Ghost Dance Page 4

  "No more truth," Raven said. "No more, no more. " It leapt from her shoulder and through the canopy of trees in the forest that was now all she could see. Its small body faded into the black of the sky and her consciousness faded with it.

  She woke in a hospital bed looking down at the white sheets folded beneath her armpits. PD was asleep in a chair beside her, slumped inelegantly with one arm hanging at his side, knuckles grazing the floor. She took a moment to study his face and was reassured to see that it was fully human. The last of the drug must have washed out of her system and the spirit world along with it. Her throat was still sore, though, and she shivered as she realised Raven had been right. The lie she'd told had physically hurt her.

  PD grunted as he shifted in the chair and his eyes blinked open to stare straight into hers. His face was still relaxed from sleep and it looked momentarily younger. For the first time, she noticed something wounded in his dark eyes. He opened his mouth to say something, but before he could speak Hammond pushed through the door behind him. PD kept his eyes on her, only tearing them away when the older man shuffled impatiently, holding the door open for PD to leave.

  "Feeling better, Alexandra?" Hammond asked once they were alone. His thin face twisted into an expression that was probably meant to be caring. PD's had been more convincing.

  Alex shrugged. "The visions have gone. I don't know if that counts as better in your book."

  "Right now it does. I have another job for you and I need you compos mentis for the briefing."

  "I've just done a job for you - what more do you want?"

  Hammond tossed something on the bed beside her: a thick leather wallet. "That's your badge. I would give you a gun but I suspect you'd shoot yourself in the foot and I need you on active duty. Welcome to full-time service, Agent Keve."

  She opened her mouth, ready to protest that she had classes tomorrow and drinks with a friend arranged that evening. "I don't think I'm ready for another day like today," she said instead.

  "We don't intend to burn you out, Alexandra. I've told you before, you're too valuable for that. And we will permit you return to your studies if you prove you can apply yourself."

  "Yeah, why wouldn't you?" she said. "You were the one who forced me to major in Native American History in the first place."

  Hammond rubbed his fingers against his temples as if she was giving him a headache. "We believed the subject would prove useful to you - the way being able to fire a gun would prove useful. We have your interests at heart."

  "Where they coincide with yours."

  "Of course. We're the government, not a charity - what did you expect?"

  She sighed. "Exactly that. So what the hell is it you want me to do?"

  "Have your heard of the Croatoans?"

  Alex nodded. "Some bat-shit crazy Californian cult."

  "But do you know anything about them?"

  She shook her head.

  "They possess the archetypal quality of being easy to join and very hard to leave. Their leader - who calls himself Laughing Wolf - claims he can teach his followers to transport their souls into the bodies of animals."

  "And can he?" She'd meant the question to be sarcastic but Hammond took her seriously.

  "We must hope not," he said.

  Alex steepled her fingers in an unconscious imitation of Hammond's own habitual gesture. "So what if some loser gets to wander around as a racoon for a while? What do you care?"

  The old man smiled. "We care because you're one of a kind, Alexandra - and you work for us. We're keen for things stay that way and we'll do whatever it takes to ensure they do. You might do well to bear that in mind."

  CHAPTER THREE

  Morgan spent two days expecting to be contacted by Kate and hearing from no one except telemarketers. When he'd been recruited to the Division he'd found himself a new flat, nearer to Borough and with furniture that came from Ikea rather than Argos. It was light and -- unlike his old place - it was clean, but he was sick of the sight of it by the time the call came.

  "About bloody time," he said when he answered the phone.

  Kate chuckled. "Sorry. Took us a while to identify the killer."

  "You know who he is?"

  "Come into the office and I'll fill you in." As usual, she ended the call without saying good-bye.

  The office meant a run-down Edwardian terrace house near the Oval. Morgan got there in a near jog, dodging pedestrians and the occasional surly cyclist. September was drawing to a close but the air was hot and humid as if summer wasn't quite ready to let go. By the time he arrived, his sweaty T-shirt was plastered to his back and his hair felt stiff with salt.

  Kate answered the door herself. In all the weeks he'd been coming here, Morgan had only met one other member of the Hermetic Division and he'd clearly been a low-grade clerical worker. When he asked Kate she'd laughed and said, "This isn't the kind of organisation that has office parties. The less our agents know about each other, the safer everyone is."

  As usual, the house was deserted. Kate led him through to the living room, a gloomy space with a carpet which might once have been blue. The sofa had been replaced with office chairs, the TV with a computer. Kate pulled one of the chairs close to it and gestured Morgan to do the same.

  "Cup of tea would go down really well," he said as he slid into place.

  She rolled her eyes, but disappeared into the kitchen to make one.

  "You're such a pushover," he said when she returned.

  She cradled her own cup in her hand as she booted up the computer. "Maybe it's just that you're so charming."

  "Nah," he said. "You're a soft touch."

  She smiled at him affectionately, but he knew it was second-hand. She cared about him because Tomas had and she seemed to feel that looking after Morgan was a way of paying back her lover for his sacrifice.

  When the computer finished loading, the screen showed the sketch an artist had drawn from Morgan's description of the murderer. It was a good likeness, capturing the hard line of the man's mouth and his hawkish nose.

  "Have you found him?" he asked.

  "Found no, but we have identified him." She clicked the mouse and another image opened on screen. This one was a photo, but it was recognisably the same man. "Meir Porat, known as 'Lahav'. That's Hebrew for both flame and sword - it's not hard to guess why he got the name, is it? He's an agent of the Mossad, the Israeli secret service. They call his cell the Shomer Hamikdash, the Temple Guard."

  "Like their version of the Hermetic Division?" Morgan said, and when Kate nodded, "But what are they doing killing some university professor over here?"

  "That's the question."

  "And that knife of his - what the fuck is it?"

  "I don't know. If our intel's right, the Shomer have put a lot of resources into tracking down the lost treasure from the Temple in Jerusalem. The Romans sacked the place in 70AD and a group of very powerful artefacts were lost to history. We don't have concrete evidence, but rumours suggest the Israelis have already found one, a prayer shawl that protects the wearer from occult harm. It's possible the knife is another."

  Morgan digested that. "And do you think that's why he's here? He's looking for more of these artefacts?"

  "Maybe. Some of the treasure could have made its way over the Channel in the chaos following the fall of the Roman Empire. That could be where our murder victim fits in." She tapped the mouse again, and the woman's photo appeared on screen, a page from the University of Cambridge website. "Dr Granger's a fellow of Trinity College, a member of the history department and a specialist in Tudor England. She's never been arrested, never mixed with any unsavoury types and never previously come to the attention of the Hermetic Division. But if the Shomer Hamikdash are interested in her, then so are we."

  "He wanted something she had - or he thought she had," Morgan remembered. "He asked her if she'd found it."

  Kate nodded. "So his next stop's likely to be Cambridge."

  "You want me to go there
, see if I can track him down?"

  "And find out what you can about Dr Granger while you're at it."

  Morgan skimmed the rest of the webpage but it was written in impenetrable academic language and seemed mainly to consist of a list of publications. He shrugged and pushed his chair back, the wheels catching in the grubby carpet as they rolled. "OK, but how do I get access? Some posh Cambridge college isn't gonna let me just wander around."

  Kate flipped him a leather wallet. When he opened it he saw that it held a police badge in his name. "You work for the government. We know how to make things happen."

  She was gazing at him fondly, a half-smile on her lips.

  "Listen," he blurted, speaking before he'd realised he intended to. "I wanted to ask you about - about me. About the things Nicholson told me." That I was born without a soul, he thought, but he didn't say it. It was too painful to articulate.

  Kate curled her hands together in her lap, looking suddenly serious - or maybe uncomfortable. "Nicholson was... He wasn't a good man, Morgan. And he was trying to convince you to do what he wanted. I don't think you should pay much attention to what he said."

  "I get that, but it doesn't mean it wasn't true. I'm not normal, am I? I reckon we can agree on that."

  "Normal's overrated."

  He shrugged and thought it was easy for her to say, who'd never had to spend a day worrying about who or what she was.

  "But you're the government," he said. "You can get things done - and you can find things out. Can't you find out more about me?"

  Her eyes shifted away from his and it occurred to him that they were already trying to find out about him. Of course they were. But if they didn't like what they found, would they ever tell him? If he was what his father had said he was, would they even risk letting him live, however useful he might be?

  "Forget it," he said, rising. "It was a stupid idea. The trains to Cambridge go from King's Cross, right?"

  Kate's hand on his arm stopped him as he made to leave the room, her palm warm against his skin. He hesitated a moment, then turned to look at her.

  "Morgan," she said. "You're a good person. It doesn't matter how you were born, it's the choices you make that define you."

  "I used to think that," he said. "All that stuff about good and evil and souls and hell, I thought it was so much shit, but we both know it isn't. And if it's true, maybe I can do as much good as I want, and it won't help me. Maybe I'm already damned."

  Kate held his eyes this time. "I refuse to think the world works like that. I won't believe life is so unfair."

  Morgan used his other hand to gently prise her fingers from his arm. "But if the world was fair, Tomas would still be alive, wouldn't he?"

  He turned away from the sudden tears in her eyes and left before she could answer.

  The journey to Cambridge was far quicker than he'd expected. In his mind, the university was at some opposite pole of existence from London and his rough, grey childhood in Lambeth. But forty-five minutes after setting out, the train pulled into the station.

  It was a disappointingly characterless building, modern but slightly rundown and utterly charmless. It would have looked at home in any number of drab English towns. A taxi rank waited outside but Morgan chose to walk, though the earlier sunlight had given way to drizzle.

  The first college he saw was a substantial golden building with a clocktower over its gatehouse. Morgan knew he looked like a tourist as he stopped and gawped but he didn't really care. It was such a peaceful place, despite the shoppers squeezing past on the main road and the gaggle of Americans being lectured by a woman holding a red umbrella. He tried to picture what it would have been like to spend the last few years here, instead of where he had, but his imagination failed him.

  Kate seemed to think he could turn himself into someone else if he chose. How could he, though, when he couldn't even picture who that other person might be?

  He hurried the rest of the way to Trinity College, through the centre of town and past a collection of equally picturesque colleges that he barely spared a glance. Trinity turned out to be one of the larger buildings, more imposing than welcoming ,though it was built from the same warm stone.

  A tall man, dressed absurdly in a black jacket and bowler hat, stopped him at the gate. "Sorry, sir - only organised tours at the moment, I'm afraid."

  "I'm here on business." Morgan pulled out the fake police ID. "Can you show me the way to Dr Granger's room?"

  The man frowned. "Dr Granger lived outside college, near Chesterton. I believe officers have already been to her house."

  "She's got a place here too, right?" Morgan guessed. "Somewhere she meets her students?"

  "You think her murder might have something to do with the college?"

  Morgan shrugged. "Just exploring possibilities."

  "Of course. I'll take you up there now, sir."

  He led Morgan through the front gate and into a courtyard that seemed to stretch for a mile in either direction. The central lawn was manicured as neatly as a golfing green and Morgan was led on two sides of a square to reach their destination, rather than cutting across the grass.

  The room was on the second floor, at the top of a rickety wooden staircase. His guide turned an old-fashioned mortis key in the lock and Morgan smiled his thanks, then stood in the doorway until the other man huffed and left him alone.

  Inside, it was smaller and shabbier than he'd expected. The furniture was old but not antique, the kind of stuff you could pick up at a second-hand shop down Walworth Road. The computer was modern, though, and he saw that it was still on. When he jogged the mouse, the screen lit. It took him a moment to see that Dr Granger had been in the middle of composing a letter, something dull to the Department of History. There was a half-eaten apple beside the keyboard, slowly shrivelling. She must have left for London in a rush.

  Morgan was struck by the sudden sense of a life unfinished. Granger had expected to return, write the end of her letter, throw away her apple. He shivered and turned to scan the bookshelves. They were packed, books ranked in a double layer and others sitting on top. Some of the volumes had Dr Granger's name on them. He pulled one out - Alchemical Transformations - and read the blurb on the back, but it seemed to have been written for someone who already knew what the book was about.

  A lower shelf proved more interesting, a whole stack of books with the words 'magic' or 'occult' in the title. Did the professor involve herself in the supernatural? But then how had she managed to stay off the Hermetic Division's radar - and at the same time attract the fatal attention of the Israelis?

  Morgan's head jerked round at the sound of the door opening and he felt a moment of panicked guilt before he remembered he had every right to be there.

  The young man paused in the doorway, blinking at Morgan.

  "Oh," he said, "I thought I had my supervision now. Is Dr Granger not around?" He had curly brown hair cut short in a vain attempt to tame it, and wide hazel eyes that made him look permanently startled.

  "I'm sorry," Morgan said, "Dr Granger's dead."

  The young man's eyes widened even further. "What the hell happened?" he asked. Morgan realised he had an American accent, one of those flat, bland ones which were hard to place.

  "She was murdered." Morgan took a step closer, studying the young man's reaction. "If she's your teacher, how come you haven't heard?"

  "I'm her PhD student - I don't see her all that often and I live out of college. Jesus Christ! Murdered? Who'd want to do that?"

  Morgan showed him the police ID. "That's what I'm here to find out. And you are..?"

  "Coby, Coby Bryson. Like I said, I'm studying for my doctorate with Dr Granger. I mean, I was. Jesus - sorry, it's just a lot to take in."

  Her PhD student, Morgan realised, probably knew more about Granger's field of study than anyone else. He pulled out the office chair for Coby, then perched on the prickly, over-stuffed sofa opposite him.

  "What can you tell me about Dr Granger?" Mo
rgan asked. "She was an expert in-" he flashed back to the powerpoint display she'd been preparing before her death "-Elizabethan alchemy, right?"

  Coby swallowed, then nodded. "Yeah, but she was particularly interested in Dr John Dee. Have you heard of him?"

  Morgan shook his head.

  Coby leaned forward, hands on knees. He looked suddenly confident and enthusiastic - a man in his element. "John Dee was probably the most famous alchemist of his age. He was a scientist too, but people today aren't so interested in his conventional experiments. They tend to focus on his more esoteric fields of research. Not that I'm sneering, that's what my PhD is about too; his search for the philosopher's stone."

  Morgan vaguely remembered that had something to do with Harry Potter.

  Coby read his expression. "It's the search for eternal life," he said. "Dr Dee believed he was close to uncovering the secret of immortality."

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The flight back from Europe took even longer than the journey out, crossing a continent this time as well as an ocean. By the time they landed in San Francisco, Alex felt like she hadn't slept in a week. Her hair was greasy, her skin too, and she concentrated very hard on these minor discomforts to avoid thinking about any of her real problems.

  "You need rest," PD told her when he'd reclaimed his luggage.

  "I need some clothes, too," she said, watching him sling his black bag over his shoulder. "And a toothbrush. I have nothing with me except my purse."

  "Then I guess you'd better put some of that thirty million dollar trust fund to work. I'll fix us a room and you can pay a visit to the Croatoans in the morning."

  "Two rooms," she said. "You can snatch me away from home and conscript me into an army I never wanted to join, but there is no way you can make me double up with you. You slept on the plane and you snore like a landslide. Call me when you've booked us in."