“Don’t worry,” Jim said. “I’m not going to let anything happen.”
“Thanks,” she said. “But I’m fine.” That’s right, don’t you worry: a man is here to keep you safe. Just keep your head down and let the men take care of everything. Karen bit her cheek, hoping the pain would distract her accusing thoughts. It didn’t. Of course she didn’t need Jim to protect her; so then why did his confident smile make her feel protected?
Because you’re a coward, afraid of your own shadow. Afraid of your own power.
The thought echoed and died and she had nothing to offer to rebut it.
“For the record,” Jim said softly, “my dates are usually a bit classier than this.”
The comment caught Karen off guard, but she found herself smiling. “Is that what this is, then? A date? To a Communist country?”
“Anyone could take you out to dinner and dancing,” Jim said. She couldn’t see his face but could picture the pleased-with- himself smirk he was bound to be wearing. “I find dark tunnels and the threat of Soviet capture to be much more romantic.”
“I suspect,” Karen said, “that you don’t find many girls who agree.”
“That’s the best part,” he said. “My system filters out the boring ones.”
Karen stared down each empty hallway they passed on their climb. “Shouldn’t we be a bit more . . . secretive?”
Jim chuckled. “The Soviets are scary,” he said, “but they aren’t omniscient.”
That did little to reassure her. She felt eyes on her, prying inside. “I suppose it’s a little late to ask this,” she said, “but are you actually any good at being a spy?”
That earned a louder laugh, loud enough to make Karen wince. “I have no idea,” he said. “Let’s just say I think being a spy and enjoying yourself shouldn’t be mutually exclusive.”
“I think I’ll enjoy myself when we’re back on the other side of the Wall.”
“Amen to that,” Jim said. Before she could make a reply, he went on. “Fourth floor. We still on the right track?”
It took Karen a moment to hear him. “Yes,” she said eventually. “Yes. Down that way.”
The last door at the end of the hall looked like all the others, except for a few extra scratches in the peeling paint. To the tenants of the building, they must have just seemed like the expected wear on a run-down apartment. But to Karen, they were proof they’d found the right place. They were crudely made, but purposefully so. They needed to look incidental, but they were anything but. Her fingers brushed them and tingled as the inherent magic buzzed.
“Runes,” she said quietly. “Written magic. Usually for protection.”
“I guess we found our guy,” Jim said.
“I guess so.”
“Then let’s be friendly and introduce ourselves.” He pulled off a glove and knocked on the flimsy door.
At first, there was silence. No movement behind the door, nothing in the hall. Had they come too late? Then the unmistakable sound of a working lock, and the click of tired hinges, and a man was standing in the doorway.
“Good,” he said in accented English. “You were foolish enough to come.”
NINETEEN
Erwin Ehle ushered them quickly inside. The apartment was tiny and cold. It barely looked lived in. There was a bed, but no pillow. No closet or dresser. A small iron stove in the corner, but no wood. And even in the little light offered, Jim could see the footprints left in the dust on the floor.
“Don’t use this safe house often?”
“Observant,” he said. He was an older man, well dressed, with hair that was graying and thinning. “I apologize for the precautions. I did not know where I would be if you came, so I was forced to become . . . creative.”
His eyes moved from Jim to Karen, taking her in as if noticing her for the first time. “You . . .” he said, his voice faltering. He quickly threaded his fingers together, his skin turning white under the pressure. “You are the magician?”
“I am,” she answered.
“I was . . . expecting a man.”
Ouch, Jim thought. Probably not the best way to make friends.
“My apologies,” Karen said. She sounded less than amused. “I’m not trying to be female, really. Just sort of came out this way.”
Ehle’s jaw twinged, muscles firing with some irrepressible emotion. He released his hands but held them tightly against his legs, as though he didn’t trust them not to move on their own. “I did not mean . . .” he said, but then trailed off. “I trust the magical trail was not difficult for you to follow.”
“No,” she said. “Though I haven’t seen magic like this before.”
“It is nothing,” he said. He lifted a small stone carving from a dusty table. It looked like it was supposed to be some sort of four-legged animal, but Jim couldn’t say if it was supposed to be a dachshund or a Holstein. “Just a trinket I enchanted, in another lifetime.”
“And the spell you used to speak to me through the wind?”
Ehle almost smiled at that. He retrieved a leather bag from the floor by the door. It looked older than Karen and Jim both. The German pulled another small item from inside, this one a wooden flute. Well, almost a flute, but while it had a mouthpiece, it had no other holes to change notes. “I was quite proud of this one,” he said. “I improved on an older design. The original used Norse runes, but I found the Arabic to be more suitable.”
“May I see?” Karen asked.
He placed the strange flute in her hand, but shook his head as he did. “I expelled the last of its magic in contacting you. A pity.”
“Mr. Ehle,” Jim said, “I thought you were working for the GDR. But this looks like you’re in hiding. What’s going on?”
“Ah,” Ehle said, smiling and looking sad at the same time. “So that explains why you still came. You do not know.”
Jim’s palms were beginning to sweat. He’d supported this crazy plan, he’d fought for it, put his career on the line for it, but it wasn’t until they walked into this lifeless room that he’d begun to get nervous. “We don’t know what?”
Ehle looked at them both in turn. “Yes,” he said, “I am in hiding, but I do not expect to remain so for long. Either I will be found, or you will take me to the West. Tonight.”
“Take you . . . you want to defect?” Jim said.
“That is why I asked you to come.”
“Your message to Karen never said anything about defection,” Jim said. “You said you had intel about the Wall. We came . . . we brought our magician so you two could—”
“I have information about the Wall,” Ehle said, “and what is tearing it down. Information that I will give you when we are safe in West Berlin.”
“Look, sir, I don’t want—”
But Karen interrupted him. “Found by whom?”
Jim saw the brief flash of fear in Ehle’s eyes. “The matter of the Wall,” he said, “has drawn the attention of our masters in Moscow. They have sent someone here to control the problem and I believe he has decided I am not to be trusted. He is a KGB colonel. I do not know his true name, but in some circles he is known as the Nightingale.”
“Hell,” Jim said.
“I thought that you would have heard,” Ehle said by way of apology.
“Who is the Nightingale?” Karen asked.
“The Boogeyman,” Jim said. Now he felt the sweat creeping down his back. “He’s the one mommies and daddies tell little spies will come gobble them up if they don’t eat their vegetables.”
“But he’s real?”
“Very real,” Jim said. “He was in Berlin years back, before my time. We lost three agents in an afternoon. Just gone. Empty coffins on the plane back to the States. And you say he’s here? Because the Wall has a hole in it?”
“There is more,” Ehle said calmly. “Whi
ch I will explain, when we have time.”
“After we sneak you across the most secure border in the world.”
“You found a way here,” Ehle said. He pointed at Karen. “Certainly you did not bring her across at a checkpoint or you would not have made it this far. Judging by the sand you tracked into my apartment, I imagine the path was a bit cramped and dark, but I do not mind.”
“Jim,” Karen said. “What is the problem? He helped build the Wall in the first place. He can help us. We can’t just leave him here for the Soviets to find.”
Even after Ehle’s crack about her being a woman, she was on his side (magician solidarity and all that). That was probably the real reason he had insisted on Karen coming with the team to meet with him. But they didn’t understand the situation like he did. They took defections from the East, even spent countless hours and dollars to make them happen. And Ehle would be a high-value asset, being well placed in the GDR machine. But he was a magician and Washington wasn’t the biggest fan of magicians, the Agency even less so. Sure, they’d take him, but they wouldn’t be happy about it. Not one bit, and it would be Jim’s name all over the recruitment paperwork.
But none of that mattered. What mattered now was getting back to the saner side of the Wall without anyone getting shot.
“Okay,” Jim said. “Let’s—”
The room filled with the sound of little bells, though for the life of him, Jim couldn’t see any. Then the tinkling stopped. “What was that?” he asked.
“Were you followed?” Ehle demanded.
“No,” Jim said. “Of course not.”
“No one knows about this place,” Ehle said. “They found the others but not this one, not until you arrived.”
“No one knew we were coming,” Jim said. “Even if they did, no one knew where. We weren’t followed.”
Ehle parted one of the heavy curtains blocking the window that looked down to the street. “A car has circled the block three times,” he said softly. “And now it is stopped by the entrance to the building.”
“How could you know that?” Jim asked.
Ehle closed the curtain. “I am a magician working for the German Democratic Republic and the USSR who wants to defect to the West,” he said. “I may be a fool, but I am not unprepared.”
Now there was an indistinct murmur of static. Jim retrieved his radio from his jacket and turned up the volume. “Say again,” he said into the receiver.
Dennis’s voice came over the line. “You’ve got four guys who just pulled up. Dressed like regular folks, but haircuts say military.”
“What are they doing?” Jim asked.
A pause. “Waiting. Watching the door you went in.”
Jim turned to Ehle. “Is there another way out of the building?”
He shook his head.
“Can’t you use some fancy magic spell to make a new door?”
The magicians shared a glance. Great, Jim thought. They knew each other for five minutes and were already bonding over their common distaste for nonmagical dummies like him.
“There are many things we could do with magic. But if they have a magician with them,” Ehle said, “any significant magic we used could be easily detected.”
Jim peeked through the curtains. He saw the car idling ominously.
“What about the roof? Anywhere we can go up there without drawing attention?”
“I am not yet a feeble old man,” Ehle said, “but there are limits on how far these legs can jump.”
Jim quickly assessed their dwindling options. The window was just big enough to squeeze through, but seeing if he could survive a four-story drop wasn’t at the top of his to-do list. Maybe there was a sewer entrance in the basement, but he doubted it. If they couldn’t sneak out, that left the more direct approach. He had a pistol strapped to his ankle and two magicians. Maybe if they—
“I’ve got an idea,” Karen said. She turned to Ehle. “What else do you have in that bag?”
TWENTY
They sat in silence.
Three of the men had grown up together in Moscow, had fought in the war together, and had been on many similar operations together. On those nights, they had joked and laughed about memories old and exaggerated. On those nights, they had complained about the terrible weather and the worse cigarettes, the women who had left them and those who they wished would leave, and the food, always the food. But on those nights, they had been alone.
The fourth man in the car did not speak. He did not even look at them. He was young but carried himself with the arrogance of a senior general. They had only been told his first name: Kirill. Do whatever he tells you, their superiors had ordered. It will be better for you not to ask questions. They asked none. They were accustomed to following the commands of a man they feared.
“Something is happening,” Kirill said suddenly.
“I see nothing,” one of the others said, looking out the window at the apartment.
“Magic,” Kirill said. “They are using magic.”
They knew they were hunting a magician. Nothing scared these men, not after Stalingrad, but magic certainly made them uneasy. Most of them wore the cheap baubles you could get from some gypsy to ward against evil spells. They did not believe they did anything, but that was hardly the point. You had to take precautions, and with magic, who knew what would work or what would not?
Kirill got out and two of the men followed, leaving only the driver. They entered the lobby and found it empty. “Up there,” Kirill said, nodding toward the stairs. The other men reached into their jackets and slid out black pistols.
On the fourth floor, he stopped as if listening for something faint. Then he led them down a hallway to the last door. One of the others, the biggest man among them, started for it, but Kirill stopped him with a raised hand and cruel eyes. He ran his fingers across some meaningless scratches in the paint, whispering to himself. Then he stood back, lifted his hands, and blasted the door off its hinges with a single word.
The men with guns were in the room in an instant.
The apartment was empty. Their quarry was not here. The room was lit with a golden light that came from a glowing stone on a small table. The man called Kirill crossed the room and picked it up, and the light immediately died in his hands. A moment later, the stone burned to ash.
The only other sound in the room was the soft flutter of the curtains over an open window.
* * *
• • •
They hit the asphalt a little harder than Karen intended, but considering she didn’t have much experience levitating three full-grown adults, it wasn’t really that bad. Then again, this wasn’t so much levitating as it was trying to fall at a nonlethal speed, and that was magic she could manage. More importantly, it wouldn’t require so much energy as to overwhelm the distraction she had left behind in the apartment.
“It isn’t that we can’t use magic,” she had said when quickly explaining her plan. “We just have to use so much of it that they don’t know which to pay attention to.” That was one of the problems with magical detection: easy to know that magic was at work, but hard to know exactly what it was doing. Ehle had offered the use of a sunstone, a straightforward enchantment useful for illuminating dark places, or blinding your enemies, depending on its strength.
“Well,” she said as she tested her feet back on solid ground, “that could have been worse.”
Then she heard a car door. One of their visitors had apparently stayed with the car and they’d just landed right in front of him. The man stepped out, his eyes wide with surprise. But even the shock of seeing humans falling from the sky wasn’t slowing his hand as he reached into his jacket.
His eyes went even wider and then rolled back into his head. As he collapsed, Karen saw Dennis standing over him, his smashed radio crumbling in his fist.
“You people know
how to make an entrance,” he said, shaking out his hand.
Above them they heard a huge crash, like someone had blown a hole in a wall.
Jim reached into the car, grabbed the keys, and tossed them into a nearby drain. “Come on,” he said. “Time to get out of here.”
* * *
• • •
Emile was not at the parking lot where they left him. Jim risked using the radio but got only quiet static. There was no one in the streets, barely even any cars, like the world had moved on and left them behind. Karen realized her hand hadn’t left her locus since they fled the apartment.
“I don’t like this,” Dennis said.
Karen wholeheartedly agreed with him but decided it was best to keep that to herself. She’d read enough scary stories as a kid to know the fastest way to summon a monster was to speak its name.
“Come on,” Jim said. Karen could barely see his face in the dark but saw enough to know he was on edge.
When they neared the building that hid the tunnel entrance, Emile appeared out of the shadows. He was breathing a bit hard and Karen noted beads of sweat on his upper lip before he wiped them away.
“Where were you?” Jim said.
“Dieter is gone,” Emile replied.
“What?”
“He left shortly after you did. I followed him for a bit, but lost him in the streets.”
Karen glanced back the way they had come, suddenly even more wary. Had Dieter told the GDR where to find them? That didn’t seem right; Dieter hated the East Germans more than any of them. But how well did she know him? How well did she know any of the men she was with? The breach, the message from Ehle at the Wall, the tunnel, the magical signal; it had all fallen into place so quickly that she’d never stopped to ask if any of this was a good idea or not.
“Why didn’t you answer me?” Jim was asking Emile.
Emile fumbled for his radio. “My apologies. I didn’t want the sound to alert him so I turned it down.”
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