The blooded mercury sprouted tentacles like a tiny sea anemone and reached for his fingers.
Olly olly oxen free.
• • •
Click.
The voltmeter needle swung hard to the right. It quivered like a hunting dog catching the scent of hare on the wind. Sasha dialed down the gain before the overtorqued coil shorted out. The Bakelite knob clunked twice. The needle relaxed, swaying until—like a tipsy sailor—it found an equilibrium that wasn’t quite vertical.
He sniffed. A mélange of hot metal and burnt lamination wafted from the meter. Or was that coming from the radio? He sniffed again. No, definitely the meter. It was warm to the touch.
The voltmeter would have sacrificed itself if so ordered. Its needle was slim as the line between sedition and loyalty, truth and falsehood, East and West. If only he had such a tool for probing the minds and hearts of those around him. A little red needle to tell him who was good, who was bad, who was loyal, who was not, who could be controlled, who could not. Alas.
He set the tool aside, taking care not to nudge the chessboards arrayed on his desk. One game was barely out of the opening, with Sasha playing a lovely King’s Gambit favored by the great Spassky, while the other showed Sasha’s black pieces held a slight but winning positional advantage unless his opponent was crafty enough to force a bishops-of-opposite-colors endgame.
He turned his attention back to the radio he’d confiscated from Tatiana Morozova’s flat. Right now it was plugged into the mains under his desk, its back cover laid carefully on the desk, a screwdriver and four screws sitting queenward of a forlorn king’s bishop. It had taken some concentration to glean a sense of its operation: Sasha’s time as a radio operator in the Red Army predated transistors. He missed the triodes’ cozy golden glow. The old tubes were superior in so many ways. One could often see a malfunction with the naked eye—a blackened grid, a broken filament. And he’d coaxed more than one broken radio back into operation just by giving it a solid whack. Transistors were too tiny. How could you whack something you couldn’t see?
But the voltmeter confirmed that the circuitry worked as he expected. He’d found nothing unusual about the device.
No hidden antenna, no hidden modifications for receiving shortwave broadcasts. He’d managed to summon a voice from it earlier, but could not seem able to replicate it. That was both a relief and a disappointment. How much stronger his hold over dear Tanya would be if he had found something truly incriminating. Such as the ability to receive Western number stations. Had there been the slightest possibility that she received coded messages from a handler in the West . . . well, that would have paid dividends for a long, long time.
No matter. He’d keep working on her. What was the next move? He envisioned several lines. The tactical approach: He could confront her directly, dropping the avuncular tone he’d adopted in her flat. But that lacked finesse. Better still, a zwischenzug: He could arrange the partially disassembled radio on display behind his desk and then conveniently “forget” about it before calling her into his office. Her roving eyes would get a good glimpse, and Sasha could watch her reaction. Or the strategic development: He could hold back, keep his power pieces in reserve, and slowly draw Tanya out. On balance, he preferred the strategic approach. But he’d keep the equilibrium-threatening in-between move, the zwischenzug, tucked in his back pocket.
For now, then, he’d leave the radio intact and locked in his desk. His army training came to the fore again, prompting him to unplug the radio before reattaching the case. It seemed well-grounded, but one could never be too careful. He waited for the faint hum of energized circuitry to fade. And waited. And waited. It took much longer than he’d expected. Transistors were supposed to be faster than vacuum tubes, weren’t they? Perhaps he was a little rusty.
He sighed, shook his head, then lifted the cover. But as he flipped it over to ease it into place, something glinted under the fluorescent lighting.
He set the cover down again, and rummaged in his desk for a magnifying glass. (A most useful tool. One could never examine photographs too carefully. Even when they came straight from the Kremlin. More than one Politburo member had fallen to an airbrush rather than a bullet.) It took a few minutes of tilting the metal plate back and forth, long enough to start wondering if he’d imagined it, before he saw it again. The faint shimmer of mica flakes. A smear of dirt? The radio had given off the unmistakable odor of singed dust when he’d turned it on—again, like the old tube radios. But no, this wasn’t random.
The mineral had been laid down deliberately, painted in lines barely the thickness of a piece of cardstock. Now that he knew what to look for, he saw the ghostly shimmer ranged all over the radio’s innards. Somebody had painstakingly inscribed the radio with a nigh-invisible circuit diagram of inert minerals. They couldn’t have used a full brush—it must have taken just a single bristle to create such fine lines. This was extremely careful work.
Sasha set the radio down again, smiling. A classic move, and a personal favorite: the discovered check.
• • •
CIA Prague Station blew a collective sigh of relief.
It was a restrained relaxation, though, not Apollo 11 crazy. That had been like a Christmas party in July, with an open bar and very good booze, with more than a few valiant souls blitzed out of their minds and perhaps just a bit of clumsy screwing in the broom closets. Nevertheless, the lightened mood hit Gabe the moment he entered the office. He didn’t need the hitchhiker redlining his senses to detect an emotional sea change. Even Frank cracked a smile. Gabe marked the day on his calendar.
Over by the coffeemaker, Dominic flirted with Junie from the secretarial pool, who laughed girlishly at something he said. The entire office had warmed to Dom. Even a bullish jingoist could be a breath of fresh air in the tail end of a long winter behind the Iron Curtain.
They’d survived the inspection. The auditors had been most worried about big-picture stuff. Newspaper-headline, Congressional-investigatory-committee stuff. By that standard Prague Station was clean as a nun’s knickers. It wasn’t as though they’d doped somebody to the gills until he leapt from a hotel balcony, or dosed an entire French village with ergotism. It wasn’t the 1950s any longer, for chrissakes. All Gabe had to hide was accidentally resurrecting a centuries-old golem, plus the fact that it had murdered a policeman. Small potatoes.
Even Josh had weathered the storm. The inspectors had blown through without churning up details of his personal life. That was largely due to Frank. It would be good to raise this delicate point with the kid. This wasn’t the time, though—at the moment, the kid sat at his desk looking pensive. He leaned with one elbow on the blotter, head resting against his fist, the other hand desultorily piling paper clips.
“It got to you, didn’t it? You’ve glimpsed the glamorous life of the bean counter and now you’re ruined for anything else,” Gabe said. “Don’t deny you were just daydreaming about paper clip audits.”
“I’ve never seen you this chipper.” Josh squinted. “Are you on uppers?”
Gabe imagined this was indeed how a stomachful of bennies might feel. His visit to the hedgewitch had lifted a burden he’d carried for so long that he’d forgotten what it was like to stand straight without a crushing yoke bending his back. Knowledge was power, and this knowledge would give him the power to evict the hitchhiker once and for all. It made him giddy.
But he couldn’t explain this to Josh. “Can’t a guy just be in a good mood for a change?”
Josh shrugged. “Well, technically we’re on US soil, and it is a free country. But give me some time to get used to the new Gabriel Pritchard. I’m accustomed to the moody bastard who likes to throw up on the local constabulary.”
Gabe would never live that one down.
“Hey, Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat.” He leaned over Josh and mimed sticking a finger down his throat. Their laughter drew a few curious glances in their direction.
“Okay, oka
y. Truce,” said Josh.
Gabe grabbed an extra chair. “So what’s up?”
“Drahomir. Is he just naturally stiff?”
Ah. “I know you’re eager to move things along, but you’ve got to have patience, okay? You’ve only been at this a few weeks. Remember, you’re playing a long game here. A looong game. Don’t think in terms of months. Think in terms of years. Careers.”
“I get that. Honestly, I do. But our interaction is a bit chilly. He trusts you; he tolerates me.” Josh shrugged. “How do I build on such a brittle foundation?”
Gabe leaned against the desk. “Open up to him a little bit. Make him feel like he’s getting something personal from you. You want him to feel like it’s a two-way street.”
“Such as?”
“Drahomir loves the symphony. Just mention in passing some concert you attended back in the States. Doesn’t matter if it was Beethoven or Three Dog Night. The point isn’t to have a conversation about music. Even if he doesn’t take the opening, you’ve given him a point of connection. He’ll remember you attend live music. And that’s grist for the mill.”
Josh mulled this over. Nodded. “Simple. I like it.”
Later, Gabe found himself departing the embassy just as Alestair entered, shaking his umbrella. The Brit favored him with a genial nod.
“Good morning, Gabriel.”
“Hi, Al.”
He was two steps out the door before his thoughts boomeranged back to their shared misadventure in the New Jewish Cemetery. He turned and jogged back inside. “Hey, Al, tell me something. Is that flask of yours a family heirloom or did you pick it up locally?” He lowered his voice. “And did you simply dip it in the river, or did you have to do something special?”
• • •
Tonight, as with the past several nights, the clientele at Bar Vodnář leaned to the West. Ever since the Soviet general, Bykovsky, had gotten himself photographed on the doorstep practically holding hands with the Norwegian, traffic from the vodka crowd had been light. That didn’t mean it was uneventful, though. Gabe staggered in around eleven.
He scanned the room with bloodshot eyes, looking like the very last thing in the world he needed was a drink. He clutched a handkerchief mottled with rusty stains, Jordan noticed, and kept dabbing it under his nose. But he put on a game face and ventured across the room, sending swirls of cigarette smoke eddying around his head. His legs were wobbly as a newborn foal’s, and he stumbled against a table, spilling the drinks of the couple sitting there. After tossing a handful of coins and cash on the table by way of apology, he lurched onward and finally slumped against the bar.
Jordan did a double take. His eyes weren’t merely bloodshot—the whites were genuinely red. He’d burst a vessel in each eye. Somebody had worked him over but good. No bruises or swelling, though. That was strange. She studied him more closely. His nose wasn’t broken, though it had bled, as had both ears. A thin scarlet crust traced the contour of each earlobe to the hinge of his jaw, and tiny scabs dotted the corners of his eyes like sleep crumbs.
Jordan hastily moved to conclude her current transaction before he scared away one of her special customers. And because her extended clientele was none of his business. Fingers lightly brushing her bracelet, she said to the woman across the bar, “All right. I’ll let you have it for twenty. But only because you’re a regular and I like you.”
Money changed hands, and so did a sun-bleached piece of the Atacama Desert. The woman on the neighboring stool took one look at Gabe, picked up her drink and her new charm, and moved to a booth.
Jordan gave his bloody rag a nasty frown. He stuffed it in his pocket.
Forgoing anything even remotely resembling a preamble, he said, “You were right.”
“Of course I was.” She stuffed the folded korunas into her pocket, then wrenched the cap from a beer bottle and slid it to another patron. “About what?”
Gabe tapped his temple with a quivering finger.
“Okay. I’ll bite. What makes you say that?”
Though he looked ready to keel over at any moment, his eyes widened and his entire manner brightened. His hoarse voice crackled with excitement. He leaned closer.
“I’ve identified it. I know its affinity.”
She blinked. “You don’t say?”
He nodded. “I’m feeling very mercurial right now.”
That sank in. “You’re certain?”
“Oh, yeah.” The high-pitched thread of a madman’s desperation wove through his laughter. “Yeah, I’m sure.”
“I’m impressed. That must have taken some smart detective work.” She looked him over again. Frowned. “So I assume this means you immediately followed it up by doing something dumb.” He tried to look innocent. But having clearly spent the earlier part of the evening bleeding from every orifice, he wasn’t selling the schoolboy act particularly well.
“You did, didn’t you?”
“Of course not.” His hands shook. She could tell he was trying his best to hide it. “But, on an unrelated note,” he said, “I will mention in passing that if you’re in the market for a new thermometer or barometer, you’re probably out of luck for a while. I happen to know that every place in town is out of stock. You can’t get one for love or money.”
“Pritchard, sometimes I swear . . .” She clenched her eyes shut and pinched the bridge of her nose, as though fending off the first tendrils of a nasty sinus headache. Which, in fact, she was. She wondered what the symptoms of acute mercury poisoning might be, and whether she’d have to cleanse the bar after he left. Was it her imagination, or was there a greenish tinge to his pallor tonight? “Do I need to call an ambulance for you?”
“I’m fine. Honestly.”
“That’s a relief. Because you look like five miles of bad road.” She reached under the bar and set a shot glass on the table. Then she turned, plucked a bottle from the top shelf, and filled the glass with some of the most expensive booze she had on hand. “Anyway, this calls for a celebration. On the house,” she announced.
He cocked an eyebrow at her. “Really?”
“Look, if you don’t want it—”
“Very generous of you. Much obliged.” He laid his hand beside the glass but didn’t lift it to his lips.
“Drink up, cowboy, before I regret my good cheer.”
He tried. He’d raised the glass about two inches before his fluttering hand slopped fine Kentucky bourbon all over the bar. Jordan snatched the glass from his hand and tossed back what little remained.
“That’s what I thought. You did something stupid tonight, and it left you so jacked up you can barely lift a shot glass.”
He frowned. “Dirty pool, Rhemes.”
“Out with it. What did you do?”
“I tried to evict it.”
All that blood . . . “Did you try to cut it out?”
“Of course not. I thought drawing it out would be easy. Seemed like it should be, uh, straightforward.”
She pinched the bridge of her nose again. This headache wasn’t going anywhere.
“I know you don’t remember how it got there in the first place, Pritchard, but you can take my word for it. And maybe you’ll notice I don’t use words like easy and straightforward.” She sighed. “So what happened?”
“Before or after two ounces of liquid metal tried to climb up my nose?”
Jordan leaned to left and right, squinting at the sides of his head. “Your nose?”
“And my ears, my eyes . . .” He trailed off, shifting uncomfortably on the stool. “Other places,” he murmured.
Forget cleansing the Vodnář. She’d have to burn it down.
“Oh, my God, Pritchard. I swear, if you start shitting blood in my bar, I truly will murder you.”
He swayed. For a moment she thought he was going down, but he grabbed the brass rail at the last second and righted himself. “How would you get rid of it, then?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Let me make a call.”
Gabe concluded, “So. Knowing the hitchhiker’s identity, can you help me get rid of it?”
“I have an inkling.” Alestair shared a look with Jordan. The Brit frowned just a bit, calculating. What was he up to? “But I’m uncertain that it would be best for us to help you.”
“Oh, come on, Al. I obviously can’t do it myself.”
“You’ve demonstrated that with admirable clarity. I mean, have you considered appealing to Miss Morozova for assistance?”
Gabe groaned. He slumped over the brass rail and pressed his forehead to the polished wood. Jordan snatched a dishrag and tried to remember where she’d put the bleach.
“I know what you’re doing,” he said, his voice muffled. “Have you forgotten she’s KGB? She might as well be radioactive.” Then he sighed. “Do you think she can help?”
“I do. But are you certain you’ve given this due consideration? Yours is a unique situation. Don’t be hasty.” Alestair finished his brandy. “Haste makes waste.”
Gabe hopped from the barstool on wobbly fawn legs. “Go jump in a frozen river. Both of you.”
2.
The next day, while finishing his early breakfast of weak coffee and cold toast, Gabe glanced over the newspaper. And almost did a spit-take. A body had turned up near the Legion Bridge. The man had been strangled and beaten with tremendous force—like the policeman the golem had killed in the cemetery. But the newest victim was a member of the Státní bezpečnost. State security: the Czech secret police.
The Witch Who Came in From the Cold - Season One Volume One Page 24