by David Mack
* * *
Under a sky bruised with dusk, Niko prowled Bayeux’s cobblestone alleyways. Deep shadows stretched down the nooks of the old coastal city. Niko limped toward a V-shaped intersection that birthed a new alley at its junction. He took such pains to draw no attention to his own passing that he barely noticed his man Xavier until he was almost on top of him.
The Maquis spy was wedged into a tight gap between two old brick buildings. His hair was a mess, his face gaunt. “You’re late.”
“One of those Vichy pricks spotted me in town. I had to shake him.”
“Did you?”
“Of course.” Niko felt no need to explain he had misled the Vichy agent by transforming himself with the talent of GAMIGIN into the guise of a teenage girl and directing the French traitor into a large building he would no doubt spend hours searching to no avail. He mirrored Xavier’s suspicion. “You said you had a lead on Briet.”
“You said you’d pay me.”
Niko reached inside his jacket with his good hand. Xavier started to draw his knife. The blade was half out of its sheath when Niko froze and told his twitchy colleague, “Relax.”
“How much did you bring?”
“It’s not money.”
“Then we’re done.” Xavier tried to sidestep Niko, who showed him the paper bag he’d hidden under his coat. “Fresh baguette. Two sausages. And a wedge of triple-cream Brie.”
The spy’s eyes widened as if he’d been offered the fortune of Midas. “How? From where? All the food is rationed! The Germans haven’t left us a bite in weeks!”
“From the best charcuterie in Bayeux.”
Xavier looked stunned. “Monsieur Delacroix? How?”
There was nothing for Niko to gain by explaining his magickal powers of suggestion, so he evaded the question with a euphemism. “I appealed to the better angels of his nature.”
The young Maquis opened the bag, stuck his beak of a nose inside it, and breathed deep its savory perfumes. “Most excellent. Truly splendid.” Another deep huff, then he rolled the bag closed and relaxed his defenses. “Briet has been visiting the new fortifications on the cliff at Pointe du Hoc a few times each week for the last month. She is supervising the construction of a new Nazi artillery bunker overlooking the beach.”
“Why that bunker? What’s so special about it?”
A shrug. “Who knows? The Nazis won’t let anyone near it.”
Footsteps echoed from farther down the alleyway. Xavier pulled Niko down a shaded street from which more narrow passages branched. Hobbled by his gimp leg, it was hard for Niko to keep up with him. Hidden once again, Niko whispered, “Tell me all about her visits. Anything you remember. Even the smallest detail might help.” Without asking permission, he invoked the memory-enhancing gifts of VERMIAS to improve Xavier’s recollection.
“She tends to come in the late afternoon,” Xavier said, his often lax focus honed by the memory charm. “Never alone. Usually with a few Waffen-SS guards, but sometimes up to half a dozen. Most times she stays late into the night, or even until the wee hours.”
Niko committed the details to his own demonically enhanced memory. “Good, good. How does she arrive? On foot? In a truck?”
“Chauffeured car, German military registry, French driver. He usually waits near the car until she returns.”
“Do you know where they come from? Or where they go after they leave?”
Xavier shook his head. “No. It never comes up. No one asks.”
More steps nearby. They ducked around a corner into another maze of narrow alleys flanked by high walls. Once more out of sight, Niko listened until he heard no sounds of pursuit. “Do the Germans building the bunker get any advance notice of her visits?”
“I don’t know. We’ve intercepted no phone calls, telegrams, or radio signals announcing her visits. If they were scheduled, it was done by secure post.”
“Who has access to this special bunker?”
“So far? Only a few high-level engineers, a handful of workers, and Briet.”
“All right.” Niko considered all that Xavier had told him. It was a good start, enough on which to formulate a plan. He dispelled his demonic enhancement of the other man’s memory. “You’ve done well, Xavier. Can I ask you to keep eyes on the bunker? I need to know if Briet comes back, or if the work is ever halted long enough for me to sneak in and get a look.”
The Maquis turned a skeptical look at Niko, but his loyalty to Free France overcame his doubts. “That can be arranged—for a price, of course.” He started walking, and Niko followed.
“Trust me, Xavier. I’ll make it worth your while.”
“So you say. I’m pretty sure you still owe me a bottle of Pinot Noir.”
“Like hell I do, you—” Niko and Xavier rounded a bend in the alleyway and came face-to-face with a pair of street urchins: a boy and a girl, neither older than ten years, both emaciated, victims of long neglect. They recoiled from the men until Niko tipped his beret to them. “Good evening. Are you two lost?”
The children seemed paralyzed by fear. Tiny shakes of their heads indicated they were not lost. Softening his tone, Niko continued, “Are you all right? Where are your parents?”
Anxious looks hinted at the children’s silent exchange of fears. Then the girl spoke. “Gone. The Nazis. Killed Papa. Took Mama.”
Niko kneeled to bring himself down to the children’s level. “When?”
“July,” the girl said. “Before Bastille Day.”
The boy added, “Shot Papa in our house.”
“Put Mama on the train,” the girl continued. With wide, pleading eyes, she implored Niko and Xavier, “Can you spare any money? We’re hungry.”
Xavier started to turn away. “Beggars and hustlers. I should’ve known.”
Catching the other man’s arm, Niko asked the children, “How long since you’ve eaten?” He listened to their replies with the discerning ear of AMON.
“Six days for me,” the girl said. She nodded at her brother. “Five for Marcel.”
Xavier grumbled, “What a load of—”
“They’re telling the truth,” Niko said.
“How can you tell?”
“I just can.” He reached into his pocket and fished out a few francs, the only currency he had on his person, and gave it to the girl. Then he nudged Xavier and shot a prompting glare at his bag of foodstuffs.
The spy was appalled. “Why would I?”
“To serve the better angels of your nature.”
“I haven’t any.”
Marshaling the mind-altering powers of NEBIROS, Niko instilled a deep seed of primal terror into Xavier’s psyche. “Shall I help you discover them?” It was a cruel way to motivate someone, but the situation called for it.
Fearful, Xavier thrust the grease-stained paper bag into the boy’s hands. The children tore the bag open and marveled at its contents. Beaming with joy, they scampered into the shadows with their bounty. The men watched the children retreat into the twilight.
Xavier grimaced at Niko. “You are a bad influence, monsieur.”
It was hard for Niko to feel sorry for a rank opportunist such as Xavier, so he cracked a mischievous smile instead. “What can I say? I’ve the Devil in me.”
41
OCTOBER
More than seven weeks in the Red Army field hospital had driven Anja to her wits’ edge.
Time spent in forced convalescence was, she noted, much like time spent in prison. It moved with maddening sloth and was full of strangers who wanted to stick her with sharp objects to take some of her blood. The food was bland and horrid. Each day was a refrain of the one before and an omen of the one to come. Fellow patients asked one another, like inmates trading secrets of guilt, “What are you in for?” And all that the nurses or doctors cared about when they spoke to her was whether she was sufficiently rehabilitated to merit her release from the institution, to return to the meat grinder of the war.
Anja was done waiting for the
ir permission.
She rolled from her cot to a floor of bloodstained planks atop packed dirt. With stealth and dispatch she dressed and gathered her belongings: coat, pack, rifle, tool roll. The dated notes on her chart told her it was October 7. A wristwatch looped around the frame of her neighbor’s cot showed the time was just after four in the morning, which meant the witching hour, when demons sent abroad were at their most potent, was passed.
Time to go.
There were no guards posted on the field hospital. In the wee hours the handful of nurses, doctors, and volunteers tended to steal naps before sunrise roused the patients, who would fill the dawn with pitiful cries and complaints.
Anja skulked past the rows of cots. The only person who seemed to note her departure was a soldier with a throat wound and no voice with which to betray her. She nodded at him on her way past and whispered, “Good luck, Comrade.” He half raised one hand in a meek wave of farewell, then went back to sleep.
Anja stopped at the exit, which was just three blankets draped in front of an arch whose door had been blown off years earlier. She pushed aside the woolen layers and peeked outside. There were few signs of life, just deserted streets of rubble. She parted the blankets and passed between them with as much speed as her atrophied limbs could bear.
To conceal the extent of her recovery from the doctors she had feigned weakness and an inability to stand on her own. The cost of her deception now came due: her legs, after weeks of disuse, trembled under the burden of her pack, rifle, and tools.
Just keep moving, she told herself. Through will alone she impelled her body into motion. She couldn’t afford to be seen or stopped, not now. When she was found to be missing, she would be declared absent without leave. In a matter of days she would be charged with desertion. It was imperative she be as far away as possible by then. Her life depended on it.
The landscape around her was jarring in its bleakness. Where once Kharkov had stood, nothing remained but the husks of buildings—sometimes as little as a single wall, or a lone doorway propped up in a field of bricks. Jagged like broken teeth, they stood in the footprints of a city laid waste. Smoke twisted from empty stretches of debris and wrecked tanks; fires burned in oil drums pockmarked with bullet holes.
A few foot patrols were out and about, usually no more than three or four infantrymen each. They all seemed more interested in their rambling conversations and idle boastings than in policing the smoldering corpse of the city, which made it easy for Anja to evade their notice and slip by them. In less than an hour she was on the outskirts of Kharkov, heading alone into the countryside, which tank battles and artillery fire had reduced to a cracked wasteland.
She turned her steps north-northeast, in the general direction of Moscow. Passing so close to the capital would be dangerous, but she had little choice: there were no direct routes from Kharkov to her native village of Toporok in Novgorodskaya Oblast. Even more perilous, she needed to make her trek on foot while avoiding any Red Army personnel who might come looking for her. She also had to hope the Germans made no late-autumn pushes into Russia before winter arrived. As for the coming cold and snow, those were hazards she would face one night and one step at a time, until she completed this long-overdue journey.
She’d had enough of war and enough of magick.
Desperate for sanctuary and absolution, Anja was going home.
* * *
Viewed through binoculars, the world was narrow and always in motion. As hard as Niko tried to hold them steady, the field glasses shook in his one good hand.
Tonight he blamed the cold that had frosted windows on the Normandy coast. He was hunkered in a ditch set back from the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc, not far from the bunker his contact Xavier said Briet had been frequenting since summer.
Why she had visited was still unclear. Neither Xavier or his source could confirm what part of the multi-battery artillery emplacement had been of interest to her. All he could do for the moment was hope tonight would be the night she showed her face here again.
Damn you, Xavier. Three weeks I have spent my nights in this hole.
He made another survey of the cliffs overlooking the beach. Only a handful of German soldiers patrolled there after dark. This night’s sentries looked no more vigilant than usual. Despite the proximity of England and the Allied forces, Normandy remained a relaxed front.
For Niko, the stakeout of the bunker had proved a mixed blessing. Because it was located inside the half-mile-wide zone within which no demon could enter and no magick would work, Niko had been forced to release his yoked spirits and venture into enemy territory with only a semiautomatic pistol, a knife, and his wits for protection. Out of habit he always carried his enchanted mirror, though it too was unable to function inside the “dead zone.”
Stripped of magick, he felt impotent, vulnerable. However, he’d enjoyed the freedom from nightmares that came with being rid of demons. Without spirits to vex him, he had cut down on cigarettes and wine, consuming them now more for enjoyment than for relief.
A far-off rumbling of engines turned Niko’s gaze inland. Distant headlights pierced the dark. A small convoy was approaching the work site. Niko lay low in his ditch and steadied his binoculars on its edge.
Three vehicles were waved through the security checkpoint. In the lead was a black Mercedes-Benz convertible with a long front end. Behind it were two German military trucks. They parked near the chief architect’s tent.
From one truck poured a platoon of Waffen-SS troops armed with submachine guns; out of the other climbed a team of civilian workers Niko had not seen before. The soldiers assumed protective formations on either side of the Mercedes-Benz, while the workers unloaded a six-foot-long, weighty, linen-wrapped wedge from the rear of the second truck.
Briet got out of the car. She stepped through her line of defenders and snapped orders at the workers who labored to carry the mystery wedge to the bunker.
What have we here? Niko focused his binoculars on the workers. Tell me that’s not some avant-garde coffee table or—
A man exited the car. Tall, handsome, and tailored: it was Kein. He interrupted Briet’s shouting to whisper in her ear. She nodded, then resumed her tirade at the workers.
The Waffen-SS troops moved with Kein and Briet as they followed the workers to the bunker. The magicians entered the fortification; the soldiers halted outside its door. No one acted as if this was the least bit suspect or out of the ordinary.
Niko noted the bunker’s position on his map. Over the last few weeks he had updated it to record the point’s warren of trenches, which linked the bunker to neighboring fortifications. Tucking the map away, he fantasized about lobbing a grenade inside the bunker, a nasty surprise for Kein and Briet. Only cold blue reason and the memory of Adair’s unequivocal orders—Observe but do not engage; gather intelligence, but don’t risk capture—stayed his hand.
As keen as Niko’s appetite for revenge had become, he remembered Adair’s warning that Kein was on the verge of unleashing something unprecedented in its destructiveness, a threat about which the Allies had no actionable intelligence. More than anything else, they needed to know what Kein was planning—and whatever it was, this was where it was being prepared.
The bunker’s door opened with a scrape of metal on stone. Briet emerged first, followed by Kein, and then the civilian workers. The Waffen-SS regrouped. One squad escorted Briet and Kein toward the chief architect’s tent, while the others herded the workers toward the trucks—then, without warning, mowed them down in a blaze of rifle fire. As the workers fell, neither Kein nor Briet spared a glance for the condemned. Their indifference told Niko the mass execution was no surprise to them, just another mundane atrocity on their path to victory.
The SS men chortled over the carnage. Niko seethed. If they were not inside the dead zone … He wished he could send a demon to gut the Nazis like trout, or crush their skulls like rotten fruit, or dismember them alive while he cut their throats with his athamé
—
Stop. Keep control. It was painful to put aside his anger, to bury his lust for vengeance, but it was necessary. He needed to be calm now.
He crouched as he shuffled toward the bunker, sheltered by the deepening twilight. No one had been left inside or at its entrance. He stole down its concrete steps, past a murder hole to a covered area that led to the bunker’s main entrance. Mindful of the armored portal’s loud scraping, he pulled up on its handle to lift it off the ground, then opened it just enough for him to slink past. He breathed easier once he was inside, hidden by the bunker’s shadows.
The interior was pitch dark. Niko dug his lighter from his pocket, opened the cover with a jerk of his wrist, and thumbed the flint. A tall flame danced on the lighter’s dense wick, throwing weak darts of illumination into the blackness that surrounded him.
He stood in a narrow passage. Directly ahead was another armored door, half open. Open doorways to his right and just ahead on his left. He crept forward, spooked by the shadows his own flame tossed onto the walls.
The chamber on the left was a guardroom, the space behind one of the murder holes. Through the other door he found a long windowless room fitted with a small cooking stove and four bunk-bed frames attached by chains to the walls and ceiling. An alcove on his left stood empty, but pipes, wires, and a round duct dangling from its wood-frame ceiling suggested it was meant to house some kind of machinery, either a heater or a generator, or both.
He returned to the passage inside the main door and ventured left, into a large open room. On its far wall, opposite the entrance, another armored door was propped open, admitting fresh air and reflected light from the fading dusk. The large room was devoid of furnishings. But before he progressed more than two steps inside … he saw it.
A demonic sigil adorned the floor. It was composed of eight wedges of marble, all of equal size and identical shape, but each unique in its engravings. Arcane glyphs had been carved into them. Some Niko recognized as Enochian wards, or as ancient Hebrew letters forming sacred names, or as seals representing specific demons. Others he couldn’t begin to identify. With all eight wedges in place, he saw that they and their markings fit together with precision. He saw no gaps; the seams between the wedges were barely visible.