Tanya managed a faint smile. “Making amends.”
It wasn’t that Tanya no longer had misgivings—she had them by the folderful. She’d hoped to catch a glimpse of her grandfather back in Moscow, maybe recover another construct he’d created, like the radio currently in Sasha’s possession. Get some kind of guidance or reassurance that the Ice remained her best option. But she’d been blocked at every turn. Still, Nadia was Ice, and Nadia was trustworthy. As long as someone like Nadia was making the decisions, Tanya could ignore that knot of unease deep in her gut and follow orders.
When it came to serving the KGB, however, she thought somewhat differently.
“Morozova?” Chief Aleksander Komyetski’s voice was a sickly syrup. “So good to have you returned to us.”
Tanya and Nadia stared at each other a moment longer, and Tanya pressed her lips into a hard line. Then, rolling her shoulders back, she straightened to face Sasha. “Thank you, Comrade Komyetski.”
His cheeks squashed up into his eyes as he grinned and tapped his watch. “Ten minutes late. I hope your time back in Moscow has not gone to your head.”
Tanya’s gaze flicked downward. “I apologize. I’d forgotten to get my money converted and missed the first bus.”
Sasha waved his hand in front of his face. “No harm done. But please, once you are settled back in, do come to my office for a debriefing.” His smile sharpened. “I should very much like to hear Lubyanka’s thoughts on our little office.”
“Of course, comrade. Just give me a moment to put my things in order.”
Tanya whirled back to her desk and drew a sharp breath.
Nadia was watching her, head tilted, jaw tightened. Tanya shuffled through the files that had been left for her in her absence—trifling reports. Surveillance notes on developmentals, lists of newly arrived diplomats, a write-up on the latest embassy soiree. Nothing that couldn’t wait. But the seed of fear that had taken root in Tanya the whole train ride back from Moscow was in full bloom now.
Sasha wasn’t just any Acolyte of Flame. He’d tried to have her killed. And she’d had to stand in front of an entire investigative committee in the cold basement of Lubyanka and swear that he’d done everything in his power to protect her, that he was perfectly fit for his job.
Anything else she could have said would only have made things worse, both for Tanya and the Consortium of Ice.
“You’re an operator,” Nadia uttered under her breath. Tanya glanced up, chest tight. “Do what you do best.”
Tanya stood. What she did best was serve. The KGB. The Ice. Grandfather. But right now, none of those were simple. What she needed was to be at the helm.
Sasha was hunched over one of his chessboards when Tanya entered his office, squinting at a scrap of paper from one of his correspondence games. Her pulse fluttered at the sight of it. A month ago, he’d been playing chess with none other than CIA officer Dominic Alvarez, a Flame sorcerer who’d run an American op to exfiltrate a Soviet defector who was a Host. But even Sasha, for all his self-assurance, knew better than to communicate outright with a CIA officer. Hence the correspondence chess.
Tanya gripped the railing of the chair she stood behind. How many more games was Sasha playing? What secrets lurked at the other end of those boards?
“Please. Sit! You look so tense.” Sasha gestured to the seat before her. “You did not find your time in Moscow relaxing?”
“I wasn’t there for pleasure.” Tanya sank into the chair and crossed her legs at the ankles.
“No, I suppose you were not.”
Sasha clicked his knight into place, jotted down a note on his scrap of paper, then wheeled to sit beside Tanya on her side of the desk. Tanya’s eyebrow flickered up. Sasha never did anything by accident. He was putting on a show, pretending they were equals. How very proletarian.
“So.” Sasha looked right through her, smiling with only one side of his face. He was too close; so close she could smell his commissary cologne and the kasha breakfast stuck between his teeth. “How are our friends in Lubyanka?”
“Displeased. Understandably so.” Tanya refused to shrink back from his gaze. “They are not overly fond of misplacing things. Especially not rocket scientists. But they came to understand the circumstances eventually.”
Eventually. After she’d “accidentally” been made to sit in the wrong waiting room before her deposition. One in the basement, with thick concrete walls pressing in around her and water dripping on her shoulder, seated just close enough to hear the screams from the interrogation cells.
Sasha nodded, gray eyes twinkling. “It is as we said in the report. He was an old man, far past his prime. Signs of dementia setting in… It was very unlikely he could have aided the Americans much. Many of his former theorems have been called into question.”
Sasha had put together this bundle of excuses and forced her to present them to the higher-ups at the KGB headquarters. And what alternative did she have? She could have blamed Sasha for orchestrating the entire exfiltration to serve an ancient society of sorcerers bent on remaking the world in their own image, and then implicated herself for using a magical ritual to wreck the defector’s plane. It might even have been worth it, for a few brief seconds, as the inquiry panel stared her down and ran through a thousand psychological inventories in their heads. But no. Better to be back in Prague, even if under Sasha’s thumb. She could learn a lot about what the Flame was doing from there.
“You see? It is as I assured you. No one will blame our office for this defection. He was of little consequence, and no harm was done to the state.” Sasha rolled back to his own side of the desk and propped his hands behind his head. “I knew Lubyanka would agree.”
Tanya stifled a bitter laugh. “I suppose you have better games to play now, comrade.”
“So I do.” Sasha busied himself with resetting a board. “I have a new assignment for you, Morozova. There was an… incident last night. In the suburbs north of Prague, somewhere called Kralupy nad Vltavou. An unregistered barge was attacked by some manner of criminals. Very tragic, really.”
“And what do we care about Czech thugs?” Tanya asked. “They kill each other off—who cares? Less work for us.” But even as she said it, something pricked at the back of her mind.
A barge.
Sasha’s eyes gleamed as he watched her from behind his chessboard. “I think you will find that we are very interested in the dealings of all parties in this incident.”
The Ice’s barge. Where they’d stored the collected Hosts, placed into stasis—most of them against their will. Tanya opened her mouth, and felt herself shrinking away inside. She’d had her fights with Nadia and Alestair about the practice, one that had been kept from her and plenty of other Ice members. Tanya still couldn’t shake the sickening memory of when Gabe first told her the truth about the barge. When she’d had to see for herself. When she brushed back the frost and found the face of the Host she’d recruited, Andula Zlata, staring blue and lifeless back at her…
“You did this,” Tanya whispered.
Sasha’s teeth clicked together and he scowled. “Would I really be coming to you if I had?”
Tanya drew a deep, steadying breath. It had to have been the Flame’s doing—didn’t it? But perhaps Sasha himself hadn’t been personally involved. Had the Flame’s internal situation deteriorated that much? There had to be some angle here that Sasha wasn’t revealing.
“I want to understand this situation better, same as you do,” Sasha said. “Everything is on the table, my dear. You can see my moves, and I can see yours. Let us work together on this, hmm?”
Tanya nodded. So he’d been left out in the cold, after all. “Tell me more about this incident.”
Sasha scooped up a file from his desk. “It would appear the barge was being illegally operated by a group of common criminals seeking to exploit the communist system for their own selfish gains. It is not clear what they were smuggling”—Sasha gave her a pointed look—“but we can re
st assured it was something dangerous to the Soviet state.”
Tanya highly doubted that. She knew that the Ice contracted with a number of organizations in Prague and elsewhere, both legitimate and less-so, to help manage the logistics of a global ritual network. She herself had played a part in that network ever since she’d joined to KGB, helping to ease the passage of information between East and West. The way Nadia had explained it, the barge was just a temporary solution—a stopping point for collecting all the Hosts they’d found scattered across Europe and putting them into a safe, centralized holding until they could be transferred somewhere more permanent and secure.
“So I am very interested,” Sasha continued, “in information regarding this criminal group that operated the barge. But I am equally concerned about the…” Sasha’s tongue ran along his glossy teeth while he searched for the right phrase. “The individuals or entities who attacked the barge.”
“You don’t know who it was?” Tanya asked. Earnestly, she realized. She no longer thought that Sasha was being coy. Maybe it hadn’t been the Flame’s doing, after all. If the Flame had attacked the barge, why would he bother bringing it to her attention at all?
“No.” Sasha clenched his teeth. “Not this time.”
Tanya slumped back in her seat. “But you believe they had a, shall we say, particular interest in the cargo of this barge.”
“They took great care to extract some of the smuggled goods from the barge just before they set it ablaze.” His forehead crinkled. “Or just after. We don’t have all the forensics just yet.”
Tanya covered her mouth. Sasha flipped to a grainy nighttime photo of the barge and the massive pillars of flame surging up from it. The Hosts. The poor Hosts. Bile rose in the back of her throat. Andula and a handful more.
“But you—you said they—they removed the cargo—”
“Some. But probably not all.” Sasha grimaced. Slowly, he closed the file and tucked it back into a pile on his desk.
Tanya sat up straighter.
“Morozova, I wish to be very clear with you. I will not ask you to recover this cargo, because I know that you will not. And that would be very unpleasant for both of us.”
Tanya nodded. She supposed it was about all the kindness she could hope for from him.
“What I will ask you to do is search for this unknown party who attacked the barge. And when you find that information, you bring it to me. Directly to me.” Sasha narrowed his eyes. They gleamed like coals as he leaned across the desk. “Am I perfectly understood, comrade?”
He honestly thought she would tell him before she told her other contacts in the Ice? But no, she saw the truth behind his request. He didn’t give a damn what the Ice discovered about this attacker.
He wanted to be the one to take the information to his superiors in the Flame.
“Yes, comrade. I understand.”
“Excellent.” Sasha sat up and laced his fingers together before him. “This is your top priority now. Please feel free to pass any of your lingering projects to Comrade Ostrokhina. I’m sure she needs something to occupy her.” Sasha nodded by way of dismissal.
Tanya rose and slipped from his office. An attack on the Ice barge, and now, it appeared, a rift in the Flame. She couldn’t shake the sense that Sasha and Zerena and whoever else were engaged in some particularly violent game of tug of war—and now she was the rope.
• • •
Something in Prague was more alive around Gabe, and it wasn’t just springtime. He tasted the crystalline coolness after the rain in the back of his mouth, and smelled every blossom, reveled in their pink and purple hues. With a twist of the hitchhiker, Prague bloomed around him, yielding secret scents and feelings and elemental chords, and at long last, they threaded together into a symphony rather than a dissonant mess.
“You’re in good spirits,” Josh said without looking up from his library book as Gabe sat down at his desk. “Been eating your Wheaties?”
“Just glad winter’s over.” Gabe scanned the daily reports inventory in front of him and, finding nothing of interest, crumpled it up and pitched it over his shoulder into the burn basket. Three points. “What’re we reading up on today? Malleus Maleficarum? Emperor Rudolph?”
Josh flipped the page. “Interrogation tactics of the First World War.”
“Cheerful. Seems a bit modern for your tastes.”
“Maybe it’s time I played catch-up.” Josh looked to his left. “Seems like we’re getting a new arrival.” He jabbed a pencil toward an empty desk near the records room. “They were clearing a space earlier.”
“You sound nervous.”
“I should be. And so should you.” Josh closed his book with a sigh. “After the way ANCHISES went down? You know it was only a matter of time before they finished sifting through the wreckage and sent some vulture from Langley to hover over us.”
Gabe’s easy smile remained. “As they should. Really makes you wonder, huh? How someone like that could just—snap.”
“Snap? You call acting as a Russian mole in a prolonged capacity some kind of nervous breakdown?”
“No, you’re right. He must have known just what he was doing from the start. He had that plane waiting, and he—”
“I’m not just talking about Alvarez,” Josh hissed, hunching forward. “Obviously he’s a big part of why the op went south. But I’m more worried about our necks.” Josh tilted his head, blue eyes narrowed. “About yours, Gabe.”
“Well, you shouldn’t be.” Gabe twirled his pencil and scribbled down a note. “We did our goddamned jobs. Anyone with half a brain can see that. It’s only when they turned Sokolov over to Dom that it all went to shit. And I, for one, can’t wait to find out why.”
Actually, that was a lie. Gabe understood the why perfectly well: Dominic Alvarez was an agent of the Flame, and had been for God only knew how long. It was the how that concerned Gabe most, slithering into his thoughts while he lay awake at night, jolting him from a walk, from brushing his teeth, from chatting up a developmental.
Someone at Langley had gotten Dom placed on the ANCHISES op, and there was a damned good chance that someone was Flame, too. The way Tanya and Alestair had explained it, rituals were geographically bound, and whatever dark purpose the Flame hoped to use the Hosts for, they must have needed Sokolov somewhere on the western side of the Iron Curtain. For all Gabe knew, the Flame had been involved every step of the way in Sokolov’s process: from first touch in Moscow to putting him on that plane with Dom.
And if the Flame were wedged that deep into Langley, then they had a very good reason to put someone from their team on the investigation—someone who’d leave every stone unturned when it came to understanding who and what Dominic Alvarez was really all about.
Fortunately, Gabe had a few cards of his own to play, and he’d already made his move.
Josh exhaled. “Well, maybe it wouldn’t hurt if you acted worried.”
Gabe pressed his lips together and studied Josh. Dark crescents lurked under his partner’s eyes; everyone’s skin was a little pale from the long winter, but Josh’s looked positively sallow. And the way his gaze kept darting away from Gabe’s, like some kind of skittish bunny—
Josh was right. He could stand to be more concerned. And that began with acting that way around Josh.
He thought of Tanya, taking his hand during the ritual. The shyness in her glance and the hard, determined set of her mouth. For a moment there, he and Tanya Morozova—a goddamned officer of the KGB—had wanted the same thing. And they’d gotten it. But that time had passed, and it had to stay history. He’d helped the Ice, but his allegiance remained firmly rooted where it had always been planted: in service to the United States.
The Flame stood for chaos and destruction—that was easy enough to oppose. If helping the Ice from time to time held back that fire, then Gabe was happy to comply. But that was a wholly different matter from tossing his lot in with the Ice. He had let that line grow fuzzy, but he couldn’t
afford to—especially not if they were going to have an investigator breathing down their necks in Prague Station.
The CIA came first.
An irritated sigh drew both his and Josh’s attention. A short white woman, generously figured, stood at the main secretary’s desk with a travel-weary pull to her mouth. “I’m here to see Chief Drummond?” Her words lilted upward as she spoke to the secretary, muddled with a Boston drawl.
Gabe crossed his arms. Her hair was perfectly coiffed, if a little dated—light brown, volumized, better suited for a Bouvier holiday on the Riviera than communist Prague. Her heels were sensibly low; she wore a sweater buttoned at her throat, though her arms weren’t through its sleeves. Her brooch pin was a glittering starburst. And the carefully curated smile on her face brooked absolutely no dissent.
“Let me guess,” Josh whispered, his voice taut. “Counterintelligence.”
“You were expecting a couple of accountants to come poking around?” Gabe asked.
“N-no. Of course not. Langley would want to be thorough.”
Gabe noticed how Josh’s jaw tightened. Josh had more reason than most to be concerned. Even if the CI broad—Edith Lowell, according to the registry she’d filed with Frank and the cables HQ had sent Gabe in advance of her arrival—wasn’t looking into Josh specifically, her sniffing around was bound to catch the scent of anything off the books.
“They’re not here for us,” Gabe said. “If they were here for us, then we wouldn’t know about it. We’d never see them coming.”
Josh scowled. “Not reassuring, Gabe.”
“They’re here to find out where Alvarez went wrong—and only Alvarez. I’d bet my ass on it.”
Josh looked at Gabe like there was more he wanted to say, but his expression was guarded. Not for the first time, Gabe got the sense that Josh was wary of him, but couldn’t quite put how or why into words. He was close with Alestair—the extent of that closeness, it was better for everyone if Gabe didn’t know—but there was no way he’d learned about the Ice and Flame and everything else. Right? Gabe scratched at the stubble on his cheek. No, he was just getting paranoid. A little was healthy. Too much, though, and he’d break.
The Witch Who Came In From The Cold: The Complete Season 2: The Complete Season 2 (The Witch Who Came In From The Cold Season 2) Page 2
