Necessary Evil (Milkweed Triptych) (45 page)

There is fog only fog no shimmering gossamer of unconsummated possibilities no golden threads to pluck and make the universe dance because everything is shrouded and gray it kept drawing closer closer closer but always she could see a thread a path a way forward not very far but she could see far enough to guide Raybould even though they
were caught in the kitchen
caught in the woods
caught in Kammler’s room
were caught in the doctor’s study she saw how to distract the doctor
and make the doctor shoot Raybould in the eye
the heart
the throat
and save Raybould’s life and then he kills the doctor and brother and Reinhardt and
Kammler
Heike kills Kammler
and Raybould
and Raybould kills her too and then they made it back to England
got caught in Weimar
caught in Lauterbach
executed in Frankfurt
recognized in Frankfurt
shot dead in Cologne
captured in Belgium
because she could see ahead not very far but it was enough and then the fog was supposed to envelop her and she’d be through it to the other side to a brand-new virgin universe awaiting her touch waiting for her to make the decisions that would push the universe on its proper path but the fog is endless and there is no other side and her bandages itch.

How did this happen when did this start it isn’t her fault it isn’t her fault she did everything perfectly and it worked and she tricked the Eidolons she tricked them into letting Raybould create a new time line for her where she lives and they’re together and she doesn’t cease to exist because the Eidolons hate her with such intensity and oh God what if the Eidolons are in the fog OH GOD what if they are there on the other side what if they are all around her now and what if they did this to her whatifthisistheirrevenge
ohGodohGodOHGOD
— Raybould comes in looking very angry and he is wearing a blanket and suddenly it is dark outside. She doesn’t remember screaming but he said she was screaming and maybe she was because her throat is sore and Raybould says she’s out of her bloody mind if she thinks he’s going to scrounge up a cup of hot tea to soothe her nerves she can bloody well forget it because she can fucking die screaming for all he cares but she doesn’t like tea because it means kettles and a teakettle hurt her legs and it was William’s fault for telling lies about Olivia and that was very ungrateful of him because he’s living in the time line she created even though she made it for herself she lets other people live here and they are ungrateful and they don’t even know the horror that might have been.

everything is broken because of Olivia. alive when she shouldn’t be. nothing will be right. the coins won’t behave until she fixes this the eidolons didn’t send the fog couldn’t have because they haven’t found her here no but when did it first appear she glimpsed it on the gossamer horizon on the day raybould arrived it wasn’t there and then it was there and so was he because it worked everything she planned had worked and then the fog appeared oh god

she did

no no

did this

no no no

to

herself

fifteen

24 June 1941

Milkweed Headquarters, London, England

Marsh studied the maps on the wall of Stephenson’s office while waiting for the old man to return from his meeting with the Prime Minister. It must have gone long.

The pins arrayed across the maps told the story of a secret war. Black pins marked the places in southeastern England where a corrupted rain had fallen, cloud water salted with traces of mercury. It had drizzled on the Channel, too, but of that they could do nothing except perhaps survive the war and wait for long-term consequences. Milkweed had done what it could to monitor the areas where the poison fell on farmland, in some cases even requisitioning properties and tracts of land “for the war effort.” It did the same when rumors circulated of a new Messerschmitt or Heinkel down in the countryside, its fuselage riddled with corrosion. Milkweed ran off the books; it didn’t have to give answers.

The first black pins had appeared in December, immediately after Will’s imprisonment. Milkweed’s saboteur had been caught quite literally red-handed.

There had been no black pins during January and February, when winter weather had curtailed Luftwaffe operations. The warlocks had pitched in when the raids started up again in March. Gauging the extent of their contribution was difficult. Two months free of alerts had done the RAF well.

Red pins on the map of Egypt showed places where the warlocks had attempted to exert their influence. The results here were more sporadic. The action in North Africa moved too quickly, and the local conditions were too varied, for the warlocks to devise an approach. Not that the Italians had offered much of a fight to the Western Desert Force. Africa had been a relatively reliable source of good news, until Rommel had arrived.

A smattering of blue pins dusted the Balkans. The warlocks had enjoyed more success there.

Two days earlier, the Führer had opened a new front in the east. Nobody was surprised when he turned round and stabbed Uncle Joe in the back. No pins on the Russian front yet; the situation there was too fluid.

Marsh opened the window. Dust from the window sash clung to his fingers with a damp grittiness. Warm spring rains had put the green back into St. James’, and now a light breeze wafted through the office, carrying with it the scent of victory gardens and ozone. It gave Marsh a brief respite from the smell of tobacco, for which he was grateful. He wiped his hands on his trousers.

He yawned. Another long night, entwined in hushed conversation with Liv. His long absence had scarred them both. They had to get to know each other again. He’d been back in England, back in Liv’s house, her bed, barely longer than he’d been on the Continent. Their relationship had survived, so far, but like a fractured rib, the trust and love knit back together slowly. The scar tissue was there, invisible to the eye but undeniable to the heart, much as the thin welt of pale skin where an assassin’s knife had nicked his jaw felt like an immense disfigurement to his fingertips when he shaved, yet shied from the mirror when he looked for it.

It was still a fragile thing, this rediscovered intimacy between them. Thoughts of Liv, her loneliness and her long-empty bed, invariably caused Marsh to wonder about Liddell-Stewart. How much time had they spent alone together? He didn’t dare ask. Open it again, and the scar might never heal.

The commander had gone to ground after Marsh’s return from Germany. Will was their only lead on Liddell-Stewart but he wasn’t cooperating. Marsh had had to work on Stephenson for two months before the old man agreed to let them take the gag out of Will’s mouth. They stationed a sentry outside his door, who would enter the cell and knock Will about if he launched into Enochian. Weary duty for the sentries, and a silly use of manpower in time of war, but more humane than leaving a man gagged twenty-three hours a day.

“Trust the commander.” That’s all Will would say.

Stephenson entered. He carried a brown dossier under his arm and an umbrella in his hand. When he turned, his empty sleeve kicked up like the skirt of a dancing girl. With his hip he shoved the door closed, while at the same time tossing the umbrella handle over a coat hook beside the door. Rainwater spattered across the wainscoting. Water stains stippled the wood polish beneath the hooks where this had happened with some frequency. The old man had eased into his seat behind the desk and already held a sterling letter opener to the ribbon that sealed the dossier before the umbrella pendulumed to a rest.

Marsh eyed the ribbon. Black. Not good.

“Your meeting with the PM went long,” he said.

“Not just the PM,” said Stephenson. He cursed under his breath; the ribbon was giving him trouble. It slid away from the dulled blade of his letter opener. He needed another hand to hold down the dossier while he hacked the ribbon apart. Marsh knew better than to offer. “Menzies was there. Ellis, too. We had to speak circles around them.”

“Ellis?”

“Army intelligence.”

Lieutenant-Colonel Menzies ran the Secret Intelligence Service. Stephenson’s post, if he hadn’t given it up in exchange for a free hand to run Milkweed. Not even C knew Milkweed’s true purpose. So what brought him, and a bloke from army intelligence, into a meeting between Stephenson and Churchill?

The ribbon snapped apart. Stephenson flipped open the dossier. A fine dusting of sand sprinkled out. Fishing around in a desk drawer for his jeweler’s loupe, he said, “This package arrived via special courier late last night.”

Stephenson fell silent while he studied the photographs. Marsh fidgeted, though it did nothing to ward off the icy apprehension trickling through his veins. Stephenson slid a quartet of photographs across the desk, along with the magnifier. “These were taken in Egypt, three days ago.”

The first photo was a wide aerial view of stony, wrinkled terrain. With the use of Stephenson’s magnifier, Marsh could see tents and other structures scattered within the labyrinth of ravines.

The second photo was also from aerial recon, but gave a clearer and closer view of a subsection of the previous photograph. Now the tents were clearly visible, as were armored vehicles and embedded artillery positions. Two of the tents were circled in red. Marsh knew he was seeing an Afrika Korps forward position.

He glanced at the terrain in the first photo. Ravines.

A bit over a week earlier, Britain’s Western Desert Force had suffered a demoralizing defeat near the border between Egypt and Libya. “Operation Battleaxe” intended to evict Rommel’s forces from a strategically important position known as Halfaya Pass, as part of a larger push to relieve the besieged port of Tobruk. The first day of Battleaxe saw an entire British tank squadron obliterated.

The third photograph was terribly grainy. It had been taken from a great distance, through a fog of heat shimmer, and then enlarged. The photographer had hid in the shadows of a ravine to get the shot. It showed a narrow slice of an Afrika Korps position, tents and half-track transports. In the background, a man held the entrance flap to a tent as though just stepping out. The dark leather bands of a harness ruined the clean lines of his pale uniform. Sunlight glinted from something at his waist.

So extreme was the devastation at Halfaya that the few surviving Tommies had given it a new nickname. They called it “Hellfire Pass.”

Marsh ran the lens over the man in the photo. The enlargement had washed out his facial features. But the coloration fit. And the man wore dark goggles to protect his eyes from the desert glare. As though he had very pale eyes.…

The fourth photo had, like the third, been taken from a great distance. Its subject was a shirtless man with his back to the camera. He stood alongside an antiaircraft gun, hands laid upon it and head bowed as though in prayer. Something dark trailed from his head to his waist. The gun was halfway submerged into the sand.

The Desert Fox had taken to burying his eighty-eights, large antiaircraft guns, up to their muzzles. When positioned like that, they melted into the heat shimmer and became invisible. A gun designed to knock bombers from the sky could shoot through the heavy armor of a Matilda tank at over half a mile. He’d killed a lot of Tommies that way.

Big job, burying an eighty-eight. Unless you happened to have a fellow who could render its base insubstantial.

Marsh slid the photos back to Stephenson. The old man said, “Well?”

“Too blurry to say for certain. The fellow in the tent might be Reinhardt. It would fit. He trained extensively for a deployment to Africa. The fellow with the gun could be Klaus.”

“Might be? Could be? You told me you’d splashed both of them.”

“Thought I had.”

“You told me you’d leveled the place. You and your crackerjack team. The girl and the retard.”

“We did!”

First thing Stephenson had done after tossing Marsh into the clink was report to the PM. Churchill, in turn, had ordered the RAF to perform a risky aerial reconnaissance mission over the farm. Within a day, Milkweed had a parcel of photos consistent with Marsh’s story. The complex had been destroyed in the manner he described: smashed to flinders, then burned to ash.

“Batteries.” Stephenson indicated the first photo with an unlit cigarette. “Have they resurrected the research?”

Marsh shook his head. “Come on, sir. You saw the photos. There was nothing left to resurrect.”

But … He squinted at the window while Stephenson struck a match, remembering a conversation he’d overheard on the day he arrived in Germany. At Bremerhaven. He hadn’t thought anything of it at the time.
Shit.

“Unterseeboot one one five,” he said. “Gretel made certain it was stocked with spare batteries.”

“Her again. Well, she’s long gone now.” Smoke jetted from Stephenson’s nose, like a dragon warning off would-be thieves who ventured too close to its hoard. “You were soft. You ought to have killed her.”

“I thought I could trust Will.”

“We all did.”

Marsh shook his head. “I just don’t understand why—”

Stephenson snapped his fingers twice. “Focus! This is our current problem.” He jabbed a fingertip on the photos. “These bastards are more persistent than a wart. Especially the ghostly fellow. Hansel.”

“Klaus.”

Marsh thought about what he knew of Klaus, what he knew of the Willenskräfte. “I suppose that if he can become insubstantial to a brick wall, he could also make himself impervious to a blow from Kammler’s Willenskräfte.”