Rogue Spy (11 page)

That was a drench of cold water in the night.

It replaced Peacock. That made Mandarin the new code for private communication between Galba, Head of Service, and the twenty-four Heads of Section across Europe. Code for the most secret of secrets.

He swung around in the straw and knelt, confronting her. “You aren't carrying that around, are you?”

“Not being mad, no. Even Smith—who thinks I'm stupid as an owl—didn't expect me to arrive with Mandarin in my pocket. I'm to bring it to our next meeting.” She gave one of her almost shrugs. “Where he intends to kill me. Or possibly kidnap and torture me. We will see.”

She knew the importance of what she'd just said. She watched him, hiding the ferocity of her attention under half-closed lids.

The next meeting. This was why he'd followed her across London. This was why he'd come into Braid's Bookshop alone. She could tell him a time and place where the Merchant would be. “You have your own plans for that meeting,” he said. “He won't realize that. He underestimates women. You, he wouldn't understand at all.”

“I am opaque and mysterious. Tonight, however, you will see my forthright side. Ask your questions.”

They were inches apart, with shadows and silence around them. Her pupils were huge. The chaos of her curls fell across her forehead and around her cheeks, making her look ridiculously young. Under her cloak, she pulled her knees to her chest, becoming small, emphasizing how slight she was. How unlikely it was she'd attack anybody. Nobody could be more harmless.

He said, “Why did you meet Smith in the church?”

“The blackmail letter—”

“—Would send you racing to the nearest port, not trotting tamely up to London. You've been ready to run for years.”

He watched her decide what to say, thinking it over carefully. Vérité had been rash sometimes. Cami was older and wiser. She picked out a few words. “He offers me something I want.”

“You must want it badly to come strolling under the nose of the Service.” He let impatience into his voice. “What could be that important?”

“You don't need to know.” A sharp shake of her head. “It's something the British Service would toss away without regard or interest.”

“What?”

“Consider this instead.” She raised her index finger. “He still wears French gloves. He hasn't equipped himself head to foot in English clothes. That argues he hasn't been in England long.”

“Reasonable assumption.”

Two fingers. “He wants Mandarin. Only Mandarin. He's
gone to remarkable effort to get it. Do you see what I'm saying?”

“One specific code implies one very specific need.”

“One operation. Perhaps the Service can imagine what it is. I cannot.” He heard the small clicking sound of Vérité tapping her teeth together. She used to do that when she was adding facts up, seeing patterns in them. Her mind had always fascinated him.

She held up a third finger. “I have one last conclusion about Mr. Smith. He's not only newly come to England, he's working on a tight budget of time. A strict, short allotment of days. Maybe even hours. He was fussy about when and where we meet. It's important. He was angry. I saw one flash of it in his eyes when I tried to change the place and day.”

He knew that anger. No raised voice. No warning. It only showed in the eyes and in the curl of a lip. To a child, it had been terrifying. For an instant his flesh shrank under old pains. Memories of old beatings. The monster had possessed a heavy, self-righteous fist. “He gets angry easily.”

“You know him well, then. I thought so, from your voice.”

There were spies of skill and training. Spies of intuition. Cami had become both. She tilted her head to the side and studied him. “You hate him.”

He didn't answer her.

For what the Merchant had done to his mother, he would die. Bare hands, gun, knife. It didn't matter so long as the Merchant lay dead on the ground at his feet. This time, he'd be sure the job was done right.

“‘It is better to be the rider of a great hatred than to be the one ridden.' My family says that and I share it with you. They have a great many wise sayings.” She let her hand drop to her side. “The meeting place is the last important thing I know. The only secret I'm withholding. If I tell you where and when the meeting is, will you let me go free?”

“No.”

“I see.” She closed her eyes and put her forehead down on the cloak where it covered her knees. She sat that way, breathing quietly, her eyes closed. When she spoke again, it was in the most ordinary tones and her voice was muffled against her
cloak. “If I don't walk down a certain street, on a certain day, at a certain hour, Smith will turn into smoke and blow away. You'll lose him.”

“Tell me the meeting place.”

She looked up to study the straw and floorboards in front of her. “My head is so full of secrets it rattles when I walk. Your Service will lock me up like the Crown Jewels. They'll send a substitute to that rendezvous or try to ambush Smith on the street. And it won't work.” She met his eyes. “You have to let me go so I can meet Mr. Smith.”

“So you can pursue some private exchange with him.”

“If you let me go, you can make sure he dies. You, yourself. There will be no political bargaining that trades a French spy for an English one. No imprisonment he can escape from. No bribes that open doors for him. If you let me go, here and now, I will give you his death, into your own hands.”

“You've found a way to tempt me.” Wise little Vérité, with her pithy sayings, had most certainly grown up. She'd emerged as Cami, with a cynical, supremely clever understanding of her fellow man.

She said, “If you take me to Meeks Street, your superiors will tell the Foreign Office and Military Intelligence. The Police Secrète will know within a day. Military Intelligence is riddled with French spies. Maybe the Service is.”

“I don't think so.”

“I know two French spies placed right in the heart of the Service.” She grinned suddenly, a wry, feral twist of the lips, and he saw the old Vérité again, inside this new Camille. “We were good, weren't we? Except, I never spied. I committed a thousand lies, in every way, right and left, but I swear I never passed code to the French.”

“I believe you.”

“It doesn't matter. I'll pay for all the spying I didn't do. If the Service doesn't kill me—regretfully and humanely, the way you'd put down a good dog—they'll keep me locked up till my secrets cool. Years and years. Unless the French dispose of me. Unless Military Intelligence gets me, which they will, because my crimes fall within their authority. Then I am dead.” She reached her hand out from under the brown wool
and laid it on his arm and watched it there, as if she wasn't sure what it might do. “Do you remember what we swore, all those years ago, in Paris, in the Coach House? The Oath of the Cachés?”

“Childish drama.”

“Your idea. Your words.”

“I was dramatic in those days.”

When he'd come to the Coach House, the Cachés were preying on each other. The strong ones took food and blankets from the weak.

He'd put a stop to it. He wasn't the biggest. He wasn't even the best fighter. But he was used to getting hurt and he had nothing to lose. He fought with a ferocity none of them could match. In a week, he had most of them behind him. In a month, he had them all.

The Oath of the Cachés turned a dozen vicious, broken children into a wolf pack, faced outward against the world. “I made that up because we needed something to believe in. We needed magic.”

She recited softly, “‘To the last extremity, I will never betray another Caché. We are one blood.'” She said it in French, the way they'd said it, crouched in a circle on the floor of that cold attic dormitory.

He hadn't thought about the words in a long time.

She said, “So far as I know, none of us broke the oath. Will you give me to the British Service?”

“I have an oath there, too.”

“I'm no danger to England. I swear it. I'll come to the meeting place with you. I'll be the bait in your trap. I'll give you Smith's head on a platter.” Her fingers tightened. “But don't give me to the Service. Let me go. I'm asking for my life, Pax.”

The obligations of friendship are set in stone.

A BALDONI SAYING

She said, “I'm asking for my life, Pax.”

She called him Pax, the name of the man he'd become.

He loosened the grip of her fingers but kept hold of her hand. When he turned it over, there were shadows in the hollow of her palm as if she held darkness there.

She was the one to speak. “We were friends once. I would have trusted you with my life. You would have trusted me.”

“Not recently.” But she'd picked the right argument. It was unsettling how well she understood him and he understood her. In the long, lying years in the Service, he'd missed having someone to talk to.

He'd already decided what he'd do.

On her palm the lines of fate and fortune were strongly marked, but imperceptible to his fingers. The tendons under the skin were invisible, but he could feel them with the lightest pressure. So many differences between seeing a woman and touching her.

Vérité knew what he'd been and what he was capable of. She'd seen him curled on the ground, shaking, exhausted, and
beaten. She'd seen him commit murder.
She's the one woman I don't have to lie to.

He didn't so much make a decision as accept an inevitability. He might have been waiting ten years to sit across from Vérité in this pile of straw, talking about friendship and trust, the two of them a bare inch from attacking each other. He knew what he was going to do. Some part of him had planned it before he climbed in the window of Braid's Bookshop. He said, “I can say anything to you.”

“You're armed and I'm not. You can recite Dante in the original Italian if you want.”

That made him smile. “Or I can do this.” He kissed the hollow of her hand. Maybe it tickled.

She drew in a breath, sharply. He had her attention.

She said, “Pax?”

The inside of her wrist was filled with the pulse beat. He ran a touch up and down the side of her fingers, between one finger and the next, where it was soft. Sensitive, he thought. She'd be sensitive in lots of places.

“What are you doing?” She frowned down to where he explored her hand.

“This.”

They knelt in the straw, facing. He set two fingers under her chin, lifted her attention up to him, and considered the woman who'd grown from the child Vérité. A tilted nose. Raphael would have put that nose on an impudent cherub. Dark eyes making some realizations. The curve of her cheek that held the sensuality of a Caravaggio.

She looked startled all the long moment he leaned to her and convinced her lips open with his and went into her mouth.

“And this,” he said. He felt her surprise. Her lips were full of tiny shocks and a disbelief that held her still, and then the softening. He pursued that softening, demanded it, gave neither of them time to think or plan. He wasn't in the mood to trade calculation with her.

“Now this.” He nuzzled across warm smoothness of cheek and forehead and the planes and valleys of her nose. Into the silly, frivolous ears lost in the ocean of her hair. He'd drawn
the geography of a face a thousand times. This transformed shape, line, light and dark, all shades of color into texture. It overwhelmed thought.

He sucked her lower lip. Softness and slickness. She was . . . oh, she was remarkable. A thousand distinct complexities of her mouth came to life under his tongue.
This is the way it should feel.
Every discovery of shape and taste robbed his brain, tugged at his cock, wound the tension inside him tighter and tighter.

After the first surprise, she wasn't reluctant. She licked into his mouth. Nibbled at the corners of his lips where the skin went thin. Little teeth held his lips, anchoring an instant, stretching, pulling, letting go.

She grabbed her fingers into his jacket. Stretched upward to him. Kneeling, pressed against him. Her mouth became passion incarnate. She was heat and quick breathing and her arms went around him. Under the wool she wore, her shoulders were naked. He pushed the cloak away and put his hands on her and felt her thin bones shaking. Vérité, the great schemer who planned everything, wasn't scheming this.

He drew back. She was breathing fast, lips slack, eyes open but empty of thought.

He wondered if he looked like that. Stunned.

Awareness crept back into her gaze. He saw the absolute puzzlement, the amazement. Then she blinked and laughter welled up everywhere inside her till it spilled out into the dim air of the storeroom. Deep, husky laughing. That was pure and simple Vérité. Her unquenchable delight in all of creation.

She said, “Why did we do that?”

Because I wanted to. You wanted to. Because I've made my choice of betrayals.
“You tell me.”

“Are we seducing information out of each other?”

“If we had all night, maybe. But we don't. We'll do that next time.” He got up to standing, clumsy about it. Aroused. Vulnerable to attack and knowing that he was. The brush of his trousers across his cock struck like hot lightning. “Think about this. Whatever I am, whatever I've done, you know I
wouldn't kiss somebody I was about to turn over to the Service.”

“I am . . . I'm bewildered.”

“We both are. We'll learn to live with it.” His muscles were dense and heavy, roaring with the need to hold her and get inside her. Looked like his days of being in charge of his body were over. Here and now, with this woman, when he couldn't afford to be distracted.

Just damn it.
He reached his hand down to help her to her feet. It'd be nice to think she wasn't entirely steady inside her own body right now.

She stood still beside him, cloak discarded, probably cold again, looking suspicious, radiating sensuality and competence. Beautiful.

“I'm supposed to trust you,” she said, “because you kissed me.”

“It worked. Check through your private opinions when you have a spare moment. Right now . . .” Right now, get her covered. Get her skin out of sight. Get those breasts hidden where they didn't drive him mad.

Her clothes were shoved under the table, out of the way. He retrieved them and tossed them in her direction. He laid her weaponry out on the tabletop, bit by bit, in a line. “You get dressed. Put your arsenal back in its accustomed places. Then we sneak you past four of the best agents in the world, who are waiting outside, alert and suspicious. Don't use your arsenal on me and don't kill my friends.”

She burrowed into her dress and emerged. “You left me behind five or six thoughts ago. You're letting me go. Why are you letting me go?”

“Because you're going to give me Mr. Smith's head on a platter. Remember?”

She ran the length of a stocking through her hand, straightening it. Then she stood on one leg and slipped it on. Her garters had fallen on the floor so she stooped to pick one up.

“Meet me tomorrow, at noon, outside Gunter's.” He looked at the window. It was wholly dark. No sign of dawn. “Or maybe I mean today. About ten hours from now, anyway.”

“I'm a fugitive in London, armed to the teeth, engaged in desperate enterprises, pursued by the British Service. You want me to eat ices with you at Gunter's, in Berkeley Square, in public, in the middle of London. Perhaps we will share a pot of chocolate. My bewilderment is unbounded.”

“A woman can sit alone in a confectioner's. Same principle as a church or a public square, but with chocolate and little cakes. And you won't get rained on.”

“I understand that much.” She sounded annoyed.

“The Service won't be looking for you there. If I don't show up at Gunter's, go to the confectioner's on Barr Street at five and wait. Tomorrow, the same.”

She wore the expression of someone thinking furiously. “Why would I do this?”

“Because you're alone, Cami. You have a plan and you need help with it. I know a great deal about Mr. Smith that you need to hear. I'll share it with you tomorrow, when you show up.”

No expression on her face, but he knew he'd made his point.

He said, “And if you don't show up, there'll be broadsides on every street corner with your face on them.”

She maneuvered into the second stocking and slowly tied the garter. “You're persuasive.”

“But you'll come to meet me because you trust me.”

“You're sure of that?”

“Cachés trust each other. They never betray each other. Somebody told me that recently. Let me do up the buttons in back. We're in a hurry.”

Without hesitation, she turned and presented him the nape of her neck, the white triangle with her backbone running down into her shift, the curls above interlocked, every one with a tiny half-moon of light trapped in it. He wanted to close his teeth on her and bite down and hold her there like a tomcat on his tabby.

Her skin drew up and twitched where his fingers ran across, doing up the buttons. Seven buttons. He closed them from bottom to top, working his way upward. There were levels of hell that provided less torture.

He said, “You'll leave by the front. There are two agents keeping an eye there. The two dangerous ones are at the back.”

“They'll know you let me go.”

“Not right away. That's the last of the buttons. Pack up. We're in a hurry.” He pulled his wrist knife.

She flinched, but he'd already flipped the blade and cut himself high on the shoulder.

She hissed, “Stop that.”

The cloth of his coat and shirt split cleanly. He'd got to the skin underneath, making a fine, long cut that looked authentic.

“What the devil—”

“Distraction and explanation.” He felt the pain and ignored it. He was bleeding down his sleeve. “More blood than I was aiming for.”

She was already pulling a handkerchief from her pocket. “You should have asked me for my knife. Here. Clean your blade. No. I'll do it. You might leave blood on your cuffs and everybody'll know what you've done.”

He let her clean his knife and slip it back in the sheath on his arm.

She said, “You're going to lie to your Service.”

“I won't have to say much.” There'd never been much chance of staying in the Service. Now there was none at all.

“Hold your arm out. Left arm. Turn it a bit.” She picked one of her knives from the table and used it, delicately, to make two long slashes in the sleeve over his forearm. Obvious defensive wounds. “You're letting me go.”

“This is supposed to make you trust me. Is it working?”

“Yes.” She stashed her knife and shivered, a tremor that ran all through her. Fear and excitement. Maybe other emotions.

While Cami gathered up her extensive collection of weapons, he let himself bleed onto the floor of the storeroom, scuffling the drops around as if there'd been a fight. Then it was through the front room of the shop, walking in a red glow past a thousand books. Cami was behind him, filled with silent concentration. He said, “I'll stagger out the front door and keep my friends busy. You sneak out behind me.” He smeared his blood on the doorknob. “Ready?”

“Ready.” She patted from one lethal device to another, making certain they were all secure. “First the
mélange de tabac.
Now they'll think I've stabbed you. Your friends are going to chop me into dog meat.”

“Make sure you don't meet them on your way out.”

*   *   *

“There she goes,” Doyle said.

“Where?” Hawker used a thread of whisper. “Ah. I see.”

They shared the shelter cast by the bay window of a print shop, across the street, thirty paces from Braid's Bookshop. From this excellent vantage point they observed the drama Pax enacted with Stillwater and McAllister. Not the details, but the import and tenor of the conversation. While that was going on, a shadow flitted lone and surreptitious from the bookshop to the street and progressed from one pool of dark to the next.

“You going to take the lead on the follow or should I?” Hawk said.

Doyle said, “I'll rest here.”

Small fractions of time passed. “Looks like Pax wants her to get away,” Hawk said.

“Looks like.”

“There's a number of good reasons we should interest ourselves in Cami Leyland.” Hawker's eyes tracked their quarry, shadow to shadow to shadow. He was motionless himself.

Staying invisible was largely a matter of staying still. Pax, the leading practitioner of the art of invisibility, had taught him that.

Doyle nodded. “I can't recall when I've come across someone who needed dragging off to Meeks Street in a more firm and immediate fashion.”

“I'd like a few minutes alone with her, discussing that incident with the snuff in his face.”

“And there is the vexed matter of her knowing all our codes. There. Off she goes, with our Pax covering her retreat. Enough to make a man wonder what Mr. Paxton is up to, unless he's a French agent, of course, and engaged in treason.”