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

by Lindsay Smith

  All she could do was to stay in place and pretend she liked it.

  “I have a present for you,” Tanya said at last. She picked up her portfolio and unzipped it Then she handed Nadia the book Gabe had given her. She had brought it in case she and Nadia made up. Which they hadn’t, of course. But she didn’t want the thing, in any case. The stench of CIA perfidy clung to it.

  A look of spontaneous joy blossomed on Nadia’s face. “Cool! I love these guys. Peter Max, Andy Warhol, all of them. So open! So carefree!”

  That was one of Nadia’s great strengths, that she could compartmentalize her feelings. Her pleasure in the book was doubtless real. But no one who knew her as well as Tanya did could possibly believe they were on a good footing again.

  • • •

  She found the Norwegian sitting at what clearly was well on its way to being his usual booth in Jordan’s bar. When he saw Tanya approaching him, he shifted the ashtray to his far side so the smoke from his cigarette would blow away from her. Her opinion of the man inched upward.

  “You are Magnus Haakensen,” Tanya said.

  “Guilty as charged. And you are clearly somebody interesting. Miss—?”

  “Tatiana Morozova.”

  “Miss Morozova, it is a pleasure to meet you. I believe you are precisely the person I am looking for.”

  At that instant, Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night” began playing on the jukebox. “Dance?” Haakensen asked. Without waiting for a response, he stood and gently tugged her out into an empty space between tables. They slow-danced. Despite the ridiculous disparity in their heights, Tanya had to admit that the man knew how to lead.

  “We are drawing attention,” she said.

  “Look at me. I couldn’t be inconspicuous if my life depended on it. Even without the white suit, everybody’s going to be watching me. I make a little cash out of that fact from time to time. Somebody needs to do business in a place like this, so they enter two minutes after I do. I walk in with a big smile. I talk people up, I share confidences, I tell stories. I suck up all the attention in the room. Meanwhile, my nondescript partner does whatever it is we came to do and leaves.”

  “Is that what you’re doing here? Drawing attention away from someone?”

  “Do you see anybody here I might be distracting attention from? I’m here on my own dime tonight. I’m looking for the other side of the curtain.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Remember how it felt when you first got into the business? How exciting it was to be in on what was really going on? You passed through a curtain and suddenly the things you read in the newspaper made a new kind of sense. Well, over the past few years, I began picking up on hints that there’s a whole other level beyond that one. People chanting at night inside government buildings. Embassy officials crucifying cats in graveyards. A few odd words with no context to make sense of them: Ley lines. Ice. Flame.” Haakensen stared down into Tanya’s eyes. “I see that you know what I’m talking about.”

  “I can’t help you.”

  “Can’t or won’t?”

  “In this instance, they are both the same thing. However, I might have work for you.” She named a price and, as expected, his mouth twisted with distaste. The KGB paid its agents notoriously badly.

  “Tell me what I want to know, and I’ll do your job for free.” Sinatra crooned on until, recognizing that he’d been shot down, Haakensen said, “Or I could do it for a kiss.”

  Tanya raised an eyebrow questioningly.

  “I’m a romantic.”

  “Congratulations. You’ve put the humorless Soviet bureaucrat off her stride and she is now so flummoxed you can trick her into saying things she shouldn’t. That was your intention, wasn’t it?”

  Haakensen smiled ruefully. “It was worth a try.”

  “Do you want the money or not?” Tanya watched Haakensen intently, and when she saw that he was about to shake his head, added, “The organization you’re looking for is called the Ice. I’ll tell you the name of a city where they’re recruiting. After that, you’re on your own.”

  Haakensen sighed. “Give me the details.”

  4.

  It wasn’t strictly necessary to have the conference room swept for bugs—the monthly sweep of the embassy had been completed only four days before—but when it came to ANCHISES, Gabe wasn’t taking any chances. When the tech crew finally declared the area clear, packed away their arcane electronic gear, and left, he turned to Frank. “It’s all yours, sir.”

  “Thanks.” Frank went to the door. “You can come in now.”

  The man who entered reminded Gabe of nothing so much as a bantam rooster. Compact but tough. He didn’t so much walk as strut. His dark brown eyes glittered with energy. Could that possibly be an American flag pin in his lapel? By God, it was. Inwardly, Gabe groaned.

  “Boys, this is Dominic Alvarez. He’s going to be overseeing ANCHISES.”

  “You must be Gabriel. Obviously, that makes you Joshua.” Alvarez’s handshake was strong, fast, efficient: pump down, pull up, release. “Sit down, both of you. I’ve got something to say before we start.” He did not sit down himself. He seemed to be too full of nervous energy for that.

  “Everybody has a hobby. Some men collect stamps, others collect blondes. There are people who write poetry, climb mountains, fire guns at paper targets. My hobby is history. Now, I could spend my time refighting the Battle of Waterloo or trying to figure out a way the South could have won the Civil War. Worthy studies, both of them. But my passion is the Bay of Pigs invasion, the most perfect military failure in American history. How did it happen? What lessons can we learn from it? How can we keep from ever doing that again?”

  Oh, great. Dominic was not only a by-jingo bourbon-and-branch-water flag-thumper, but an armchair general to boot. This was going to be one long afternoon.

  Alvarez charged on, warming to his subject. “Now, there were a lot of reasons for the fiasco. The training camps in Guatemala were an open secret. Boats sank on coral reefs that weren’t on their maps. The B-26s arrived late, which is why a couple of them were downed by friendly fire—you didn’t hear that from me, incidentally. A hundred little snafus went into making the Bay of Pigs invasion the sublime fuckup that it was.

  “But they all boil down to one thing: We got cute. What we should have done was go in with everything we had: the Army, the Navy, the Marines, the Air Force. We would have been in Havana by nightfall, and Castro would be folding laundry in Leavenworth now.”

  Alvarez paced briskly back and forth as he talked, stopping in his tracks whenever he paused for emphasis. “Now. To ANCHISES. A Soviet scientist wants to defect. We want to help him do so. There are two ways the extraction can be handled. We can go in like the Mission: Impossible team with a glittery plan requiring a thousand moving pieces coming together with split-second precision . . . and create another Bay of Pigs. Or we can play it sweet and simple. Which will it be?”

  Frank had been slouching in a chair off to one side, staring at the ceiling. “Don’t look at me,” he said. “I’m hands-off, this operation. The only reason I’m sitting here is so I won’t look too stupid in front of my superiors if you three jokers screw up.”

  Gabe cleared his throat. “We were thinking the best way would be two men, a reliable Czech driver, and a Volvo in good repair. Two spare tires and a can of gas in the trunk, a semiautomatic pistol in a clip beneath the dash in case things go haywire. Our man walks in one door, guides the package out another, they get in the car, next thing Sokolov knows he’s in Radio City Music Hall, watching the Rockettes.”

  Turning to Josh, Alvarez said, “That the way you see it too?”

  “Sir, it is.”

  Alvarez slammed his hands together. “Then we are all on the same page. Now, let’s get down to brass tacks.”

  • • •

  Gabe and Josh had put together a plan that they thought was tight. By the time Dominic was done with it, a drill sergeant could have bounce
d a dime off its surface and nodded in grim approval. Jingoist or not, Dominic knew his stuff.

  They were just wrapping things up when there came a knock at the door, and Frank’s secretary entered with a tray carrying four cups of coffee, a sugar bowl, and a pitcher of milk. When the door closed after her, Dominic whistled softly. “Now that’s what a secretary ought to look like. Red lipstick and a tight skirt. None of this libber nonsense.”

  “Look but don’t touch,” Frank growled. “No intra-office fraternization while I’m in charge. Understand? It degrades morale.”

  “Message received, sir,” Alvarez said. “Loud and clear. Still, a man can dream. America is the land of dreams, after all.”

  When the coffee was done, Frank dismissed everybody with: “Good work, all of you.” Which, coming from him, was unexpectedly high praise. “Gabe,” he added, “you stay behind.”

  When the others had left, Frank leaned back against the front of his desk, a gesture far too casual to be anything but premeditated. “What’s your feel for ANCHISES?”

  Cautiously, Gabe replied, “I am beginning to feel decidedly upbeat about this operation.”

  Frank took his cigarette out of his mouth, glowered at it as if it were something distasteful, and laid it aside in an ashtray. “I like you, Pritchard. You remind me of a guy in my platoon in Korea, name of Stinky. Good kid. Probably deserved better than the nickname we gave him, but what the hell. We were in the ass-end of nowhere in the ruins of what used to be a village and the Chinks had us pinned down. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Couldn’t even see the enemy; we were firing blind. Then they stopped shooting at us. Sometimes they’d do that, hoping to trick you into standing up. Ten minutes went by, maybe twenty. You have no idea how slowly time can pass under such conditions. Thirty minutes in, by my guess, Stinky raised himself up on his elbows, gave me that big, goofy, shit-eating grin of his, and said, ‘I’m pretty sure they’re gone, sir.’

  “Which is when a bullet ripped through his skull.” Frank sighed, stood, picked up his cigarette. “Don’t get cocky. I don’t want to wind up with your brains spattered across my face.”

  • • •

  Magnus was in his usual booth in Bar Vodnář when General Bykovsky strode in looking stern and excited, as men tend to be when they get their first taste of spycraft. Assuming all had gone according to plan, just minutes ago the general had received a telephone call from Tatiana Morozova promising to share information of the greatest importance. Without actually having said so, she would have presented herself as an ambitious underling with something juicy on her boss. Bykovsky would have tried to talk her into coming to his hotel, of course. She would have insisted that would not be safe. Finally, they would have settled upon this ostensibly neutral setting. By the way he held himself, the general was carrying heat.

  It was astonishing how the least whiff of tradecraft turned grown men, even war veterans, into little boys again, avid to shoot dead every Apache in the playground.

  “General!” Magnus said. “Come sit with me.”

  Bykovsky looked carefully around the bar. Then, face stony, he slid into the booth opposite Magnus. “You know me, then?”

  “Beyond the obvious, that you’re Soviet military of command rank, served in World War Two, and are currently in Prague as a member of the intelligence community, I have not the slightest idea. My name is Magnus Haakensen, by the way.”

  A hint of a smirk materialized on the general’s face. “‘You know my methods, Watson.’ I have the posture of a military man and, I flatter myself, the air of authority that befits my rank. My nationality is written on my face, ergo I am Soviet. Given my age, I naturally served in the Great Patriotic War—what Russian did not? But what’s this about the intelligence community?”

  “I’m in it myself. I know the type.” Magnus did not mention the gold-and-steel Rolex peeking out from the general’s sleeve: expensive, obvious, and just a trifle vulgar. The man wearing such a thing would consider himself very important indeed—and other than the IC, what was there in Prague to draw such a personage? Anyway, Tanya had told him all he needed to know about the general. “Also, you are in a spy bar.”

  “I am?” Bykovsky looked about the place with new interest.

  “You are. Your Cold War is being fought in a gentlemanly manner. You share a watering spot with your enemy; perhaps you even nod to him as you enter the room. When I was in the Irish Republican Army, we played a rougher game. There were Catholic bars and Protestant bars. You knew which ones you belonged in and which were worth your life to enter. Once, I was sent to Derry—”

  “Londonderry, you mean?”

  “You see? If we were in Derry—the name you use for the city depends on which side of the struggle you’re on—you would have just signed your death warrant. A couple of the boys would leave their stools at the bar, take you by the arms, and frog-march you outside. There’d be a gunshot. A phone call later, somebody would drive up with a car to take away the body. The boys would return to their drinks and when the British Army came by the next day, asking questions, it would turn out that nobody had seen a thing. That’s how you fight a guerrilla war. Like Mao said, the people are the ocean in which the revolutionary swims. But I started to tell you about the time I was sent to Derry. There was an informer there who had been responsible for the arrests of three good men and nobody knew who it was. So I . . .”

  Though the general listened with an air of open skepticism, Magnus knew that inwardly he was mesmerized. Soviet spooks all speculated about what they might have been and done in the days of the Russian Revolution, had they only been born earlier. Give them a glimpse of the real thing, of desperate deeds performed under the loosest of supervision, and their fantasies rose up within them to glaze their eyes and drown out all coherent thought.

  When the story was done and had drawn a roar of laughter from the general—it was a genuinely funny tale, if a little gruesome around the edges—Magnus lifted an arm to catch the eye of the bartender. “Jordan! Vodka and a plate of bread for my friend.” (His two rules for getting along in the world were Learn the bartender’s name and Tip well.) Time now for the change-up. “When the Six-Day War began, I was attached as an observer to the Jerusalem Brigade, which meant that I wasn’t supposed to so much as touch a weapon. But guess what? If you grab a rifle in the heat of battle and start firing, nobody complains.”

  The appeal of a story from behind the Israeli lines was that it gave the general the illusion of insight into the thinking of the other side. Not that Magnus had any such insight to peddle. But he needed to keep Bykovsky’s attention, which this particular anecdote did easily.

  “You were an observer. For whom?”

  Magnus tapped a new Marlboro from its box and lit it with the coal of the old one. “That would be telling. Ah! Thank you, Jordan.” He took command of the bottle and poured a shot for his guest.

  “Za zdorovie!” Bykovsky downed the shot and pinched up a bit of bread to follow it with.

  “Khorosho poshla?” Magnus asked politely, and Bykovsky nodded.

  It was then that Tanya entered the bar. She froze. Magnus had to admire her skill. She feigned shock as well as anyone he’d ever seen—and he had known a great many inherently deceitful people in his time. Gesturing with his cigarette, Magnus said, “Looks like your girlfriend isn’t happy about something.”

  “My—?” Twisting around in his chair, General Bykovsky was just in time to see Tanya’s face shift from shock to anger.

  She spun around and fled to the street.

  Bykovsky went lumbering after her with Magnus at his elbow, unobtrusively hurrying him along, prepared to shove him forward if he hesitated at the door or to grab his arm if he tried to draw his gun. They stepped out of the bar together. And into a barrage of flashbulbs. By the time Bykovsky was done blinking, the car containing the photographer had roared into the night. Tanya was nowhere to be seen.

  “You’d better go home and get some sleep, General,” Ma
gnus said. “I have a feeling that tomorrow is going to be a long day for you.”

  • • •

  Prague after midnight was an unlit necropolis of empty streets. But from the heatless, unlit apartment that was maintained by the KGB precisely because it had a good view of the only hotel in Prague suitable for foreigners who might require surveillance, Tanya could see that the light was on in General Bykovsky’s room. Evidently, he was finding sleep elusive. Doubtless, the enigmatic encounter at the bar had set his brain awhirl with speculation and worry.

  It was time to make his day worse.

  There was a live telephone line in the room, but no phone. No matter, Tanya had brought her own. With pliers and gaffer tape, she swiftly spliced it in. Then she dialed the same number she had called earlier, when she had presented herself as an ambitious and treacherous underling with evidence of misbehavior on Sasha’s part. For just the briefest instant, she felt the icy touch of fear. Did she really dare threaten a KGB general?

  She did.

  In the coldest, most furious voice she could muster, Tanya demanded, “What in the name of hell were you doing consorting with the Norwegian?”

  “Norwegian? What are you—?”

  “You couldn’t possibly be so stupid as to not know who Magnus Haakensen is. You should have shot him on sight. You’re in a Warsaw Pact nation, you could have gotten away with it.”

  Bykovsky made shushing noises. “Now you are talking nonsense, Comrade. Why should I shoot anyone?”

  “Don’t you dare call me Comrade. It’s too late for you. I’m going to save myself.”

  Tanya slammed down the phone. Then she went to the window.