Maybe. Maybe that would work.
But she still needed to let Gabe know the map was there. Just in case. She needed to find a way to leave a message without leaving a message. A simple action that Jordan could report to Gabe to draw his attention to the jukebox.
Edith fished a coin out of her purse, stood up, turned to the jukebox. It was an unusual blend of music—American rock-and-roll and jazz, mostly. Some classical. She flipped through the albums, rubbing the coin between her fingers.
She dropped in the coin. Looked again at the men in the booth. Still ignoring her. But Jordan wasn’t. Good.
She made her selection: Brahms’s “Hungarian Dance No. 5 in G Minor.”
Then she sat back down at her little checkerboard table and slipped a book out of her purse. Always a useful thing to carry, for a situation like this. She opened the book but only pretended to read it, turning the pages at intervals. When the song ended, she stood up, put it on again.
Over and over, she did this. Biding her time.
Finally, she pulled her purse onto her lap once more. But this time, she slipped the map out along with a coin. When she went to make her selection, she lingered at the jukebox, head cocked. Listening. But also examining. The jukebox wasn’t pressed snugly against the wall. Edith slid over to the side of it, her eyes on the selections but her fingers moving deftly over the jukebox’s frame. Just as the song reached its final crescendo, she found a gap, an empty space between the frame and the jukebox’s wooden backing. She slid the map into place and chose the Brahms one last time. Then she went back to her seat and let the song play out, finally taking a sip of her whiskey. Edith hoped her hint wasn’t so subtle that the map was lost forever.
As the last strains of the music fell away, Edith gathered up her bag and left Bar Vodnář.
The night was cold compared to the stuffy air of the bar. Felt darker, too, as if the streetlamps had burned out. She moved quickly toward her car.
Two men stepped out of the shadows.
Literally, she thought, skin prickling. They literally stepped out of the shadows. “Can I help you?” she asked, drawing herself up, hating that she was still wearing the frumpy outfit she had worn to the hotel.
“I believe you have something of mine.”
Neither of the men had spoken; this voice emerged out of the darkness, disembodied. Edith tensed. She’d heard that voice before.
“Cartwright?”
He stepped through the darkness like it was a curtain. The same neat brown hair and athletic build she remembered, dressed in his formal finest.
“Hello, Miss Lowell,” he said, and then another figure materialized beside him.
Gabe.
For a moment Edith felt as if all the air had been sucked out of her body. But then she saw Gabe’s glazed-over expression, his slumped shoulders. The faint glimmer of light outlining his form.
“You have him under—under some kind of spell!”
Cartwright smiled, his teeth gleaming.
Edith moved as quickly as her training had taught her. Quicker, even. She dropped the bag and grabbed the gun and fired. She forgot about the protection charms until it was too late.
Cartwright descended on her, bringing the darkness with him.
• • •
Gabe’s head pounded with a pain he hadn’t felt since the early days of the hitchhiker, a pain like a deranged gnome drilling deep into the base of his skull. He sat up. Nausea lurched in his stomach and he leaned over and retched. Nothing came up but greenish spit.
What did he remember? Following Edith. She’d left the hotel, come to Bar Vodnář. And then—
His hands were sticky. Covered in something. That green spit? He wiped them idly on his clothes, trying to take in his surroundings. The cobbled alley beside Bar Vodnář. Edith. Edith had gone inside but he hadn’t, someone had come up behind him—
His stomach lurched again, only this time it wasn’t nausea but panic, a sick, overwhelming panic, throbbing like the pain in his head—
Only then did he look down. See that his hands were dark. Gloves? No.
Blood.
They were covered in blood.
His vision seemed to sharpen into focus. First his hands, then the street beyond them. And on that street—
Gabe scrambled to his feet. Choked up bile.
Edith.
Edith lay sprawled on the cobblestones, her chest blown open.
And blood. Blood everywhere.
On her clothes, her hair, her throat.
His hands.
His hands.
The Witch Who Came In From the Cold
Season 2, Episode 11
Absent Friends
Max Gladstone
Prague, Czechoslovak Soviet Republic
April 30, 1970
1.
The cop hit Gabe again.
He let the punch knock him to the concrete floor of his cell. He landed wrong. His shoulder screamed. He let some of the pain show, and lay on his side, still, bleeding from the mouth. Cut his lip. Tongue still whole. Blood tasted dull. People said it tasted like copper, but Gabe didn’t have much of a sense of how copper tasted. Blood, he knew.
He panted through his nose, and curled around his stomach as best he could, in case the boots followed. He had two kidneys, after all. Burst intestines would kill him faster. He thought.
There’s a fine art to getting the shit kicked out of you. Field operatives don’t learn it at Langley, because the kinds of people who go into the field tend to already have experience getting the shit kicked out of them, or kicking the shit out of others. Most everyone’s comfortable with the basics. But sometimes people traded techniques, in case they came in handy.
Like now: With his hands cuffed behind his back, three big guys in the small room (he’d christened them Meatface, Pugsley, and Bob), no weapons, and no backup, his options didn’t look good. A stiff kick might break Pugsley’s ankle, but that left two more guys with guns they hadn’t drawn yet. No. Best lie here and bleed and act like he wasn’t a threat.
He didn’t have to act that hard.
Far away, a door opened. He heard murmuring in Czech, too quiet to make out. Hands seized him and lifted. The hurt shoulder wrenched badly in its socket. “Where are you taking me?” he asked, through the blood, and received a shove in answer. Considering his last question had led to the punch—he wasn’t even sure what he’d asked, which was a bad sign—the shove was an improvement. He staggered down a narrow, dirty hall, Pugsley to his left, Meatface to his right, Bob presumably around somewhere. They turned, and turned again, and climbed a narrow stair to a door that opened into the night.
It was still night. Or was it night again?
An unmarked car waited, running. Gabe didn’t recognize the driver.
Meatface tossed him in and slammed the door. Gabe’s head rang off metal; an engine roared and he rolled in the backseat. Through the rear window he saw Meatface, retreating, glowering as if he’d just lost his favorite toy. The fucker’s knuckles still dripped with Gabe’s blood. Served him right.
“What’s going on?” Gabe asked in Czech. The driver did not answer. Gabe tried again in Russian, in English. No response this time either, save a sharp turn that knocked Gabe back over. Blood stuck his cheek to the leather seat.
For the first time in the last—how long? An hour? Two? More? Less?—well, however long, he had a moment to himself without someone screaming questions, or hitting him. Time to plan. Just a wire mesh screen between him and the driver. Could kick it out, maybe, if he had leverage. He tried the doors; they didn’t open from inside.
This was bad.
Czech cops were bad. Czech jail was bad. An unmarked police car driven through the streets of Prague by night, by a man who did not speak, that went a few steps past bad.
And then there was Edith.
God damn it.
He saw her again, still and sprawled on cobblestones, haloed by streetlight reflections in blood. Felt the
sick panic as he tried to remember how he’d come to stand over her body, and found only a gray cotton haze.
He had not killed her. He could not have killed her. But what had he been doing in that street? Who had struck him, and how? Had he been drugged by the Russians? Enchanted, somehow, by the Flame?
Edith. Christ. She tried to play the game, and they took her off the board.
He had been so sloppy, all along, ever since he’d come to Prague, since Cairo, even. If he’d caught the mole in the ANCHISES op in time, Langley would not have needed to send a counterintelligence officer. If Gabe had been better at hiding his own tracks, Edith would have never learned about the magical cold war happening beneath the real one. If Gabe had been able to protect her, she would be off in some other station, making somebody else’s life miserable with her books and her lukewarm mug of tea. But she was dead. And it was his fault.
The blood shining on the pavement. The blood shining on his hands.
• • •
Gabe wrenched his hurt shoulder trying to work the cuffs’ chain around his legs. He grunted through the pain, and gave thanks for his long arms. His back muscles pulled like hot taffy, but the handcuffs came around. The driver glanced in the mirror, but said nothing.
“This isn’t the way to the embassy,” Gabe commented when they turned left. He didn’t specify which embassy. Always a chance the driver might get sloppy.
He did not.
They stopped in a back alley in a rundown district of shuttered shops. The driver opened the rear door and stepped back, gun drawn. With his free hand, he gestured for Gabe to get out.
He did. Slowly. No sense coming off all badass when you’re down. Better to let them think they had you whipped. The pavement felt slick underfoot. (Blood between cobblestones.) A door opened up the alley.
Not much time.
He staggered forward. The driver’s aim left him for a fraction of a second.
He bowled into the driver, and tore the gun from the man’s hand. It slipped from Gabe’s fingers. He tried to elbow the man in the throat, settled for the jaw, and scrambled for the gun. The driver grabbed the back of his coat, and Gabe sprawled. Running feet approached. Reinforcements. Guards, probably—from the open door. He just needed the gun. He kicked the driver’s arms and reached for it.
A cane trapped it and swept it away up the alley.
The sight of that cane alone stopped Gabe’s struggle, but the reinforcements’ hands seized him from behind anyway. They pulled him upright.
Frank Drummond, CIA Station Chief Prague, stood between Gabe and the gun. Frank’s clothes looked slept-in, which they probably were. Frank himself looked like he was about to kill someone; Gabe hoped, appearances to the contrary, he was not.
“Sir,” Gabe began.
“Don’t you even talk to me.”
Gabe knew, hell, the whole station knew, how Frank sounded when he was angry. Frank used his anger like carpenters’ tools, to break a man open or build him up. This was a different, less polished voice. Its cracks showed. Through them, he heard a rage he’d never known.
Gabe had never feared his boss before. He did now.
Frank waved to the guards with his free hand. “Get him inside.”
• • •
Tanya paced by the Vltava in the rain, trying to fix her wrecked operation.
She wanted a cigarette, wanted a drink, wanted a warm bed and a cup of tea with milk. She wished she had been born to a different family, who would have raised her without the expectation that she would, when she came of age, join a struggle already millennia old before the Mongols sacked Kiev.
She knew her own mind, and knew the dangers of these unspooling circles of thought and blame, the guilt that stretched back through time to taint all the well-considered decisions that led her to this moment. Ignore the shifting ground. Return, always, to facts.
After the first barge raid Tanya had decided, on her own authority, to chase Zerena Pulnoc. Nadia and Alestair could rescue the Hosts; she would use the Flame’s divisions against them, to cultivate Zerena as an asset. The ambassador’s wife wanted to use Tanya as leverage against Sasha Komyetski—logical enough, use an Ice plant in KGB Prague Station to bring down the Flame Chief of Station, paving the way for Zerena’s own ascension. Yes, Tanya had served Zerena’s interests—but she used those interests against the Flame itself.
That had been her grandfather’s way. When he taught her chess, he warned her to beware the united assault. Break your opponent’s focus, force them to split their attack, and pick up pieces in the chaos. That had been the plan: Gain Zerena’s trust, then exploit the divide between her and Komyetski to hurt the Flame.
Even after Flame cultists seized the Hosts by the waterfront, she had thought—I can use this. Back footed, the Flame, like all cornered animals, displayed singular ferocity. In victory, swollen with pride, they could be turned on one another. So she looked for her chance to help Zerena strike against Sasha—and spin the Flame spy’s death into a victory for Ice.
But Zerena had pushed too hard.
Zerena had asked Tanya, point-blank, for incriminating information about Jordan Rhemes—and while Tanya had committed state treason for the woman, she refused to betray the Ice so directly. But she’d been forced to invent—and those lies must have been caught. The sorceress had dropped her. More than that—she had withdrawn from the world, missed parties and public functions.
If Zerena knew about Tanya’s betrayal, why hadn’t she burnt Tanya at once, exposing her treachery to Sasha and dooming her to a painful death in some grubby Lubyanka sub-basement? Perhaps she wanted to see Tanya squirm, to watch the other woman crawl across her palm, smirking at the certainty she could crush her at will, a child playing with a pinned insect. But changing her social calendar, acting so out of character for the cunning socialite mask she wore—this was more than a vendetta. Zerena had an op brewing, and Tanya’s ill-considered attempt to protect Rhemes had left her in the cold.
Tanya needed leads. She knew of the herbs from Zerena’s study: dungwort, calendula, boneset, lavender, and cloves, ritual preparations for ritual magic—but a different combination, from different traditions, than the magic of the Ice.
If she couldn’t trace Zerena herself, perhaps she could trace her tools.
Some of these herbs and roots were common, but not in purities required for ritual work, while others on the list she wouldn’t expect to find in Prague. Of the many purveyors in the city, only four could source all five. She’d visited three so far, walking fast, taking as much care with tradecraft as she could manage, but still she felt overexposed. The time for gentle questions was over. A spot between her shoulder blades itched—perhaps she’d been made already—but she had no patience left, and little time.
She stopped in front of the fourth shop: a small basement store with herbs hanging in the dirty windows. Her fist tightened until her knuckles cracked.
She glimpsed a face in the glass, strained, severe, long past pain. She realized it was her own.
She shoved the door open: a sharp movement, like breaking a bone.
• • •
The guards frisked Josh Toms before they let him downstairs. “Strict orders,” they said. “No offense.”
Of course not. Frank would be stupid not to suspect him at this point, after, God, Edith, after Gabe, after everything. But Josh himself had been the one to rat Gabe out to Frank after ANCHISES. Which might mean Josh himself was responsible for all of this, in a way. So much blood. So many friends gone.
Edith. God. He’d misled her, he’d feared her. He’d liked her, by the end. He felt safer with her behind him, at the riverside. Before everything went wrong.
The stairwell was dark and steep. He set his hand against the wall as a guide. The stone chilled him through his glove.
They had not given him the key. The door at the bottom of the stair had a little window cut into it, smaller than a clenched fist. Josh stared through, into shadows.
&nb
sp; Gabe sat on a chair, facing the wall. He must have heard Josh’s feet on the stairs. For that matter, he must have heard the conversation at the top of the hall.
“We have to tell Frank,” Josh said, through the door.
Gabe raised his head, but did not speak.
“He has to know.” Josh glanced over his shoulder. He didn’t see the guards at the top of the stair, but you never could tell who was listening. “He let me come because he thought I might have a chance of getting you to talk sense.”
That, at least, drew a sound: a short outbreath. No one who had ever heard a laugh would call it that. Gabe stood, and turned toward him. In the dim light his face looked painted with shadows, but those shadows were blood. Josh remembered, as a kid, looking into his own cracked and beaten face in the mirror, rendered foreign by violence, remembered the roil he felt beneath the dead, alien eyes he saw.
Gabe looked so near dead.
“We can’t keep anything from him now,” Josh said. Meaning magic. Meaning Ice and Flame. Meaning this whole damn secret war you’ve stumbled into, dragging the rest of us behind. “Not after Edith.” He wasn’t close to crying. Not even close. He just. Fuck. He’d pretended to be every chauvinist prick he’d ever served with, because Alestair—Alestair!—told him they had to keep her off the scent. Our business, my friend, relies on appearances. He’d made her hate him, just a little. But she was a good person. Kind, if not friendly. Wry. She’d had his back, and he’d had hers. And all of that for this. He punched the door. The sound made Gabe blink.
“Shouldn’t do that,” he said dully. “Hurts your knuckles.”
“Fuck you.” He’d never said that to Gabe before. He couldn’t remember saying it to anyone before. “Fuck you and fuck this. Edith’s dead. We got you back from the Czech police, and don’t even ask what we had to give them in return. Frank deserves to know. You keep stuff from him, you’re endangering him, endangering our mission here, endangering the whole world.”
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 39
