Rogue Spy (12 page)

“Oh, that's likely, that is.”

They waited. They didn't see her slip around the corner. They just ticked off enough time to know she must have covered the requisite ground.

“And she is out of sight.” In the dark, unseen, Doyle managed to convey the impression of a nod. “I'd say it's time to get our boy back to Meeks Street.”

“Let's go do that.”

A man who says he tells no lies is a saint or a liar.

A BALDONI SAYING

Pax jerked alert. An instant of confusion and he knew where they were. He'd fallen half-asleep in the hackney.

“We're here.” Doyle kicked the coach door wide open. “Everybody out.” He swung from the door, hooked his boot into the back wheel spokes to climb down, and walked off to wake up the house, not seeming to hurry but somehow covering the ground fast.

“Back with us, I see.” Hawker scrambled past him, out of the coach, onto the ground. He flipped down the stairs and stood, casually keeping an eye on things.

Streetlamps staked out a series of twenty-foot claims up and down Meeks Street. At Number Seven, they'd lit the lanterns at the door.

He was expected. The prodigal had returned. He didn't anticipate a fatted calf.

He steadied himself on the coach door getting down. The half hour of sleep had disoriented him. The paving stones seemed to catch at his feet all the way up the walk. The stairs were unfamiliar under his boots, the railing strange in his hand.

He was stupid with weariness, and he still had lies to tell.

The door opened before he got all the way up the stairs. Giles was fully dressed, holding a candle. He'd have slept on the couch in the study on a night like this, when agents were out working. He said, “Galba's in his office,” and added, lower, to Hawker, “He's annoyed.”

Giles stood back to let them in. Doyle went first and took the candle from Giles's hand to light one of the lamps lined up on the table.

“Well, that's coincidental. I'm annoyed, too.” Hawk walked through the door. “Damn if it does anything but rain in this city. Give me the key and I'll lock the weather outside.”

I'm wet.
He knew that in some distant, unimportant way. He was stiff with cold and just on the edge of shivering. They all were.

He left his hat on the ugliest sideboard in Europe and followed Doyle from the parlor through the door into the hall. He'd been ready to face Galba a dozen hours ago and lay down all the truth he had in him. Now he was going to lie.

Giles locked the parlor door and caught up behind them in the hall. “Food? A bath? Do you want to change?”

He shook his head. “Just Galba.”

Nobody who held the position of doorkeeper was a fool. Ten years ago it had been his work. Now it belonged to Giles. This wouldn't be the first time Giles opened the door in the middle of the night to an agent, tired and dirty with travel, who needed to talk to the Head of Service.

Probably the first time he'd let in a traitor.

Galba will send the boy away on errands if I have to be killed. They won't let Giles know about it till it's over.

He wondered how they'd get rid of the body. That was the kind of job they'd have given him, if he hadn't been the one getting killed.

Doyle said, “Tea. Food. A dry blanket. Bring them to the office.” Giles took off running, headed for the kitchen. Doyle's eyes went to Hawk. “You go upstairs and change.”

“Later,” Hawk said.

Doyle said, “Now. That's an order.” When Hawk just kept
walking, he added, “Galba's going to say the same thing. You're not part of everything that goes on at Meeks Street.”

“I'm part of this,” Hawker snapped.

“Laisse tomber
.
”
He didn't realize he'd spoken French till it was out of his mouth. “Let it rest.” He must be staggeringly tired to make a mistake like that. Or maybe he just couldn't play a part anymore. Not with Doyle. Not with Galba. Not with Hawker. He went on in French, “I'm a spy. I'm a traitor.” Hawk had to understand where they stood. “You can't help me. Step away.”

“Oh, that's good advice. A veritable fount of wisdom is what you are. Having failed to get yourself killed in Paris, you come riding in from France like a bloody migrating sparrow to see if they'll do it here.” Hawker spat that out. “You couldn't just walk over to the Police Secrète and let your erstwhile employers do the job, because they might not make you suffer enough. No. You come to let the Service do it. God, if I ever met such a pigheaded cully.”

Doyle used his teeth on a fingertip to take his glove off. “‘Erstwhile.' I like that.”

“My never-ceasing endeavor to expand my grasp of the King's English,” Hawk said. “What'd you grow up speaking, Pax? French?”

“Danish.” A relief to tell some truth. He was tired of lying to his friends . . . to the men who would have been his friends if he'd been honest.

Hawk said, “Not my first guess. We are in for some interesting revelations, aren't we?” And to Doyle, “Do you know what Galba's planning to do with him?”

“No idea.” Doyle switched the lamp to his other hand to take off the right glove. “He'll do it whether you're there or not.”

“So I should wander off and warm my feet by the fire while you and Galba gut him like a mackerel. I think not.”

Doyle, imperturbable, stuffed the gloves into the pocket of his coat. “I won't kill him at headquarters, will I? Not when I got all London to be murderous in. I'll let you know what's decided. Trust me with this.”

“I do. I'm coming in there anyway. You'd have every agent in England in that room if they could fit.”

“Which would serve no purpose, except irritating Galba.” Doyle's eyes slid toward the office of the Head of Service at the end of the hall. “I'll speak for you, Hawk.”

His friends. He'd wondered where Doyle would stand in the matter of punishing the traitor in the British Service. Now he knew. Doyle and Hawker were going to fight for him. Madmen, both of them. Legendary madmen.

They'd picked the wrong battlefield. They didn't know how much he had to confess. They didn't know he had more lies to tell.

Doyle said, “What Pax has to say will be easier if you're not hearing it.”

“Embarrassing revelations in the spy trade. We'll all be awkward together.” Hawker hadn't even slowed down.

The mirror at the turn of the hall showed their approach, Doyle a little behind him, Hawker a little ahead. When they got there, his reflection pulled the knife from inside his coat and laid it on the table. His gun went beside that. Then the wrist knife from its sheath. The boot knife came next. The wire in his sleeve. A pointed steel needle eight inches long. Vérité wasn't the only one who walked around armed to the incisors.

Doyle caught the significance at once. Hawker, a second later. An agent goes armed. An enemy under parole doesn't carry weapons into the office of the head of the British Intelligence Service.

Doyle set his hand flat on the door of Galba's office. “You ready?”

The house was silent. If anyone was awake upstairs they were staying out of this. He was acutely aware of Galba, on the other side of the door, listening and waiting for him.

He caught a last glimpse of himself in the mirror.
This is what a man looks like when he walks out to face a firing squad.
“Let's get this over with.” He pushed past Doyle into Galba's office.

The width of a blade separates saying too little and saying too much.

A BALDONI SAYING

It was as hard as Pax had expected. He walked through the door Doyle held open, took three paces into Galba's office, and faced the Head of Service. “I have a report to make. You have to hear me out.”

Galba sat at his big desk, a wide-shouldered, massive man with a mane of white hair, wearing a red banyan and an expression of impatience. “Let us not be dramatic. I have always trusted your sense of what is important, Mr. Paxton. I doubt that has changed. Sit down.”

“I'd rather stand.”

Galba said, “I didn't ask what you'd rather do. I said, ‘sit down.' You're bleeding.”

“It's not important.”

“That's something else I didn't ask you. Will,” Galba turned to Doyle, “why is he in this state?”

“He fell asleep on the way here and he needed sleep more than he needed fixing a minor wound.” Doyle divested himself of his greatcoat and looked around, deciding where to put it. He chose a straight-backed chair under the window. “It's barely leaking by now.”

“Other injuries?”

“None.”

“I need not have asked.” Galba shifted mail from the center of his desk to the side. “Adrian. It appears you expect to join this conference. Why?”

Hawker had planted himself in the doorway. “I am an ornament to any conversation. And while I'm here, you won't dispose of him.”

“It's too late at night to deal with this,” Galba said. “Will?”

Doyle eased himself into the shabby, comfortable chair to the right of the desk and stretched his legs out long. “Let him stay.”

Galba said, “Paxton?”

It took him a second to realize Galba was asking him whether Hawker should stay. “He's not necessary.”

“Well, that's duly noted.” Hawker walked past him and put his hand on the back of a chair, looking down at Galba.

Galba's eyes were chips of blue ice when he contemplated Hawker. “Let me sum this up for you, Adrian. Over the last four days, with considerable effort on everyone's part, we have closed your bullet wound and brought your fever under control. You were ordered not to leave the house until Luke pronounced you fit for duty. Was there some part of that order you didn't understand?”

Hawker shook his head. “No, sir. But I—”

“You not only disobeyed my direct orders, you did so at Mr. Paxton's behest. No one is better aware of Paxton's anomalous position than you, yet you went without hesitation when he called. Do you expect to be rewarded?”

Hawker never did have the sense to stay quiet. “You'd do the same.”

Galba's eyes didn't waver. “That is the sole reason you're in less trouble than you deserve. Go. You may return here after—” He interrupted the objection before it was spoken. “After,” he repeated, “you've changed clothing and dried your hair. I'm the one who will have to face Doyle's formidable Marguerite if you die of fever.”

“I'm not going to die of—”

“Did I express a desire to discuss this? Go.”

Hawker left without a word. The hall outside was silent,
but he was probably running upstairs, rather than lurking and eavesdropping.

“Mr. Paxton.” Galba's eyes shifted to him. “I told you to sit down.”

“I'll stand. It'll keep me awake.”

Ten years ago, he'd faced Galba across this desk, with Doyle sitting in that same chair. He'd been fourteen and he'd told them he was Thomas Paxton. His life in the Service began with that lie. Tonight, in the same room, before the same men, that life ended. He'd come full circle.

Ironic.
“I'm not Service. I don't have to obey orders.”

“An interesting argument. I'd expected a somewhat more penitent return.” Galba removed a packet of papers from the drawer of his desk. “This doesn't contain a resignation. Does Carruthers have it?”

“She didn't ask for one.” His eyes no longer held a scorpion sting from the snuff mixture, but they felt gritty from tiredness. “I'll write it out when I'm done here.”

Galba fanned the papers out across the blotter on his desk. “This is thorough.”

His confession was in tight-written, neat script, inclusive, detailed, and damning. “Carruthers kept me locked up for a week, writing that and making copies. You could call it house arrest. Then she sent me to you.”

Galba said, “I wondered if you'd show up here. Doyle said you would.”

“Where else would I go?”

“You'd see it that way, of course.” Galba selected a page. “Ten years ago, when you first came here, you stole secrets and turned them over to the French. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

Galba looked up. “Expand on that.”

He fixed his eyes on a point in the bookcase behind Galba, on a red book next to a blue book next to another red book. “I was trained as a French spy in the Coach House in Paris. I came to Meeks Street pretending to be Thomas Paxton, son of James Paxton, British Service agent. You took me in. I used that position of trust to steal confidential information.”

He'd written that in every copy of the confession. Now the
words clenched in his throat when he said them out loud. He had to tear every syllable loose from his gullet and guts. Strange that it came out emotionless and dry as dust.

“You stole the documents listed here.” Galba slid a dozen pages to the center of his desk.

“I may have missed some. It's been a long time.”

Doyle leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and clasped his hands behind his head. “Twenty-year-old naval deployments. Gossip from the Russian court. Receipts for hiring horses.” Doyle snorted. “Vital secrets, that lot.”

“I took old files from the basement. It's still treason. I've admitted everything.” He swung back to face Galba. “This is more important. Today, I followed the woman who sent the coded note, to the church in Fetter Lane. I saw—”

Galba raised his hand and cut him off. “Is further action required between now and daylight?”

Nothing could be done, no questions asked, no searches made, in the middle of the night. “No.”

“I have given you four agents and twelve hours to deal with that.” He touched Cami's coded note where it waited on the side of the desk, still undecoded. “Do you need to return to the streets at this time?”

“Tomorrow. In daylight. I'll make sketches.” Sketches of the Merchant. Not Cami. He didn't want them to find Cami in whatever refuge she'd run to this time. And he had to sleep. He was swaying on his feet . . . and dripping blood. He tightened his hold on his upper arm.

“Then we will set that aside for the moment,” Galba leveled his hands on either side of the pile of papers that held his history, “and return to your deeds ten years ago. You admit that you met a Frenchman—your
surveillant
—over a period of five months and gave him various, largely worthless documents. You killed him,” Galba consulted a page, “with a single stab wound under the sternum, on the morning of May fifth. You were fourteen.”

He nodded. He'd written everything down. There was nothing else to say.

Doyle opened one eye. “That was the man they found in Swan Alley, a decade or so back. I wondered about it at the time. Nice, professional work if I remember correctly.”

It hadn't been his first kill. “We were well trained.”

“I'll give the French that,” Doyle said. “They produce deadly fourteen-year-olds.”

Galba turned a half dozen pages facedown and went onward. “After that, did you provide information to the French?”

“Never.” He was expressionless. Anything on his face, any nuance of his voice, was there because he allowed it. It could be just another lie. When you lied as well as he did, even the truth was a calculation. “That was the end of it.”

After he'd killed his
surveillant
he'd waited, month after month, for the Police Secrète to reach out from France and kill him. No one came. In the end, the Tuteurs had been the ones to die. When Robespierre fell, they fell with him. Their lines of command were broken. Their records burned. They took their secrets and the location of their Cachés to the guillotine.

Galba said, “Did you lie to me or to your other superiors in the British Intelligence Service?”

“I lied about who I was.”

“Other than that.” Galba was impassive.

“I spotted Cachés twice and didn't tell you.” He swallowed again. “They'd gone English. I judged they were no threat.”

“Other than that.”

They'd come to tonight's lies and disloyalties, still ongoing. “An hour ago I had a Caché trapped, and I set her free. She's Camille Leyland, niece of
the
Leylands. But I need her loose in London.” He shook his head, trying to clear it. Trying to say enough and not too much. “Don't bring her in.”

“You will doubtless explain why, eventually.” Galba continued, “Is there anything else you have done in the last ten years to harm British interests or the British Service? Any more lies I should know about?”

This room, this office of the head of the British Service with its untidy shelves and hundreds of files and reports, the violin case, the matched knife and sword that Galba had carried on assignment thirty years ago—this room held the center of his whole adult life. He'd made himself someone with a right to be here.

He closed his eyes. Galba and Doyle were both looking at him when he opened them again. “When I reported, I reported
as if I were working for you. As if I were an agent. I didn't edit the truth.”

“I never caught him at it, if he did.” Doyle slid ink bottle and penholder to the side, clearing a space on the desk. “When Hawker's reporting, on the other hand, any resemblance to the facts is pure coincidence.”

The dumbwaiter rumbled in the dining room, coming up from the kitchen. Giles would be here in a minute with tea.

He turned to the sound and felt the almost weightless burden he wore around his neck. Sometimes the small lies are the hardest to let go of.

The twine caught in his hair as he pulled it over his head. He'd put the ring under his clothes before he left Paris. He hadn't felt right, wearing it after he'd been found out.

He set the ring on the desk. It was solid, heavy gold, bearing a shield with two chevrons and three stars. He'd used it for sealing letters. Everybody in the Service knew it. He'd worn it on his little finger because it couldn't get past those bony knuckles of his.

Galba studied it soberly. “James Paxton's ring.”

Say it. Just say it.
“I took it off his hand. In Russia. When he was dead.” He tasted smoke and death in his mouth again, remembering. The Merchant and his men had brought him to the dacha they'd burned down and the family they'd murdered. They made him bury the bodies and heap rocks on top, so he'd be convincing when he described the scene. They'd held him down and burned his arm. Then they pointed west and told him to walk to England. It had taken him six months. “I didn't kill him and I couldn't have stopped it. I'd send it to his family, but there isn't any.”

Doyle said, “The Service is his family.”

That was what Galba had said, ten years ago, to the boy who walked into Meeks Street claiming to be James Paxton's son. Galba had said, “Now the Service is your family.”

Doyle leaned across the desk to pick up the twine. He let the ring hang a moment, turning. “We'll take charge of this.” At the bookcase beside the hearth he took down a plain wood box, put the ring in, and closed the lid quietly. “He was a good man.
A good agent. We'll find a use for that signet someday and remember him.”

“He wouldn't begrudge it.” Galba gathered the pages of the confession together and squared the edges. “We must now deal with this deplorable situation. You should have come to me, voluntarily, years ago. Did you really fear retribution for crimes committed when you were fourteen?”

“Hawker's still alive.” Doyle settled back into his chair. “I'd call that better-than-average evidence the Service has vast tolerance.”

“You have made serious errors in judgment, Mr. Paxton,” Galba said.

A rattle of cups—that had to be deliberate—sounded outside the door. Hawker carried in a tray with bread and ham, teapot and cups.

His arm ached. His eyes burned. But he couldn't let that pass. “I'm not Paxton.”

Doyle snorted. “Like to know who you are, then.”

“Do you consider yourself Dalgaard? After your mother?” Galba drew in the corners of his mouth. “According to these extensive self-revelations you've never lived as Niels Dalgaard and your mother deserted you when you were nine. I doubt you want to answer to the ridiculous name ‘Devoir.'”

“He could use MacIntosh. Or Ambleside. Dalrymple. Higgins. Widding-Smythe.” Hawker set the tray in the space cleared on the desk. “Or Jones. There's something reassuring about a Jones.” He lifted the lid off the pot and looked in.