Transmission: Ragnarok: Book Two (50 page)

The figure smiled beneath his wolf skin. His arms were outstretched, his hands empty, though a sheathed sword was at his side.

‘I am what he said.’ Ulfr’s voice was calm. ‘And I challenge you for leadership.’

‘
What?
’

‘You heard.’

There was a conjoined roar as both men closed, Ulfr not drawing his sword, stepping inside the swing of Magnús’s cut, right hand clamping the back of his neck, face heading for the throat like a lover, but Ulfr’s mouth was wide and he clamped his teeth deep, aiming true, wanting the windpipe – not the blood vessels – and crushing it in his bite, then ripping back. Magnús croaked, falling. Left-handed, Ulfr snatched Magnús’s sword, then plunged it into its owner’s heart.

He kept the tableau like this so the reavers could see their leader’s fate; then he thrust with his foot to push the corpse clear of the blade. In the frozen quiet, the wet sucking sound was clear. Then Ulfr drew his own sword, spat, and stood with both blades unsheathed. Around him in the dell were some fifty men, maybe more, all staring this way.

‘Any questions?’ he said.

At least a dozen reavers looked at each other and snarled, turned back to Ulfr and yelled as they ran at him, drawing swords and swinging axes to the ready, in one case a long-handled war-hammer.

Óthinn’s shit
.

Time for the blood-rage once more.

Glimpses: chopped fingers, hammer falling from the riven hand as his other blade took out an eye; hilt into face on the backswing, rebound forward into another’s throat, while his other sword chopped down, and someone roared; spinning, using the ground, their headlong sprint working for him as he deflected one man into another, and then again; fingers tingling as he lost a sword but grabbed testicles, howling as he ripped upwards and the man went down, tripping two more; turned another right around, the back of his neck fresh and clear like a girl’s, his scream like an animal’s as blade severed vertebrae; tearing an axe loose from a dead man’s hand; two-handed once more, screaming as he plunged into a group of five, six men and chopped down with strength that could not be deflected; split a face vertically in two.

And clicked it off, the rage.

Soaked with sweat and blood, he took in the twisted wounded and the dead, strewn across the bottom of the dell. Then he looked up at the others, the three dozen who had stood back. They were staring at him, afraid but not of the violence or even the rage, for they were reavers, used to blood and battle. What they had never seen was someone who could enter and exit
berserkrgangr
at will.

Good. So you understand
.

He turned in a circle, checking them all, not ignoring the danger from those he had wounded without killing.

‘Any more questions, anyone?’

Suddenly, someone laughed.

Thank Loki for that
.

Others began to laugh, then beat their weapons against their shields, while the wounded looked up at them as though they were insane.

‘Give us your name,’ a reaver called, ‘if it please you, good Chief.’

The new leader put down his axe, then raised his sword. Runes were carved on it, the first six newer and cruder than the final four, but making sense all the same to those reavers who could read.

‘I am Fenrisulfr!’ he cried. ‘And with a hell-wolf at your head, who can stand against you, against
us
, my brave and bloody reavers?’

There was a pause, then a roar, weapons shaking, not at him but at their prey, all the weak of the Middle World.

‘I promise you blood and gold and death!’

Far away, with Kolr’s reins between his teeth, sitting by the ash-tree where he had been commanded, Brandr whimpered.

Seven years since the war’s end. Gavriela, with time to spare before the meeting, stood staring at a rubble-strewn bomb site. Boys in short trousers were kicking a football, innocent of the events that created their playground – the deaths and screaming, the flames and collapse – and she could not tell whether it meant hope or despair: moving on from the past, or failing to learn its lessons. They would grow up as individuals; but what of the species?

Some said the end of rationing was only a year away. Food, intact housing, and family safe: that was all that mattered. You had to deal with the rest only because ignoring it placed the fundamentals in jeopardy. Hence, by sequences of faultless logic leading to insane conclusions, the mutual fear between Soviets and the West. They said that not a single Russian family had made it through the war with everyone living; now they reached for the uranium, created missiles in readiness, so that more devastation like this could be brought into being; except there would be no children playing in the ruins.

According to a mole in Washington, plans for something called the Atlas ICBM were being drawn up; the mole’s opinion was that once proposed in final form, the programme would be initiated. But it was the thinking more than the hardware that worried Gavriela; Turing’s transatlantic counterpart, von Neumann, was recommending a first-strike all-out nuclear attack against the USSR, on the basis of rigorous mathematical analysis.

Both of these reports had crossed her desk in the context of signals intelligence; the first because the radio relay was a joint Section VIII-GCHQ operation, while the second was a composite analysis arising from a series of intercepts: SIS’s eavesdropping on the Cousins (the new term for American spooks) had expanded to included the RAND corporation, think-tank to White House and Pentagon alike.

One of the boys had fallen over. After some thirty seconds, he got up and continued to play, receiving the ball and dribbling it with aplomb across the broken ground, heedless of the red streak starting at his knee.

Gavriela blew out a breath then walked away.

King’s Cross was close by, and the queue at the taxi rank was short: only six people. She joined it, alert for anyone following, and climbed into the fifth taxi – two had shared – and told the driver Charing Cross. No one struck as her odd when she climbed out at her destination – ‘Thank you, missus,’ said the driver, checking his tip – and from there she went on foot, past Trafalgar Square and along Flea Spotter Alley, tradename for the static counter-surveillance setup where the eponymous fleaspotters would check to see whether she had picked up anything untoward, most likely with Slavic features.

The entry protocol took the usual length of time, not least because there were visitors ahead of her, including a large group with American accents – she gave a tiny nod to an NSA officer who had spent time at Eastcote; he returned the nod but no more – but finally she was through, with an escort to lead her upstairs. His name was Price, and she had met him before but knew nothing about him, except that he looked hard around the edges, meaning he probably got here via SIS’s absorption of SOE. At Rupert’s office he knocked and opened the door for her, then closed it behind her as she went in.

‘Sit down, old thing,’ said Rupert. ‘I’ll be Mum.’

There was a tray ready, the porcelain tea-pot with a gaudy cosy. Rupert poured strong-looking tea through a sterling silver strainer. He added the milk for her, just a soupçon, and handed it over without sugar. Trust him to remember how she took it.

‘How’s Brian?’ she asked.

‘Shivering in Trondheim.’

Which could mean frying in Tangiers or sitting downstairs at a desk: his once-temporary transfer to SIS had long ago turned permanent. He had never attempted to be Carl’s father, which was just as well: everyone knew that Carl had been sired by Jack Woods, Lieutenant RN, deceased.

For spinster read widow.

‘I wondered’ – with her, Rupert rarely spun things out – ‘whether you had seen much of AMT lately.’

His voice sounded languid, but the signals he transmitted were always what he wanted others to read. The real Rupert Forrester was buttoned up inside; she wondered if Brian ever saw that man.

‘I’ve been to Manchester a few times,’ she said. ‘The Colossus there, even the Pilot ACE, are far behind the Eastcote setup, but we’re starting to struggle. You know that the Americans are going to dominate the computer world if you don’t let civilian BP veterans talk about it. In a couple of years, we’ll have lost our lead. Plus,’ she added, ‘we need Alan full time, not the short-term visits he’s been putting in.’

Turing had been GCHQ’s chief liaison to the Americans.

‘You’re singing to the choir, Gabby. Our lords and masters don’t agree.’

‘Right. And?’

‘And what, precisely?’

‘Come on, Rupert. It’s a travesty. Alan’s no security risk. He was totally open with the police when he reported the theft. That’s how his homosexuality landed him in court, but that’s precisely why he was never open to blackmail in the first place.’

Unspoken: Rupert of all people had to sympathize.

‘Men like … Alan,’ he said, ‘are accepted more than ever these days, by ordinary people, though that’s not saying much. Accepted by men who served alongside queers in the war.’

The pejorative had an ugly tone in his mouth, immediately covered up.

‘But there’s paranoia blowing through the corridors of Whitehall’ – he gestured at the door – ‘and he damn well should have known better, the stupid bastard. I can’t do anything for him.’

‘If you can’t, then who will?’

‘No one, that’s the point. You probably won’t know this, but your senior directors—’

‘Offered him a permanent post,’ she said. ‘Five thousand a year, cheap at the price and academia’s loss. So for God’s sake, why can’t we have him?’

‘Because the world’s insane, which is why you and I have jobs in the first place.’ He stared at the window, and asked it: ‘Have you read Forster?’

‘Captain Hornblower? One of Carl’s favourites.’

‘I meant E.M.’ He faced her again. ‘As you well know. He said he hoped to have the strength to betray his country before his friends. Ignore the abstract in favour of the tangible, I expect he meant.’

‘So I take it RO never considered him,’ she said, meaning the Recruitment Office.

‘Unlikely. I was hoping you’d do a courier job for me. Be my legman.’ He smiled his Etonian smile. ‘Legwoman.’

From a drawer he took a cream-coloured envelope. Only the best stationery for the privileged few.

‘It looks thin,’ she said.

‘There’s a cheque inside, farewell payment for services rendered. Drawn,’ he said, ‘from a slush fund that does not exist as far as the grannies are concerned.’

For grannies read accountants.

‘Made out to whom?’

‘To A. M. Turing, old girl. To the man who did more than any other individual, apart from maybe Winnie, to save this bloody country from the jackboot.’

The envelope was light in her hand.

‘Is there a message to go with that?’

‘Yes.’ Just for a moment, something burned in Rupert’s eyes; then the glacial mantle was back in place. ‘Tell him, we hope he enjoyed his holiday in Norway.’

The Lyons Tea House establishments were ubiquitous, and while Rupert these days would not be seen dead in one, Gavriela rather liked them: warm and moist, with steam escaping from the polished urns, the chatter of young mothers taking their children out for a treat – a glass of orange squash, a soft round doughnut crunchy with sugar – and men of all sorts reading newspapers while they drank their tea. Also, the company had designed and built their own computer, the LEO, operational for the past two years, which made them smart people, or so Gavriela thought.

On her way here, she had seen no mobile spotters; but a watcher already in place would be hard to detect, except by being too good: an absence of vibration from someone who looked capable. She sat waiting and watching, tea in front of her, picking up nothing untoward.

Alan came at the appointed time, bought tea and McVitie’s at the counter, and brought his tray over. His eyes, the same shade of startling blue as Oppenheimer’s, remained fastened on her as he sat, scraping the wooden chair into place.

‘Nice to see you again, Gabby.’

‘Likewise. Have you been following the news from Japan?’