The Witch Who Came in From the Cold - Season One Volume One

by Lindsay Smith

  “Wasn’t wandering,” he managed. “Homing.”

  He’d been about as aimless as a compass. What Jordan took for wandering had been triangulation, of a sort. He didn’t know how he knew where to go, only that he did. Same way he’d zeroed in on that wretched barge.

  A car rumbled slowly down the macadam just beyond the graveyard wall. In unison, they snapped off their flashlights and hunched in the shadows, listening for the slam of a door or the shouts of discovery. Gabe counted thirty heartbeats before exhaling.

  Jordan shook her head. The gesture sent eddies of silvery mist gamboling through the gravestones. “We’re running out of luck. So listen to me, okay? The golem is a legend. It’s a comforting fairy tale and nothing more.”

  Gabe wanted to say, Well, I’m pretty certain that something is sure as hell down there.

  Instead, it came out as “Gunnnghhh . . .” He doubled over again.

  “Gabe, you’re drooling.” Jordan handed him her handkerchief and grabbed his coat lapels. “We’re leaving.”

  “No. We’re too close now.”

  He managed to lever himself upright. Swaying like a prizefighter, he hefted the shovel and kept digging. Jordan made to take it from him just as his blade thunked against something hard. “Shine your light down there.”

  “Gabe—”

  “Please, just do it.”

  Jordan sighed and cupped her hand around the beam to lessen the inevitable fog halo before clicking the switch. His shovel had splintered the planks of a crude casket.

  “Huh,” she said.

  The screech of tires pierced the night. Gabe dropped to his knees and started brushing away the dirt with his hands. The touch of the casket jolted him like a live wire. There was an inscription on the wood. Hebrew, of course.

  “Can you read this?” he mumbled. The taste of blood filled his mouth.

  The soft glow of approaching flashlight beams pierced the gloom. One set to the north and another to the east, moving quickly.

  “Damn,” said Jordan. “We’re blown. Time to go.”

  She grabbed Gabe by the shoulders and tried to haul him to his feet. He shrugged her off. Jordan tumbled backward. Her flashlight went sailing in a high arc, spinning like a lighthouse beacon, visible clear across the graveyard.

  Shouts and whistles echoed through the cemetery.

  “We have to go, NOW! They’ll have us surrounded.”

  The urgency in her voice penetrated his fugue. “Yeah, okay—”

  A muddy fist like the river incarnate punched up through the moldering planks and clamped around his wrist.

  • • •

  Eighteen hours earlier, Gabe had been crouched under the open hood of the Moskvich, which was parked slightly skewwhiff over a curb at the edge of the Old Town Square. He cranked the socket wrench. Then he shook feeling back into his numb fingers, stretching until his back popped. And watched the passersby.

  “Overalls, flat cap, seven o’clock,” he said.

  Josh fished out a toothpick and grimaced at the side mirror. He dug at an incisor for a few moments before saying, “You mean Boris Badenov over there?”

  “Must catch pesky moose and squirrel,” Gabe said in his best caricature of a Russian accent. Josh snickered.

  “Okay,” said Gabe, serious again. “Try it now.”

  Josh hit the starter. The engine coughed for a few seconds as if considering the suggestion before deciding, on balance, not to bother.

  “Nope,” said Josh. “Still dead.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Peabody. I hadn’t noticed.”

  The temperature had dropped overnight. The Gothic towers of the Church of Our Lady before Týn were a pair of burnt Christmas cookies dusted with powdered sugar. The cold provided a superb cover. For a car designed and built by the damn Russians of all people, the Moskvich exhibited a profound and illogical aversion to cold weather.

  Josh muttered under his breath. “Piece of crap.”

  Gabe spat the taste of copper from his mouth and sighed. “Oh, come on, you hunk of junk.” He peeled off the useless gloves and puffed on his fingers a few times before pulling them back on. He crouched under the hood again, splitting his attention between the heap of fine Soviet engineering and the mid-morning police presence.

  Frank had them assessing potential routes through the Staré Mĕsto, in preparation for ANCHISES. It was scrubwork and they knew it. If the officers working ANCHISES found themselves herded into the wide open spaces of the Old Town Square, it would mean so many other things had already gone so enthusiastically to hell that the op was a catastrophe. Gabe’s screwup with Drahomir had cast a pall over Frank’s faith in him; he’d salvaged that, but the clouds hadn’t dissipated. So Gabe would eat this slice of humble pie, plaster a shit-eating grin on his face, and ask for seconds like Oliver goddamned Twist if that’s what it took to get a place at the table again. He shivered in the shadow of the Old City Hall while the ticking of a medieval astronomical clock flicked ice water at him.

  At least Josh was in a good mood. He didn’t mind being on the periphery of the preparations. It meant he was involved, and the boy was hungry for any piece of ANCHISES.

  Still slouched behind the wheel, Josh said, “Look sharp. Got two VB homing in.” VB: Veřejná bezpečnost. The Czech regular police. “And based on their expressions, I question your mastery of local parking regulations.”

  “Quiet, you. Crank it again.”

  Gabe dropped the tradecraft and focused on the car. The butterfly valve was sticky. It shouldn’t have been cold enough for fuel to gum up the valves, but God only knew what passed for gasoline here. Half the cars in Prague ran on a hair-curling witch’s brew of kerosene and vodka.

  “Sir! Sir, please, a moment.”

  Gabe pretended not to notice the cops. To Josh, he called, “Okay, I think I got it this time. Try it now.”

  A metallic tingle scraped Gabe’s tongue like a wire brush. The insulation on the spark plug wires looked dodgy; he must have brushed one with the wrench. He pretended to adjust the valve. At which point he “noticed” the police.

  “Yikes. You startled me,” he said in English.

  “Ah.” The cop made a gesture that encompassed both Gabe and Josh. “Americans?”

  “Yes,” said Gabe. He peeled off his gloves and started blowing on his fingers again. “Cold Americans.”

  The cop frowned at the gloves. He clucked his tongue. “No lining.” He folded back the cuff of his own glove just far enough to display a thick layer of fur. “Rabbit,” he said. “Much better.”

  Gabe nodded appreciatively. “Děkuji.” He gestured at Josh to start the car again, but the cop intervened.

  “Sir, please. You can’t leave your auto here.” He pointed up and down the cobbled lane. “Narrow street, yes?”

  “Oh, we’re not leaving it. We’ll leave as soon as my friend learns how to start a car without flooding the damn engine.” On cue, Josh jabbed the starter again, giving the gas pedal a good stomp to ensure the engine flooded.

  Gabe tossed his hands into the air. “Now you’ve done it, you dimwit.”

  The younger policeman shook his head. “Sir, please. This lane is not a—” He and his colleague exchanged a few quick words in Czech and English. “—It’s not an ‘auto shop,’ yes?”

  “Oh, we don’t need a shop. I can fix this myself.”

  Gabe started to lean under the hood again, but the VB guys intervened. “Ne, ne. You must go now. Already it is too long.” The other cop pantomimed pushing the car. “You push your auto away from the square.”

  Gabe sighed. Their chances of successfully surveilling the square had fallen between slim and none. Best to move on gracefully. “Very well.”

  “We’ll help you,” said the older policeman.

  “Thank you,” said Gabe. He leaned under the hood to clear away the wrench. The copper taste came surging back with a vengeance. Gabe banged his head on the hood when a jolt shot up his spine. It felt like a thousand volts. He tos
sed the wrench aside and slammed the hood, glaring through the windshield at Josh.

  “Hey, leadfoot! Are you trying to kill me?”

  Josh’s eyes widened. He gave a minute shake of his head. I didn’t . . . he mouthed.

  Oh, crap. Gabe hadn’t brushed against the spark plugs. It was the hitchhiker again.

  The VB guys had both retreated a step. Gabe ransacked his mental filing cabinet for a way to cover his gaffe. Every drawer came up empty. But it wouldn’t have mattered anyway: The jolt ricocheted back down his spine as if completing an ethereal electric circuit. He jackknifed at the waist, slammed his forehead against the cobbles. The younger cop tried to catch him. And that’s when Gabe tossed his cookies all over the nice policeman’s fancy gloves.

  • • •

  Tanya’s breath wriggled through the woolen balaclava like steam from a leaky radiator. It frosted her eyelashes. When she squinted, the world became a dark kaleidoscope. She’d been crouched behind a riverbank piling since the wolf hours, that loneliest stretch of night. She shivered again. It had to be at least ten degrees colder now than when she’d begun her hypothermic vigil.

  The barge was a long, low thing, of a type used to transport bulk freight like sand and gravel. The corrugated iron hatches comprising the deck rose only midway between the water and the top of the tugboat’s pilothouse.

  It certainly didn’t feel special. It elicited no tingle in her magician’s intuition. Was Gabe was having her on? Perhaps this was a—what did the Americans call it? Oh, yes: a snipe hunt. But on the other hand, placing the “safe house” on running water and keeping it in constant motion would cloak it from divination. It was a tale of sophisticated magical tradecraft, yet Gabe knew too little of such things to spin a plausible lie. So either he really had found something, and badly misunderstood it, or somebody was coaching him. Either way, she had to know.

  The bow rested against a piling in the center of the Hlávka Bridge. The tug pilots had chosen this expedient rather than mooring along the riverbank while waiting for congestion downriver to clear. Was the subsequent tactical advantage just a coincidence? Mooring along the bank would have made the entire length of the barge vulnerable to boarders. Instead, this arrangement forced would-be visitors to either drop down from the bridge or sneak across from shore in a rowboat—both options in plain view of the tug’s elevated pilothouse. It was an excellent defense against incursions.

  Well. Mundane incursions, anyway.

  From a coat pocket she produced a length of copper wire and a lipstick tube filled with the ashes of a particular species of Vltava river grass. Gathering enough in the middle of winter had been a chore, and she wasn’t certain that the withered brown foliage would suffice in lieu of healthy greenery. She had to hope it did. If she got this wrong, or lost her concentration halfway across, she’d probably freeze to death.

  She smeared ash along the length of the wire and then wrapped the copper around her index finger, working from the tip to the base, then around her hand. The configuration resembled the coils of an electric space heater.

  Shadows inched across the river, night’s rearguard ceding the field to sunrise. In moments, she gauged, the rising sun would peek over the bridge to shine directly into the frosty forward windows of the pilothouse. And, she hoped, momentarily blind any observers. She crept around the riverbank piling.

  Every military and intelligence service in the world had its own version of the lieutenant’s prayer: Please don’t let me screw this up. Every sorcerer had her own version. Tanya whispered this to herself now. She prepared a chant; it rested on her tongue like a mouthful of broken glass.

  Then she waited. And waited. Until—

  There! Sunlight glinted off the windows.

  Tanya retreated a few steps, clenched her wire-bound fist, and spat the pent-up chant at the river. Before her mind had time for traitorous second thoughts, she sprinted straight toward the icy water.

  The copper coil pulsed with searing heat in the instant before her foot broke the surface. She gritted her teeth against the pain. The magicked coil sucked all the heat from a tiny section of the river; the water directly under her boot flash-froze into a thick plate of ice. She skipped forward like a stone across a pond. The coil instantly went cold, then flared hot again just in time to prevent her next footfall from plunging into the river. The wire pulsed like that—frigid one instant, blistering the next—in time with the rapid rhythm of her footsteps. Tanya left a trail of floes in her wake as she sprinted across the river. She lunged, caught the barge prow, and scrambled aboard.

  Crouched in the recess between the forward cargo hatch and the bridge piling, she listened for the thudding of steel-toed boots and the metallic clack-chack of chambered rounds. But nothing broke the tranquility of early morning on the river. If she hadn’t been wary of her breath giving her away, she would have sighed.

  Nothing tingled her nape; nothing fizzed at the tip of her tongue. She was lying on the damn thing and the barge telegraphed less occult significance than a dead trout.

  If I wasted those ashes on a barge full of gravel, it will not matter how much Alestair vouches for you, Gabe Pritchard.

  She couldn’t open the hoppers without standing in plain view of anybody on the bridge. She squinted. Actually, she couldn’t open them at all. Nobody could: the forward cargo hatch was welded shut.

  Tanya was still pondering this when the putter of a two-stroke motor broke the soft lapping of water against the hull. The pilothouse’s portside door creaked open and a voice called across the misty waters in phlegmy Czech.

  “You’re late.”

  “You’re drunk,” came the reply from the motorboat.

  Ah. The shift change.

  While the tug pilot bantered with his relief, Tanya scooted to starboard. She found an inspection hatch built halfway down the length of the vessel. This lacked the grimy weathering of the rest of the vessel, a recent retrofit. It was fastened with a padlock. Tanya unwrapped an inch of copper from around her finger and worked it into the lock. The keyhole sported fresh scratches; somebody else had picked it recently. None of the Ice’s usual wards were active, either. Someone hadn’t been following Ice protocol to check and recheck the wards, not that Tanya should be surprised. She spun the wheel; the hatch swung open soundlessly.

  The cargo hold’s magical aura hit her between the eyes like a hammer. It carried a hint of numbness, like the lingering traces from a shot of anesthetic. The hatch closed behind her, plunging her into darkness. She turned on her light.

  “Bozhe moi!”

  The flashlight dropped from her slack fingers to roll along the keel. The barge wasn’t filled with wheat, or gravel, or anything so simple. The cots were piled two and three high in places.

  Tanya gathered her wits and her flashlight. Only then did she realize how steamy her breath had become. It was cold down here. Even colder than the river.

  Roughly half a dozen cots were occupied, but not by people. By blocks of ice. She played her light across the nearest slab. It contained a sallow, middle-aged man with a widow’s peak of shocking white hair.

  Are they dead? Or just deeply unconscious?

  What was this place? No wonder Gabe had been horrified.

  Tanya worked down the line, searching for any sense of who these poor souls might be or why it was necessary to place them in stasis. But they’d been stripped of any identification. What was the pattern here? What could—

  Tanya froze, clapping a hand over her mouth.

  On the sternmost cot, all by herself as though it were a place of honor, Andula Zlata lay encased in ice. Like the victim of a fairy-tale curse.

  Who do I work for?

  Had she been duped by Flame all these years, an unwitting acolyte tricked into thinking she served a noble cause? Or—even worse—was Ice run by twisted madmen?

  Grandfather. I must speak with Grandfather.

  Another horrifying thought: What if . . . what if Dedushka already knows about this?
What if he knows and condones it? What if—

  From outside came a muffled shout. Heavy footsteps rattled the decking. The inspection hatch opened.

  • • •

  The door to Frank’s office still hadn’t opened. Had Josh been in there the entire time? How much could they have to discuss?

  Gabe paced through the embassy corridors. He passed Alestair, whose cover identity from MI6 occasionally brought him to the United States embassy, by virtue of the US/UK special relationship. Today his contribution to the defense of the West against the creeping scourge of communism consisted of leaning rakishly against a filing cabinet and regaling a member of the secretarial pool with an improbable tale.

  “. . . Now, this was a bit of a sticky wicket, you see, for at that moment I was—”

  “Have you seen Josh?” Gabe burst in.

  “I think he’s in Mr. Drummond’s office,” said the secretary. Her name was Junie something, as Gabe recalled.

  Alestair nodded at him. “Ah, Gabriel, my lad.”

  Yeah, we’re all just good pals, aren’t we? Nothing sketchy about you or your magical allies and their floating coma ward. Gabe resisted the urge to punch him.

  “You seem a bit ruffled. You are well, I trust?”

  Gabe jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “How long has Josh been in there with Frank?”

  Alestair deadpanned, “Until a moment ago, I gather.”

  Josh looked like Gabe felt. But the sight of Alestair seemed to brighten him. Gabe sighed.

  “Ah, Mr. Toms. A pleasure,” said Alestair.

  Josh nodded. “Gabe. Frank wants to see you.”

  Gabe took the younger officer by the arm and led him a few strides away from the others. He bent close, lowering his voice. “What’d you tell him? You were in there a long time.”

  “I told him the truth, okay? That you’re acting weird, that I’m worried about you.”

  “Worried about me, or about what I might be doing to your career?”

  Josh scowled and shook Gabe’s hand from his arm. “I didn’t tell Frank anything he wouldn’t have heard sooner or later anyway. Better for you if it’s sooner. You want to get ahead of this.”