Besides, compelling dark eyes and a quick tongue didn’t make a girl someone he’d actually like. For all he knew, a longer conversation might prove her the type he couldn’t stand—another Ada. Which, come to think of it, confirmation of such would convince his mind to stop throwing the memory of her eyes before him at all hours of day and night.
Yet another reason to try to meet her.
Cigars burned slowly enough that he could amble a few feet closer to the door without it looking odd. There was no one stationed outside the warehouse—a good sign or bad?—but he’d bet there’d be someone inside somewhere.
He catalogued all he’d been able to discover about the building from out here. There was a back door—locked. He’d tested it. A front door, which was near him now. And a loading bay with a large rolling door that moved upward. He’d spent a couple of hopeful minutes examining the few inches it had been up today, calculating whether he could slip underneath.
Perhaps, if he didn’t breathe and could angle his head correctly. But it was risky. He could get stuck, and it would likely take quite a bit of maneuvering, which could draw the attention of any workers inside the warehouse.
“Al pie. Al pie, Barto.”
Drake’s gaze flicked up, over. Across the street, an aged man walked, a cane in one hand and a dog straining at a leash in the other. Upon the command, the dog came to a halt. But it whimpered and looked back at its master, tail wagging. The old man paused, patted a pocket, and felt around the ground with his toe. “Where did it land, Barto? Eh?”
The dog whined a response, and the old man muttered a mild curse. “Come, dog, I heard the coin fall, and we need it if you’re to have a bone tonight. Where is it? Coin? Eh?”
The dog wagged its tail again.
Pushing off from the building, Drake jogged across the street. “Can I help you find something?”
The man looked around, his gaze skimming over Drake. When his eyes rested not on Drake’s face but on his shoulder, Drake realized he was blind.
“I believe I dropped a peseta.” His voice was hesitant. “If you happen to see it, young man?”
Drake quickly took in the area around the old chap. Within a few seconds, the glint of sun on the coin drew his attention to a dirty crack where road met building. “There it is. Just a moment.” He moved over to grab it. “Here you go, señor.”
The old man stretched out a hand, surprise lining the crags of his face when Drake pressed the coin into it. His fingers curled around it, feeling its contours. “Gracias.”
“De nada. May I pet your dog?”
The old man chuckled and slid the peseta back into his pocket. “I would rather you didn’t. I’m sorry, but he works best when he is not distracted. I promise you, he receives his reward for a job well done when he guides me safely home.”
Drake was glad he’d asked, then, and not just reached out to ruffle the mutt’s fur. “I understand. Is there anything else I can help you with, señor?”
The man grinned. “No, gracias. Are you new to the neighborhood, young man?”
“Just visiting, sí. Esteban Martín Caminante.” It was the name Thoroton had provided for him to use when not in a part of the city where he was already known, or when in another part of Spain—that second surname literally meaning traveler. A little joke that no one would understand.
The old man smiled. “And I am Pietro Rodríguez Brasa. You have made my dog’s day and done me a kindness, Esteban. Again, gracias.” When the wind shifted, Señor Rodríguez turned his face a bit and sniffed the air, his eyes lighting at the whiff of cigar smoke that drifted by him.
Drake grinned too. “I don’t suppose you would care to finish my cigar, señor? I probably shouldn’t take the time to do so. My abuelo expects me home.” He’d have offered the old man a fresh one, if he’d had one on him to offer.
Señor Rodríguez didn’t appear to be put off by the thought of sharing. His eyes brightened still more. “I haven’t enjoyed one in nearly two years. If you are certain you don’t want it . . .”
He had no idea how happy Drake was to give it up. “I will have another tomorrow. Here. Enjoy.” Drake slipped the smoldering cylinder into the man’s outstretched fingers. “Buenas tardes.”
“Good afternoon to you as well, Esteban.” Looking far happier than he had when he told his dog to heel a minute ago, the old chap gave a command to walk and sauntered down the street.
Drake watched him until he turned the corner, still smiling a bit. He’d have helped the old man regardless, but in this particular case, helping him could help Drake too. He angled a glance across the street to make sure their exchange had been out of sight of the tiny window in the warehouse’s door and, satisfied, jogged over and pounded on it.
Within a few seconds, the creaking door swung open, revealing a man with a cap pulled low over his eyes. “Sí?”
“Sorry to bother you.” Careful to keep an expression of mild concern on his face, Drake gestured to the street. “My uncle Pietro—his dog slipped away from him. Perhaps you heard him calling to him? Barto?”
There was enough shift in the bloke’s eyes to prove he was familiar with Pietro and Barto. “Barto? But he’s such a good dog!”
“He is.” And Drake hated to malign him. “I don’t know what has come over him. But he ran around the back of your building here, and then I lost him. I think he may have slipped under that door in the back. Could I check?”
“Of course!” The bloke opened the door and waved him in, searching the street behind him. “Where is your uncle? Does he need to come in, to rest?”
“Ah.” Drake motioned to the corner he’d turned. “I got him settled with a cigar. He will be all right until I return with Barto.”
The guard chuckled. “I imagine. Go, go. Find the dog. I’m afraid I must stay here at my post, or I would help you.”
“No matter, I’m sure I’ll find him soon enough. Gracias.” Victory singing through his veins, Drake hurried down the short corridor that blocked the warehouse proper from this door. He whistled and called for Barto as he went, darting one look over his shoulder to make sure the helpful guard really was staying at his post.
All clear. Drake muttered a prayer of thanksgiving and jogged into the cavernous, dim space.
Inside were crates of various sizes. Equipment. Shelves. The light coming in through the grimy windows was barely sufficient to show him anything, so he withdrew a small electric torch from his pocket and got down to business.
“Barto!” he called again for good measure as he moved along one row of wooden crates. He switched his light on and shined it on the black words stamped onto the wood. This stack, apparently, was grain. He shook his head at the sheer volume of it. All this grain sitting here, and yet Pietro would probably go to bed hungry tonight. The owners of these warehouses and shipping ventures were getting rich from the war, while the average worker was all but starving.
He couldn’t worry about that right now though. Hall wasn’t interested in grain—or at least that’s not what he’d sent him here to investigate. He moved down another row, calling for the dog now and then, until the black words he sought filled his torch’s circle of light.
Tungsteno.
Wolfram.
Yes! Drake flashed the light along the row, counting how many crates there were, making note of the weight stamped on them. He’d have to do the actual math later with paper and pencil, but a quick estimation was sufficient to confirm that this tonnage was enough to tempt the Germans to try to obtain it—and to tempt England to let them, so that they could then confiscate it.
Drake rounded the corner of the stack to make sure there were no more crates hidden behind what he could see. He’d done a bit of research on wolfram after Hall mentioned it—enough to know that it was crucial not only in armor plating but in weapons themselves. It was rather impressive, having the highest boiling and melting temperatures of any known metal, and had first been identified right here in Spain some hundred and thirty
years before.
More importantly, it was here now, in this warehouse.
A scuffing sound made him pause. It was not coming from the front of the warehouse, where the guard presumably still stood sentinel, but from the rear. Another guard? He’d have thought the first would have mentioned if there were someone else who could help him search for the dog.
It almost sounded like a dog. Or some sort of animal, scraping and shuffling. Drake eased forward, switching off his torch and sliding it back into his pocket. Gripping the handle of his pistol instead, he pulled it out of his waistband. He’d never actually had to use it—but he would, if necessary.
It was probably just a big rat, scrounging for spilled grain. Or a cat. A dog. Nothing to warrant his alarm. He’d not assume so, though. He picked his foot up and set it silently back down, moving stealthily along until he could see the bar of afternoon light spilling through the scanty inches left open by the massive door at the rear.
Not an animal. A man, squeezing through the space, as Drake had considered and then dismissed doing. Someone out to liberate a few pounds of grain?
No. As the bloke squeezed through and stood, Drake caught a glimpse of his face. A face he’d seen before, skulking about much like he himself tended to do. Thus far he hadn’t found a name, but he was all but certain the man was a German agent—Drake’s opposite number.
In the same instant, the man spotted him and apparently recognized him just as quickly. In a flash, he’d whipped something from his own waistband and squeezed the trigger.
Drake ducked behind the crate of wolfram as a bullet bit into it, and he swallowed back a curse. The shot wouldn’t have drawn any attention. There’d been a Maxim Silencer on the pistol’s barrel, something he didn’t have on his.
And attention was the last thing he wanted. Attention would mean more guards and possibly the move of this supply of metal. The undoing of all his weeks of searching. No, he wouldn’t go shooting at the man shooting at him.
Keeping his head down, he ran in a hunch along the crates. Another muffled shot sounded, another bullet bit into the floor an inch from his heel. The man must have come to the end of this aisle. Drake tossed himself over another stack of crates and rolled across it, dropping to his feet on the other side. “Barto! Get back here, you mutt!”
Footsteps sounded from the front. From his crouched position, Drake saw the shadow of the German freeze, then melt away as he sought cover.
The friendly guard must have come to the end of his corridor. “Is all well?”
Drake emerged from the rows of crates, putting himself in plain sight of the German, no doubt, but also of the guard. His gut told him that the agent wanted secrecy as much as he did, otherwise he wouldn’t have that silencer on the end of his barrel. He wouldn’t shoot him with anyone watching.
He hoped.
Pasting fond exasperation on his face, Drake jogged to the front. “Silly animal slid back out the rolling door. I’ll get him.” He moved into the stubby corridor, smiling despite the breath he held. Please, God. Please. A prayer not for his own safety at this point—the chap had had a clear shot of him as he’d moved and would have taken it already if that were his intent—but for the guard. He didn’t think the opposite number would attack him. If he were here to scope out the wolfram, too, then he wouldn’t want it moved any more than Drake did, and shooting a guard would pretty much guarantee that anything valuable in this warehouse would be shipped to another. But sometimes the Germans surprised him.
The guard chuckled and opened the front door for him, obviously blissful in his ignorance of the bullets that had just seared their way through his warehouse. “Better hurry. Best of luck!”
“Gracias!” Grateful he had an excuse to run, Drake kicked his speed from jog to sprint once he was on the street.
Even so, the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. Had the man gone out the same way he’d come in? Was he out here yet? Which direction would he go?
A muted shot answered that. Drake kicked up his speed as the bullet took a chunk out of the wall behind him. At least the bloke didn’t seem to be a crack shot. Too close for comfort though.
Where, then, to run?
Spying an alley that would remove him from the gun’s line of sight, Drake dove down it, sprinting to the end, a prayer pounding with every footfall that he’d reach the exit before the other bloke reached the entrance. His ears strained to hear anything over his own breathing, his own pulse, his own steps.
There. Other running steps—but Drake was even then turning out of the alley onto the street running parallel to the one on which the warehouse sat. A farm wagon loaded with hay—no doubt destined for another warehouse—creaked by. A lorry sputtered along opposite. His eyes darted this way and that, his mind darting just as quickly through the options.
He could toss himself into the hay wagon, burrow down.
No.
He could run into that open door of the next building down and then search for a back exit.
No.
His gaze latched onto another alley, not quite opposite. He’d scouted out this section of town enough to know it would deliver him to the river. If he could get out of the Bilbao la Vieja—the city’s industrial left bank—and across the river, he’d be back in the Casco Viejo, the Old Quarter. And there, he’d be on his own turf, where he knew every street, every turn . . . and many of the people.
Go.
The lorry was rattling in the right direction. He dashed into the street and to the opposite side of the automobile, getting as close as he could to its side and matching its lumbering speed. His legs he kept aligned with its rear wheels, and his back he kept hunched enough that his head wouldn’t clear the top of the lorry’s frame. He grasped one of the cords holding a canvas top over the cargo to steady himself and glanced ahead to where that next alley drew slowly closer.
Ten more seconds. Five. Now. He peeled away from the lorry’s side and into the narrow street while the lorry covered the entrance.
With any luck, his opposite number was following the hay wagon, poking into that for him. Or running down the street proper.
If so, all Drake had to do was be out of sight again by the time he crossed the mouth of the alley. It was a short little thing, improving his chances. He increased them more with another muttered prayer in Spanish.
The scent of the river washed over him in the seconds before he charged out of the alley’s shadows and back into the golden afternoon light. He skidded out of the alley and to the side, out of view from the other end, and took stock of where he’d come out.
“Señor?”
Perhaps some would think it an outstanding coincidence that one of his grandfather’s men stood on a barge not ten yards from where Drake had emerged. He knew, rather, that it would have been far stranger had any of the docks here on the Bilbao la Vieja not had one of Abuelo’s barges at it.
The only thing particularly notable was that it was Eneko who stood there with his pole already in hand. His grandfather’s most trusted employee. His mother’s childhood friend. The man least likely to cause him any trouble by saying too much to Abuelo.
Drake hurried over and dropped onto the barge. “Vamonos.”
Eneko muttered something incomprehensible and poled away from the dock. Once they were drifting in the lazy current, the man turned glinting brown eyes on him. “And why were you among the foundries today, Don Dragón? You told your abuelo you were attending classes.”
Drake cleared his throat and offered no more than a Spanish um. “A ver . . .”
At that equivocation, Eneko shook his head, still more brown than grey. “If you ask me, you are a dragon who needs your wings clipped.”
If only he had some—that would certainly make it easier to fly away from trouble. And a bit of fire-breathing wouldn’t hurt either. Drake laughed and grabbed the second pole. Best to get them across the river as quickly as possible—and out of range of the German’s pistol.
5
> Are you certain you want to join us?” Margot hung back near the church’s front step with Dot as Maman chatted with a few friends from the parish. They’d only discovered two weeks ago that they, in fact, attended Mass at the same time and place as her new friend . . . but Dot had always found a seat in the back, and Maman always led Margot to the front.
Dot drew in a breath that shook a bit around the edges, but she smiled and nodded. “It’s been ages since I’ve enjoyed Sunday dinner with anyone. And it was so kind of your brother and sister-in-law to invite me.”
Kindness had little to do with it. Lukas had been so impressed that Margot had actually made a friend her own age—more or less—that he’d been hounding her all month to “get the girl here so we can get to know her better.”
Maman had chided him for his incredulity. And Lukas had laughed and said, “I was beginning to think my little sister was actually a forty-year-old man, given her choice of companions.”
Was it her fault that girls her own age were more often than not so silly they made her itch? That the only people she’d ever found who let her be herself were among that motley collection of academics in Room 40? Still. She smiled now at Dot and didn’t at all mind that the Lord had finally given in to Maman’s prayers on this score. “If at any point you want to leave, please believe that we won’t be offended.”
Generally speaking, Dot did fine enough once she was out. But Margot had also learned that there came a point in the day when she was just finished. When the world got to be too much and she had to get home before the anxiety clawed her to bits.
On the average workday, that time came about ten minutes after her usual dismissal time. Margot certainly didn’t want to be the cause of it springing upon her on a Sunday, the day she usually holed up in the safety of her flat after the hour at Mass.
“Your niece is precious.” Dot’s focus had gone to where Lukas and Willa stood chatting with someone, little Zurie positioned happily on her mother’s hip, fingers hooked in her mouth. She’d inherited Lukas’s dark hair and eyes, set in a face shaped more like Willa’s. She was indeed a pretty little thing, which wasn’t surprising. Lukas was as beautiful in a masculine way as their mother was in the feminine, and it stood to reason he’d pass the family beauty along to his children. Though Willa got a glint in her eyes anytime someone praised her daughter’s beauty. She had a prejudice against being called pretty—and apparently didn’t like it applied to her little one either.
The Number of Love Page 5