Rogue Spy (29 page)

It is not necessary to be brave. The pretense is enough.

A BALDONI SAYING

Cami left the alley and walked out into the open, feeling Pax's eye on her. In these last hours he had become a vessel, filled with purpose, solid and dense in his concentration. All for her. That knowledge burned like a flame in the back of her mind, giving off warmth. She was not alone.

She picked up her skirts as she stepped into the street, glancing left and right. The sniper was set up behind that window. Baldoni—her blood, her family—waited at both ends of the street, armed and ready, none of them in sight. Service agents practiced their form of well-armed subtlety behind some of the closed doors up and down the street. There were seven of them, six men and a woman.

Pax was one of them still. He didn't believe that, but it showed in every word they spoke to him. In their faces. The fraternity of the Service had closed ranks around him.

This motley, disjointed, powerful, and clever crew was going to take the Merchant alive. It would be done. Had to be done. It was too late to wonder if there'd been better choices along the way. It was far too late to back out now.

She narrowed the world to here and now. Semple Street took on vivid clarity and color. The shadows had contracted to nothing, this close to noon. Birds chittered on windowsills. Voices leaked from open windows. Somewhere to her left she heard the sound of a broom sweeping. A fragment of newspaper rolled end over end in a gust of wind. A cat sat, artistically arranged on its doorstep. Women in black, heads together, talking, had settled in for the duration. A window opened and a small rug took an airing, shaken out.

She came to Number Fifty-six, to her own particular square of pavement, the exact cobbles, and set her feet firm and a little apart, ready to run or fight or be shot by one of the many men who might do that. It was taking her post as a soldier on the battlefield does, resigned and scared.

She could sense eyes on her, like the faintest itch on her skin. She felt Pax's steady regard. She could have Pax's attention out of the whole mixed brigade of watchers.

Let Pax live through this. If you'll just let Pax live . . .

She caught herself bargaining with God, promising to light a hundred candles in gratitude. She knew better than to haggle with God like a fruit seller in the market. God expected her to pay attention to the business at hand.

But she'd light flocks of candles if Pax lived.

She slowed her breathing. Tensed and released the big muscles of her body a few times. No point in burning up all her courage and strength before the game even began.

Forty-seven coaches, carts, gigs, and carriages passed. Twenty-two people. One dog. Then the Merchant.

*   *   *

“I probably could put glass into this.” Hawker turned his head and considered the broken window. “It doesn't look that hard.”

Pax said, “Planning to change professions?”

“Never hurts to be prepared. One of these days I'm going to push Galba just an inch too far and get booted out of the Service.”

“That day has come and gone.” Pax rested the pistol on the nail he'd driven into the drainpipe and sighted down the length of it. It was a Mortimer and he'd had the barrel rifled to give it
some accuracy. At this range, it would work as well as a Baker.

Hawker was turning over the sheet of glass, holding the edges through folded rags. “I'll bet you could throw this, if you added some heft to it.” He weighed it in his hands. “Who are they going to let torture the Merchant when we catch him? Not you.”

“Doyle, I imagine.”

Hawk nodded. “Then Doyle will be the one to kill him at the end. Or Galba will come in and do it, being Head of Service.”

“You're counting your chickens before they're hatched.”

“I'm wringing their necks, plucking, and stewing them before they're hatched.” Glancing into Semple Street, Hawker added, “Just concentrate on sighting your gun. Our girl's holding fine. Calm as a pudding.”

*   *   *

She knew it was the Merchant before she saw his face. The plain black landau, anonymous, secretive, with the curtains drawn, announced him like a blast of trumpets.

The Merchant was driving himself, which she hadn't expected. He dressed like a coachman and counterfeited the bored competence of a hired driver. He'd come to this meeting without his henchmen.

He was five minutes early. She'd have thought he was a man to be finicky about unimportant details.

She wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. That was her signal to all the neighboring deadly people. It said,
This is the Merchant.

A hundred feet away, in a second-floor window, the curtain drew back. That passed her message to everyone who couldn't see her directly.

The closed coach told her he'd brought something or someone with him. He could fit two or three henchmen inside, ready to kidnap her. Or he could have Camille Besançon in there.

The carriage stopped level with her. The leather curtains
of the windows didn't twitch. Up on the box, the Merchant took a lungful of the cheroot he carried, set the brake, and wrapped the reins around it.

Close up, he was a deeply unconvincing coachman. That pallid face gave him away. He wore gloves too fine for a driver. His boots were gentleman's boots, smooth, glossy, well fitted, and soft. He made mistakes all over the map. The cheroot was another one. She'd never seen a driver carry anything in his hand but a whip.

The Merchant shed his gloves, matched them palm to palm, and dropped them on the seat. He shrugged out of the driver's coat, which was a thick, well-worn, authentic garment of many capes that had been made for a fatter man. He climbed down to go to the horse's head.

When he took the halter, he held the cheroot out to the side where it wouldn't annoy the horse.

“I am glad you decided to come. You brought the code?” He ventured that as one would hope, politely, that a borrowed book was about to be returned.

“I have it.” She touched the bodice of her dress. That wasn't where she'd hidden the fake code. One tells many minor lies to hide the great ones. “Show me the woman.”

“In a moment.”

“Now.”

“Patience. All in good time.” He might have been a very nice man, saddened and hurt by her suspicion. He smiled at her and his eyes were most perfectly empty. “I have her inside the coach. Let me . . .” The horse was an orderly and placid mare, but she shuffled hooves and shook her great head at the smell of tobacco and fire. The Merchant waved largely. “You, boy! Come here.”

She'd been aware of a rattle and click along the pavement behind her, but in a situation that held a choice of threats, she'd concentrated on the nearest and most deadly. She glanced over her shoulder, keeping the Merchant in view at the same time.

The boy approached, bowling a hoop, letter perfect in his role of Child Playing on the Street. He was dressed exactly as
a loving mother in Semple Street would send her son from the house.

Carlo Baldoni. He was what—twelve? A child in the line of fire. Damn the Baldoni anyway, and damn her for not expecting this.

Carlo propped his hoop against the railing, a convincing, well-used hoop that he'd doubtless stolen. Respectful, curious, he approached. “Yes, sir.”

The Merchant dropped the halter, navigated in his pocket, and found sixpence. “You like horses?”

Breathless and high voiced, with exactly the right accent, Carlo said, “Oh, yes, sir.”

“Then hold mine. This is Dolly. She's very gentle.” The Merchant sent the coin riding over and under the back of his fingers. Sleight of hand. Pax could do that, too. This might be where he learned it. “You'll have another like it when I come back.”

When Carlo came to pick up the reins, the Merchant clasped his shoulder in a friendly way and gave him the coin. One could almost see nephews and nieces gathered about the knee of this genial man as he handed out sugarplums. “What's your name, son?”

“Tommy. Tommy Goodall.”

“Tom. A fine, strong name. Men with that name have been great fighters for great causes.” The Merchant smiled down into the innocent, upturned face. “You'll do something important in the world, Tom.”

The Merchant's voice was like the sweetened cream that topped iced cakes. Sweet, cloying, full of wind, amorphous. She heard an inhuman emptiness whistling beneath.

He showed no inclination to reveal his larger plans to her. Not why he needed the Mandarin Code. Neither the purpose nor the location of the gunpowder.

She would make certain this woman in the coach was safe, then let the British Service have him.

Every moment she delayed was an invitation to disaster. Pax stood in the alley with a pistol pointed at the Merchant's heart. Mr. Hawker would be lethally equipped. Innocent-
looking Carlo was Baldoni and thus old enough to carry a knife. There was a sniper three houses down. She was armed herself, for that matter. The potential for death was strewn across the Semple Street landscape like brown leaves in September.

From inside the coach came a faint knocking sound, as if an animal were trapped there. Or as if a woman, bound and gagged, tossed herself back and forth on the seat.

The Merchant walked a little ways from the landau, to smoke his cheroot.

Why was he smoking? Her mind skittered off, pursuing that oddity. A clumsy disguise? A weapon? A signal to his men?

She said, “Show me that woman.”

Amiable as a basking snake, sincere as bread, he held out his hand and made curled beckoning with his fingers. “You will see the woman when I've examined the code. Give me the paper, Cami Leyland. Come, I think we must trust each other a little, at this point.”

Horribly, sickeningly, when he wore that expression of grave reason on his face, he looked like Pax.

Like Pax . . . and not like. The Merchant had the square jaw, the lean cheekbones, the long, mobile line to his lips. There was the shared blood, plain to see.

Pax had said, “I am no part of him.”

Different men had been poured into the same vessel—one clean, one unclean. They were nothing alike, Pax and his father, not in the least grain or particular.

She said, “What are you going to do with the code?”

His eyelids drooped. “You know I can't tell you that.”

“I have to know what I'm risking. I have to know whether they'll trace this back to me.”

Something ugly curled behind his eyes. His voice held condescending amusement. “I promise they'll never know it was you.”

He lies. To a Baldoni.

The Merchant was one of those who protected his great lie with many small lies. He lied with the exact opposite of the truth instead of a slight twisting of it. He promised most when
he was about to betray. A Baldoni five-year-old would be ashamed to lie so badly.

She furrowed her brow as if she were thinking furiously. “Are the Leylands involved? I can be traced to them.”

“This is nothing to do with the Leylands. The code won't be connected to them at all.” He scarcely bothered to hide the mockery, he was so certain of her stupidity. “We won't use it in England.”

Lies. The truth is the opposite.
The kegs of gunpowder were in London so his operation was in London. What connected the Mandarin Code, kegs of gunpowder, Camille Besançon, Semple Street, and her? How did they intersect?

“You'll take this code overseas?” she said.

“I leave for Austria at once. This is nothing to do with England.” With his mouth, with the muscles of his face, with his skilled voice, the Merchant conveyed reassurance. Not with his eyes, though. Never with his eyes. “I promise you will escape harm.”

He plans to kill me.
Fear and anger shivered through her. Why hadn't he already done it? What was he waiting for?

The Baldoni said,
To know the purpose of a lie, look at the results of it.

The Merchant's lies had brought her to Semple Street. So far, they'd accomplished nothing else. Maybe the Merchant wanted her here.

She kept her hands still, not giving the signal. Up and down the street, she was watched through field glasses and gunsights. Two dozen men waited to move in.

He's stalling for time. Something's going to happen.

She could sense Pax as if he stood beside her, his finger on the trigger, his eyes on the Merchant, in his belly the ice-cold hatred of a lifelong vendetta.

Don't kill him, Pax. Not yet. Not yet.

A rider passed, sitting his horse in a sloppy, preoccupied manner. In the house behind her, a baby had been crying for a while. That continued. And down the street, out of sight, a wagon, or maybe a carriage, approached. Four well-paced horses, light on their feet. A coach, then. The noise of their hooves slowed as they approached.

“This gets us nowhere.” The Merchant blew out an impatient breath. “One of us must yield. Come. Look at the woman and be convinced.” He turned on his heel, abruptly, and pulled open the door of his coach.