Christopher Golden

by Codename Wolverine X-men

  “And the government,” Creed added.

  Maverick stared at him.

  “What’re you starin’ at, North?” Sabretooth snarled. “I been captured before. All I’m sayin’ is, I been held in a setup just like this once or twice. Was the government done it, too.”

  “What part of the government are we discussing here, Creed?” the Widow asked, and Maverick admired her tone. She had her own brand of snarl, did the Black Widow.

  “Who knows? CIA? The Shop? DOD? The Agency? SAFE? Doesn’t really matter, does it?”

  Nobody had an answer to that.

  “Well, I for one don’t have any desire to sit around and wait to find out who our captors are or why we’ve been taken,” the Widow said. “We’ve got to figure a way to get out of here, and quickly.”

  Sabretooth snorted. “You come up with somethin’, cupcake, you let me know. ‘Til then, I’m just gonna sit back and wait for Mystique to come and get me.”

  “Why in the name o’ God would she want to do that?” Cassidy asked, incredulous.

  “Creed and Darkholme go back a ways, don’t you, Sabretooth?” Maverick taunted.

  “We’re teammates now, and that’s what matters,” Creed said. “She was there when I got snatched up. She’ll come after me.”

  “If they don’t get her first,” the Widow added grimly. “The four of us only have one thing that connects us all, and Mystique was a part of that as well.”

  “Hell, she might be the one behind our being here,” Maverick noted with sudden realization.

  “Seems to me if we’re all here because of that Zhevakov mess, there are a few players from that game still not accounted for,” Cassidy observed.

  “Silver Fox is dead,” Maverick told them, and glared at Sabretooth.

  “It happens,” he grunted, a sly smile on his face, fangs showing.

  “Other than Mystique, that leaves Wolverine and Kestrel,” Maverick continued. “Chances are, these guys have already gone after them. As long as they’re still out there, we can figure they’re trying to find us.”

  “Yeah, maybe, but I’m not bankin’ on gettin’ help from either of those two,” Creed snarled. “At least I know what to expect from Mystique.”

  “True,” Maverick agreed. “She’s an animal, just like you.”

  In a dark room, a man with hatred in his heart stared at three monitors showing the inside of the cell where the objects of that hatred were being kept. Behind him stood Colburn and Crain from Team Alpha.

  “What of the others?” the man inquired. “I want them all before we begin. I’ll never know the truth unless I have them all.”

  “Don’t worry, sir,” Colburn replied. “It’ll go just as we agreed—I promise you that. Teams Alpha and Omega deal with these kinds of operations every day. We’ve spent our lives training to handle every imaginable crisis. The dinosaurs who used to be a part of Team X don’t really stand a chance.”

  “You said that before, Mr. Colburn,” the man said, voice tinged with venom. “But Wolverine still eludes you.”

  “We’ll have him, sir. No more than forty-eight hours, guaranteed.”

  “You’d better, Mr. Colburn. If you expect me to follow through on my end of the bargain, you’d best perform on your end.”

  As the old teammates began to argue and threaten one another, the Black Widow silently worked her fingers and wrists inside the metal sheaths that bound her hands. Their captors had removed the hardware she usually wore around her wrists. It looked a lot like slightly gaudy jewelry, but actually contained a taserlike weapon she called her “widow’s bite,” which held more than thirty thousand volts of electricity. They’d known about that, of course. But she’d find a way to escape, no matter what.

  After several minutes of intense concentration, she rested, determined to try again, to keep trying until they were out. As she rested, she became uncomfortably aware of the presence of Sean Cassidy, clamped to the wall nearby. Their relationship had always been awkward at best, and often even outright hostile, even after she defected from the KGB.

  “Strange, isn’t it, lass?” he asked, as though he could read her mind.

  “Very,” she agreed, but didn’t look up to meet his gaze.

  “To think that, whoever our unseen enemy is, we’re apparently being punished for a confrontation that we stood on opposite sides of those long years ago,” Banshee said aloud. “It’s a horrible irony, don’t you think, that we’re trapped here together?”

  Finally, she looked up and met the Irishman’s eyes. He had the kindest eyes she’d ever seen. She hadn’t remembered that about him, and it struck her as profoundly sad. Natasha Romanova had known a great many men in her lifetime. Most of them were cold-eyed warriors or snake-eyed spies. A select few were wise, and even fewer were warm and kind. She wondered if Sean Cassidy’s heart had been so filled with hate those long years ago that his kind eyes had grown cold for a time.

  If so, she was pleased to see that he had changed. It happened to everyone, she knew, but not always for the best.

  “Ironic, yes,” the Black Widow said, “but horrible? No. Whoever it is that put us here, they’re the enemy. As long as I know I’m on the side of the angels, I’ll take whatever comes my way.”

  A cloud passed over Cassidy’s face, and for a moment, Natasha remembered what it had been like to be his enemy, those years ago. Maybe, in some small way, he still held her responsible for not being there when his wife was killed?

  But there was more to that look than just memory. There was doubt and hate, even disgust.

  Cassidy’s eyes narrowed, then turned away from Natasha and focused on the other side of the room, where Victor Creed still strained against his bonds.

  “Aye, Widow?” Cassidy said slowly. “And what makes ye so sure ye’re on the side of the angels?”

  Natasha stared at Sabretooth for a long time. She never did come up with an answer.

  * * *

  Agent Sean Cassidy stared at the forbidding gray expanse of concrete looming just ahead. It was unique in all the world, a symbol of humanity’s greatest weakness as a species: hatred. Sean remembered one of his professors at Trinity College commenting that the difference between humans and other animals was the ability to love. He’d been a romantic fool himself then, and had heartily agreed.

  It had been another student, someone Sean didn’t know, but who had surely become a cynic at far too young an age, who’d pointed put the other half of that equation. Humans could love, but they could also hate.

  After World War II, the Allies quickly began to look at one another with suspicion. The British and Americans, and later the French, had joined their occupied zones in Berlin together into one. The Soviets weren’t even invited. West versus East. It was the beginning of a conflict that would blossom into the Cold War and lead to the creation of America’s Central Intelligence Agency, among many other things. It also was the starting point for an invisible barrier between the ever-growing Soviet Union and the rest of the world: a barrier called the Iron Curtain.

  A decade and a half after the war had ended, that invisible barrier was a reality. But it wasn’t enough in Berlin, where the line between enemies literally split a city, and a nation, in two. In 1961, the East German government, puppets of the Soviets, built a physical barrier of concrete and barbed wire.

  The true irony of the Berlin Wall, however, was that it was built not to keep Westerners out, but to keep East German citizens in. They weren’t afraid of invasion or immigration—the conditions were such that nobody would choose to emigrate to East Germany. No, they just wanted to make certain that their people could not leave. East Germany, then, and East Berlin in particular, became a sort of enormous prison, most of the inmates of which weren’t even aware of their captivity.

  What many people seemed to forget, however, was that Berlin was one hundred and ten miles inside East Germany. West Berlin was the lone refuge of democracy behind the Iron Curtain, a pimple on the face of communism
.

  The wall itself was a jagged scar across the city, twenty-eight miles in length, but even that fifteen-foot-high chunk of concrete was only the last of the obstacles separating the two halves of the city. Or the first, if you were East German and yearned for freedom. Which, Cassidy figured, was pretty much a given. Otherwise, why have the wall at all?

  Another misconception was that the wall merely split the city. No, that was merely the most intense section of the conflict represented by that barrier. In truth, the wall ran the entire circumference of West Berlin, just shy of one hundred miles. It was a fortress city, and yet the walls around it had been built by the enemy.

  In his days as a student, Sean Cassidy had considered that one of the great ironies of the twentieth century.

  The rest of the wall was not as immediately forbidding in appearance as that which divided the city. Yet in some ways, it was more treacherous ground. The no-man’s-land between the concrete wall and the barbed wire fence was as wide in some places as three hundred yards. Three hundred yards of dog runs, tank traps, hidden flares, mines, alarms, infrared cameras, and machine gun towers occupied by Grepos, the East German guards whose main occupation was to kill anyone who tried to cross without authorization.

  Yet several times a year, according to the prep research Cassidy had done, someone still managed to escape. And each escape was analyzed and responded to, which made it that much harder for the next person. But it was possible. Which was good to know.

  And this was the place where Agent Cassidy had to search for the Black Widow. It didn’t matter. He would go to Moscow itself—to hell, in fact, if it meant bringing down Natasha Romanova.

  On the other hand, Cassidy could fly. So, theoretically, he could leave whenever he wanted. But then his sonic scream would bring him unwanted attention and make him an immediate target. No, better to do it this way.

  “Halt!”

  Cassidy looked down from the expanse of the wall, barren but for the barbed wire. He stood on Friedrichstrasse, right in front of what was still called Checkpoint Charlie—the only place where non-Germans could enter East Berlin. Cassidy could see through the checkpoint to the far side of the passage, the East German side, where the Polizei guarding the gate were arguing with a man who was attempting to pass through into West Berlin. The man was obviously German, but East or West was impossible for Cassidy to determine by simple observation. However, when he overheard the man arguing that he was American, that his passport was genuine, even Sean had to doubt him.

  At the risk of aggravating the border guards even further, he pressed on, hoping to take advantage of the momentary confusion. Perhaps in their frustration, the guards would not give him as much of a hard time as he had expected.

  Now the guards had begun to argue with their West German counterparts. But it was clear where this thing was heading. Cassidy walked up to the guardhouse on the Western side even as more East German guards appeared on the other side of the gate and escorted the shouting man away.

  A sign to his right read: YOU ARE NOW LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR.

  “Halt,” said a West German guard to his right.

  The man had close-cropped blond hair and ice-blue eyes. He wasn’t unpleasant, but neither did he smile as he examined the papers that Cassidy held out for him. It gave Sean pause to wonder exactly how different this man was from the one who performed the same function on the other side. It was the same city, after all, or it had been back in 1961, when the wall was built.

  The two could be brothers. The thought disturbed him and all too sadly reminded him of home. While there was no city split in as dramatic a way as Berlin had been, Ireland was also torn in two by hatred and ignorance.

  “Schon gut, clanke,” the guard said, and gestured for him to move on.

  “Guten Tag,” Cassidy replied, wishing the man good afternoon in his own language, and nodded his head slightly.

  Halfway through to the other side of the world, halfway through the Iron Curtain, he looked up again at the East German guards, then up to the machine-gun-wielding Grepos on the wall, and he froze. Cassidy couldn’t help but feel the tension roiling in the air around him, stirring the acid in his gut and speeding his heart. He watched the way the afternoon sunlight glinted off weapons held by the East German guards, and he started to question the wisdom of his mission.

  But only for a moment. Of course they’d never believe he was who he said he was—he’d known that going in. More than likely, they’d have a tail on him from the moment he entered the country. But, he reminded himself, the Widow was in East Berlin.

  As if just thinking of her were some kind of beacon, he stared out at what little of East Berlin he could see through the gate, and felt a chill run through him. She was there, somewhere. She might be close by, for all he knew.

  The guard stared at him as he approached the east-side checkpoint. The man’s hard eyes flicked down to Cassidy’s blue jeans, scanned his leather jacket, then lingered on his thick reddish-blond hair and sideburns. Sean had known he wouldn’t be able to hide who he was. He was an Interpol agent, an investigator, not a spy. He spoke German, and rather well in spite of his brogue.

  But he was as Irish a man as God had ever made.

  The guard gestured for him to follow, then directed him to a building just beyond the watchtower that loomed above the wall. Already, there was a line of people waiting to pass through, and Sean was relieved. It wasn’t just him. Most of them seemed to be Turkish migrant workers, and from the flowers and other gifts they carried, he suspected they were waiting to visit girlfriends in East Berlin.

  While Cassidy waited, he filled out a customs declaration. Fifteen minutes later, a stone-faced functionary looked at him sternly through a window—the setup reminded Sean of a train station.

  “Papiere, bitte,” the humorless man said.

  Cassidy sensed the burning eyes of the guards in the room on the back of his head, but he kept his attention on the man in front of him. He offered his passport, his international driver’s license, identification that claimed him to be a reporter for the London Times, and a falsified invitation from one of the many bureaucratic agencies within the East German government to come and take a tour of East Berlin in order to disprove the horrible things the capitalist West had said about the city.

  The man stared at the documents for a very long time.

  Cassidy shifted his weight and didn’t bother to try to hide his nervousness. If he’d actually been Seamus McArdle, as his papers identified him, he would have had every reason to be nervous.

  The armed guards inside the building hadn’t raised their weapons, nor had they seemed to pay any attention to Cassidy at all. Nevertheless, the barrels of their rifles seemed conveniently angled toward where Sean now stood.

  Someone coughed behind him, and Cassidy twitched slightly. The door was open behind him, and Sean could smell someone cooking not far away. Something fried, which was no real surprise in Berlin. A small chill had crept into the air, and he felt it very keenly. He felt everything very keenly in those few moments. His heart beat loud enough to be a distraction.

  “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” the man with his papers asked, watching his face.

  “Ja,” he replied. “Das ist notig, nicht wahr? “

  The man nodded sagely. He’d merely told the man it was necessary for him to speak German in order to do his job. But it seemed to be enough, combined with the finely crafted false documents, to free him from their scrutiny, at least for now. He’d be shadowed at all times, and the Polizei would most certainly be looking into his “invitation.” He had a few days, at best, before the Stasi, the DDR’s answer to World War II’s Gestapo, would start paying him extra-special attention. Then East Berlin would become a very inhospitable place for a certain Irishman. Even more so than usual.

  Cassidy stood by calmly as his one small bag was searched meticulously. The guards didn’t do the best of jobs because they didn’t really expect to find anything. If he was a spy,
he wasn’t going to be stupid enough to carry weapons or any incriminating documentation in his bag.

  Six minutes later, he had his back to the Berlin Wall, and was moving deeper into East Berlin. The Iron Curtain had been swept aside. It was disturbing to realize that none of the rules of existence familiar to him were of any use here. But, Cassidy thought, as he took note of the raggedly dressed woman who had already begun to tail him, it was also liberating.

  The rules didn’t apply anymore.

  That could be very dangerous for him. But it could be dangerous for his quarry as well. And for anyone who got in his way.

  Cassidy sat at a sticky table in the corner of a Bierstube. The raggedy woman who had been following him had waited outside the tavern until a stern-faced, bearded man had entered. Her departure was enough to identify her replacement, and Cassidy studiously avoided looking at the stern man who drank beer and read the local newspaper by himself at the center of the room. It looked like the Stasi had taken an interest in him earlier than he’d expected.

  When the barmaid arrived to ask if he wanted anything, he ordered a bowl of Koniginsuppe, an odd stew of beef, sour cream, and almonds. Then he simply waited.

  It wasn’t until the barmaid was leaning over to clear the empty bowl that she whispered his name.

  “Herr Cassidy.”

  Sean started to look up, but turned the movement into a long reach for his stein. The woman knew his real name. She might be his contact, or an East German agent trying to bait him into revealing his true intentions. If she was the latter, and she knew his real name, it wasn’t likely he’d get out of East Berlin alive.

  “Gibt es ein FKK Strandbad in dieser Gegend?” he asked suddenly, as if he’d just thought of it.

  The waitress looked affronted, glared at him with an expression of disgust. “Sind Sie von einem Rettungsdienst?” she asked archly.