The Milkweed Triptych 01 - Bitter Seeds Read online

  He hadn’t known it housed SIS headquarters.

  Or that his dear friend, for whom he’d stood as best man not a week earlier, was a spy.

  As for Stephenson, Will had always regarded Marsh’s putative father as a bristly but harmless codger. But the old man had seemed anything but harmless when he’d shoved a copy of the Official Secrets Act in Will’s face. Technically—as Will now understood, thanks to Stephenson’s rather alarming speech—the Act was law within the United Kingdom, so he was bound by its provisions whether he knew it or not. This may have been Stephenson’s attempt to comfort a bewildered newcomer. It didn’t. But by making Will sign a sworn oath that he would abide by the terms of the OSA, he’d guaranteed that Will would pay attention and take the matter seriously.

  The Scot finished with the screen. He returned to the front of the room, where he took up the eight-millimeter film reel and started threading it through the projector.

  Will asked, “Pip, how long have you been an agent of the Crown?” He rubbed his palms on his knees, slowly warming to the subject.

  Marsh gave him a guilty half smile. “Since leaving the Navy.”

  “Ah. I see. And all the time I believed you worked for the Foreign Office . . .”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Ah. Recruited you out of the Navy, did they?”

  “No, it was before that.”

  “Oxford?”

  Marsh hesitated. He started to answer, but stopped when the door opened. Stephenson entered, carrying a file folder. The old man latched the door behind him.

  Ah, thought Will. So that’s it.

  “It was a long time ago,” said Marsh.

  “Does your blushing bride know about this?”

  Stephenson and Marsh shared a quick, fraught glance at each other. Something unsaid passed between them. Will knew with certainty he’d just resurrected an uncomfortable topic. But the moment passed before he could find a way to gracefully rescind the question. Stephenson joined the gruff fellow at the projector, where they spoke quietly.

  His eyes on Stephenson’s back, Marsh said, “Look, Will. Were it the least bit possible, Liv would know all. But she’s safer the less she knows. And I will do anything—anything—to protect her.” Again Will felt that sense of a powerful spring uncoiling inside Marsh, a warning tremor of intensity. Marsh pointed at the projector. “Which in fact is why we’re here.”

  “I think we’re ready,” said Stephenson. “Time for you to get these gentlemen up to speed, Commander.” He walked along the wall, pulling every window shade until the room would have been dark if not for the light of a single lamp.

  The announcement created opposing reactions inside Will. He shook off the tremor of unease, the sensation of a last chance slipping away. If I leave now, he thought, I’ve seen no secrets and there’s no harm done. But as childish as it may have been, he also felt a tingle of excitement. William Edward Guthrie Beauclerk, special consultant to His Majesty’s spies!

  And as far as breaking ranks with the other warlocks went, he’d already done that at the Bodleian, years ago. It may have been a foolish thing to do, but the damage was already done. By helping Marsh now, Will could turn that foolish indiscretion into something good.

  The Scot took a chair on the other side of Marsh. Marsh scooted his own chair back a bit so that he could address Will and the other man.

  “First things first,” he said. “Will, meet James Lorimer. Lorimer, meet Lord William Beauclerk.”

  Will offered his hand. “A plea sure.”

  “Aye.”

  As they shook hands, Will noticed mottled discolorations on Lorimer’s fingers. The man was older than he or Marsh, too, closer to Stephenson’s age. Perhaps his late forties. He enjoyed the occasional cigar, too. The smell wafted from him, and his thick black beard was dusted with ashes.

  Will couldn’t help but look down at himself: the Savile Row shirt of sea-island cotton, the double-breasted suit, the pocket watch. Perhaps the breast-pocket silk had been a step too far in this company. He could see Lorimer making the same evaluation as they looked each other over. Then again, Will hadn’t known what to expect of this meeting.

  Marsh continued. “Lorimer knows part of this story, and you know a different part of it, Will, though you may not realize it.” And then he launched into an incredible tale: sneaking into war time Spain to meet a Nazi defector; spontaneous human combustion; a half-charred filmstrip; a gypsy woman with wires in her hair.

  Had it been somebody else telling the story, Will would have laughed it off as a fevered hallucination. Instead he had to accept the notion that in another century Marsh would have been the real-life hero of a Rudyard Kipling adventure.

  What am I doing here?

  “And that is how we recruited Lorimer into our little family,” said Marsh, gesturing at the Scot. “He was a sergeant back in the Great War, connected with the Army Film and Photographic Unit. Later he went to work for the General Post Office Film Unit. We needed somebody who could reconstruct the Tarragona film. Somebody good.”

  Lorimer said, “Reconstruction’s a bold claim. You haven’t seen the end result, boy. Stitched it together as best I could, but there’s a fair bit missing. Had to make wild guesses in some parts. Even so, that film . . .” He trailed off, shaking his head. Then he pointed at Will. “Remind me again. What’s His Highness doing here?”

  Marsh said, “Stephenson and I feel, based on what little we’ve seen, that Jerry is on to something unnatural. Having seen the entire film, you may agree.” Lorimer canted his head, as if to say perhaps. “To best deal with this, we need an expert in the unnatural. Will is a, ah . . .”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Pip. Let’s get over heavy ground lightly, shall we?” Will turned to face Lorimer and Stephenson behind him. He took a deep breath. “My grandfather was a warlock. My father, too. While I didn’t follow in the family hobby, I have had the training.”

  Lorimer looked disgusted. “This is unbelievable. Five months. Five months I’ve worked on that sodding filmstrip, nightmares for free, and for what? So that you can hand it off to this chinless wonder.” He stood.

  Stephenson laid his one hand on the man’s shoulder. “Sit down.” Lorimer took his seat again, grumbling. “We didn’t hire you for your beliefs. You’re here as a film expert, and as such, you’ll do your goddamn job.”

  Will recoiled. The old man had a steely core, unpleasantly like his grandfather.

  “It’s no hoax,” said Marsh. “I’ve seen it.” The look in his eyes was clouded and distant. Will knew he was back at the Bodleian. Marsh shook his head, as though clearing his thoughts. He pointed to Stephenson’s file folder. “Is that what I think it is?”

  Stephenson took a seat at the head of the table. He flipped open the dossier and slid it in front of Will, Marsh, and Lorimer. “This is everything we have on Doctor Karl Heinrich von Westarp.”

  It was, Will noticed, a rather thin file. A single photograph clipped to the top page depicted a grainy black-and-white head shot of a man showing the first hints of baldness. He wore round wire-rimmed spectacles and a thin mustache. The graininess made Will think the image had been enlarged from a portion of a larger photo.

  “Born in Weimar, Germany, April 13, 1872. Only child to Gottfried and Marlissa von Westarp. Wealthy family, owned quite a bit of land. Father died in 1899; mother died in 1915. He was apparently self-taught in his youth, and attended the University of Heidelberg starting in his mid-twenties, from 1896 through 1902. Quite the scholar. Studied philosophy, chemistry, physiology, and history. Wrote a well-received treatise on Nietzsche. Didn’t obtain his letters in history, however. He may have had a falling out with the faculty.

  “After Heidelberg, von Westarp came to Britain to study medicine at King’s College, London. Stayed there until 1908 before returning to Germany.”

  Marsh sat up. “He was here.”

  Will said, “Thirty years ago, Pip.”

  “This,” said Stephenson, tap
ping the photograph, “is our only image of the man. Class photo from King’s, taken on the day their medical degrees were conferred.

  “After that, our man disappears for the next ten years. We’ve been unable to turn up any sign of him prior to autumn of 1918, when he popped up again in Munich. Where he became one of the founding members of the Thule-Gesellschaft.”

  Marsh whistled. “I’ll be damned.”

  Will shook his head, knowing he’d just missed something important. He looked back and forth between Stephenson and Marsh. “I’m a bit lost here, gents.”

  “Thule Society. Bunch of Teutonic occultists,” said Marsh. “And anti-Communists, and anti-Semites.”

  Upon hearing this explanation, Lorimer took on a more contemplative demeanor. His eyebrows pulled together in a small frown. Will remembered that Lorimer was the only person in the room who had so far seen the reconstructed Tarragona filmstrip.

  “But von Westarp didn’t stay with the Thulies very long. Had a falling out with them, too, within a year.”

  “Do we know what caused this rift?”

  “No. All we know for certain is that by 1920 he had returned to Weimar, and converted his family estate to a foundling home.”

  “A what?”

  Stephenson read from a card in the folder. “Yes. The Children’s Home for Human Enlightenment.”

  Marsh cracked his knuckles, thinking. Almost to himself, he said, “‘His children. Von Westarp’s children.’ Krasnopolsky mentioned them.”

  A wave of unease came over Will, closely followed by the memory of a long-disregarded myth. “Why the sudden interest in children? What prompted this?”

  Stephenson shrugged. “Unknown. But our assets in the area have uncovered announcements in the local papers dating from around that time. Warnings of an outbreak of Spanish flu at an orphanage just outside of Weimar, warning people to stay away.”

  “Is that true?” Will asked as he studied the doctor’s photograph. Perhaps it was an artifact of the grainy reproduction, but the man seemed to regard the camera with a cold, almost clinical expression. Even on what should have been a joyful occasion. “Was there such an outbreak?”

  “Impossible to say. Von Westarp ran the orphanage as a private enterprise, funded with his own money. There are no public records. No death certificates.”

  “So he was taking in kids,” said Lorimer, “but at the same time he didn’t want outside visitors.”

  Marsh added, “And he ran the whole thing on a country estate, family land. Plenty of room for hiding things.”

  Lorimer voiced the key question. “What was he doing?”

  “Isolating them,” Will murmured, almost to himself. “Seeking the ur-language.” The others glanced at him, expecting elaboration. Stephenson appeared particularly keen to know Will’s thoughts. But Will was preoccupied with legends and myths, hoary old tales of the first warlocks.

  “What ever it was, the orphanage ran quietly for most of a decade. Until ’29, when Himmler gifted von Westarp with the rank of SS Oberführer.” Stephenson closed the file. “Here ends the lesson. Now let’s see what Krasnopolsky died to bring us.”

  Lorimer stood. He turned off the lamp, plunging the room into darkness before the clattering projector tossed a bright white square on the screen and the wall behind it. Lorimer nudged the projector, centering it.

  The film began with the Crown seal, and this notice:

  MILKWEED / GRACKLE

  MOST SECRET

  UNAUTHORISED DISSEMINATION OF THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN

  THIS FILM CONSTITUTES TREASON AGAINST THE UNITED KINGDOM OF

  GREAT BRITAIN AND NORTHERN IRELAND AS DEFINED BY PARLIAMENT

  IN THE OFFICIAL SECRETS ACT OF 1920. PUNISHMENT UP TO AND

  INCLUDING EXECUTION MAY RESULT.

  MILKWEED / GRACKLE

  Well, thought Will, I’m in it now.

  The room strobed dark and light so quickly that Will’s eyes ached in the effort to keep up. A parade of images flashed on the screen, sandwiched in moments of darkness. The dark frames were placeholders, he realized, representing the portions of film damaged by fire. After the reel spooled past the outermost layers where fire had done the most damage, the dark stretches grew shorter. But not enough to make viewing easy or comfortable.

  Will struggled to absorb the surreal tableaux. A shirtless man hovering twenty feet above an orchard. Half a second of nothing but a brick wall, then a nude woman standing before it with no transition. A young man with pale eyes laying his hand on an anvil, the film shimmering, the metal sagging. Another man standing halfway inside a wall, like a ghost. A muscular fellow on a leash (a leash?) scowling at a mortar emplacement that imploded upon itself. The ghost man standing in front of a chattering machine gun. The leashed man scowling at an upside-down tank. A soldier throwing something at the anvil man, and a flash.

  The subjects of the film wore belts with dark leads running up to their skulls. Each and every one of them. Repeated viewings didn’t make it any less horrifying.

  They watched the film again. And again. And again.

  Will was so wrapped up trying to assemble the images into a single story—trying to conceive of how von Westarp had achieved these unnatural results—that it wasn’t until the third viewing he noticed an obvious problem.

  “There’s no sound,” he said, breaking the silence.

  “Of course there’s no bleedin’ sound,” said Lorimer. “It’s a silent fucking filmstrip.”

  “That’s a shame,” said Will. When Marsh asked him why, he elaborated. “If we could hear those proceedings, it would be a great boon. Alas, that’s not an option.”

  “So you do think this is supernatural?”

  “Are you not watching the same film as I, Pip? Because I believe I just witnessed a flying man. A flying man. That is not natural.”

  Stephenson said, “What are those things they wear? The belts, and the implants.”

  Will shook his head. “Honestly, I haven’t the faintest idea. This is a form of the craft utterly unknown to me. But I’d like to know how it works.” It looked like magic without blood. Was that even possible?

  Marsh looked at Stephenson, then back to Will. “You’ll do it, then? You’ll help us?”

  “I am at your service,” said Will.

  “Welcome to Milkweed,” said Stephenson.

  four

  9-10 May 1940

  Ardennes Forest, Belgium

  The Götterelektrongruppe sped through a moonlit forest in a six-wheeled Panzerspähwagen. Klaus rode in the back, along with a massive store of replacement batteries. The road swerved around hills and dipped through gullies. The armored scout car had minimal suspension; every bump in the road jostled the occupants as they sped along.

  A two-hundred-meter-wide swath of old-growth forest and underbrush disappeared in their wake, flattened and incinerated in an orgy of willpower. On the left, impenetrable stands of beech and spruce disappeared behind the bulwark of blue fire racing alongside the truck. On the right, centuries-old oaks and sapling firs disintegrated as though ripped apart by a giant thresher.

  The car was designed for a crew of five; they numbered six. Reinhardt and Kammler sat in front, crammed next to their driver. Buhler huddled behind Kammler, in the gunner’s seat. His leg jounced up and down as he yanked on the imbecile’s leash. Gretel was in the rear, next to Klaus, where the radio operator normally sat. She sat with her head tipped back, eyes closed but looking ahead.

  Reinhardt and Kammler drained their packs with wild, amphetamine-fueled abandon. Klaus relayed new batteries up front as his comrades swapped out the depleted packs. At first they had stopped every few kilometers to change the batteries. After a while they had found a rhythm, though, and now they moved like clockwork.

  They were the tip of the spear. By morning, the three Panzerkorps of German Army Group A would barrel through the newly opened forest, circumventing the Maginot Line and tearing into France’s soft, undefended interior.
<
br />   Their leaders called it Operation Sichelschnitt: the cut of the sickle.

  The engine rumble made a contrabass counterpoint to the white noise whoosh of fire and imploding wood stock. Outside, the night smelled like the workshop of an overzealous carpenter, singed sawdust and pulped lumber. It stank inside the car. Kammler had crapped himself.

  “Crush. Crush. Crush,” Buhler rasped. Hours of screaming, then chanting, the same mantra had given his voice the texture of sandpaper.

  At some point during the night, they crossed from Belgium into France, though even with a map it was impossible to tell when or where.

  Gretel sat up. She said, “Fortification, two minutes ahead. Sentries will hear us forty seconds from now.” Klaus shifted his weight as their driver, a combat driving specialist reassigned from the elite LSSAH unit of the Waffen-SS, applied the brakes. “Seventy seconds from now. Ninety.” The truck puttered to a stop. “The sentries will not hear us,” Gretel concluded.

  She turned, smirking. “But Hauptsturmführer Buhler will fall in a thistle when he goes to piss in the woods.”

  “Crazy bitch. You say that every time we stop. You’re trying to make me hold it all night.”

  She shrugged.

  Everyone climbed out. Buhler handed Kammler’s leash over to the driver, who wrinkled his nose. The crackle of underbrush receded as Buhler strode off to relieve himself. Reinhardt leaned against the cab. He lifted a cigarette to his mouth with trembling hands. The amphetamines had him wound so tightly, he almost vibrated. Moonlight shone in the whites of his eyes. A tiny orange flame momentarily engulfed the tip of the cigarette. Klaus knew that the cigarette wouldn’t mask the taste in Reinhardt’s mouth.