Chapter 36 Will
Will
Thomas was asleep finally. The doctor had given him something for the pain that had pulled him under within minutes. He’d fought it, of course. Tried to stay awake, stay alert, stay ready for whatever came next, but the drugs had won the day.
I watched him from the doorway, drinking in the slow rise and fall of his chest, and the way his hand curled against the pillow where I’d been lying, as though, even in rest, he reached for me.
I pulled the door closed as quietly as I could and made my way down the hall to the kitchen.
The farmhouse was quieter now. The American team had retreated to one of the outbuildings for their own debriefing, and the Baroness had finally allowed herself to rest in a puffy leather chair by the fireplace.
Her eyes were closed, though I suspected she wasn’t really sleeping.
Bisch had resumed his post by the window with his rifle leaned against the wall within arm’s reach.
“He’s asleep,” I said as I stepped up beside Bisch.
He nodded but didn’t turn.
“I need to make a call.” I didn’t have to tell him who would be on the other end.
“There is a village,” he said, finally looking in my direction without turning his body away from the window. “It is twelve kilometers to the southwest. It is barely a dot on the map, but there is a post office with a telephone. It should be open by now.”
“Can you drive me?”
“I can.” He reached for his coat. “Should we bring the Baroness?”
“Let her rest. I’ll be back before anything happens.”
He studied me for a moment, then nodded. “The car is out front.”
The drive was silent. Bisch wasn’t a talker under the best of circumstances, and these were far from the best of circumstances.
The road wound down from the farmhouse through snow-covered fields, past shuttered chalets and frozen streams. The sun was fully up now, pale and cold, casting long shadows across the landscape.
I stared out the window and tried not to think about Thomas.
It didn’t work.
Every time I closed my eyes, I imagined him struggling to stay upright on an ice-covered bridge. Then I recalled the doctor’s grim expression as he assessed the damage.
All because he’d done exactly what we were supposed to do.
That was the part that kept spinning in my head like a dreidel that refused to fall, the part I couldn’t let go of. For once—for once—we’d actually followed orders. “Observation only,” Manakin had said. “Document the attacks, gather evidence, do not engage.”
Thomas had done exactly that.
He’d photographed the warehouse, stayed hidden, and avoided confrontation.
And he’d still nearly died.
I wanted to kill him for that alone. The stupid man just couldn’t manage to keep from getting shot or stabbed on missions. With his luck, he’d probably get assaulted by a carrier pigeon if there were no guns around.
I’d probably lost a decade of life while worrying over his broken body—and we’d barely been in this spy game for a decade. How was I supposed to survive our next ten or twenty years of slinking about the world in shadows?
Despite being a good little spy and following Manakin’s instructions, the Order had found Thomas anyway. They’d hunted him through the streets of Bern, chased him into the river, and shot at him in the middle of the night.
He’d done everything right, and it hadn’t mattered.
I wondered what Manakin would say about that.
The village was barely large enough for a name.
The tiny sign welcoming us to the community was filled with so many letters and accent marks that I knew I’d never be able to pronounce, much less remember, it.
A handful of buildings clustered around a single street.
At the center stood a church with a pointed steeple.
To its right was a post office that doubled as a general store.
Bright lights inside illuminated two rows of mailboxes.
Beyond them were aisles of shelves filled with food and sundries.
This village looked like the kind of place where everyone knew everyone and strangers stood out like blood on fresh snow.
Bisch pulled the car to a stop in front of the post office but kept the engine idling.
“I will wait here,” he said. “It looks like the power is still on in this town, so you should be able to make your call. If there is trouble—”
“There won’t be.”
He shot me a look that said he’d heard that before, but didn’t argue.
I got out of the car and walked into the post office.
A middle-aged woman blinked at me through thick glasses from behind the counter.
Her gaze held the wary curiosity of someone who didn’t see many outsiders.
I smiled, asked about the telephone in my best German.
She stared a moment before pointing toward a wooden booth in the corner.
The booth smelled like cigarette smoke and varnish. Neither was pleasant. Inhaled together, I nearly gagged.
I closed the door, lifted the receiver, and dialed.
The line crackled. Clicked. Hummed.
Then: “Yes?”
It was Manakin’s voice, flat and tired. I checked my watch and did the mental math. It was the middle of the night in Washington.
“Manakin, Emu,” I said.
A pause.
His voice sharpened. “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you for six hours.”
“We’ve been busy, sir.”
“Busy?” The word dripped with something between anger and exhaustion. “I get a flash report about shit going down in Bern, and then I hear nothing. For six fucking hours, you give me nothing?”
I didn’t respond.
Another pause.
“Is Condor alive?”
“Yes, sir. He’s alive.”
I heard Manakin exhale—a long, slow breath that carried more emotion than he’d ever admit existed.
“How bad is he?”
“Bad enough, but he’s out of danger. His shoulder wound reopened, he had hypothermia, and the blood loss was pretty severe.
He’s stable now, but it was close.” I leaned against the wall of the booth.
I knew how close he’d come to dying, but saying it out loud somehow made it even more real.
My legs threatened to buckle right there in the phone booth.
“He had to slog through the river. I don’t know how long he spent in freezing water before Bisch found him. ”
“Jesus Christ.” Manakin was quiet for a moment. “I already know about the attacks. The French have assets in place who reported everything in real time. My counterpart in Paris kept me on the horn to listen. Please tell me you two didn’t get into another firefight on foreign soil.”
The shift to mission talk steadied me.
“No, sir. Even Condor followed orders and just observed. We managed to capture seventy-two exposures from the warehouse, plus everything the other team got from the secondary sites. The Baroness’s man delivered them to a journalist at the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
The story should be hitting newsstands right about now. ”
“Should be?”
“We’re in a farmhouse outside of Bern. We won’t know if it worked until—”
“It worked.” Manakin’s voice was grim. “I just got word from our station in Bern. The paper ran a full front-page exposé. Your Baroness also made headlines in Paris, New York, Washington, and a dozen other major cities. The papers printed names, photographs, bank records . . . the whole thing. The Federal Council will convene any minute now.”
My heart lurched. “And?”
“We’ll know soon. The President is monitoring everything from the White House. The Director woke him up an hour ago.”
“Shit,” was all I could think to say. Then my mind left the White House and drifted back to our mission. “Condor did it, sir,” I said. “He’s the one who got the warehouse photographs. He’s the one who nearly died for them.”
“I know.” Manakin’s voice softened slightly—as close to gentle as he ever got. “I know what it cost. And I know you’re angry.”
“I’m not angry.”
“Bullshit.” There was no heat in it, just recognition. “You’re furious. At me, at the situation, at the whole goddamn system that put him in that position. And you have every right to be.”
I didn’t say anything. What was Manakin saying? What was he admitting?
“For once in your goddamned lives, you followed orders,” Manakin continued. “And Condor still nearly got killed.” A pause. “I’m sorry for that, but that’s the job, Emu. It doesn’t matter how careful you are, how good you are, how perfectly you follow the rules, sometimes people die anyway.”
“That might be the weirdest thing anyone has ever said to comfort me.”
Manakin actually snorted into the phone.
“I’m not your priest with soothing words.
I’m trying to make you understand.” His voice hardened.
“You think I don’t know what it’s like? You think I haven’t watched good men die following my orders?
That I haven’t sent people into situations I knew they might not come back from?
” He laughed—a bitter, humorless sound. “I’ve been doing this for more years than you two have been alive.
I’ve buried more friends than I can count—and every single time, I’ve asked myself the same question you’re asking now: Was it worth it? ”
“Was it?” I swallowed. Manakin had never opened up about his past or experience or anything, really, but his words resonated with truths I couldn’t deny. “Was it worth it?”
“I don’t know.” For the second time on that call, I nearly lost my balance at Manakin’s honest admission.
“Sometimes I think so. Other times, I think we’re all just playing games while the world burns around us.
Then something like this happens, and I think maybe, just maybe, we’re making a difference. ”
“Nothing’s been stopped yet, sir.”
“No, but we’ve done our part. Thanks to my two most frustrating, stubborn operatives, we’ve given Switzerland a chance to survive.”
I let my head rest against the wall of the booth, and tried to feel some pride in what we’d done. Win or lose, Manakin was right. We’d done what we could. We hadn’t sat idly by while the world fell to pieces. We’d stepped into the breach, where other men might’ve stood frozen.
Then I thought about Thomas, about the way he’d held on to me like I was the only thing keeping him anchored to the earth, the only thing keeping him alive.
“He almost died,” I said quietly, my voice cracking despite my best effort to remain strong. “Following orders. Doing exactly what you told us to do.”
“I know, son.”
“If Bisch had been five minutes later—”
“I know.” Manakin’s voice was heavy. “And . . . for what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”
“Thank you, sir,” came out of my mouth without conscious thought. All I could see was Thomas’s broken body lying on the bed, his blood soaking sheets and blankets and—
“I want you two out of Switzerland tonight,” Manakin said. “The President wants the Swiss to take the credit for this. He thinks it will strengthen the remaining councilors.”
“Assuming we win the day.”
“Right,” Manakin agreed. “Assuming that.”
There was a pause—so long I wondered if Manakin was still on the line.
“And Emu?” He stilled my hand before I could hang up.
“Yes, sir?”
“Take care of each other, will you?”
A heartbeat passed, and the line went dead.
I stood in the phone booth for a long moment, the receiver still pressed to my ear, listening to the static.
Take care of each other.
From Manakin, that was practically a declaration of love.
I hung up the phone and stepped out of the booth. The woman behind the counter gave me a curious look. I’d been in there longer than a normal call warranted. I smiled, paid for the call, and walked back out into the cold.
Bisch was leaning against the car, smoking a cigarette. He straightened when he saw me.
“Trouble?”
“No. Just a long report.” I climbed into the passenger seat. “We need to be out of Switzerland by tonight.”
“The Baroness suspected as much.” He started the car. “She has already made arrangements.”
Of course she had. The Baroness was always three steps ahead.
We pulled out of the village and began the winding drive back up to the farmhouse. The sun was higher now, the snow glittering like diamonds in the morning light. It was beautiful—the kind of beauty that felt almost obscene after everything that had happened.
“He will recover,” Bisch said quietly.
I looked at him. “What?”
“Your partner.” Bisch kept his eyes on the road.
“I have seen men come back from worse. He is strong and very stubborn.” A pause.
“He fought the entire time I was dragging him to the car. He kept trying to tell me about the photographs, about keeping the film dry. Even half conscious, he was thinking about the mission.”
“That sounds like him.”
“It is a rare thing.” Bisch went quiet for a moment. “The Baroness sees it in both of you. That is why she trusts you.”
“She told you that?”
“She did not need to.” He glanced at me. “I have been with her for many years. I know what she values. I see who she lets close.” Another pause. “You are the first outsiders she has trusted since . . . since her husband died.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
The Baroness’s husband had died in 1943. He’d been killed by the Nazis, according to the fragments of her history I’d pieced together. The Baroness had lived through nine years of solitude, nine years of building walls.
And for some unfathomable reason, she’d let us through.
“Thank you,” I said finally. “For saving him, for being there when—”
“Do not thank me.” Bisch’s voice was flat.
“I did what the Baroness would have wanted, what any decent man would have done.” He turned the car onto the narrow road that led up to the farmhouse.
“We should all be thanking him for having the courage to finish the mission even when it was killing him.”
I would. I’d thank Thomas for the rest of my life if I had to. For the mission and so much more. But first, I needed to see him. I needed to watch him breathe, feel his heartbeat, and remind myself that he was real and alive and still here.
The farmhouse came into view. Smoke curled from the chimney. Thick snow capped its rooftop, and the morning sun painted its walls in shades of gold.
“Bisch?”
“Yes?”
“The Baroness. What she said about trusting us—” I hesitated. “Does that mean you trust us, too?”
His hands seemed to squeeze the steering wheel a bit tighter as his eyes darted from the road to me. Then, as he pulled the car to a stop in front of the farmhouse, he said, “I trust the Baroness’s judgment. That is enough.”
It wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement, but from Bisch, it was something.
I got out of the car and walked toward the farmhouse door. Behind me, I heard Bisch lighting a cigarette.
Inside, Thomas was probably still asleep.
I pushed open the door and went to find him.