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)

by Lindsay Smith

  Josh felt pinned by Frank’s eyes. “What’s the other half?”

  “The other half,” Frank said, “is that Edith is a very good officer.”

  “You said that already, sir.”

  Frank didn’t look away. “You know anything about dachshunds?”

  “The wiener dogs?”

  “Dachs means badger in German. When badgers fight dogs, they go at the throat from underneath. So the Germans made a dog built low to the ground, a dog the badger’s tricks don’t work against. Edith has deep roots in the Company. She doesn’t like people. She’s determined, and perceptive. Men in our line of work have ways of keeping secrets, and those ways don’t work on her. So. While she’s in town I think you need to get out of the office more. Into the field.” His lips curled up, but the humor, if there were any, did not reach his eyes. “You’re looking a little pale.”

  “Sir?” Josh could pretend, one way or the other, but he knew what Frank meant. He’d been discreet—he’d tried to be discreet. His whatever-you-called-it with Alestair Winthrop, that passed casual muster as a less-dangerous liaison for the sake of interagency cooperation. But he’d grown too confident here, with Frank’s tacit knowledge, and Gabe’s. If Edith learned he liked men, there’d be no escape. “Fine,” he said. “Give me the file.”

  Frank passed it along. “I’ll give you all the help I can.”

  “We should have a better union.”

  “Spies don’t get one,” Frank said. “We love our jobs too much.”

  • • •

  Gabe hated his job.

  There were too many goddamn papers, for one thing. He was used to a certain amount of paper shifting in day-to-day spy work, expense reports and documentation being, as someone he’d disliked once told him, the lifeblood of bureaucracy, but the reams and piles and boxes of paper an internal affairs investigation required made the worst red tape he’d ever faced seem charmingly rules-light by comparison. From where he sat, he could barely see the office window. Paper ramparts walled him in. These pages held everything they knew about Dom. Everything they could find about everyone Dom had ever worked with. Everything they could find about Dom’s landlord, about Dom’s pets, Dom’s family, Dom’s phone records. Gabe hadn’t exactly liked the guy in person, and here he was, now the world’s biggest goddamn Dom Alvarez expert.

  He stood, stretched his back and popped his shoulders, and rounded the rampart to the window.

  “Did you find something?”

  The second reason he hated his job looked up from her work for the first time in three hours. Edith Lowell, Langley’s agent of everything-but-mercy, wore a blazer, a sweater, a blouse, and a thin string of pearls. She was starting to wear on Gabe’s nerves.

  He wasn’t sure what he’d expected. Someone more like Tanya, maybe, or Nadia, that jagged professional edge. If Edith had arrived furious, with Gabe and with Prague Station, that might have made sense. If she had been cold, he would have understood that, too. But Edith didn’t chew scenery. Edith made no pronouncements. She didn’t pledge to catch her man or get to the bottom of this; she’d never made hay of Prague Station’s incompetence. She just worked.

  She worked constantly, and perfectly. She worked for hours at a time in utter silence, sipping maybe every twenty minutes from a mug of long-cooled black tea, no milk, no sugar. She never touched her face or her hair. She sat with her back arched slightly, head so still Gabe could have balanced a book on top of it. Sometimes she rubbed a pearl earring between thumb and forefinger. That was the closest thing she had to a nervous twitch. Edith made no sound save for page turns. Edith never cleared her throat, never coughed, and Gabe, whose hearing was just fine, thank you very much, couldn’t hear her breathe. Two hours ago he’d thought she might have gone to the bathroom, or for more tea, and glanced over the rampart to check, but she was still there, still silent, still working.

  Perfect. Then again, Dom had been perfect too—a different kind of perfect, the perfect jingoistic ex-jarhead, complete with cigar stub. The Marines turned out guys like him by the twelve-pack. He had also been a Flame agent in disguise, and Gabe had never suspected a thing.

  He wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  “Not a damn thing,” he said. “His service record is pretty much spotless. The closest thing I can find to a blemish is a poor fitness report from a CO who didn’t like Cubans, which the base commander overturned. If I never read the word exemplary again, it’ll be too goddamn soon.” He waited for Edith to react to the curse. She didn’t. “I don’t think there’s anything in there.”

  “We’re not just looking for bad marks on his service record,” she said, with that sharp Kennedy accent. None of the Boston kids he knew in the service talked like that. “We’re looking for connections between his service record and his other files—bonds that might have been turned against him, people he might have subverted. Now that we’ve established his background, we’ll investigate the records of any close contacts he developed in his early days of service.”

  “Half the guys Dom served with have command rank now. You want us to look at all of them?”

  “If we must.” She turned from her open file. “If you’re tired of reviewing his service records—”

  “Yes.”

  She slid a thick folder out from beneath the one whose contents she was reviewing. “We got this from Karovich in the Transportation Ministry: entrance and exit visas surrounding Dom’s time in Prague. Dom’s pilot was East German—or at least the papers he filed with the tower in Prague were. We’re looking for relevant nationals.”

  Gabe glanced from the inch-thick folder to Edith’s sharp green eyes. Even if he’d known what he was looking for there, he wouldn’t have been able to find it.

  He took the folder and walked to the window. Edith returned to her work.

  The early spring street outside the embassy taunted him. It wasn’t nearly so warm as it looked, but the sun shone, and the skies were blue behind the clouds. Even the pavement seemed welcoming, and the people, who still hadn’t warmed enough to shed their thick winter coats, almost looked happy. He wanted to be out there, almost happy himself, among those people, milling, reading newspapers, just strolling, hands pocketed, eyes skyward, or like that guy over there, waiting at the corner, smoking—

  Gabe blinked.

  Waiting at the corner, smoking a cigarette, wearing a bright red pocket square and a bright red tie.

  “Do you smoke?”

  Edith did not look up. “No.”

  “Mind if I do?”

  “A bit,” Edith said.

  Thank God. “I’m stepping outside for a half hour. All this paper’s getting to me. I need to clear my head.” He used his most offhand tone of voice, but expected an argument.

  “Go ahead. There’ll be plenty of work left when you get back.”

  And more after that, and more. As if his absence meant nothing, which meant his presence meant nothing, which raised a whole bunch of questions whose implications he did not want to consider. Most proximately: she didn’t trust him.

  He needed to fix that somehow. How, exactly, remained a mystery.

  Well, he thought, with what even he realized was gallows humor, if he had to clean up this mess anyway, he might as well make it a little worse, first. He cursed, grabbed his coat, and went to find Tanya Morozova.

  2.

  Josh went looking for the mob.

  Frank had dossiers on organized crime, or at least slightly-less-disorganized crime, in Prague, tracing back to before the war. There was a black market here, as anywhere—people traded, banded together, built trust and expanded. Some organizations boasted ancient histories by the standards of the trade, resistance fighters who never let their networks lapse, or the grand old scumbags of empire. The Soviets made criminals of their own, too, and like everything Soviet-made, their crooks tended to be overbuilt, under-designed, and graceless. These were back-alley crooks, the kind of people who’d break kneecaps over a crate of counte
rfeit Levis and smuggled Beatles LPs. Certainly none of the groups on file had the gumption to attack river shipping, even under the cover of darkness.

  Reading between the lines, Josh bet Frank would have been happy with any excuse to get him out of the office. That twisted in his gut. Putting Josh on the assignment meant that he didn’t have anything better to do—that for Frank, protecting Josh from his own agency mattered more than getting any serious work done. Which meant, in a roundabout way, that he was compromised, that the fact he liked looking at one kind of person more than any other really was fucking with his job. Dammit.

  He caught a crosstown bus, and squeezed himself between globular commuters wearing thick wool coats despite the weather. This whole situation could go hang, as far as he was concerned. Dead-end assignment? Stay out of sight for a few weeks? To hell with that. If he’d been given a dead-end assignment, he’d drag some big wriggling thing back to the embassy, up the stairs, drop it on Frank’s desk, and wait for someone to pin a medal on him.

  Which they wouldn’t, of course. This was no business for medals and parades.

  Josh started his search at the pier, flipping the collar up on his long black coat to cut the wind. Sun slanted across the Vltava. Far away, the clock tower chimed. He kept his breath shallow. Spring had broken the winter’s deepest cold, but the air still hurt his throat.

  Dockworkers unloaded boxes from a flat, weathered barge. They wore coveralls and gloves, but none of the coveralls were stenciled “Mafia Guy,” which nixed his first plan.

  Second plan: frontal assault.

  A small lofted office oversaw the pier. He climbed the damp wooden steps. One was loose, and the pavement was a long way down.

  Josh had seen some big men in his time, so he wasn’t quite prepared to call the man behind the desk the biggest. Hard to put him out of the running, though, from breadth alone, and if an ounce of fat lingered on that body, Josh couldn’t spot it beneath the ill-tailored suit. Not that you could tailor a suit to a guy who looked like that. Easier to tailor a tent.

  The fellow looked up when the door opened. Had to look hard to see out from underneath those heavy brows.

  “Hello,” Josh said, quickly, in Czech. “I’m—the people I work with have some items to ship, and we have never shipped through Prague before. I’m asking around for advice.” Stupid, stupid, he should have at least gotten the cover story straight before coming in here and—

  Monument Man didn’t move the corners of his mouth down so much as the center of his mouth up. He grunted, and gestured with his skull toward a door—well, more of a gap in the partition, but it had delusions of grandeur.

  Josh hung his coat on the stand and entered the back office, where a balding, thickset man in an even worse suit slumped in a desk chair, scribbling limply on a pad of paper. He’d lined half the paper with jagged back-and-forth patterns, like shark’s teeth, before shifting into whorls. He looked up, and produced a smile he must have kept folded in a drawer when not in use.

  Josh believed in the power of positive thinking. He could tell this would be a useless conversation from the moment the slumped man applied his smile, but he did not let himself think it. You could stop yourself from thinking, if you tried hard enough.

  “I’m afraid,” the man said, after they’d introduced themselves and Josh settled into an uncomfortable chair, “we can do little for you without the proper forms, and those are quite difficult to find. Many, many layers of review. What would you like to ship?”

  “Cigarettes,” Josh lied.

  “Ah, well, in that case you must speak with the under-over-secretary of gum rot, and the archimandrite of the second-order carbon copy,” and so on. Josh knew the local bureaucracy enough to know that, at this point, he was getting the runaround, and once he realized that, he stopped listening until the man behind the desk reached: “So, as you can see, it will be a lengthy process. I hope, for your sake, you are not attempting to make arrangements quickly.”

  “Of course not,” Josh said. “But I did hope I could find someone who might help me with those, ah, arrangements.”

  The pen continued its slow progress along the paper, but the whorls turned jagged again. “Unfortunately, I merely run this office, and oversee these men. I am a small creature, as you can tell. Some have highly placed friends, but I am not among them, alas. We are condemned to a life of difficulty.”

  “The people I represent,” Josh said, “would be very excited to find an easy path to ship through the city. If there is anything I can do…” He left the sentence hanging.

  “There is not,” the slumped man said. He put down the pen and looked, for the first time in their conversation, straight at Josh. His eyes were watery and black. “I apologize. But if you do not have the proper authorization, there is nothing I can do for you. Kazimir?”

  Josh turned. Monument Man stood in the door—well, stood just outside the door. Kazimir could not stand in the door, exactly. He was too tall.

  “Fine,” Josh said. “I’m leaving. Thank you for the advice.”

  The slumped man smiled again.

  Kazimir turned aside to let Josh squeeze past. Josh shouldered into his coat, pulled the door open, popped his collar, and descended the slick wet steps, one gloved hand always on the rail.

  When he reached the bottom of the steps, Kazimir, behind him, said a single word. “American.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Your coat is local. Your shirt is—” He dropped into accented English. “Brooks Brothers.”

  Josh turned. The extra height of the step made Kazimir tower, not that Kazimir needed much help. “Yes.”

  “You need help moving cigarettes?”

  “I need a lot of help,” Josh said.

  “Small cafe down the street,” Kazimir said. “Look for me tonight after dark. Maybe we can talk. But come alone.”

  • • •

  Gabe had half an hour and Edith would notice if he was late. Walking—jogging, really, to judge from his lungs—to the small park near the embassy took six. He took a pack of Marlboros from his jacket pocket, tapped one out, lit the cigarette, sat on a bench facing the street, and waited.

  A woman sat next to him. Not Morozova. She read a newspaper. He glanced at his watch. Fifteen minutes. The woman stood. He glanced down. Her purse lay on the ground by his feet. He jumped up, grabbed it, looked around the park, playing nervous. A door opened across the way and a dress—it might have been the woman’s—disappeared within. The door drifted shut, slowly. He crushed his cigarette, ran past an old woman walking a dog and a young woman walking with her daughters, danced across the street between slow-moving cars, and shoved his way through the door into a dark, dusty concrete stairwell. He reminded himself to speak Czech: “Ma’am! I think you dropped this.”

  A door to his left opened. “Good. You found it.” He recognized Tanya’s voice. He felt a lot of things at once, and didn’t have good words for any of them.

  Because he—Christ—trusted her, he only felt a moment’s stab of fear as he stepped through the door, and she clicked the latch shut behind him and secured the chain. They stood in a living room unfurnished save for thick curtains that let in little light. Morozova drew back from the door. She looked strained. She looked alive, which he worried about these days. When she’d left for Moscow, he’d assumed everything one assumed. She wouldn’t come back; she’d been called home for good; she was in the Lubyanka basement, with a hole in her head if she was lucky, or dead or dying in some place without a name, some place from which they’d peeled all names. They were both good players, but good was not enough to survive this game. “I missed you,” he said. The truth slipped out. It made the room feel uncomfortably tight.

  Surprise whispered across her face, and something followed, like a smile without form. Maybe she had missed him, too. She must have been at least as worried. But whatever armor she’d donned against Moscow, she had not removed it yet. “You shouldn’t have thro
wn the cigarette away. That is an American cigarette. If they search the square—”

  “You think it would have looked more natural if I kept the thing as I ran?”

  “You would have been harder to trace.”

  “What do you need?” Gabe leaned back against the door. “You have five minutes. And two people know my face now.”

  “Ice people. And only one of them has seen you.”

  “The other one just knows you were trying to signal someone at the US embassy. That’s much better.” Gabe breathed in the heat of his frustration, and tried to breathe it out. “Rough times at the office, sorry. What can I do for you?”

  She glared at him, then looked away, though there was nothing to look at save the cobwebs in the unloved corners of the room. “I need your help.” His watch ticked seconds. The words came in a rush. “The Flame is moving. A new player is in town. Someone connected with the Acolytes, someone big. We do not know who. I hoped you could enlighten us.”

  “You’re coming to me,” Gabe said, “for information about who’s entering and leaving Prague. Can’t you get that information on your own? Don’t your people basically own the local secret police?”

  Her face flickered—now that had been a smile. Hadn’t it? “We could,” she said, “but my boss at the KGB happens to be an evil Flame wizard, as you know. I do not have access to my usual official channels. Hence, I come to you.”

  “We used to be able to meet in public. Or, at least, without the runaround.” He was wasting time, and he shouldn’t. Why had that felt important to say? Keep it business. She has her problems, you have yours, don’t complicate things.

  “We made a move,” she said. “It was the right move, but we now face the consequences. Can you help me?”

  “What happened?”