An hour and a half has passed since Mo spoke to Angleton. She’s been home to get changed and collect her go-bag, but still makes the meeting in a popular wine bar off New Oxford Street with time to spare, thanks to her warrant card and a slightly confused police traffic patrol. (External Liaison will raise hell about it tomorrow, but tomorrow can fend for itself.)
The middle-aged man in the loose-cut Italian suit is already there and waiting for her, sitting in the middle of a silent ring of empty tables while his dead-eyed bodyguards track the access routes.
“Mrs. O’Brien,” says Panin. “Welcome.”
She pulls out a chair and releases her bulky messenger bag, dropping it between her feet as she sits. She has her violin case slung across her chest, like a soldier’s rifle.
“Добрый вечер, как ты?”
Panin’s lips quirk. “Quite well, thank you. If you would prefer to continue in English ...”
“My Russian is very limited,” Mo admits. “My employers are more interested in Arabic—not to mention Enochian—these days.”
“Well, let us consider drinking to the bad old days, may they never return.” He raises an eyebrow. “What’s your poison?”
His English is very good. Mo shakes her head. “A lemonade. I don’t use alcohol before an operation.”
Panin glances over his shoulder. “A lemonade for the lady. And a glass of the house red for me.”
“I didn’t know they had table service here.”
“They don’t. Rank has its privileges.”
They wait for a surprisingly short time. The minder delivers the drinks, as ordered, and retreats to his stool in the corner. “Angleton told you he was sending me,” she says, tentatively laying out the terms of discussion.
“He did.” Panin nods. “We share a common interest. Other agencies of our two great nations continue to bicker like bad-tempered children, but we must rise above, perforce. Alas, all is not always clear-cut.” He reaches into his inside pocket and brings out a wallet, then produces a small portrait photo. “Do you recognize this man?”
Mo stares at the frozen face for several seconds, then raises her eyes to meet Panin’s gaze.
“I’m not going to start by lying to you,” she says.
Panin relaxes minutely—it is not evident in his face, but the tension in his shoulders slackens slightly. “He left a widow and two young children behind,” he says quietly. “But he was dead before you met him.”
“Before . . . ?”
“He was one of ours. I emphasize, was. Abducted two weeks ago, not thereafter seen until he appeared on your doorstep, possessed and controlled—we would say превратилась, turned—a tool of the enemy.”
“Whose enemy?”
Panin gives her a look. “Yours. And mine. James advised me to tell you that I have been involved in CLUB ZERO from another angle. The Black Brotherhood do not only fish in British waters.”
“That’s not news. Nevertheless, I hope you will excuse me for saying that if your illegals are taken while working overseas, blaming the local authorities is not—”
“He disappeared in St. Petersburg.”
“Oh. Oh, my sympathies.”
“I take it you can see the problem?”
“Yes.” Mo takes a sip of lemonade, looks apprehensive. “I’d be very grateful if you could tell me everything you know about this particular incident. Did Ang—James—explain why it’s of particular interest to us right now?”
“One of your mid-level controllers has been taken, no?”
“Not definitely, yet.” Her fingers tense on the glass. “But he’s out of contact, and there are indications that something has gone badly wrong, very recently. We’ve got searchers looking for him right now. Anything you can tell me before I brief the extraction team ...”
“You are briefing—” Panin’s eyes unconsciously flicker towards her violin case. “Oh, I see.” He eyes her warily. “What do you know of the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh?”
“As much as anybody on the outside—not enough. Let’s see: the current group first surfaced in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia after the establishment of the monarchy there, but their roots diverge: White Russian émigré radicals, freemasons from Trieste, Austrian banking families with secrets buried in their family chapels. All extreme conservatives, reactionaries even, with a basket of odd beliefs. They’re the ones who reorganized the Brotherhood and got it back in operation after the hammering it took in the late nineteenth century. They’re not based in Serbia anymore, of course, but many of them fled to the United States immediately before the outbreak of war; that’s the trouble with these cults, they fragment and grow back when you hit them.”
“Let me jog your memory. In America, they infiltrated—some say, founded—the Free Church of the Universal Kingdom as a local cover organization. They do that everywhere, taking over a splinter of a larger, more respectable organization; in Egypt they use some of the more extreme mosques of the Muslim Brotherhood. In America . . . the Free Church is a small, exclusionary brethren who are so far out of the mainstream that even the Assembly of Quiverful Providentialist Ministries, from whom they originally sprang, have denounced them for heretical practices. Some of the Church elders are in fact initiates of the first order of the Black Brotherhood; the followers are a mixture of Christian believers, who they see as dupes, and dependents and postulants of the Brotherhood. The Church is mostly based in the United States—it is very hard to move against a church over there, even if it is suspected of fronting for another organization, they take their religious freedom too seriously—but it has missions in many countries. Not Russia, I hasten to add. The nature of the Church doctrine makes the personal cost of membership very high—they tend to be poor, with large families—and discourages defection from the ranks; additionally, the Brotherhood may use low-level glamours to keep the sheep centered in the flock. We hear little more than rumors about the Brotherhood itself; despite fifty years of attempted insertions, we’ve been unable to penetrate them. Their discipline is terrifying. We have heard stories about ritual murder, incest, and cannibalism. I would normally discount these—the blood libel is very old and very ugly—but complicity in war crimes has been repeatedly used to bind child soldiers into armies in the Congo, and I have some evidence that those practices were originally suggested by a Brotherhood missionary ...”
Mo shudders. “Whether they eat their own children or not, they have no problem eating somebody else’s.”
“You have evidence of this?” Panin leans towards her eagerly.
“I’ve seen it.” Panin flinches at the vehemence of her response. “Although they may not have been strictly human anymore, by that point—they had been thoroughly possessed—”
“That was the Amsterdam business, was it not?”
Mo freezes for several seconds. Then she takes another deep breath, and a hasty mouthful of lemonade, then wipes her mouth. “Yes.”
“Cannibalism is a very powerful tool, you know. The transgression of any strong taboo—it can be used for a variety of purposes, bindings, and geases. The greatest taboo, murder, provides two kinds of power, of course, both the life of the victim and the murderer’s own will to violate—”
Mo shakes her head, raises a hand. “I don’t need that lecture right now.”
“All right.” Panin sips at his wine. “Excuse me, but—there is a personal connection?”
“What?”
“You appear unduly upset ...”
“Yes.” She looks at her hands. “The missing officer is my husband.”
Panin puts his glass down and leans back, very slowly, with the extreme self-control of a man who has just realized he is sharing a table with a large, ticking bomb. “Is there anything I can do to help?”