Rogue Spy (9 page)

Doyle saw it in an instant. “Great gibbering frogs. Camille Leyland.”

“They didn't slip her into the home of some general or Foreign Office drone, hoping she'd come across a code once in a while. They were more ambitious. She went to the top codebreakers in England. The Leylands.”

Doyle said, “They put her right under my nose.”

“Couilles du diable,”
Hawker whispered.

“She played me for a fool,” Doyle said.

“Consistently and with panache,” Hawk said. “She comes from France. She miraculously washes ashore in a shipwreck. She just happens to be the Leylands' niece. It was always too
much of a coincidence. Why didn't I see that?” Hawker kicked at something in the street.

“Because I told you she was genuine.” Doyle grimaced. “A hundred witnesses saw the girl stagger ashore. She was half-drowned and bruised head to foot from tumbling on the rocks. When I questioned her, I saw a little girl, shaking with fever, letter perfect, and innocent as a rose. I believed her.”

The Tuteurs were meticulous when they made a placement. His own story had been just as good. “You could have talked to her for a week and never caught her in a lie. At the Coach House we were trained to resist interrogation.” He stepped off the pavement into the street. “You can't imagine how well we were trained.”

Hawker fell into step beside him. “You know where she is.”

“I know where a Leyland would be and she's been a Leyland for the last decade.” Vérité had become Cami. He knew where a Cami would be.

Doyle, with no break in the appearance of good-natured indolence, was at his other side. “She was ten years old. Even the French didn't send ten-year-old Cachés.”

“She was twelve and scrawny as a twig.”

“She didn't sell secrets.” Hawk found another rock on the street to kick. “We'd have spotted her the first time we lost a Leyland code. What the hell has she been doing all these years if she's not selling English secrets?”

Hiding.
“If that bastard gets his hands on her, she'll spill every code she's ever seen. Every secret she's read. He could make stones talk.” They'd reached the top of Paternoster Row, looking down the line of streetlamps. “That's what the bastard's after. The Leyland codes. She's gone to ground at—”

“Braid's Bookshop,” Doyle said. “Specializing in the literature of France, Germany, and Italy. The Leylands shop there when they come to town.”

“They shop everywhere,” Hawker said. “When I was doorkeeper at Meeks Street they used to send me all over town, looking for some Greek commentary on horseradishes.”

Doyle said, “But Braid's for the code books. Cheap editions printed in Paris or Vienna. Inconspicuous. Replacements available everywhere. And the owner's apartment at Braid's is empty.”

They were walking away from the streetlamp, stepping on their shadows. None of them made any noise except the soft words, back and forth.

“Now, that I didn't know,” Hawk said.

“You been in France.” Doyle loosened up his coat, making it just that one bit easier to get to his gun. “The finer points of life in this great metropolis have escaped your attention. The old man's wife died . . . it must be six months ago. He moved in with his daughter and I don't think they've rented out the upstairs. They hadn't last time I went by.”

They stopped, together, at the alley that ran behind the houses on this side of the street. Braid's was six houses ahead, marked by a glow of light in the shop window. Wind reshaped the mist, revealing the street for twenty yards, then taking it back again. They were all getting wet.

“I love unoccupied premises.” Hawk patted his chest, checking knives, following Doyle's example. “As the professional milling cove among us, I suggest we call in Stillwater and McAllister to watch the shop. You, Pax, and I go in the back way. We—”

“I go in alone.”

A long pause.

“You want to do that?” Doyle asked. “She's already attacked you once.”

“I'll be more careful.”

Silence. Waiting.

He said, “I may convince her to talk. We were friends once. No.” He cut off what Hawk was about to say. “This isn't as simple as dragging one more Caché out of hiding. We need the information inside her.” He glanced at Doyle. “It's important.”

Doyle didn't point out that a traitor took a lot on himself, giving orders. “We could convince her to talk at Meeks Street.”

“Not by any method you'd be willing to use. She knows how to keep silent. As I say, we were trained.”

Doyle took another half minute, then nodded. “It's your decision.”

His decision. He imagined the moment of capture.
Overwhelming fear and then a fight she had no chance of winning. His gut kept saying it was wrong to give Vérité to the Service. He couldn't remember a time he'd had to push himself forward on one path when every instinct badgered him to take another. “Give me time with her.”

“Some time. Then you need to report to Meeks Street. Galba's patience is not infinite.” Doyle paused and said, “Don't let her get behind you.”

“I won't.” He pulled his mind to the last details that had to be arranged. This game could end in a lot of different ways. “Put McAllister and Stillwater on the front, left and right. You, if you will, take the far end of the alley, watching the back of Braid's. Hawk takes this end. That corner, where he's out of this wind. This isn't the weather for somebody with a bullet hole in him.”

“Bullet wounds are no match for my well-practiced stoicism,” Hawk murmured.

“I'll go in the window up there.” It was an upper-floor window on the front. Almost certainly, Vérité was sleeping in the back of the shop, near a fast escape. With luck, she wouldn't hear him breaking in.

Doyle studied him for one more minute. “You're sure you want to do this?”

“There's a good chance she'll talk to me if I'm alone.” He buttoned his coat so it wouldn't get in his way.

Hawk said, “Going by past behavior, there's a good chance she'll slit your throat.”

The window was fifteen feet up. “I will hold that thought in mind.”

He clamped his throwing knife in his teeth and backed down the pavement. He ran, hit Doyle's cupped hands, and took the leap upward. Caught the windowsill with his fingers and hung. Found a toehold in the brick and pulled himself up.

It is not enough to know how to ride. One must know how to fall.

A BALDONI SAYING

She slept darkly and dreamlessly. Someone touched her shoulder.

She came up clawing. Hitting out with the heel of her hand. Then he had her wrists trapped, caught, pushed to the straw she slept upon. A ton of solid muscle held her down. Her legs tangled in the wool of her cloak, kicking uselessly.

Shadows resolved into a face leaning over her. He said, “Don't fight me.”

Devoir.
It was Devoir.

She froze.

His fingers settled to a better grip on her wrists. He said, “Hello again, Vérité.”

She could curl upward, ram her head into his face, break his nose . . .

And that was an exercise in the futile. Even if he didn't know exactly what she was planning, and she was quick enough to batter him raw, he wouldn't let go. You could grind Devoir neatly into sausage and he wouldn't let go.

His body pressed like rocks. His breath blew hot on her face. Strands of his colorless hair hung between them. Her
gun, loaded and ready, hidden under the rolled-up dress she was using as a pillow, could have been in Northumberland for all the good it did her.

She considered this abrupt reversal of fortune from every possible angle and didn't like it. “I wasn't expecting you.”

“You should have.” For a minute, his eyes glittered, fierce and unreadable. Abruptly, his weight was gone from her. He curled to his feet and stood looking down. “We didn't finish talking.”

The British Service had found her. Her long deception was finished. Time to pay the piper. Icicles of panic shivered in her muscles.

Slowly, she pushed herself up to sitting. Her fingers brushed the pistol grip.

“Don't,” he advised.

There are opportune moments for violent ambush. This did not seem to be one of them. She stretched her arms out, resting her elbows on her raised knees, on the cloak she'd used as her blanket. She intertwined her fingers, looking harmless.

He said, “Get over by the wall. Leave that cloak where it is. I want to see your hands the whole time.”

“I'm in my shift.”

“I've seen you naked.”

They'd all seen each other naked in the spartan dormitory at the Coach House. When they were Cachés. When they were children, spies in training, miserable and deadly. When they'd been friends. “I was twelve. Nobody was interested.”

“I'm not interested now. Get up.” The words scraped out of his throat one by one. If he still hurt, so many hours after she'd thrown the
mélange de tabac
at him, he wasn't going to be in a forgiving mood.

She drew herself together against the cold, feeling hollow and weak. Once, she'd been questioned by men from the British Service. They'd been gentle with her because she looked like a child and they believed her well-practiced lies. The men who came for her this time would not be gentle. They wouldn't believe her and they wouldn't forgive her for deceiving them.

If they were in this house, they were quieter than smoke.

Devoir said, “Stand up. Get back against the wall.”

Not Devoir. Paxton. She would think of him as Pax and remove the last familiarity from her mind. Pax, the stranger. Pax, the unknown and unknowable. Dangerous Pax.

She kneed out from under her cloak, stood, and backed away till her spine encountered bookshelves. She was a model of docility.

“Very wise,” he said.

Thin red firelight leaked through the open door from the front of the shop, the half-banked fires that kept the damp out of the books. He crossed the room like a tall shadow, uncannily silent, and knelt on the pile of packing straw she'd slept in. He kept a prudent eye in her direction.

She said, “You're safe from attack. You're four stone heavier than I am and expecting it.”

“I'm glad we both realize that.” He pulled the pistol from under her makeshift pillow. Fluid, shifting gleams ran up and down the barrel as he inspected it. “Nice gun.” He weighed it in his hand. “It's light.”

“I hollowed out the stock.” The first shock was ebbing away. She tucked her hands under her armpits to keep them warm. It also hid her breasts. She was shaking. In the most dire of her nightmares, she'd never imagined facing Devoir as an enemy, having given him so much cause to be furious with her. “I wasn't going to shoot you.”

At least, she didn't think so. She hadn't considered the matter in depth. “I don't shoot old friends.”

He tapped the pistol butt on the floor to knock the powder out and make the gun useless. “That's reassuring.”

“If I did, your colleagues would be on me like a pack of wolfhounds. Where are they, by the way?”

“Here and there.” Pax wore the same dark clothes he'd had on in the afternoon, inconspicuous in the night. His hair was undisguised, pale as old ivory. He laid the gun aside. “Let's see what other deadly things you're carrying.”

His voice was deep and gravelly from the slight damage she'd done to it earlier with the
mélange de tabac
. He set about plundering her cloak with intent, efficient motions. He was not, she thought, merry hearted and forgiving.

“Knife,” he said, finding one. “And surprise, surprise, another knife.” He slipped that one from its sheath, admired it, then tossed both of them down beside the pistol. He began pulling four-inch pins from the seam of her cloak. “You're a walking armory.”

“I'm not generally. Weeks go by and I'm innocent of anything but one little penknife to cut package string. Most days, I couldn't menace a stalk of asparagus.” Not being obvious about it, she felt along the shelves behind her. Books were of no use in this situation, but perhaps someone had left a pair of scissors. “I'm no longer carrying a little silver box full of ground pepper and snuff. That bolt has been shot, so to speak. There's some wire you haven't found yet. It's in—”

“Stop that.” He didn't look up. He meant, stop searching the shelves, which he had somehow noticed her doing.

There probably wasn't anything to find anyway. She hugged herself close and awaited events. Was it a good sign that no one else from the British Service had popped in? Could Pax possibly be working alone? “How did you find me?”

“I asked the pigeons.” He located the wire in the hem of her skirt and drew it out.

“That's not a weapon. Merely useful. And it's the end of your discoveries. I don't expect you to believe me, though.”

“I don't.”

She was chilly with nothing but her shift between her and the night. Her nipples had drawn up tight, making little peaks against the linen. Cold and a bit painful. Also immodest. She covered up as well as she could. It was silly to think of modesty and impossible not to.

He'd finished investigating her rolled dress and moved on to the pockets, showing no interest in breasts. “You have a penknife.” It hit the pile of knives and metal darts with a musical chink.

“I'd forgotten that. Can't think why. You never know when you'll have to penknife somebody to death.” She could, in fact, kill someone with it if she had to. As Pax knew. “My father used to say the most deadly weapon is the human mind. I agree in principle, but I'd rather face a hundred philosophers than even one gun.”

Pax was silent in response, a silence she'd call hostile and problematic.

“Nice set of lockpicks.” He added them to the pile. “So. You weren't quite disarmed.”

“Picklocks aren't weapons.”

“You could poke my eyes out.”

“I don't need little iron sticks to do that.” She'd use her thumbs, as they'd been taught. They'd learned those lessons, the two of them sitting side by side, cross-legged in the dirt, in the courtyard of the Coach House.

“I hope that completes the arsenal. I'm going to be irritated if I search you and find something else.” He pushed her clothes away and uncoiled upward and came toward her.

He was fast. There was nowhere to retreat. He pushed her back against the shelves, his arm across her chest like an iron bar. Lines of wood dug in, up and down her spine.

He snapped, “What does he want?”

“Who?”

“Try again.” His arm pushed the breath out of her. “What . . . does . . . he . . . want?”

Smith. He meant Smith. “I don't know.”

“Keep lying and this will be a very short conversation. We'll finish it at Meeks Street.”

“Wait.” Her voice wavered at the edges. She steadied it. “Just . . . wait.”

“Where is he? Why is he in London? What game are you two playing?”

“No game. I'd rather stuff live rats in my shift than play games with that man. I've seen him precisely once. We didn't exchange addresses.”

“Why did you meet him?”

His back was to the door and all the light. His face was hidden, utterly. She spoke to darkness and she told the truth. “About a week ago, I got a letter, a nasty little missive full of threats and blackmail. I came to London to meet the blackmailer. When you walked into that church, I thought it was you.”

“Really?” The word fell like ice, arctic cold.

“For six seconds. Acquit me of more stupidity than that. If you wanted something from me, you wouldn't write letters.
You'd track me down to a storeroom at the back of a bookstore and bark questions into my face. You'd half choke me while you were doing it.”

He stopped pushing his arm into her chest and took her shoulders instead, shaping his hands to get well acquainted. “What's he doing in London? What does he want?”

This was not, perhaps, the moment to explain how much she knew about England's secret codes. So she said, “I have no idea.”

Pax's thumbs twitched in the delicate indentation where collarbone met the bones of the shoulder. They'd been taught how to torture captives, starting there, where unbearable pain lay just below the surface. Their teachers had made sure they experienced that pain.

She felt him carefully, deliberately, loosen his grip and slide his hands downward to manacle her arms.

“Here's good advice,” he said. “Don't trust that man. Don't believe anything he promises. And don't lie to me.”

She could feel anger inside him, like the dark orange coal in a hearth that flares into fire unexpectedly, all at once. She knew him in this mood. In the Coach House, Devoir used to sit up at night, staring into the dark, brooding, radiating this kind of tightly wrapped rage.

He'd never let it loose. She wondered if he'd do so now. “Let's talk first. You can hurt me later, if you still want to.”

“I'm not hurting you. I'm not even making you nervous.”

“I beg to differ.” Held this way, she couldn't shrug, but he'd feel the twitch.

Somewhere in the long years, Pax had become tall. She hadn't needed to look so far up to talk to him when they were children. He'd been thin then. Now he had the stripped-down frame of someone who'd pushed himself relentlessly, too hard and too long.

What did it say of a man that his hands were callused from fingertip to palm? That his forearms were wire-hard muscle under the skin? She read years of self-discipline in his body where it weighed, honed and hard, against her. There was no hint of compromise anywhere in the compendium of him.

She'd fought Devoir on the practice field when they were
children. He was stronger. She was faster. Sometimes he won. Sometimes she did. They'd slap the ground and stand up and begin again. If they fought now, she wouldn't win without hurting him badly. She might not win even then.

London was filled with amiable fools. It was a pity one of them hadn't waylaid her. “This is pointless. You don't have to extract information from me like a toothdrawer pulling teeth. Everything important is in that letter I sent to Meeks Street. Read it.”

“It's in code.”

“Decipher it.” When the Fluffy Aunts came, they'd have it worked out in ten minutes. She wriggled inside his hold, against his body. “I haven't been benign to you recently, but if I promise to be inoffensive for five or six minutes, will you give me enough space to scratch my nose?”

“Bear the discomfort.”

Supportez l'inconfort. C'est votre sacrifice à la Révolution.
She remembered cold days, hungry nights. Hours in the bare training field, hurting with a dozen kinds of pain, body and mind. The Tuteurs said, “Bear the discomfort. It's your sacrifice to the Revolution.”

In those days, Devoir had been a rock of strength for all of them, endlessly strong, endlessly patient. She missed him. This stranger was no substitute.

Paxton—most definitely he was Paxton, not Devoir—wrapped himself the whole length of her body, reading the tension of her muscle, ready to predict any attack before she made the first twitch. He was nicely graded force, intelligently applied. One must applaud.

But any man on earth can be persuaded. A judicious mixture of lies and truth could work wonders. “You're expecting great revelations. I'd rather you didn't.”