Pembroke looked puzzled. “Arrangement?” He shook his head. “No. I’ve made no arrangements with him.”
Apparently Klaus hadn’t brought up the deal he’d struck with Marsh. There wouldn’t have been any point, had Marsh died in the hospital. Marsh lacked the patience to spell out their deal on the tiny slate; Klaus would have to wait a few more days until Marsh could speak without shredding his vocal cords.
Assassin? Marsh erased this immediately after flashing it to Pembroke, lest a nurse or doctor enter.
Again, Pembroke shook his head. “There wasn’t much left, after you drove into him. That chap melted half the bonnet before you made contact; his body was fused into the metal. It was hard enough getting you out of that wreck and into an ambulance without compromising the situation. But we managed to get a tarpaulin over the car quickly enough. We loaded the entire mess onto a flatbed lorry and hauled it to a warehouse down on the docks.” Marsh nodded; he knew the place, an SIS holding. The sutures throbbed again. “We’ve loaded the place with dry ice, to preserve the remains, but…”
Marsh closed his eyes. He sagged back into his pillows. So much for learning anything useful.
“Lincolnshire Poacher remains silent.”
Marsh sighed. Of course it would be.
“But,” said Pembroke, “speaking of which, we think we know how Cherkashin is communicating with his handlers back in Moscow.”
Marsh raised his eyebrows.
“Klaus has confirmed the Soviets captured one of the Twins during the raid on von Westarp’s farm. He claims to have seen her loaded onto a truck.”
Marsh rolled his eyes, slammed his head back into his pillow. A suture popped. The Twins. Of course, of course, of course.
Doctor von Westarp had labored for decades in his quest to capture Nietzsche’s “will to power.” At the foundling home he ran as a front for gruesome medical experiments, he went to horrific lengths to sculpt an Overman from the soft clay of abandoned children. And years later, under the patronage of Heinrich Himmler, he succeeded. By 1939 he’d created four men and four women capable of impossible feats: Gretel, Klaus, Reinhardt, Kammler, Rudolf, Heike, and a pair of nameless identical twins.
The Twins had a very specific ability, but a damn useful one. They saw through each other’s eyes, heard through each other’s ears, each feeling everything the other did. They were useless for combat. But they were a superb channel for ultra-secure communications. With one Twin in Berlin and her sister stationed elsewhere, the German High Command was free to relay the most sensitive orders and receive the most detailed reports without recourse to encryption or burst transmissions.
Marsh’s mind raced. He broke the chalk in his haste to scrawl, The other?
The broken fragment clicked on the floor. It rolled beneath the cot, leaving a faint powdery trail.
Pembroke said, “He doesn’t know where the Jerries had her stationed. But. Hard to believe she wasn’t somewhere in Europe. Perhaps even Germany. It’s a safe bet Ivan has her, too.”
Of course he did. Hindsight made it bloody obvious. Why hadn’t he reread the archives, scoured the Schutzstaffel operational records he’d retrieved from Germany? He ought to have refreshed his memory the day he returned to Milkweed. If he had, he’d have made the connection at once. But he’d refused to admit to himself that he’d gone soft, that he needed a refresher. That his prime was well in the past.
But none of that mattered now. The Soviets’ slow, methodical elimination of the original Milkweed warlocks suggested they were gearing up for something. Something big. Marsh had warned Pembroke about this. And now they knew, based on the Knightsbridge debacle, that Arzamas-16 had succeeded in re-creating and improving the original REGP technology.
Taken as a whole, it meant Ivan planned to unveil the Communist equivalent of the SS’s Götterelektrongruppe. To make the world tremble before the inexorable might of the Soviet Union.
But that hadn’t happened yet. If it had, Pembroke wouldn’t have wasted time with small talk and pleasantries. What stayed Ivan’s hand? Cherkashin and his handlers had saved Will for last, and now Will was dead, as far as the outside world was concerned. For what were they waiting?
Alongside The other? Marsh drew an arrow pointing to Will’s death, and another arrow from that to Confirmation?
Pembroke nodded. “Yes. That was our conclusion. Our friend Cherkashin runs a tight ship, doesn’t he? Not one for breaking protocol.”
Deducing that protocol wasn’t difficult for somebody well versed in tradecraft. Will’s death had been all over the news. No doubt Cherkashin had heard of it. So had his handlers in Moscow. But it could be elaborate subterfuge. Disinformation. So they wouldn’t act until he personally confirmed Will’s death, via the Twins, and Cherkashin wouldn’t do that until he’d received his own confirmation from the assassin.
Which was a shame. The children down in the Admiralty basement would make a nasty surprise for the Soviets. Milkweed was poised to chop Ivan off at the knees, if only he’d step into the open.
But they could coax him out. If only they had one of the Twins …
And Marsh knew exactly where to find her. He thought back to Will’s debriefing sessions. They’d questioned him at length about the embassy. Which is how Will had come to mention the guard posted outside a steel-banded door.
Tap, tap, tap went the chalk while Marsh outlined his idea to Pembroke.
* * *
Gretel returned. She tried to take Marsh’s hand again. He pulled away. “Don’t touch me,” he managed.
“Rest your voice,” she said. “Use this.” She rested the slate on his lap again.
Don’t touch me, he wrote.
“Your bandages come off today,” said Gretel.
Why are you here?
She frowned, as though it were obvious. “Your bandages come off today.”
He started to call for Roger, but raising his voice tossed him into another choking fit. He swallowed blood and flecks of sour tissue. Gretel put a hand on his chest and gently pushed him back to the pillows. “Relax.”
Her hand felt warm through the thin fabric of his hospital gown. It lingered. Marsh couldn’t reach up to knock it away without tugging painfully on a needle or his sutures. She smiled at him.
“—weaned from the painkillers entirely over the next several weeks, though it may be difficult.”
The door opened. Dr. Butler held it for Liv, apparently while discussing Marsh’s care. She entered, nodding halfheartedly as she took in the doctor’s instructions. Gretel’s hand dropped to her lap.
Oh, no, thought Marsh. Not now!
They had a chance to reconnect. It wasn’t his imagination. He’d felt it during Liv’s visit. She’d held his hand while he slept. But Gretel’s presence may have already destroyed the thaw in his relationship with Liv.
Liv began to ask Butler a question, but stopped when she saw Gretel sitting on the edge of Marsh’s bed. “Who is this bint? Your girlfriend?”
Gretel stood. “Hello, Olivia. Raybould and I work together.” She took Liv’s hand in both of hers. “I’m so pleased to finally meet you.”
Liv frowned at her. But the glare met Gretel’s eyes only for a moment. She flinched away when she saw the wires. She hugged herself again.
“Well, isn’t the Foreign Office a truly fascinating place,” she murmured. More loudly, she said, “I didn’t realize you fancy Jerry girls. Raybould.”
How on God’s earth could he explain Gretel? Liv, please meet Hitler’s secret weapon. She’s insane, cold-blooded, and clairvoyant. She’s been obsessed with me longer than I’ve known you. Nobody knows why.
Gretel killed our daughter.
Sod it all for a game of soldiers, he decided. Liv deserves the truth.
He steeled himself against the inevitable pain. “Gretel—,” he began, but Butler cut him off by laying a friendly hand over his mouth.
“Not yet. Give your voice another day’s rest. Use the slate if you must.” To
the women, he said, “He mustn’t get too worked up before I remove the bandages and sutures.”
Gretel slid her arm into the crook of Liv’s elbow. Liv flinched again. “Let’s step outside while the doctor cares for your husband.”
Marsh tried to yell through Butler’s hand. “Get away from her!” But yelling merely distorted his ruined voice, and the doctor’s hand muffled it into meaningless noise.
Liv paused, frowning. Gretel nudged her toward the door. Butler pulled a syringe from the pocket of his long white coat. He uncapped it with his teeth and spit the plastic cap aside.
“Look,” he whispered, leaning over Marsh to slide the needle into his shoulder, “I’m sure it’s quite distressing, your wife and mistress meeting like this, but what’s done is done.” His thumb depressed the plunger. “You must relax.”
“Liv, don’t let that bitch get her claws into you,” Marsh mumbled.
* * *
When he woke, Liv and Gretel were gone. The doctor stood over him.
“We’re finished,” he said. “How do you feel?”
Marsh stared up at him through bleary eyes. He blinked groggily. Finished? Oh. The bandages.
He reached up to touch his face. His fingers traced a furrow of scar tissue that extended from the corner of his left eye to the edge of his jaw and across his throat. It was hard and smooth, like a leather coat forgotten in a rainstorm and dried in the sun. The skin beneath his fingertips felt nothing.
“Easy, easy,” Butler said. He held a shaving mirror in one hand. “It’s important for you to accept that your body image is going to change. That takes time. But it’s equally important to remember you’re the same man you were prior to your automobile accident.” With that, he handed the mirror to Marsh.
He didn’t recognize himself. The mirror shattered on the floor.
The scar was longer and wider than he expected. An ugly furrow of puckered flesh covered half his face. The damaged skin was shiny and pink where it had burned, and cleaved down the center where the sutures had held it together. Now it itched like mad.
Butler said, “I advise you against shaving, for the time being. Further irritations to your skin could cause keloid scarring.”
The warning was unnecessary. Marsh had already decided to grow a beard. With luck, it would hide the worst of his scars, lessen his disfigurement.
He dressed while Butler explained how to clean and care for his scars. The instructions didn’t register, because Marsh was fixated on finding Liv and getting her away from Gretel. His foot bounced impatiently on the linoleum floor while Butler wrote two prescriptions, one for antibiotics and the other for painkillers.
Marsh managed a growly, “Thank you,” before hurrying from the room.
Liv and Gretel were seated on a bench in the corridor, where everything smelled of sterilizing bleach. Liv was slumped against the smaller woman, head on her shoulder. Gretel had an arm around Liv. Liv shuddered. Her eyes were red, as was her runny nose.
“I had such high hopes, that day in the garden.… Everything was supposed to be perfect and wonderful from then on,” said Liv, her voice heavy with the release of pent-up sorrow. Gretel hugged her. “It was before the war started. Before Williton…” She fidgeted with a scrap of pasteboard in her lap.
It stopped Marsh in his tracks. Liv had carried the evacuation tag receipt in her handbag ever since the day they’d said good-bye to their infant daughter at Paddington Station, back during the worst days of the Blitz. It was the other half of the perforated tag they’d clipped to Agnes’s clothing. The evacuee number was still faintly visible on the creased and worn pasteboard: 21417.
Gretel whispered to Liv. Liv shuddered again. Gretel gently offered a handkerchief to wipe away her tears.
Marsh knew in an instant what had happened while he’d been sedated. Gretel had given his wife the sympathetic ear she’d long missed. Gretel had looked ahead (how many years?) and foreseen a path for slipping her poisoned nettles around Liv’s heart. In return, Liv unburdened herself to Gretel, confessed feelings she’d never expressed even to her own husband. And along the way, she unwittingly gave Gretel everything she needed to know in order to orchestrate the bombing raid that had killed their infant daughter.
Gretel had known so much about them during those confusing days in 1940 … and it had all come from Liv. Today. In 1963.
It staggered him, this first peek behind the curtain. Even his rage quailed when confronted by the sheer scope of Gretel’s manipulations. The world was her loom; she weaved paradox and sorrow in equal measure.
You miserable bitch. Marsh’s hands curled into fists, his physical agony forgotten. He started forward again, savoring the release, anticipating the sensation of wrapping his fingers through her wires, feeling the electrodes crack their way out of her skull like hatchling chicks on Easter.
Gretel saw him. Liv felt her shift; she looked up. Her face was a mask of grief and confusion.
He recognized the depth of that sorrow because he met it in the mirror every morning. But Liv didn’t recognize him. Not through the scars, the tears, and the fog of memory. Not for several heartbeats.
Which was just enough time for his rage to become an impotent fury. He couldn’t drag Gretel out of the hospital by her braids. Not without telling Liv the truth about what she’d just done. That this, combined with Gretel’s madness, was what had killed Agnes.
It would break Liv.
Marsh knew he couldn’t do that. Even if the price was losing his chance to reconnect with Liv and to finally have his revenge on Gretel. He couldn’t subject Liv to that much self-hatred.
Gretel studied his ruined face and smiled.
ten
8 June 1963
Croydon, London, England
Marsh’s release from the hospital was the pebble that started an avalanche. Events unfolded quickly after he returned to the safe house. They had to. This year’s celebration of the Queen’s Birthday fell on the third Saturday of June. It made for a hard deadline, just nine days after Marsh returned.
At least, Will thought it was Marsh. The man called himself Marsh, acted like Marsh, even cracked his knuckles like Marsh. But the hospital had been a cocoon, housing a ghastly metamorphosis. The sandpaper rasp where his voice had been; the ugly wreck of his face, etched with a serpentine scar; the salt-and-pepper stubble where before he’d always been clean-shaven. Speaking more than a few sentences at a time caused him to flinch. He moved gingerly, even eating and swallowing with measured deliberation. And, like the man he’d always been, he bore the burden stoically. Alone.
But sometimes, when he thought nobody was watching, Marsh would sag against a desk or wall or chair, and toss another painkiller tablet into his mouth. Will, who knew something of finding escape in painkillers, watched him. In Will’s case, it had been to escape a quiet, invisible agony. Marsh’s agony was seared into his face for all to see.
Marsh had become the physical embodiment of Will’s self-delusion. An unassailable contradiction to the comforting lies Will had told himself. Will had justified his arrangement with Cherkashin by convincing himself the only victims were the warlocks themselves: men who deserved their fates.
But Marsh’s disfigurement was a direct result of Will’s actions. Did he deserve that fate?
No.
Will had done this. Marsh wasn’t dead (they called it miraculous, but they didn’t know just how stubborn he could be), but his blood still stained Will’s hands. Will’s recklessness had maimed an innocent man. Marsh had become a mirror, an enchanted looking glass, reflecting a hideous truth behind Will’s beautiful lies. Thanks to Gwendolyn, Will had begun to overcome his wounds. But Marsh would never overcome this. There was no healing it.
Will had entered this venture cloaked in righteous self-pity. The cloak fit no longer.
He wondered what Marsh had told Liv. Will had taken such a fancy to her, so long ago. And though he hadn’t thought much about her in the intervening years, he found he couldn�
��t bear the thought of Liv blaming him for what had become of her husband. Although, of course, she ought.
Will had his own part to play in Milkweed’s preparations. If things worked according to plan over the next several days, the tenor of the negotiations was going to change. It was Will’s job to ensure the children weathered the transition smoothly. Being dead, he no longer had access to the safe in his office at the foundation. But Stephenson—that cold, methodical bastard—had of course seen fit to copy the master lexicon Will had assembled from the individual journals of the warlocks recruited for the war effort. Pethick retrieved a copy from the Admiralty vault on their next visit to the children.
The work came with unintentional and unwelcome consequences. If Marsh’s situation was enough to shatter Will’s self-delusion, every minute spent in the Admiralty cellar made it more difficult for Will to believe himself a victim of the past. Those awful children were the true victims. Of abuses that sprang directly from Will’s own actions. His evasions, the adroit self-justifications, these failed in that demonic classroom.
Will admitted everything to Gwendolyn, one evening in the safe house.
He sprawled on a sofa in the den, long legs dangling over the edge while the top of his head nudged up against her leg. It was the first time she’d let him touch her since the day Marsh had appeared on their doorstep. They held that arrangement a long time while he owned his actions.
“You were right. I am sorry.”
She twirled a finger through his thinning hair. “Do you know what I think?” she said.
“That your father might have been on to something when he ordered you to reject my marriage proposal?”
A sad smile touched her lips. From Will’s vantage, peering at her upside down, it looked like a grimace. “I think the only way out of this is forward.”
This from the woman who had nearly tossed Marsh out on the street when she believed he’d come to ask Will to work for Milkweed again. Did she no longer feel protective of him? Surely she realized forward meant turning a blind eye toward further blood prices? He felt cold. Naked. But Gwendolyn had yet to be wrong about such things. Her wisdom outstripped his own.
The Coldest War Page 24
