Tanya’s eyes glimmered. “I didn’t say there was a Russian spy on your team, you idiot. One of your men is Flame. This is not about getting Sokolov back for the Russians, but for the Ice. Are you listening to me at all?” She took a long drink of her beer. Gabe suddenly didn’t feel so sure of himself.
“This is not about Russia and the West,” she hissed. “You know the defector is a Host. I am not going to deny that it was the KGB who ordered me to raid your safe house. But I am asking for your help now. Not as a spy, but as a sorcerer for the Ice.”
The room spun around. Gabe grabbed Tanya’s half-empty beer and took a long drink. Tanya didn’t protest.
“Fuck,” he said when he had finished.
No, no one on his team was a traitor. He could be sure of that. But could he be so sure none of them were Flame? He didn’t know enough about magic to be certain.
“Fuck,” he said again, more softly this time.
“Yes,” said Tanya.
They eyed each other across the table.
“You want to turn him into an icicle, don’t you?” Gabe finally said.
Tanya looked down at the top of her beer. There was that haunted quality again. “I don’t want him to fall into the hands of the Flame. The Ice’s methods are—” Her voice faded away, and she closed her eyes and shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. I won’t let the Flame have him. I don’t care about the Americans anymore. But the Host cannot go over to the Flame.”
Gabe sat unmoving. Tanya’s cheeks were flushed; her chest rose and fell with her quickened breath. She didn’t like the idea of the barge, either, he realized with a jolt. She wasn’t going to come out and say it, but he could tell, the way she hadn’t looked at him when he’d brought up the frozen bodies.
“You know what the Flame is capable of, don’t you?” she asked in a hard voice.
He hesitated, then nodded. Alestair had told him about the Flame, about what they wanted to do to the world. Burn it down and start over.
“We can’t be on opposite sides anymore,” Tanya whispered.
Gabe knew she was right.
• • •
Josh bolted around to Bar Vodnář’s back door—he remembered Gabe mentioning it once or twice, and was grateful to discover that it actually existed. Unfortunately, it was locked, but the lock was old, and Josh was sure he could pick it. He slipped his set of picks out of his pocket and jammed them in the keyhole, then rattled them around.
The door sprang open.
Josh leapt back. His picks clattered to the ground. Jordan Rhemes stared at him.
“Let me in,” Josh said. “I need to know what Gabe is doing.”
“Gabe’s talking to an acquaintance.”
“He’s talking to the KGB!”
Jordan sighed. Fiddled with her bracelets. “You don’t know what you’re dealing with, Mr. Toms.”
“I know enough to know that you are interfering with business of interest to the US government. If you don’t let me in, there could be consequences.”
Jordan rolled her eyes. Josh felt a flash of irritation.
“I’m serious, Miss Rhemes.”
She sighed, and Josh was prepared to push the matter further, to flash his credentials and make veiled threats. But then she sighed again and pushed the door open.
“I know you’re not going to give up,” she said. “So just come in. Listen away. It doesn’t matter.”
A trap? Maybe, but he was going to have to take the risk.
“Thank you,” he said as he walked in, but she just shook her head.
“You won’t understand.”
He didn’t know what to make of that. But he could hear the low murmur of Gabe and Tanya’s voices in the next room. He crept up the stairs, onto the balcony. The lights were off up here, and it was easy for him to sink into the shadows.
Josh pressed himself against the wall and turned toward the balcony to listen.
Gabe’s voice drifted up from below: I’m not doing this with you. Then Morozova’s: You lied. And did she say something about a golem?
Josh frowned. He leaned closer to the balcony, trying to make sense of this senseless conversation. Ice. Flame. Magic. It had to be some kind of code. And Jordan had warned him—You won’t understand.
Part of him hoped that Gabe had just been grooming Morozova on the side, that this wasn’t what it looked like. But why would they need this ridiculous code, if that were the case?
The voices fell silent. Josh pushed himself closer to the balcony’s edge and peered down. He could barely make out the booth where they were sitting. Gabe took a swig of Morozova’s beer. Friendly, casual, like they’d known each other for years.
Josh jerked his head away and pressed against the wall. His heart pumped. He’s just grooming her, he told himself, over and over, but those weird code words jangled around in his thoughts. I won’t let the Flame have him. The Host cannot go over to the Flame. Who was the Host? The Flame? Was Ice Russia? It made sense, in an obvious sort of way. Was the United States Flame? But no, she had said the Americans, as if they were separate.
Gabe and Tanya’s voices murmured together, too low for Josh to hear now. A dark anger churned inside his chest. He wanted to leap over the balcony, pull his gun on both of them. Demand answers. But of course he didn’t. He wasn’t stupid. He just sat in the darkness, listening.
• • •
“This way, Mr. Sokolov. Watch your step, now.” The American pointed at a place where the sidewalk had crumbled away, leaving a jagged hole in the cement. “Wouldn’t want you tripping and hitting your head.” He grinned and winked. Maksim gave a thin smile in return. The American was a friendly man, gregarious and charming. He’d been the one to pull Maksim out of the safe house before the KGB arrived, and in the car ride over, he’d even offered Maksim one of his cigars. “It’ll help calm your nerves,” he said.
It hadn’t, but Maksim still appreciated the gesture.
“We’re in the city,” Maksim said, a stupid observation. But after the horror of tonight, he only had room in his head for stupid observations. “Is that wise, moving me so close to the KGB offices?”
“You’ll be fine, Mr. Sokolov. You have my word.” They were at the front door, and the American—Dom, his name was Dom, Maksim knew he needed to remember the names of his protectors—reached into his pocket and extracted a key, a big, brass, old-fashioned thing. The lock let out a click and a hiss when the key turned. Odd, thought Maksim.
“This is a neutral safe house,” Dom said as he pushed the door open. “That’s why it’s safer. The KGB doesn’t know about it.”
Dom stepped inside, blending into the shadows. Maksim hesitated—what did he mean, a neutral safe house? Wasn’t the whole point of any American safe house that the KGB not know of it?—but only for a second, because he did not like being out in the open. When he crossed the threshold, a knot of tension formed at the back of his head. He rubbed it. He was so tired.
Dom swung the door closed, locked it—there was that strange click-and-hiss again—and flipped on the lights to reveal a sparse living room. Maksim wrinkled his nose. The air inside had a strange, metallic odor to it, as if they stood in a machine shop and not a house. Maksim rubbed at the growing ache at the back of his head.
Dom glanced over at him and gave a small smile.
“Let’s get you set up in one of the bedrooms,” he said. “Make sure you’re nice and comfortable.”
Maksim nodded. The metallic scent strengthened. It wasn’t unpleasant, exactly—just unnerving. He couldn’t place where it was coming from.
Dom led Maksim down the hall and into a small bedroom. No furniture except for a mattress in the corner.
“I know it’s not exactly the Ritz,” Dom said, “but you’ll be safe here.”
Maksim nodded. The pain in his head was spreading down his spine. He needed to rest. Lie down. Try to sleep.
He moved across the bedroom and sank into the mattress. Dom watched him from the doorway,
leaning up against the frame.
“It’s been a long night,” Maksim said apologetically.
“That it has.” Dom grinned, pulled out his half-smoked cigar. “I know just the thing to help you unwind.”
Maksim looked up. Was the lock on the door glowing? No, it was only the moonlight. Only his imagination.
“Tell me, Mr. Sokolov,” Dom said, chomping down hard on his cigar. “Do you play chess?”
Episode 13: Company Time
by Max Gladstone and Lindsay Smith
Prague, Czechoslovak Socialist Republic
March 2, 1970
1.
The CIA pilot readied his plane in the cold before dawn.
Whatever you’re imagining, he didn’t quite look like that. Higher-ups in his line of work frowned upon people who looked like anything in particular, and he conducted himself so as to minimize any form of notice, including frowns. He took no risks. He turned in early. He smoked, but never more than three a day. He did not drink outside his home. He last had a hangover in 1959. Whatever derring-do was, he daring didn’t.
The pilot walked slow circles and reviewed his checklist. No ice on the wings. Wheel well: free of detritus. No rivets loose. He reviewed two checklists—the one on his clipboard, and the one in his head. The checklist in his head featured a few select, secret, Langley-mandated items the one in his hand did not. For most people, this would defeat the purpose of a checklist. The pilot was not most people.
The fuel truck came. He exchanged nods and broad gestures with the crew; when they needed to speak, they used broken German. The pilot’s German was perfect, as was his Czech, but he did not want the crew to know he spoke either language well. He waved thank you to them. They waved back. Any description the flight crew later offered would be muddled by his gloves and hat and scarf and coat.
The sky above the airfield blued.
Prague winter morning cold crystallized the air. The pilot’s breath sparkled with ice. He stood before his plane’s nose, stared up at the featureless glass curve of the cockpit windshield, hands in his pockets. He rose onto his toes and settled back down again.
He relished waiting. He liked the pause, the tension like a coiled spring. Everyone the pilot knew thought about flight differently. For him, its magic consisted of suspension: the coyote magic of moving through air unfallen, so long as you kept to the plan and didn’t think too much. So long as you did what needed doing, when it needed doing.
The sun threatened the horizon. The pilot checked his watch. Not late. Not yet.
• • •
Gabe Pritchard ran a stop sign, skidded over a dusting of snow, and slammed the brakes, bringing the Moskvich to a sudden stop by the steps of a gray apartment building. Alestair Winthrop, smoking on the sidewalk and so swathed in slick fur and black wool against the cold that he looked like a pomaded werewolf, revolved toward Gabe with the disdain of a man roused far too early for far too little cause. “Gabriel. I was about to leave. Surely your emergency can wait until morning.”
“I need your help, Alestair.” Gabe climbed the four front steps in a jump, tried the door—locked, of course—took a knee, and pulled lockpicks from his inside jacket pocket. Hands shaking. That would be the heartbeat. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and tried not being furious, without much success. Not enough time.
“Apparently, if you’re willing to do that in full public view.” The Brit ran up the steps and spread his jacket wide like wings to shelter Gabe.
Gabe doubted the sail of Alestair’s coat would help them avoid attracting attention, though maybe well-dressed men flashed closed front doors in Prague on a regular basis. He’d run into weirder local customs in his travels. Distraction. That was the adrenaline, messing with him.
“What, pray tell, brought you to such a state?”
Gabe’s second attempt almost broke the pick. Adrenaline, again. No one on the street, no open windows. Maybe talking would help. “Dom’s cover’s blown.” Alestair said nothing—he was monumental and impassive, playing out the beat for more information. “The Flame had someone in the safe house before the Soviet raid. They know Dom’s fallback plan—they could jump him and snatch the target before they reach the plane.” So exposed, saying this stuff out loud. Hell. No time. Focus. Exhale. Tension, rotate, rake. The lock slipped, the knob turned, the door opened, and he ran inside, Alestair following.
“Your man won’t be home.” Running upstairs after Gabe didn’t seem to hurt Alestair’s composure any. His voice barely shook. “Not after what happened last night.” Not after the raid, he didn’t say. Not after an all-out KGB attack broke a CIA safe house that should have been impregnable, not to mention a secret. Not after a months-long plan to run a defector came to fuck-all because of what looked like the machinations of a cabal of—Christ—cultists. Because in spite of their precautions against the KGB, they hadn’t guarded against bedtime stories.
It was Gabe’s fault, again. His fault Dom was on the run. His fault Dom might already be dead, from magic or from a more prosaic bullet, and Maksim Sokolov, defector and elemental Host, in the hands of the Flame.
“You can help me find him.” Gabe turned a circle on the fourth floor, scratched wood floors sandy with snowmelt grit, walls long grayed from their former white. Dom’s apartment lay behind the stairwell, facing the street. Gabe ran to the door, which was, of goddamn course, locked. “With—” Even now, even after the madness of the last few months, his voice hooked when he said, “With magic. If we can find something of his, maybe you can do that whatsit, synecdoche thing—”
“Sympathy.”
“Whatever.” The door fit poorly in the jamb. He knelt, checked the light that filtered through. “Dead bolt. Dammit.”
“Stand back,” Alestair said.
The Brit spent so much time affecting the fop that even Gabe, who knew better, tended to forget what he really was: an intelligence veteran of decades’ service, an old-school cowboy James Bond son of a bitch, and a sorcerer.
Gabe stood back.
Alestair drew his hands from his pockets, and removed his gloves by the tips. He rolled his shoulders, then swirled his hands through two perfect circles in the air. Gabe saw—no, he couldn’t have seen, he knew magic didn’t work that way—arcs of light trail the man’s tapering fingers. Alestair and the world stood perfectly still together.
Then Alestair kicked the door down.
The jamb splintered; the door swung open. Gabe rushed through the door, hands raised and out, ready to put them over his head (in case Dom was here and sleeping with a gun), or tackle whoever was waiting here, armed, for some dumb grunt like Gabe to pull exactly this maneuver.
On the ride over, he’d thought all the angles through. Dom would be here and alive, in which case he’d explain as fast as he could; Dom would be here and dead, in which case, if the assassin remained, disable him or her and interrogate, and if the assassin had gone, search for clues; most likely Dom would be gone, in which case search his personal effects for something Alestair could use to track him.
Gabe was ready for anything but a room that looked like no one had ever lived there.
• • •
“You got no idea how good you’re gonna have it in the West, doc.” Dom cornered hard onto the airfield. Maksim Sokolov jerked against his seat belt, and let out a breath of air. “Sorry about that.”
“In Leningrad, drivers worse,” Sokolov said, slowly, in English. “Also in the war.”
“You’re doing great, doc. Just great. You’ll fit in fine. And we have absolutely everything, you’ll see. Freedom. Good booze. And the women! Nothing quite like an American woman. Just a few more hours.”
“If we escape.” Sokolov glanced over his shoulder for the eightieth or three hundredth time this ride—conservative estimates, both. Maybe he wasn’t used to being shot at, maybe the raid on the safe house hit him hard, maybe a lot of things. But for the love of Pete, you’d think having a timeless elemental locked up inside your
skull would make a body less skittish. Jaysis H. Christ.
Still, no sense teasing the Host, so Dom said: “I get it, I really do, all that old-country pessimism. It’s a good reflex, especially where you come from. But you’re on your way to a better place, my friend.” Dom plucked the cigar from his mouth with his gloved hand, and pointed its ember across the airfield to a cargo prop warming itself on the runway. “See? There’s our ride.”
• • •
Empty didn’t begin to cover it. Empty was how you were supposed to leave a safe house when you shipped out. Dom’s one-room apartment, on the other hand, had been scoured. The floors shone. Not a speck of dust lingered in the corners. The bare mattress stank of bleach. No pictures hung on the walls. No clothes lay in the drawers. The acrid stench of burnt hair filled the place. Gabe traced that smell to the glistening white bathroom. Toothbrush, shaving kit—all gone, if they were ever here. Shower curtain, ditto. Charred ash coated the bottom of the bathtub; a few embers still smoldered there. Gabe poked through the ashes with the toe of his shoe: scraps of cloth from the bedsheets. A camelhair suit he remembered Dom wearing. Everything that couldn’t be taken.
The fire should have cracked the tub, but hadn’t. Blackened flame tracks rose to a height of one foot all around the inside of the tub, and stopped clean, as if they’d met a wall that wasn’t there.
Gabe backed up slowly from the tub, out into the main room, past the untouched stove.
“He’s left us a gift, at least.” Alestair lifted a wrapped cigar from the windowsill, as if it might bite him. “Not his brand, unless I am very much mistaken. A joke of sorts, I do not doubt, considering the thoroughness displayed elsewhere.”
“This isn’t normal,” Gabe said, “is it.”
“Define normal.” Alestair rolled the cigar between his fingertips. “This is how I would proceed, if I wanted to keep an acolyte from tracing me. Clean thoroughly. Remove any trace that might be used to establish a sympathetic or”—with a trace of humor Gabe didn’t share at the moment—“synecdotal link, as you would have it.”
The Witch Who Came in From the Cold - Season One Volume Two Page 19
