“Still I am talking with many of the peoples with whom we must discuss these things. Yes? Very interesting! But, tonight, party. Good boxings! Light and middleweights, tonight.”
The bell rang. Two young men circled one another, gloves out, testing. The one on the left was bruised, the one on the right was bloody. “Fun.”
“Very! Come, watch, I get you drink.”
Josh followed him to the bar. Crowds, it seemed, had a way of parting around Kazimir. Kazimir set down a bill, and the bartender poured them two bourbons. “I didn’t know you could get bourbon here.”
“Very expensive,” Kazimir said. “But is all to good business.”
“I see. To a good,” he searched for the right word, “partnership.”
They clinked glasses and drank. Behind Josh, someone hit the mat. He turned to watch the count.
And there, in that same low-backed dress, stood the Russian. This time, she was staring right at him.
She turned and walked through a side door, away from the lights and the fight.
Josh glanced back to Kazimir. “I’m sorry. Over there—are those the, um, the toilets?”
Kazimir, eyes closed, relishing his drink, nodded.
“I’ll be right back.” Josh downed the bourbon and ran.
• • •
Gabe did not like telling stories on demand, and he liked telling them at gunpoint even less. Mortal danger did concentrate the mind, but the particular shape of that concentration, in Gabe’s experience, highlighted sensory detail and possible answers to the question “how the hell are we going to get out of this,” and tended to blunt the creative skills required to spin a proper yarn. But Edith’s cool green stare, and the comfort with which she held that sidearm, left him with no other options.
Keep it simple.
“I’m waiting,” she said, and raised one eyebrow. For all the affect in her voice, they might have been playing cards, and he was hesitating on the bet.
All explanations save the truth deserted him. “Okay,” he said. “Look. Dom’s dead. His plane crashed. Whatever he was up to, it went wrong.” Edith’s glare did not waver. “I thought whoever was running him might have sent someone to find out what went wrong. So I grabbed more recent entry-exit files. We have Dom’s phone logs. We have a record of his movements. If there’s some crossover—if he was talking to someone who showed up in the last couple weeks—that would give us a lead.”
“And you didn’t think to tell me about this. Why?” He’d heard people sound more emotional asking about a casserole recipe. For all the calm, though, he recognized the ribbon of threat underneath those words. She didn’t trust him, but the way he answered this next question might determine exactly how she didn’t trust him. Careful, Gabe. Careful.
“You don’t respect us.”
She blinked.
“You haven’t exactly made a secret of it, since you got here. You don’t like Prague Station, you don’t like the way we do things. That’s fine. We were part of a colossal fuckup. I want to get to the bottom of it just as much as you.” He burned as he said those words, which surprised him. Was this even lying? He did want to find Dom’s sponsor, to learn the truth, to serve his country. Flame agents inside the CIA, sabotaging American ops, selling out good men to the KGB—whoever they were, he wanted them flushed like quail, wanted them silhouettes in his sights against a gray sky. He wanted the shotgun in his hand. And so did Edith. So why was he afraid of her? Why hadn’t he trusted her, since she arrived? “I thought you might dismiss my ideas, because they came from me. So I took initiative. I should have included you. I’m sorry.”
Standing still hurt more than most people thought, because most people never actually stood still. They twitched and shifted weight, relieving stress. Gabe didn’t dare. Edith had read his service record. She knew she would only get one chance, maybe two, at this distance, if he started to move. She would shoot first. So he let the pain between his shoulder blades build and hoped—dearly, fiercely—that she would believe him, that her exact progress through the office, her care, her conviction, her regulated mugs of tea, came from a place that understood a need to bear up under disrespect.
There were not many women in the Company, after all.
Edith lowered the gun.
Gabe exhaled.
“Not so fast,” she said. “We’re going to the embassy. I will review these files. You will stay in my line of sight while I do so. And then we’ll see.”
• • •
Josh chased the woman beneath the warehouse. Through the doorway, the basement was a warren of twisting hallways, all alike. He glimpsed the Russian spy’s black skirt flaring around a corner, and padded quickly after her, footsteps light, and tried not to think about what had happened to the last person he saw chase this particular woman.
Don’t worry about it, he told himself, in a sort of sideways imitation of Gabe’s voice. Stay cool. Keep your distance. Don’t make any threatening moves. You’re here to fact-find.
He glanced round the corner, into an empty hall lined with doors. One stood ajar, two doors down and on the left. There was a light on inside. He padded close, listening.
A door latch clicked open behind him; he had just begun to turn when strong hands grabbed him from behind.
Gabe wouldn’t have made a sound. Certainly not something which even Josh had to admit was best characterized as a squawk. Gabe would have fought back with some sort of crazy mix of jiujitsu and pure old Captain America haymaker moxie, and then maybe some kind of snappy James Bond-style comeback. Or was that Alestair?
Anyway, Josh didn’t expect either of them would end up slammed against a wall by a woman about half a foot shorter than they were, with her arm against their windpipe. Then again, Josh could be mistaken. He’d seen this woman fight before.
Her eyes narrowed, and she flushed beneath her makeup.
“No,” he said, in Russian, which was all he could manage through the pressure of her forearm against his throat. He tried to move, but she was doing something to his other arm that he couldn’t describe, but which made the entire limb a solid bar of pain.
“You helped me,” she said. “In the alley.”
Josh’s reply came out a bit gurgly, so he nodded.
“Why are you following me?”
She relaxed her hold on his neck so he could answer. Still, he had to spend a few seconds sucking wind before he could speak. “I recognized you. That’s all. I wanted to… say hello. Learn why you’re here. Ask your name.”
Yeah, so he sucked at fieldwork. He could probably fight his way out of a paper bag, if the paper bag were blindfolded and had one arm tied behind its back. But he knew from chess.
Neither of them wanted this to get bad. He’d made a mistake following her, but she’d made a bigger one getting violent. She had to be thinking: Why was the American here? Kill him and you’ll never know. Do the Czechs like him more than they like you? If so, you hurt him and you’ll have a bad night. Or you can take the opening he offers, laugh this off, little misunderstanding, I don’t trust strangers who follow me down hallways as a rule. Maybe even mistake his interest for a crush, some little flirtation she could use. If she was, after all, a spy.
Did her embassy know she was here? She might be sneaking out on her own—this could be a handle he could use on her, a path into the Soviet embassy, if he played his cards right.
Unless she was working with the smugglers. Unless Josh had read Kazimir wrong and their business arrangement was deeper than it seemed—in which case, she might kill him here and let the mob sort it out.
The big difference, his stomach reminded him, between doing this sort of stuff on the chessboard and doing it in real life, was that the stakes were a bit more immediate.
The woman looked into him: read him, like Alestair read him. He wondered what she saw. Whatever she saw or sought, she was close enough that he could feel her decide what to do next.
“It’s a fight night,” she said. “I like
to fight. And I like to watch. So sometimes, I come here.”
Which was an opening in return. We can leave this hallway together. If we play it very, very carefully.
“Me too,” he said.
She stepped back, and freed his arm, and adjusted the front of her dress, which Josh imagined would have been somewhat noteworthy for a very different man. He shot his cuffs, and straightened the lapels of his jacket. She extended one hand. “Nadia.” She said it as easily as she said her real name, which maybe it was. He could check against embassy rolls later. At least it was probably the same name she’d given Kazimir.
Which meant he was stuck with his. “Josh.”
She had a strong handshake, and softer hands than he expected, which was not saying much. Her calluses were right for guitar and handgun. “Pleased to meet you. Shall we?”
“Let’s.”
• • •
Lightbulbs burned in the embassy parapet. Gabe sat in his chair, in the corner, and watched Edith work. She had turned her chair at an angle to the desk, so she could keep him in view even with a document in her lap. The gun lay on the table, beside her manicured hand and the mug of tea. She had not spoken in at least an hour.
“I could get some coffee,” Gabe said.
She did not answer.
“I think there are doughnuts left in the bag I brought—”
“I threw them out,” she said, “after work. We don’t want ants.”
She turned a page.
“Well, I’ll—” he tried to stand.
Her hand drifted to the gun. “Sit down, please.”
He sat.
Gabe crossed his legs. He didn’t realize it at first, but he’d crossed them the same way Edith did: knee to knee. He relaxed, changed position, ankle over knee instead. Dry air insinuated through floor exchanges. Bright lights made the world outside the window black.
He was fucked.
She was a Flame agent. Had to be. Someone had sent her, same as Dom. Yes, she’d seemed sincere in her apartment. But then, if she’d shot him in her room, that would have been an investigation. So much easier to get him cashiered—he’d left himself wide open. She’d accuse him of misusing resources, that would be easy enough, get him reassigned, and whatever Flame muckety-muck sent her would send his replacement, and then the Flame would own both sides of the game in Prague, which meant, probably, game over for the world.
And even if she played it slow and didn’t try to use this against him now, she could just say, there’s nothing here, and send the files back, and so much for Tanya’s hope of tracing new arrivals from the Flame.
But if she didn’t find anything—that wouldn’t prove she was a Flame agent, because one way or the other she wasn’t letting him get his hands on those files, and there might not be anything in there to—
She was glaring at him, flat and unimpressed, over a file she held out between them. She tapped a number with the eraser end of her pencil. “I said,” she repeated, “does this mean anything to you?”
Gabe reeled. He read the dot matrix heading: phone records, Dom’s. “Um. It’s a phone number?”
“It’s the number of a pay phone in Ankara.”
“You know pay phone numbers in Ankara.”
Her stare, roughly translated into English, read: Try to catch the fuck up, darling. She grabbed a second piece of paper, from the entrance permit file that had started this whole evening’s nonsense.
“To be specific,” she continued, “it’s a pay phone number a few blocks from the registered home address of this individual.”
Most of the details—birthday, purpose of visit, passport number—sailed right past Gabe, but the name hooked him, and the face, for all the grainy Xerox, lit his nightmare bonfires: in a dark dank room in Egypt, knife raised. The face he’d seen himself. The name, he’d learned from Jordan.
Terzian.
His hitchhiker stirred.
“Mean-looking son of a gun,” Gabe said, and hoped Edith was too caught up in her own triumph to catch whatever he’d let slip.
“A mean-looking son of a gun,” Edith said, “who arrived in Prague two days ago. And who told the border guards where he planned to stay while he was in the country.”
“People lie on those things all the time.”
“But it is more of a lead than we’ve found in two days’ work.” She flicked on the safety, and stowed the gun in her purse. “Go ahead. You can drive.”
5.
In Gabe’s defense, the hotel was already on fire when they arrived.
Terzian’s address belonged to the kind of ratty guesthouse Gabe had seen entirely too much of in his travels, the sort of place any half-decent market economy would have put out of its misery decades ago, remaining in business only by virtue of payoffs and kickbacks to the responsible authorities. The fire, if nobody stopped it soon, would do what the market hadn’t. Gabe really didn’t care what Marx would have thought about that. He parked the car, jumped out, and ran through the first rubberneckers into the building, with Edith chasing after.
They’d arrived even before the engines. The fire seemed to have just started, and it was burning from the roof down. He had a guess where Terzian’s room would be, but, screw it, he checked the desk ledger anyway—no clerks to stand in his way now. “Fourth floor,” he shouted to Edith, who’d followed him into the dingy lobby. Not bad. Two floors down from the roof—maybe the fire hadn’t reached it yet. He fought through the flow of people from the stairwell, elbowed past panicked apparatchiks and tired men, seeking Terzian in their faces, finding nothing, but at least breaking a path for Edith.
Every good instinct his body possessed fought him as he approached the heat. He kept his head down. The stairwell wasn’t burning, yet. Yes. Good. That made all the difference, that made this course of action okay—that the stairwell wasn’t burning yet.
The crowds thinned out as they climbed, and by the time they reached the fourth floor, everyone who could had already left. He burst into the hall, and found he needn’t have checked the ledger. Someone had already broken Terzian’s door off the hinges.
He ran through, into an inferno.
There had been no smoke, no heat, but suddenly he was aflame. Fire caught his trousers, his coat, his hair. He screamed, doubled over, clapped his hands to his face—
His hitchhiker, the elemental half-stuck within him, turned. And the pain stopped.
Flames licked the room around him, blazed from his clothing and from the carpet, but he stood there unharmed—his elemental, keeping him safe. Which it wouldn’t do from normal fire. So. Magic.
Someone, something had wrecked Terzian’s room. Everything that wasn’t shadows and flame was splinters and dust: paper turned to ash, furniture shattered, even the bed tossed aside. Sigils burned on the walls and floor, wards and magic nonsense blackening wallpaper. And there, near the window, stood a figure wreathed in green flame.
It wasn’t Terzian. Gabe remembered the Flame cultist as tall and reedy, skin slack on his frame, as if the furnace that powered his eyes had melted away the rest of him. The figure he saw through the flame was little more than an unfinished silhouette, strong and stocky, a blur of power beside a broken window.
He stared into the shadow’s eyes—he thought they were eyes—and his heart broke with the weight of a feeling that both was, and was not, recognition.
Then he heard a scream, and remembered Edith.
She’d been mere steps behind him—and she didn’t have an elemental to keep her safe.
He turned from the shadow as it slipped out the window into the night.
He tackled Edith back out into the hall, pressed her to the carpet with his body. The flames around her vanished—after she crossed the threshold? After he touched her? She rolled onto her side, and coughed. Her sweater stank faintly of burnt hair, and her skin shimmered red. But she’d been in the heat for a second, at most. She would be okay. He hoped.
Calculations still ran, always ran, in the back of
his mind: The room hadn’t been busted up like it would have been if there had been a fight. So the fire—maybe that was a trap? If so, triggered by who? The shadow? Didn’t matter. If Edith were Flame, she would have recognized the magic.
In this moment, crouched over her, he hated the part of himself that thought that way. He glanced back into the fire, but the window was broken, and the shadow was gone.
“What—” Edith coughed again. “What was that?”
“It’s fine,” he said. “Can you walk?”
“I believe so.” She held out her hand, and he helped her to her feet. “But I rather think we should run, don’t you?”
• • •
The ambassador’s wife answered Tanya’s knock in a patterned silk robe, with her hair up. Even in such relative undress, Zerena Pulnoc still made Tanya feel—wrong-footed, that was the way of it. Often, facing Zerena, she felt under-everything: dressed, educated, polished. Now, standing on the woman’s doorstep, wearing her best skirt and blouse and boots and lipstick, armor she’d chosen piece by piece for the encounter, she felt like a schoolgirl still in uniform.
“I,” she said, and lost her train of thought. Her hands found each other in front of her skirt. She’d told Nadia she could handle this. She could.
Zerena waited in the crack in the door. Tanya ought to have been able to see past her, into the residence itself, but some combination of the bright front porch lights and Zerena’s pale glow made the woman seem an angel guarding the abyss.
Zerena waited, and Tanya realized she had not finished her sentence.
She tried again. “I’ve been thinking about what you said.”
“Have you?” Zerena made it sound like nothing: as if she’d offered Tanya a passing suggestion about how to wear her hair, or recommended a restaurant.
Complicating Factors Page 4