Rogue Spy (4 page)

If the box is opened even a crack, all the secrets escape.

A BALDONI SAYING

In the cool dark of the church, Pax looked down at black, black curls and skin that glowed like a wash of ochre over rose madder. Vérité never lost that gold color to her skin, even in the middle of winter.

He'd said, “I barely know you,” but it wasn't true.

Ten years had fined down her features and taken the childish plumpness from her cheeks, but the set of the eyes was the same, girl or woman. The long, strong planes of that stubborn face hadn't altered. The bones are immutable.

Some indefinable interior quality of Vérité remained as well. An unflappable toughness. An ironic intelligence. Whatever it was, it looked up at him from behind the same familiar brown eyes.

There was no better place to confront her. It was private as a tomb in here. Without preamble, he said, “You sent a letter to Meeks Street. Why?”

“Is that where you saw me? In Braddy Square?”

“Feeding birds. You made a pretty picture.”

Her shoulders lifted a fraction of an inch. “That was a mistake, then. Another mistake was waiting to see the message
delivered. One can be too conscientious. Next time, I'll wrap the letter around a spontaneous rock and throw it through the window.”

“That works, too. You sent a letter to Galba. What did you put in the paper, Vérité?”

A moment passed. “It's not about the words. You're asking if I sent poison in that letter.”

“You had a certain skill with poisons, once upon a time.”

She looked at her hands, there in her lap. “And having that skill, I must use it . . . as if I were an amateur musician, eager to sing a ditty in the drawing room after supper.” Her voice was empty as wind whistling through a crack in the window. “I put that note into the hand of a young boy. There's another, not much older, who answers the door at Meeks Street. And you ask if I poisoned the paper.”

“The child I knew in Paris wouldn't have. You aren't that child.”

She lifted her eyes to meet his.

A decade peeled away and he was back in the Coach House in Paris, learning to be a good, obedient French spy. Vérité, in the schoolroom, head tilted to the side, deciphering code on a slate. Vérité lying to the Tuteurs, her face innocent as an upturned daisy. Vérité, grinning, reaching her hand down to hoist him up over the wall of the Coach House for an expedition, stealing pastries for everybody. Vérité, sharing her dinner with a stray cat.

They'd been friends.

She said, “You opened the letter and saw code. Do you know, a great many troubles in this world would be avoided if we all stopped reading each other's mail.”

She gathered her cloak around her and slid toward him across the place she'd left empty. She wore drab, practical clothing. Spy's clothing. No jewelry. Nothing about her to attract attention. Nothing to flash a warning if she moved quickly.

He hadn't expected to find Vérité still deep in the Game. When he thought of her in the years between, he'd hoped she'd slipped into an ordinary life. Sometimes, lying in a shepherd's hut on the side of a mountain, looking into a fire of pinecones and dried moss, he'd remember her. She was a
piece of his past he wanted to remember. He didn't have that many. He'd pictured her dancing at a country ball or running her fingers down the row of books at a lending library. Painting bad watercolors of some English countryside. Taking music lessons. He'd imagined what she'd look like without any shadows behind her eyes.

She wasn't wearing a wedding ring. He'd thought she'd have a husband by now.

Why didn't you get out of the Game, Vérité? The Tuteurs went to the guillotine and the French lost track of us. You could have been free.

When the records in the Coach House burned, most of the Cachés faded quietly into the populace and became English. Vérité was still a spy, still working for the French.

As he'd chosen to work for the English. Damnable that his last act as an agent would be turning an old friend over to the Service. “How did you get that code?”

“You'll figure it out.” She sat looking at the back of the seat before her, face closed and intent, as if she were reading something written on the wood there. “We missed you, you know. It was hard at the Coach House without you. We fell apart for a while, me and the other Cachés. We depended on you.”

“I told you not to.”

“We did anyway.”

The Tuteurs always took the boy or girl without warning, from a meal or in the classroom. They'd say, “You have been chosen to serve France,” and march them away with nothing but the clothes on their back.

He'd known it would be his turn, sooner or later. He wasn't exempt. He'd never been treated specially.

When the Tuteurs came for him, Vérité stood at her bench, looking stricken, scattering gunpowder and tangled fuse from a half-made bomb. He'd worried what would happen to her—the youngest, the smallest of them—when he was gone.

“We voted Fidélité leader after you left.” She ran her fingertip around the post at the end of the pew.

“Good choice.”

“He did well enough, but he wasn't you. When we parceled out your things, they gave me your blanket.” Laughter flickered
across her face, under the soberness. That was pure Vérité, that glinting, elusive spark that lit up in the middle of some desperate business. “For a week, I went to sleep holding on to it and crying . . . till everybody got tired of that and tossed it out the window. It took me two days to wash the mud out.” She shook herself. “I haven't thought about that in years.”

“A lot of water under a lot of bridges.”

“And some bridges burned forever.” She sighed and stood up, turning so she ended up facing him. Every instant of movement was graceful. Unstudied. She could have been a leaf twirled in the wind. “This is like . . . it's like when Alexander burned his ships on the shore so his army couldn't run away. We have our backs to the sea. Neither of us can retreat.”

“No retreat,” he agreed. In a few moments, one of them would hurt the other. They shared that knowledge without having to say it aloud.

“I'm sorry it's come to this,” she said. “I owe you so much. I would have died of despair in those first days in the Coach House if you hadn't been yelling at me.”

“I never yelled.”

“You became ironic. We were all in awe of you when you were ironic.” She leaned against the end of the pew. Her cloak was weighted on the left side of the front. That would be where she carried a small, reliable pistol. She'd always loved pistols.

It surprised him to find himself looking down at the top of her head. He'd grown since he was fourteen.

“I cared for you, Devoir, with my whole heart, as only a child can care for another child.” She spread her hands, empty, palms up. “Yet here you are and here I am, very close to enemies. I have a sudden urge to say something significant about Fate and Inevitability.”

That sounded like the too-old, too-wise girl he'd known. His Vérité still lived inside this sleek brown stranger with the eloquent hands and the measuring eyes. It wasn't only bones that stayed unchanged year after year.

He wished he didn't have to arrest her. Men like Galba, Grey, and Doyle wouldn't blame her for being a French agent, but they couldn't let her run loose, either. She'd go to
imprisonment in one of the escape-proof houses the Service kept in remote corners of the kingdom. They'd treat her as well as they could.

She took a casual step to the left. “I didn't feel you following me from Braddy Square. You remain an expert at being invisible.”

“Thank you.”

“I'm going to pay dearly for sending that letter. The funny thing is, I meant it for the best. I've stumbled into something the Service needs to be warned about. And two old women are in danger. I was afraid of being killed and taking my knowledge with me across the River Styx.” She edged left again, luring his attention away from the door and whoever was coming here to meet her. Nicely done.

On the training field at the Coach House, they'd been matched for fighting sometimes. They'd signaled cues to each other for the next strike, the next feint, planning a game of attack and defense, keeping the Tuteurs happy with a showy fight, making sure neither of them hurt or got hurt.

They were studying each other now, giving no signals. No clues.

She shifted position along the wall and he matched her, step for step.

“So.” She retreated a little. Retreated again. “The Tuteurs put you into Meeks Street. Does the British Service know you're a French spy?”

“I told them I'm Caché.”
They've known for a couple of weeks now.
No reason to tell her how long and well he'd lied to them.

“That's unfortunate.” She caught her lower lip in her teeth. Hard white teeth making a dent in a soft lip. “I'd hoped to talk my way out of this encounter by threatening you with exposure.”

“Not that easy.” He took a step that ate into the space she'd made between them, driving her left again. Now the sun was in her eyes. His advantage.

“I could tell you how loyal I am to England. Would that convince you to walk out of here and stop making trouble for me?”

“I'll let you sort out your various loyalties at Meeks
Street.” He wished he didn't have to take her there. But Vérité hadn't been playing patty-cake for the last ten years. That ingenious mind had been busy. She'd been acquiring English codes, for one thing.

“My problem”—she gestured, inviting his attention to her problem—“is that you may not have become English. You could have remained loyal to France. A Caché from the Coach House, placed in the belly of the British Service, would be the most valuable agent France could have in England. You may be Police Secrète.”

“I'm not.”

“You'd deny it, of course, to lull me into a false sense of security.”

“It isn't working, is it?”

They'd ended any pretense. Now they circled each other openly in the narrow confines of the aisle between the pews and wall.

Her voice remained calm, her step fluid. “If you've become English, you will arrest me. If you're still French, we've mislaid our recognition signs and you must extinguish me ruthlessly and hide my body under one of these uncomfortable benches. Unless I kill you first. Or we might kill each other like a pair of cocks in an ill-managed cockfight.”

“Nobody's going to kill anyone.” He made it an order.

They faced each other in the empty church, each of them judging the distance between them. It was the length of a single lunge with a knife or a blow with the fist. It was inescapable death from a fired pistol. This was a fighting distance that left no room for retreat or defense. Advantage would go to whoever was first to attack.

Neither of them attacked. Nothing simple was happening here. Nothing straightforward.

She stilled. The lines of her drab clothing hung quiet. The strength of her determination glowed vivid as fire inside her skin. She could have been a candle lit in this churchy gloom.

That was the way she always looked when she fought. Doubly alive. Daring the world to aim a blow in her direction. Dodging it quick as an animal when it came.

The child he'd known had been skinny as a whip, vibrating
with energy, her arms and legs too long for her body, her features too big for her face. Now all the disparate, unsettled, unfinished parts of her had come together. Then, she'd been dangerous. Now she was deadly.

But her voice was full of laughter, same as always. “What do they call you at Meeks Street? Not Devoir. George? Clarence? Percival?”

“Thomas Paxton. Pax.”

“Pax.” She mumbled the syllable around her mouth, tasting it. “Latin for peace. It seems an odd name for a spy.”

“I've always thought so. I don't want to fight you, Vérité.”

“We agree, then. And I'm Cami. I've been Cami for a long time now.”

A thread of recognition spun from the name “Cami.” He couldn't grab hold of it. “Will you come with me to Meeks Street? Come quietly? I don't want to hurt you, Cami.”

“I don't want to hurt you, either.”

Slowly, she ventured a single small step into the space that lay between them. And then the next step. She kept her hands in his sight, held before her, unthreatening. She said, “I'm sad for the memory of an old friendship, lost forever. I owe you a tremendous debt from those days in the Coach House.” They were very close now. Hesitantly, as if her hand made the decision all by itself, she reached toward him. “I come from a family that never forgets debts. I wish . . .”

“There is no debt.”

She touched his cheek. It shocked like a spark from cat fur. She whispered, “I wish . . .”

An awareness of Vérité as a woman had been hovering in his muscles and blood since he'd walked into the church. He'd pushed it away. Ignored it. Denied it.