“They burned the sheets in the bathroom.” He couldn’t quite bring himself to say ‘he’—but the cigar was a message, wasn’t it? “Nothing else caught.”
“The Flame does enjoy its cheap tricks.” Alestair sighed, and pocketed the cigar.
For all his shaking earlier, for all the adrenaline and urgency, Gabe was still now, and cold. He saw Dom in his mind’s eye as clearly as if the man stood right in front of him, smoking that damn cigar in this cast-off shell of an apartment, a shell within a shell. “He’s—” He stopped.
“There are many explanations,” Alestair said. He sniffed the bed. His face wrinkled briefly at the smell of bleach. “If the Acolytes of Flame seized your man, they might have returned to his apartment to ensure we could not trace him through mystical means.”
But the Dom in Gabe’s mind’s eye just grinned around the cigar stub and shook his head. Gabe agreed with him. “If they snatched Dom, they wouldn’t have left him alive—if he’s dead, they don’t have to worry about us tracking him. One bullet in the brain, one body in the river—that’s a lot less risky than scouring his apartment. For all they knew, his place was under surveillance. And even if they had some use for him: Why leave the cigar? It’s a taunt. This is magic. Dom’s magic. He’s not one of ours, is he?”
Alestair turned on Gabe. “Ours?”
Dammit. He hated saying it: “Ice.”
Alestair’s left eyebrow twitched up so small an increment Gabe might have believed it unintentional, had he not lowered it again just as gradually. Gabe waited for the Brit to push it—to point out that Gabe was calling himself Ice now, what an interesting development that was, how droll, fantastical, indeed. Waited for the other man to rub it in.
Alestair wasn’t a kind man, Gabe knew. But he was kinder than that, at least. “No,” he said. “I’m afraid not.”
• • •
Dom set the chessboard on a spare crate in the hold. Sokolov, strapped in across from him, wrung his hands and glanced left and right: up toward the cabin and out toward the runway. He awkwardly tugged the sleeves of his heavy coat, fixing an invisible crease.
“You’re safe, doc. Nothing’s going to stop us now.”
“I will never see Leningrad again. Saint Petersburg,” Solokov said, testing the old name as if deciding whether he liked it. “My son, they will investigate him, to be certain he did not attempt to hide the details of my escape. He knows nothing. I have not spoken to him in years.”
“He’ll be fine.” Dom wouldn’t have lasted in this line of work if he didn’t know how to keep uncertainty out of his voice. He reviewed, by reflex, the many ways to hurt a man. Bamboo under the fingernails. Just take the fingernails off. The thing with the arms behind the back, dislocating the shoulders, what did they call that again? Was that strappado, or was strappado the thing with the feet? Fire, of course. Fire had a lot of advantages. Phantom pains, for example.
He slid a new cigar from his pocket and offered it to Sokolov, who didn’t notice. Dom cut the cigar tip off with his belt knife—he always carried a knife on assignment, never knew when you might need a blade. The blade curved through tobacco leaf and dimpled the pad of his thumb.
He lit the cigar with a long match, held the smoke in his mouth. In the cockpit, the pilot raised his hand.
“See, doc? That’s the all-clear. We’re good to go.” He pointed his ember to the chessboard. “Would you like to play white or black?”
• • •
“Stop the plane!” Gabe sprinted into the CIA comms station, trailing Alestair and a wake of perplexed embassy staff. “Get the pilot on the horn, contact Langley if you have to, but we need Sokolov’s plane grounded.”
“Sir?” Roslin was the comms officer’s name. Gabe’s brain produced it just in time—cooperating at last. Where had it been all these months when he needed it?
“Do it, Keith. The operation’s been compromised. Sokolov’s in danger. We need him on the ground.”
Roslin hesitated, hand on the radio. Transistors hummed and whirred. The marine who’d been chasing Gabe caught his arm, but didn’t pull him away. A tight line ran from his eyes to Roslin’s. Gabe’s skull felt tense, his head hurt, and he wondered if that was the elemental inside him, or his native mix of exhaustion, fury, and caffeine. He made himself cold and earnest. This was part of the job, too. You could offer, you could trade, you could build trust all day long, but sometimes you had no resources left but your own authority.
Roslin picked up the receiver.
• • •
A phone rang in the CIA pilot’s cockpit. He frowned. That phone was not supposed to ring. He dropped his hand from the overhead instrument panel, lifted the receiver. “Hello?” No call signs, no identifying handshake. No one had this number. He did not have the number that was calling him.
He wasn’t angry, because he did not get angry. But he was frustrated.
Distortion squawked into his ear. A mess of voices tangled one another, crushing meaning.
“Repeat. You’re not clear.”
The competing voices stilled. One spoke into his ear.
Off to his left, a small cargo plane lifted off.
“I don’t understand.”
A repeated question.
“I have not received the package. Your delivery boy is late. I had to forfeit my slot in line to a cargo prop.” He leaned over to starboard, and squinted. “Though the prop didn’t load any cargo that I saw. Just two passengers.”
• • •
Takeoff was so gentle on this clear, cold day that the chess pieces barely slid on their board during ascent. “Good move,” Dom said as Sokolov drew back his hand. Bishop forking bishop and knight. Whichever way Dom played, he’d lose one, though if he sacked the bishop, he could retake with the rook’s pawn and open the rook—though then he’d have doubled up his pawns, and he’d dropped a pawn already in a dumb fast-tempo play early on and shouldn’t be trading now in any event. This was why Dom preferred correspondence chess. His grandfather had taught him how to play in summers of long, slow games, days-long sometimes, hot south Florida afternoons spent drinking sweet, strong coffee on the back porch overlooking the creek. The old man was patient, calm. Sitting across from him, you didn’t feel bad taking an hour to puzzle out a move. Grandpa smoked, and waited, and sometimes hummed. He wasn’t going anywhere.
Until he did.
Which was the point of all this fucking around with Hosts and magic, after all. Cancer. Death. Bad ideas. Dom wanted nothing to do with them.
At any rate, ever since the old man went, Dom had lost his patience for face-to-face games. He wanted to be moving, to take control, to rush in and slaughter enemy pieces, positional advantage be damned. The pressure of his opponent’s presence made him want to scream. There’s no cooperation here, buddy. There’s just you and me in this world. And I’m going to win.
So he made stupid moves, sometimes, and got himself into trouble.
“Good move, doc. I need to think a bit.” He worked the cigar between his teeth. “Think I’ll head up and talk to the pilot.”
“Of course,” Sokolov said. He clasped his hands, each set of knuckles white.
One hand always on the plane wall, Dom worked his way forward to the cockpit and settled down beside his man. Dom didn’t know the guy—another acolyte the Flame had found, a pilot pledged to the cause. That was fine. Everything worked better that way: No need for names. No need to know what precious cargo he carried.
Their flight plan circled them back over the airfield. Prague’s steeples and rooftops spread below, half medieval winter paradise and half Communist hellhole. And somewhere down there on the airfield, Dom thought he could see the speck of plane he was supposed to have boarded with Sokolov not half an hour ago.
Farewell, Prague Station. Farewell, CIA. I’ll see you when I see you.
He tossed them all a salute that he would never have admitted wasn’t mocking, and walked back to the chessboard. He sat, and started humming
, like the old man. After he lost the bishop, he realized he was humming “As Time Goes By.”
• • •
“Fuck.” Gabe slammed the receiver down. He’d torn it from Roslin’s hands as soon as the call had gone through. He stood in the radio closet, breathing hard. Roslin stared. Alestair watched, betraying nothing.
The operation was blown. Dom was Flame. Dom had Sokolov.
Gabe tore his arm free from the marine’s grip, and straightened the lapels of his coat. He marched from the closet, down the narrow, windowless hall toward a dead end, head down, thinking nothing.
Footsteps behind: He recognized Alestair’s step before the Brit spoke. “Gabriel.” Conciliatory. Calming. Cocksucker.
“Don’t start.” Gabe dragged in a hot, hard breath. “They have Sokolov.”
“That seems to be the case.”
Gabe hit the wall, hard. His fist hurt. He knew how to hit, knew it on a deep, reflexive level, and good thing too, or else he would have broken his wrist. “What can they do with that? What can they do with him?”
“A great many things.”
Gabe heard the hesitation—Alestair was a good agent runner. Knowledge was power. You have something the agent wants. Don’t give it up for free. He remembered Cairo: dust and sun and silver in shadow, a knife and a fire behind his eyes. He remembered Sokolov entering the hotel, quiet and scared and surer than he had any right to be. “Tell me some.”
“They want to break the world open, to burn it and build something, no doubt they would call it beautiful, from the ashes. They need Hosts for that, as we need Hosts to stop them. Sokolov can fuel their workings.”
“He wouldn’t do that. The guy is a scientist.”
“Science, Gabriel, is a way of knowing, not a set of beliefs. If they show Sokolov their powers, he will believe them.”
“He was leaving the Russians. No way he’d fall for the Flame’s line.”
“Perhaps. Then again, perhaps not. The Flame has ways to encourage cooperation, as have we. Bribery of all sorts, subtle and grand. Of course, they also have ways to compel allegiance. And failing both—we have no idea to what extent they have developed the ceremony that embedded that elemental in your head. If Sokolov resists, a possibility on which I would not wish to wager, they may be able to rip his elemental from him, and grant it to a creature more firmly theirs. Failing this, we suspect that if they control the conditions of a Host’s death, they can direct the elemental to an infant of their choosing.”
“If. May. Suspect.”
“You’ve always known our fields were not entirely dissimilar, Gabriel. That’s the reason so many of us operate . . . amphibiously, if you will. In both worlds of hidden knowledge at once. We know what we know—or what they want us to believe. We are reasonably certain we can tell truth from falsehood. But only reasonably.”
“With him, will they have enough to do—whatever it is they want?”
“We don’t know how many is enough. They’ll have more power, certainly. And any one Host could be the one they need.”
The rage that had seized Gabe cooled. He turned. Alestair was staring at the blank yellow wall as if into a crystal ball that showed him a future he didn’t like. “We won’t be able to catch him,” Gabe said. “We don’t know where that plane’s going. It could change call signs a dozen times before it goes to ground. They could land it forty miles from here, or four hundred. Fly it under radar.”
Alestair nodded.
“Could we stop it? With—” Gabe breathed in, and out. “Witchcraft?”
“Sorcery, please.”
“I’m American, Alestair. For us, magic is witches.”
Down the hall, Roslin shouted in Czech at the aircraft control tower. Need more information, Gabe caught. Yeah. Good luck with that.
“We have no Hosts in Prague,” Alestair said. “I am a . . . witch, as you say. But we lack a Host.”
“The barge on the Vltava—”
“Has moved on, taking with it the Hosts and their elementals.”
He might be telling the truth. Or he might be lying through his teeth, backing Gabe against the wall, forcing him to say now: “What about me, Alestair?”
If Alestair felt triumph, he was too careful to show it. “We would need ley line control.”
“Jordan’s bar. She’ll let us use it.”
“And we need acolytes.” Alestair closed his eyes. “I’m sorry. Witches, if you prefer.”
“You can’t do it alone?”
“No.”
“So we bring them in,” he said.
“Them?”
Gabe lowered his voice. Made it vicious. “Tanya Morozova. Nadia Ostrokhina. We need their help.”
2.
Tanya dragged herself up the stairs of the apartment building, moving against the flow of the early morning workers headed to their factories and desks. The world felt far too normal, after everything she’d endured. How could these people carry on, unmarred by fear of the chaos to come? How could they smile and laugh and trade little barbs as if they were not living on borrowed time under the threat of the Flame’s terrible plans?
Nadia opened the door before Tanya even knocked. “Bozhe moi.” Nadia scrunched up her nose. “You look like—”
“—shit. Yes, I know.”
“No. I’ve seen you look like shit before.” Nadia stood back to let her enter. “This . . . this is something else entirely.”
Tanya glanced at Nadia’s sofa, a threadbare floral life raft. Her every joint ached, screamed at her to sit, but she feared that if she sat, she’d never be able to get back up again. “Before you say that you told me so . . .”
“Tikho. I don’t care about that.” Nadia gripped her by her shoulders. “You are here.”
“For now.” Tanya sucked in a ragged breath and closed her eyes. “They have the defector. The Host. The Flame has him.”
“Wait—” Nadia had been picking up a mug of coffee; she slowly set it back down. “The CIA is Flame?”
“Yes. No. One of them is.” Tanya pinched the bridge of her nose. “Someone in the safe house—he’s been in contact with Sasha. I saw a chessboard that was exactly the same as the one Sasha’s been playing, and the magic that was used—” Tanya took a deep breath. “One of the Americans is working with the Flame. This wasn’t an exfiltration op for the Westerners. It was the Flame, seizing a Host for themselves.”
Nadia had been wound in a tight ball, but as she listened to Tanya’s exhaustion-tinged raving, she slowly unfurled, focused and ready for battle. Tanya locked eyes with her and leaned forward, desperate, her body pointed like an arrow. Nadia had to believe her. Tanya couldn’t prove her claims at all, not with hard evidence and carefully sourced intelligence reports. All she had was her operator’s intuition. But keeping a Host out of the Flame’s grasp was too important to leave to chance.
“And what,” Nadia said very carefully, “do you think the Ice should do about this?”
Tanya exhaled. “We must stop them from leaving with the Host.”
“Leaving?” Nadia asked.
Tanya nodded. “The safe house was a waiting room. They were prepping for exfiltration. Maybe they’ll take the Host back to America, maybe not, but wherever they mean to take him, we can be sure what they mean to do with him there.”
Nadia pressed her lips into a thin line. The fact was, they weren’t entirely sure how the Flame was using the Hosts, only that they were. Thirty-six Hosts in the world at a time, representing the thirty-six elements, no more, no less. And the more of them the Flame had at their disposal, the more Hosts they placed along the confluences that crisscrossed the globe, the more power they could draw on to fuel their rituals. These were the facts under which the Ice operated, ever since whispers of the Flame and their dark goals had begun to crackle in recent decades.
Then there were the rumors. Tanya was quite certain Nadia did not wish her to hear about them, and every time Tanya had tried to ask her grandfather’s construct in the radi
o, before Sasha had stolen it from her, he’d behaved as if it were beyond his scope. But Tanya knew better. Nadia had told her about the wild eyes of Ice operatives who’d witnessed things they wished they hadn’t. She’d heard the tight whispers in Bar Vodnář. That the Flame was finding a way to harvest the elementals from their human vessels. Plant them into people of their own. It made for a great scary story to tell Hosts, to convince them to give themselves over to Ice custody. But as a reality . . . the thought made Tanya’s stomach wring itself dry.
Tanya rested a hand on Nadia’s forearm. Her partner had height on her, and a boxer’s easy confidence, but Tanya knew the force behind her chilly stare. “I must ask you something, knowing full well that as your subordinate, you need not answer me.”
A vein throbbed along Nadia’s throat.
“How many Hosts does the Ice have in custody?” Tanya asked. “Not just in the barge, here in Prague. How many, total?”
Nadia shrank from Tanya’s grip. “Not enough.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “Not nearly enough.”
“Then we cannot let the Flame have even one more.”
“No.” Nadia’s voice was tiny, high-pitched. It occurred to Tanya that she’d never seen her friend, her superior and subordinate, without her masks before. Had never even noticed that the easy bluffer, the insouciant seducer of men and women alike, the boxer and jazz aficionado and condemner of all things capitalist even was a mask. But she saw past it now, and it sent a chill worming straight to her heart.
Tanya relaxed her fingers and her hand fell from Nadia’s arm. “Then I have an idea.”
Nadia’s living room offered few obvious hiding places, but Tanya was a veteran at rooting out dead drops. She kicked up the threadbare Kazakh rug and began tapping the edges of floorboards with her toe. One popped up easily, and Tanya knelt to scoop out the contents of the hollow beneath the board. Tangled copper wires; crystals; a collection of vials tightly rubber-banded together, all of them sloshing with muddy water and labeled in Nadia’s loose script.
The Witch Who Came in From the Cold - Season One Volume Two Page 20