About a half mile from headquarters the path wound through a thick patch of ferns and then dropped into an open glade. June hesitated for a moment and when Aelric did not emerge on the path that came out of the depression, she dropped to her hands and knees and crept forward.
She knew the glade well enough. By day it was a pleasant spot and once or twice she and Danny had come this way to picnic and make love. Under the full moon their pleasant little picnic spot was transformed into something completely different.
Through a break in the lacy foliage June caught a glimpse of movement in the glade. Oblivious to the damage to her dress, she pressed herself flat to the earth and slowly wormed her way forward through the overhanging ferns.
The moon was high and its silvery light poured into the clearing. Duke Aelric stood in the middle of the open space and he was not alone. There was another cloaked figure beside him, nearly as tall as he was. Then Aelric moved and June saw it was Lisella.
She was near as pale as the moonlight itself and her hair cascaded down her back dark as the forest shadows. Like Aelric she was wearing a cloak with the hood thrown back. To a normal mortal she would have been heartbreakingly beautiful, but June dug her fingers into the soil and pressed herself flatter at the sight.
Neither of the elves spared a glance for their surroundings. They were deep in conversation. The liquid tones of elf speech did not carry well, but June could see clearly enough.
Lisella was speaking quickly, her eyes focused on Duke Aelric’s face. Aelric heard her out without changing expression and then said something with a half-smile that made her draw back and bite out a retort.
From her hiding place June watched intently. Normally elves were impassive or half-mocking when they spoke to each other. She had never seen them talk together like this.
Lisella faced Aelric square on and said something. Aelric half-nodded, as if agreeing with her, and then responded calmly. Lisella seemed to have trouble controlling her temper. She said something short and sharp.
Aelric made a chopping motion with his hand and turned away, as if to leave. Lisella’s voice caught and held him. He turned back to her. Without moving closer he spoke firmly to her. She looked at him closely and then shrugged.
Lisella cocked her head and said something with a mocking little smile. Aelric nodded.
She arched an eyebrow slightly but he said nothing and stood firm. At last she nodded and spoke. He bowed formally and she responded with a half-curtsey. Then she turned and swept out of the clearing. Aelric stood watching her for a moment and then took the moonlit path back toward headquarters.
June remained flat on her belly under the ferns for a long time before she rose cautiously and slipped back to the fortress.
Wiz got an early start the next morning and by the time Danny arrived in the lab he was deep in his latest project.
"You know your buddy, the elf dude?" the young programmer said as soon as he stepped into the room.
"It’s elf duke," Wiz said without looking up from the code he was debugging.
"Whatever. Anyway you know Lisella, the one you said was trying to kill you?"
Wiz looked up cautiously. "Yeah?"
"Did you know Aelric’s meeting her here?"
"What? How do you know that?"
"June saw them out in the forest last night. She says it looked like they were arguing about something."
"So June’s still following Aelric."
"You ought to be glad someone is," Danny snapped. "Didn’t you hear what I said? He’s meeting with the one who’s trying to kill you!"
"She’s not trying to kill me anymore."
"She sure wasn’t trying to do you any good when she showed up at the City of Night."
Wiz laid down the scroll he was holding. "Look, I don’t know why Aelric’s meeting Lisella. But right now we can’t afford to alienate him. So tell June to lay off, will you?"
Danny stared at him, hard. "Man, you’re goddamn blind! You just don’t want to see, do you?" With that he turned on his heel and stomped out of the lab.
In the next hour Wiz got maybe two lines of code written. Finally he gave it up and went to find Moira.
Moira was in the storeroom, overseeing the stocking of a load of supplies which had been brought over the Wizard’s Way that morning. While the servants bustled about, Wiz took her off in a corner and told her June’s tale.
"A human spying on elves?" she said when Wiz had finished. "It seems unlikely. They can pass unseen by mortals as easily as they breathe."
"Yeah, but if anyone could do it, it would be June. Besides, magic doesn’t work as well here, remember?"
The hedge witch wrinkled her brow. "To be sure it is an unlikely tale for her to concoct. Well, if it is true, then we must be even more careful with our elf duke."
"I thought you trusted him, more or less."
"Less now than before."
"I don’t know, though. If he wanted to harm us there are a lot easier ways to do it. Why go through all this rigamarole of pretending to ally with us?"
"Well," Moira said, "it is said that elves are tricksome and strange."
Twenty-one: THE GREAT PLANE ROBBERY
Ivan Semonovich Kuznetsov, major in the GRU, snapped awake and sought groggily for the thing that had awakened him.
The four big Ivchenko turboprop engines on the wings of the AN 12 transport beat steadily as the plane bore east and a little north toward Leningrad. His cheek was slightly numb from the cold and vibration where it had rested against the metal side of the cabin.
But there had been something…
He shook it off. Too much vodka last night, that was all. Truly it was a terrible thing to grow old. Not that thirty-three was old, but he could no longer drink the night away and rise fresh with the dawn.
But this dawn there was cause enough for celebration. Snug in the belly of the aircraft was the newest, fastest graphics supercomputer the Americans made. In a few hours it would be in Leningrad and Major Ivan Kuznetsov could expect to share in the rewards of a job well done.
The computer had traveled a long and shifty path from the factory in Texas. It had originally been ordered for a research institute in England, but by a carefully staged "coincidence" it had been diverted to Austria and from there on to what had been East Germany where the Soviet intelligence service still had friends. Kuznetsov had some small part in all of that. Now he was accompanying it on the last leg of its trip to the Soviet Union.
Where it would go once it reached Soviet soil he did not know and would never have dreamed to ask. There were many important projects in the motherland that required computers which were beyond the current abilities of the socialist nations to build. Since the Americans still would not sell such computers openly, the nation relied on the GRU, the intelligence arm of the Red Army, to acquire them in other ways.
"Comrade Major…" Kuznetsov jerked fully awake. Whenever one of his subordinates addressed him as "comrade" he knew something had gone wrong.