Necessary Evil (Milkweed Triptych) (5 page)

And it was much the same on the other side. As long as anything of von Westarp or the Götterelektrongruppe survived, people would seek to re-create that work. And Britain wasn’t safe as long as that were the case.

I’d read the operational records; I knew how the doctor’s program had begun. I knew about the orphanage and the mass graves. I’d come from a future where Whitehall had justified turning children into warlocks; in a way, it wasn’t so different from what von Westarp had done to his early test subjects. So it didn’t matter whether the research rested in German hands, or Soviet, or British. It all had to go. The farm, the batteries, the research, the Tarragona filmstrip … All of it. Which meant that on top of everything
else,
I had to find a way to wipe the doctor’s “children” from the face of the earth.

One of whom, it should be noted, could read the future.

But I couldn’t hope to deal with either problem, Milkweed or the Reichsbehörde, from jail. They’d ship me off to an internment camp on the Isle of Man. It’s where they stuck the Germans and Italians who’d had the misfortune of living in the United Kingdom when the war started. British nationals of questionable political leanings, too. By the time I got out of there, it would be far too late.

And just to top it all off, the nausea had returned.

I tapped my head against the window glass.

Shit. Shit. Shit.

How could I have been so careless? The cock-up that got me in bad with the coppers was one for the record books. Thank the Lord the old man—my mentor, John Stephenson—hadn’t been there to see it. Just before he started the negotiation that sent me back to 1940, Will had tossed his billfold to me. He’d meant for me to take the cash, and I’d accepted, because there hadn’t been any time to prepare. I returned to 1940 with nothing but the clothes on my back and the contents of my pockets when the Eidolons were moments away from erasing us. It was a good-faith gesture, a damn thoughtful thing to do in the face of such horrors. Thoughtful enough that it caused me a twinge of shame for how I’d treated Will. I had shunned him for decades, but in the end he was the noble one.

But it was also a futile gesture. And I would have seen that immediately if I hadn’t been scared shitless and reeling from Gretel’s revelations at the same time.

Cash? How many times had our currency changed between 1940 and 1963? We had a new
monarch,
for Christ’s sake. I wondered if the coppers had noticed that yet. There probably wasn’t a single piece of paper in Will’s billfold that would stand up to scrutiny in 1940. Licenses wouldn’t look like that for another ten or fifteen years.

Obvious now. But things had been so desperate.

It was hard for me to believe that there had been a time when tradecraft came naturally to me. I’d been rather good at it. You might say I’d been raised for that life. But I’d been out of the game for more than twenty years when Gretel and her brother emerged from behind the Iron Curtain. By that point I’d spent more years as a gardener than as a spy, and it showed.

When I had been a younger man, this kind of oversight would have been unthinkable to me. In fact, back then, I—

The idea I’d tucked away came surging back. I had the first inkling of a plan. But it was disturbing as hell. And I was nauseated enough.

The coppers took me to Cannon Row. I’d spent some time in various lockups during the years since my retirement from Milkweed, usually for drunkenness and a bit of brawling here and there. So I knew most of the stations by name.

They opted to toss me in the clink overnight rather than try to sort things out then and there. They held on to Will’s billfold, and emptied my pockets. All they got for their trouble was my house key. I’d long ago made it a habit not to carry identification on me when engaged in work for SIS, and that had carried over to Milkweed.

But Leslie Pembroke’s Milkweed, the Milkweed of the 1960s, was a slapdash affair. Somebody had made a bloody great oversight letting Will keep his billfold after his death had been so widely publicized. The fight with the Soviet agent had burned down half the crescent where Will’s house had been. Milkweed had covered by spreading information about a ruptured gas main. They ought to have taken his ID when Will read his own obituaries in the papers.

Francis brought the key and billfold to the desk sergeant. “Public indecency. And a possible burglary,” he said, nodding in my direction as his partner led me around the corner and into one of the two empty cells. It didn’t differ significantly from others I’d known: cot, toilet, sink, and a single foot-square window set high in the bricks. This, like every other window in Britain, was covered with a blackout curtain.

The cell door clanged shut behind me, hard enough to rattle the springs on the cot. I listened for the lock; it snapped into place, a sharp metallic sound beneath the jangling of the copper’s keys. I lay on the cot and began to shiver. The blanket smelled unpleasantly of sweat and cigarettes, which tweaked the nausea. So did the pillow stains, which gave off the odor of Brilliantine. I wrapped the blanket around myself, but it did nothing to keep the trembling at bay.

They’d contact Will about his missing billfold. Meaning that soon enough they’d realize he was Lord William, which would only worsen things for me. How would Will react when the coppers told him they had his billfold? And how would the coppers react when he told them he was missing no such thing, and they took a closer look at its contents? Would Will recognize me? I shook my head, then winced when the coarse bristles of my beard snagged the blanket. The Will of this time knew a clean-shaven Marsh. But I had grown a beard to help hide the burns I’d received during an unsuccessful attempt to capture a Soviet wetwork specialist. The agent in question had been the product of Arzamas-16: the secret research city where the Soviets had reverse-engineered, reproduced, and improved upon Doctor von Westarp’s achievements. Hence the fire that scorched me. Even if Will saw past the beard, the scars would prevent him from seeing Raybould Marsh’s face.

The scars from that fight weren’t only skin deep. Superheated air had blistered my throat, charred my vocal chords. I sounded nothing like my younger self.

Then it hit me. I knew, in a sudden flash of insight, exactly how Will would perceive me.

I looked and sounded like an old warlock.

This was a perfect opportunity. I knew exactly what to do. And for the first time since my arrival, I felt a twinge of hope. Perhaps undermining Milkweed wouldn’t be as difficult as I’d feared. Even now Will was toying with the prospect of calling on the others to join Milkweed. I could intervene before that happened. Prevent Will from ever recruiting the warlocks in the first place.

I knew, based on conversations with Will in the original history, in the aftermath of our attempt to show Gretel to the Eidolons, that he suffered misgivings about his ability to handle further negotiations. So did we both after the mutilation those demons forced me to perpetrate against my friend. But Will knew we needed help. And he also knew there were other warlocks scattered throughout the country. Men like his grandfather. Men, I hoped, like me.

I’d tell Will the truth, of a sort: that I knew about Milkweed, and I knew what he was planning to do. I’d demand that I be the one to contact the other warlocks. After all, he was at best a novice, but I fit the role of an experienced elder. And after he’d pieced together the relevant information from his grandfather’s journals (he’d done it once before, after all) he’d give me the whereabouts of the others. Speaking Enochian was out of the question, of course, but through my time in Milkweed I’d learned enough about the warlocks to pass as one of them. I’d have to hide my palms from Will, otherwise he might notice they weren’t spiderwebbed with fine, white cuts like his own. But that was easy.

I would use Will as a means of tracking down Britain’s warlocks. Just as the Soviets had done in the early ’60s.

But I wouldn’t kill them. Not right away. I’d keep them in reserve in case the war turned desperate again. I refused to throw Britain to the wolves.

And if it did become necessary to muster the warlocks, I’d retain one advantage. Will would be my eyes and ears inside the coven. I would turn him into a double agent.

It was stunning, the magnitude of my hypocrisy. I came from a future where Will was an unrepentant traitor to the country. Driven by grief and guilt over the things he’d done during the war, he had passed information about Milkweed’s warlocks to the enemies of Britain. Enemies who systematically murdered the old men. I’d wanted to see Will’s neck stretched for his collusion with the Soviets. But now here I was, deliberately planning to make him my own creature.

There was another option: I could tell him the truth. The whole truth. Tell him what the future held in store for us. Warn him about the blood prices, his morphine addiction. It was a seductive thought, having one true friend in 1940. A true ally. But I feared Will would make a hash of things. The man was incapable of discretion. And he’d be wary, given the strange things he’d witnessed on the Tarragona filmstrip. He’d go to Stephenson with this. And, worse yet, the younger version of me. And that pair would waste invaluable time chiseling into the bedrock of my story. Events could very well pass the tipping point by the time they reluctantly decided to take me at my word.

No. It was easier, and faster, to present myself to Will as something he was already prepared to accept.

I wasn’t proud of how I intended to use Will. But it was a necessary evil for the sake of the greater good. Or so I told myself. It didn’t lessen the disgust at what I saw myself becoming. Treating people like game pieces, evaluating them as means to an end? I was already thinking like Gretel.

The passage of time and my experiences in the future had given me an unforeseen advantage. I knew Will better than he knew himself. But there was one man whom I knew better than anybody. And if this was going to work, I’d have to turn him, too.

*

Everything relied on removing the threat posed by the Reichsbehörde. All the strategizing in the world would be pointless if I couldn’t find a way to do that. The conclusion was despicable, but unavoidable.

I needed Gretel’s help.

Acid clawed its way up my throat. I rolled off the cot, still tangled in the blanket, and kneeled on the slate floor while violent spasms ejected my stomach’s contents into the toilet. When it was over, I lacked the strength to pull myself back on the cot. I stayed on the floor.

“You well?”

I looked up. Another copper had poked his head in. He stared at me, frowning.

I scraped the back of my hand across my mouth. “Told you I was ill,” I croaked.

“You need a doctor?”

I shook my head. He withdrew, looking unconvinced.

Gretel. The mere thought of working alongside that raven-haired demon made me violently ill. How would I ever look Liv in the eyes—or
myself,
for Christ’s sake—knowing full well that I’d willingly allied myself with the woman who’d killed our daughter? How would I ever look Agnes in the eyes? How could I work alongside Gretel without succumbing to the urge to murder her? Without despising myself?

It was vile. Another necessary evil.

As much as I was loath to admit it, I needed access to Gretel’s power. I needed her knowledge of the future. Without it, this entire venture was doomed.

Gretel knew the score as well as I did. Better. She would cooperate as long as our interests were aligned. As to what would happen later …

*

A nimbus of gray light limned the bricks at the edges of the blackout curtain. A British sunrise, softened into a dull haze as the sun burned through a layer of rain clouds. I’d have known it anywhere.

The evidence of sunrise caught me by surprise. I hadn’t expected to sleep. But I had, and now the night’s jumble of fever dreams evaporated like storm clouds before the rising sun. I remembered little of it, except that John and his colorless eyes had figured heavily. Once again, my ears rang with the screams of a dying world.

Cold, dried sweat had stiffened my clothes and leeched the twin odors of tobacco and hair cream from the bedding into my hair. This roused the last traces of nausea still lingering dormant in my gut. My beard itched where the bristles edged the furrow of scar tissue along my jaw. I moved slowly, untangling myself from the blanket with careful deliberation. At least the throbbing behind my temples had retreated.

I don’t know how long I lay there, lost in thoughts about the Reichsbehörde, before a copper came by. I didn’t recognize him; I reckoned Francis and his partner had gone off shift. He slid a tray through a slot in the door. It held a plate of toast and a cup. I recognized the scent of weak tea steeped from the second or third use of the leaves. It was a common practice during the war.

“Thought I heard you moving about,” he said.

I took the tray. “How much longer?”

“Depends on what Lord William says when he gets here.”

13 May 1940

Westminster, London, England

Cannon Row wasn’t a five-minute walk from the Admiralty building, just a bit past Downing Street. Will strode through the Admiralty screen onto Whitehall, nodding to the marine sentries who manned the sandbag revetments. A handful of heavy raindrops pattered against his bowler. The leaden sky threatened to unleash another cold drizzle, as it had been doing on and off all day long.

He picked up his pace. He hadn’t bothered with an umbrella; it was too much trouble with only one good hand. The Westminster Palace clock tower loomed over the Thames when Will turned the corner to Bridge Street. It showed a few minutes to three. He’d been absorbed in poring over his grandfather’s lexicon, trying to make sense of the Eidolons’ name for Marsh, when the strange message from the Metropolitan Police finally reached him.

Will checked his pocket again. No, he hadn’t lost his billfold. What a queer mix-up.

The Cannon Row police station huddled beside New Scotland Yard, a nineteenth-century building that hulked over the Victoria Embankment. To Will’s mind, it looked like nothing so much as a Victorian Gothic confection, a five-story layer cake of red brick and white limestone. Will inadvertently passed the station entrance, walking instead to where the Yard building itself fronted the embankment with two large iron gates. He had to get directions from a constable on duty at the gates. The clock tower was just chiming the hour when he finally managed the station proper.