“Only if she’s in there more than half an hour. She knows how to calm herself and never thanks me for interrupting her process.”
Margot clasped her elbows. She still had much to learn about her best friend, to be sure.
Drake slid the tea onto the end table and motioned for her to join him. “Red said he’d be here by six-thirty. If she hasn’t emerged before then, we’ll go in.”
She nodded and forced her feet to move again. Six steps, a two-hundred-seventy degree pivot, and she sat beside him.
He pressed a warm cup of tea into her hands. And waited.
She took a sip and then began, detailing everything she could recall.
“I recognized him,” she said only after the rest had been summarized. She looked up from the tea into Drake’s silver-blue eyes. “It was John Williams. He didn’t look like he had at the Go game—he’d been hunched over then, disheveled-looking, always a bit unfocused in the eyes. He was different tonight. Standing tall—far taller than I thought he was.”
Drake went stiff beside her. “How tall?”
“Probably . . .” She closed her eyes, visualized the distance she’d had to look up into his face, calculated. “I’d say between six-four and six-four-and-a-half, depending on the soles of his shoes.”
He hissed out a breath. “What about his hair? The color of his coat?”
Her brows drew down. “Dark—longish. The first time I saw him he was in a blue coat, but this one was grey. Why?”
He scooted forward a bit and angled in. “That night you ran from the flat—the bloke you ran into. Was that him?”
“I . . .” She drew back, and not because it was the first time they’d ever referenced that night when she’d run out into the darkness with her lips still warm from his, with her ears still ringing with his claim that he loved her. She hadn’t been paying any attention at the time. Her eyes had been blurred with tears, and she hadn’t looked up. But she must have had impressions. “I didn’t look at his face. It could have been, I think. The height seems right. Why?”
Drake muttered something in Spanish and looked away.
Margot scooted an inch and an eighth closer. “Drake—why?”
“Because that sounds like the man who’s been watching the flat.”
“This flat? But why?” He was just a former emissary to Japan. A sailor. Not right in the head, but harmless, she’d thought.
She’d obviously been wrong. Had he been following her? And watching Drake and Dot here? Planning this attack? It didn’t make sense. What could he want?
“I can’t be certain. But I suspect he’s working with the German agent who shot me on the train, the one in charge of getting the anthrax-laced sugar where it was meant to go.”
No, that made even less sense. “That can’t be. He was here before you were shot. And why would you think the man who shot you has anything to do with this?”
“He’s called me on the telephone. It was Jaeger’s voice. We haven’t been able to locate him, but the man you call Williams—he knew who I was that night, and he knew I’d been watching him, that I knew who he was. Minus the name. He must be an agent on the ground, here, one Hall’s men have missed. We thought we’d identified him as a bloke who’s called Niall Walsh, but he could well have another alias.”
Margot stood, her tea sloshing in its cup. “Why didn’t you chase him down that night? Apprehend him? Get answers?”
“You were more important.” But he winced and looked away. “Though maybe I should have. I’d feared reopening my wound, but I probably could have stopped him, or at least taken his knife. Then he couldn’t have attacked you two today. I’m sorry. At the time, the choice had seemed obvious.”
He’d chosen her, soothing her fears, over the best chance he’d probably ever had to apprehend a German agent hunting him down? “How is that obvious? I was acting like a . . . like a silly girl. You shouldn’t have let that stop you from finding him! Don’t you think I can weigh the situation and see that apprehending a German agent is a bit more important than wiping away my ridiculous tears?”
And for that matter, why hadn’t he bothered mentioning this little detail before now? That he’d been in danger all this time, hunted down? Perhaps they could have pieced it together sooner. Realized that her Go partner was working with his opposite number. She spun away, too many factors enumerating themselves for her to sort while she was looking at him.
His hands rested on her shoulders. “Nothing’s more important than soothing your tears, ridiculous or warranted. You matter more than a dozen German agents.”
She tried to shrug his hands away, though they settled right back where they’d been. And she was stupidly glad of it. “Don’t be absurd. One is never greater than twelve.”
“It is when you love the one.”
She huffed out a breath.
“You’re thinking I should have told you all this sooner. About the man following me. About Jaeger.” He pulled her toward him four inches, until her back brushed his chest.
Her eyes slid closed. “I’ve been obsessing over what killed my mother, wasting hours of time on newspapers that told me nothing. I could have been working on this instead. Finding answers that obviously are there. Because he’s there.” Had been for so long. Could he have had anything to do with Maman’s death? No, that didn’t fit. Not if he’d been hovering outside this flat. It must have to do with something else.
“I’m sorry.” His thumbs rubbed at her neck, digging into the knots of tension and bidding them loosen. “I’m used to protecting the women I love—hence why I didn’t even want to tell Dot what my position in the navy really was. But I should have told you sooner. You’re right.”
“Not to appease me. Because I could help. You know I could.”
“I know you could.” His voice was a whisper at her ear. “I didn’t want you to have to. I didn’t want to bring that danger to your door.”
She turned, dislodging his hands but catching them in her own. Facing him. “It was already there. I don’t need to be coddled, Drake. And I won’t coddle you. He could have killed your sister. He was aiming a knife at her.”
He knew that. The sobering truth of it turned his eyes from silver to lead, heavy and dark. His fingers tightened around hers until it nearly hurt. “We need to stop him.”
We. One plus one. But the truth was, it didn’t always equal two. Sometimes the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. Sometimes, when two things worked together, they were stronger than they should have been.
Pounding on the door made her jump, her gaze breaking away from his, her pulse hammering as fast as it had when she’d run here fifteen minutes ago. As fast as it had when he’d kissed her.
“Drake! Open up!” Red’s voice called out.
Margot released Drake’s hands, and he strode to the door, jerked it wide, even as the one to Dot’s room cracked open too. “What is it?”
Holmes’s chest was heaving, as if he too had run all the way here—or as close as he could get to running with his foot, anyway. He looked past Drake, to Margot. “I saw police swarming all over a building of flats on my way here and stopped in to see what the hubbub was about. It was Williams’s building.”
She looked to Drake, then back to Red. “What has he done now?”
“Williams?” Red shook his head. “Williams apparently hasn’t done anything for more than a month. They found his body in the basement. The bloke who’s been living there, the one I followed . . . apparently he isn’t Williams at all.”
“Walsh, then.” Drake charged toward the stairs, his face a stony mask. “And he’ll be on the run.”
28
Drake stood in the center of Williams’s unfamiliar flat, knowing well he was only here because Hall had once again pulled strings. Margot stood beside him, her fingers gripping his. To give strength or receive it? He wasn’t sure anymore.
Dot was at home, with Red and their upstairs neighbor to chaperone. And to fuss over them. Camden had
been standing sentinel at the door when they’d left. Hall hadn’t sent him, but Cam apparently had heard him barking out an order for an armed guard and had volunteered for the job.
Heaven help anyone who tried to cross him.
“I don’t understand.” Margot’s eyes stayed fixed on the portrait that hung, framed, on the wall. The real Williams, it seemed, smiling as he posed for the camera, shaking the hand of an important-looking Japanese official. Not the man either he or Margot had seen before. “Why would he have assumed Williams’s identity?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps he thought his Niall Walsh cover had been compromised.” Drake’s glance skidded around the room, not sure where to rest. The police had already been all through it, looking for any hints as to who had murdered the poor man. Muddy boot prints marred the floor, papers had been left out on the table, drawers upended.
“Who is this man?” Margot had looked away from the portrait at last. But her gaze settled on the grey overcoat hanging neatly in the corner. Apparently he’d had to flee from the bobbies too quickly to grab it.
But it was the one he’d been wearing outside Dot’s flat. The one, according to Margot, he’d been wearing earlier that evening when he’d attacked them.
“I don’t know. I only know who he’s not. Not Jaeger.” Jaeger hadn’t operated like this, killing innocents for his own convenience. The warehouse clerk, all those people on the streets between them, the family in the train carriages. Abuelo, for that matter, and the household there. Jaeger had known who Drake was, called him by name. But he’d never hurt anyone else to get to him.
Professional, Hall had said. Opposite numbers. But it hadn’t been personal.
Yet it had been Jaeger’s voice on the phone. He was involved. Somehow.
Margot’s fingers slid free of his, and she wandered through the small, three-room flat. For a moment, Drake just watched her unique way of wandering. She didn’t do it aimlessly like other people. She wandered with precision. Two steps, a halt, a three-hundred-sixty degree turn. Two more steps, another halt, another turn. Taking in everything. Seeing numbers, probably, to account for everything. Boards in the floor. Books on the shelf. Pillows on the bed. Slices of bread on the plate on the table, where Walsh or whatever his name really was must have been sitting down to eat when the police had knocked on his door.
Not his door. Williams’s door.
Drake moved, too, after a minute. Less precisely, but perhaps more purposefully. He was no stranger to poking about, finding information, investigating. The police had said they’d taken nothing with them, that there was nothing to give them a clue as to the killer’s identity. Nothing, they insisted, to indicate that the man living here was even Williams’s killer rather than a random squatter.
He knew better. Drake opened every drawer, checked every loose board, pulled out every book.
“Margot.” The volume in his hands was in German, but he recognized a few of the words. It was a guide on the game Go. And it had telltale yellow papers sticking out of its pages like bookmarks.
She appeared at his side and drew in a sharp breath. “Telegrams.”
“Telegrams.” He opened to the first one, made note of the page number in case it mattered, and handed it to her after only a cursory glance. “In German.”
“In code.” She sank onto the edge of the little wooden chair by the bookshelf. “Blast.”
“What?”
“In the mystery code. I’m all but certain of it. The one we haven’t broken yet.”
He extracted the others too. “What about these?”
She took them, her eyes going over them not word by word but seeming to swallow them whole. Then she let her eyes slide shut, her lips move without sound. And she nodded. “All the same.”
Drake re-marked the pages in the book with pieces he tore off a blank page on the desk. “How long will it take you to break it?”
“Too long. Weeks. Months. We don’t have enough examples of it.”
“Not even when combined with what you have on file?”
“These are what we have on file. Some of them, anyway. The originals.” She stood again, her dark eyes troubled. “We need to get this all to the admiral. We can check the sources, see where they were sent from. That might give us a clue as to what code we’re looking for and where we can find a codebook.”
In this flat would be nice—but he had a feeling this bloke hadn’t left such a thing lying about. He nodded and looked around again. “Let me just make certain there’s nothing else of interest hiding here first.”
“All right. I’ll stare at these a bit longer. See if I have any epiphanies.”
He let a smile tease the edges of his mouth as he turned back to the bookshelf. If anyone could crack a code just by staring at it, it was surely Margot De Wilde.
He didn’t find anything else hidden in the tomes, nor in the cupboards in the kitchen, nor anywhere else he checked. After a thorough search, he moved back to Margot’s side. “I suppose those are our only clues.”
She wasn’t staring at the telegrams any longer though. She was staring at a small notebook opened to a blank page.
“What is it?”
She picked it up, angled it toward the light. “I thought so.”
He bent down to match her view and could just barely make out indentations on the page. “What does it say? Something important?”
“It’s what he used to write the notes that he left with the—wait a minute.” Frowning, she stood and spun in a faster three-sixty. “Where’s the game board?”
Drake spun, too, even though he knew well it hadn’t been anywhere in here. “I don’t know. Could it be set up in the park?”
Her answer was simply to look at him for a second and then take off for the door. Drake followed in her wake, pulling the door closed behind him and nodding his thanks to the bobby stationed in the corridor.
Williams’s flat wasn’t far from the park. It only took them a few minutes to reach it and walk the familiar paths.
But the table was empty. No game. No notes. Certainly no Niall Walsh.
“He must have it with him.”
Drake shoved his hands deep into his pockets. “He didn’t grab his coat, but he grabbed the game?”
“Priorities, I suppose. Which tells us what?”
He grinned. “I’m rubbing off on you. That, mi alma, is the question. It tells us he’s going to use it again. To communicate with you.”
“Well then. It’s his play.” She tucked her hand into the crook of Drake’s arm—without prompting, without invitation—and tugged him along the path. “We need to get to Hall.”
They didn’t speak as they hurried along. He had to imagine that her mind was working through everything like a moving-picture reel. His certainly was. Drawing up all the details again, examining them, asking what each piece could mean, then flipping to the next.
Wondering, always wondering, where Jaeger fit into it.
The OB was officially closed for the night, but it wasn’t empty. It was never empty, especially not on the floor that the intelligence hive had taken over. The night shift was there, waiting for the new codes to come in shortly after midnight. And Hall was still there, pacing his office like a caged lion.
He charged out of his door as they drew near. “There you are. What did you find?”
They briefed him as succinctly as possible, Margot handing over the telegrams. The admiral’s lips pressed together as he blinked, taking it all in. “We have these in our files?”
Margot nodded. “And a few others besides.”
“Then let’s see what the others are, where they came from. See if that lends us any aid.”
Drake didn’t know what to look for or how to help as they pulled down box after box and riffled through them, so he just leaned into the threshold and set his mind toward prayer. The best possible use of his time just now anyway.
“Here they are.” Margot pulled out what was clearly a logbook, and Hall handed over a
stack of papers. The other intercepts, he assumed, in the code in question.
She flipped page after page, ran a finger down the charts.
“Well?” Hall looked over her shoulder.
“All the ones our fellow had in the book originated in Berlin, which is no surprise. It looks like they were sent to a variety of locations, though. France. Spain. Ireland. Here.”
“He must have got around, whoever he is. What of the others?”
Margot checked the papers, flipped a few more pages in the log, and then looked up with bright eyes. “There are a few intercepts with reverse locations—originating here or the other places and sent to Berlin. And others from Berlin to South America, more to the Continent. But a few went to zeppelins.”
Drake straightened. “Does that mean zeppelins would carry the codebooks?”
Hall slapped a hand to his knee and stood up from where he’d crouched. “It’s likely.” His eyes met Drake’s.
Drake knew exactly what he was thinking. “A zeppelin just went down yesterday in France.” It had been part of the information he’d sorted that morning. He’d flagged it, because he always flagged it. Hall must have reviewed his flags already. “The French reported nothing salvageable from the wreckage.”
“Bah.” Hall took a step past him, his brows drawn. “I’ll offer a reward for anything useful brought back. That’ll inspire some of our chaps to scour the area, widen the search. I only pray we’ve time enough. It will take at least a week for our lads on the ground to be given leave to hunt through the wreckage and then get anything they find back to us by ship. I do worry that—”
“I’ll go.”
They went still, both of them. Hall, in front of him. Margot, behind him. Both of their eyes drilling into him. Drake straightened his shoulders. “We need answers now, or this bloke’s going to vanish on us.”
Hall shook his head. “By the time you could get there, the others might as well—”
“Camden can fly me in.” He summoned a smile. “Assuming you can help him get his hands on a plane again, sir.”
Hall lifted his brows. “You’re going to ask him for a favor? I know he is your friend, Elton, but he hasn’t been in the best frame of mind recently. I wouldn’t count on his good graces.”
The Number of Love Page 30