Live Without a Net

by Lou Anders

  While on the cobblestones, fragments glittered like diamonds in the watery winter sun.

  The transatlantic flight, in the gray condragon’s passenger womb, passed in fitful, sickening dreams—featuring Dick and Gunny, above all Laura, in strangely dark, surreal surroundings: good cheer turned to mockery amid chaotic dreamscape—as prep-infusions fought through my bloodstream, reset circadian rhythms, depleted skin melanin to a European pallor.

  My escort, the young-looking SOE junior officer who had brought my infusions—were the Special Operations Executive recruiting from the schoolyards now?—said scarcely a word during my periods of lucidity.

  It went against the paranoid grain to take debilitating treatment that left me barely conscious, unable to defend myself. But this was not a public flight; I had no right to refuse the treatment.

  At one point I woke fully, stared through transparent membrane at the night sky, the silver-capped waves below, and laughed out loud. My junior officer looked worried, but I merely shook my head, unwilling to share the very real memory that had visited me.

  Feynman—Dick—had led me into the comms room just before 11 A.M., when we would normally be finishing our intellectual sweat session. I should have realized something was up from the grins the women gave him. As always, glistening black threads filled the room; on them crawled commspiders, pinhead up to fingernail-size, passing between nodelice whose thoraces were swollen with the molecular-encoded fluids which technicians termed infopus.

  And then, on the stroke of eleven, a sudden phase shift occurred. My neck prickled as half the commspiders rose up on tiny rear legs, raised forelimbs in salute, and I realized the whole cross-and-diagonal formation was the Union Jack, instantiated in web arachnids.

  Dick grinned as he, too, saluted.

  Smiling, I slipped back into sleep, ignoring the nervous vibrations I was receiving from the youngster escorting me, aware they could mean only one thing: the mission pace was into overdrive; they were ready to send me in.

  In London, I passed through Whitehall quicker than the proverbial dose of Andrew’s Liver Salts. Final briefing, unusually, was to be in Baker Street; within twenty minutes I was there.

  Even though they knew me, I went through full procedure at each of three checkpoints before I was in the heart of the great cubic warren. Formerly Marks & Spencer’s corporate HQ, now more concerned with creating codes than selling winter woollies: either way, there was a grim, heartless, lightless efficiency to the place. A gray rectilinear warren, devoid of windows (save for the outer layer, where no secret work was carried out), whose unending sameness made it easy to get lost.

  “Fleming … How are you doing, old chap?”

  “Not bad, Leo. Got a good one for me, have you?”

  “Guaranteed unbreakable.”

  “Or my money back?”

  We both laughed.

  But that was only codes-and-ciphers; my briefing officer for the mission per se was a nervous-looking man with slicked-back hair and heavy glasses. His dark suit looked two sizes too big for his scrawny shoulders.

  I did not know him well, but his name was Turner and his reputation among the field agents was of a ferocious intellect, second to none, whose planning paid as much heed to getting his people back as the initial access phase. They loved him for it.

  But I knew that the powers-that-be used Turner sparingly, for the high-risk projects where potential gain outweighed perceived danger, in the opinion of Whitehall’s desk-bound analysts.

  He poked his head into the anteroom where I was waiting. “I’m ready for you now, old thing.”

  “Civil of you.” I followed him into the windowless room and sat opposite his desk. “Lewis would’ve kept me kicking my heels for fifteen minutes, just to remind me who’s boss.”

  “Ah.” Turner removed the spectacles, which I wasn’t sure he needed, polished them on his wide silk tie, replaced them. “That’s an Old Harrovian for you.”

  “You’d be an Eton man.”

  “Not quite.” With a sly smile, “Barnsley Grammar School for Boys. On scholarship.”

  I wondered what Feynman would make of the social minefield that was our all-nurturing but ruthless class system.

  “You could have fooled me,” I told Turner, and hoped he would take it as a compliment.

  “Language check.” He steepled his fingers, getting to business. “You have fluent Polish?”

  My personnel file lay on the desk, unopened.

  “Rusty.” This worried me.

  “You don’t have to pass for a native,” Turner assured me. “You will have a German-national cover-ID, but I’m aware that’s no problem. You can assume regional accents?”

  I nodded, knowing that the real briefing was about to start.

  “Very well. This—” Turner laid out a series of wide glossy black-and-white photographs: dark forest, slate-colored shore, choppy ocean waves. “—is your target area. That’s the Baltic Sea. And these men form your objective.”

  Two individuals, three photographs. Clear portraits of men in formal suits and bow ties; both of them scientists, I knew. Classic Aryan profiles.

  “Code names Wilhelm One,” said Turner, “and Wilhelm Two. Their identities are hidden within the Reich, but they do in fact share first names. And the photographs, as you can see, postdate morphosurgery.”

  “Final cut?” I needed to know if their appearances might have changed since then, to move even closer to the Reich’s cosmetic ideal.

  “We think so. They’re too busy for further surgery.”

  In the third photograph, taken upon an airfield with a dragon squadron as backdrop, “Wilhelm One” was standing to the rear of a group dominated by Hermann Göring. Though the scientist was mostly obscured from view, his black SS uniform was unmistakable.

  “Why two men?” I asked, knowing it doubled the risk.

  Whistles. Men’s shouts echoing in alleyways. Killer dogs, barking.

  I shook away the memory.

  “This one”—Turner pointed at “Wilhelm Two”—“is designing what flyboys call the payload. His institute in Berlin is carrying out the same work as our friends in New Mexico.”

  “You’re sending me into Berlin?”

  His gaze, dishwater gray, fastened on me for a long moment, and I wondered whether my show of nerves had blown the mission before the start.

  “Access and egress,” he said evenly, “would take too long. Not to mention the other difficulties. Wilhelm One, on the other hand, is developing long-range nymphcluster dragons on a genetically isolated development site in Usedom.”

  “All right. The Baltic, then.”

  Breathe. Stay calm.

  “And this chap, Wilhelm Two—Willi Zwei, we’ve begun calling him—is the one who appears to have made contact with us. I believe it’s an insurance policy, in case his side loses the war. At the moment, it’s a policy he probably thinks will never pay out.”

  Most Nazis would stake their life savings on all-out victory right now. These background ambiguities scared me.

  “We’re not sure”—I wanted to be clear on this—“who made the contact? They came to us first?”

  “Not exactly. Polish Intelligence had already alerted us to the existence of this development base.” Turner tapped the forest photograph. “The SS might have become aware of the partisans’ surveillance, and set up a scam.”

  “Dear God.”

  “If I thought this was a likely scenario”—with frost in his tone—“I would not be sending you in. Is that clear?”

  “Understood.”

  “Willi Zwei is due to visit the base from Berlin. I expect you and your team on the ground to make rendezvous with whichever Wilhelm is behind the message—”

  “They made contact via a cutout?”

  “Of course. But the content indicates it must be either Wilhelm One or Two: they passed on info only one of them could have known.”

  No need to ask for details. If they were pertinent, he would tel
l me.

  Turner talked me through the scenarios; none of them was pleasant. The worst possibility was that their project was stalled or fake, and I was falling into a trap specifically designed for someone with enough knowledge to verify nucleic bomb schematics at a glance.

  “That’s all,” he said finally. “Thomas Cook’s will see you through the rest.”

  Their official designation was Clothing, Travel, and Firearms, but we called them Cook’s Travel Agency because they sent us to such exotic places, where we could meet interesting people and with any luck not have to kill them.

  Quite often, we came back.

  “Thanks very much. I’ll send you a postcard.”

  I tried the operator again.

  “Whitehall one-four-nine-eight,” I told her.

  Once more, the empty ringing tone.

  Before I left the Baker Street cube, Leo called out to me. He was waiting at the intersection of windowless corridors that I was most likely to take, grinning while a uniformed sergeant gave directions to a newly joined-up FANY who was obviously lost. She frowned prettily, unused to deciphering Geordie accents.

  “Well, pet, first you go left—”

  “Come on,” said Leo. “There’s someone you ought to meet.”

  I followed him back to his office, but it was empty. Leo surprised me by jamming a slightly disreputable trilby upon his head, then shrugging on his overcoat.

  “We’re going to Victoria.”

  “How’s she doing, anyway?”

  “Grow up, Fleming, why don’t you?”

  As we walked along Baker Street, it occurred to me that sandbag manufacturers, to judge from the dirty piles around every doorway and window, were making a fortune. I looked up; the skies were clear of all but cream-and-gray cloud masses. It would be nice to see some rain.

  “How’re your FANYs doing, Leo?”

  “The resend rate is cut right down.”

  And agents blessed him for it. X-radiation checkpoints, sporemists, and natural hazards garbled many cryptocytes, whether avian-borne or carried by couriers beneath fingernails, or secreted in places it was best not to think about. If Leo’s teams could decipher a part-randomized base sequence from the field—in effect, cracking a code that was not the one the agent had intended to use—it saved a second dangerous journey, with a vastly increased risk of capture.

  “So who are we going to see?”

  “Someone you’ll like, I promise.”

  By this time the evening was growing cool, and we walked faster as we turned into Victoria High Street. Then we stopped opposite Westminster Cathedral, with its oddly pleasing mixture of brick-red and gray, and the bicolored tower rising upward. Leo headed across the road, and I tagged along.

  Inside, the cathedral looked soot-blackened but darkly impressive. I followed Leo through a discreet door at the side, nodded to a priest in vestments, and climbed a creaking wooden stairway. At the top, Leo rapped on a door.

  “It’s me.”

  “Come in, you.”

  Inside was a small oak-paneled office whose shelves were crammed with books. A tall redheaded man rose from his bureau to greet us.

  “This is Jack,” Leo told me. “And I’ll warn you now, he’s a Jesuit. Don’t expect to win any arguments.”

  I held out my hand, smiling. “I won’t. How do you do, Father?”

  “Jack. Please.”

  Leo peered at the shelves. “He’s also the best geneticist we have.”

  “Second best.” Jack waved me to a wooden chair. “You’re too modest, Leo.”

  “I don’t think so. There’s something I could use your help with—”

  As they launched into an arcane discussion of phage-borne randomizers, I walked over to the shelves that Leo had been examining. A small plain crucifix hung overhead, facing the picture of the Sacred Heart. Beneath lay a crammed mass of titles: Wallace’s Descent of Man; Schrödinger’s Life Waves; the complete Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Everything Immanuel Kant had written, in the original German. Gray’s Anatomy. Hobbes’s Leviathan. A slim volume of Emergenic Transforms, by Riemann. Machiavelli’s The Prince, in both English and Italian. Tarzan of the Apes, by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

  Open on the desk, beside a cheap brown-robed statuette of some saint, was a copy of von Clausewitz’s On War.

  “Interesting,” I murmured.

  “Saint Gregor Mendel?” asked Jack, mistaking my interest. “He’s one of my heroes.”

  “Of course.” I wondered in how high a regard he held von Clausewitz.

  “Have you ever wondered how different the world might’ve been, if the Vatican legate hadn’t plucked him from obscurity and spread his work across the globe?”

  “Um …”

  “I’m afraid the Philistines have arrived,” said Leo.

  “Story of my life.” Jack held out a small glob of blue gel toward me. “Here you are. It’s a new antiviral. Best protection you can have.”

  So he knew I was going into occupied territory.

  “Thanks, Padre. I mean Jack.”

  At that point, Jack broke out a bottle of Beaujolais, which he assured us had not been consecrated, and we drank a small toast or two and chatted about everything from girls—Jack laughed a lot—to Kant, to the war in Africa.

  It was only later, at the end of our convivial evening when an SOE driver came to collect me and Leo, that I wondered what was really going on. Had Leo intended to cheer me up, the day before I went into danger? Or had he set up this distracting soiree purely to keep me busy?

  Chatting beside me on the rear seat, Leo looked too fresh and innocent for the deceptive world in which we moved. But, even as I responded to his questions, all I could really think of was the one person who had come to matter, my small core of stability while everything around us slid into chaotic uncertainty.

  Night flight.

  Crouched in my transparent half-shell, ready to roll—

  “Thirty seconds.” The jumpmaster checked me, nodded.

  A gunner peered back inside the long fuselage, grim-faced. Probably wondering whether I was worth it: there had been ack-ack on the way in, and Pterafighter or Falcon squadrons were probably already rising; the flight back was not going to be fun.

  Asforme…

  “Ready—”

  Slipstream, as the hatch furled back. The jumpmaster reached toward me.

  “—Go!”

  Then darkness and buffeting winds were all around, fear shrieking inside, as the half-shell completed itself, became a cocoon.

  Darkest night above me, and below. Tumbling …

  And drop.

  Wet ripples on the silver moonlit grass: the drop sphere and its chute membrane were half-dissolved at the foot of a night-black hedge. I waited … then a soft whisper sounded, and I dropped. Shadows against the night: four men, maybe six.

  Wide-eyed, breathing fast and shallow, I crouched like a sprinter at the blocks, scared as hell and ready to explode into—

  “Hello, darling.” Liquid words, sliding through the chill night air, struck straight through my trained defenses, and I nearly choked with shock.

  Laura?

  I should have realized. Even the initial infiltration, the setup, would have needed specialized knowledge.

  “Dzien dobry …” A male voice. I could just see the rifle outline in his hands.

  “Mílo mi pan poznać,” I told him.

  But it was the figure at the group’s center I wanted to see.

  Laura’s here!

  A week of dream and nightmare: of days holed up in safehouses—here an attic, while German voices rose up from the street below; there a deserted farm, the farmer’s ruddy-faced wife giving cause for concern as she slipped away unannounced: we broke cover and made our way into the woods, just in case—and of the nights, traveling through heathland, which became steep slopes blanketed with thick forest, filled with the rustle of tiny creatures, wind brushing branches, and the surprising h
oot of a predatory owl.

  And Laura, my Laura, was with me.

  “You’re good at keeping secrets, my darling,” I told her. “I should’ve guessed why Leo kept me occupied in London.”

  “There’s no secret how I feel about you, dear man.”

  Kindred spirits, and more.

  When we traveled at night, we walked as one: each holding the other’s hand, sometimes with our clasped hands in her coat pocket or mine, for warmth. Among the four Polish agents with us—who moved through darkness like pale, alert cats, their night vision enhanced even beyond mine—there was a calm acceptance of the relationship, with neither joking nor resentment.

  They knew how easily lovers could be wrenched apart by the capricious, devastating daily tragedies of war.

  Finally, after a cold few hours spent crouched beneath undergrowth while roving scanbats passed overhead—dark flutterings against a strangely golden moon—we trekked on through winding forest paths, finally descending to the town of Lubmin.

  From the forest’s edge, we watched. As false dawn smeared the eastern sky, stars glittering against a backdrop thickening into navy blue, our small group stood watchful, breathing pine-scented air, regarding the cobbled streets and peaked roofs. There were no patrols.

  And then a window shutter moved, just beneath a wooden eave, and someone laid a striped dishcloth across the granite sill. That was our signal.

  One by one, we slipped across the open ground with nerves screaming against a hail of bullets that never came, boots in hand so that we walked on cold uneven cobblestones in silent socks, reached the back door leading to the safehouse’s scullery, and slid inside.

  The first morning was the worst.

  In a threadbare coat and dirty shawl, head bent forward, Laura shuffled into a group of workers on the gray cobbles below, while I watched from the attic window. Then a dark green flatbed Volksnashorn transport pulled up, and one of the Wehrmacht soldiers jumped down, jackboots clattering on stone. He rapped the armored hide in a control sequence; the rear unfurled, formed a ramp up which the workers could drag themselves, ready for another long shift at The Keep.