Necessary Evil (Milkweed Triptych) (47 page)

But the creation of a new time line had overwhelmed her precognition with the psychic equivalent of radio hash jamming a navigation beacon. She hadn’t intended the batteries to find use in North Africa. Reinhardt and Klaus were supposed to be dead, not deployed with the Afrika Korps.

I knew how things would progress. I felt like Gretel.

Even now, my younger self was formulating the idea of mounting a surprise attack via the Eidolons. Just as I’d had the same idea, long long ago, to send teams to the farm. No amount of reasoning would dissuade Raybould Marsh from going on the raid. The mule-headed prig would insist on seeing things through to the end. Nothing short of a crippling injury would stop him.

Which, of course, I would deliver. Because if he went and the raid went pear-shaped all over again, the Eidolons would demand the soul of his next child in exchange for rescue. Thereby consigning Liv and he to life with a soulless monstrosity. It would destroy them. And, eventually, the world.

Future echoes.
Will’s phrase was quite apt.

But none of this brought me any closer to destroying the warlocks. It brought to a high boil the anxiety I’d wrestled with for months on end. So I decided to do what I always did when my frustration became unbearable. Taunting Gretel never failed to lift my spirits.

She huddled in the corner, as she did most days, surrounded by little stacks of coins. Uneven strands of greasy hair hid her eyes. She’d taken to chewing on it. Eddies of soot licked at my footsteps when I approached her. Our current accommodations had become available after the Fire Watch had failed to keep Jerry incendiaries from claiming a good portion of the warehouse. The building would have to be demolished one day, if the war ever let up.

Like a monk reciting the rosary, she murmured to herself for hours on end. The steady drone had put a rasp into her throaty voice.

“… shecan’tbealiveshecan’tbealiveshecan’tbe…”

On and on it went. She was too deep in her thoughts to notice me, so I kicked a stack. Ha’pennies went bounding and clicking across the warehouse floor. That got her attention. She looked up at me through a fringe of hair. Her lips still moved, but at least she shut up.

“Thought you might want some good news,” I said. The words felt like rose petals on my lips. “Your darling brother Klaus is alive and well.”

A shimmer in her red eyes joined the tremble of her lips and chin. Her face contorted, and for a moment I thought she might start weeping again. I particularly enjoyed it when she did.

Gretel said, “Why must you…” She inhaled sharply. Her eyes widened. “Duck!”

I hit the floor, arms crossed over my head.

Nothing happened.

I counted sixty beats of my palpitating heart before climbing to my feet. Gretel convulsed with laughter.

It wasn’t the gentle laughter of the faintly amused, nor was it the self-assured and carefully calibrated gaiety of times past. It came out of her in a wild confusion between gulping breaths, a stunted hybrid of joy and despair. She shook with hysterical glee and chest-heaving sobs.

I stood. “Very funny,” I said.
Evil bitch.

“See? You still trust me. We have a connection.”

Something fell out of my pocket as I brushed away the worst of the soot. I plucked a bloody rag from the floor. I’d been carrying it for months, clutching it like a talisman while I climbed the walls with frustration for my inability to access the warlocks.

My plan for the Twins had been so simple. But everything had gone straight out the window with Will’s capture. I didn’t have a warlock ally to negotiate the Twins’ reunion. And all the surviving warlocks were hidden away in their citadel, safe and snug and slowly destroying the world. I couldn’t get near—

And then I had it.

I had the solution.

The heavens didn’t crack apart. Epiphany didn’t come to me on the wings of angels blasting golden trumpets. But it damn well should have.

If I timed things right, I could solve virtually all of my problems and wrap up the mission that had sent me twenty-three years into the past with just a few hours’ work.

It was so goddamned obvious.

Joy rose within me, like a golden bubble escaping stygian depths. It melted the despair that had settled on my soul like a sheen of hoarfrost. My fingers tingled.

I joined Gretel in her laughter. A pair of cackling maniacs, us.

*

Took quite a while to fall asleep that night. Epiphanies are like that, I suppose.

I’d been dreaming of Liv when something jerked me into consciousness. Her smell, her laugh, the tickle of her hair across my chest, it all evaporated, leaving me disoriented and aroused. In spite of the river-scented breezes that gusted through the scars of bomb and fire damage, summer heat left the warehouse stuffy and close. I slept without a shirt or a blanket. But when I tried to sit up, something held me back.

Gretel’s arm. Draped across my stomach. Her leg, across my knees. Her wires across my chest. The odor of her unwashed hair in my nose.

She’d wormed into my cot and pressed her naked body against me. Moonlight shone on the curve of an olive-colored thigh. A tangle of ravenblack hair concealed the swell of a breast. Her skin was cool to the touch, but sweat-soaked canvas squelched beneath the small of my back.

Her skin glided across mine where our bodies touched. She was smooth and soft and slick. And so much younger than me.

It had been so long since I’d lain beside a naked woman. An eternity had passed since I stopped thinking of Gretel as human. But she was, and in her body’s prime. I could smell her arousal.

“We have a connection,” she whispered.

Her breath stirred the hairs on my neck. Her fingers left a trail of gooseflesh down my stomach. My body betrayed me. I cursed my traitorous flesh. How long had it been since a woman touched me?

“Olivia isn’t your wife,” said Gretel. The tickle of her lips against my earlobe sent unwelcome tremors down my spine. I involuntarily arched my back. Her breast rubbed against my shoulder. Her fingers plucked at my trousers.

She shifted against me, laid her other hand across my open mouth when I tried to speak. Her fingers tasted of a thousand coin tosses. They were moist. I spat out the sour tang of her own excitement.

Gretel straddled me. I belted her.

She toppled from the cot with enough force to rattle the floorboards. I jumped to my feet and gave her a barefooted kick for good measure. My heel thudded against her sternum, knocking her down again.

“You’re sicker than I ever thought possible. I’d sooner bed the Devil herself than you.” I knelt, and grabbed her by the throat. “Never touch me again.”

“Olivia will never touch you as I do,” she croaked.

“She’s lost to me because of you!”

With fistfuls of hair and wire, I dragged her across the warehouse and flung her into the corner. I hoped the floorboards riddled her arse with splinters. Though nothing could have been rough enough to scour away the disgust I felt at my own body’s betrayal.

*

Gretel kept her hands and thoughts to herself the next morning. I packed up my few belongings and prepared to move us out. We went west, across the river. There I kept an eye on St. James’, and waited for history to repeat itself.

sixteen

2–3 July 1941

Westminster, London, England

Halfaya Pass, Egypt

The promise of sunrise coaxed the songbirds of St. James’ into a serenade for Marsh. The blackout retreated to the western reaches of the city like a fugitive cutpurse seeking refuge in grim alleyways, while the eastern sky faded from black to wet wool gray to a chalky blue like the veins beneath Liv’s skin.

He’d left Walworth in the middle of the night, taking care not to wake Liv as he slipped out of bed. If he could manage it, he’d catch a nap in the Admiralty later. But for now, the prospect of finally seeing an end to the work that had begun with Krasnopolsky made sleep impossible. So did the collywobbles that came from knowing there were a dozen ways for the plan to go wrong.

Once this was over—well and truly over—he could look into a change of profession. Something that didn’t take him away from home for six months at a time. Something that didn’t involve lightless dungeons. Something that didn’t require lying to Liv.

Marsh recited a two-part password to a pair of sentries. The larger one, a blotchy-faced fellow a thumb under six foot tall, opened the gate for Marsh. This was the only portal through the ten-foot privacy fence, barricades, and coils of concertina wire that had enveloped a good portion of St. James’. A raven eyed Marsh’s passage through the checkpoint. It fluttered away with the whoosh of wide black wings when the gate banged shut.

Pain flared in his knee. He stumbled. Marsh put his back to a mulberry tree and massaged the razor-edged ache. The pain was rarely this acute. Not even during physical training for the Navy, and later at Fort Monckton.

Not now,
he prayed.
Just one more day. Then I’ll happily live out my days as Liv’s dot-and-carry-one.

Wispy ankle-high mist clung to the dewy grass. It swirled around Marsh’s legs and sloshed across the walkways trodden into the grass between the tents. The mist was thickest over the lake. But it was shot through with the first light of day, so it dissipated quickly. In its place, a humid scent arose from the lake. Warm day ahead.

Not as warm as a summer day in Egypt. And yet warmer than the desert night, where Marsh’s plan would unfold.

Marsh scratched at the sticking plaster affixed to his hand. Yesterday, the warlocks had taken a few drops of blood from him and all the others slated to go on the mission. Stephenson had made certain they didn’t prick fingers or cut palms, anything that might interfere with the use of a weapon. So now Marsh had a nick on the back of his left hand. It itched.

Mud squelched beneath his boots. The ground near the tents had been churned up by frantic activity as Milkweed turned the park into a staging ground. Marsh lifted a tent flap and ducked inside. One of the sniper teams would receive its final briefing here. In one corner of the tent stood a plaster mannequin. It wore a mock-up of a Reichsbehörde battery harness. A second battery model, sculpted from wood and Bakelite, sat on the table. They looked sufficiently close to the real thing that they’d be indistinguishable from a distance. And that was the only thing that mattered. The mock-ups had been used for training the snipers. Anybody wearing a battery was a prime target.

Four photographs hung on the blackboard: the same set that had come to Stephenson via special courier. Arrows in several colors of chalk indicated various tents in the Afrika Korps encampment, including most prominently the one Milkweed’s analysts believed to contain the battery stores.
KLAUS
had been written in block letters beneath the blurry photo of the man with the eighty-eight. A terse summary of his known characteristics followed, drawn heavily from Marsh’s recollections. A similar list accompanied Reinhardt’s photograph.

Marsh went back outside and checked one of the Nissen huts closer to the lake. Milkweed had built three such huts. One team would depart from each. The huts were arranged in St. James’ Park in a very precise geographic relationship. If the warlocks did their jobs correctly, the distribution would be retained when the teams and their equipment arrived in Egypt. And if Milkweed’s read of the recon photos was accurate, it meant they’d place their teams at strategic locations within the maze of ravines that formed Halfaya Pass.

The huts were necessary for concealing the Dingos: fast four-wheel-drive armored recon vehicles. The Dingos were necessary for two reasons:

First, the warlocks hedged quite a bit when Stephenson pressed them on how accurately they’d be able to land the strike teams. A bit of driving might be necessary, which unfortunately meant reducing their element of surprise.

Second, Lorimer’s gadgets—he called them “pixies”—were too large to be carried by hand. Somebody had cleaned out the Milkweed vault around the time of Gretel’s escape (Marsh reckoned he knew the culprit), meaning Lorimer hadn’t had enough time to study Gretel’s battery to back out an accurate circuit model. Thus, the pixies compensated for a lack of finesse with what the Scot called “real nadger-crushing power.” He claimed that more portable versions were possible, but such would have required tuning the inner workings of the pixies specifically to details of the Reichsbehörde battery design.

This Nissen hut also contained a workbench, sledgehammer, chisel, and a stone dredged from the lake. A lacquered box alongside the stone contained dozens of bloodstained handkerchiefs.

*

The echo of boot steps reverberated through the corridor and into Will’s cell, rousing him from a nap. Napping was the centerpiece of his life in the citadel. He spent his days napping, reading, and quietly going mad.

It sounded as though an entire phalanx of marines had come down. A surge of panic launched him to his feet. He coughed, twice, the second time bringing up something hot and bitter. Why would Stephenson send an entire squad of marines to Will’s cell? Had the old man overcome his reluctance to execute the brother of a Peer?

Will stood at the door. He watched through the tiny square of wire-reinforced glass. But the squad of marines tromped past in pairs. They formed a bodyguard troop around the remaining warlocks: a pair of marines, then Grafton and White, four more marines, followed by Webber and Hargreaves, and two more marines to round out the bunch. Four men to guard each pair of warlocks.

They were only allowed to leave the citadel when it came time to pay another blood price. Even then only two warlocks were permitted outside at any time. And always in the presence of bodyguards.

But now the lot were moving out. That meant one thing: a very large blood price. Larger than two men could pay on their own. It meant that tonight they would put in motion Marsh the Younger’s plan for ambushing and eradicating the last vestiges of the Götterelektrongruppe.