Danny took it better than most: just a measured silence and a clench of his hand on the rail. “Tell me more.”
“You remember our compromised officer, Alvarez?”
Danny nodded. That was how surprise took him, back in Korea: right in the voice box.
“We’d planned to sneak him out of the country on a cargo plane, but he had his own ideas. His own plane, his own pilot. They headed north, kept low. We found the plane wrecked near the German border, and retraced its path. Thing is, the CI agent the Company sent over, she found a document—a flight plan charting the plane’s course. Dated before we found the plane. Before the op even happened. And it looks like it came from your office.”
Danny’s jaw tensed, and the movement showed in his temple.
“We have to be very careful here. I don’t know who it is, but they work fast. Our officer’s already dead, which means they’re reckless. That’s good for us, and bad. Good, since it means they’re jumpy, exposed. They wouldn’t kill her unless they really had no better option, so if we move fast, we should be able to button them up.”
“Christ, Frank.”
There it was: the doubt. “It’s hard to believe, I know. But the Soviets have an edge with this kind of thing. I’ve seen shit that would blow your mind. And I’ve come through. We’ll take care of it.”
A car rolled down the road. “What leads do you have?”
“I have a map your office put together. I have a date. I’ll need a list of your staff—we can go through people who might have ties with Alvarez, maybe served with him before.”
“Is this going to hit me from further up the chain?”
“Not if we get ahead of the story first. Right now it’s you and me. I’d rope in some of my staff, but you may have heard, Prague Station has its issues.”
Danny had a kind of head-down laugh, like he was laughing at the situation, or at himself. “We always seem to have issues.”
Bruiser barked, and tugged at her leash. “Sorry. Damn dog always wants something.” He turned toward her. “Come on, girl. Let’s—”
He didn’t finish that sentence.
He couldn’t say what had happened, was the strange thing. When he’d been shot, when the shell took his leg, the numbness and pain had filled him. He didn’t lose his body—a new weight just took its place. He’d been drugged and drunk and this was neither. Here he was, Frank Drummond, stuck inside his skin. His heart beat, his chest rose and fell. But somehow he couldn’t make his body move.
A sick green light shone on the pavement beneath his feet. A gust of wind struck him and he trembled, and almost fell. Bruiser barked louder and louder. Danny’s hand caught his arm.
“Sorry, Frank.”
Even then, Frank almost still trusted him. The old sin: assuming you’re different from everyone else. Assuming that whatever it is, it can’t happen to you. It can, and if you think it can’t, it will.
Which did not answer the question: What the fuck was wrong with his body?
Bruiser growled, and tugged harder on the leash. Frank would have fallen over, but Danny held him up.
A car parked on the street, and men in suits emerged.
Frank really could have used his voice right about now. He probably would have shouted for help, but for the most part he really wanted to curse.
Bruiser tugged harder, and the leash slipped free of Frank’s hand. It burned his fingers passing through.
“Shit,” Danny said, before the dog came at him.
The weird green light broke, and Frank fell forward, gasping for sweet, fresh air. Goddamn. Stupid. Stupid fucking man. That’s what Donna would say. “Bruiser!”
Behind him, Danny moved, and Bruiser yelped.
“You stay the fuck away from my dog!”
Frank grabbed the railing and spun, swinging out with his cane. Bruiser had recovered from the kick, but backed up, confused. Danny dodged from the cane, and tried to snatch Frank’s arm—some shit in the palm of his glove was glowing. Poison? No, he hadn’t touched Frank’s skin. Poison could seep through clothes, though. Fuck that. Trust your distance, and trust your cane. “Go, Bruiser!” Some small and mostly helpless angel must have been watching out for him, because Bruiser actually went.
“You need to understand, Frank. We’re doing this for your own good.” Frank’s backswing struck the railing, and snapped off the tip of his cane. Danny smiled; Frank jabbed the splintered end of the cane at his old friend’s face, and Danny stopped smiling, and started bleeding. Missed his eye, though.
“That what they tell you in Moscow?” Frank shuffled forward, one hand on the rail, and kicked the broken piece of cane into the bushes as best he could. Behind him, he heard the suit boys from the car, their footsteps heavy as a jarhead’s.
Danny raised his glove—not the glowing one—to the cut on his cheek. “Frank. You really still think this is about Communists?”
“You sold out your country.”
“Grow up, Frank. Countries!” He ducked back when Frank came at him with the cane, and this time Frank’s balance was too far forward. Danny caught his arm, and once again Frank stopped. No pain, no shock. He just stopped moving, overbalanced and all. Would have broken his teeth if not for Danny’s grip. “Countries are amateurs. You think you know the stakes. You talk about the end of the world. But you’re playing an old game, with monsters in it, and you don’t even know how the pieces move. And you just made me take you off the board.”
The nothing Frank felt changed, and darkness closed around him. Somewhere far away, he heard Danny shout, “Get his cane. And find that damn dog!”
Go on, Bruiser, he thought while he still could think.
Get home.
5.
Josh woke four times that night, alone in his bed, heart racing, and lay twisting covers around himself like a cocoon until he decided there was no point growing even more familiar with the shadows on his ceiling, and rose, and dressed in the dark for work.
The sky was raw pink by the time he reached the embassy. The city around him stretched and yawned. Trucks rumbled through their rounds, collecting garbage, dropping off packages that would soon become garbage. He shambled across the street and fumbled for his pass, ready for the day, ready for nothing in particular, and would have gone ahead into the building had he not heard a loud bark.
A marine at the gate tried, and failed, to corner a big yellow Lab with a leash trailing from its neck. The dog darted back out of reach, zipped through the soldier’s legs, and ran for the embassy door.
Josh blinked at the dog for a long time as it ran around the pursuing marine. He stared at the leash. He wondered why the dog looked familiar. He wondered where Frank might be. It had been a very long, very sleepless night, so it took him a few minutes to realize why he was asking himself those two questions in that specific order.
The marine tried another tackle, which didn’t work. Josh knelt, and spread his arms. What was the thing’s name? “Bruiser! Here, uh. Girl. Here, girl.”
The dog seemed skeptical, but trotted over nonetheless. She limped, holding her weight off her back right leg, but she came into his arms. Her collar glinted pink in the morning haze. Josh wondered where Frank had gotten off to. He wouldn’t have let Bruiser get far. Bruiser stank of mud and dead things, and her collar and leash were soaked.
“How long have you been out, girl?”
Bruiser didn’t seem to have an answer for that. She started to walk away. Josh caught the leash, but she kept walking—pulled him off-balance toward the gate.
The marine, who’d been watching, arms crossed, from across the yard, shot him a thumbs-up. “Good work, sir. I woulda got her sooner or later, but I appreciate the hand.”
“This is Frank’s dog,” Josh said. “Has Mr. Drummond checked in this morning?”
The marine jogged over to the duty station. A long few seconds passed, during which Josh attempted without much success to convince Bruiser to stop choking herself on her collar in her attempt to
get out the embassy gate. The marine jogged back. “No, sir. Checked out last night. Maybe he missed the gate.”
“He wouldn’t.” Bruiser tugged against the leash again. “Can you check me back out?” He followed Bruiser through the gate into the morning streets of Prague.
She trotted contentedly down the road for a while, and Josh started to think he had made a mistake, jumpy and full of nerves, believing himself to have stumbled into a Lassie episode. But when Bruiser stopped at a corner, or tugged gently to make Josh shift his path, he did what she asked.
Eventually, they reached the riverfront, the morning sun glittering off the cold, gray-green water. Bruiser dragged him across the grass to the bank, to the rail. “Whoa, girl! Hold on, there.”
Bruiser stopped dead. Josh stumbled, and recovered his footing, but she didn’t start walking again. Had he broken her concentration? Distracted her from the trail?
She barked, then barked again.
He looked over the railing. The water’s surface rolled with small waves. He saw no body. Then again, if there was a body, the current might have carried it away. He felt sick to his stomach.
He examined the pavement at his feet, near where Bruiser stood. Small red dots, dried. Could be paint, or ink, but he’d seen enough blood recently to know that was wishful thinking. He looked around for more.
Beneath a nearby bush, he found the broken tip of a black cane. One cane looked very much like any other, but that one belonged to Frank.
Josh knelt, took a handkerchief from his pocket, and wrapped the fragment of cane.
He did not know what to do.
Bruiser walked up to him, and set her head on his shoulder. He hugged her around the neck and knelt there with her, breathing.
6.
Sasha found Terzian in a candlelit basement, taking augury from the entrails of a dove, or else simply butchering the poor creature for his amusement. It was hard to tell. Terzian’s long fingers worked in the dove’s open flesh, and drew out guts like twists of yarn.
There were many ways of magic, even without a proper Host to draw from. Sasha was not aware of any particular advantage blood sacrifice offered over, say, manipulations of yarrow sticks or a book of Virgil. But some people enjoyed watching pain.
Sasha closed the door and chose a spot near it, within the rather considerable range of peripheral vision Terzian’s bugged eyes afforded him, and outside the splash zone. Not for the first time, he wondered how a good officer and acolyte would best express his seething incoherent rage to a superior whose powers’ limits were not clear. He settled on: “I believe you have kidnapped an American named Frank Drummond, who is CIA Station Chief in Prague. And I want you to let him go.”
“Wrong,” Terzian said, and knotted a strand of guts around his finger.
“Please enlighten me.”
Terzian cut the intestine below the knot. “I have kidnapped no American.”
“Then he is dead? Because neither I, nor anyone in my organization, would be so blindingly stupid as to remove a head of station from play for what seems to me a minor investigation. He was a known quantity—a good adversary, yes, but we understood his operational patterns. If he has died the Americans will retaliate. He will be replaced by some cowboy and we will have to start all over again!”
Terzian looked over to Sasha, and his eyes were glowing red from within.
Sasha stopped talking.
Terzian turned back to the bird, and picked up his knife again. “I forgive your outburst,” he said, magnanimous and terrible. “The American’s death would be foolish, and reckless. I did not kidnap him, but he is not dead. Our mutual friend took him alive.”
“How do you know this?”
Terzian gestured dismissively at the disemboweled dove.
Sasha crossed his arms. “A pleasant parlor trick for the new initiates, but if you could get dependable information that way, the Flame would need no organization, no assets. How did you learn of the kidnapping?”
“Cartwright told me.”
“Did you impress upon him that this was foolishness in the extreme?”
“I did.” Terzian plied the knife through flesh again, and began to peel out tiny ribs. “I am given to understand he has his reasons. Perhaps sentimentality is among them.”
“Order our mutual friend to let him go.”
“We are … equals, in a sense, Cartwright and I.” Done with the ribs, Terzian began to pry the spine free, one vertebra at a time, taking care to preserve the spinal fluid. “He is free to do what he feels right.”
“And if he brings the Americans down on our head?”
“He can handle the Americans,” Terzian replied. “Now please, Sasha. Either be quiet, or leave. This is delicate work.”
• • •
Nadia turned pages and understood nothing. She finished reports only to realize she had not read them—then she started again, and realized she had not read them this time either. She felt an overwhelming need to hug someone, and the woman she wanted to hug had left her life, and would never speak to her again. She wanted to scream, but when she locked herself in the bathroom and opened her mouth, she could not find her voice.
She moved through her paperwork like a robot, filed stupid forms, and when the noise in her head finally reached crescendo, she set it all down and left. Told the secretary she was sick. She usually allowed herself one cigarette on the walk home. This time, she smoked two.
She let her hate for the city flow over her. Not that she always hated Prague. It was a city she had come to know as an adult, and lived inside for years. She’d come to it too late to feel the child’s immediate and utterly unjustified love she felt for Moscow. Growing to know its fogs and river and winters, she had developed a complex of interlocking feelings about it, contempt and love and rage and comradeship and exasperation. Hate, for a while, was comforting. In hate she could be alone. She wrapped hatred around her like a blanket.
She felt so secure and confirmed in her aloneness that she did not notice Josh Toms waiting by her apartment building’s rear door.
“Nadia.” She had not expected him to return so soon. He sounded unsure, and scared. She looked up to see if any windows were open, and up and down the alley to see if anyone was close enough to hear.
“Mister Toms.” The next words fell so far outside the recruitment cycle that her voice caught as she tried to say them. “Are you okay?”
He shook his head.
She sat beside him on the bench. After he’d stormed out of their meeting before, it was a rare gift to have him return like this: shucked of his shell, terrified and in need of help. She felt the stir of that old officer’s hunger, the need to convert, to land an asset she thought had slipped through her fingers. But she also felt sorry for him. “What’s wrong?”
He glanced at her, then at his folded hands, then back at her. At last he resolved whatever question he was asking himself, and produced from his pocket a piece of cloth, folded around a broken wooden stick with a rubber foot. It meant nothing to her until he said, “They got Frank.”
“Drummond. Your boss.”
“Yes.”
She took the section of cane from him, and examined it. Few scratches around the shaft, outside of a large divot where it must have struck a wall with considerable force. It had been long used, and cared for well. “Not the KGB. Not that I know.”
“Of course it wasn’t.” He snatched the cane back. “If he’s dead or captured, it’s because he started fucking with your after-school friends.”
“I do not understand.”
“The ones who attacked the dock. The Flame, you called them.” He spoke with all the ferocity a whisper could hold. “Edith learned about magic, and she went chasing some lead, and she’s dead now. And Frank went looking for whatever she found, and they got him. The only reason I have to hope he’s still alive is that we haven’t found a body.”
Small hope, she did not say. She knew the sound of desperation.
�
��They must be saving him for something. Maybe a trade. Maybe to frame me next. Whatever’s happening, we need Gabe. We both do. But that’s all I got. No quid pro quos. I don’t know what Frank found, if anything. I don’t know what Edith found, if anything. I don’t have anything to offer. But we need Gabe.”
“Why did you come to me?”
He set a hand on her wrist, then drew it back. His eyes had not left the middle distance above the pavement. “Because I’ve spent the last few days running out of friends.”
The Witch Who Came In From the Cold
Season 2, Episode 12
Zügzwang
Lindsay Smith
Prague, Czechoslovak Soviet Republic
May 1, 1970
1.
Zerena knew what it was to be truly hungry.
Hunger lived in her body, not just in her stomach, but in every inch of her. She was hollow, and she yearned for anything that could fill her in. Sometimes, it was as simple as a hot meal—they were so hard to find in the devastation after the war, when her parents were half-dead and wholly wrung out as they scrambled between jobs that paid next to nothing. But other times, all she needed to sate her was a flattering word. Sometimes it took another person holding out their leash to her and letting her take control. Sometimes it came from a whispered word, a meaning long since lost, and yet that word could fill her up with a glorious light and turn her world into a kaleidoscope rather than dreary post-war grays and browns.
And with those words came power. Came the promise of more words, more mixtures, more poultices to be found. She followed the trail they left behind, their slow-drifting smoke winding through ancient streets, and there she found at last what she needed to be whole.
So it seemed for a time, at least. But hunger wasn’t done with her yet.
Terzian saw her hunger, though for too long Zerena didn’t want to believe he did. He knew just when to reel her back in when she’d had enough of his games. She’d tried to play him right back, but she was too young then to understand. She knew better now. She knew so much better than he could ever guess.
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 42