Yari said.
‘Another Other!’ said Raivo. ‘Over there, by the way out!’
And there was a dark-haired, stocky thirty-something man standing right beside the glass doors, wiping his forehead with the handkerchief in one hand and holding a mobilephone to his ear with the other. He wasn’t saying anything, either, but obviously listening to lengthy instructions from someone. There was a small black briefcase standing beside him.
This Other was a Dark Magician.
‘And they’re following us too,’ muttered Raivo.
‘Why would anyone be interested in us?’ Yukha asked doubtfully. ‘Any number of Others could have business at Moscow’s international airport.’
‘Remain vigilant, Brother!’ Yari reminded him. ‘Fáfnir is saddened and alarmed by carelessness.’
Yukha thought glumly that after the hopeless failure of the operation to deliver the Talon to Moscow, the resurrected Fáfnir ought to incinerate all four of them. Or at least the three survivors. But, as usual, he didn’t say anything out loud.
Meanwhile the Light One finished his coffee, cast a displeased glance at the Dark One and set off in the general direction of the restaurant. His aura had returned to its even azure colour, with a barely visible hint of cherry red where the stripe had been.
The Dark One was still talking on his mobile. Or rather, listening.
‘They want to make sure we leave!’ said the shrewd Raivo. ‘As if we weren’t delighted to go – what have we got to do here!’
But Raivo was wrong.
The Light Magician wandered around the airport for a while and then settled at the counter again, reading a book and sipping coffee. The Dark Magician finished his conversation and walked across to the ticket desk, and the Brothers sensed a trace of magic. Quite strong magic, too – fourth grade or so.
‘What’s he doing there?’ Raivo asked, getting worried. ‘Is he getting a ticket too? Eh? Yukha, he’s not going to bother us, is he?’
‘Why would he?’ Yukha asked. ‘Look!’
The Dark Magician walked away from the counter window with a ticket in his hand.
‘They’ve cancelled a ticket someone had already paid for!’ Raivo guessed. ‘Would you believe it! There’ll be a fuss.’
And there was a fuss, when the passengers were checking in for the flight four hours later, when they all found themselves in the same queue. Including the Light Magician. One of the passengers was politely informed that his ticket had been sold to him by mistake, that the airline apologised to him and offered him a seat in business class on the next flight.
The Dark Magician watched the outraged passenger’s complaints as if nothing untoward was happening. He actually seemed to be smiling. But the Regin Brothers had no reason to smile – the Dark Magician and the Light Magician were flying on the same plane as them.
‘They’ve decided to see us all the way to Prague,’ Raivo eventually announced. ‘They’re taking this business seriously.’
Yukha shook his head.
‘No, Brother. No. Something’s not right here. You’ll see – they’ll come up and want to talk to us …’
CHAPTER 1
GESAR HAD summoned Anton in the evening, when the analysts and the technical staff had already gone home, and the field operatives who happened to be on duty that night had only just begun arriving at headquarters. The corridors on the second floor smelled of freshly brewed coffee, hot cinnamon buns and mild, fragrant tobacco – that year a fashion for smoking pipes had swept through almost the entire Night Watch staff Even the women hadn’t escaped it.
It was already about a year since Anton had worked in the IT department. He had been replaced as boss of the computer section by Tolik. A second-grade magician – Anton had been classed as second grade at the beginning of the year – was too important a figure to be spending his time stuck in a chair, tapping away at a keyboard and debugging programs.
‘Like some coffee?’ Semyon asked. Anton nodded, and just at that moment the phone rang. Silence fell instantly in the small room where the four field operatives – Anton, Semyon, Garik and Bear – were sitting. They could all sense a call from the boss.
And who it was for.
Anton’s colleagues watched closely as he picked up the receiver.
‘Call in to see me as soon as you’re free,’ Gesar ordered without saying hello. ‘Finish your coffee and then come up.’
‘Very well,’ Anton replied steadily. ‘As you wish, Boris Ignatievich.’
He thought for a moment and then lit his pipe. If Gesar hadn’t warned him time was short, it meant there was no great hurry.
‘You in line for a dressing down?’ Garik inquired. Anton just shrugged. He could be in line for anything, from a charge of betraying the cause of the Night Watch to a promotion. From being told to stay in the office and not stick his nose outside to being ordered to storm the Dark Ones’ headquarters. When a magician of the highest grade got some idea into his head, it was pointless trying to guess his plans. Especially if that magician was in the kind of bad mood that Gesar had been in for the last few months.
Basically they were all feeling pretty lousy. This year had been one failure after another. It had all started in the summer, when the workaday, humdrum arrest of a witch practising magic illegally had spilled over into conflict with the Dark Ones. Then the fine young magician Igor Teplov, who had drained his powers in that conflict, had been sent to the Artek children’s camp to recover and run foul of a deliberate provocation by the Dark Ones. A witch called Alisa Donnikova had managed to enchant him and make him fall in love with her. She was Zabulon’s girlfriend, the same Dark bitch who had interfered time and again in the Night Watch’s most complex intrigues. This time Alisa hadn’t gone unpunished – Igor had killed her. But in the process he had exceeded the limits of force permissible in self-defence, and now his fate hung by a thread.
A few months later Vitaly Rogoza had turned up, and that had proved to be a real disaster. At first they’d taken him for an ordinary Dark One, then they’d begun to suspect the visiting Ukrainian was an emissary, sent to assist the Day Watch. But Rogoza had turned out to be a Mirror – that very rarest of phenomena, which had been recorded less than ten times in the entire history of the Watches. He was a direct creation of the Twilight, moulded out of a quite unexceptional individual, who might not even have been an Other, into a monstrous fighting machine. If only they’d realised that straight away … but they hadn’t. And in the struggle with the Mirror, Tiger Cub had been killed, Svetlana had lost her powers, and several other magicians had suffered to a greater or lesser degree.