Christopher Golden

by Codename Wolverine X-men

  Cassidy smiled at the response. He couldn’t help it. She had given the appropriate code phrase, confirming herself as his contact. Despite his smile, she scowled in disgust and grabbed his nearly empty stein, marched away to get him another.

  When she returned, she didn’t lean over nearly as far, keeping a look of annoyance on her face. Still, she managed to whisper to him quietly enough that even the couple at the next table could not have heard her.

  “I’ve lost track of your packages. But your friend left Moscow yesterday,” she said, in perfect English. “She favors fine hotels.”

  And that was all. The barmaid fled to the back of the bar as though Cassidy had insulted her yet again, and this time she did not return. He left his money on the table and rose from his chair. The stern-faced man who’d been put on his tail was good. He didn’t even look up as Cassidy left.

  When Sean exited the tavern, he saw the raggedy woman again out of the corner of his eye, across the street half a block away. He ignored her, and walked on. Time to find a hotel for himself, and begin tracing his target.

  The stern-faced Stasi officer was called Haifisch by those he worked with. The shark. And Haifisch was no fool. He followed the barmaid into the back room of the tavern and saw her slip into the ladies’ room. Several moments later, an absolutely putrid-smelling old woman came out, brushed past Haifisch without even glancing at him. The old woman muttered something nasty in German.

  He waited nearly three minutes before going into the bathroom. There were no windows. No means of egress whatsoever, save for the door he’d just walked in, and yet the filthy little restroom was empty. His rage was matched only by his confusion as he burst from the bathroom, ignoring the stares of the tavern’s patrons.

  On the street in front of the tavern, he searched for the barmaid without any luck. The old, malodorous woman was also nowhere in sight. Haifisch snarled and returned to the tavern for another mug of beer. Fraulein Feuer would keep an eye on the spy for the moment. The barmaid, however, would have been a greater coup. Haifisch hated traitors above all else, and he would have liked to make the woman suffer before she confessed her treason, and the name of her co-conspirators.

  Haifisch smiled at the thought, and hoped he’d get another chance.

  Outside the tavern, an old man in rural peasant’s clothes walked slowly away. But he was not German. He was not, actually, even a man. He had been both the barmaid and the smelly old woman only minutes earlier. He was Mystique. And Mystique was also searching for the Black Widow. If her own contacts couldn’t find the KGB’s dangerous little girl, Mystique hoped that Sean Cassidy could. She was determined to complete her mission, no matter what it took.

  The marketplace in Karl Marx Allee roared with the voice of a thousand transactions. Bartering and theft were equally common. Items considered common in the West were often luxuries here, and so everything was sold at market. Some things, however, were sold out of sight of the general public, in the shadows of alleyways or behind stalls hung with woven cotton and wool.

  Natasha Romanova was clad in simple, drab clothing common among locals. She moved through the marketplace gracefully, silently avoiding human contact despite the crush of people around her. A large man with white hair and a bulbous red nose spotted her, averted his gaze, and brushed hard against her anyway, obviously enjoying the feeling of her lithe body against his own.

  As he apologized, he smiled at her, and put a firm hand on her shoulder. She was five feet, seven inches tall. Not a small girl, but thin and almost dainty-looking. At nineteen years old, she was far too young to be a widow already, but so she was. Her face looked even younger, she knew, and she might have been mistaken for as young as sixteen. Even fifteen, depending on the way she smiled or the cut of her hair. Such self-knowledge was important in the game of espionage.

  The red-nosed man with his hand clamped on her shoulder saw only a delectable little treat he hoped to manhandle. His smile said as much, as did the way his tongue hung, like a panting dog’s, between his slightly open teeth.

  But he was looking at her body. At the alabaster flesh of her face. When his gaze locked on her eyes, the big man’s smile vanished as if it had been burned from his face. She knew what he saw there: a frozen, barren landscape more deadly than Siberia. It was her soul. Once, there had been love and life there. Now it was a hard place, cold and dead as her heart, ever since her Alexi had been taken from her. It was his death that led her to work with the KGB, to become the Black Widow.

  The red-nosed man apologized again, and stumbled backward, unwilling to turn his back on the woman with death in her eyes. He nearly fell as he collided with a merchant’s cart loaded with rough, multicolored linens.

  As quickly as he disappeared, he was forgotten. The Widow made her way through the marketplace, then walked along Karl Marx Allee until she came to Alexanderplatz, a square filled with hotels, shops, and flats that had been built up in the past decades as East Berlin’s trade and tourist center. Not far from Alexanderplatz, she found the mouth of a dark, cobblestoned alleyway. She counted the windows on the top floor of each building to her left. At seventeen, she went to the opposite side of the alley and dropped down into a stairwell, huddled down like some poor wretch who made a home of garbage.

  She sat and waited for her target to emerge. Several hours passed before a middle-aged man in a tattered gray jacket and cap came out of the building. He glanced from side to side, missing Natasha entirely, and then began to walk down the alley in the opposite direction from the marketplace.

  The Widow followed.

  “His name is Grigorii Zhevakov,” her KGB controller had told her. “He was never a very good agent. But his wife, Katrina… she was one of our best. She would do anything to fulfill a mission. It’s Katrina you must be careful of. Doubtless she will have the disk.”

  Scientists. That was the cover the Zhevakovs had used in their real life. But it had been a thin cover at best. They were spies, just as she was. Now they were hoping to defect to the United States, and they had stolen a data disk vital to the security of the Soviet Union to present to the Americans as proof of their good intentions. Natasha had no idea what was on that disk, but it wasn’t her business to know. She had a job to do, that was all that mattered.

  The Black Widow was going to make certain the Zhevakovs never set foot on American soil.

  She set off after Grigorii, knowing full well that his love and loyalty would be the things that destroyed his marriage. Grigorii would lead the Widow to Katrina, or eventually Katrina would meet up with her husband back here in this alley. Natasha would retrieve the disk, and then, if the traitorous couple did not force her to take their lives, she would see that they were returned to the Soviet Union, where they would most surely be made to pay for their duplicity.

  Defection. It was something she found hard to understand. It would be like turning away from one’s own family, from one’s own mother. Certainly, there was an allure to the capitalist West, the glitter and glamour, the forbidden fruit of selfishness and depravity. But with all that Mother Russia, and her KGB superiors, had done for the Black Widow, she could feel only a righteous fury toward those weak-willed souls who would fall to the temptations of capitalism.

  Fury, and a bit of pity as well.

  But pity would not keep her from punishing the betrayers.

  The Widow followed Grigorii Zhevakov, ignoring the appreciative glances of men she passed. After Alexi’s death, she had no more interest in love or passion, except where it served her KGB masters.

  It was a commercial flight, following a preordained path southeast across East German airspace on its way to Vienna. Or at least, that’s what the East Germans would think it was. In truth, it was flying unusually low for a commercial flight, something that would have been attributed to instrumentation malfunction if they were questioned. They weren’t.

  But there were only five passengers on this flight, and four of them weren’t going to be staying onboard a
ll the way to Vienna.

  Wolverine stood in the open hatch and watched the world pass by miles below. He turned to make certain Team X was ready for the drop. Silver Fox was right behind him, her face unreadable as always. Well, almost always. You knew what was on Fox’s mind when she was ticked off. Other than that, she kept her own counsel.

  Maverick’s face didn’t give much away, but it didn’t have to. He was more than happy to supply his teammates with his opinion. He was a great soldier, and Logan was always happy to have North at his back, but Maverick was a bit too holy for his tastes. The boy was trying too hard to get into heaven. When you worked the spy game, pulled black ops in countries where nobody’d seen God in years, Logan figured it was a bit of a handicap to have a conscience.

  North would bear watching, then, as always. He’d never fouled up an op before, but Wolverine could sense it coming.

  Then there was Sabretooth. Creed couldn’t hide a thing. He loved this gig, Logan knew. Plenty of opportunity to kill people. Wolverine was no innocent. Killing came with the job. But he didn’t take lives unless it was absolutely necessary, and Creed had a habit of purposely putting the team into a position where killing became the only answer.

  They had to pull together if this mission was going to come off smoothly. They’d done it before, of course, but it was getting more and more difficult, the divisions among them too broad.

  Silver Fox leaned forward, and Logan moved aside to let her look out the hatch. But it wasn’t the view she wanted. He was surprised when he felt her lips touch his own, dry from the air rushing into the plane. Wolverine smiled, but Silver Fox didn’t bother. It was odd, he thought. He did believe she loved him, and yet she never seemed all that impressed with love in general. Or maybe she just didn’t trust love.

  Hell, why trust at all—in anything, or anyone? They were in a business that made you realize trust was nothing but foolishness, or fear of the truth, or both.

  “What do you think about this op?” Fox asked him.

  Logan blinked, stared at her through his goggles. He couldn’t make out the deep brown of her eyes past the plastic in front of his face, and the goggles she also wore. He longed for it, that earthy brown that just sucked him up and brought him home to the mountain woods he loved so dearly.

  How could he love someone who kept so much of herself inside? But then, he knew he wasn’t much different. Still, like a lot of things, like Team X itself, he figured time would take its toll.

  “What’re you askin’, Fox?” he replied. “Seems on the up-and-up. Pretty simple, actually, if you skip the whole part about it bein’ nearly suicide. In and out, do the job, it’s Miller time. What’s confusin’ you?”

  “Nothing’s ever simple, Logan,” she explained. “I always wonder who we’re really working for, you know?”

  Logan smiled. “They don’t call it black ops for nothin’, darlin’,” he said.

  “I don’t mind the dirty work,” Fox said in a low voice. “I live for it. And I’ll take orders like a good little soldier because that’s the only thing I can believe in. It’d just be nice to know for sure if we really are the good guys.”

  “Can’t say for certain there are any more good guys, Fox,” Logan replied. “Just us and them.”

  “I won’t believe that,” she argued.

  “Then you’re in the wrong business, babe,” Wolverine growled.

  Silver Fox seemed as though she was about to say something else, but the cockpit door opened and John Wraith emerged. He’d been up in front talking with the pilot. His appearance meant they were over their target area. Wraith was a teleporter, and a powerful one, but there were limits to what he could do. Sure, he’d jumped half a dozen people thousands of miles in one ‘port before. But it put him in a world of hurt to do it. So teleportation, when possible, was left for extraction.

  Incursion was up to Team X.

  “Ten seconds!” Wraith called over the roar from the open hatch. “Everybody set?”

  Team X signaled thumbs-up to their controller. The plans for dropoff and pickup had long since been worked out. It was time to jump. No pep talks from Wraith. It wasn’t his style. He did the job. As long as he kept on doing it, that was good enough for Wolverine. But Logan didn’t have any real faith in John Wraith, codename: Kestrel. Nope. Codename: Wolverine had faith only in himself.

  Falling.

  What a rush.

  The ground barreled up at them and the wind tore the breath from Logan’s lungs. He had a supply pack on his back, weapons and disguises. The black jumpsuits Team X usually wore were good enough for jumping out of planes, but once on the ground, they’d need to start doing the spy thing.

  He adjusted his goggles, watched the ground rising up toward him as if the whole world were on the attack. It was a HALO—high altitude, low open—drop over land, which was never a good idea. They wouldn’t open their chutes until they were dangerously close to the ground. No room for foul-ups.

  Wolverine pulled the ripcord. Instantly, the chute hauled him up short and hard, and he held his breath a moment. Then he was sailing down with the dark chute wide open, scanning the ground, and praying nobody had seen them. Nobody who would take notice.

  He glanced around and made certain the others had their chutes open. He couldn’t hear anything but the air ripping past him. A forest range opened up just ahead of them, and Wolverine angled his chute as close to the tree line as he dared.

  The ground came up fast. He hit, buckled, and rolled. Immediately, he was up, gathering his chute, and dragging it toward the woods. The others did the same and they buried the chutes quickly in a shallow hole.

  “No turning back now, kiddies,” Creed said gleefully, his savage grin enough to give away his mood.

  “Stick to the mission agenda, Sabretooth,” Wolverine said.

  “Whatever ya say, runt,” Creed replied.

  It wasn’t long before they had covered their jumpsuits with the rough linen clothing common to the East German countryside. For Creed and Logan, who spoke a little German, and for North, who had grown up in East Germany and spoke the language fluently, it was enough. Silver Fox needed something more. But with the appropriate attire and a little strategic makeup, it wasn’t difficult to disguise her as a gypsy woman. The disguise wouldn’t hold up under intense scrutiny, but it would serve their purposes.

  If not, there’d be trouble.

  But then, Logan thought, there was bound to be trouble on this op anyway. Just the way Creed was acting, and Silver Fox starting to show some kind of twisted morality, the mission had been off from the start.

  They’d been walking for more than an hour, the countryside quickly giving way to the spillover from East Berlin, the homes of those who would not deign to live within the city limits, including the higher-ups in the SED—East Germany’s communist ruling party. They were men and women of power who were, themselves, little more than puppet soldiers to a puppet government whose true master was the Soviet Union.

  With East Berlin still at least ten miles ahead, they passed a vast, secluded estate whose gates were more cosmetic than secure.

  “This’ll do,” Logan said. “Creed. Fox. Go in and get us a car. Quietly. And make sure it don’t have any identifiable markings. Maverick and me’ll make sure you don’t get any surprise visitors.”

  Creed showed his fangs in a nasty little smile and disappeared over the fence. Silver Fox followed in silence. Logan went to the edge of the fence and hunkered down so that he wouldn’t be conspicuously visible from the road.

  Maverick stood in the center of the dusty road, staring at him.

  “North,” Logan growled. “You got head trauma, kid? Get some cover.”

  “Have you lost your mind?” Maverick asked, too loud, and stalked across the road to drop down into the brush by the gate with Wolverine.

  “You lost yours?” Logan drawled. “You want to blow this op?”

  They stared at one another. Their peasant clothing did not hide the fact
that they were dangerous men anywhere near as well as it did the weapons they each had hidden amongst their clothes.

  “You have a problem, Maverick?” Wolverine asked.

  “We could have gone for that car,” North replied bitterly “You didn’t have to send those two.”

  It was what Logan had expected. Maverick was angry, and it wasn’t because he was jealous, that he actually wanted to go for the car. No, Logan knew just what was bothering David North.

  “In case you didn’t notice, kid, we’re in the middle of a covert operation, here,” Wolverine said. “For this op, at least, I’m field command. Let’s just get in and out of communist country as fast as we can.”

  But Maverick wasn’t about to give up.

  “Logan, you know what’s happening up there right now!” he snapped, gesturing toward the mansion. “You don’t think Creed and Fox are going to just go up and ask to borrow a car, right? You and I, we might have taken any witnesses down, bound and gagged them and put them in the wine cellar or something. That isn’t what Creed’s going to do.”

  Wolverine didn’t reply at first. Maverick’s words were echoed by the complaints of his own conscience. But the op was the most important thing. He hoped Creed wouldn’t waste time killing anyone he didn’t have to kill, but part of him knew that sending Creed and Fox would be more expedient simply because of what they would do to witnesses. They didn’t have time to play nice.

  Maverick stared at Logan, waiting for answer. He didn’t have one. Two minutes later, a Mercedes rolled silently down the estate’s drive, motor off. Wolverine felt relief wash over him. If they hadn’t turned the engine on, that meant they had left somebody alive inside the house. Maybe they hadn’t killed anyone at all.

  It was a nice thought. And just to make sure he kept it, Wolverine chose not to ask.

  Once they had driven into the pollution-blanketed, industrialized core of East Berlin, they turned onto a side street and abandoned the car—it was a little too nice a ride to be driven by a bunch of folks dressed like common laborers.