Nest of the Monarch

by Kay Kenyon

  “It will take an hour!” Kim whispered.

  “They are concentrating on the lake, but soon they will complete a more thorough cordon. We cannot wait an hour.”

  “Nikolai and I are getting out,” Kim said.

  “Do not be a fool. Where would you go?”

  “Back to the farmhouse.”

  “Everywhere will be searched. Just wait and see.”

  “I’m not—”

  She fell silent, focusing on the largest truck, the one that had lost the siding from its flatbed. Through the windshield she saw flowers. Flowers in a vase secured on the dashboard.

  Under the shouted orders of the soldiers, the workers continued to shovel, throwing the potatoes into the ditch. A man stood beside the truck, shaking his head as he watched his cargo being thrown away. She saw him gesturing with one of the soldiers, pleading the case of his ruined delivery.

  “I know that man,” Kim said.

  “Then pull up your hood.”

  “No. I need to get his attention. He’s come for me.” She looked at Adler, her heart thudding heavily. “For us.”

  “Who could be coming for us?”

  “Duncan.”

  “Who?”

  Kim felt a smile cut across her face. “The British government.”

  In another minute Adler pulled down his cap very far on his head and stepped out of the car. He approached the truck driver and they spoke briefly, the driver shaking his head and spreading his arms at the mess on the road.

  Kim had told Adler to say, “I’ll trade you a Sparrow for a few potatoes.”

  The car behind them that had been blocking their way backed up on the road just enough to allow Adler to do so as well. At the first widening of the road, both cars turned around. As he had been hastily instructed, Adler followed this car down several winding streets until they approached a hay truck parked in an empty lot.

  Someone opened the door on Kim’s side of the pickup, and a sandy-haired young man looked in at her. “Good day to you,” he said. “Just hop out and we’ll get you in the hay wagon.”

  Kim and Nikolai crawled out of the car. She resisted an urge to throw her arms around the fellow. “You know they’ll search a hay truck,” she said.

  “Not this one, they won’t.” He grinned and gestured her toward the back of the flatbed. “We’re north of the truck accident. We’ll be on our way before the mess is cleared away.”

  In what was starting to reveal itself as a smoothly choreographed sequence of actions, another man appeared to take charge of Adler’s pickup, driving it off.

  “How did you know when to have the truck accident?” It was two hours earlier than Kim had said they’d be escaping.

  “We had several accidents planned. When we heard the explosion, we set one of them in motion.” He lifted up a flap of tarp, revealing rolls of tightly baled hay. Pulling the false front from one bale, he uncovered a gaping hole.

  “There are three of us,” Kim said, instantly worried.

  “Yes, ma’am. I can count.” He lifted Nikolai up and urged him inside. Adler went next.

  The young man said, “We thought there’d be another woman.”

  “There was.” Kim looked in the direction of the Aerie and the forest-clad lower slopes. “There is another woman.”

  “Where is she?”

  Kim stared into the distance, trying to conjure scenarios where Hannah might live.

  “You have to leave now, ma’am.”

  Turning back to him, she said, “Call me Sparrow.”

  She was SIS, and even if it was just for a little while longer, she wanted her code name.

  “Sparrow. Right you are,” he said.

  “And watch for the other woman.”

  Adler was waiting, crouching in the passageway. He extended a hand to help her up. She took it, and then the false front of the bale slammed shut.

  Kim and Nikolai slept on blankets smelling of horses and dust. After a time, sunshine found cracks in the hay bales, stabbing at her eyes, forcing her to keep them shut. Now and then she saw Dietrich Adler seated on a bale, smoking a cigarette. Once she thought it was von Ritter, until she remembered it could not be.

  At some point they were herded out of the wagon and rushed across a field to a waiting airplane.

  On board, seated next to Kim, Nikolai said, “I have never been in an airplane.”

  “Neither have I.”

  The plane taxied, and in a long glide eventually managed to take to the air.

  Nikolai leaned in to her, to speak above the roar of the plane. “They don’t have to call me Your Highness anymore, do they?” His tone was flat, just checking out the new protocols.

  “That’s true. Is it all right with you, Nikolai?”

  “Yes. It would have been very dangerous to be tsar.”

  Kim took his hand, and he gripped it tightly as they watched the fields grow small beneath them.

  Duncan had deployed his assets throughout the village and in blinds along the road. The Nazis were still looking for a woman with short black hair who might be accompanied by a young boy, but Duncan and his men were watching for a woman in a brown parka.

  In the empty house the Office had taken over in the village, one of his men brought in a woman wearing a gray plaid coat and a blue scarf. Not the garb they had been expecting, but she had apparently found different clothes and had convinced Duncan’s man of who she was.

  “So you are Hannah,” Duncan said, thinking about how much trouble she had caused and how poorly he had handled things.

  She pulled off the headscarf, revealing bright red hair. “Yes. And I hope you have a good plan for getting out of here.”

  Duncan gazed at this small, pale woman who looked half-starved and had a faint blood smear on her forehead.

  “We do indeed.”

  50

  SIS HEADQUARTERS, LONDON

  FRIDAY, JANUARY 8, 1937. Kim sat at a long table in the center of a windowless conference room. By a lamp on the table, she saw that she was facing four men. She didn’t recognize any them—not that in the clandestine services she would—and they had not been introduced.

  Along the wall, out of the lamplight, several chairs. One of them was occupied, the person’s face in shadow. She suspected it was the chief himself, the man called E.

  It was the third time she had relayed the sequence of events and her actions in Germany. Once had been to Julian, alone in a hospital room where she had rested for two days and undergone tests. The second time was to a two-man team that recorded her narration in an all-day session.

  This time she had the feeling she was relating everything again for the man who sat in the shadows. She had been perfectly candid except for a few details of the meeting in the Festival Hall with Erich von Ritter. The embrace. That wouldn’t have gone over, not at all, and she wasn’t sure how to explain it.

  Another question came at her. “Isn’t it possible that Alex Reed was told of your being at the Wittenberge train station because they were fishing for intel on you, and knew Reed socially?”

  The questions all came from the one with the thick glasses.

  Kim knew they were eager to absolve Alex Reed of jeopardizing her cover. He was in line to be first secretary for trade, and the “niece in London” incident was awkward. The story they preferred was that Alex had been the innocent recipient of news from Gestapo acquaintances derived from a routine check at a train station; news that Alex’s wife had mentioned a niece in London.

  Doggedly, Kim answered the leading question. “Alex told me that a man I saw him talking to was with the German Automotive Association, but I discovered a business card revealing that he was Gestapo. Alex spent some time with this agent on a porch at the Belgian embassy Christmas party. Why would he lie about the man’s identity if he was merely a social contact?”

  Her interrogator consulted his file. Kim had the impression that he wasn’t really listening but rather going through a formality of an interview. Who were
the others? The deputy chief of SIS? Representatives from the Foreign Office?

  “How would you characterize your relationship with Alex Reed before you began to suspect his involvement with the Gestapo?”

  “He distrusted my role and made clear his concern that I would sour his political relationships with Nazi officials if my undercover mission was breached. We didn’t trust each other after Hannah Linz appealed to me for extraction. I began to feel that the house on the Tiergartenstrasse wasn’t safe.”

  “And you also didn’t trust your handler at the Berlin station.”

  “I had doubts. More importantly, Hannah Linz didn’t trust him. She assumed the intelligence service wouldn’t back her. By the time you approved extraction, she had lost faith in British involvement. She revealed details of the Monarch operation to me and said she would work only with me. I had a few hours to decide whether to walk away or exploit this opportunity to infiltrate the Aerie. I saw that I didn’t have much support.” From any of you, she wanted to add, and didn’t. Even before she had taken the mission into her own hands, the Berlin station hadn’t backed her, and London had stepped up too late to make a difference with Hannah.

  Although it was true that on Christmas Day they had infiltrated the village and brought a hay truck.

  Her interrogator moved on. “What do you think would have happened if Hannah Linz hadn’t been able to bring you to a level 7 to allow you access into the Aerie?”

  “They would have sent me home.”

  “Or eliminated you.”

  She shrugged. Death was a possibility in some missions. These men knew that.

  “Therefore, without proof of any kind you went to the Aerie, trusting her story of catalysis. Risking your life.”

  You’re welcome, you pompous, self-justifying bastard.

  He added for good measure: “Risking a diplomatic incident of the highest order.”

  “Where would we be now if I had turned her away? The Nazis would still have Irina Annakova, and her Nachkommenschaft would be undermining and spreading chaos among our closest allies.”

  “They are no doubt already at their posts.”

  “But they can’t be sustained. Without Irina Annakova, their powers will fade. I attempted to bring her out, but she died during the escape. And now you have Hannah Linz.” They had told her that much. Kim imagined Owen Cherwell’s delight in having an entirely new Talent to calibrate at Monkton Hall.

  “Is Hannah undergoing testing?” She did wonder how you tested for catalysis, other than submitting another Talent to the infecting touch, and then watching them become unbearably confident and unable to eat biscuits.

  “We won’t be discussing that.”

  “But you admit she’s a valuable asset?” She didn’t expect they would discuss that, either. Surely the men in this room couldn’t still be thinking that Hannah Linz was just a Jewish agitator misled by conspiracy theories. She had played a central role in disabling Monarch.

  As her questioners began to close their files, she brought forward her final piece of intel. “The house the embassy found for Alex Reed and me in Berlin was very likely a Jewish home that had been hastily confiscated by the German authorities. A man and wife and an infant lived there. They left all their possessions behind.” Hopelessly, she added, “I thought you might want to look into that. How embassy staff are taking advantage of”—she let sarcasm creep in—“the Jewish problem.”

  Silence greeted this. The man in glasses put his pen in his shirt pocket.

  From the shadows along the wall came a voice. “How are your symptoms from the catalyst treatments you underwent?”

  It was the first time an official other than a doctor had asked her this. “I feel like I’ve drunk too much coffee. I’m experiencing a high degree of irritation at the reception I’ve received here. At the same time, I don’t trust my own perceptions, at least not my logical thoughts. To the extent that they are logical. I still crave rare meat.”

  Shuffling around the table. They hated that part.

  Now that she had been given permission to describe the results of her nearly disastrous augmentations, she had a little more to say. “People tell me things. More than ever. Things that are very hard to ignore and apparently ruinous to act upon, even in the clear interest of His Majesty’s Government.”

  She looked over at the shadow. “Also, I have trouble eating.” And sleeping. Awful, dark dreams of the Nachkommenschaft. “I’d like to go home. Until . . . I’m feeling normal again.”

  Her interrogator with the glasses said, “When do you think that will be?”

  “In ten weeks.” But whether her symptoms and her ability would subside gradually or steeply at the end, she didn’t know.

  “Will I be able to see Hannah?”

  “I’m afraid not.” The man in glasses again.

  “What about Captain Adler?”

  “He is being resettled here. With our gratitude.”

  She was glad they were grateful for something.

  “And Annakova’s son, Nikolai?”

  “He’ll be placed with a Russian family here. It’s best if you have no further contact.”

  The voice from the shadows spoke softly. “What is your interest in the boy?”

  “I made a promise to protect him.”

  The shadow voice again. “A promise about a Russian child you hardly knew.”

  Her anger lay just behind her teeth. If she opened her mouth, she’d be saying things no one wanted to hear. What the hell. “Yes, I hardly knew him. But Evgeny Borisov helped me convince Irina Annakova to turn. A man whose precognition ability caused him immeasurable pain, and who loved the boy and his mother. Before he swallowed rat poison, he wanted to know that someone would look out for the child.”

  After a long, uncomfortable pause, the interrogator pulled the file together and closed it. “I think we are done, here.” He fixed her with pitying look. “You have several important and bravely executed missions to your credit. For those, we owe you a debt of gratitude.”

  Sturmweg on the North York Moors; Nachteule in Wales. Probably he didn’t mean Monarch in the Bavarian Alps.

  The voice in the shadows said, “I agree, we’ve heard enough.” He paused, and the men at the table put down their pens and turned to him.

  “I think you’ve earned a rest, Sparrow.”

  “Thank you for listening to me.” She gathered her purse and gloves. “I didn’t actually think you would.”

  “When you’ve recovered, I’d like to see you back here.”

  Kim stared in the direction of the man at the sidelines whose features she couldn’t see.

  The interrogator flattened his mouth, probably restraining a comment that would love to get out.

  Had E just confirmed that she still had her job? She sat quietly, trying to absorb this, but his words kept bouncing off her heart. The bullet wound in her shoulder ached. She thought of Erich von Ritter dying as he sat against the tree. Her emotions were awash in things that were over and done with but that lived on.

  “You don’t have to answer now. When you trust your judgment again, you can decide if you’d like to stay.”

  “I’ll just be a 6 for the spill,” she reminded him.

  “Quite enough, Sparrow. Quite enough.”

  ON THE WAY TO WRENFELL HOUSE

  SATURDAY, JANUARY 9. Kim was pleasantly surprised that Julian had arranged a car hire for the trip home instead of going by train. But for once neither of them was in a hurry. Their food was packed. Someone at the Office had put together lunches for both of them, assuring that Kim would have nourishment of the sort she needed.

  Julian had decided to retire, saying it was a young man’s game. Another factor: some of the higher-ups had taken notice of his privileged position with E, and he didn’t care for how he was being second-guessed. “It’s time anyway, Kim,” he assured her. In the face of what seemed a remarkable cheerfulness on his part, she set aside her immediate reaction of distress. Her father w
as sixty-three; not old, but the service took its toll. She felt there was more to come on this topic. And with a long stint together at Wrenfell, there would be plenty of time.

  Still, it was the changing of the guard for the Tavistock household, and she felt it acutely. How impossible this would have seemed a year ago. So many ways that was true. As Julian drove, she looked over at him with a great welling in her heart.

  Before they had set out, he had given her an envelope. Inside, her watch. No note. Of course they wouldn’t have let Hannah include a note. Kim put on the watch, rubbing her forefinger against the crystal, thinking of Hannah saying goodbye and wishing it could be in person. Kim’s diamond ring from her cover marriage was no doubt by now the property of His Majesty’s Government.

  They drove north. For the first two hours, Kim had told him a more detailed story of Berlin, Hannah Linz, and the Aerie. He didn’t interrupt except for the occasional “Mmm,” his understated way of reacting to the most outrageous things. A few times he reached down to put a gentle pressure on her hand.

  “I hope you won’t treat me like an invalid,” she said, but put a smile with it.

  “Not at all.”

  “And especially not a demented invalid.”

  “Of course”

  “But if I do seem—off-kilter—at any point, you will tell me?”

  He shot an ironic look at her. “Three months, maximum. Then no excuses.”

  “Agreed.”

  “I don’t suppose you met Hannah Linz,” she said, probing for any lingering connections to that extraordinary woman.

  “No. I wish I could have done.”

  Ironically, the service had made the assumption that she was letting her heart lead her in relation to Hannah. Yet when the mission was over, one was presumed to have no feelings in the matter. There was a time for heart and a time to refrain, she knew this. But sometimes caring, intuition, and judgment were braided together, each informing the other. Even her male counterparts must know this at some level, though they would never say so.