“Just be careful,” was all Josh said.
Gabe nodded. “You too.”
“Pardon. Are you Pritchard?”
Edith stood over his desk, hand on her hip, the faintest amused smile perched on her lips. Gabe stood and stuck out his hand to shake with her. “You must be Edith. A pleasure to meet you.”
“Charmed,” she drawled, those Brahmin vowels gaping. “We’ve got quite the task before us, haven’t we?”
She’d gone to Radcliffe, her record had said. She’d have had to, to rise as far as she had as a woman in the CIA. Bound to be sharp as a tack. But Gabe wasn’t so worried about that.
His prime concerns were who she knew and just what the hell she was tied to.
“Indeed we have.” Gabe tossed a grin over his shoulder toward Josh, who wore the distinct expression of What the fuck? “They sent me a redacted version of your accomplishments—pretty impressive. I can’t wait to start comparing notes. I’m so glad you agreed to let me work alongside you for this investigation.”
“I wasn’t left with the impression that I had much of a choice.” Edith smiled briskly. “Well, shall we begin?”
The Flame probably pulled all kinds of strings to get one of their own in charge of Dominic’s investigation. So Gabe had pulled a few of his own to make sure he was on the task force, as well. He gestured toward Frank’s office and let the hitchhiker take a deep breath. Mud from the rainy streets, fine silk fibers in her blouse, complex perfume… Nothing out of the ordinary yet.
But Gabe would be watching.
“Ladies first.”
• • •
Tanya bit into her cucumber sandwich and chewed without tasting. Everything tasted like ash anyway. The Vltava River shimmered and danced before her, where she sat on a park bench along the quays, and a group of kids perched on the river’s edge shrieked and kicked their feet in the muddy water heavy with mountain melt. With a sigh, she wrapped up the rest of the sandwich and pitched it into the bin beside her. The sooner she got this over with, the better. One hand dove into her pocket and she ran her fingers over the jagged edges of the charm inside.
“Ah, there you are.” A woman in a camel coat approached, long, lithe limbs swinging, balletic. She adjusted her oversized sunglasses and positioned herself on the bench next to Tanya. “Much better weather than Moscow, now, isn’t it?” she asked in Russian.
On anyone else, the coat and shades would look ridiculous—like some socialite playing at Mata Hari—but on Zerena Pulnoc, the Soviet ambassador’s wife, it was the perfect chic disguise.
“A bit more heat than I was expecting,” Tanya said.
Zerena’s mouth tightened into a bloodless smile. “For both of us, it would seem.” She slung one arm over the back of the bench and angled herself toward Tanya. Her straight, pale hair surrounded her face like a gilded frame. “I suspect little Sashenka has asked you to bite off more than you’re willing to chew, hasn’t he?”
“I’m not interested in discussing work details with you,” Tanya said. She wasn’t interested in discussing any details with Zerena. Still, for all her viperous charm, the woman had saved her life. Tipped her off to the American Flame operative’s plan. There was some kind of hook dangling before her; Tanya could almost see its glint. But just where Zerena meant to lead her, she couldn’t yet be sure.
And Tanya wanted to find out.
Zerena glanced down at her nails, painted a chipper coral shade to match the coming spring. “We both know it isn’t just about the office.”
Tanya clenched her jaw. “Was it you?” she asked. “The barge?”
“Initially,” Zerena said. Tanya blinked at her candor. “My men, anyway. But there was another party involved.”
Tanya stifled a laugh. Sasha wanted to know first so he could get an advantage over on Zerena, and now here Zerena was, prodding her for the prize. And what could she do to Zerena over the barge attack? Start a witch hunt against the ambassador’s wife? Zerena had done nothing dangerous to the state—not anything the Politburo would believe, anyway. Sasha, too, she’d had no choice but to protect. To indict Sasha was to indict all of the Prague office. The last thing Tanya needed was an ideological purge on her hands.
“These attackers,” Zerena said. “They must have wanted the cargo for some purpose of their own. We are both aware of the many uses they can serve.”
Yes, Tanya was aware. Andula. All Tanya had wanted was to keep her safe from the Flame. But if she’d fallen into someone else’s hands, or been one of the ones killed or captured—
“I am looking for answers to all these questions. Same as you. Same as Sashenka.” Zerena tossed her hair over one shoulder and stared back toward the river. “Perhaps we can help one another understand this situation better.”
Tanya’s right hand tightened into a fist. “Perhaps.”
“Of course,” Zerena said, “I do think I’ve helped you plenty already.”
And there it was, the hook pulling tight. Whatever charm Zerena had given her when Sasha sent her to her death at the CIA safe house, desperately trying to recover the defector and Host—it had saved her life. And Tanya knew it. But she’d been so damned determined to stop the Host from falling into Flame hands, from letting the CIA nab yet another Soviet scientist, that she’d had no other choice but to accept it. The Ice couldn’t make charms like that. Even if they knew how, they’d write it off as a waste of resources, or an abuse of power. In that, Tanya could glimpse, however briefly, the appeal of Flame’s methods. She saw that candle glimmer in Zerena’s eyes, guiding everything she did.
If playing along with Zerena meant tracking down the Hosts and finding out what purpose the Flame wanted them for in the first place, then maybe Tanya could dance with that fire, too. Especially if playing along meant keeping an eye on Sasha and Zerena both.
But she wouldn’t cave in too quickly. First she needed to see where the hook was pulling her.
“One more tidbit for you,” Zerena said, long legs uncrossing. “There’s a new arrival in town by the name of Terzian. Someone you might wish to keep an eye on.” Zerena tilted her head. “I suspect at least one of your friends will know him by name. If not, well, then I suspect your friends are beyond my help.”
Tanya forced a smile to her face. “I appreciate the assessment.”
“A peace offering,” Zerena said. “There can be more, if you like.”
Fat chance of that. “It was your choice to help me, not mine,” Tanya said, standing up. “Then and now.” She brushed the crumbs from her jacket and slid her hands into her pockets.
Zerena smiled. “In time,” she said, “you’ll find I’m the best choice you have.”
• • •
Frank peered through the plastic blinds of his office window into the main floor of Prague Station. Gabe and Edith, the Counterintelligence broad, were bent over a table in the conference room, poring over Dominic Alvarez’s files. Gabe looked at ease. Far too at ease. Ever since that fucking slimeball Alvarez disappeared with their prized defector, Gabe had been the model operative. And then, somehow, after botching the ANCHISES op, Gabe had landed himself right on the team that should have been investigating him.
Frank’s phone chirped. With a groan, he limped back to his chair and plucked up the receiver. “Lieutenant General Cartwright on the line for you, Chief Drummond,” his secretary announced.
Frank stretched his legs out in front of him. Fucking finally. “Put him through.”
“Drummond!” Lieutenant General Cartwright’s voice bellowed through the receiver. “Damn good to hear from you, son. How’s desk jockey life treating you?”
Frank rubbed the edge of his knee, where it met his prosthesis. “I’ve known worse.”
“Haven’t we all.” Cartwright chuckled, straight from the gut. “You know, this NATO detail ain’t so bad for me, either. Brussels is goddamned gorgeous. Think I eat my weight in mussels and fries every night, though.”
“Yeah, I heard about your SACEUR
appointment,” Frank said. NATO’s Supreme Allied Command post for the European continent was about as comfy a gig as they came—Europe by way of the cities, rather than some muddy air base in the middle of farmland. “Congratulations.”
“Yeah, well, it’s got its own headaches.” A hesitation. Frank pictured him pausing to look down at his cigarette as he searched for the right words. “Sounds like you’ve had your fill of them, too.”
Frank reached for the key switch on his phone. “Go secure?”
“Always.”
Frank turned the key. Waited for the crackle and hiss as Cartwright did the same, and the call rejoined.
“It’s not that they shouldn’t be investigating,” Frank said. “That op was a goddamned mess, start to finish. I’d love to know what went down.”
“We only got the sketchiest of details,” Cartwright said. “I had a team that was supposed to be meeting the plane that never came. At first we figured some suit up at Langley just went and changed things without telling us.”
“No. It was rotten all the way through.” Frank took a deep breath and steadied himself. “But I’m a little concerned about the team they’ve pulled together for the aftermath.”
“What, the Radcliffe skirt? I’ve never met her myself, but she seems competent enough, for a broad. Not much to look at, I hear, but your higher-ups seem to like her work.”
Frank winced. “No. It’s not that. It’s… it’s one of my own guys they assigned to work with her.”
The static of the encrypted channel was thicker, furrier than the open line. It had a weight that rubbed up against Frank as he waited for a response. “I’m very sorry to hear that, Frank.”
Frank propped his head in one hand, cheek smooshing against his palm. “I’m not saying he’s dirty. Obviously if I had anything to go on, his ass would be in the stockades. It’s just that feeling you get, right? The birds go quiet in the fields and a cloud crosses over the sun…” He blinked away the memories. The splash of mud against his face. With trembling fingers, he reached for a pen and clicked it open, shut. “I’d rather put his focus elsewhere. Somewhere I can keep an eye on him.”
“Understood. I’d trust your instincts over half a dozen shitty analysts’ reports any day.” The phone cracked as Cartwright adjusted it on his shoulder. “What’s this tool’s name?”
“Pritchard.” Frank’s throat rasped. “Gabriel Pritchard. I just don’t know that we’re going to get the CI investigation we need with him on the team.”
“No sweat, Frank. He’s former military, right? Name sounds familiar. Maybe one of his old commanding officers had a hand in it. But I’ll see what I can do.”
Frank stumbled through the rest of the pleasantries—half-hearted pledges to golf together, or shunt off their wives on a shopping trip in Paris at the next NATO glad-handing gala. He twisted the blinds open again and watched Pritchard, a screw tightening inside his skull.
He hadn’t forgotten Josh Toms’s concerns. And when the mud and blood clung to you and your sweat ran cold, all you could do was watch your back.
3.
Zerena detested smoking in closed rooms, but sometimes, it was unavoidable. She ashed her cigarette into an empty glass vial and stared at the centuries of peeling paint on the stone wall across from her. Karel and one of their other acolytes—Dusan, Dušek, someone unimpressive—were bickering on the nearest bench, but their words didn’t reach her. With another drag on her cigarette, she checked the gold watch on her wrist.
“We’ve waited long enough,” Zerena announced. The bickering died down; a dozen heads swiveled toward her in the partial darkness of the cellar. Meeting in cellars, like they were common criminals, or witches of no real power or skill. “It would appear we must resolve this ourselves.”
Karel raised one quivering finger. “I don’t know that that’s—”
“We are running low on ritual components and we cannot sustain the Hosts’ stasis for long,” Zerena said. “In absence of any guidance from our betters—”
“I do apologize for the delay.” Terzian strode down the cellar steps, cane clutched in one hand. So he was using it less as a tool today, and more as a tactic. His suit was rumpled and his accent thick with irritation. “I forget that Soviet train timetables are a mere suggestion. A five-year plan, yes?”
Zerena narrowed her eyes and flicked her cigarette ash to the floor.
“Wraith.” Terzian gave Zerena a curt nod and flicked his thumb at a smudge of plaster dust on his sleeve. “Now, what was this about guidance from your betters?”
She crooked her mouth to one side and leaned back against the stone wall. “I was going to make a proposal. We cannot sustain the Hosts’ stasis much longer.”
“Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
He paused in front of Zerena and peered down at her. Terzian’s wizened face, the light brown of sand by the Caspian Sea, nonetheless looked healthy and shrewd, his contempt showing in the hard edges of his jaw and the sneer to his lips. Zerena had been in awe of him once—of the power that radiated from him like starlight. The Flame gave her something to latch onto, a drumbeat beneath the rhythmless rush of life. She felt that drumbeat under her skin still. But it was her own now. She was Terzian’s no more.
“I understand that attacking the barge was partly your idea,” Terzian said.
“We lost a Host when Alvarez went missing,” she replied, her tone threaded with chill. “I found a way to recover more.”
Terzian’s nose twitched. “An entire barge under the Ice’s protection. And you did not think perhaps this might warrant a much larger force than what you sent?”
“I selected a target I thought we could handle. We are not the Ice. Our hands are not bound by procurement slips, bylaws, rigid chains of command—all things which shatter easily.” Zerena tipped her chin up. “Our forces were more than sufficient to handle the Ice guards.”
“I do not expect you to follow some arcane protocol, Zerena. But I do expect results.”
In the corner of the cellar, Sasha Komyetski chuckled to himself. White-hot anger set Zerena’s nostrils flaring.
“As I understand it, the Ice had ten Hosts aboard that barge. And you’ve recovered three of them?” Terzian’s tongue clucked against the roof of his mouth. “Abominable.”
“Our—our team was attacked.” Karel spoke up, though his voice sounded pressed through a too-thin pipe. “It wasn’t the Wraith’s fault. The attacker took the Ice unaware, too—set the barge on fire and proceeded to kill men on both sides—”
“Ah. Then what spells did you use to repel the attacker, Wraith?” Terzian asked.
Zerena drove the butt of her cigarette into the bench beside her. He knew perfectly well she hadn’t been there to personally oversee the operation.
“She charged an impressive array of charms for us. We all contributed beforehand, but she conducted the majority of the rituals to draw energies into the charms.” Karel tugged at his Oxford collar. “There was an embassy event, but Kralupy nad Vltavou was our best chance at getting the drop on the barge.”
“So the Wraith, who seems to think herself the high priestess of Prague, had to go rub elbows with some agricultural secretary.” He shot her a withering look. “You couldn’t get your husband to do it?”
“We were attacked,” Karel snapped. Zerena cut her eyes toward him. “Or perhaps you don’t care that there is another player interested in collecting the Hosts?”
Terzian’s smile thinned. “And do you know who this other player was? Because I was rather under the impression that you lot have still not figured that out.”
“N-no. All I know is that this person was a witch, too. They understood—things. They were doing something to the flames.”
“Doing things to flames! Ah, this is divine. I think I am starting to understand just why the Prague acolytes have contributed absolutely nothing of value in the past several years.” Terzian strode toward Karel and paused before him. “What kind of things?
”
“There was this… dead zone around them. And the flames were a strange color—it wasn’t natural, they burned hotter, spread faster… I don’t know what kind of magic it was. I didn’t have the right charms on me to root it out.” Karel swallowed. “We were prepared to fend off the Ice. Not whatever—whoever this was.”
“You did not have a leaden working?” Terzian asked. “To neutralize a magical patch of space? Is that not standard anytime you undertake something of this magnitude?”
“Well, we weren’t expecting—”
“You weren’t expecting. No, you weren’t expecting anything. Because you are weak. And you have allowed weakness to fester.” Terzian curled his upper lip back and rapped the edge of his cane against the stone floor. “But that is not our way.” His expression blazed bright in the cellar’s darkness. “Everything not useful must be burned away.”
Zerena lifted her head, a retort building on her tongue, but before she could, the sharp stink of bile filled the cellar. Karel tossed back his head with a dried-out moan. His skin was shriveling—peeling back from his lips and eyes.
“Stop!” he hissed. But his protests withered as his teeth rattled free of his gums, then clattered to the floor.
He slid forward, off of his bench, and crashed to the ground. His knees crumbled into dust, then his torso, and his skull. A crack of energy shot through the chamber, then scattered. Every eye was wide and gleaming as they watched Karel turn to nothingness; every mouth hung slightly agape.
“One less useless donkey for all those charms,” Terzian said. His skin had acquired a faint glow, like he’d just enjoyed a fresh scrub or a dip in the sea. He pulled a fractured crystal bound with wiring from his pocket and dropped it to the ground. It smashed and turned to smoke. “Maybe that’ll keep you from exhausting yourself, Wraith.”
Zerena reached, with shaking hands, for the breast pocket of her coat. She was going to need another cigarette.
“We aren’t moving on the Hosts until we resolve this issue,” Terzian said, and turned to Zerena with a stare that smoldered like coal. “Find me this vigilante.”
The Witch Who Came In From The Cold: The Complete Season 2: The Complete Season 2 (The Witch Who Came In From The Cold Season 2) Page 3