Over his shoulder he said, “Dom. Hold up a sec.”
Then again. Alestair seemed to know Gabe a bit. He would have warned Josh if he perceived a problem with his partner. Wouldn’t he? Not only because they were allies against the Iron Curtain, but also because of their connection. They had a connection, didn’t they?
Dom hovered on the boundary between the kitchen and sleep. Josh deliberated.
The other officer yawned so widely the hinge of his jaw popped like an arthritic knuckle. Josh made his choice.
“I, uh . . . I didn’t know doctors were involved.” Which was true. He phrased it to imply that he knew stuff, oh, sure, he knew stuff. Just not, you know, the doctor part.
Arms crossed, leaning against the window frame, Dom pursed his lips, as though choosing his words carefully. “I suppose you have a right to know. It affects your career as long as you two are attached at the hip.” He shrugged. “Everyone, really.”
“I know he had a rough patch this winter. But he’s only human. We all have those.”
“Of course. I’m not pointing any fingers, okay? But on an op like this”—Dom cocked his head toward the closed bedroom door, from which emanated a faint snoring—“I have to be extra careful. I gotta know my team inside and out. I take my job and its responsibilities seriously. Seriously as cancer. So if I’d seen anything that made me doubt his, or your, or anybody’s abilities, I’d have scotched the whole thing. I didn’t, and that should tell you what I think of Drummond’s team at Prague Station. But when I caught wind of Pritchard’s ‘rough patch,’ I dug around. I know some guys. I got a copy of his file.”
You know “some guys”? Guys who could get you a classified personnel file like it was no big deal?
“And?”
“You’ve heard he was stationed in Cairo before this, right?”
“He doesn’t talk about it much, but yeah. I gather it was pretty dull.”
“Uh-huh. That’s the party line. I’m sure he wants everybody to think that. Drummond knows it’s a bullshit smokescreen. Don’t you buy it, either. You know why his tour in Egypt ended?”
“Never asked.”
“Try it sometime, and watch how he answers.” Dom leaned closer, dropped his voice to a true whisper. “He doesn’t know either.”
“That’s crazy.”
“You tell me. Pritchard’s trailing a guy. Everything’s normal. Doing his thing, doing it well. Until right there on the street, bam! Blacks out.” Dom punctuated the story with a snap of his fingers. The report echoed like a gunshot. Both officers waited, listening, until the low drone of Maksim’s snoring resumed its rhythm. “Wakes up some time later raving like a loon. No memory of what happened. Cairo ships him home for observation. For the most part he seems okay, except every once in a while . . . But Pritchard twists a few arms, calls in a few favors, wheedles another posting in the field. He’s not a hundred percent, though, is he?”
“Not always.” A simple statement. It wasn’t like he was revealing a secret. Everybody knew about the incident with the cops. So why did it feel like he was betraying a trust? “But like I said, everybody hits a rough patch.”
“Everybody gets a nosebleed once in a while. Not everybody bleeds from the friggin’ eyes, pal.”
“Holy shit. Really? When did that happen?”
“A little while ago. To his credit, he shrugged it off like it was a mosquito bite. Not before I just about had a heart attack, though. You’ve never seen that?”
“I, uh . . . I’ve seen Gabe have . . . I don’t know. I thought maybe it was a seizure. I knew he’d been in ’Nam. I just assumed he’d picked up something in the jungle. A parasite, maybe.”
“These seizures. They getting worse?”
“No, actually. He’s been in better shape recently than practically any time since I’ve known him.”
“Well, that’s something. You’ve noticed the flask?”
Oh, that. Josh chuckled in relief. “That’s not what you think. He’s not a drunk.”
“I know. I confronted him about it. But that’s just it. I could understand a guy who drinks under the table. You think he’d be the first tippler in the clandestine service? Kid, you ever get sent on a tour of the real backwaters—and I hope you don’t—you’ll see seasoned officers behaving in ways that’ll curl your toes.” He shook his head. “You gotta admit, even for a superstition, it’s a strange one.”
Before his weary mind could catch up and rein in his mouth, Josh heard himself say, “Alestair Winthrop carries a flask.” He flinched.
But Dom conceded the point. “True. Those two do spend a lot of time together.”
That wasn’t what Josh meant. But Dom wasn’t wrong, come to think of it.
Outside, the first car of the day blurred past the alley. Prague was waking up. Josh clenched his jaw, fighting to keep a traitorous yawn penned in solitary. “What do you think happened to Gabe?”
“Couldn’t say.” Dom shrugged. “Not my place, either. But hey, like I said. He’s a good officer. Solid guy. If he chose not to bring you inside on it, I’m sure he had a good reason.”
“I’m sure.”
But if you’re not trusting me with this, Gabe, what else might you be keeping from me? Why do you always look like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar every time you find yourself in the same room with that KGB chippy? Where do you go when I can’t find you?
Dom yawned again. “I gotta hit the hay. You’re okay out here for a couple more hours?”
“Sure. I’ll make some coffee.”
“I’ll spell you in two.” Dom went straight to the couch. The springs creaked. His eyelids fell like a boom. But then he cracked them again, briefly. “Hey, Toms. This was just between you and me, right? I like Prague. I’m not the type to crap where I eat, you know?”
“Sure. I know.”
• • •
If not for the curtains in the window, the flat on the ragged edge of an industrial zone might have been empty. From the street, it appeared dark. If anybody sat at that window—and someone ought to be sitting there—they didn’t twitch the curtain, didn’t do anything to reveal themselves when Gabe strolled up the alley.
He knocked twice. Paused. Twice more.
Footsteps behind the door. Then Josh’s voice: “Whiplash.”
“Fenwick.” I’m unharmed, it meant, and our trail is clean. Had he said, “Do-Right,” Josh would have double-bolted the door, grabbed Maksim, and scrammed out through the emergency exit while Gabe tried to distract or confuse the adversaries converging on the safe house. So far, though, ANCHISES was proving itself more of a Nell then a Dudley. Gabe hoped it would stay that way.
A dead bolt clacked. A chain rattled. The door opened just widely enough for Gabe to duck inside.
“Morning, pal.” He opened his overcoat, revealing the waxed paper bag he’d held cradled to his chest. He hadn’t wanted to look like he was meeting somebody for breakfast. “I brought koláče.”
Josh bit his lip. “Hmm. Thanks.”
His eyes were pink, and the skin beneath them dark and papery. “Have you been on watch since you got here? Where’s Dom?”
“I let him sleep. I had a lot to think about.”
Gabe put the bag on the card table just outside the tiny kitchen. The hitchhiker stirred, like a napping cat flicking one ear, when he focused on the bedroom door. Sokolov was in there, all right. He could sense the Host. Sense the negative space, the elemental-shaped metaphysical void, within the man.
“Any nibbles from our friends?”
“Quiet night.” Josh rubbed his eyes. “Speaking of, you were gone quite a while.”
“I back-traced the entire overland route. No signs of activity.” He pointed to the table. “And then I picked up breakfast, in case you missed that part.” He opened the bag, inhaled. “Got your favorite. Apricot, right? I figured you deserved an attaboy after the way you handled things last night.” He stuck out his hand. “Nice work, by the way.”
&nb
sp; Josh looked at Gabe’s outstretched hand, then the bag of pastries. He took the latter and disregarded the former. “I’ll see if Maksim’s hungry.” The curled top of the paper sack crinkled in his fist. He knocked on the bedroom door and stepped inside without waiting for a response.
Dom tossed off the flannel blanket under which he’d been quietly snoring. He sat up, stretched hard enough to coax a creak from the springs. Sniffed. “Did I hear the magic word? Koláče?”
But Gabe was still frowning at the closed door. “What the hell got into you?” he muttered to himself.
“Aw, don’t mind Toms. He’s been up all night.”
• • •
The conference agenda was canceled and the attendees confined—discreetly, but firmly—to the hotel. Immediately following Tanya’s conversation with Sasha, he had made half a dozen telephone calls, including one to his superiors in Moscow. Within an hour, the StB had stationed extra plainclothes officers in the lobby, the kitchen, and at every egress.
Two of the scientists’ original minders were still in hospital, recuperating from injuries they’d sustained during the brawl. Neither could tell Tanya just how the fight had started, or why, or why they’d been so relentlessly determined to injure themselves and anybody around them.
Of course they couldn’t. They’d been enchanted by a CIA officer. Tanya knew it in her bones.
And to think I’d actually begun to trust you, Gabriel Pritchard. What if Sasha hadn’t tricked us? Would you have stolen Grandfather’s construct for yourself? For America? Perhaps your story about the “hitchhiker” was nothing but air. A ruse to gain my cooperation. In this, I should have heeded Nadia.
And worse yet . . . if Gabe had learned how to achieve a spell like this, it was entirely due to Alestair’s tutelage. Like a frozen lake in late spring, the Ice was starting to crack.
The third minder had been discharged with only superficial bruises, but she couldn’t speak with him. At some point during that long night he’d been “recruited for special duty.” Which meant that even now he was probably on a fast train to someplace very distant and quite cold.
So that left it up to Tanya and Nadia to manually account for each and every member of the conference. Per Sasha’s orders that the defection be known to a bare minimum of officers, they had to do so under the guise of delivering complimentary toiletries from the hotel. They split up, lest the census take all morning.
More than one of the male scientists clearly hoped Tanya was a prostitute in disguise. Pigs. But only a few of those earned a hyperextended thumb thanks to a mislaid hand or a poor choice of words.
Indeed, she discovered that most of the conference attendees were desperately eager to resume the meeting, to an extent that was almost endearing. Nobody could admit outright that the great scientific farce known as Lysenkoism had stunted Soviet agriculture and put botanical science decades behind the West. She imagined it took a certain kind of bravery to devote oneself to a study that had been taboo, a bourgeois pseudoscience, less than a decade ago. Thirty years ago, the title “geneticist” had been a death sentence. Literally.
She was crossing door number eleven from her list—Piotr Medvedev, a bespectacled expert on wheat rust—when the news came down: Somebody had found a body in the Vltava, a bit downriver of the West German embassy. The embassy, she recalled, featured a balcony overlooking the river. Perhaps somebody had fallen during the brawl.
Or perhaps it was meant to appear that way.
Yet at every door on her list, Tanya found a bored and confused scientist right where she or he was supposed to be.
Not so for her partner. When they met three hours later to compare notes, Nadia reported that nobody had answered the second door on her list. Not the first time she knocked, not after she completed the remainder of the list and returned.
She circled the name.
“Well, well, well, Comrade Sokolov,” said Tanya. “I wonder if our friend Mr. Pritchard knows you’re a Host?”
3.
Karel wouldn’t take a cup of tea. He wouldn’t even take a seat. He stood by the French windows, arms crossed, scowling. As if he found Zerena’s company distasteful. How quickly they forget. Vladimir hadn’t even bothered to answer her summons, the insolent little rat.
Well, no. Not a summons. A polite request for a conversation. To confer with her . . . equals.
But Zerena disregarded the slight. As long as the men believed she’d been bested, that Sasha had somehow chastened her and thereby assumed control of Flame operations in the city, she could take advantage of their foolishness. She could still get what she wanted. It was merely a matter of making them believe that she served Sasha’s agenda now, and thus their own.
So she flashed her best smile—tainting it with a hint of disappointment at the corners, just large enough to let Karel glimpse the chinks in her armor, to see how the fall from grace rankled her, deep in her private heart of hearts—and, with a minute shrug, poured herself a cup. Karel’s cup, an LFZ original sporting a cobalt net pattern like the rest of the tea service, went untouched.
Brightly, but with a hint of cloud, she said, “I trust you and your absent partner haven’t broken your new toy?”
He inspected his fingernails. “I told Vladimir that you wanted a meeting so that you could try to wrest a construct from us. I’m not going to do that.”
“Oh, Karel. Truly? You truly think I’d summ—” She caught herself, and did it slowly so he’d notice. “—I’d request a meeting just to ask for a share of your own efforts? To beg for table scraps?”
He shifted. Zerena hoped she was better at projecting the meekness of a broken spirit than he was at hiding genuine unease. “If you try to wrest it from me, you’ll fail,” he said. Full points for bravado; he spoke as if he believed it, even though they both knew it to be a transparent lie. “And then you’ll incur Komyetski’s displeasure.”
Zerena lowered her eyes, lest he see just how laughable she found this threat. Gaze downcast, she held her cup before her lips. It warmed her fingers. She inhaled wisps of steam, rolled a ghostly hint of citrus and pekoe across her tongue. She counted to ten before responding in what she gauged to be the right combination of indignation and regret.
“I know we’ve had our conflicts. Which is why I requested this meeting, so that we could put that behind us and start working together.”
He picked at a fingernail with his teeth, grooming himself like an animal. “Together?”
She nodded. Laying one hand on a lacquered box alongside the tea service, she said, “Your construct. Has it found the Host yet?”
Karel gave her his best attempt at a blank stare. Bless his foolish heart, he actually believed she couldn’t read him easily as a samizdat Bible. Sasha’s gambit had emboldened them all.
Of course it hasn’t found the Host yet. You’d be crowing it from the rooftops and lording it over me if it had.
Finally, he shook his head. “It definitely had the trail, but lost it at the river.”
It took two sips of very hot, very expensive tea before she trusted herself to speak again. She set down the cup and opened the box. It contained a brooch of pounded silver braided with copper and a smaller, matching pendant on a tarnished chain the color of an old bruise. Karel stepped away from the window for a closer look.
She took the pendant. “It would take very little for me to earn a modicum of trust from Morozova. Perhaps a token of affection. A gift.” She slid a finger across the brooch. Then she offered the pendant to Karel and chose her words carefully, reminding herself not to phrase things as a command or edict. “I propose you let Morozova do your work for you. Let her find the Host. If you install this in your construct, it will be drawn to her jewelry, and thus your quarry. Sasha wants the woman gone; let the construct do as its nature demands.” When he didn’t immediately move to accept the pendant, she shrugged. “You’ll get the Host plus credit for eliminating Morozova in a way that keeps Sasha’s hands completely clean.”
“I get a pat on the head. I get to live. I get to keep serving our cause.” This time, the look on his face truly was unreadable. In response, she said, “If you think my ego is so great that I’d rather die than live with a bruise, you’ve never understood me.”
Reluctantly, he took the pendant. Even then, however, he wouldn’t take a cup of tea with her.
She breathed in, and suppressed a smile.
His loss, the petty fool. It was excellent.
• • •
By evening, it was official: Maksim Sokolov was nowhere to be found.
But the body pulled from the Vltava was a rough match for his size, coloring, and body type. Unfortunately, the poor bastard who’d fallen into the river had also fallen afoul of a marine propeller, which just happened to mangle his face beyond simple identification.
Strange, how perfectly inconvenient that was. Almost as if somebody had planned it so. Tanya and Nadia couldn’t prove that the dead man and the missing man were the same person. Nor could they prove they weren’t.
They couldn’t home in directly on the Host without animating their own construct, much like the one Nadia had tried to distract. But that was difficult and time-consuming, and the spellwork would set Prague’s ley lines vibrating like a pair of plucked harp strings. If Gabe sensed that—or if Alestair did, assuming he was part of this—he’d take countermeasures. Ordinarily Tanya wouldn’t spare a second thought for the pointless efforts of a hatchling sorcerer. But the hitchhiker—if it existed—made Gabe unpredictable, unknowable.
Furthermore, the existence of the roaming construct indicated that at least some of the local Flame acolytes were already hunting the Host; a major magical work by Ice would put every Flame magician in Prague on alert.
But maybe, just maybe, they could track the Host without resorting to the brute force of a hunter construct. Hosts left faint magical footprints everywhere they went. If they acted quickly, before those ripples faded, they could follow Sokolov’s trail. Parts of it, anyway. Doing so put far less stress on the ley lines, especially when they augmented their search with traditional spycraft. They started at the river’s edge, at the very spot to which Nadia had chased the construct when the hulking mass of braided trash and magic lost its quarry.
The Witch Who Came in From the Cold - Season One Volume Two Page 14