The Witch Who Came in From the Cold - Season One Volume Two

by Lindsay Smith

“Morozova’s not my friend.”

  Jordan shrugged. “This is what I can offer. And you should be grateful.” She slid the scroll back into the bottle and replaced the cork. “You have no idea what this stuff is worth.”

  “What will you use for ink?”

  She slid him the bowl and the knife, which was not quite as sharp as her smile. “Guess.”

  3.

  Josh had spent all afternoon talking to himself in the mirror in his apartment, practicing his walk, the angle of his shoulders, picking up and putting down suitcases. He expected, based on his brief, unsuccessful stage stints in college, that even so simple an act as carrying luggage would become, conservatively speaking, a million times ganglier and tanglier when performed. The first time he’d learned to walk had taken a year or two, depending on how one counted, and considering that, he made remarkable progress in a single afternoon. He was almost feeling positive about the evening’s operation, at least until he entered the embassy briefing room and found Alestair waiting.

  “My dear Mr. Toms!” The Englishman uncurled himself and leaned across the table, one hand extended. “I didn’t expect you would be the one our dear friends dispatched for this rendezvous.” His hands looked spindly, his fingers long and narrow, but his grip could have pulped wood.

  “I’m as surprised as you are,” Josh said. The room’s bad lights cast a sickly green over everything, but somehow Alestair’s eyes stayed bright, pale blue.

  “Let’s not all get too chummy.” Dom sauntered in, thumbs hooked through his belt loops, suit jacket flared, smelling of cigar smoke—though thankfully, for once, not smoking. “Your people can get us into the hotel, Winthrop?”

  “Our staff contact, Baračnik, can outfit Josh with the needed uniform and place him. Josh, you will be directed to Sokolov and will escort him upstairs, do your business, and exit. Baračnik will meet you beforehand in the restaurant two blocks south and three east of the hotel; you’ll identify yourself by carrying this folded newspaper.” Alestair passed it across the table. “He’ll approach you with a question about opera, an article about which he will recognize in the paper. Claim that you are not a follower of the form. He’ll take you to the hotel and instruct you—all very straightforward. You won’t be in public until the proper moment. Acceptable?”

  “He gets the picture,” Dom said.

  “While I share your confidence, I’d prefer to hear him agree in his own voice.”

  “I can do it,” Josh said. “Thank you for setting this up.” His mouth felt dry.

  “My dear friend, it’s the very least I can do. Feel free to call upon the services of, ah, Her Majesty’s government whenever you have need. Anything for the colonies, and so on and so forth.”

  • • •

  Gabe spotted Morozova across the International’s crowded entrance hall—wearing a nametag, even, and talking with a uniformed woman who must have been a member of the hotel staff. Here on cover business, probably. He waited, buzzing with adrenaline and whiskey, as Morozova’s conversation swelled to a full hand-waving argument. Which woman would stab the other first? Neither, it turned out. They shook hands, and the staffer marched away as if to the trenches of a lost war. Morozova remained, staring into an explosion of hothouse roses in an ugly vase by a window. Behind the roses, snow fell.

  “We have a fairy tale about that,” he said, in English, when he joined her. “Roses and snow. Sometimes there’s blood, and a raven or something.”

  She’d given no sign that she’d noticed his approach, but neither did she seem surprised when he spoke. “So do we. Yours probably comes from ours.”

  “They let you tell fairy tales?”

  “Have you ever tried to stop someone from telling tales?”

  Gabe shrugged and let her have the point. “You here in character tonight?”

  “An embassy cultural attaché has her duties, among them overseeing the organization of this conference and assuring the delegates’ comfort.”

  Bullshit. “That why you were arguing? The delegates’ comfort?”

  “Comfort,” she said, “and security.”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk about.” He was drumming his fingertips on the table, and made himself stop. Outside, wind swirled snowflakes against snowflakes. Rooftop shadows cut strict lines over fallen white. Nothing moved but the snow. “Delegates arrive tonight.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the golem’s still on the loose.”

  A car rolled past outside. Headlights lit her ivory. “What are you saying, Pritchard?”

  She looked so honest and interested, and so alone, that he almost told her everything: the golem, the risk, and how alone he felt too, unable to confide in Josh or Dom or Frank or even Jordan completely, how it felt to be pulled from your own skull and dragged down a gullet lined with glowing teeth. But Tanya Morozova was an acolyte of the Ice, which he barely trusted, and an officer in the KGB, his—what did you call it? Mundane? Secular was the word the nuns would have used. Either way, his enemy.

  He could not trust her, or tell the truth. But he could ask for help.

  “The golem hasn’t been a problem so far, because it’s preying on locals. But what if it takes one of the delegates?”

  “It wouldn’t try. There is too much security.” Too quick an answer: She wanted that to be true, but wasn’t sure.

  “Maybe the golem isn’t afraid of guns. If it gets the notion it wants to kill one of the delegates—that would make a lot of headaches for both sides. For all sides,” he corrected himself.

  He told the truth, because you always did in this business if you could. Telling the truth cut the chances of being caught in a lie to just north of zero. Don’t tell the whole truth, no, just enough to let your target draw her own assumptions. Morozova wanted the golem gone as much as he did, and the more she directed her attention toward it, the less she’d be focusing on the International, and on Sokolov.

  “Do you have a plan?”

  He checked the reflection in the window glass. In the lobby behind him, two clerks annotated registers behind the front desk. A bellhop escorted a late arrival in a wheelchair to her room, and another followed, struggling with bags. A fat man lay asleep beneath a newspaper. If he was faking, he faked more convincingly than anyone Gabe had ever seen.

  He took, from his inside pocket, the slip of skin-paper. “If the thing shows up, we need to get this inside its head somehow. I’m not sure if it will work, but it’s all I’ve got. I’d do it myself, but the thing’s big, and fast. Many hands make light work.”

  She touched the slip. “Where did you get this?”

  “Jordan.”

  “Rhemes wouldn’t have just given you something like this. She would have demanded more payment than you could afford.”

  “She’s a friend,” he said. “She wanted to help.”

  “You’re hiding something.” He never would have described her as open, but she closed before his eyes.

  That’s what we do, he almost said. “I’m not.”

  “Rhemes would not have given you this without reason. She’s not enough a part of our world to care about this conference. She thinks you’re in danger. I don’t know why, but I’m tired of being kept in the dark.”

  He remained alone by the window, watching the snow, after she left.

  • • •

  Josh finished his prep in good time, filing and annotating cases beneath rows of ticking clocks, each turned to a different time in a different city. By Tokyo this whole thing would be over, one way or another.

  A shadow crossed his desk, and he smelled cigar smoke. He closed the folder. “Alvarez.”

  “Josh, I know you’ve got your panties in a twist about this, but really, you’ll be fine. It’s like the first time you shoot a guy. Seems a lot worse when you’re thinking it through than when you’re doing it, or when it’s done.”

  Josh locked a stack of folders in his desk drawer, pulled on his greatcoat, and picked up his suitcase. “Going m
y way?”

  “No one’s really going your way, Josh,” Dom said, “but I’ll walk you out.”

  They wound down three flights of stairs in silence. Josh barely felt the carpet beneath his feet. A gust of wind could have blown him away. Dom’s footsteps echoed, even muffled by the carpet. The guy moved as if testing the ground beneath for weaknesses. Josh couldn’t imagine him sneaking up on someone. Different training, maybe. Different tools for different tasks.

  Dom didn’t speak until they reached the ground floor. He slid one hand from his pocket and settled it on Josh’s shoulder. Emily, Frank’s secretary, rushed past them up the stairs, bearing a mug of coffee and a thick accordion file; Dom followed her skirt with his eyes.

  If Emily noticed, she didn’t acknowledge. Dom didn’t seem to care whether she had.

  “Just wanted to talk to you,” he said, in a tone of voice Josh knew too well, had heard too many people use in his direction, half-cautious, half-dismissive, as if the subject under discussion was barely worthy of mention. “We’re all friends here, and because we’re all friends, I can say: You know about Winthrop, right?”

  “I know he’s”—don’t say MI6, the area’s not secure— “a culture guy for the UK.”

  Dom’s hand tightened on Josh’s shoulder. “That’s not what I’m talking about, understand?”

  “I don’t think I do.” But you had to be careful, of course, because if you came off as too dense they’d peg you for defensive, ask: What do you have to hide? “Is there a problem?” Which could mean: Is there something wrong with the mission? Is he a double agent? Treacherous? But could also mean whatever Dom wanted to hear.

  “Not really,” he said. “I mean, he’s not, let’s say . . . he’s not unreliable,” with weight on that last word. “But if I was you, I wouldn’t let him get too close. Might give some people the wrong impression. Nothing to worry about, nothing I’ve heard specifically, nothing you need to trouble yourself with. Just—watch out, all right?”

  Josh nodded, but couldn’t bring himself to say all right.

  On his way to the meeting, switching from van to bus to van again, doubling back through narrow streets in snow as the gray night deepened into dark, he rewound the conversation in his mind. His reactions seemed so obvious in retrospect: the way he’d tightened under Dom’s hand, the slight lean forward in his conversation with Winthrop, and he’d certainly, for all his care, overplayed perplexity with Dom. No one would have missed that implication, and most, having caught it, would laugh, deflect, make some crude joke. He’d exposed himself. He rehearsed the old arguments he hoped he’d never have to make: Liking men wasn’t a security risk any more than liking women; hell, there were women in the agency these days, and they liked men just fine. Blackmail? Sure, but blackmail only worked if you feared discovery. Which he did.

  Dom thought he was looking out for Josh. Gotta warn people about that Alestair Winthrop. Who knows what reputations he might sully, what insinuations he might slide into the old boys’ networks, close and vicious as any quilting circle.

  Fuck, the gall of the man. Like Josh couldn’t take care of himself. Like he didn’t know what Winthrop was about. Like he hadn’t been thinking about it for . . . well.

  He dreamed sometimes about those eyes. Not often, but enough.

  I’ll be fine, he told himself as he entered the narrow corner restaurant with its low Formica tables. Fine, he repeated in his mind when the tall blond man with the double chin approached, examined his folded newspaper with grim earnestness, and asked if he planned to read the review of Arroyo’s new album. Fine, he prayed, earnestly as he’d ever prayed to any god before, as Baračnik excused himself, having established by code that Josh should meet him at the hotel loading dock in forty-five minutes.

  Fine, as the hotel door opened, exhaling steam into the snow-swirled dark, and Baračnik beckoned him into reddish light.

  He’d never done this before, but Gabe was there, and Gabe would watch out for him.

  The doors closed with a clang and Baračnik snapped the lock shut.

  • • •

  Gabe spent an unprofitable few minutes watching snow and trying to talk himself out of his funk. He’d misplayed Morozova. Rookie mistake—come on too strong, too fast, lean on her loyalty to Ice and her self-regard and expect her not to ask your angle. He needed help with the golem, yes, but he’d hoped to parlay that into information about her KGB masters’ security plans.

  So much for that. Might as well handle things the old-fashioned way.

  When the lobby behind him was clear, he reached into the rose vase, past the thorns, and found the folded piece of paper pasted inside the vase neck, right where Winthrop’s contact had left it. Blood beaded on the back of Gabe’s hand. He hadn’t felt the thorn go in. He sucked up the blood and unfolded the paper: room 618, Sokolov’s berth. They didn’t have time to screen the whole hotel for bugs again, but he could look over the scientist’s room one last time, in case Morozova or her pals had bugged the place after the embassy team’s sweep.

  He checked his watch. Delegates would arrive in an hour and a half. Plenty of time. Run a thorough search, drop by the lobby, catch Josh’s eye, and give him the all clear. Easy.

  He walked past the elevators to the service stairwell. Six flights would do him good, after a winter stuck in too-cold offices. In Cairo, he’d promised never to complain about cold weather again. So much for promises.

  The door slammed behind him, so loud Gabe almost convinced himself he’d imagined the twitch in his skull. But the twitch did not fade with the echo. It remained, pulling down toward the basement, to the center of the world. Not the clear bell-throb of a Host’s presence, either—this was the same squirrely tug he’d felt in the abandoned safe house.

  The golem.

  Shit.

  He must have led it here—the golem wanted his elemental, and he’d dragged it into play on the night of Josh’s op. Should have known better, should have stayed away, asked Dom to check the room—no. Shoulds were for after-action reports.

  Consider the situation.

  You’re in a conference hotel in Prague. There’s a golem in the basement that will track you down wherever you run. You have no backup. But then, it has no escape.

  A smart man would have run, or found backup. Winthrop, maybe; Gabe hated being in the man’s debt, but there were worse fates.

  Gabe, at the moment, was not feeling particularly smart.

  He descended into the bowels of the hotel.

  4.

  Tanya trailed storm clouds through the International’s conference level, reviewing meeting rooms and coffee services and posted schedules for some damn thing she could argue about. Pritchard. She didn’t like the bastard, couldn’t forgive him for wasting her time and—what was the American expression?—yanking her chain. But she should not have turned him down flat and marched off. The American was an asset, however reluctant, and she’d ignored a chance to reel him in.

  Why?

  Trace the causes. Especially in magic.

  The rage welling up at Pritchard was the same fury she’d felt when Nadia had joked (joked!) about the comfort of spy work. Tanya was tired of being kept in the dark. She was tired of bodies on barges and of other people deciding her ignorance was necessary.

  She was tired of being used.

  Pritchard wanted help, but wouldn’t say why. His notion that the golem might disturb the conference seemed far-fetched. The thing had kept firmly to the shadows so far. But Pritchard might know something she did not—about the golem, or about the conference—which had no magical significance so far as Tanya knew. What if he wasn’t worried about magic, though? What if his masters in the CIA had their own plans for the next week?

  She could have played him out, learned his secrets, but she’d let her pride chase him off.

  Damn.

  To persist in a mistake, her grandfather always said, was to repeat it.

  She closed her eyes and exhaled some of her an
ger. She no longer felt imminently murderous. Good start.

  She ran downstairs from the mezzanine to the front hall and crossed to the bellhop’s desk. “Did you see which way the American went when he left?”

  “Didn’t leave.” He pointed to the stairs.

  “Thanks, Comrade,” she said with a wave, and walked as fast as decorum would allow toward the stairwell. Concrete up and down, no footprints anywhere. Might he be searching the hotel? Meeting a contact?

  She heard a muffled cry from the basement, and started running.

  • • •

  Gabe came to and found himself being dragged along a cracked concrete basement floor. This was why you went in with backup, with a partner: so when you were proceeding down an ill-lit basement hallway with a bottle of Vltava water in each hand, someone would shout a warning when the golem you’d thought was in front of you turned out to be hanging from the ceiling.

  He blinked his eyes clear, and focused on the hand that held his leg. The golem seemed thinner than he remembered, and when it glanced back over its shoulder, it looked even more like him. He kicked at the golem’s hand, but the clay seemed impervious to size 11 oxfords.

  He inventoried his assets and outs. Vltava water, gone—he’d brought his flask and a fresh wine bottle full of the stuff; the wine bottle had fallen in the attack, and was likely broken. Not that it would have been much use anyway. He groped for his inside jacket pocket—the scroll was still there.

  The golem turned a corner, and tossed him against a wall.

  The impact knocked the breath from his lungs. He heard something tear, and hoped it was his jacket. Okay, okay, get it together. Stand up. Find an escape.

  He lay in a pipe-lined nook in the hotel boiler room. Pipes knocked and steam hissed. The golem loomed above him. Reddish light played off its features, rough clay echoes of Gabe’s own.

  He forced himself to his feet, one hand stanching the blood from his split lip. The golem stretched out its arms. Gabe breathed twice, then leapt forward and stabbed the golem in the forehead with the scroll—but the scroll did not go in.