Rogue Spy (8 page)

Malevolence is sold at a bargain. One pays full price for stupidity.

A BALDONI SAYING

Perhaps I made mistakes.
Cami considered this possibility while she picked the lock. She worked by touch because it was midnight and the moon had no chance against this wet fog.

Her mistake—if it was a mistake—lay not in letting Mr. Smith's minion trail after her. That was according to her plan. What she'd done next was not. It had been self-indulgent to return to Fetter Lane when she had all of London at her disposal. It had been an error in judgment.

She'd gone to make certain Devoir was up and cursing, snarling, furious with her . . . able to see. She couldn't walk away and not know.

It was a very Baldoni decision. Nothing is more important than friendship. Baldoni do not haggle like shopkeepers over the cost.

Devoir . . . oh, Devoir was all he'd been at the Coach House, and more. Coughs racked him, he gasped for breath, but he got stubbornly to is feet. Half-blind, surrounded by bumbling confusion, he'd spotted her thirty feet away. She'd seen him do it.
She'd seen him catch the sleeve of that dark-haired man and give chopped, vehement orders.

Devoir had attached himself to her like a cocklebur and followed her up and down London all afternoon and evening. In the end, though, it had turned out well enough. Here she was where she'd always intended to be, breaking into Braid's Bookshop.

London is ungenerous. The night does not willingly offer up free lodging. Every park, every thin alley, every backyard shed, even the protected overhang of a front doorway, is locked and watched. The shop owners and householders of London no more wish to shelter people who walk at night than the landholders of Cambridgeshire wish to provide coverts for foxes.

She was invading an institution of sorts. Braid's had bought and sold books in this brick house on Paternoster Row for two centuries. There were castles in England with lesser pedigrees. Probably an antique Marcus Braidus had traveled to Rome on donkey back, brought home Latin scrolls for homesick centurions, and sold them in a mud hut on this site.

The Fluffy Aunts always came here when they were in London.

She concentrated on the padlock on this gate, which might have deterred a toddler with a jackstraw. Otherwise, it was a waste of iron.

She would take this new knowledge away from the day. Devoir no longer fit in the box her memory had made for him. She saw him . . . differently. She saw him as he must appear to a stranger. He'd stood in the center of that yammering mob, his coat discarded and him wet through to the skin, the linen of his shirt being revelatory about his anatomy.

He was still stringy as wrapped leather on that long frame, still thin and drawn out, but he had broader shoulders now. He'd become hardened and steady in his body. Somehow harmonious. The awkward bones and angles of Devoir, the boy, had become this swift, sleek predator, muscled like a man. It unsettled her to see him looking like a grown man.

In future she would avoid Devoir like one of the biblical plagues.

The lock grated open to her. Only imagination made the scraping loud in this empty alley. She pushed the gate slowly inward, balancing it delicately on its hinges so it wouldn't squeak in an unseemly manner.

Her intrusion onto the Braid's property was accompanied by a satisfactory silence. No one looked out any of the windows up and down the alley. Behind the board fence of the house next door, the vocal little dog was tearing away at the stale loaf she'd tossed him. Like most dogs he was inclined to bark madly at every wandering cat and let a sneaking invader like her pass unannounced.

She was more tired than she'd expected to be at the end of this day and more wet and less successful. She didn't begrudge the afternoon spent following and being followed by the bristly head and large ears of a Frenchman. She only wished he'd been more careless. She'd hoped to follow him back to wherever they were keeping Camille Besançon. If that woman was Camille Besançon.

The henchman had not, unfortunately, taken his bristly head back to report to Mr. Smith. Instead he'd wasted his day, and her own, lounging his way from one Soho tavern to another.

So her first plan hadn't worked. Tomorrow she'd try something else.

The yard behind Braid's was full of rough sheds and the bins waiting for the rag-and-bone man. None of that showed as even the ghost of a shape in this darkness. The windows were dim red rectangles, upstairs and down. Braid's left a low fire burning, safe behind a grate, in every room. Books don't like the damp.

At home they left fire on two of the hearths downstairs and—

Not home. That wasn't her home.

She pushed away those thoughts. They were painful and unprofitable and there was no going back, anyway.

She had not liked being followed by the skillful, nearly invisible Devoir. Her awareness of him was spun from tenuous glimpses of a hat in a crowd or a face reflected in a shop window. It had taken hours to snip him loose from her trail. The squire back home . . . the squire in Brodemere used to claim the fox enjoyed the hunt as much as the huntsmen did. Piffle.

She eased across the flat, unevenly set stones of this yard. They were slippery in this wet, solid mist, which seemed an unnecessary complication to the evening. If London hadn't been enjoying such a wet night, she would have had some moonlight to see what she was doing.

Nowadays Baldoni made their living in comfortable salons, cheating at piquet or dealing in meretricious copper mines. But they never forgot they had once been mountain bandits. They still taught their children the not-so-gentle art of tracking prey in city and countryside. How to avoid becoming someone else's prey. Concealment is a skill with wide applicability.

And she'd been trained in the Coach House. Truly, she had a solid grounding in the robust arts of sneakiness.

The window of Braid's book storage room, warm looking and welcome in the dark, was a dozen feet away. She'd dry this cloak by the fire and—

She kicked into a pail some nameless fool had left in the middle of everything.

It thudded loudly and rolled down the paving stones, clattering. Every dog up and down the alley took to yapping its head off.

She held absolutely still and counted two hundred in Latin.

A proper Baldoni wouldn't stub a toe against a wooden bucket, regardless of how dark it was. A good Caché wouldn't, either. Maybe she should stop congratulating herself on eluding the British Service and pay more attention to what she was doing.

The heavy, foggy air drizzled on her, determined about it. Stubborn. She could have done without such firm decisiveness. She counted to two hundred in the Tuscan of her childhood.

The dogs became bored with inciting one another to frenzy. One final deep bark some distance away ended it. No windows lit up anywhere along the alley.

The count in Spanish was not strictly necessary, but she did it anyway. Patience separates the amateur from the professional.

She whispered,
“Doscientos,”
before she limped her way forward, feeling ahead of her with cautious, intelligent feet.

There were no more obstacles. The lock on the window yielded to the logical argument of a thin blade. The windowsill, when she hiked herself up to it, was slippery with the wet and full of splinters. She swung her feet inside, into the ground-floor storeroom, and was in an old familiar place.

Books on every side, shelves and shelves of them. Crates stacked at the far end. A sizable pile of clean straw, tidy in the corner. More books, a roll of brown paper, scissors, and a ball of twine on the table. The half-open door was full of reddish light from the little fire on the grate in the main shop.

The shop cat, a long, languid tom named Pericles, curled his way around that door and padded over, prepared to welcome her with his usual indiscriminate affection. This was a quiet, contemplative room to break into, filled with the smell of book bindings and glue, warmed by the buzzing purr of Pericles the cat.

She didn't close the window at once. She set her hands against the frame on either side and looked out, pleased she wasn't being rained on. The fabric of the night stretched around her . . . sky and streets, wet brick, dark smells, the random sounds of London.

Men were looking for her. She felt it as a tiny prickle on the skin, a touch on the mind. They wouldn't give up. She was in danger every day she stayed in London.

Pericles jumped to the windowsill and bumped at her hand with cold nose and feathery whiskers. Nothing more comforting than a cat.

The night was empty except for a mist that didn't quite become rainfall. When she was as sure as she could be that she was alone, she removed Pericles from the sill and closed the window, shutting out the damp and the darkness. For tonight, she was safe.

Even an honest man may walk abroad at night.

A BALDONI SAYING

Pax walked through dark rain that didn't so much fall as hang suspended in the air. It condensed on his face and formed droplets that fell from the brim of his hat. He had the feeling that if he stood still he wouldn't get wet at all.

Goods wagons rumbled past, making deliveries in the empty streets long before dawn. A few laborers plodded toward the fish stands and vegetable markets, head down, enduring, and the mist ate up their voices when they passed. There were almost no women out.

He'd sent word where to meet him. He'd wondered if they'd come. If they'd let Hawker come.

They were waiting outside St. Paul's.

The hackney stood in the circle of wet paving lit by a streetlamp. Thin, bright lines traced the brass railing of the coach and the stippling of worn gilt on the window frame. They'd lowered the carriage lights to coin-sized points of red. Walking toward it felt like approaching a huge animal crouching in the dark. Up on the box, Tenn slouched inside his driver's coat, dozing, leaned back, the reins slack in his hand, playing a black coachman hoping for one last fare of the
evening. Thirty feet away the steps of St. Paul's led into black mist.

Hawker, in a shabby jacket and cap, held the cheekpiece of the right-hand carriage horse, stroking the long nose and verbally abusing the pair in broad Cockney. They were right nodcocks, weren't they, letting somebody talk 'em into dragging a coach around? Then he switched to his beautiful, educated Parisian French, misquoting Rousseau.
“Le cheval est né libre, et partout il est dans les rênes.”

Hawker made a convincing groom till you heard him speak French.

The horse is born free, and everywhere he is in reins.
Rousseau wrote some of the books he'd used to teach Hawk French. It had seemed a good idea at the time.

How many meetings like this, in how many open fields and dirty alleys? How many welcomes by old friends, a circle joined together by a hundred shared dangers in the past?

This would be the last time. Even now, he wasn't one of them. They just acted as if he were. They all knew better.

He said, “Where's Doyle?”

Hawker switched from his fluent French to his fluent Cockney. “If I kept the estimable Mr. Doyle in me pocket, I'd inform you of his whereabouts. As it is—”

Hawk hadn't finished before Doyle appeared out of the dark. Large, ugly, imperturbable Doyle, wearing a scar on his cheek and the clothes of a shopkeeper.

“We been asking each other if you'd show up in London,” Doyle said mildly. He ambled over to lean against the big wheel of the coach, letting the drizzle fall on him and around him without any sign he noticed it. “And here you are, right on time. Seems you've brought a bit of excitement with you.”

“To brighten our otherwise dull lives.” Hawker came up to make the third corner of the triangle. “Stillwater is watching Paternoster Row. McAllister is down Ludgate. We are alert on all points of the compass, as usual. You lost that damn woman, didn't you?”

“He don't have her tucked under his arm, so we will assume she slipped away,” Doyle said.

“Solely because he wouldn't let me sneak up on her and
lay a knife at her jugular, which, if I had done, would have discouraged her from wandering off
and
made it less likely she'd take a shot at me.”

Doyle, Hawker, and him. It felt like the three of them, on the job, running an operation together. When he was fresh come to Meeks Street, it had been Doyle who trained him. Doyle who took him out on his first field work. Who brought him home between assignments to be fussed over by Maggie and play knucklebones with their offspring. He couldn't number the lies he'd told Doyle.

He didn't want to meet Doyle's eyes, so he talked to Hawker. “She didn't shoot at you. She shot a man before he could brain you with a bottle of wine. You should be thanking her.”

“Oh, I will. I will,” Hawker said. “The minute I meet her, I'll do just that.”

“Then let's arrange it.” He turned away from St. Paul's, putting the faint push of damp air in his face. The great dome of the church loomed above, invisible, blocking the wind. He'd been in the high mountains of Italy long enough that he could sense the shape of the countryside from the way the wind blew.

Vérité was out there in the soft night, hidden as only a Caché learned to hide. If he didn't find her in the next hour or so, he might not find her at all. “I followed her out of Soho, going back and forth, but generally in this direction. She knows the streets—didn't hesitate—and this is where she was going.” He sliced a line to the west with his hand. “I lost her there, in Fisher's Alley.”

Doyle followed that line with his eyes. “How did she lose a fine old tracker like you?”

“She had a cutout in place. A classic. She ducked in a shop and out the back, slick as wet ice.”

“I do appreciate a woman who understands the fine art of the chase,” Hawker murmured.

The shopgirl had blocked his way long enough for Vérité to wriggle away like an eel, out a window, into the maze of alleys. “She paid them to delay me. It was arranged yesterday.”

Tell them the last of it. She deserves appreciation for the joke. For the sheer audacity of it.
“She went through a corset
shop.” The memory of his search of a corset shop would stay with him awhile. “There were customers in the back.”

Hawker grinned.

Straight-faced, Doyle said, “There would be.” He searched in his pockets and found his silver toothpick case.

“She's toying with you,” Hawk said. “That is sarcasm. Pure sarcasm.”

Doyle said, “You'd recognize that.”

Hawk paced to the front of the hackney, then turned and came back again. The horses kept a watchful, interested eye on him. “She set up her cutout yesterday, so whatever she's up to is recent. Or else . . .” He raised his hand. “No. Don't tell me. If she lived in London, she'd have a dozen cutouts in place. She only just arrived in town.”

“Within a day. Maybe two. She hasn't had time to do anything elaborate. Her escape plan will be basic, simple, stripped down. Classic procedures.”

“Classic is she'll run straight from that shop to her hiding place. Spend as little time as possible in the open.” Hawk said what they all were thinking. “That means she's not far from Fisher's Alley.”

“Gone to ground.” Doyle flicked open the toothpick case with his thumbnail. “She's got some bolt-hole. Someplace safe.”

“Not far from here,” Hawker said. “Where she will spend the night warm and dry. Unlike some of us.”

“Ain't you a delicate flower all of a sudden.” Doyle's scarred smile was pure, amused villainy. “You stand there and grow moss for a bit while Pax and me figure out where she is.”

“I'm not complaining,” Hawk said. “Just pointing it out.”

They stood in an island of light, floating in a dark sea, facing west, toward Fisher's Alley.

“She won't break cover till morning, when the streets get busy,” Doyle said.

“At which point we'll lose her, even if this fog lifts,” Hawk said.

The Merchant was alive, loose in London, running like a rabid dog. Vérité was the key to finding him. There was no chance in hell he'd let her escape. He squared his thumb and fingers and held them up to frame the west, spreading north
and south from Ludgate. A space seven or eight streets wide. “She's in there.”

“Well, that's useful.” Hawk removed his cap and shook some of the rain off. “I cannot tell you how excited I am at the prospect of searching the neighborhood of St. Paul's, house by house. We'll go up one side of the street and down the other, picking locks.” He peered up to where the dome of St. Paul's couldn't be seen. “Maybe I can break into the church. That's a sin I haven't committed recently. There is not a boring minute in this life.”

“She's not in the church.” Hawker was capable of invading St. Paul's if he wasn't stopped. “That's too public, too open, too few doors, no defenses. She was trained . . .”
Say it. No more lies. Not to Hawker. Not to Doyle.
“We were trained in the Coach House to avoid places like that.”

“Some of the best spies in the world came out of that school in Paris.” Doyle took out a toothpick and considered it. “You Cachés.”

That answered a question. Doyle knew he was a traitor and he knew the details. But he'd come to help. No questions asked.

A considering silence fell. To all appearances, Doyle was in deep meditation upon the black mist in the direction of Paternoster Row. Hawker had gone back to pacing.

After a minute, Hawker said, “I'm getting tired of chasing this fox all over London.”

“Vixen,” Doyle corrected mildly.

“Right. I know that,” Hawker said. “This vixen. Tell me her name. I'm annoyed at her.”

“Vérité.” It felt odd, telling them her name, as if two parts of his life were colliding, breaking to pieces, falling into each other. “You've been annoyed at her all day. You keep offering to kill her.”

“Earlier I was irked when she tried to blind you. Now that she's aimed gunfire in my direction it has become my own personal ire.” Reaching the end of his chosen path, Hawk turned and paced back. “Why here? Why this place?”

Doyle rolled the ivory toothpick between his fingers. “A friend nearby? Somebody in trouble goes to a friend.”

“This quarter's crawling with Frenchmen,” Hawk said. “Émigrés, spies, royalists, the scaff and raff of the Revolution.”

But it didn't feel right. “That's not why she's here.” He ran his sleeve across his face, feeling the grate of leather over his eyelids, smelling the rain. “She's on her own. She wouldn't drag a friend into this business. It's treason.”

“Treason's a hanging affair.” No way to tell what Doyle was thinking.

Was Doyle warning him not to pull Hawker down with him when the reckoning came? No need. He wouldn't let Hawk do anything stupid.

Hawker paced, digging a trench in his ten or twelve feet of the pavement, arguing with himself. “Not hiding with a friend, then. Not the church. Nobody's going to hide in St. Paul's, it being full of churchmen. Who knows when one of them will take a notion to ring bells or start praying? She's not crouching in somebody's coal shed because we have determined she planned this all out in advance. Lodgings?” Hawk answered himself immediately. “We might find her that way. She'd be remembered. She's pretty. Always a nuisance, being pretty.”

“You'd know,” Doyle said.

Hawker ignored that. “She doesn't know the city.” Hawker had the Cockney's sense of superiority over people born in the hinterlands outside the sound of Bow bells. “She'll know bits and parts of it. She'll have favorite streets. That's what she led you through. That's where she's hid herself.”

“And she's near Fisher's Alley.” Doyle plied the toothpick awhile. “There's a chance I can narrow this a little. A while back I heard dogs barking up and down Paternoster Row, not far from the market. I didn't get there in time to pin it down.”

“You think that was her.” Possible. Very possible. Nothing so discreet as nighttime breaking and entering.

“Dogs. The curse of an honest thief.” Hawk went back to pacing and discussing matters with himself. They could set flame to a pile of trash, yell “Fire!” up and down the street, and catch the woman when she came running out. They could set the dogs barking again and try to recognize a particular yap . . .

The fog skirted back under a forward line of wind. A streetlight showed the name over a shop. Morrison Bookseller. What had Hawker said?
She'd know some streets well.
“You come to Paternoster Row for books. Half the booksellers in London are here.”

Hawker, being Hawker, had to say, “She's a dedicated reader. She wants a nice novel to lull her to sleep. We'll find her burgling one of the bookshops along Paternoster.”

“When I was chasing Vérité, we kept passing bookshops. She knows the streets with bookshops.”

“What else?” Doyle watched him.

Vérité, with her head bent over a slate in the schoolroom at the Coach House, scratching out codes, counting under her breath. Vérité filling her long bench with papers full of numbers, letters, charts. “She's a codebreaker, the best they'd ever seen at the Coach House. Back in France they got excited about that and trained her. They would have placed her where she could get hold of codes.”

“Books. Code. Book codes,” Doyle muttered.

Hawker, still now, pulled at his lower lip. “Bookshop. Get out of the rain in a bookshop. Fine. Good.” Behind his eyes, he was like a tiger pacing. That alert and impatient. “Which bookshop?”

“I know where she has to be.” He'd added everything together, clicked the last puzzle piece into place. “She said she's called Cami. That has to be Camille. She used one of the old Leyland codes in the letter she sent to Meeks Street.”