The Coldest War

by Ian Tregillis

  Four: Cherkashin’s network, Lincolnshire Poacher, is running the assassin. But it has changed its procedures and fallen silent. We’ve lost track of it.

  Conjecture: We are buggered.

  He pinched the bridge of his nose, concentrating. The future of Milkweed, and therefore quite possibly of the country, rested with a dozen halfway inhuman children locked in the cellar.

  The cellar. What was it Will had said?

  My God. I didn’t imagine it.

  Marsh sat up. “Will,” he said, interrupting a question from Pethick, “how did you know about the cellar?”

  Will shook his head, processing the sudden change of topic. “The cellar? Oh, you mean—” His eyes flicked over to Gretel. “I witnessed some of that work. Just prior to leaving Milkweed.”

  “Did you tell Cherkashin about it?” asked Marsh.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I did what I did to bring evil men to justice. Anything else was irrelevant.”

  “This is important. Does he know about it?”

  “To my knowledge, no.”

  “Are you certain? Did he ever ask about it?”

  Will enunciated every word with emphasis. “We never discussed the cellar.”

  Klaus surprised everybody except his sister by chiming in. “Your worries are misplaced,” he said.

  The room fell silent. After the space of several heartbeats, Pethick said, “And how do you know that?”

  “You worry that this Soviet agent may know of something hidden in the cellar of this building,” Klaus said. “He doesn’t. If he did, he would have taken it long ago. Or destroyed it.”

  “What makes you say that?” said Marsh.

  Klaus took a deep breath. Like somebody steeling himself to dive headfirst into murky water. “Because I was trained as an assassin, too. It’s what you do with somebody who has my ability.”

  Marsh laid his hands on the table again, thinking very carefully. “So. If things had gone differently, you would have been the Götterelektrongruppe’s wetwork specialist?”

  “Yes, me. There was another.…” Klaus glanced at his sister, just for an instant. A complex expression played over his face. Marsh wondered what passed between the siblings just then. “Heike.”

  “Heike.” The name rattled around in the back of Marsh’s mind, dredging up memories of things he’d read long ago. “She could make herself invisible. Is that right?”

  “You know about Heike?”

  “I’ve read the Schutzstaffel’s operational records of the Reichsbehörde.”

  Klaus’s eyes widened. “Those records disappeared before the end of the war. Our captors at Arzamas spent years searching for them.”

  “You see, brother?” Gretel broke into a wide smile. She beamed at Marsh, almost like a proud parent. “He’s very, very good.”

  The demon’s affections made Marsh bristle. He felt oily. Tainted.

  “Getting back to the point,” he said. “If you were the Soviet agent, Klaus, how would you destroy something in the cellar of this building?”

  “I would walk through a wall, carrying a rucksack filled with high explosives. I would drop through the floor to the cellar. I would find my target, deposit the explosives, and walk out through the explosion.” Klaus shook his head. “Because this building hasn’t been reduced to rubble, I conclude your Soviet agent hasn’t learned about the cellar.”

  Which was the answer he’d expected from Klaus. But the blood drained from Pembroke’s face, and Pethick looked uneasy. The look on Will’s face was more cryptic.

  Klaus said, “I developed this technique to deal with the ouvrages in the Ardennes forest.”

  “You should have seen him,” said Gretel. “Nobody can clear out a pillbox like my brother.”

  “Of course,” said Marsh, “you’d already know this, Leslie, if you’d studied those files properly.”

  Pembroke cleared his throat. “This is all fascinating, I’m quite certain. But if we could leave the reminiscences for another time, and return to the matter at hand?”

  “I know what we need to do,” said Marsh.

  18 May 1963

  Knightsbridge, London, England

  The conversation at the Admiralty building had raged well into the evening. But though the questioning had stopped for the time being, Will found himself growing anxious again, only partially because of Marsh’s plan. He didn’t know what would happen when he faced his wife again. Would she even be his wife? Why didn’t he tell her when he’d had the chance? The look on her face had kept him awake all night. So stricken. So betrayed.

  In fact, Gwendolyn looked at Will as though he’d risen from the dead when he returned. She gaped at the sight of Will waltzing in like a free man. The whites of her eyes had taken a reddish cast; the skin under her eyes was dark and puffy.

  “William?” she gasped. “What are you doing here?”

  “I live here,” he said, but his attempt at levity failed. He was too tired, too confused and frightened by Marsh’s scheme, too sick with the worry he’d dealt their marriage a terminal blow.

  She stepped forward, but didn’t take his hand. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “You … you haven’t escaped, have you? Please tell me you haven’t made things worse by running away.”

  “No,” Will said. “I haven’t run away.” He perched at the edge of the fainting couch. He patted his hand on the couch, but Gwendolyn continued to stand. He sighed. “If you go to the window, you’ll see a blue lorry parked up the street a bit. My chaperones, if you will.”

  Gwendolyn pulled the curtains aside. “They’re watching you?”

  “Yes.” He joined her at the window. She stepped away.

  “May we discuss what happened?”

  “Discuss what? You lied to me, William.”

  To that he said, “Yes,” because it was the truth, and because he didn’t know what else to say.

  “You betrayed me. You betrayed the country.”

  To that he merely nodded. Because he still couldn’t bear to hear himself admit it aloud. What he’d done to the warlocks was nothing they hadn’t brought upon themselves. It was justice. He knew that down to his marrow. But to have betrayed Gwendolyn, to have driven this wedge between them …

  Will cursed Marsh and his bloody crusades. Damn him, and double damn that wretched Gretel. Even more than Marsh, she had ruined everything. Why did she care what Will did?

  He said, “They were evil men. You know what they did to me.” The tears returned. “I had to do something about them. I couldn’t bear it any longer. The anger. The shame. The self-hatred.”

  “What you did,” said Gwendolyn, “makes you no better than they.” She went upstairs. The bedroom door clicked faintly when she locked it behind her. Will cradled his head in his hands and wept.

  * * *

  The MI6 vehicle didn’t leave Knightsbridge when Will stepped out early the next morning. Too conspicuous, he assumed. No doubt somebody from the service had an eye on his car during every inch of his journey from home to his office at the foundation. Will suppressed the urge to crane his neck to peer through the rear window, to try to see if his minders were still there. Too much of that might have alarmed the driver.

  Oddly enough, he found the constant surveillance almost comforting. He tried not to wonder how his shadowy watchers could possibly intervene in time if another attempt on his life happened as suddenly as the automobile accident. Will reassured himself that as long as SIS needed him, they would keep him alive. It was better than trusting to blind luck, which as Marsh had explained was the only thing that had spared him thus far: Will was a public figure living in the center of London, and so Cherkashin’s man had opted for a hands-off approach by staging a very public and very tragic accident. A few seconds’ difference and that might have been the case.

  Will tried not to think about whether Milkweed would still need him after they’d carried out Marsh’s plan.

  He arrived at half past n
ine. Angela, his secretary, looked relieved. “Welcome back, sir,” she said. “I worried myself sick after His Grace told me what happened.”

  Claws of cold, nauseating panic dug into Will’s stomach. Aubrey knows? He’d hoped he could postpone that particular conversation a bit longer.

  But Angela kept smiling at him. As though everything were right with the world. She looked at the sling cradling his arm. “How are you feeling?”

  Ah. She meant the accident. Will hadn’t returned to work since then. It seemed a lifetime ago.

  His voice shook when he said, “This?” He glanced at his arm, wondering how to sound like his old self. “A minor inconvenience,” he lied. “But I fear I’ll be rubbish with a typewriter for some time.”

  “That’s what I’m for, sir.” She took her seat. “Things have piled up a bit since you’ve been gone. Mostly owing to Minister Kalugin’s visit. I’ve put it all on your desk, sorted by date and urgency. Shall I put tea on?”

  “Yes.”

  Will retreated to his office. He caught himself before he locked the door. Don’t change your routine. Marsh had emphasized that.

  He moved the potted nasturtium from the corner of his desk to the window. The soil was moist. Angela, thoughtful to the last.

  The flowers blazed scarlet in the sunlight. Easily visible from the street, for Soviet and British spies alike. A flowerpot in the center of the windowsill: Urgent meeting requested.

  After that, Will turned his attention to the paperwork stacked in neat piles on his desk. But he made little headway because he glanced across the street every few minutes, waiting for the arrangement of blinds across the street to change. He couldn’t concentrate. The simplest documents twisted themselves into indecipherable riddles. He’d spent all night on the rug outside the bedroom door, listening to Gwendolyn’s sorrow. He couldn’t clear the sound of her tears from his head.

  Nothing happened for several hours. Angela brought him a late lunch of tomato sandwiches. He didn’t eat.

  The afternoon dragged by, one agonizing minute at a time. Did Cherkashin’s men know SIS had nabbed him? Did they know Milkweed had him on a leash? Perhaps instead of moving the blinds, they’d shoot him through the window.

  He knew it was an irrational fear. They’d never kill him so obviously. Would they? He hunched his shoulders, touching his temple where he imagined a rifle bullet smashing through his skull.

  As it did every weekday at five o’clock, the hum of traffic swelled into the controlled chaos of the evening rush. Car horns; the rumble of engines and hiss of tires on asphalt; the unintelligible murmuring of a dozen conversations from pedestrians on the pavement. And as he did every weekday, Will tuned it out.

  The blinds moved at twenty past. One up, one down: Message received. Come immediately.

  * * *

  The crowds had thinned by the time Will arrived. He was thankful for that; it meant the gardens would close before long, giving him an excuse not to dally with Cherkashin.

  Just deliver your message and go, Marsh had said. And for God’s sake, pretend you mean it.

  On his way to Cherkashin’s bench, Will passed a young couple strolling arm in arm, a dustman emptying the rubbish bins, and a mother pushing a pram with two infants nestled inside. Who among them were SIS minders? All of them? None of them?

  Will arrived before Cherkashin. He seated himself next to a stand of wilted snapdragons; their bare stems cast shadows like needles across the sculpted lawn. A breeze tossed golden petals across the pavement, where they caught on his shoes. The gardeners had laid down new soil in the plots upwind. The world smelled of manure.

  The itchy feeling in his temple returned, and it grew with every minute that Cherkashin didn’t appear. As though somebody’s gaze tickled him through a rifle scope. Will concentrated on the lies that Milkweed had set him loose to tell.

  Lincolnshire Poacher is the assassin’s link with Moscow, Marsh had said. We must disable that network before we deal with him. In order to protect the cellar, we must sever the lines of communication.

  Of course, said the other spies, in a fit of pique. But that’s easier said than done.

  But Will knew, from the way Marsh stared at him while he outlined his thoughts, that this segue to the problem was intended for him. The nonspecialist.

  Radio triangulation, Marsh continued. Feed them something hot, too hot for a slow diplomatic pouch, and they’ll have to resort to a burst transmission. Find the transmitter, and we have our wedge.

  Of course, said the other spies, in a fit of pique. We’re not amateurs, thank you so very much.

  The trick, said Marsh, is knowing what to tell them. And it was here that Will knew he had just become the cheese in a very large mousetrap. Marsh pointed at him. It’s staring us in the face.

  During that long preliminary interrogation—preliminary, because other sessions and other methods were sure to follow—the act of describing Will’s interactions with Cherkashin cast them in a new light. The pattern unraveled, as though the spinning reels of the recorder tugged at a loose thread.

  The hinting. The probing. Why didn’t Cherkashin take all Will’s information in one exchange? Why draw it out?

  Because he wanted to turn you, William Edward Guthrie Beauclerk. Because he wanted to wrap you up with a bow and send you back to his masters in Moscow. Because he wanted you to oversee the training of brand-new warlocks for the Great Soviet. But you wouldn’t play along. So when you convinced him it would never happen, at that final exchange when you condemned to death the last of those wicked old men, so, too, did you condemn yourself.

  Cherkashin’s footsteps echoed in the gathering dusk. The soft leather soles of his shoes scraped loudly on the pavement. He swung around the bench and fixed Will with that cold, gray-lipped stare. He ran a finger across his forehead, flipping his hair aside; he needed a trim.

  Will tensed when Cherkashin’s hand snaked into his suit. But the Soviet spy runner retrieved a cigarette and a lighter, rather than a pistol. He dragged deeply. The cigarette tip blazed orange in the shadows.

  Cherkashin fixed him with another stare while exhaling. Smoke jetted from his nose like steam from a Chinese dragon. “I thought you were eager to be done with me,” he said.

  Feed them something hot, Marsh had said.

  “Tell me about life in Moscow,” said Will.

  18 May 1963

  Croydon, London, England

  Madeleine kept her word. When Klaus turned in for the evening, after returning from the roundtable debriefing of William Beauclerk, he found the center of his bed taken up with a broad, flat package wrapped in brown butcher’s paper and twine. He opened it to find a set of watercolor paints; half a dozen brushes; a palette; a board; four metal clips; a sheaf of thick, pulpy papers almost two feet square; and three books: Watercolor Painting for the Novice, Studies in Advanced Watercolor Technique, and Watercolor Masters: Dürer to Cézanne.

  The accompanying note said: Good luck, Klaus —M.

  It made him smile. He cracked open the tin of paints. They had a subtle scent, like rain and soft candle wax.

  Klaus stayed up late that night, reading by the light of his bedside lamp. Only later, while drifting to sleep, did he realize he didn’t know what to paint. He didn’t know how to have a hobby. But he had one now: a simple fact, a thrilling fact. His last thoughts that night were to wonder if the British would try to psychoanalyze him based on his artistic efforts, and to realize he didn’t care.

  He woke early the next morning. He hurried back to his room with his plate of breakfast. But it was nearly lunchtime before he remembered it, by which time the eggs had congealed and the beans were cold. He was scraping dried egg yolk from his plate to the bin, and wondering how one would create such a precise amber color with watercolors, when Marsh knocked on his door.

  “I don’t know where she is,” said Klaus.

  “I don’t care about Gretel,” said Marsh. “Not at the moment.” He beckoned toward the garden. �
��Let’s take a walk.”

  Klaus sighed. He wanted to return to his books. But he knew this was inevitable. Marsh was obsessed with Gretel; naturally he’d use Klaus as his Rosetta stone. Klaus would never be his own person. He would always be, first and foremost, Gretel’s brother. She wove her webs too tightly; the strands stuck fast, and nothing he did would ever scrape them clear. The watercolor obsession was a petty, pointless rebellion. Still, it was his. As long as he had it, he refused to despair. He had to start small.

  Roger came in as they stepped out. He said to Marsh, “It’s clear, boss.”

  They startled a pair of starlings. The garden occupied the entire lot behind both houses. Ivy carpeted the brick wall around the garden. (Jade. Vermilion. How to create such colors?) Klaus knew the wall itself was topped with glass shards. A paving-stone walkway meandered past ferns and flower beds (yellow, blue, violet).

  Marsh paused, his attention caught by a small maple tree in a wide clay planter. He touched the leaves, turning them gently with puckered knuckles. The waxy green leaves were a dull gray underneath, and mottled with brown. (Warm colors? Cool colors?) Marsh squatted beside the planter and touched the soil, rummaging through the thick layer of last autumn’s leaves that had accumulated around the trunk. He pulled out a handful of crumbling leaves, and sifted through them on his palm.

  “They need to transplant this,” he said to himself. “It’ll die soon.”

  Klaus remembered the way Marsh had been dressed when he’d first arrived at the Admiralty. In a boilersuit with mud on the knees. “You’re a gardener?” he asked, surprised.

  “Yes.” Marsh smiled to himself. Whether it was wry or rueful, Klaus couldn’t tell.

  “I thought you were a … government worker.” Klaus knew better than to use the word spy.

  “I’ve been that, too.”

  Marsh grimaced when he stood. He gave the tree’s condition one last critical glance. He dropped the dead leaves, wiped his hands on his trousers. He sat on a wrought iron bench with cedar planking, in the shadow of a patinated armillary sundial. Klaus chose to stand.