Ian Tregillis - Bitter Seeds

Will knew that pressing the issue would only start a row when Marsh clearly wanted to avoid one. He resigned himself to hoping for a quick end to the war, so that he could visit with Liv again and meet Marsh's daughter. Someday he'd get to be an uncle. “Can you at least relay my congratulations and best wishes to Liv?”

“Of course.” Marsh tried to lighten the mood. “By the by, does Lorimer know you stole one of his cigars?”

Will played along, though he didn't feel like it.

12 May 1940

0deg41'13” East, 50deg26'9” North

It creaked and it sweat, this submersible coffin.

Every few minutes another bead of water rolled down the hull, leaving behind a trail that glistened like tears on the face of some iron leviathan. The droplets formed around the welds and rivets where the hull plates joined together. The submariners called it sweat; they said it was condensation from inside the boat.

But to Klaus's eyes it looked like the English Channel bleeding through the steel skin of Unterseeboot-115.

It was nearly as cramped as the box that Doctor von Westarp used to punish him. The crew—made more crowded than usual, and therefore more churlish, by Klaus's presence—breathed one another's breath, breathed air tainted with a hydrocarbon cloy of diesel that lingered long after the engines had been switched to electric power for silent running. He could have escaped the constriction by drawing upon the Gotterelektron, but that would have meant dipping into the store of extra batteries they carried. And Gretel had been vague on why they were necessary.

He needed to rest. Though how anyone could sleep on a U-boat defied imagination. Every time he closed his eyes, another creak or groan echoed through the boat. And then his eyes would pop open, and he'd watch another bead of water rolling down the hull, and he'd be achingly aware of the ocean poised overhead to crush them at any moment.

He wished the submariners hadn't told him about the minefields. The Channel had already claimed several U-boats; the coast of Scotland was a safer insertion point. But this route was faster, and the Reich's commanders had every reason to expect a successful mission: Gretel had foreseen it. Or so she led them to believe. But as for the ultimate fate of the submarine, she had also kept that vague. This mission might include a three-mile swim to shore, and it would be just like Gretel not to mention it.

He squeezed his eyes shut, concentrated on breathing. He forced himself to relax, to take in air with a slow, relaxing rhythm.

The hull groaned as the boat sliced through the sea, changing depth once again.

Three days since he'd had any sleep. Before long, he'd start hallucinating.

Klaus pulled the crumpled paper from the breast pocket of his uniform. Soon he'd have to change clothes, but as long as he could get away with it, he wore his uniform. The Gotterelektrongruppe insignia on his collar raised eyebrows and more than a few confused glances among the crew. They hadn't learned to fear it yet. Not so with his rank insignia. He was an SS-Obersturmfuhrer. That, at least, these submariners understood.

He unfolded the note he had found in his pocket on the night of the Ardennes offensive.

Dear Brother: By the time you relay the contents of this note to

Standartenfuhrer Pabst, I will be in the custody of our enemies... .

12 May 1940

Milkweed Headquarters, London, England

Have you come to take me to the ball?”

“Get up.”

Marsh hauled the prisoner to her feet from where she'd been sitting cross-legged on the cot. He pulled her arms behind her back. So thin were her wrists that the handcuffs, twin bracelets of cold iron, hung loosely on her feverish skin.

She craned her neck to peer at him over her shoulder. “No flowers?”

With his hand between her shoulder blades, he nudged her out of the cell. The ridge of the wire beneath her frock rolled away from the pressure of his fingers.

“But you presented a bouquet to Olivia when you first took her to dinner.”

The twisted, unexpected invasion of privacy riled him. Were the prisoner a man, Marsh wouldn't have hesitated to give him a little shove. And the prisoner, unable to catch himself, would have taken a tumble on hard concrete. A petty thing, perhaps, but it would make the point.

Threaten my family, will you?

But at that moment, looking up at him with faux innocence, she seemed so fragile. He remembered the bruises on her face when he'd first glimpsed her in Barcelona. Marsh also remembered the surgical scars. She'd been treated terribly, and she was too small to defend herself.

How could she have known about the corsage? A lucky guess, perhaps ... but she also knew Liv's name, and about the baby. And she had known Marsh was carrying ether in his pocket ... And she wore the same kind of battery harness seen in the Tarragona film.

Was she a mentalist of some sort? A mind reader?

Perhaps she couldn't stop herself from saying the things she did. Perhaps she'd blurted out something she saw in somebody's mind, some dark secret, and received a beating in return.

“How do you know the things you do?”

Her eyes widened in a caricature of harmlessness.

He tried a different tack. “You act like you know me. Perhaps you also know that you're better off here than you were with your companions.”

Silence.

“We just want to understand what von Westarp did to you, and why.”

When she wanted, the woman had one hell of a poker face. It slid into place now, an expressionless mask.

He sighed. “Don't ever mention my wife again.” As he took her elbow and led her toward the stairs, he added, “Or my son.”

She twisted around to look at him again, a frown tugging her eyebrows together.

“Aha.” Marsh snapped his fingers. “Gotcha.”

Her eyes narrowed; her expression frosted over.

Milkweed enjoyed a fair bit of seclusion in this disused corner of the Old Admiralty. It more or less had its own stairwell between the cellar and the second floor. Which meant that Marsh could get the prisoner upstairs without piquing unwanted interest. He kept a firm grip on her forearm—enough to prevent her from running, not enough to bruise her—as he escorted her past the offices that Stephenson had wrangled for the project. Several still stood empty but for gunmetal-gray filing cabinets and second-rate wooden desks adorned with typewriters that predated the Great War. Most rooms either had no furniture at all, or had been used for storage.

By day, these rooms along the rear of the building enjoyed a view of St. James' Park. Sunset over the park shone through a gap in the blackout curtains. Marsh pulled the prisoner aside and fixed that.

At Stephenson's insistence, they gathered in one of the smaller, interior rooms. Easier to keep out prying eyes and ears. Will had indicated that the location was immaterial.

Lorimer was there already, as was Stephenson. Marsh set the girl on a stool in a corner farthest from the doorway. He unlocked her handcuffs, pulled her arms around to the front, and then fastened one wrist to the pipe of a radiator. She watched the others with bored indifference.

Stephenson caught Marsh's eye, inclined his head toward the prisoner. Get anything out of her?

Marsh gave his head a minute shake as he closed the door. Nothing, sir.

Lorimer had determined that the object on her belt was indeed a battery, but of a sort he'd never seen. How it worked and why it was jacked into her skull remained a grotesque mystery. For the time being, it sat unmolested in Stephenson's vault until Milkweed could recruit a few science boffins to help Lorimer reverse-engineer the thing.