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

by Lindsay Smith

  “I can’t get ahead of anything when you go running straight to Daddy the moment we get home.”

  “I was trying to clear the runway for a soft landing.”

  Gabe ran a hand through his hair. “Thanks. “

  As Gabe turned to leave, Josh said, “Just to warn you? He’s pretty angry.”

  “I’m sure I’ll survive.” My career, however . . .

  Josh blinked. “You remember the shovel story?” He whistled softly as they rejoined Alestair and Junie. “Two guys.”

  “I heard it was three,” chimed Junie, “and the third was some sort of special forces fellow.”

  “Ah,” said Alestair. “Now that reminds me of Calcutta . . .”

  Gabe knocked on Frank’s open office door. “Sir?”

  The station chief stood with his back to the door, gazing out the window. “Close the door. Sit down.”

  Gabe did. “Sir—”

  “I said, ‘Sit.’ I didn’t say, ‘Speak.’” Frank turned his attention from the window and pointed to a photo on the desk. “Remember my girls’ dog?” He shook his head. “Damn thing’s still pissing on the dining room rug.”

  “Sir—”

  Fiddling with a buckle on his suspenders, Frank said, “You don’t piss on your own floor, do you? When you’re at home, I mean.”

  Gabe blinked. “Uh. No, sir.”

  “Of course you don’t. You’re housebroken. A proud day for your parents, no doubt. So I can’t help but wonder why you insist on pissing all over everything we do here.”

  Gabe kept his mouth shut. After a fraught silence, the station chief said, “That was your invitation to explain yourself. Succinctly and persuasively.”

  “I haven’t been feeling well.”

  “Pritchard, if this were a head cold I’d tell you to walk it off. But there’s not feeling well and then there’s acting like you’ve got a brain tumor fixing to bust your melon wide open.”

  “I don’t have a brain tumor, sir.”

  Frank stopped and looked up. “You sure about that, son?”

  What if it was all in his head? What if the hitchhiker was a figment of a diseased mind? The hallucinations, the phantom sensory impressions, the seizures . . . but then Gabe remembered that awful barge, the way he’d felt its proximity, the way it drew him like a magnet. That was no brain tumor.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, that’s a shame,” said Frank, “because then we could write off your behavior as a medical issue.” He opened a drawer. “Instead, it’s a question of how many loose screws you have rattling around up there.”

  “Sometimes I wonder, sir.”

  Frank produced a half-empty bottle of scotch and two tumblers. His prosthetic leg made a hollow clunk when he kicked the drawer shut.

  “We all do. That’s our legacy.” He splashed a finger of booze into each glass. Pushing one across the desk to Gabe, he said, “Those of us who have been in the shit.”

  Early as it was, Gabe knew better than to refuse. They raised their glasses in unison.

  “De oppresso liber,” said Frank.

  “Semper fidelis,” said Gabe.

  Clink.

  It burned all the way down. The smoke that filled Gabe’s sinuses tasted like a burning oak barrel.

  “How long were you in the Marines before they pulled you for intelligence work?”

  “Not too long, sir. Middle of my first tour.”

  “That’s plenty long. I’ve heard about those jungles. I know what you’re going through.” Frank fell quiet for a moment. “I saw some shit in Korea.”

  Gabe coughed. “I hadn’t heard, sir.”

  Frank rolled his eyes. “Jesus. Please tell me you’re a better liar in the field than you are in my office.”

  “I like to hope so.”

  “Prior to this posting, your reputation was solid.”

  “And after this posting?”

  “That’s up to you. We’ve fought hot wars, you and I, and know we’re fighting a chilly one now. We’re not that different. Lord knows there were times when I didn’t have my head screwed on right.”

  “I appreciate it, sir.”

  “Don’t mistake me. I’m not turning a blind eye and I’m not forgetting anything. But you pulled the Drahomir debacle out of its nosedive, and even showed some grace in handing it over to Josh. That earned you this courtesy chat. But when you walk out of this office you’re officially out of second chances.”

  “I understand, sir.” Gabe set the shot glass on the desk. Lightly.

  “Maybe you are smarter than that damn dog, after all.”

  That evening, Gabe spent more time and money than he could afford staking out a booth at Vodnář. He waited until most of the clientele had stumbled home. Jordan set down the glass she’d been drying and tossed the dishrag over a brass fitting along the bar.

  Without preamble, Gabe said, “I need a favor.”

  The glare she shot him could have stripped paint. “You do understand that favors aren’t like liquor, right? It’s not the sort of thing where one runs a tab.”

  “It’s about Cairo.”

  Jordan held his gaze for a long moment, before finally relenting with a heavy sigh. “Low blow, Pritchard. Low blow.” She squinted, pinched the bridge of her nose. “I’m listening.”

  “Two shovels.”

  She blinked. Brightened a bit. “Not what I expected to hear. But okay. I can do that.”

  “I need something else, too.” She cocked an eyebrow. “I need help robbing a grave.”

  2.

  Haret El-Yahud, Cairo

  March 19, 1968

  Gabe Pritchard’s posting to Cairo in ’68 was his first turn through the Levant. But in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, the atmosphere in the country was less Cecil B. DeMille and more Carol Reed. Less than a year after those brief hostilities, the streets of Cairo still bristled at the humiliation.

  Getting your ass kicked will do that.

  Three months in Cairo and Gabe had yet to glimpse one serving girl clad in defiance of the Hays Code. This morning, for instance, he’d spent the morning crouched in an oven-hot storage space over a cobbler’s shop in the Haret El-Yahud, the Jewish quarter. Twice in the past week, his target, a Mossad agent, had visited an antiquities shop across the street.

  The previous June, Israel had tripled the amount of territory it controlled in less than a week. When the concerted attack by its neighbors ended in fiasco, Israel took the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt (officially the United Arab Republic), the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. Yet a mere ten days later, the Israeli government voted to cede the territorial gains back to Syria and Egypt—all except a tiny parcel of land called the Gaza Strip. But SIGINT suggested Mossad had moved several assets into Gaza immediately after the takeover, even before the ceasefire took effect. Almost as if they’d been poised at the border just waiting for somebody to wave them in.

  There were obvious public diplomatic reasons for the concessions, of course. But the flurry of covert activity cast a peculiar light on the situation. From the sidelines, Sinai and Golan looked just a bit like misdirection. A magician’s trick.

  Nine months later, CIA Cairo Station identified one of the same Mossad assets in the medieval quarter, posing as a scholar of antiquities. Gabe’s bosses wanted to know why. Surveillance had turned up nothing unusual on the man, so Gabe had headed a high-risk/high-reward operation with the local lamplighters. Penetration of a hotel room safe revealed the Mossad man carried artifacts taken from the Qasr al-Basha, a Mamluk-era palace situated in the Old City of Gaza.

  It was starting to look more like plain old graft rather than intelligence. It certainly wouldn’t be the first instance of a case officer using information gleaned from work to pad the retirement account.

  Gabe’s job was to confirm that explanation. If the Mossad officer strolled into a the store of a gray-market antiquities dealer carrying the Mamluk artifacts, then exit
ed empty handed, that would be fairly convincing. Especially if, on the way out, he obligingly carried a burlap sack bulging with cash. Gabe wasn’t counting on it, though; much to his disappointment, conditions in the field rarely embraced the tidy internal logic of a Bullwinkle cartoon.

  Foot traffic picked up as the morning wore on. A woman unlocked the shuttered shop: late 40s, early 50s, long dark hair with a hint of gray, slight build, five-six to five-eight. The Mossad man’s contact?

  Business was slow on mid-week mornings. Jordan Rhemes took her time reconciling the cash register. There hadn’t been many transactions the previous day; the pushy “scholar,” who didn’t know a Berber from a barber, had once again driven her few other customers away with his dogged refusal to accept “no” for an answer.

  Just the thought of him wearied her. If he showed up a third time, she might be forced to use the scimitar under the counter to behead herself. But then her cousin Hakim would inherit the shop, and the poor witless boy would have to sand all of Jordan’s blood out of the floorboards. That didn’t seem fair.

  She set her cup of tea on a display case containing Berber relics—bracelets, earrings, a fragment of undecipherable writing, a Moroccan wooden comb—and opened a pulpy biography of T. E. Lawrence, settling in for a long, quiet morning. She found her place in the book and reached for the cup, but paused at the wisps of steam dancing above the brim. They swirled as though caught in a breeze. But the chimes over the door weren’t moving. If there was a draft in the shop, it wasn’t coming from outside. Brow furrowed, she closed her eyes and felt a faint tickle against her skin. She closed and locked the shop again. There was nothing was out of place. Nothing broken. But something ruffled the fringe of an Algerian Kabyle rug hanging behind the counter.

  The rug concealed a door. A special door. A heavily locked and warded door. A door she opened infrequently, and only for very special customers. A door she’d chosen not to open for the self-proclaimed scholar. A door she checked every evening before closing up shop.

  Oh, no.

  With one hand she eased her blade from the scabbard beneath the counter. With the other, she clutched the charm at the hollow of her throat. The ancient words she whispered chilled her lips as they escaped in visible puffs of breath that should have been impossible even on Cairo’s very coldest winter days. These, too, shimmied in the draft. She closed her eyes, concentrating on the chant. When she’d drained the charm, she opened her eyes again. Had customers been present to witness this, they might have remarked on how Jordan’s eyes had changed, as though now limned with phantom silver. Her magic-enhanced senses heard no concealed heartbeat, tasted no sweat of hidden assailants.

  She hefted the blade and swept aside the wall hanging. The door was closed. Mostly. But the paint on the doorjamb was badly gouged. It looked like somebody had forced the door with a crowbar; the damage to the frame prevented it from sealing properly. So now it admitted a soft but incessant zephyr from the cavern beneath the shop.

  The wards—powerful disincentives against tampering, laid in place by her grandfather—should have prevented such a crude assault. Jordan studied the door with magicked eyes . . . and gasped. Tendrils of dread braided her spine. The wards weren’t ruptured. They were gone.

  Careless, careless. How could I be such an imbecile?

  She knew instantly who had done this: the so-called scholar. He’d been obsessed with Mamluk artifacts; he sought to reunite a set of relics, or so he’d claimed, and had practically demanded to see anything she might have had in her collection. She’d demurred, telling him simply that she had none, which was the truth. When she’d laughed off his money, he’d grown angry and stormed off, scowling like somebody determined to do something unwise. She’d laughed that off, too. After all, her shop was warded.

  She should have realized that he wanted to see her special wares not because he thought he could cheat her out of something valuable and easily fenced, but because he understood their true significance.

  And that meant one thing: a Flame acolyte. Had he come from Ice, the artifice would have been unnecessary. Though Jordan tried to keep them at arm’s length these days, the legacy of her family’s long association with the Ice made for decent, if somewhat muted, relations. They would have had the courtesy to be up front with her.

  How could I be so stupid?

  She pushed the door open and stepped behind the rug into a dark tunnel. Jordan flicked a switch. Then, still wielding the blade and her magicked senses, she descended, dreading what she’d find. If they’d cleaned her out, the chaos those maniacs could wreak . . . A single one of these items in the wrong hands could be disastrous. How many might suffer because of Jordan’s carelessness?

  The tunnel had been chiseled into the bedrock under the city by unknown persons for unknown reasons centuries or even millennia ago. She’d been coming down here since she was a little girl. She knew its every twist and echo. But this morning it had an odd scent, so out of place it took her a moment to identify it. Petrichor: the clean, heavy smell of a cleansing rain on hot stone. But the tunnel was kilometers from the Nile. It was never damp down here. Apparently this was also the scent of broken protective wards. She wished she didn’t know that now.

  She’d expected to find the shelves toppled, every item missing or destroyed. But at first glance it almost appeared that everything was undisturbed. Almost.

  To magicked eyes, the lacuna blazed like a bonfire on a moonless night. The items on the shelves were undisturbed: vials containing the ashes of rare plants; unremarkable crystals containing trace amounts of exotic metals; bracelets woven from the stems of flowers that had grown in only one bog on earth, a bog which had long since been drained; fulgurites unearthed in high desert valleys accessible only by mule; a dinner-plate sized piece of bubbled green trinitite from a military base in New Mexico; sundries from every corner of the globe. Jordan saw this instantly from the shape of their accumulated magical aura. But the rarest and most powerful items were stored within hidden clefts chiseled into the cavern walls. One such cleft emitted no magical aura. It was empty.

  She didn’t need to consult her inventory to know what had been stolen. The fake scholar’s obsession allowed only one possibility. He, or his Flame allies, had stolen a clay figurine discovered by Napoleon’s staff in the Ottoman fortress where the campaigner stayed for three nights while preparing for the Siege of Acre. The place had many names, for it had changed hands many times over seven hundred years, most recently during the Six-Day War: Napoleon’s Fort. Radwan Castle. Qasr al-Basha.

  Her family had never unraveled a purpose for the figurine, though it had been imbued with staggering elemental power. Whatever its true purpose, the homunculus had been wrought by a master sorcerer in a bygone era. It crackled with a power that nobody should wield. Not even Ice. Certainly not those anarchic bastards in the Flame.

  Jordan doffed her scarf and uncapped a vial of ashes. She tapped a thimbleful of fine gray powder into the center of the silk, then she bit her thumb and spat a drop of blood into the ash. Next, she set a pale blue crystal into the grit and folded the scarf closed. After tying the bundle together with a leather cord, she placed it in the secret hollow where the figurine had rested for generations. The artifact’s unique magical aura had seeped into the surrounding stone; Jordan’s makeshift magic dowser-cum-compass absorbed the residuals and began to vibrate, almost imperceptibly, in sympathetic reaction.

  She jammed the bundle in her pocket before taking a moment to peruse her special inventory. She donned a bracelet of flowering grasses still green as the day they’d been picked a century ago, and placed a patinaed copper coin under her tongue. It tasted not of metal but of salt. Back upstairs, Jordan retrieved the scimitar scabbard and hid this beneath her robes. She took extra care to lock the hidden door and re-create the wards before departing.

  Gabe, sweating to death in his airless garret across the street, perked up when he saw her depart.

  “Well, now, hello,” he s
aid, watching her set off at a fast walk. “Where are you going in such a rush this morning?”

  In one hand, Gabe had an officer of a foreign intelligence service carrying priceless archaeological relics. In the other, he had a woman who ran a shop clearly specializing in rare items. The math was adding up to graft, not a geopolitical conspiracy of musical chairs. But he wasn’t paid to judge books by their covers.

  Grateful for any break from the stakeout, he set off to follow the woman.

  A single tail through the crowded rabbit warrens that passed for streets and alleys in Cairo was less than ideal; he should’ve had a team for this. But he’d never find her again if he peeled off to run back to Cairo Station. She acted indecisively: lingering at intersections to study every path before continuing; stopping suddenly and changing direction; looping back and traversing the same alley over again. At first he thought these were artless attempts at tradecraft, intended peel off any followers. But she acted as if searching for something, following a trail he couldn’t see or hear or smell.

  His tradecraft was solid, though, and he managed to keep her in sight, even when she strode through a crowded pedestrian market. She never saw him.

  Of course, she didn’t need to see him to sense him. Jordan had given all of her senses a sorcerous jolt. The follower she detected almost certainly worked for, or with, the man she tracked. And probably intended to kill her.

  She hadn’t expected that this day would be her last. Suddenly, she missed her father and mother more than she had in years.

  It was an irritated loneliness, however. She’d broken with Ice years ago. It figured she’d die doing their dirty work for them, and those idiots would never even realize the service she’d rendered.

  Then the tugging in her pocket turned into a vibration as she neared the ley line beneath the Masr el Qadīma: Old Cairo. Her makeshift dowser trembled so rapidly it started to hum: The clay figurine was nearby. But, given the man trailing her and his probable intentions, it seemed unlikely she’d ever get it back to her shop intact. The best she could hope for was to destroy or corrupt the statuette before Flame absconded with it.