The Coldest War (17 page)

One file stood out from the others by virtue of its size. The accompanying photograph showed a man considerably younger than the one whom Marsh had recently seen on television. The man in the photo had no wrinkles, no bags beneath his eyes. Will Beauclerk had gone underground before the official end of the war; Milkweed agents had tracked his movements through a recurring sequence of dosshouses and hospitals over the course of several years. Will had been a drunkard and a morphine addict when the old man kicked him out of Milkweed. Leaving the service hastened his decline.

Marsh paused. He'd known that Will had been in a bad way. But this … It was a miracle the man hadn't killed himself during that time.

The surge of regret caught Marsh unaware. Will had been a close friend. Marsh hadn't realized, until now, how much he missed that friendship. How lonely and isolated the wreckage of his marriage had left him. What kind of man had he become, that he didn't care if an assassin gutted his former friend? The fight with Liv, and his failure to defuse it, had saddled him with a nostalgic melancholy.

The file documented that somehow, miraculously, a sober Will emerged from his long, slow suicide with a wife at his side. The Lady Gwendolyn Wellesley, eldest daughter to the Earl of Portland, had met Will while working as a nurse. The file contained a photo of Gwendolyn. Marsh felt a stab of resentment; he wondered how well she might have preserved her looks into late middle age if she had been taking care of John for all that time, rather than Will. At least Will could crap by himself. Presumably.

Since then, Will had been something of a public figure. Keeping tabs on him was trivial. It wouldn't take much investigative work to know if the brother of the Duke of Aelred had been killed. Reading the newspaper would suffice.

The sun had fallen into evening, sending long shadows across the silent parade ground, when Marsh noticed the mail. A single envelope, filled with something stiff, addressed to Raybould Marsh care of the Admiralty. The handwriting was unfamiliar.

Very few people knew Marsh could be found here. Of those who did, all but two could speak with him at leisure. No need for strange packages.

He started to tear the envelope open with his thumb, as he did with mail at home, but stopped himself. The envelope had been postmarked. Rather than risk tearing or smudging the mark, he fished out his pocketknife and slit the narrow end of the envelope. Marsh dumped the contents onto his desk. A set of color photographs tumbled out.

They formed a sequence of images, shot from a distance at a low angle, of two men sitting on a bench. The images were slightly blurry and somewhat dark. Marsh found himself wishing he had Stephenson's jeweler's loupe, which the old man had kept from his days analyzing aerial photographs during the First World War. A blurred fringe of green bordered some of the photos, as though they had been shot through a hedge. The final photograph in the batch showed the front page of the
Times,
and the date. The photos had been taken three days earlier.

Marsh turned his attention back to the men. After a few more seconds of study, he knew what these photos were meant to tell him.

“Bugger me,” he said.

The man on the left was Will Beauclerk. The man on the right—caught in one of the photos accepting an envelope from Will—Marsh had never seen before. But he didn't need the second man's identity to know how the Soviets had tracked down Milkweed's original warlocks. Will Beauclerk had sold them out.

He felt a fool. Will didn't deserve his concern.

“You son of a bitch.”

Pembroke had been right all along: the leaked information was coming out of Milkweed through an insider, not because they'd been compromised by an outsider.

A dozen thoughts raced through Marsh's runaway mind, each competing for a moment of attention with a flash of insight before he landed on the next conclusion. It all fell together.

Will didn't need Milkweed's files to find the warlocks; those files existed because of Will's effort to find those men in the first place. And the Soviets hadn't done anything about the warlock children, because Will didn't know about them. How could he? He'd been drummed out of Milkweed long ago. His information was out of date.

“You bastard, Will. You unbelievable bastard.”

Marsh wanted to scream with rage and weep with envy.

He ached with the need to punish Gretel. He'd lost his own
daughter
to her machinations. Agnes's death had become an unhealed wound, a gangrenous cyst on his marriage. It had weakened the love between Liv and Marsh, poisoned it, to the point where the next insult—their son, John—killed it completely.

But he couldn't exact revenge on his enemy. She was clairvoyant. Untouchable. And that made his a solitary crusade. Even Stephenson had brushed off Marsh's warnings when he returned from Germany with incontrovertible evidence that the Soviets had taken her. Because the war had severely weakened Britain, and Whitehall couldn't risk upsetting its fragile alliance with the USSR. Nobody—not the old man, not Milkweed, not SIS—had lifted a finger to put things right for Marsh.

But later, when Will suddenly decided to have it out with his former colleagues, he had nothing less than the entire KGB jumping to his aid.

It wasn't fair.

Why, Will? Money? Ideology? A bit of both?

A grudge?

The Soviets had found a way to turn him. It probably wasn't difficult. They might have started when Will was a raving, drug-addled lunatic. That's when he was the most vulnerable; Marsh made a mental note to get the SIS lamplighters digging into Gwendolyn Wellesley's past. Family history. Political inclinations. Perhaps they'd find a den of Bolshies.

And, of course, Will's brother was a prominent pro-Soviet figure in the House of Lords. Will oversaw the daily operations of Aubrey's NGO. Meaning the Soviets had plenty of access to the younger Beauclerk.

Everything fit. Marsh knew that when Milkweed dug deeper, it would find more evidence damning Will. Knew it in his gut. He could save a lot of work, and perhaps lives, if he simply confronted the man.

New questions presented themselves: Who was the man photographed with Will? Who took these photographs? Gretel herself? But then why did she go to such elaborate lengths to mail him the photos?

Marsh locked the photographs in his desk. The corridors were empty and silent; most folks had gone home for the evening. But Marsh found Pethick locking up his office, clearly on his way out for the evening. He had a brown mackintosh slung over one arm, and an umbrella threaded through the handle of his briefcase. With his black suit and black umbrella, he looked more like a banker than spy. And that spoke volumes about the current state of Milkweed.

“Good evening,” said Pethick. “And he's working late already. Not one to waste time, is he?”

Marsh waved the empty envelope at him. “Where did this come from?”

Pethick shrugged. “The post, I presume.”

“How did it get on my desk? Who put it there?”

Pethick studied the envelope for a moment. “We do have regular post service here, you know. And I note this is addressed to you. I'd say that solves it.”

“I want you to see something,” said Marsh. Pethick followed him back to his office.

When Marsh laid out the photographs for him, Pethick let out a long, low whistle. He scanned them slowly, his gaze sweeping forward and back across the photos.

Marsh asked, “Do you recognize these men?”

Pethick said, “Yes.”

“The man on the left is Will Beauclerk. The other?”

“I believe that is Yevgeny Cherkashin. Cultural attaché at the Soviet embassy here in London.” Pethick paused to study the date in the
Times
photo. He looked at Marsh. “But in SIS circles, he's known for running the Lincolnshire Poacher network. A handful of Soviet agents spread throughout the United Kingdom.”

“Lincolnshire Poacher. Number station?”

Pethick nodded. “Broadcast out of Nice.”

Number stations were a simple, secure means of openly sending orders to agents working undercover in foreign countries. The sobriquet described them accurately; the typical number station broadcast consisted of a male or female voice reciting a sequence of numbers. The numbers referred to blocks of a one-time pad. As long as the only copies of the pad belonged to the sender and recipient, and as long as certain precautions were followed during the generation of the pad itself, the messages were essentially unbreakable. Most number stations broadcast at regular intervals, usually at preset times and frequencies on certain days. The Soviet empire had dozens of such stations broadcasting around the world from behind the Iron Curtain. Britain operated stations of its own.

Many number stations commenced or terminated their broadcasts with a few bars of a song or melody. Cherkashin's handlers in Moscow had evidently chosen a British folk song.

“So we know about Cherkashin's network, but we haven't rolled it up,” said Marsh. “To avoid tipping our hand?”

Pethick said, “There is that, yes. And, also, the network has fallen silent since—” Pethick scratched his chin. “—hmmm, you'd have to ask the signals chaps down in Sussex to know with certainty. Two years, perhaps?”

“Silent isn't the same as inactive.” Marsh jabbed his finger at the stack of files pertaining to the dead warlocks. “Cherkashin has been rather busy.”

17 May 1963
Croydon, London, England

The drive to the safe house had taken seemingly forever in slow-moving traffic. Klaus knew they had been moved to a place called Croydon, but beyond the name, he knew very little of the place. He and his sister had huddled near the back of the truck during the move, and what little he could see through the front windshield had been obscured by sheets of rain beneath a coal black sky.

A glimpse of the environs while hustling from the truck to the house suggested a heavily industrial, working-class neighborhood. Dingy brick row houses lined both sides of the street, crowded shoulder to shoulder like empty-eyed beggars glaring at the occupants of passing cars.

Their safe house was outwardly indistinguishable from the others on this street, with the exception of being a corner lot. A redbrick wall surrounded the rear garden. On the inside, the safe house occupied a large footprint. The interior walls separating the safe house and its neighbor had been removed, although the street-side appearance of two separate houses was strictly maintained.

The house reeked of stale cigarette smoke. It was the smell of boredom, of hiding and waiting for days on end. And in Gretel's case, playing rummy.

In addition to Klaus and Gretel, three people occupied the safe house. He gathered that one—a woman named Madeleine, whom he'd glimpsed only briefly upon arrival—lived here semi-permanently, on the other side of the house. Probably to preserve the fiction of a single-family dwelling on that side. She ran the house. The minders who had moved Klaus from the Admiralty building, Anthony and Roger, were charged with keeping an eye over the siblings until replacements arrived to relieve them in a few days. But they weren't immune to boredom. Hence the cards.

Klaus couldn't decide if Gretel was using her power. Like him, she had no battery. But she did win most hands. She responded to the other players' complaints with demure deflections about luck and skill. Klaus knew that tone of voice; she was highly amused.

Klaus didn't participate. But the afternoon's endless card game did tell him something useful. Their minders were British Intelligence, obviously, but they weren't from Milkweed. Only an idiot would knowingly play cards with a precog, even if the stakes were merely plastic chips.

“Damn. There she goes again,” said Anthony. He tossed his cards on the scuffed table, knocking the rumpled corduroy blazer from the back of his chair to the floor.

Gretel laughed, and started to protest. Roger cut her off, “Yeah, we know. It's better to have luck than skill.”

“It is, truly,” she said. “Isn't that so, brother?”

Klaus shrugged noncommittally and went back to peeking through the drapes to watch the street below. He saw nothing funny about being cooped up in a British safe house. The accommodations were better and the attitudes warmer than they had been at Arzamas, but that didn't alter the fact that he was a prisoner again. Because of Gretel.

The street saw little traffic. Sunlight glinted on the pavement alongside the road, where dwindling puddles had been left by the previous day's deluge. Klaus watched not out of expectation for anything specific, but because he knew that sooner or later another cog would slot into place, and Gretel's machinations would advance ever closer to her secret goal. He lived in a state of perpetual dread, waiting for the other shoe to drop. It was wearying, but he was loath to drop his guard.

Klaus spent three hours at the window. He saw one neighbor fail to clean up after her poodle when it crapped on the pavement, and he watched the postman zigzag his way up the street with his satchel banging against his hip. Both times he wondered if they, like he, were unwitting chips in Gretel's great game.

His stomach gurgled. Klaus set aside the vigil in favor of lunch. Madeleine stood at the kitchen counter, spreading marmalade on a piece of toast with quick, precise gestures of the knife blade. She was tall for a woman, nearly Klaus's height, with a mass of chestnut hair that cascaded over her shoulders. She looked up when he entered.

Scrape
-
scrape
-
scrape
. Aggressive competence.

“Am I allowed in here?” The words left an aftertaste of shame when they left his mouth. It was appalling, how automatically he reverted to the mind-set of a prisoner.

She raised her eyebrows, surprised or amused by the question. Age hadn't yet softened her skin, hadn't yet caused it to sag. Klaus guessed she was roughly ten years younger than he. She asked, “Why wouldn't you be?”