The Milkweed Triptych 01 - Bitter Seeds (34 page)

“William!” Hargreaves beckoned to him. “Come.”

“You know, it occurs to me,” said Will, tugging the bowler down over his ears as he stepped into the wind, “that by watching this activity and alerting neither the police nor the Home Guard, I am, legally speaking, an accessory to this deed.” Hargreaves and Webber stared at him blankly. Webber’s bad eye, Will noted, matched the color of the fresh snow that dusted the gravel alongside the train tracks. “In other words,” Will continued, “I am, through the agency of my tacit consent, already a participant in the payment of this price.” He looked back and forth between the two. “You see.”

They didn’t. Nor did they much care. The greedy bastards would butcher their own mothers if it meant half a chance to see a deed like the one slated for to night.

Will crossed the country lane to where the others knelt. They had chosen this intersection thirty miles outside the city for its seclusion. Their chances of getting caught were quite low. The tall trees lining the road swayed, the wind in their boughs sounding for all the world like crashing surf. It felt like they were funneling the wind straight down the road. It was a suffocating wind.

He loosened the scarf around his neck until the ends flapped like pennants. “In fact,” he added, “you might say that by doing nothing, I’ve done quite enough.”

The shriveled skin of Hargreaves’s face twitched as it often did when the warlock was irritated. “Pull yourself together and do your duty,” he said. “We must head back soon.”

Will sighed, tugged up his trousers, and crouched next to the tracks. He double-checked their work. They’d placed the charge at the seam between two lengths of rail. It was a small thing, not strong enough to topple a train by itself, but more than enough to pry the seam apart. All it needed was a trigger. Webber anticipated him and pushed a leather satchel across the ground with the toe of his boot.

In Will’s grandfather’s day, a warlock’s bag of tricks contained knives, wooden bits, leather cords, and bandages. Will’s carpetbag back at the Kensington flat still contained a pair of bloodstained garden shears. But this was not his grandfather’s war. Warlocks served the king now—though His Majesty didn’t know it—and their tools for spilling blood had grown in sophistication along with their understanding of Enochian.

It’s a strange kind of inflation,
Will thought,
always driving these prices up. Blades are outmoded, worthless; the ha’pennies of negotiation. Dynamite and priming cord, that’s where the purchase power is.

Will fished inside Webber’s satchel until he found a length of cord and a pressure switch. It took several tries to affix the switch to the rail. The ice-cold steel shrugged off the adhesive putty. He layered it on until he could be reasonably sure that vibrations from the train wouldn’t dislodge the trigger before the wheels touched it.

How is it that in order to serve my country I practically had to become a fifth columnist?

Which was exactly the result Stephenson wanted, the charming pragmatist. The warlocks’ actions in paying the Eidolons’ blood prices could be blamed as the work of fifth columnists. Nazi sympathizers. Jerry saboteurs. It had to be that way. A more direct path would have been to extract the prices from condemned prisoners and the like—so-called undesirables. But that would have required paperwork; it would have left a trail back to the Crown. And, given how expensive things had become, using prisoners to pay the blood prices would have quickly reduced the warlocks to executing people for shoplifting.

Webber and Hargreaves retreated along the road to where Will had parked the car.

Yes, you left the dangerous bit for me, didn’t you?
A frisson of paranoia jolted Will. Was this deliberate? Part of a secondary negotiation of which he knew nothing? Were they hoping for a mistake?

He took extra care while arming the charge. He did it just as he’d been trained by the SOE: one wire at a time, taking care to avoid stray static charges.

That finished, he nicked a finger and squeezed out a few drops of blood. They froze to the rail, mingling with the blood Hargreaves and Webber had already shed. The warlocks’ blood was a bridge, connecting the negotiated blood price with this act of violence. They’d done their parts. Somewhere in Surrey, Will knew, Shapley, Grafton, and White were doing something similar. Together all six warlocks were conegotiators. Coconspirators, too, if anybody ever learned about this.

After that there was nothing left to do but give it a quick once-over and hurry back to the car.

A train whistle echoed faintly through the trees. Will gunned the engine to drown out the noise, and promised himself a single drink when they returned to the Admiralty.

The wind died around sunset. Darkness and silence together descended upon London. A deepening cold gripped St. James’ Park. It leeched warmth from tents, turned metal Nissen huts to iceboxes, and aggravated the twinge in Marsh’s knee.

He stuffed an extra packet of aspirin into his kit. The pain hadn’t hobbled him yet, though it threatened to. He’d get a medic to look at his knee after he came back, but there wasn’t time enough for that now. There was also the danger that he might be sidelined from the raid. And that was unacceptable.

Marsh counted through his gear. The ritual helped him to focus, to find his center.

One combat knife, six-inch blade. Six Mills bombs. Four white phosphorus grenades. One Enfield double-action revolver (No. 2, Mk. I). Five six-round cylinders for same. One Lee-Enfield bolt-action rifle (No. 4, Mk. I). Five ten-round magazines for same. One electric torch. One pair of handcuffs. One vial of ether. One garrote. Three magnesium flares. One compass. One medkit.

He filled the webbing pockets on his belt with still more cylinders and magazines. Then he rubbed burnt cork on the exposed skin of his hands and clean-shaven face, darkening himself until his flesh would blend into the shadows along with the black coverall he wore.

Throughout Milkweed’s camp, he knew, dozens of men were going through the same ritual, if not with the same equipment. Mostly in groups, taking comfort in the camaraderie of false bravado, chasing off the collywobbles. Three huts, three teams. The plan was for the teams to retain the same geo graph i cal distribution—one each to the south, west, and east—when they landed in Germany.

Arrived
in Germany. Marsh kept thinking of it as a landing, as though they were parachuting in, though he knew it was nothing of the sort.

He hefted the sack off the table and shrugged the straps over his shoulders. Then he checked his belt, slung the rifle over his shoulder, and stepped outside.

In peacetime, the glow of London, combined with humidity and smog, often erased even the brightest stars from the sky. But that was no longer the case, owing to the blackout and the crisp evening. Overhead, a wine-dark sky shimmered with points of blue and white. Even orange in places. The air felt so sharp, so crystalline, that Marsh found it easy to imagine there was nothing at all between himself and the stars.

The inconstant knee pain that had dogged him his entire adult life flared anew, sharper this time. Marsh leaned over to massage it.
Not now. Please, just through to night.

Footsteps squelched in the slush around the side of the tent. The noise was so subtle that Marsh wouldn’t have heard it at all if not for the stillness of the evening. It sounded like somebody hesitating in the shadows, wanting to approach him without disrupting his solitude.

Marsh straightened up. “Yes, I’m on my way, Will.”

No answer. Another squelch.

“Lorimer? Is that you?”

Something moved in the shadows. It created a rustling sound, like somebody brushing against a tent.

Marsh’s hand went to the revolver at his belt. He crept forward. “Who’s there?”

The shadows moved again at the same moment he stepped around the corner. He found himself face-to-face with a stranger. Both men started in unison; both had their weapons drawn.

Marsh couldn’t make out the other man’s eyes, but he was clearly surprised to see Marsh. A beard hid the stranger’s face. Moonlight reflected wetly off a puckered furrow of scar tissue.

This wasn’t one of Milkweed’s men. The organization was small enough that Marsh knew every face, every name. Marsh knew that he’d never in his life seen this man, and yet there was something familiar about him. The revelation came in a flash: he’d heard this man’s description before.

The intruder recovered before Marsh could raise his sidearm. His voice was a gravelly rasp. “You’ll thank me for this later.”

He pointed his own revolver at Marsh’s leg, but his eyes widened in surprise as he pulled the trigger.

“No! Blood—” The stranger fired and disappeared in the same instant.

Pop.
Marsh’s knee exploded in pain.

Oh, God, Liv, I should have seen you this morning—

Marsh crashed to the ground, clutching his leg with one hand while swinging his firearm in a wild arc toward where the assailant had stood. But the man was gone.

So, too, was the pain. Just like that, it evaporated, leaving nothing behind, not even the original twinge. And not just to night’s pain, either; the constant trickle of discomfort from his knee, the ever-present ache that Marsh tuned out most of the time, was gone. The reversal was so complete that for a moment Marsh thought he’d gone into shock. But his hands were dry. No blood. And his coveralls were undamaged, with no hint of a bullet hole.

“Bloody fucking hell.”

Phantoms.

Marsh lay sprawled on the ground, panting. His breath sparkled. He flinched, expecting a surge of pain to follow every thud of his racing heart, but it never came. Only a slowly growing chill as the cold and wet seeped into him.

“Bugger me.”

He climbed to his feet, shakily, half-expecting his leg to give out. It didn’t. But he did take a few moments to collect himself before joining the others.

All eyes turned to him when he entered the Nissen hut. Will, Hargreaves, and Webber stood around a workbench upon which rested a piece of Portland limestone somewhat smaller than a rugby ball. An iron chisel had been driven deep into the stone, not quite far enough to cleave it in two. The stone had been marked with a bloody handprint that straddled the fissure made by the chisel. A sledgehammer rested on the bench next to the stone.

Marsh understood that the stone was there for the benefit of the warlocks rather than for the Eidolons. It was an object to help them focus, in the same way that Will used fire. The cleaved stone would become a single object existing
here
and
there
simultaneously.

Waves of pent-up anticipation boiled out of the corner where the rest of Marsh’s team milled around. Ten men: some younger, some older, every one a walking arsenal, every one replaying the Tarragona
filmstrip over and over in his head. Marsh could see it in their eyes and in the hard, blank looks on their faces.

The snipers wore Ghillie suits, camouflage festooned with bits of foliage. The rest wore dark balaclavas to match their coveralls. The snipers carried Enfield rifles like Marsh’s, with scopes; their spotters carried submachine guns. Everyone had corked their faces. It was the first time Marsh had ever seen Will in anything less than a suit.

Like Marsh, every man headed to Germany wore a small sticking plaster on the back of one hand: the warlocks had taken blood samples. The Eidolons had to see the men in order to move them. Marsh dreaded the thought of being scrutinized by those monsters again, but he’d tolerate it for the sake of hurting the Jerries.

Lorimer was inspecting the pair of tall, blocky wooden pillars that flanked the squad. Lorimer called them his “pixies.” Coils of copper wire wreathed the narrower center portion of each column. Ceramic endcaps covered the top and bottom of both machines. The gadgets had been designed to be as light as possible, so that two men could carry one at a dead run.

Stephenson stared at the mud stains on Marsh’s coveralls. “What the blue pencil happened to you?”

Marsh shook his head. “Forget it. It’s unimportant.”

Will shot Stephenson a pointed look. The old man frowned. He joined Lorimer.

Will came over. He didn’t carry as much equipment as the rest of the squad. The knife, the revolver, and the rifle all looked absurdly out of place on him. The weapons were a last resort, in the case of self-defense.

Marsh asked, quietly, “What was that just now, between you and the old man?”

“Bit of a disagreement. What did happen to you, Pip? You took a fall, I can see that much.”

Marsh motioned him to a corner of the hut. He lowered his voice to a whisper. “I think I just saw your phantom.”

“My phantom?”

“The fellow you saw here in the park back in May, on the night our strange little guest escaped.”

Will’s eyes widened in surprise. It didn’t, Marsh noticed, soften the dark weariness in his features. “You’re certain? That would be rather odd, you and I seeing the same apparition months apart.”

“He matched your description. Down to the voice.”

“Hmm. The ghost of St. James’.” He shook his head. “You know, Pip, there’s still time to call this off. . . .”

Stephenson clapped twice. “Gentlemen. It’s time.”