Warriors

CHAPTER 23

The old man knew what was coming next.

The birds.

Earlier, down in the dungeon, he’d been beaten and battered about the head so much it was easy to feign unconsciousness now and then. He’d heard the two women whispering to each other, pausing in their torture when they thought he’d passed out on the stone floor. They’d used a phrase that was wholly alien to him then; the words had no meaning. But there was no mistaking its meaning now:

The hunger birds.

The first bird missed; the second plucked his right eye out. It landed on his cheek, the organ dangling only by a viscous thread of tissue and muscle.

A bolt of red pain seared the interior of the now empty socket. A gelatinous substance ran down his cheek. The old man whirled about. He could no longer see the hazy pale moon high above the thin and drifting clouds.

No, the hunger birds filled his vision: a great mass of beating black wings that filled the air now. Terror-struck, in shock and disoriented, the man stumbled through the tangled undergrowth that covered the frozen ground inside the cage of the ornate black wrought-iron aviary.

The shrieking black monsters were everywhere, all beaks and talons, fueled with bloodlust now, diving straight down and stabbing at their carrion feast viciously, striking with long serrating blows using their razor-sharp beaks, raking his bald head with their steel-encased talons until his blood flowed down in sheets.

He shouted, half blind, flailing at the screeching ravens with his balled fists, tripping over his own feet as he ran. He couldn’t beat the swarming birds away, could not tear the masses of them from his body.

They alit upon both his shoulders, three stubborn blackbirds to each side. He slammed through the trees, trying to shake them off. He could not.

The birds’ steel claw spurs were embedded in the soft flesh of his naked shoulders and they could not be flung or pried away. They began fighting one another over his ears, stabbing at each one with their sharp little beaks, tearing away small morsels of tender tissue before retreating a moment to let the others feast.

His knees weak, he clung to a tree and cried out, insane with pain.

“Stop them! Please! What more do you want to know? I’ve told you everything! For God’s sake, have mercy upon me! Let me out! I beg you!”

He paused, threw back his head, and roared at his shrieking tormentors. The cruelest of all birds.

The hunger birds.

“The ravens,” he cried to the heavens.

These demonic creatures would surely peck him to death within minutes. His would be the slowest of deaths. It was a hideous end to a life spent in the service of the mind, a quiet life, working in the shadows of the library stacks, sometimes in light, sometimes, yes, even in secrecy. Like every man, he was not quite what he appeared.

It could all have ended so differently. He could have died in bed, in his beloved cottage upon the Fens, surrounded by his books, his pictures, the warmth of his sleeping dog wrapping him in comfort.

But he’d been caught out. Oh, yes. He’d slipped up somewhere along the way. And his silent enemies had come for him. He’d always known it all might end this way. He’d been playing the great game for many, many long years. Since the war in the Pacific had ended. He was very old for a spy. Many did not live nearly so long. But he didn’t want to die, not yet, not like this.

This was hell.

And that was not even the worst of it.

He knew what lay in wait for him if he survived this terrible trial. He’d seen it with his own eyes; they’d shown the dungeon to him before they began the interrogation. Shown him the ancient death device. And a death more horrible than any conceivable. Worse, yes, worse even than the birds.

Better to die here? Die now? End it?

Yes.

Surrender.

Let the loathsome feathered fiends have their way, then. Let it end here. Now.

He considered the end of his life. It was time.

Come, ravens, flock all to me, and satisfy your hunger.

It was the middle of the night. The wind was up, rattling the bare branches. A change in the weather. The nearest farm was six miles distant. No one could hear the victim’s cries for mercy. No one had ever heard anything. It was a place of secrets. A place where the secrets had secrets. Where secrets flourished like hothouse orchids.

It was a place where evil felt at home.

Two women, both exotically beautiful, but one a decade older, stood outside the two-story Victorian aviary and watched the horror unfolding within. The complex iron lacework structure was beautiful, finely wrought in the shape of a cathedral dome, designed by the Bishop of Ely, who had built this place nearly two hundred years earlier.

The women were bathed in the cold blue artificial moonlight pouring down from the floodlights mounted high up inside the cage. Six large round lamps mounted inside the dome of the aviary and illuminating the nightmare below. A cold, dry wind blew hard from out of the east. Dark, snow-laden clouds scudded past the moon, touching the fields and barren black forests below.

“What do you think?” Chyna Moon, the elder of the two said.

“He’s had enough, I should think. Let him out, poor sod.”

“No. He has not. He’ll talk if it kills him. He’s betrayed us! The professor here’s been working the other side for years. My father sent me a shot of him sitting on a goddamn bench with some Six agent, a man in Berkeley Square. Doing a pass. My father demands the bloody name of that agent, and I will have it from his mouth or seal it forever.”

“God, stop the birds then, Chyna. Look! They’re going for his tongue now… there’s one trying to get inside his mouth!”

“Christ, you’re right, he’s down… giving up,” she said, unbolting the ornately carved cast iron door and darting inside. She knew she’d extracted just about every syllable of information she was going to get from the old traitor. But he had one more name, she knew it. And she wanted to hear it before he died.

She carried a thick canvas tarp, stiff with blood, with a weighted edge like a fishing net. She shooed the birds away, then flung the tarp out in a perfect arc. It landed atop of the victim, covering his body completely.

The birds were not done. One of the nightmares dove at the tarp, letting out a piercing scream of ravenous appetite and furious frustration.

The older woman stepped between the bird and covered victim. She wore a sterling whistle hung round her neck. Now she put it to her lips and blew. The pitch was well above the range of human hearing, but it was certainly effective enough for her pets. Miraculously, all the whirling birds seemed to halt in midair, retreating in an instant, darting above, finding perches high in the leafless arms of the great trees that grew inside.

The ravens became perfectly still.

Their black eyes glinted malevolently. They were only waiting for a signal. A second sound from the whistle meant resume attack.

“Ravens, vultures, and crows,” Lorelei Li whispered as if mesmerized. “Ravens, vultures, and crows… ravens, vultures, and crows…”

“Stop chanting! Come and help me, girl, will you!” the older woman cried. She had one arm around the old man, trying to drag him out with the cover still protecting him. He wasn’t helping, too weak from loss of blood. “He’s too bloody heavy, damn you. Get in here!”

The younger, arguably the prettier, one slipped inside. Together they dragged him outside and laid him down. The older one knelt on the frozen ground near his head, bent over him, caressing him gently.

“Tell me,” she whispered. “Tell me who you met with on that bench in Berkeley Square. Give me his name! All these years, asking me your innocent questions about my family in China. About my father. All about my father! Why? For money? Silly old fool, look what it’s cost you. You’ve got me to deal with now… and I know you’ll believe me when I say I can be vastly more unpleasant than your little friends at MI6.”

“Kill me,” the old soul whispered in a ragged croak.

“Not just yet…”

The two women struggled with the old man going down the steep, twisting stone staircase that led to the cellars. When they reached the bottom, they lit some of the torches that stretched off into the darkness, bolted to the stone walls with ancient iron brackets. The old man was unconscious again, sagging between them. His feet bumped along on the cobbled stone as they took him to meet his fate.

It was a large stone room and the site of many evils over the centuries. Tears of water seeped from the stone above and fell upon their heads. At the far end stood a heavy wooden structure. It had served as a gibbet at one time, a guillotine later on. It now served as something far worse.

Steps led up to a wide square platform of white tile with stainless steel gutters on all four sides. It was those awful gutters, actually, that made the trembling, half-blind, half-mad victim’s skin crawl.

Where once a noose had waited, there now waited the current executioner’s recently installed machine of death. A gleaming, razor-meshed contraption in the shape of a large bag hung from an overhead beam. Dating to the Tang dynasty, the hideous device was called Qian Dao, the “Shining Basket.”

It was a torture even more terrible than the Death of a Thousand Cuts.

Outside in the forecourt, it had begun to snow.

Really snow.

“I got the name I wanted,” Chyna said. “The man photographed in Berkeley Square. He whispered it to me just before I let the bag drop.”

“Who is it? What name did he say?”

“Hawke. Alex Hawke. That bastard.”

“You know him?”

“Oh, yes. I know him, all right. Lord Alexander Hawke. Ex — Royal Navy, now MI6 intelligence officer. He’s been a thorn in our side for as long as I can remember. Years ago, my father had had enough and sent my older sister Jet to Cannes to kill him. She fucked him instead.”

“Why?”

“Simple. Because he’s the most attractive man you’ll ever meet. And charming. And rich as the gods. He treated Jet like a common whore and disposed of her like a soiled tissue. And, later, he got my other sister killed for her troubles. My father and my sister Jet loathe this man. Wait till I give them this little piece of information.”

“I’d like the chance to meet this Alex Hawke before you do anything drastic, Chyna. Okay? Just once. I promise.”

Chyna frowned. “You little slut.”

“What of it? You ought to know me by now. I’m the kind of woman who can fuck a man and kill him.”

The two women loaded the almost weightless corpse into the boot of the old silver Rolls-Royce, slammed the lid, and climbed inside. There was little blood spatter in the boot. The victim had bled out suspended above a rain barrel in the Shining Basket. Now he was wrapped inside the canvas tarp.

“Where do we take him?” the younger one asked.

“Cambridge.”

“Cambridge? You’re bloody joking.”

“On the contrary. I know a spot. A secret place, actually. No one has set foot inside its walls in a decade or more. It’s perfect. Besides, look out there. It looks like quite a snowstorm. And snow covers any number of dreadful sins.”