The Desert Fox had taken to burying his eighty-eights, large antiaircraft guns, up to their muzzles. When positioned like that, they melted into the heat shimmer and became invisible. A gun designed to knock bombers from the sky could shoot through the heavy armor of a Matilda tank at over half a mile. He’d killed a lot of Tommies that way.
Big job, burying an eighty-eight. Unless you happened to have a fellow who could render its base insubstantial.
Marsh slid the photos back to Stephenson. The old man said, “Well?”
“Too blurry to say for certain. The fellow in the tent might be Reinhardt. It would fit. He trained extensively for a deployment to Africa. The fellow with the gun could be Klaus.”
“Might be? Could be? You told me you’d splashed both of them.”
“Thought I had.”
“You told me you’d leveled the place. You and your crackerjack team. The girl and the retard.”
“We did!”
First thing Stephenson had done after tossing Marsh into the clink was report to the PM. Churchill, in turn, had ordered the RAF to perform a risky aerial reconnaissance mission over the farm. Within a day, Milkweed had a parcel of photos consistent with Marsh’s story. The complex had been destroyed in the manner he described: smashed to flinders, then burned to ash.
“Batteries.” Stephenson indicated the first photo with an unlit cigarette. “Have they resurrected the research?”
Marsh shook his head. “Come on, sir. You saw the photos. There was nothing left to resurrect.”
But … He squinted at the window while Stephenson struck a match, remembering a conversation he’d overheard on the day he arrived in Germany. At Bremerhaven. He hadn’t thought anything of it at the time. Shit.
“Unterseeboot one one five,” he said. “Gretel made certain it was stocked with spare batteries.”
“Her again. Well, she’s long gone now.” Smoke jetted from Stephenson’s nose, like a dragon warning off would-be thieves who ventured too close to its hoard. “You were soft. You ought to have killed her.”
“I thought I could trust Will.”
“We all did.”
Marsh shook his head. “I just don’t understand why—”
Stephenson snapped his fingers twice. “Focus! This is our current problem.” He jabbed a fingertip on the photos. “These bastards are more persistent than a wart. Especially the ghostly fellow. Hansel.”
“Klaus.”
Marsh thought about what he knew of Klaus, what he knew of the Willenskräfte. “I suppose that if he can become insubstantial to a brick wall, he could also make himself impervious to a blow from Kammler’s Willenskräfte.”
“Pity you didn’t think of that at the time.”
“I was just the tiniest bit preoccupied at the time.”
“This is damn troubling.”
“They’re only men, sir. What about Lorimer’s gadget? That would bugger them nicely, to hear him tell it.” The Scot had been more than a little annoyed when he learned that Marsh’s efforts had obviated the pixies before they ever saw use in the field. He was proud of his creation, and he wanted to stick one to the Führer. “And I think it would cheer him a bit.”
Stephenson said, “Perhaps it would, if we could get one in range. But our two friends are hunkered in quite effectively. Rommel controls Halfaya. Bit difficult to swan into those ravines with a commando team. They’d see us coming from twenty miles away.”
Marsh stood. “We’ll have to find a way.”
“Are you off to give the good news to Lorimer?”
“I’ll leave that for you. I want to try Will again.”
“Waste of time.”
24 June 1941
Admiralty Citadel, London, England
Will perched on the edge of the cot, long legs folded under him like a carpenter’s rule. He scratched the itchy beard he’d grown during his incarceration; Stephenson wasn’t about to let him near a blade. His fingers massaged thick curls. He hadn’t expected to have time to grow a beard. After a few days he realized they couldn’t execute the brother of a duke without making a show of it. Which would have drawn attention to Milkweed.
So he was bored, but otherwise well rested. Things had been a little better since Marsh the Younger convinced Stephenson to let Will have reading materials. Newspapers were still off-limits.
There was no stool. Marsh crouched beside a stack of novels, mostly Kipling and Hammett. Close enough that the sentry wouldn’t hear the conversation that unfolded below the thrum and whisper of ventilation stirring the stale air.
Marsh got straight to the point. “Gretel’s brother is alive,” he said. Will cocked an eyebrow. “So is another one of von Westarp’s brood. They’re in North Africa.”
A sharp inhalation whistled through Will’s teeth. He saw it all in a flash. The second future echo. They plan to magic a team into Africa. “I take it your paterfamilias doesn’t know you’re sharing this news.”
“The commander needs to know. How do I contact him?”
Will frowned, but didn’t say anything. Marsh ran a hand over his face. “I hope you realize that whatever you’re not telling me about the commander, whatever the two of you are hiding, events are passing you both by. I don’t understand how he talked you into doing what you did because you won’t tell me. But he protected my family while I was away, and that’s earned him some consideration in my eyes. Still don’t trust him, but I’m willing to hear him out. This isn’t a trick, Will. Where is he?”
Will prodded the curls beneath his chin with his finger stump. “You’re certain her brother is alive?”
“Yes.”
“And you think she planned that.”
“I don’t know. But the commander should be aware of the possibility.”
“Yet you say you don’t trust him.”
“He isn’t who he claims to be. There is no Liddell-Stewart. Of course I’m wary.”
“He isn’t your enemy.”
“Damn it, Will! Why won’t you tell me what you know?”
“Because it’s complicated. Better if you suss it out for yourself.”
“Then tell me how to contact him. Please.”
Will sighed. “It’s been too long. I wouldn’t know where to find him now because he moves about. He has to, because of the raids. He was camping out in a warehouse on the Bermondsey docks, but as you know, the Luftwaffe took a special interest in the East End.”
“He’s hiding in the ruins. Clever.”
Will couldn’t help but smile at that. Let me guess. It’s what you would have done?
Marsh stood. “Is there anything you need? Anything I can try to get for you?”
Will gestured at the pile of books with a languid wave of his long fingers. The spiderweb of scars arrayed across his palm flashed in the actinic light of his cell. “I could do with something fresh. I find Kipling grows a bit stale on the third read.”
“Consider it done.”
Will asked, offhandedly as he could manage, “Has Stephenson decided what’s to be done with me?”
“Afraid not. He has other things on his mind.”
“Ah. Well. I suppose he would.”
Marsh turned to go. Before he knocked for the sentry, Will said, “It might be wise to sit this one out, Pip. The transit will be far worse than my colleagues let on.”
The look that settled over Marsh’s face indicated that gears had been set into motion. It was the same look he got when chewing on a new puzzle, or when confronted with a new set of facts. He sat again. “What transit?”
Will cradled his head in his hands. “Oh, sodding.”
25 June 1941
Bermondsey, London, England
“He’s coming,” said Gretel.
She stood before a cracked and grimy window, bare feet black with soot. Her weight shifted side to side as she curled and uncurled her toes. Pucker marks of old, broken blisters stippled her skin. Her hair was a ravel too matted for braids.
So confident was
her announcement, so matter of fact, I thought perhaps she had recovered some measure of her prescience. Which left me conflicted. I needed access to her ability, to the things only she could know. But I wanted her suffering to know no solace. Wanted the yearning for her lost godhood to be endless. Eternal.
Her wires hung free. The window-glow of sunlight gleamed on the copper connector.
I stood. Followed her gaze. I glimpsed my doppelgänger ambling up the wide street, skirting uncleared debris. He carried a haversack over his shoulder. I couldn’t read the look on his face.
Gretel spun, putting her back to the window. Wires and greasy hair cartwheeled around her head, tickling my arm. I wanted to flay my skin and scour away the stain of that incidental contact.
“I knew,” she said. The edges of her voice curled under the razor edge of rising panic. “I knew before I looked. I did. Knew he’d come for me. He comes for me. He always does.”
His hands were empty. Didn’t mean he wasn’t carrying an Enfield, however. I considered my chances of vacating the warehouse with a stumbling madwoman in tow before he arrived. Slim indeed. And he’d find us again, the mule-headed bastard.
I quit the foreman’s office and descended the swaying stairs. Fire damage had warped some of the supports, causing them to curl away from weld seams popped wide by Luftwaffe bombs. I stood just inside the entrance, watching as he assessed the cavernous warehouse. A whistle blew somewhere on the Thames to our east.
He paused before entering. As I would have done, had our roles been reversed. I stepped into the light.
“You here to shut me down?”
“You intend to give me a reason?”
He unslung the haversack, opened it, and produced a bottle of brandy. Pinched, no doubt, from the bottom drawer of Stephenson’s desk. Though I pretended not to know that.
Instead, I said, “That’s a rare find these days.”
“I know a good source. But it’s a vein I can tap only once.” He uncorked it. He held it to his lips for the duration of one loud swallow. “I think I’ve visited half the ruins along the river. Thirsty work, that.”
I took the bottle. Ever since I had swallowed fire, liquor and my throat went together like feral cats in a wet sack. But I managed to not cough, then gestured him inside.
“One at a time is best,” I said. “Stairs are dodgy.”
My younger self didn’t know what to make of Gretel’s long fall since she’d brought him home from Germany. He’d seen the beginning of that descent, but I’d been there for the hard landing. She flinched as though seeing the two of us together caused her pain. Perhaps it did. She bowed her head, hiding unfocused eyes behind ash-streaked tresses. My doppelgänger and I crossed the warehouse mezzanine to blunt the sharpest edges from her keening.
He said, after another swig of the old man’s brandy, “What have you done to her?”
“Nothing she hasn’t done to herself.”
“It’s gone now, isn’t it?” He pointed at his head, pantomiming wires. “All of it.”
“Your unannounced visit would’ve sent her sobbing if she hadn’t glimpsed you through the window.” I pulled a wooden crate closer to the panes. It creaked under my weight. “But you’re not here out of concern for Gretel.”
The look he gave me was hard, calculated, wary. But not unfriendly. “After Coventry? No.”
Ah. Liv had told him about our narrow escape. The catch in his voice told me everything I didn’t want to know about the state of their relationship. Everything I couldn’t help but picture when I imagined the two of them together. She’d taken him back.
I said, “I’d like to know what became of Will Beauclerk.”
He said, “I’d like to know what sent you to Coventry.”
We stared at each other. Then he sighed, leaned forward, and took the bottle from me. “He’s safe and unhurt. And adamant I should trust you. He certainly did, given what you had him doing.”
“I’m not your enemy,” I said. Another swig from the bottle had me coughing brandy into my sinuses.
“Yet you’re hiding from SIS and the security service. And,” he said, “you had Will undermining Milkweed.”
Yes I did. “It’s complicated.”
“Like your relationship with Gretel,” he said. “Whatever that is.”
“Yes.”
“I could take you in right now.”
“You could.”
He cracked his knuckles against his jaw. Thinking hard, my young counterpart: he did both hands. He reached a decision, and it didn’t involve dragging me to the Admiralty. For which I was grateful. I wasn’t up for fighting him, and losing, a second time.
He said, “Stephenson received a parcel of photos.” I waited. “Couriered from Egypt,” he added.
And then I knew why he’d tracked me down. This was an addendum. A professional courtesy. A postscript to the secret mission we’d run together. The mission we’d thought a success.
“Hellfire Pass.”
“Apparently.”
“Anybody else?”
He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, in the direction from which came Gretel’s moans. “Big brother.”
“Damn,” I said. Because I also knew, in the next instant, why Will had decided to help him find me. This was a message from him, too: beware the future echo. I didn’t need the old Gretel to tell me how this would unfold. Sooner or later, some clever boy at Milkweed would gin up a cockeyed scheme for using the Eidolons to teleport a team to Halfaya. The smart wager was on the very clever boy sitting across from me.
He said, “I think she arranged this.”
I wondered about that. She might have, once upon a time. “I don’t know,” I admitted.
“She prepared a cache of batteries separate from the farm.” He told me about U-115 and its unusual cargo.
“Does Milkweed have a plan?” I asked.
“Not yet,” he said. “You going to spike it when we do?”
I remembered the night the Ghost of St. James’ Park tried to shoot me in the knee. I finally knew what he’d been trying to do. And what I was soon to do.
“I want those bastards dead just as you do.”
My younger self frowned, sensing the evasion. I changed the subject.
“Why’d you come here?”
“Figured that after everything—” His gesture took in Gretel, the warehouse, Liv, Agnes, Coventry. He twisted the cork back into the bottle, packed it with the heel of his palm. “—you deserved to know.”
“Stephenson will cut your bollocks off if he gets an inkling of this.”
“I’ve known the old man a long time,” he said. “He’d give me a fair listen before he stretched my neck.”
“That he would.”
He frowned at that, too. Wondering, no doubt, how I knew the old man. But he gave me a pass on that as well. His consideration of me had risen considerably since last we met. All it took was saving the lives of his wife and daughter. But I knew myself, and knew he still didn’t trust me without reservation. What fool would?
He returned the remainder of the brandy to the haversack. I could hear it sloshing, faintly, when he slung it over his shoulder. He caught my eye, jerked his head toward the far corner of the mezzanine. Gretel was watching us again.
“She’s changed, but I don’t think she’s quite finished yet. Watch yourself. That’s what I came here to say.”
*
Through a window coated with years of industrial grime, I watched my younger self recede on his way past the docks. His demeanor had changed in the months since I’d last seen him. Still every bit the abrasive lot he’d always been … I’d always been. But he was more relaxed now.
I wondered how long it had been before Liv took him back into her bed. It could have been me beside her.
As he disappeared into the distance, I wondered if I had made a grave error by not telling him the full truth. But my identity was my trump card, and the fact he’d sought me out meant my doppelgänger accepted t
hat I was on his side. Though wary, he accepted me as an ally. So I’d chosen to keep that card in reserve.
For months, I’d thought that if I could get to him without MI6 nabbing me, I’d explain everything to him, thus securing his cooperation in eliminating the warlocks. But that was when we believed all vestiges of the REGP destroyed, all of von Westarp’s children dead.
But they weren’t. He hadn’t completed his mission to the farm as we’d originally believed, meaning we still hung between Scylla and Charybdis.
My younger self thought Klaus’s reappearance meant Gretel had played us. Thus he’d come to warn me. Good of him to do so. But he’d been misled by the extra cache of batteries hidden away on U-115.
He still didn’t know Gretel as I did. Didn’t understand the full context of her manipulations.
True to form, she’d prepared a soft landing for herself. After the dust settled, when all was said and done and we’d averted the threat of the Eidolons, why on earth would she forsake her ability? Gretel sure as hell wouldn’t. So U-115 carried enough batteries to last her through all the years of a long life spent gazing down on us mortals with faint amusement. Perhaps she’d kick the anthill from time to time, just for jollies.
But the creation of a new time line had overwhelmed her precognition with the psychic equivalent of radio hash jamming a navigation beacon. She hadn’t intended the batteries to find use in North Africa. Reinhardt and Klaus were supposed to be dead, not deployed with the Afrika Korps.
I knew how things would progress. I felt like Gretel.
Even now, my younger self was formulating the idea of mounting a surprise attack via the Eidolons. Just as I’d had the same idea, long long ago, to send teams to the farm. No amount of reasoning would dissuade Raybould Marsh from going on the raid. The mule-headed prig would insist on seeing things through to the end. Nothing short of a crippling injury would stop him.
Which, of course, I would deliver. Because if he went and the raid went pear-shaped all over again, the Eidolons would demand the soul of his next child in exchange for rescue. Thereby consigning Liv and he to life with a soulless monstrosity. It would destroy them. And, eventually, the world.
Necessary Evil (Milkweed Triptych) Page 36
