Hammer of the Witches

by Kai Wai Cheah

  The earliest mail was three months old. Long before the Chios hit. Brunner and his contact were keeping each other up to date, informing each other of Hexenhammer’s movements and activities. The day before the Chios operation, Brunner’s handler dumped an entire file on Brunner with accompanying instructions.

  The operation begins tomorrow. Study this package well. Our assets within Interpol will place you in the best position to influence police operations around the continent. Once you’re in position, release this information as you see fit. Guide the police to sweep up the Tier Two targets, but ensure they leave the Tier One targets to us. Good luck.

  Both Brunner and his contact conversed entirely in Anglian, but while they were fluent, they didn’t use the same idioms, sentence structure or phrases a native speaker would.

  The data package was a target deck. Names, aliases, addresses, identification details, contact information, biographies. I’d seen many of those names during my cross-continental trip with Eve.

  “These must be Hexenhammer members,” she whispered. “Not even I know this much about us.”

  “Your traitor does,” I said.

  “It’s not that simple,” she said. “We deliberately minimize the use and retention of personal information within Hexenhammer. That way, if one of is compromised, he can’t give up the others. But this? This is too much information for any one person inside the organization to learn.”

  “Maybe you’ve got multiple traitors,” Keith suggested.

  “Or maybe the traitor has the backing of an intelligence agency,” Bob said.

  “Maybe he’s not a traitor,” I said. “Maybe he’s a double agent.”

  “If he’s a double, who’s he working for?” Pete asked.

  “Whoever’s backing the conspiracy,” I said.

  “What kind of national intelligence agency would back terrorism?” Ricky asked.

  “I presume you’ve heard of the Contras, or the Near Eastern mujahideen in the eighties,” Eve said coldly.

  “Terrorism in the West,” Ricky amended.

  “Red Army Faction, Free Eire Army, the Jackal… Who supported them?”

  “The Rhosians?” I shook my head. “What do they get out of this?”

  “Why not?” Bob asked. “It leaves us reeling and distracted and creates an atmosphere of tension and terror in the West. It leaves them free to rebuild their old empire. It’s how they operated during the Cold War.”

  “No way,” Pete replied. “There’d be indications if they were working up to another round of hybrid war. Propaganda, information operations, troop deployments. There’s been none of that.”

  “Guys, we don’t have jack,” Alex said. “Until we know more, all we’ve got is just empty speculation.”

  We kept reading.

  Most of the emails were updates. What Task Force Opal was doing today, what the handler was going to do and what he needed from Opal, latest updates from the agencies investigating Hexenhammer, how the handler wanted Brunner to “guide” the cops.

  We called up the mirrored devices on multiple active panels and cross-referenced the emails. Brunner wore multiple hats. To Task Force Opal he was the liaison with Task Force Onyx. To the national police and intelligence services, he was one of their primary liaisons, feeding them information that allegedly originated from other agencies, information that in reality came straight from his handler. In turn, Brunner fed the take from every service to his boss, keeping him abreast of the situation.

  Brunner was playing a delicate, dangerous game. A single mistake, and his edifice of deceit would come crashing down. I had no idea how he maintained his web of lies. Just trying to map out what he said gave me a headache.

  But one thing was clear: all the information Interpol had on Hexenhammer came directly from Brunner’s handler.

  “The handler is either the double or is contact with the double,” I mused. “That’s how he knows so much about Hexenhammer.”

  “And the handler likes to keep our boy Brunner updated on his ops, too,” Pete continued.

  Every time the giants came out to play—Dusseldorf, Rome, Amarantopolis, other jobs elsewhere we’d never heard about—Brunner’s handler sent a warning order and instructions on how to maintain “the narrative.” Their words.

  I wasn’t surprised. If Brunner’s job was to lie through his teeth, he needed to know what truth to protect.

  “We can use that to flush out the double,” I said.

  “How?” Eve asked.

  “Canary trap.”

  The men nodded understandingly. Eve raised an eyebrow.

  “Eve, you can contact the suspects, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. We tell them that you’ve located another Hexenhammer operative, one of the Tier One targets, and are going to need the suspect’s help to extract him. But we give each suspect different times and places.”

  “And when Brunner’s handler passes on the information, we can identify the double,” Eve finished.

  “Exactly.”

  Eve steepled her fingers. “We have an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.”

  “How?”

  “One of our missing Hexenhammer operatives reached out to me. Here, let me show you.”

  She hooked up her phone to an empty active panel and displayed it.

  Dearest Eve,

  Please forgive my prolonged silence. After the attack on Chios, our comrades have tried to reorganize and regroup underground. Shortly after they contacted me, I saw them hunted down one by one. I suspected there was a traitor within Hexenhammer, but I didn’t know who.

  You intervened at the Hagia Aletheia, didn’t you? You’re the only one among us who would give a speech like that. You’ve shown me that you’re the only one I can trust.

  Yesterday the police arrested my producer for “terrorism.” Vitaly has no connection to us, but it’s only a matter of time until they find my family. I need your help to flee the country. Once we’re clear, I’ll help you tell the world the truth about what we’re doing.

  Best wishes,

  Stepan

  He wasn’t on the list of Eve’s suspects.

  “Who’s Stepan?” I asked.

  Her eyes twinkled. “The most high-profile Hexenhammer member: Stepan Mikhailovich Kiryanov.”

  “The Stepan Kiryanov?” Alex asked.

  She nodded. “One and the same.”

  He laughed. “Get out!”

  “Who’s he?” I asked.

  “He’s a Rhosian independent webcast journalist. He calls himself a philosopher, but he’s hated on both sides of the aisle. Every day he releases a series of webcasts discussing current events, social issues, politics, things like that.” Alex shook his head. “He’s one of the leading public intellectuals of our time. Eve, how did you get Stepan Kiryanov on your team?”

  She smiled. “I knew him from a while ago. When we founded Hexenhammer, I asked him for his support. He jumped in straight away.”

  “He denounces political violence all the time. Why did he join up?”

  “What we do is self-defense. Preemptive, perhaps, but self-defense all the same. We don’t target innocents—only criminals and terrorists that governments won’t touch. We argued about it all day and night, but he eventually agreed that if the government wouldn’t protect the people, we had to.”

  “That must’ve been something to see,” he said. “Is that why he speaks so glowingly of Hexenhammer?”

  “Yes. He handles information operations.”

  “Propaganda,” I said.

  “He hasn’t lied about us,” Eve said.

  And propaganda was a critical component of every war. I switched tack.

  “How do you know he’s not the double?” I asked.

  “He insisted on being isolated from our other operations. He doesn’t know anything about what we do. He names and shames politicians we’ve identified, condemns criminals and terrorists, and passes on our public statements about our ope
rations. That’s all. We contact him either through myself or through cutouts. He doesn’t have access to the kind of information Onyx does.”

  “And the suspect might be among the members he knows,” Pete said.

  “Precisely.”

  “All right,” I said. “Set it up.”

  ***

  Rhosia had always been a cold and distant land to me. My father had fought in WWIII, but he never spoke of his combat days. He sealed his memories in an ancient footlocker, and I never pried into his secrets. All I knew was that in the archives of the Mobile Assault Division there was a file bearing the name of Staff Sergeant Marcus Landon, Silver Star with bronze oak leaves, Bronze Star with combat V, and two-time winner of the Purple Heart.

  I satisfied myself by reading about the Cold War and the Third World War in my youth. I began with decades-old spy thrillers and military fiction, graduating to biographies and military history.

  The late eighties had promised a brave new world of freedom and prosperity, riding on the universal acknowledgment that particle beam defenses had forever ended the age of strategic nuclear warfare. A new generation of reformers came to power in Moskva, promising an era of peaceful co-existence and cooperation with the West and a series of reforms to reap the benefits of peace.

  Glasnost and perestroika were supposed to save the Soviet Union. Instead, they exposed the deep-seated corruption and resentment that pervaded Soviet society. After an energy crisis in the final months of the decade, the Soviet economy went into a fatal tailspin. The hardliners took the opportunity to depose the reformers.

  Fearing a fresh wave of crackdowns, anti-communist groups started uprisings and protests across Eastern Pantopia. The Red Army crushed them with a vengeance. In East Berlin a nascent resistance movement overran the border guards, allowing the people to flee to the West. The Red Army followed.

  And the old world ended in nuclear fire.

  East and West shattered the sky and poisoned the Earth. Millions of men, women and children died on both sides in the opening days, and there was no sign of stopping. Every time one side or the other gained a temporary advantage, out came the nukes, the gas, the daimons. But slowly, inexorably, the West wiped out the Soviet particle beam defenses.

  The threat of nuclear apocalypse hung over the Soviets like the Sword of Damocles. Encouraged by the West, Red Army troops defected en masse and turned on the Communist Party, kicking out the hardliners and reinstalling the reformists. The New Year’s Revolution ended the war, and within three months the Empire of Evil had finally ceased to exist.

  But this was Rhosia. Memories ran deep. Too much blood had been spilled on both sides. The Rhosians might openly welcome Hesperian dollars, but the West had always been their primary adversary. Even without a continent-spanning specter haunting us, we were operating under Moskva Rules.

  Assume nothing. Never go against your gut. Everyone you meet is a possible enemy agent. And whatever you do, don’t look back: you’re never completely alone.

  It took us a day to coordinate the op. Eve fired a series of emails to her suspects, saying that she’s located another Hexenhammer member in Rhosia, but she needed manpower. There were a few positive responses. She gave them different meeting places: Arkhangelsk, Novosibirsk, Ekaterinburg, Saint Petersburg.

  Our true destination was Moskva.

  Landfall at Tula blew my first assumption out of the water. Rhosia was hot. A heatwave had descended on the Northern Hemisphere. Once outside the air-conditioned airport, I was sweating just by standing still.

  We split up, playing our cover. We were nouveau riche travelers touring the world, having recently come into a vast amount of money. The Tula airport offered much cheaper prices than Moskva to resupply our airship, so while we were here, we wanted to sightsee.

  Everyone—the hackers, the crew, the contractors—dispersed across the city. Eve and I caught a train northeast to Moskva.

  In keeping with our cover, we went shopping at the world-famous TsUM Department Store. There, I purchased a gray ultralight T-shirt made of merino wool and a pair of jeans. Eve bought a bright red sundress with a knee-high hem. We changed clothes and personas, turning into a young couple enjoying the sights and sounds of the city. I didn’t have a Rhosian language pack, so we were Anglian tourists on a long-term vacation.

  Moskva was so bright and clean. Cleaner than Amarantopolis, Rome, my native New Haven. Though there were few trash cans and dumpsters in sight, the streets were free of litter. There was practically no graffiti to speak of. Sure, this was the high-class section of the city, but from what I had heard, most of Moskva was the same.

  As I walked the streets, I saw the last vestiges of Soviet rule: baroquely decorated communist-era buildings that tried to showcase the wealth and glory of the Revolution while minimizing cost and maximizing utility; plaques that proudly bore the star, hammer and sickle; statues and mausoleums of Felix Dzerzhinsky, Josef Stalin and Vladimir Lenin. They were the lingering ghosts of a long-dead empire, haunting the streets of a city that had long ago abandoned and repudiated them.

  We weren’t just killing time, of course. We walked in looping circles, looking for signs of surveillance. The FSB had inherited its Soviet predecessor’s habit of routinely investigating diplomats, reporters, businessmen, the ultra-rich and other interesting foreigners. The question wasn’t whether they were watching us but how intensely they were doing so.

  Today we hadn’t earned the honor of a dedicated surveillance team, so we headed to our rendezvous: a coffee house imaginatively named Coffee House.

  This outlet was a single story standalone establishment three blocks away from Red Square. This being Rhosia, the cafe sold alcohol at the counter. The corner seats were all taken. We made do by sitting off to the side and watching over each other’s shoulders. Eve studied the menu and ordered a double cappuccino topped with chocolate and nuts. I was strictly old-school: espresso, black, no sugar. The coffee didn’t match up to the Yirgacheffe or Blue Mountain brews I was used to, but it was pretty good.

  A half hour later, Stepan Kiryanov entered the cafe. He had a long face that seemed perpetually stretched into an expression between a grimace and a grin. His crown was bald and shiny, and he compensated by having bushy brown eyebrows and a well-trimmed beard. He wore a green shirt, faded blue jeans, and a messenger bag at his right hip, crossed over his chest. That was the all-clear signal: if he wore it on his left hip we would leave immediately.

  Eve waved him over. We stood to greet him. Kiryanov swept her up and kissed her on both cheeks.

  “Your hair is so rough,” she said, giggling.

  “Just the way the ladies like it.”

  “Not me!”

  They had history there—a history she hadn’t told me about. When it was my turn, we simply shook hands.

  “Luke,” I said by way of introduction.

  “And you can call me Stepan,” he said with a smile. His Anglian was lightly accented but fluent. “Thanks for coming on such short notice.”

  “No trouble at all,” she said. “Did you come alone?”

  “Yes. Of course. And you?”

  “We’re clean. The FSB didn’t feel like following us today.”

  She wasn’t the ice queen or the honeypot today, just a vivacious young woman. She was smiling a lot more, but she smiled like a Rhosian: always with the lips, never with the eyes.

  “Good. My family is a distance away. Please follow me.”

  Stepan was a talker. As we walked the streets, he gave an impromptu history lesson, discussing the influence of communism, the rise of crony capitalism after the War, how things hadn’t really changed.

  “It’s always difficult being a journalist in this country,” he said. “At least, if you’re not a government mouthpiece. But now? With terrorism in the air? All the government has to do is say you’re a threat to ‘national security’ and poof! You disappear into Lubyanka Prison.”

  “Is your government after you?” I asked.

/>   “I am wanted for ‘questioning’ in connection with Hexenhammer activities. Bah! Hexenhammer has never conducted operations in Rhosia.”

  “Isn’t it dangerous to just walk around like this?” Eve asked.

  “I have a friend in the FSB. He warned me when his colleagues got too close. He couldn’t save my producer, but he is buying time to get my family and me out of the country.” He sighed. “Not that we have much time left.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “My friend tells his bosses that he is keeping me under close watch to ‘identify other suspects.’ My family and I have been running around the country, moving from hotel to hotel. For now I’m releasing prerecorded footage online to maintain the fiction that I’m still at work. Once I run out of material, they will realize I’m no longer at home or the studio, and they will ask inconvenient questions.”

  The journalist sighed again and continued. “A different group arrested Vitaly, my producer. My FSB contact doesn’t have influence over them, and Vitaly knows I’m not working any more. It’s only a matter of time before the rest of the FSB learns the truth. And then the manhunt will begin proper.”

  “You can’t leave?” I asked.

  “My passport, and those of my family, have been blacklisted. If I tried to leave legally, we’d be arrested. And unfortunately, I don’t know any smugglers.”

  “We can help,” Eve said.

  “We’re counting on you.”

  Forty minutes later we arrived at a backpacker’s hostel. Eve and I stood watch outside while Kiryanov checked out. He emerged with his wife and toddler in tow.

  Eve bent over and smiled at the child. “Privet! Kak vas zavoot?”

  The child scooted away, hiding behind Mrs. Kiryanova’s leg.

  “Anya is very shy,” her mother said, smiling indulgently. Patting her daughter’s head, she spoke something to her in Rhosian.

  “Pree… priv-et,” Anya said.

  Mrs. Kiryanova continued speaking to Anya. Anya probably comprehended little more of what her mother said than me, but it sounded like praise.