The Coldest War (13 page)

His new captors were polite, respectful, and indicated a great interest in his well-being. The Reichsbehörde had never been like that. Nor had Sarov. And the food was better than anything at Arzamas-16. But what Klaus truly wanted was out of reach, ripped from him almost before he knew how much he'd yearned for it.

Because of Gretel. But someday …

The cell itself was among the sturdiest he'd ever seen. Out of habit, he'd gauged the wall thickness as they'd escorted him through the doorway. It looked to be a good eighteen inches of reinforced concrete; a triviality to Klaus when he embraced his Willenskräfte, but practically impenetrable to anything else. Even sound. Plush, thick-pile carpet covered every inch of the floor (blue), walls (yellow), and ceiling (white). Klaus had the impression his captors had upholstered the cell with anything they could find. The steel door opened and closed on noiseless bearings; it sealed with a
click
and the susurration of rubber baffles.

One sink, one toilet, one cot. No visible grille or duct for air circulation. Klaus had spent an hour lying on the cot, fighting off the first tendrils of claustrophobia, after that observation.

It was quiet as a coffin. Clearly it had been constructed for that purpose. Why did they need a silent cell? Psychological warfare? Were they trying to break him? Other claustrophobics like him?

The faintest of knocks announced a visitor. By straining his ears, Klaus could just make out the rattle of a key in the lock. The massive door inched open. Pethick, the man who'd first attended to Klaus and Gretel, stood outside. The corridor was carpeted top to bottom.

“Good afternoon,” he said in a muted voice.

“Afternoon? I can't tell. My prison has no windows, no clock.”

Pethick beckoned him outside. “I do apologize for the accommodations, but they are the best we could do on the spur of the moment.” He carried a key ring on a thin chain, much like a pocket watch. The carpet absorbed everything but a faint jingle when Pethick sorted through the dozens of keys on the ring.

“You and your sister—” He stopped before another cell door, pointed to it with another key. “—caught us quite off guard. We might move you to a safe house, depending on circumstances.”

Gretel had, of course, been waiting for them. She joined Klaus and Pethick in the corridor. There was an eagerness to her step. And the shadows behind her eyes, those dark currents where her madness lurked, lay dormant. This, for Gretel, was giddiness.

The siblings followed Pethick upstairs. The cellar had changed markedly since Klaus came here as an enemy soldier to rescue Gretel. But he recognized the stairwell. They'd climbed it in the final moments of their escape.

“How are you?” Klaus whispered.

“Cheerful and well rested,” said Gretel.

Pethick took them past Pembroke's office. A single door of polished walnut opened on what appeared to be a conference room. It smelled of leather and pipe tobacco. The long, rain-spattered picture window along the west wall offered a view of gray sky and the park shrouded in mist. A dreary day: most of the light came from lamps situated on end tables around the edges of the room, and the brass light fixture suspended over a wide oval table. High-backed leather chairs surrounded the table and flanked a cold hearth at one end of the room.

Pembroke was there, staring out the window. The stem of his pipe—dark wood polished to a glassy finish—rattled against his teeth when he raked it slowly back and forth. He turned when the trio entered.

“We've found your man,” he said. “Marsh. They're bringing him in now.”

Gretel beamed.
She
is
excited,
thought Klaus.

He didn't share her excitement. He'd succumbed to the same old weary anticipation, alloyed with the special dread that came from knowing Gretel was about to play another of her cards. Cards seemed an apt analogy, but—
After all these years, I still don't know your game, sister.

Did he care any longer? Only insofar as her secret purpose brought him closer to the life he sought for himself.

He wondered who Marsh was, and why he was so important.

Pembroke and Pethick motioned them toward the pair of chairs across the table from the door. Pembroke seated himself at one end of the table, on Klaus's left. Gretel sat on Klaus's right, in the center of the table. Pethick stood at the far end of the table.

“Perhaps now,” said Pembroke, “you'll tell us what this is all about.”

“Soon,” said Gretel.

Pethick interjected. “We've been rather patient.”

Gretel was unimpressed. The look on her face said as much. But these men couldn't read her. Klaus wondered how long she had been waiting for this moment. Years? Decades?

They waited in anxious silence. Klaus looked to the window. The rain had driven even the most stalwart pleasure-seekers from the park. From his vantage in the Admiralty, the park was an emerald enclave, a raft of jade on a slate gray world. Waterlogged and dim, it was glorious, untouchable. Only yesterday he'd sat on that bench, down there, licking warm salt from his fingers and tasting life as a free man. Those wonderful few minutes before Gretel flapped her wings, wrapped him in her eddies, and dragged him along in her wake.

Pethick spoke again, snapping Klaus out of his reverie. “Have you ever met him, sir? Marsh.”

“Once. Nine, maybe ten years ago.” Pembroke nibbled on his pipe again. “Well. More of a glimpse, really.” The adjutant, or whatever role Pethick played for Leslie Pembroke, raised his eyebrows. “At Stephenson's funeral. But he didn't linger after the burial.”

Pethick nodded extravagantly, as though this were the most sensible thing in the world. He ran the tip of his tongue along the inside of his upper lip. “I understand they called him ‘Stephenson's pet gorilla,' in those days.”

Gretel looked offended. She turned her sloe-eyed stare on Pethick. The shadows had returned.

“No, no, Sam. Don't be fooled,” said Pembroke. “Yes, he was a bit coarse. And yes, they said that of him. But I suspect it was resentment more than anything else. He came from a very working-class background, you know.”

“I didn't.”

“Oh, yes. The lore says the old man discovered Marsh as a young hooligan. He broke into the old man's house to pinch his food or some such, according to the stories.”

Gretel listened, wide-eyed. Her lips parted slightly, a posture of wonderment. As though she were hearing the childhood secrets of a longtime lover.

Pethick said, “He didn't.”

“He did. According to lore. The old man saw potential in him, practically raised him as a son from then on. Sent him to Oxford. Quite a sharp fellow, too. Took two firsts, languages and botany.”

“According to lore?”

“According to his file,” said Pembroke.

This exchange between Pethick and Pembroke didn't provide Klaus any clues as to why this Marsh fellow was so important to Gretel. But it did give a sense of the person.

Klaus had spent his childhood and early adult years at the Institut Menschlichen Vorsprung (the Institute of Human Advancement), which later became the Reichsbehörde für die Erweiterung Germanischen Potenzials (the Reich's Authority for the Extension of German Potential), learning how to harness the Götterelektron and perform feats of Willenskräfte. But the Reichsbehörde had been more than a training ground for the Götterelektrongruppe. It had also been a spy school. Which had meant studying the enemy; learning to think like the enemy.

Klaus and Heike had been trained for quiet operations: infiltration, assassination, espionage. And while his one and only mission on foreign soil (in this very building) hadn't been very quiet, Klaus remembered enough of that old training to catch the unstated nuances of what Pembroke said. A low-born man like Marsh wouldn't have been well received among his peers in the intelligence world.

Two quick raps at the door. Gretel sat up, smoothed her braids.

“Enter,” called Pembroke.

A new man, somebody Klaus hadn't seen yet, poked his head in the doorway. “He's here, sir.”

From the corridor behind him, a muffled, angry voice: “Let me see her, son. Let me see her
now,
or I promise you're going to have a very bad day.”

Gretel licked her lips. Pembroke nodded. “Very well.” A quick look carried some private communication between Pembroke and his second. Pethick nodded, too. “Bring him in. But be alert.”

The door opened more widely. The first man entered and took a spot to the right of the door. He was followed by a second fellow, dressed much the same—overcoat, suit, linen trousers dark with rainwater from the shin down. An unofficial uniform, perhaps. The second man took a spot to the left.

Gretel inhaled. A gasp of delight. Ecstasy.

A sodden, disheveled man barged in after them. He wore denim coveralls over a flannel shirt, every inch dark with rainwater. Long, wide patches of ocher mud caked his knees; he'd been kneeling in wet earth. Rain had plastered his thin hair, dark like wet sand, to his forehead. Tiny beads of water sparkled in the lamplight, suspended on his eyebrows and eyelashes. They dripped when he blinked, tracing rivulets down a craggy face. He had a black eye.

Marsh took three steps into the room, shaking the table with the heavy fall of his work boots. His gaze went straight to Gretel. The corner of her mouth quirked up.

Klaus had never seen so much hatred bottled behind a person's eyes. Not even Reinhardt could summon such rage. Marsh quivered with it, brimmed with it. Klaus inched closer to his sister.

“Hello, darling,” said Gretel. “I told you we'd meet again.”

Marsh said, “Tell me why, you bitch. Tell me why you killed her.”

Klaus started to object. “My sister has never—”

But Marsh cut him off with a single contemptuous glance. “I know you're not that stupid, Klaus.”

This took Klaus aback.
He knows me. More than these others, who know my name only by reading it in a file. Who is this man?

Marsh approached the table. “Williton. Tell me why.”

Gretel said, “It was necessary.”

“Necessary? Agnes's death was
necessary
? For what? She was
four months old!
”

The men at the door stepped forward, ready to act. Pembroke raised a finger without taking his eyes from Marsh and Gretel. They kept their distance.

Quietly, Klaus tried again. “Gretel, what's Williton?”

Marsh looked at him. “It was a village. Tiny, insignificant speck on the map. We sent our daughter there during the evacuations. Safe as houses. Until September eighteenth, 1940, when your Luftwaffe bombed it into powder.” He glared at Gretel. “Bombed it into powder because she advised them to do it.”

In a flash, Klaus remembered another meeting much like this one. Instead of Marsh it had been General Field Marshal Keitel, the Führer's chief of staff, bellowing at Gretel. He'd demanded to know why she hadn't forewarned the OKW of the catastrophic failure of Operation Sea Lion. Britain's warlocks had summoned monsters to devour the invasion fleet.

And just like now, she had been unmoved by the gales of fury and indignation directed at her. And just like now, she'd said only that it had been necessary. And then she twisted the conversation, convinced Keitel that the most important thing in the world was to flatten a little town nobody had ever heard of. And, of course, they had.

Gretel said, “You'll understand, one day soon.”

Marsh's face twisted with disgust. He addressed Pembroke for the first time. “Have they been unplugged?”

“Of course.”

Marsh took the chair across from Gretel. He sat, sliding a bit back from the table. “I'm here. Talk.”

Everyone looked at Gretel. She began by describing, with Klaus's help, their capture by the Soviets at the end of the war. From there she described the immense effort the Soviets had poured into reverse engineering the Reichsbehörde technology: the secret city, the mass graves.

“This is a waste of time,” said Marsh. “I warned Stephenson about this over twenty years ago. There's nothing new here.” He stood, glaring at the siblings. “She's playing us.”

“Let's hear what they have to say before we make that decision, shall we?” Pembroke asked.

Marsh looked at Pembroke, Pethick, Klaus, and Gretel. He cracked his knuckles against his jaw. (
What a strange mannerism,
thought Klaus.) Then he made to retake his seat.

Pembroke relaxed. So did the men at the door.

“Please, continue,” he said.

Gretel nodded at him demurely, but her eyes flicked to Marsh, just for a moment, before she picked up her story.

Which was how Klaus happened to be looking at Marsh's hands at the moment he yanked a pocketknife from a compartment of his coveralls. Marsh was halfway across the table in another instant.

He's fast,
thought some strange, disconnected part of Klaus's mind. The rest thought, and said, “Gretel!”

Klaus reacted instinctively, calling up the Götterelektron and grabbing Gretel's arm at the same moment.

But, of course, he had no battery.

Gretel's chair tipped sideways, toward Klaus, at the same moment Marsh's momentum knocked her backwards. Klaus displaced his sister just enough for the first thrust of Marsh's blade to miss her throat; her head twisted sideways from the glancing blow of his knuckles, and then a flash of metal emerged through her swaying braid. The impact knocked Gretel out of Klaus's grasp.

Gretel on the floor. Marsh atop her. Blade coming back. Bright flash at her throat.

Pethick got an arm around Marsh's neck, the other grabbing for his wrist. But he couldn't dislodge him. Marsh was too strong. The second thrust nicked her earlobe.

Gretel's head rolled back, her mouth open. She was—