Josh couldn’t breathe.
Kazimir put him down, but kept one massive hand on his shoulder. “You come alone to meeting! You do not ask, ‘Where are we going.’ You do not say, ‘What assurances do I have that you, Kazimir, will not kill me.’ Is good! So we are not having to kill you.”
“Ah,” Josh said. “You speak English?”
“Learn from movies!”
“Thanks. For not killing me.”
“Perhaps we can even do business.” And Kazimir opened the door.
The room looked—about like Josh had expected, to be honest: big and unfinished and cement, interrupted by pillars, with a loading door in one wall, crates strewn around in some order, presumably, and a few tables set up in the corner by another, longer crate, on which stood a shield wall of liquor bottles and some dubiously washed glasses. He had not, however, expected the boxing ring.
“Is good, yes?” Kazimir asked. “Boxing for friends. Some nights, many come, there are big fights, we take bets, small bets, on the side, you know, good money, good fun. Fighters come from all around. Perhaps even you, ah?”
“I don’t think so,” Josh said. “I bruise easily.” He scanned the room, right to left, like he’d been taught. A double handful of men, drinking or playing cards or lifting weights. A few women. One, in fact, working the punching bag in the far corner of the room.
Josh recognized that right hook.
It was amazing how much the human body could do without the interference of the conscious mind. Somehow his legs kept walking, without running into things, even, while his brain was months in the past, in an alley halfway across the city, watching a woman with a Moscow accent lay out a Czech secret service man. And then, in the French embassy, that same woman in a low-backed dress.
They hadn’t found a name for her yet, but she was in the Audubon Book of Spies all the same.
What the fuck were the Russians doing here?
Did Kazimir know? Were the Russians working with this little group of businessmen already? Or was she setting them up?
She hadn’t seen him. She was too focused on kicking that punching bag’s ass. He turned his back on her.
“Follow,” Kazimir said, waving him toward a side door. “For private business, yes?”
“Who’s that girl?” he asked, softly. “In the corner.”
Kazimir’s arm settled around Josh’s shoulder, and his fingers bit into Josh’s arm. “Your interest, I understand, but is a tale of woe, my friend, for she is not intrigued by Kazimir. But! Is okay. She is a good woman: is Russian, embassy secretary, is liking boxings and Amerikanski books. No trouble to us. Come. Let us discuss business.”
Fists struck canvas as the door swung shut.
3.
Tanya slunk home that night hungry, angry, and tired—so, when she heard a footstep behind her in her ostensibly empty apartment, she swung first.
She missed, ended up with a fistful of jacket, got her other hand on the person’s lapel, and tugged them down and across her outstretched leg. Somewhere in the movement, though, her balance got skewed, or her intruder found their footing, and Tanya ended up being the one wheeling through shadows to strike the wall. Sparks danced in front of her eyes, and her top teeth bounced against her bottom teeth. Strong hands forced her arms back; she kneed whoever it was in the groin, but they twisted their hips, and turned her knee aside.
“Tanya Mikhailovna,” said the intruder in Russian, in a voice Tanya recognized. “Stop. Please.”
She stopped. Just enough light passed into her apartment through her curtains’ gap to shape Nadia’s face in the dark. She smelled lemons and lavender.
“How did you get into my apartment?”
Nadia shook her head, like the question was either ridiculous or self-evident. On reflection, Tanya supposed it was. “Why did you contact Pritchard?”
How did she know? Tanya pushed against Nadia’s grip. The other woman did not release her, not at once. “Let go.”
Then Nadia did, but did not step back. They remained too close for comfort. “You know as well as I do: Counterintelligence is all over the American embassy. We ruined their defection—”
“To keep a Host out of the hands of the Flame.”
“Still, the defection was ruined. The CIA cannot ignore their operation’s failure. So they have sent their creatures. We need Gabe—and the worst possible thing we can do now is have anything to do with him. We discussed this. You and I. You said, and I agreed, that we should only contact him in an emergency. So. What is the emergency?”
Tanya slid out past Nadia, and walked to the kitchenette. She took a bottle of vodka and a pickle jar from the refrigerator, and two glasses and a small plate from the cabinet. “A new Flame superior has come to town. With Sasha compromised, we do not have enough resources to identify this person. Gabe has more freedom, even with the investigation.”
Nadia stalked forward. She circled Tanya, and Tanya remembered how she looked in the boxing ring: dancing around the edge, testing her target’s speed, their reflexes, watching their eyes and the way they shifted weight. “How do you know that?”
Tanya’s hand shook. To cover, she used it to open the pickle jar lid. Juice splashed on the counter. “What do you mean?”
“How do you know the Flame has sent a new witch?”
“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” She mopped up the spill with a towel. “The barge hit—”
“The Flame has a presence here already. They did not need new people to hit our barge.”
Tanya looked into the pickle jar, chose two, and placed them on the plate. “I heard from Zerena.” She slid the vodka across the counter without looking up.
“Have you gone mad, Tanya?”
“Drink the vodka. Please.”
“Don’t tell me to drink the vodka. That woman is dangerous, and clever, and we have no idea how deep her roots in the Flame extend. She is not the kind of person we want to fuck with.”
“I can handle her,” Tanya said, without looking up.
Nadia didn’t answer.
Tanya clutched the edge of the table. “She and Sasha are enemies. And Sasha is our number one problem—we are hamstrung with an acolyte in the station chief’s seat. And Sasha knows I’m Ice, which gives him a hold on me. We can use her to deal with him. I can use her.”
“She plays the game at a high level. She fought her way tooth and nail from nowhere to power.” Whereas you, Nadia did not need to say, spent your childhood being groomed to inherit. “She’s climbed a heap of bodies to get where she is today. You can’t use her.”
Tanya lifted the shot. “To your health.”
Nadia wasn’t looking at her, either; she was staring at the sliver of light beneath the curtains. She reached for her own shot and raised it to eye level. “So.”
They inhaled, exhaled, downed the vodka. It burned. Tanya ate her pickle. Nadia ate hers.
When the fire faded, Tanya spoke. “Some of the Hosts were captured in the barge raid.”
“Yes.”
“Was one of them Andula?”
Nadia drummed her fingertips once on the counter, then looked up. “Yes.”
• • •
The next morning felt like spring. Blue skies domed a city the sun transformed. Trees budded, flowers flirted with with blooming. Prague emerged, crouching, waiting for a blow.
Josh found Alestair smoking on the bridge, overlooking Old Town and the banks of the Vltava. The clock struck eight, reminding Josh of his hangover—he’d been drinking with Alestair again last night. He couldn’t keep this up. He wanted to keep it up forever.
The city had been moving for a long time already, of course. Josh finished his pastry.
Alestair uncoiled his arm and flicked cigarette ash into the river. “Every American should visit Paris at least once, I believe. It applies a certain veneer of culture, and would stop you from ever making the mistake of trusting Czech pastry.”
“Good morning to you, too.” Josh stopped by the r
ail and watched the red roofs and the dashes of green by the bank. The smell of Alestair’s cigarettes reminded him of bars he liked back home, and of the company of friends. “Frank sent me out on a job.” He shouldn’t be telling Alestair this, but then, they were allies, and anyway, he was long past the point of paying attention to the list of things he shouldn’t be doing with Alestair. “Dealing with some… private sector types.”
“A hazard of entering the working world. Some days I do ask myself if it’s worth the excitement, the adventure, and the glorious sex.”
Josh colored, and even though Alestair wasn’t looking, his mouth approached a smile. He must have seen Josh blush out of the corner of his eye. “With Edith in town—you know Edith?—Frank wants me out of the office. So he kicked me this.”
“Admirable.” Alestair turned from the view, and walked toward the far bank. Josh trotted to catch up. “A neat solution to the problem.”
“I’m not a problem.”
“No, of course not, dear boy. But more field experience will be good for you. And we need to be quite careful with our careers.” He sounded so offhand. Josh wondered if he’d ever become that—was calm the right word? Resigned? Comfortable? If hiding would ever become so second nature that he thought of it purely as a tactical position, as a question of propriety and self-defense. “I sense a certain reluctance.”
“I’m working with crooks, Alestair.”
“Our work is not without its own crookedness.”
“They’re nice enough. But. I mean. Doesn’t it ever get you mad?”
The cigarette had burned to the filter. Alestair tossed it off the edge, as if strewing flower petals. Josh could have drawn him in three lines. “I’ve not had the pleasure of meeting, personally, your Edith from Counterintelligence, but I have seen her around. It’s wise not to work with her—at the very least because I enjoy our little chats, and the more knowledge she has of your schedule, the more difficult they will grow to arrange. But, in our work as in magic, a certain degree of misdirection is always welcome.” He raised his right hand: he still held, somehow, the smoldering cigarette Josh had seen him toss into the river. “It might behoove you to cultivate a certain… interest, in Edith. Nothing grotesque, mind. But she is a pleasant enough aesthetic specimen.”
“What are you suggesting?”
Alestair set his hand on the small of Josh’s back, and Josh, tense, frustrated, was even more frustrated to notice himself thrilling to that touch. “Our business, my friend, relies on appearances. People decide what they want to see: two old friends walking together, for example. So make her decide what to see when she looks at you.”
Josh felt sick. He felt turned on. He wanted to pull away from Alestair. He wanted to crush him against the railing, bend those perfect lines in his arm, and kiss him, hard and fast and full in front of God and everybody. But he could not.
They walked together, in silence, until they reached the farther shore.
• • •
Gabe woke early, but he reached the office late regardless. He needed the extra time to head across town and leave a note in a dead drop for Karovich: a simple request, nothing classified, just a little more information in the same vein as before, for a similar payment. Which would put a substantial dent in Gabe’s savings account, but never mind. All in a day’s work, saving the world from magic. Or for magic. Or some damn thing.
Anyway, no sense wasting time feeling bad about a job well done. He rode high into work. Brought coffee for the receptionists, traded jokes with Josh in the office kitchen, said hi to Frank and got a grumbling adjustment of papers in return—which, for Frank these days, was the equivalent of a hug and a surprise party, so that felt okay.
When he reached the tower room, coffee and pastries in hand, he thought, for a blessed second, that he’d beaten Edith in: no overcoat on the rack, papers undisturbed. He set his coffee mug and the bag with the doughnuts on the table, and settled into the chair, hands crossed behind his head.
He almost fell when Edith said, “You’re late.”
She was there, after all: behind the paper rampart, straight-backed, pearls on a gray sweater, hair in a different sort of coil-bun thing he lacked the words for, the same folder as yesterday open on her desk. He hoped the mug of tea wasn’t the same, too. “God! You scared the pants off of me.”
“Fortunately not.”
He decided not to try that one on. “I stopped for coffee. You want a doughnut?”
“No,” she said, and after a tick, in which she, maybe, was realizing he expected her to say it, “thank you. I’ve moved on to Alvarez’s phone records. If you could continue with the transportation documents?”
“Fine.” He rolled his shoulders, flexed his back, and settled in for a long day with a bad doughnut.
Another day of papers. Another day of trying, vainly, furiously, to weave some sort of explanation through the squeaky-clean paper trail Dom left behind—another day of forms in small type, of carbon stains on his fingertips, of folders and paper clips that lost themselves, of pencil tips lingering in margins. Another day of knowing that, no matter how hard Edith searched, no matter how hard she made Gabe search with her, they would never find what she was looking for. Because the gross truth was, the Soviets hadn’t turned Dom Alvarez. The Flame had—when he was a kid, maybe, or when he was a young Marine on the make, or when he joined the CIA. The Flame wouldn’t leave a paper trail. Edith might be some big-deal bloodhound from back home, but she was on the wrong scent entirely, and he was stuck trotting alongside her until she admitted there was nothing to find. If she wasn’t a Flame agent herself, actively covering Dom’s trail.
Thank heaven for small mercies, she didn’t seem to suspect Gabe himself, yet. Or if she did, she was being circumspect about it. Which wasn’t a good thing at all, come to think of it.
Gabe stopped thinking, and waited for the end of the day. He kept his mind in the files, and found nothing. Of course.
He clocked out at six, leaving Edith in the office, and took his time reaching Karovich’s dead drop. This one was simple: a locked mailbox in a residential district. He took buses and changed to other buses for a while, doubling back and around, to case the neighborhood and be certain he wasn’t followed, which was harder than he expected: All around him Prague had loosened into spring, and people thronged the sunset streets, fathers and kids, old women and old men ganging together, enjoying themselves and their world and making Gabe feel perfectly alone.
He worried, for a while, that the spring crowds might make it harder for him to approach the dead drop, but as the sun set Prague remembered that spring had a lot of ground to cover yet, and closed up again. Streets emptied. Gabe relaxed into his long coat.
He entered the apartment building in question, keyed open the mailbox, and—good—found the folders there. Easy. Entrants into Prague in the last couple weeks who hadn’t left already. Fewer than he’d thought. He could get through the pages in a night, take them for a spin, see what he could see, and give Tanya the thumbs up, or the thumbs down. Drop the files back for Karovich. Focus on Edith, on the investigation, on finding some way to pass the time.
He stuck the files beneath his coat, and stepped out into the night.
A car idled by the curb in front of the door. Streetlights glinted off a pearl necklace in the driver’s seat.
Edith said, “Get in.”
4.
Gabe could not remember a less comfortable car ride. Even the one time in Jakarta, with the machine gun and the snake, didn’t quite compare.
“I—” he started, but Edith interrupted him.
“Don’t speak.”
He shifted in the passenger seat.
She drove him to a building near the embassy that he recognized but had never entered. Parked the car. “Walk to the front door.” She followed him, one hand in her coat pocket. Tossed keys on the step by his feet. “The gold one opens the door. The silver one’s for upstairs.”
“Am I—”
<
br /> “Don’t speak, I said.”
He opened the door, and preceded her up the steps.
“Third floor. First door on the left.”
He stopped, opened that door with the silver key, and entered the room. One suitcase lay on the floor, and another stood open on the dresser, and a book lay on the table by the bed. This was a room for someone who did not sleep so much as wait. The bed was made with hospital corners.
He waited while she closed the door and walked past him. When she drew her hand out of the coat pocket, it was empty.
“I knew you didn’t really have a gun.”
She hung up her coat, walked to the open suitcase and drew a gun from within. She held it with as little regard as she had held a pen. She did not point it at him. “Put the files on the table.”
He did.
“I guess I can talk, now?”
She shrugged. Not much of an invitation, but it would serve.
“I can explain.”
“Try,” she said. “Really, do.”
• • •
Josh found his own way back to the warehouse. Heart somewhere just a little south of his throat, he descended the steps and knocked on the door at the bottom. Someone opened the door, which didn’t do much to brighten the stairwell, since the someone basically filled the doorway. Beyond, he heard music and conversation. “Hi,” Josh said, feeling some weird combination of horrified and embarrassed, like he was a kid again asking if Davey could come out and play. “Is Kazimir there?”
“Joshua!”
The bouncer moved back just in time to allow Kazimir to reach through the door, grab Josh, and pull him into the brightly lit cellar. If Josh hadn’t seen the place himself earlier, he would not have recognized it now: tablecloths on the tables and makeshift bar, the weights and gym equipment cordoned off, all the crates carried off to some back room, and the place was full of people, dressed not quite to the nines, but to the sixes and sevens, at least. Even Kazimir had poured himself into a suit, to a good sort of overstuffed sausage effect—Josh doubted the suit’s stitching would endure a solid flex—and slicked back his hair. “Good to see you, Kazimir. Have you given any thought to our conversation yesterday?” Not putting too fine a point on it: He’d broached the issue of customs evasion in the back room, received a few noncommittal grunts of the ‘have to run it up the chain’ variety, and a suggestion that he return tonight, which he was smart enough to know not to take as a mere suggestion.
Complicating Factors Page 3
