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

  “I warm up slowly.”

  “It is your move.”

  Without glancing down, Frank grabbed a checker and took three of Komyetski’s at once. “There,” he said. “I moved.”

  Komyetski breathed in through his nose, and took Frank’s attacking piece.

  Frank made three more jumps. “King me.”

  The game didn’t last long after that. Just a bit of mopping up. Komyetski took longer than Frank had expected to pin down and kill. When the game was over, the Russian leaned back in his chair, and folded his hands over his belly. “Invigorating.” He blinked, and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Unexpected.”

  “Always liked checkers,” Frank said. “A thinking man’s game. Good afternoon, Komyetski. Take care of yourself.”

  “You won’t indulge me in another game?”

  “I like to quit while I’m ahead.” Frank stood with the aid of his cane, shouldered into his coat, and left with Bruiser. He didn’t look back, no matter how much he wanted to see the expression on Komyetski’s face.

  • • •

  Josh doubled back twice. He rambled. He bought a pack of cigarettes and stepped off the street to smoke one, then spent a while coughing, because he did not know how to smoke. The space Ostrokhina had described was a narrow stone yard with a dry fountain spotted by lichen. He knew Nadia’s address, of course—Prague Station had put her under light surveillance after they learned she was KGB—but he’d never visited the place in person before. There was a bench, beside an ash bin for cigarettes. She leaned against the wall, smoking. He sat, and tried again, and still couldn’t get it right.

  “Shallow breaths,” she said. “Easier on the lungs.”

  The words came out all at once. He’d kept silent for so long. “I didn’t know where to go. Who to talk to. Who was safe. Alestair, I can’t. I don’t want to see him anymore. He was—he didn’t tell me what he was.”

  She drew into herself. “How many people have that luxury? To say who they truly are?”

  “What happened to your friend? The girl from the boxing ring?”

  “Gone.” Nadia tapped cigarette ash.

  He had said he was sorry already, but he said it again, in case, though it sounded so futile. And then: “A woman in our office died.”

  “You were close?”

  “No,” he said, too fast. Then he blinked. “Yes. I don’t know. I think so. We were friends. And Gabe—” He stopped. Whatever else Ostrokhina was, she was also a KGB agent. But he’d gone too far to back out now. “I can believe in—you, what you are, what I’ve seen you do. I can even believe Alestair, for God’s sake. But I can’t believe Gabe would kill her. Someone set him up. And he was too good to be set up, without …”

  “The word gets easier to say, the more you use it.”

  “Magic.” Saying it always felt like he had betrayed something.

  “Good.” Her praise made him feel no cleaner. “Magic changes the world. It does not change the mind. There are few rules, but that is one. Hosts, however, are things of magic themselves. They are vulnerable to certain techniques. But even so, a Host’s own will cannot be bent. Gabe is not a Host, but possesses some of their attributes.” Josh did not understand. He watched Ostrokhina, waiting for her or the world to make sense. She looked away. “It is possible he was lulled into a sleep. Like drugs, but harder to trace. Led to an incriminating location, then released. Our enemies—the Flame—could not have done this before, but they grow stronger. We in the Ice fight them, but their leader is reckless and powerful.”

  Josh laced his hands together and squeezed them. He needed the pressure to remind himself to hold his grip, on himself and on the world. A tongue of ash jutted from his cigarette. The smoke had tasted foul to start, and tasted no better now. “I need to save Gabe.” Because if I can’t clear him, he did not say, my boss will keep his investigation moving, and then he’ll be trapped in this just like me, and he will die. “Help me. You owe me, for the alley.”

  “The cultist, back in winter? The professor? He would not have hurt me.” Nadia drew the cigarette from her mouth and examined the ember as if seeing it for the first time. “I hate these things, you know.” She dropped the cigarette butt, and crushed it with her shoe.

  “Maybe you don’t owe me. But you owe Gabe. Whatever he’s done for you, you owe him.”

  “And he owes us.” Nadia sat beside him on the bench. “You worry for your friend. I understand.”

  “You’ll help me?”

  “I need to know the details. The woman in your office must have learned something dangerous to the Flame, if they went to such great lengths to silence her. Tell me what you know. Tell me what she found. And we will find a way to save your friend.”

  It sounded so simple when she put it that way. Of course she would have to know the details. Telling her would win him an ally, and he needed more of those in this strange, deadly game. She wanted to help. She was so good at showing him she did. He could not imagine her betrayal. He had come to her for answers, after all, and for aid. They both wanted to save Gabe—so they were on the same side. Weren’t they?

  He set the cigarette, still burning, in the ashtray beside the park bench. Calmly clad his words in ice. “You and your recruitment cycle can go to hell.”

  • • •

  When Frank returned to Bar Vodnář after a few turns around the block, the Russian was gone, his seat empty. Frank considered the room one more time.

  Put yourself in the other guy’s—gal’s—shoes. Maybe Edith wanted to leave a message, or a clue. But she hadn’t given anything to the bartender—at least, nothing the woman mentioned to Frank. Something about Rhemes didn’t smell right. Which was to say, she smelled fine, but didn’t pass the sniff test. Which was to say—aw, to hell with it. Point was, Edith might not have trusted her. But the bar was not KGB-friendly, and Gabe and Jordan had some kind of relationship CI never felt was compromising. So Edith might have thought this the best of her bad options. That didn’t say good things about her impression of Prague Station’s operational security, but then, the brass had sent her to clean house in the first place.

  Edith sat in this bar for a while, to hear Rhemes tell it. No meetings. A drink she barely touched. And—

  A coin fell into a cashbox, and the record changed.

  Ella Fitzgerald on the jukebox.

  Eyes closed, he remembered the first time he heard her, when his father brought the record home. Won it in a game, he’d said. A voice like rough honey.

  Edith sat by herself at the table, listening to jukebox music all night long.

  Frank hobbled to the box and fished a coin from his pocket. Bruiser nosed the side of his knee, and he scratched her head. The jukebox looked like every other jukebox he’d ever seen, slightly classier than usual, maybe, with more chrome and red, and a couple mirrors and flashing lights for good measure.

  What did he expect? Lights from heaven? This wasn’t magic. If she’d hidden something, it had to be here.

  He paged through the catalog. He fished under the jukebox with his cane, but found only dust, and not much of that. Rhemes ran a tight ship.

  The jukebox stood an inch out from the wall, just enough room for the plug. He checked the back anyway—trying to act casual, even though nobody seemed to be watching. And, what do you know, there was a narrow gap between the jukebox’s wooden back and frame, just wide enough to hold a folded piece of paper. He tried to look as if he were drumming his fingers, trying to decide on a tune, as he worked the paper free.

  He slid the paper into his jacket and walked away, feeling it like a burning lead weight in his pocket. He recognized the printing. This was it. He caught a crosstown bus. He passed the ride in stoic silence, and he got off three blocks from the embassy. He dug his fingers into Bruiser’s coat, and breathed as deeply as he could make himself, and tried not to remember the pit and the blood-spattered entrenching tool, or the cold dry sky over Korea, the pain from his leg, or the squish of human brains bet
ween his fingers. The past closed in on him. He itched for a blade, for a gun in his hand. For the war.

  But he made it to the embassy, and upstairs to his office, without murdering anyone. He even managed to smile at the guard who checked him in. You always had to be polite. That was one of the rules he set himself, because you never knew who, in this agency, would fuck you over at the first opportunity.

  He locked his office and opened the paper.

  He read it three times to be sure.

  Christ.

  He had to make a phone call.

  4.

  Late, smelling of smoke and the sweat of a long day’s work, feeling more like a marathon runner than a spy, Tanya climbed the steps to Nadia’s apartment and knocked three times, hard, on the door. She waited, then knocked twice more. Someone would hear her, look out into the hall, take note.

  She hugged herself. Ordinarily, she would have thought nothing of a neighbor’s notice. She and Nadia worked together, had been seen in each other’s company at all hours, guilty of mere friendship. But the stairwell felt more dangerous now—Zerena’s henchmen behind every door, Flame sorcerers cackling at her many mistakes.

  She knocked again, three hard knocks, hammer blows on coffin nails, while bad chances chased bad chances through her mind. Perhaps Nadia had been made already, or else Tanya was blowing her cover now, coming here frantic, eager, looking for a friend. She knocked once more. Some door would open soon: Nadia’s, or the door across the hall, or one of the doors upstairs or below. Neighbors made neighbors’ business their own. The Party encouraged it. Even in good times, it always helped to know what secrets the woman across the hall held close.

  Knock, knock, knock, and hope.

  The door opened—Nadia’s. Her friend stood, suspicious, in the crack between door and jamb, her thumb in the guts of a paperback English novel. Tanya pushed past her, slammed the door behind herself, locked it. “We have to raid the Vodnář.”

  Nadia stepped back, and closed the book entirely. Her fingers dimpled its cover. “What?”

  “The Vodnář. The Flame’s using it for a ritual.”

  “Rhemes is on our side.”

  Tanya shook her head. “She’s on her own side. I don’t know what hold the Flame found over her, but it’s strong. I found traces of herbs in Zerena’s study: magical stuff like nothing we ever used. I traced the supplier, hoping they could give me a client list. The vendor’s been buying for the Flame, all right—in massive quantities, everything they can source, and it’s all being sent straight to Rhemes.” She needed help right now, and all she saw was Nadia draw back. “I staked the place out. I saw Komyetski through the window, dealing with Jordan. The Flame is working on something big, and urgent. They just started buying these herbs, these supplies, in the last two days. They must be using the Hosts. It could be a coincidence, I know, but we can’t afford the risk. We have to move.”

  Tanya felt like she was drowning, while Nadia stood silent on the shore. She needed a line, a hope, but Nadia gave nothing. Of course not: Between Van, and the Hosts, her friend had been through so much. Nadia shook her head. “We need more. More information, more time.”

  “We don’t have it.”

  “What about Zerena? Can you get anything out of her?”

  And there was the rope thrown away. Nadia lit so few lights in her apartment: She lived like a cat, reading by candlelight, navigating by shadow. The shadows closed in like dark water. “Zerena dropped me.”

  Nadia betrayed nothing—Tanya read all she wanted, and all she could not bear, into her: all those long nights of warning, Nadia’s constant caution that she might let Zerena use her to no effect. She’d thought she had been so clever, but in the grand and final calculus she had been far more useful to Zerena than Zerena had been to her.

  “But if we need more information,” she said, desperate, “we can use Gabe. He’s close to Rhemes. She’ll trust him, if she trusts anyone now. We reach out to him, and get him to approach her. We might have to offer him—” But she stopped. Nadia wasn’t looking at her anymore. She felt the building’s concrete chill, and its silence, the silence of the women in the neighboring apartments and the silence of the Prague night outside. “What happened?”

  “He’s not dead,” Nadia said, and that voice contained its own silence. “He was arrested. Spirited away, we think, to a CIA safe house in the city. They say he killed a woman.”

  “No.” The word’s immediacy scared her, the anger and the edge she had not realized lurked beneath despair. “A setup.”

  “We think so. The Flame, most likely. The forensics are damning, but there is a trace of magic.”

  “We should help him.” That sentence burst from her without pause for choice, consideration, the weighing of options—a refreshing golden rightness after her cold, wandering day.

  Nadia only shook her head once. Again, Tanya needed no elaboration. She could make the perfect arguments herself. If Gabe was framed by the Flame, they could not clear him—the framers would have used their magic to incriminate him by untraceable means. And if the CIA held him captive, what did she envision? A KGB rescue? And what then? Gabe Pritchard would not defect. Her rescue would leave him, at best, a ghost without a country, one of those pathetic half-men wandering masterless through central Europe, selling themselves, their contacts, their skills, to whoever would deign to use them. “One of the Americans, Toms, he already came to me to ask for help with Pritchard,” Nadia said. “There is little we can do. But, about this Rhemes situation—there must be another way. We will find it.”

  And yet. After her failure with Zerena, and with Pritchard in custody, Tanya felt Prague slipping like a fish from her grasp. She felt alone. And there was something else: a fire, at the thought of Pritchard chained. She told herself that was the need that burned in her—a need for control, for power, a spy’s need to hold secret knowledge and have men in her debt. But this was a different fire, and its heat scared her even as it warmed. She lacked a name for it. No, that was wrong. She did not want to match it with a name.

  Nadia had offered reassurance, but Tanya could not repay that favor.

  She had to go, so she went.

  • • •

  Frank waited in the park by the river, watching Bruiser interrogate bushes in succession. Clouds hid the moon, and left the water a distant murk below. There’s a kind of black that’s deeper than empty space—the black of presence, rather than the black of absence. Bruiser pissed under a bush. “Good dog.”

  A man approached, wearing a paperboy cap and a long wool coat in spite of the warming weather. Steam wreathed him, though it looked like smoke. He joined Frank near the edge. “Got a light?” In English.

  “You don’t smoke, Danny.”

  “Always thought I should start,” Danny replied. “Help me fit in with the general staff. Those meetings, Christ. I’ve been in strip clubs with better air.”

  “Not in uniform,” Frank said.

  His friend laughed. “No, not in uniform. Never liked wearing the uniform out. It’s cheating. On the flag, if nothing else.”

  “I meant, you’re not in uniform right now, Lieutenant General Cartwright.”

  Danny seemed uncomfortable with the title, even though it fit. He always had looked like an officer, even when they were in the shit together; he had that way good officers had of making their men feel at ease, of making them want to do better. Clean-cut and all-American didn’t begin to cover it. “I’m in your territory, Frank.”

  “And it’s good to see you here. Even if you’re just passing through.”

  “Shouldn’t I try to blend in?”

  “With Prague?”

  “With all this.” Cartwright didn’t gesture, just shouldered deeper into his coat, and looked as golden boy as ever. “I don’t get what you see in it. I never did.”

  “Same as you. Duty.”

  “Some kind of duty. They keep you in one place and forget about you if you’re lucky. Your own family can’t know w
hat you do half the time, not to mention the country.”

  “Maybe I’ll write a book when all this is over.”

  “They won’t let anyone read it.”

  “For now, maybe. Give it fifty years.”

  One side of Cartwright’s face tightened in that way he had of not quite smiling. “And then some kid in California will make a movie.”

  “And who you think they’ll cast to play me?”

  “Sidney Poitier?”

  Frank laughed, even though that joke wasn’t funny. “Shit. He’ll be eighty. I look that old to you?”

  Cartwright’s hands shook a little. He set them on the railing overlooking the river. “Doesn’t it bother you, that no one will ever know about the good work you’ve done?”

  “I killed five men and lost my leg and they brought me to Washington so the president could give me a medal.” Bruiser pulled on the leash. Frank held her close. “I’ve had enough of people knowing about my work. I’d rather just do it. Speaking of which.”

  “Speaking of which,” Danny echoed. He sounded tired. “What did you find?”

  They were alone, but Frank still dropped his voice. “It might be nothing. But I think you have a mole.”

  No two people took news like that the same. One guy in Düsseldorf fought back when Frank told him—he wouldn’t believe it, couldn’t, the whole operation part of some Company plot to fuck with his career, and his command. Frank had walked the man through a pile of evidence without convincing him. The mole would not have hurt the officer’s career, but his disbelief sure had. Most common reaction, in this as in everything else, was disbelief. Nothing evil about that. Motherfuckers just tended to believe they didn’t make the same mistakes as everyone else, even if they knew how often beliefs like that were bullshit. Security was tough, and the Soviet human intelligence machine turned out damn fine officers, and the sad truth was, everyone was vulnerable.