Necessary Evil (Milkweed Triptych)

by Ian Tregillis

  Even Lorimer couldn’t argue with that.

  Will’s mouth had gone dry. He coughed. “I, ah … What I mean to say is that there may be a rather straightforward explanation.”

  Both men picked up on Will’s hesitation. “By all means, please enlighten us,” said Stephenson.

  “It’s something of a long story,” Will said. “Perhaps I should wait until Pip arrives.”

  Stephenson shook his head. “Out with it, Beauclerk.”

  They watched while Will fidgeted with the brim of his bowler hat. He took a steadying breath, then forged ahead before he could lose his nerve.

  “I was contacted by the Met yesterday, you see.”

  And so Will related the story of his visit to Cannon Row. Lorimer and Stephenson listened in silence, awestruck by the extent of Will’s obliviousness, until he described the absurd copy of his own billfold.

  Lorimer said, “You bloody stupid tosser. You fucking idiotic toff.” He muttered obscenities and insults through the rest of Will’s tale.

  But Stephenson didn’t say a word. Only the whitening of his knuckles as he gripped the ashtray betrayed any emotional reaction at all. Will expected him to hurl it across the room, or use it to bash in his skull once the rage overwhelmed him. It’s what Marsh would have done. Instead, the old man waited until Will’s rambling and awkward confession wound down to its conclusion. When he spoke, it was as if he’d plunged so deep into rage that he’d come out the other side again, emerging into serene detachment.

  He might have been commenting on the weather when he asked, “And at no point did you consider having a look at this fellow they’d caught with your billfold?”

  “It obviously wasn’t my billfold and it obviously wasn’t John Stephenson in their custody, so I thought the matter was settled.” Silence fell upon the office. Will rushed to fill it. “I mean, surely the Jerries wouldn’t be so careless. As forgeries go, the documents weren’t even remotely credible. It had to be an elaborate hoax. A practical joke.”

  But Stephenson was already dialing the telephone on his desk. It was particularly agonizing to listen along while, through a sequence of calls, the old man discovered that the fellow caught in St. James’ Park had been cut loose. And that the police had done so on orders from “higher up.” Will didn’t understand the significance of that, but Lorimer and Stephenson did. The security service had put a tail on the mystery man. They were also watching Stephenson, whom the stranger had claimed to be.

  MI5 didn’t know about Milkweed. Nevertheless, the Security Service had stumbled upon evidence of German interference in Milkweed’s affairs.

  They’d been scooped. That was the pièce de résistance, the crowning jewel of Will’s recent mistakes. So acute was the shame he wanted to bury himself. The fear of what he might have caused left his shirt damp under the arms.

  Pip put his faith in me. How on earth can I possibly redeem myself? Will could think of one possibility. Two days ago, he’d have rejected it out of hand as being too extreme. Too fanciful. But now …

  Stephenson said to Lorimer, “We’re left with no indication of who this mysterious prisoner might have been.”

  “We know it wasn’t the minger who sprang the lass.” Lorimer shook his head. “At this rate, the four of us will be outnumbered by German agents by the end of the week. Bloody fuck.”

  Four. That number again. But where was Marsh?

  “Well, that’s one place—the only place—where something good might come out of yesterday’s debacle.” Stephenson opened a desk drawer. He produced a bundle of papers wrapped with a black ribbon. Each page was embossed with the full Royal Arms, making it equivalent to a decree from His Majesty. There had been dozens of witnesses to the chase, dozens of witnesses to a man who ran through walls as though they were a mirage. Those witnesses, Stephenson explained, were Milkweed’s new recruits.

  “Be ready to show the Tarragona film in a few days,” Stephenson told Lorimer.

  “Aye.”

  The talk of swelling Milkweed’s ranks, of finally giving the organization the resources it needed for dealing effectively with von Westarp and his “children,” convinced Will to voice his proposal.

  He said, “I fear that spies and soldiers won’t ever be enough. No matter what von Westarp has accomplished, or how he accomplished it, the Eidolons are our best chance of countering it.” He held up his bandaged hand. “And in that regard, my contribution has been less than exemplary thus far.” At that, Lorimer snorted. Will continued, “We need true experts, not a dilettante like myself.”

  What Milkweed needed more than anything else, Will explained, was warlocks. Men descended from the bloodlines that had, for many centuries, secretly curated knowledge of Enochian. Will’s grandfather, the twelfth Duke of Aelred, had been one of these men, as had Will’s father. Aubrey, Will’s brother, had been groomed for the peerage as was traditional for the older son. But Will had been raised in a different family tradition.

  Though these men guarded their hard-won knowledge jealously, they were known on rare occasions to engage in trade with their colleagues. The old duke had done so. Which meant that his journals might hold records of other warlock lineages, or their whereabouts.

  Stephenson listened with considerable interest while Will laid out his proposal. It didn’t take long. Marsh still hadn’t arrived by the time the meeting concluded. Will departed immediately on his new recruitment mission.

  14 May 1940

  Bermondsey, London, England

  I dreamt of sea wrack and ravens, for how long I couldn’t say, until the thrum of rain on a metal roof nudged me to consciousness. It was loud as an artillery barrage, or the Devil’s own tattoo. Rainwater sluiced through a rust hole far overhead, drizzling me with cold water and ocher grit. I rolled over, groggily trying to escape the worst of it. But moving kicked up sawdust from the warehouse floor; the sneezing fit banished any hope of further sleep.

  I yawned. Stretched. My joints ached. They popped and cracked from neck to ankles. Sleeping on the floor hadn’t done my bad knee any favors. I blinked up at a row of windows streaked with sooty marks of the warehouse’s past. A leaden gray morning loomed just beyond the glass and grime. It was raining stair-rods again.

  I shivered in my underclothes. The rain had arrived from the sea, riding a line of squalls. Cool drafts swirled through the warehouse, mixing scents of the Thames and diesel fuel. The hoists and cranes above the warehouse jetty rattled their chains like Marley’s ghost. I’d taken my younger counterpart’s clothes from the Anderson; I went to the pile folded on a relatively clean spot of floor and dressed in civilian clothes. No uniform today.

  I had slept like a dead thing. After sending my doppelgänger off with his Nazi escort, I’d headed for the river. It had been a long walk to Bermondsey on top of a very long and exhausting day. But I needed a place to work.

  Back in ’63, after the battle with the Soviet agent who’d given me my wounds, Milkweed had taken his body to a warehouse down on the docks. It was one of many properties secretly belonging to SIS throughout London and the UK. That particular warehouse had been damaged by bombing during the war. And, like so many pieces of London, it had never been fully rebuilt. Its derelict state had made it perfect for MI6. For now, the place was undamaged, but quiet, and slowly falling into disrepair. It wasn’t yet an MI6 property, but attacks on shipping convoys had evidently reduced the flow of cargo to the point that the owners had been forced to consolidate. I’d have to move out before history repeated itself and it took a direct hit from a Luftwaffe bomb … if history repeated itself. But for the moment, and as long as I was willing to share it with rats, bats, and pigeons, I had a space from which to run the second prong of my mission.

  Which was the order of business for today. I’d taken my best shot at the REGP, but now it was out of my hands, and I wouldn’t know for a long time whether my arrow had flown true. But Milkweed I could do something about.

  Klaus’s infiltration of the Admiral
ty had spurred a flurry of changes. I knew that in the original time line, today had been the day when Will took it upon himself to track down and recruit the warlocks. So today’s job was simple: pay him a visit.

  I wouldn’t say that I felt relaxed—that was impossible, after a scant few hours of sleep on a wooden floor—but I did feel a temporary reprieve from the grinding weight on my shoulders. Dealing with Will was easy. It felt good to have a task well in hand.

  My stomach rumbled, reminding me I hadn’t eaten a thing since what the coppers had given me yesterday. And that I hadn’t had a proper meal since 1963. There was still a fair amount of cash left out of what I’d nicked from the Anderson shelter. Enough for breakfast, if I could find it. But I didn’t know the neighborhood, so it seemed more likely I’d be stuck with pub food, if I could find one open this early.

  I glanced at my wristwatch. And cursed. Loudly.

  It was mid-afternoon. I had slept most of the day.

  *

  Rain soaked past my bones and into my marrow while I pounded on the door of Will’s Kensington flat.

  No answer. But I kept at it because I didn’t know what else to do.

  Think. Think. Where was Will? With a bit of concentration, I could piece together his movements in the original time line.

  I remembered how the old man had torn us new arseholes after the fiasco of Gretel’s escape. Will had left straight from that meeting on his trek to find the warlocks. But he would have had to pack a bag before leaving. And then he’d needed his grandfather’s papers. So he’d said good-bye to me at the Admiralty, made a quick stop here in Kensington, and then set off for his family estate at Bestwood, up in Nottinghamshire.

  But events were unfolding differently now. I had changed things: Raybould Marsh wasn’t at that meeting. How did Stephenson react to my absence? I reckoned it had made him even angrier. Further, that he took his anger out on poor Will and Lorimer. If anything, Will was probably more committed to finding the warlocks now than he had been in the original time line.

  Was he still at the Admiralty? Had he already been to the flat? Or was he waiting on a train? I checked my watch again. My best chance for intercepting Will was at the train station. Assuming he was still in the city.

  I dashed back through the downpour to the taxi. My clothes were uncomfortably tight. They belonged to a younger man, one who didn’t carry the paunch of late middle age. Now they were sodden, and clung to my skin. But not so tightly as the renewed sense of failure.

  The driver hadn’t complained when I’d asked him to wait. My dithering was worth a princely sum. He folded up his newspaper and set it on the seat beside him.

  “Your mate’s not home, sir?”

  “No.”

  “Terrible day to be out and about, if you ask me. Where next?”

  “St. Pancras station.” That’s where Will would have caught a train to Nottinghamshire.

  And so I wandered the platforms like a revenant spirit, haunting each train bound for the Midlands until the last departure of the evening. But I was too late. There was no sign of Will.

  “God damn it!”

  My voice echoed through the mostly empty station. A solid kick sent a rubbish bin rolling off the platform, trailing newspapers and chip wrappers. I worked my way down the platform, booting every bin I could find.

  “Son!” Kick. “Of!” Kick. “A!” Kick. “Bitch!”

  I remembered something the old man had said to me once, a very long time ago: I’m quite impressed. When you cock something up, you do it good and proper. How right he’d been.

  I had missed my opportunity. Which left me powerless to do anything. Now there was nothing I could do about Milkweed until Will returned. I didn’t dare set foot back in the Admiralty; by now everybody had heard of the stranger who had attacked Will in St. James’ Park. Even now, Stephenson and Lorimer were busy rounding up all the witnesses to the escape. Slipping the King’s shilling into their ale, so to speak. Very soon the old man would discover the vault had been cleaned out.

  No, the Admiralty wasn’t safe for me.

  I limped out of the station before somebody could call the coppers to report the old codger who’d gone off his nut.

  For dinner, I stopped in a pub and bought a piece of cod wrapped in newspaper. After a few bites, I waved down the barman and ordered a pint of bitters to wash away the taste of ink. In spite of this I finished the fish quickly, wolfing it down like the starving man I was. I ate as though with each bite I could snare Will, reel him back to London, delay his errand, keep my mission on track. The bitters went down equally fast.

  This public house had a hearth on one wall, empty now but for a smattering of last winter’s ashes. I’d met my wife in a pub not unlike this one. The clientele was a bit rougher here, but it reminded me of the Hart and Hearth. I had fond memories of that place. Will had introduced me to the Hart, and to Liv, on the same evening.

  He’d blown it to pieces the following year. Part of the Eidolons’ blood price in exchange for destroying an invasion fleet. Will had begun to drink before then, but I think that was the night that broke him. After that, the Eidolons’ relentless demands for blood and slaughter hastened his decline. And relentless they were, for every drop spilled was another piece of the map, another Eidolonic fingerhold into our world. Thus Will and the others set fires, sank barges, even derailed a train. Atrocities committed against our own countrymen, all to fuel Milkweed’s secret war against the Götterelektrongruppe.

  I shook my head. Nothing I could do about it right now. I’d fix it when Will returned. What was one more item on the ever-growing list of things to put right this time round? Didn’t seem to matter much at this point. The sodding list was already absurd.

  My scars got looks, of course. By now I’d grown accustomed to the double takes, the stares, and the way people conspicuously looked at anything other than the ruined side of my face. But I discovered a bright side to looking like a wounded veteran.

  The war dominated most conversations. And they took an optimistic tone, for the most part. The BEF was still putting up a fight on the Continent; most folks believed things would turn around once the French recovered from the Jerries’ underhanded evasion of the Maginot Line. We had a new Prime Minister, one who clearly understood the Fascist threat. The possibility of complete and utter disaster hadn’t yet penetrated the national psyche. Standing alone against our enemies hadn’t yet become a grim possibility. We hadn’t yet lost an army at Dunkirk.

  And so it didn’t take long before the conversation at the bar turned to the last time we beat the Boche. From there it was just a few pints before somebody approached the old duffer with the scars.

  “You a vet, mister?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Great War?”

  I started to shake my head, but caught myself. I was the right age for a veteran of the previous war. So instead, I nodded. “Royal Flying Corps.”

  “You were a pilot?” More men gathered round. The entire country hungered for good war stories. And there was nobody more flash than an ace.

  “Yeah.”

  One fellow said, proudly, “My son is in the RAF. He’ll give the Jerries what for.”

  “God bless him,” I said, raising my glass. “God bless all the fighting boys.” We drank to that.

  “What’d you do, sir, if you don’t mind saying?”

  “Flew reconnaissance for three years. We stuck a camera under my Bristol”—I set down my pint, to better explain with my hands—“then I flew over enemy territory. Snapped troop movements, artillery emplacements, and such.”

  “Get shot at?”

  “All the bloody time. Spent more time patching holes than I did in the cockpit.” That got a laugh. “Once had a round come up through the seat and snap off my goggles.”

  “It didn’t.”

  “Still have the pair to prove it,” I said.

  “Do any dogfighting?”

  I shrugged. “Saw some combat.”

&nb
sp; “How about von Richthofen? You ever fight him?”

  “Red Baron? I’m still here, aren’t I?”

  That got another laugh from the group. Somebody slapped me on the back.

  “Ever get shot down?”

  The bloke who asked this got a couple of dark looks, but I pretended not to notice. “Austrians got me. Shredded my plane out from under me, sent me spiraling down. God I loved that Bristol. I aimed for no-man’s-land.” I swigged from my pint and set the empty glass on the bar. “Woke up in a field hospital. That’s how I got these,” I said, pointing to the burn scars on my face. That broke the ice, when they saw I wasn’t shy about my experiences.

  True story, almost every bit of it. Replace the burns with an amputated arm, and you had the story of my mentor, John Stephenson. He’d shown me the goggles.

  I couldn’t very well tell them the truth, could I?

  Kept as close to the old man’s exploits as I could. I could spin the story well and do justice to the old man’s service. He didn’t talk much about the old days, but I listened when he did. Usually over a brandy or three.

  I wouldn’t have done this if I weren’t a vet. I might not have had any respect left for myself but I still respected the men in uniform. And I was a veteran. Of a secret war. And battles that hadn’t happened yet, or perhaps would never happen in this new history.

  And I’d been having a shit time of things for as long as I could remember. It was nice to be appreciated, just for a little while, and even if it weren’t for the things I’d actually done for King and Country. It was good to have the gratitude of a few countrymen.

  The details were irrelevant. I told Stephenson’s story as a substitute for my own experiences, but it was my anguish that came out in the telling.

  The fellow who’d first asked me about the war shook my hand. “You done the country proud, sir. Thank you.”

  And, God love them, the other fellows raised their pints to me. Nobody had ever thanked me for my service. Very few people knew the truth of what I had done and endured and suffered for the sake of Britain. But even they had never said a kind word about it. Not even the old man. I dug out a handkerchief and pretended to blow my nose so my new mates wouldn’t see the water in my eyes.