The Coldest War (7 page)

Reinhardt raised an eyebrow and looked at Klaus. “We heard about it later,” Klaus said.

“Heard about it?” Reinhardt narrowed his eyes. He glared at Gretel warily. “And how exactly did that happen?” He turned back to Klaus. “What happened to
you
? Let's start there.”

Klaus remembered the last time he'd seen Reinhardt. They had been traveling together during the most hellish winter on record. People had gone mad that winter, driven insane by the preternatural weather while their children spoke in tongues. Word came that the Red Army had crossed Poland and was plunging deep into the Reich, which had been rendered defenseless by the malevolent cold. Their rivalry had simmered over as they debated what to do: Should they return to the REGP and defend Doctor von Westarp's legacy from the Communists? Or should they race to Berlin and confront the invaders head-on?

Reinhardt, ever the glory hound, had insisted upon the latter. Klaus chose instead to return to the farm, hoping to find Gretel and escape west before the Reichsbehörde fell. But the Soviets were there, pixies at the ready.

And so they had spent two decades as war prisoners and test subjects, the foundation of an immense research program in a secret city in the depths of the Soviet Union.

Reinhardt smirked as Klaus wrapped up his summary. “I told you going to the farm was a mistake. Captured, eh?” He stared at Gretel, who had perched on a stack of crates. Quietly, he mused, “Now, I wonder why she let that happen. Seems to me she might have warned you.”

Klaus's former comrade in arms was a self-aggrandizing braggart, a narcissist, and, among other things, a necrophiliac. Still, the man had a point. How unsettling.

“So you've escaped after all this time,” Reinhardt continued. “Why now, I wonder?”

A cold tingle leached into Klaus's spine, his gut. Questions like these forced him to confront unpleasant truths about his own foolishness. He changed the subject.

“How did you end up here?”

Reinhardt fell quiet. At last he said, “I engaged the Soviets northeast of Berlin. An armored column. I fought them alone, fought them to a standstill! I melted their tanks, incinerated their troops, reduced their artillery to slag. And when they shot at me, I laughed. It was glorious. I was magnificent! Finally, I had become the instrument the doctor had intended.” He fell silent again. “But there were more Communists than batteries. Many more.”

Klaus said, “I warned you about that.”

“I had to retreat while I still had the Götterelektron.”

“I'm sure it was a glorious retreat, too,” Klaus said. “Or were you running for your life?”

Reinhardt made a crude gesture. “I returned to the farm for more batteries, but it had already fallen. It was obvious that you and the other cowards had rolled over the moment the Red Army arrived.”

Klaus crossed his arms. “They had
pixies
. Dozens of them. There was nothing we could do.”

“I spent my last battery staying ahead of the advanced forces. I crossed the Pyrenees on foot, and made it out of Spain about a year later. Canada was my destination. They had an open-door policy for former Schutzstaffel, like us. Too terrified of the Red Menace to turn away a potential ally, I suppose. This dirty, dinky island was supposed to be just a stop along the way … but I ran out of cash.”

“Poor Junkman,” Gretel repeated.

Reinhardt jumped out of his chair. “I swear to God, if you say that one more time, I'll strangle you on the spot.”

“No, you won't.” Klaus leapt between them, seized his Willenskräfte, and put a fingertip through Reinhardt's sternum. A warning.

Reinhardt staggered backwards, looking dumbfounded. “My God,” he whispered. “My God.” He fell into his chair, still staring at Klaus in his ghost form. A shaking hand touched his scalp. “You have batteries?”

“Of course,” said Gretel.

“My God … I thought, I, I thought you were like me.…” Reinhardt shook his head, as if dazed. “How many?”

Klaus became substantial again. “We left Arzamas with eight,” he said. He unbuttoned his shirt and peered at the gauge on his harness. Defusing Reinhardt's threat hadn't taken much charge, but the old battery had seen better days. They all had. “We have a few left.”

Reinhardt's pale eyes shone with a strange reverence when he saw Klaus's harness. Almost unconsciously, his hand went up to touch the battery. The reverence became hunger. Lust. “Give them to me.”

And then Klaus knew, knew beyond any possibility of doubt, why they had come here. Why Gretel had engineered this reunion. He saw the piles of electronics, heard the desperation in the other man's voice, and knew.

Gretel had come here to make Reinhardt dance.

“We need them,” Klaus said.

Reinhardt leapt from his chair again. “Do you even realize what you have? Have you forgotten the meaning of that harness? How can you appreciate what you've never missed? Without those batteries, you, and me, and her—” Reinhardt jabbed a finger toward Gretel. “—are
nothing
. But with them, we are gods.”

The passage of time had transformed this once-fearsome weapon of the Reich into a desperate, pitiable man. If Klaus didn't loathe Reinhardt so much, he might have felt sorry for the fellow. Maybe he did anyway. “We're not gods, Reinhardt. We never were.”

“Please,” said Reinhardt, his voice barely a whisper. “Just one.” He stared through the one unobstructed window, down to where the children played. Klaus could imagine what he had in mind. It was sickening.

“We can give you more than that,” said Gretel.

The two men looked at her. She leaned back on the crate, legs kicked forward, stretching. The hem of her stolen skirt revealed her ankles, bony as always but now dark-veined with age. With two fingers she reached into her blouse and produced a folded piece of dark blue paper.

Reinhardt whispered, “Is that what I think it is?”

Gretel unfolded the paper and held it up for them both to see. It was a blueprint, a jumble of spidery white lines. One of the secrets of the old Reichsbehörde, rendered as cobwebs on cobalt.

“Annotated in the doctor's own hand,” she said.

“Now I understand.” Reinhardt stepped forward, hand outstretched. His old swagger had returned. “You want me to build replacements for you.” He wiggled his fingers.

“No.” Gretel tore the battery blueprint in half.

“What are you doing?” Reinhardt clutched his head in dismay. “God damn you mongrel whore! I
need
that!”

“Now, now,” said Gretel, wagging a finger at Reinhardt. “Don't be greedy.” She tore the blueprint again, oblivious of his cries of rage and despair. He fell to his knees. A neighbor pounded on the adjoining wall.

“Relax,” she said. “Have you forgotten how in the past I delivered your heart's darkest desire?”

Klaus thought back to poor dead Heike. He shuddered.

“But this you'll get in pieces,” she continued, fluttering the blueprint scraps. “In the meantime … I need two favors. Little things. You might even enjoy them. Each errand will earn a piece of the blueprint in the post.”

Reinhardt stared up at her. “I hate you.”

She stood. “Where do you keep your stationery? I need a pen, paper, postage stamps, and a pair of envelopes.” Gretel gestured at the piles of discarded equipment crowding the flat. “And, Reinhardt? You'll need a camera.”

10 May 1963
Walworth, London, England

“Another,” said Marsh.

He rapped his knuckles on the bar. Once, twice. The boards were damp with liquor he'd spilled; his fingers came back smelling of whiskey. Circlets of condensation riddled the bar. Like the rings of a tree telling the story of winters and summers and floods and fires, these rings spoke of a long afternoon.

“You been here all day, mate. Why don't you get along now?” The proprietor was a short, pale man with tattoos on the knuckles of his left hand.

Marsh fixed him with an angry stare. Partially to make a point, and partially to focus on something while the room swayed. “Another,” he managed.

The barman shrugged. “Your funeral, mate.” He refilled the shot glass. While drawing another pint, he said, “If I came 'ome that pissed, the missus would cut me bollocks off.”

“Liv wouldn't notice. Not today.” Marsh tossed back the shot. He squeezed his eyes shut, shook his head. Speaking past the fire in his throat, he added, “We have an agreement.”

“You're a lucky man, then.”

“Lucky.” Marsh spat, wiped his hand across his mouth.

“Oy! I'll have none o' that in here!”

A few of the closer patrons paused in their conversations and domino games to stare at the barman and his unruly patron. The black-and-white television in the corner shouted a shaving cream jingle into the silence.

One by one, they shook their heads and returned to their own lives. The regulars recognized Marsh, though nobody knew his name. And vice versa. He knew what they saw when they bothered to notice him: a graying man with the craggy face of an unsuccessful boxer, with dirt under his nails and holes in his denim coveralls, well into the pudgy years of late middle age. A pathetic fellow even by the standards of a low-class establishment in a down-on-its-luck neighborhood like this.

The barman shook his head at somebody behind Marsh, made a placating gesture. He pulled a towel from beneath the bar and cleaned the spot where Marsh had spat. In a more moderate tone, he said, “You're havin' a bad day, I respect that. But pull that again and you'll be out on the street with that shot glass up your arse.”

An odd thought flickered through Marsh's head, tempered by anger and alcohol and memory. The barman was shorter than he; garroting him wouldn't be hard. He knew from experience that taller men made for longer, more dangerous, less silent kills. But Marsh didn't have a garrote. And he'd prefer to keep drinking.

He shrugged off the threat. “I've been thrown out of better places. Got tossed from Sunday service once.”

Marsh gulped at his beer, changed the subject. “It's my daughter's birthday.” John's older sister would turn twenty-three a little bit before midnight.

“That's something good. Why don't you go home, then, and spend it with her?”

“The worms ate her long ago. She died in the war.”

“Oh.” The barman shook his head. “Sorry to hear it, mate.”

Marsh ignored that. “Maybe it was rats. Could've been rats that ate her up. We never buried her proper. No body. Too much rubble. Just a casket. An empty casket.” He pulled on his pint. Foam from his lips spattered the bar as he said, “It was so small.”

Quietly, the barman said, “Blitz?”

Marsh grunted.

The barman sighed in sympathy. “Bloody Jerries.”

He drifted away, down the bar to deal with a few of the other regulars here at this early hour of the afternoon.

Bubbles streamed up through the amber depths of Marsh's glass, like tongues of smoke billowing up into a still evening sky. Williton had been reduced to a sea of smoking debris by the time he and Liv arrived. Worst of all, he remembered the smell: the sharp scent of cordite lay over the ruined village like a fog, mingling with the baby smells from Agnes's blanket.

From somewhere far away, he heard Liv saying, “What if she's cold?” And from somewhere even farther away, he heard, “Leave 'im alone. He's grieving.”

Marsh shook his head, shook off the memory. Now the telly shouted the BBC news at quarter past. Cracking his knuckles against his jaw, Marsh turned on his stool to get a glimpse of the screen.

A kerosene lamp had been identified as the cause of the recent fire in the Forest of Dean. The rumors of abandoned villages in Tanganyika had proved false, but now similar reports were coming out of British-held India near the Nepalese border. The Eighth Cruiser Squadron was soon to join the HMS
Ocean
in the Persian Gulf. Radio receivers at Jodrell Bank in the U.K. and Parkes, in Australia, reported the space station had fallen silent. Urgent transmissions from the cosmonauts returning from their orbit of the moon suggested they had received no communications from the station since emerging from the moon's shadow a day ago. Moscow denied any problems.

Closer to home, news of the day concerned a sweeping new trade agreement between the United Kingdom and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. His Grace, the Duke of Aelred, was credited with brilliantly shepherding the initiative through a period of increased tensions between the two nations. Up flashed an old clip of Aubrey Beauclerk shaking hands with a member of the Soviet diplomatic mission. The duke was thought to be a likely successor to the Foreign Secretary, if the BBC could be believed.

Then the image changed to a clip of the duke's brother.

“Turn it off,” said Marsh.

The younger Beauclerk, long a political outsider and burdened with what was delicately referred to as a “murky” past, had in recent years become one of the duke's closest advisers. Lord William Beauclerk had played a major role in hammering out the new agreement; the commentary predicted a bright future for the duke's brother, complete with twee metaphors about sunlight after the storm.

William fucking Beauclerk. It wasn't fair.

“I said, turn it off!” Marsh hurled his pint glass at the television. He missed. It shattered against the wooden cabinet, splashing the screen and those closest with the dregs of his beer. The room erupted with shouts of anger and alarm.

“Oy!” the barman yelled. “That tears it!”

Somebody tried to grab Marsh's arm; his knuckles connected with what felt like a jaw when he threw a punch. But dizziness and rage made it a wild, uncoordinated swing, little more than a glancing blow. The hand on his forearm tightened its grip.

Marsh jumped from his stool, reflexively thinking to use it as a weapon to break the hold on him. But when he wheeled to face the man holding his arm, a punch landed solidly on his cheekbone, just beneath the eye. The sting of torn skin; the thrower wore a wedding ring.