She went from codebook to telegram and back again, her smile growing a little more with each sentence that made sense. It was the right one. They’d found it. Soon she was slapping the first short decrypt to the side—the plain text scrawled directly onto the telegrams, each word above its encoded counterpart.
Drake snatched it up while she went to work on the next. “Identify targets for plan B3.” He paused, probably looking at the admiral. “Do we know what that is?”
“No. Where was that one sent from?”
Margot didn’t need to check her notes—she’d already memorized the order of receipt and location. “From Berlin. To here in London. As is the next, if we’re looking at them in order of dates received.” It being no longer than the original, she even then wrote the last word. “This one says, ‘Locate admiralty codebooks.’”
A beat of silence, then Hall snorted. “Well, they’ve failed in that. We’d know it if our codes had been compromised.”
They would, as they had been alerted when the minesweeping code had been. But it could be why this agent had been targeting her. The date on the telegram matched up with when he’d begun appearing.
She went to work on the next message, which was longer. The men chattered on about the mission while she decrypted, until she slid the sheet over toward Drake.
“This one is reporting the death of an Agent Regnitz in the line of duty. Requesting transport of body. . . . Regnitz? I don’t recognize that name.”
“It’s a river,” Camden said. “In Bavaria. Aside from that . . . it could be a surname, I suppose. Or a code name. Sir?”
Hall’s footsteps sounded, and then there was the rustle of paper exchanging hands. “I don’t recall seeing it in any of our other information.”
Nor did Margot, though she gave it only a passing thought. Her focus was already on the next telegram. A response to the first, it seemed. “Transport was refused. The recipient was instructed to dispose of the corpse however he saw fit and then implement plan A22.” She slapped that paper down too. “This next one is also from Berlin but seems to have been sent to England again, sir.”
“Where were the previous two received originally?”
“Madrid.”
She heard the hitch in Drake’s breath. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, since we know it has something to do with Jaeger, and the train was bound for Madrid. I suppose A22 commanded him back here, somehow or another.”
“So it would seem. Though I would still like to know how an agent of the Central Powers managed to slip past us without my knowing it.” Hall’s irritation echoed off the marble stairs.
Margot scratched another word onto the page.
“Or was it two agents, even?” Drake asked. “We know Jaeger is here, given the phone call. He must be working with the man who attacked the girls last night. This bloke seems to have been here for a while—I would bet under the name Niall Walsh originally. Perhaps he helped secret Jaeger in somehow too.”
“Without our knowing it?” Hall huffed. “Not possible.”
Margot’s lips twitched. “The law of large numbers, sir. It’s possible someone has evaded your knowledge all this time, however improbable it may seem.”
“Statistics that don’t particularly help just now. What we need are some hard facts. Margot?” Hall stepped closer.
Her smile had stalled and faded. “This is the last one of those we found in the flat, and it just references another plan by alphanumeric designation. The others were sent to South America. Not to our man, I should think.” With a frustrated sigh, she set her pencil down. “Useless. All of it. You two put your lives in danger for nothing.”
“I don’t believe that.” Drake sat beside her and bumped his shoulder into hers. “We needed that codebook. It’s given us pieces. Perhaps we’re still missing a few others, but we’ll find them.”
“Tomorrow is soon enough to renew the search.” Hall blinked, nodded, and motioned to the door. “Everyone to their beds—that’s an order. And Camden?”
The pilot paused with a foot already aimed for the door. “Sir?”
“Well done.”
His face didn’t exactly soften. The shadows didn’t exactly abandon their posts in his eyes. But a bit of light entered there, alongside them. After a moment’s pause, he nodded. “Thank you, sir.” He strode for the door. Though when he pushed it open, his next words had their usual snarl to them. “Well, look who it is. I didn’t know nursemaids made office calls.”
“Red?” Drake pushed to his feet, brows drawn.
Holmes was pushing past Camden with a scowl. “I haven’t time for your nonsense just now. Elton, you’d better get home.”
Margot slipped the two telegrams no one had picked up into the codebook and stood too. “Dot?” She met Drake’s questioning look. “She was properly upset this morning. Handed in her resignation, gave me a dressing-down, and stormed out.”
“She won’t answer the door.” Red motioned toward the general direction of her flat. “And she must have dismissed the guard you’d posted. But that’s not why I’ve come, actually. There’s an older Spanish gentleman at your building, Elton, demanding to see his grandchildren and causing a terrible uproar.”
Drake actually jerked, as if a bolt of electricity had coursed through him. “Well, it can’t be my grandfather. He never leaves home.”
Red lifted dubious brows. “Then perhaps you can at least come and explain why whoever it is keeps yelling for a dragon. One of your neighbors is convinced he’s calling down dark magic or some such rot, and he keeps lapsing into Spanish, which no one else can understand.”
Drake jolted again, and Margot gripped his hand. “Dragon?” he muttered.
“That would be you, wouldn’t it, Eighteen?” She knew she looked a bit too amused at his expense. But she couldn’t recall ever seeing him caught so off guard. “Looks like your abuelo has a few surprises up his sleeve after all.”
31
Suddenly Drake thought he knew how those pilots with altitude sickness had felt. Utterly disoriented, he could only stand in the doorway to the landlord’s office, sure he was seeing an apparition. Or an illusion. Or a figment of his own imagination. Something other than what his eyes insisted he saw—Francisco Mendoza de Haro. Here, in England, where he had never once deigned to step.
It was Margot who stepped forward first, hand outstretched, and said, “You must be Señor Mendoza. I’m Margot De Wilde.”
Abuelo, ever the gentleman, even when he was only an illusion, took her hand and pressed his lips to it, despite that she’d clearly meant to shake instead. “Ah, my granddaughter’s new friend. Es un placer conocerle.”
Drake shook himself and stepped forward. “Abuelo. What are you—why are you . . . ?”
Abuelo’s eyes could sparkle with the best of them. “Rarely have I seen you unable to frame the right question, Dragón.” Then his too-dark brows lifted toward his white hair. “Is this how you greet your abuelo?”
“Lo siento.” Apology muttered, Drake moved forward to embrace him. “You look well.”
“As do you, which is a great relief to me.” Now he narrowed his eyes, rebuke in his gaze, and motioned with a hand.
Only then did Drake notice that Eneko stood in the corner, clutching a hat, which he now held out.
Not just a hat. Drake’s hat. He took it, knowing he looked as dazed as he felt. “How did you get this?” It ought still to be tumbling through the Spanish countryside. Or on the head of a farmer who laughed over his find.
“The better question, Dragón, is how did you lose it?” Abuelo moved to the rickety chair behind the landlord’s scratched desk and sat in it with the same grace and authority he used when taking his own seat in Bilbao. Steepling his fingers, he narrowed his eyes still more. “Imagine my concern when the policía knocked on my door two weeks ago, your favorite hat in their hands, saying they discovered it at a suspected murder scene in Madrid and traced the label to the haberdasher you favor there. He so v
ery helpfully checked the number he’d put on the tag against his books and gave them your name. Imagine my concern, Dragón, when they said they were not certain whether it belonged to the victim or the culprit, but that you were a person of interest in this crime.”
Drake groped for support—a chair back, a shelf, something to keep him upright. Instead he found Margot’s hand in his. Which anchored him far better than furniture could anyway. “I beg your pardon?”
Abuelo shook his head. “I, of course, knew you were well. You had wired me since this mysterious death to tell me you were spending Christmas here. And, of course, you are no murderer. That was never in question. So I told the policía they must have been mistaken. That my grandson was but a lackadaisical university student who could not seem to finish his studies in a reasonable amount of time. And one who further prolonged his graduation by deciding to winter here for some unfathomable reason.” His eyes darted to Margot, and his lips slid up just a fraction—not enough to be thought a smile on anyone else, but the equivalent of a grin for him. “Or perhaps not so unfathomable now. Why have you not mentioned your cariño in your letters to me, Dragón?”
Drake could only shake his head. “I don’t understand. What murder scene?”
“Ah. This was of the utmost interest to me, too, despite my certainty you had nothing to do with it. I had to expend considerable effort and call in many favors to determine this.” Abuelo waved his fingers again, and again Eneko stepped forward.
Eneko’s expression said more than Abuelo’s did. That whatever this was, it was serious. He held out a thin stack of papers clipped together, a photograph on top.
Naturally, Drake’s eyes went first to the image. And his head went light at the grainy shot of two men entering a building. Grainy, but good enough to see their faces.
“El Señor was providing for us with that photograph, sí? A woman had her camera out, at her window, to try to get a snapshot of her son riding on his bicycle—you see him there in the foreground. She did not realize she had captured anyone else in her image until weeks later, when she received her pictures back. And even then, she only came forward when we put an advertisement in the newspaper, asking for any information to be had on suspicious men seen at that address.”
“Suspicious men,” Drake echoed, eyes still pasted to the image.
Margot had leaned in, too, and had drawn in a long breath. “It’s him. The taller one—that’s the man who attacked us. Was he the one following you?”
“Yes.” Drake swallowed. “And the other is Maxim Jaeger.” Jaeger, clutching at his leg. Jaeger, agony on his face. Jaeger, supported by the man in the grey overcoat, looking as though he wouldn’t have been able to walk without said support.
Red, who had been hovering in the doorway behind him, eased forward to study the image. “They look a bit alike, don’t they?”
“A bit.” He’d thought the mystery man had been familiar, hadn’t he? Slightly? But he’d assumed he’d seen his picture. It hadn’t occurred to him that he looked familiar because a few of those features Drake had memorized were the same as Jaeger’s. The nose. The eyes. That was where the similarity ended, but seeing both faces together now, it was obvious. “They’re brothers.”
Margot’s breath eased out again. “Drake . . . have you ever heard that other man speak?”
He could only shake his head, easily following her train of thought. She might have, during their Go game, but she’d certainly never heard Jaeger. But if they were brothers . . . “It could have been him on the telephone. Not Jaeger at all.”
“If Jaeger is the name by which you know the injured one,” Abuelo chimed in from the desk, “then I can promise you he did not place any telephone calls after the seventh of November. He is deceased. His body was just discovered in a shallow grave outside the city a few days ago. A bullet apparently severed the artery in his leg. We believe he bled out in that building the photograph shows him being led into.”
“A bullet.” Drake closed his eyes, well remembering the pistol in his hands that day as he climbed the ladder on the train car. Firing wildly, blindly, just trying to keep Jaeger down. But if his opposite number had already stood up . . . His fingers tightened around Margot’s. He’d killed him. He hadn’t meant to. Hadn’t, honestly, wanted to. Yes, it was war. Yes, he knew what was expected. But recognizing a man was an enemy didn’t mean he wanted to eliminate him entirely. Because he wasn’t just an enemy. He was a man. A son.
A brother.
But Maxim Jaeger was dead—undeniably. And his brother was here. “You will pay,” he’d said. Not for the sugar, not for the anthrax. For Maxim’s death.
Margot must have been doing the same arithmetic in her mind. She tugged on his hand, angled toward the door. “Red, you said the guard was gone from the door? And Dot wouldn’t answer? Not even for you?”
No. Drake didn’t need to be pulled. He surged forward, doing the pulling.
“Dragón.” Abuelo had stood, and he must have rushed to get to the door by the time Drake put his foot on the first step. “I do not know if it matters, but Jaeger was not the name I was given when I asked one of my German contacts to discover his identity for me. I was told he was Heinrich Regnitz, a decorated officer before he and his brother, Dieter, were both recruited into intelligence.”
Feet itching to launch him up the stairs, Drake still paused long enough to shake his head. “How did you discover all that, Abuelo?”
“I have friends in high places. On both sides of the war.” His brows lifted again. “Apparently closer than I knew on the Allied side. I expect a full explanation from you before I go home. I have long known you were not taking more classes, but I would like to know what you have been up to.”
Eneko appeared behind Abuelo. “I told you he ought to have his wings clipped.”
Drake didn’t spare the time it would take to roll his eyes. He bounded up the stairs, Margot at his side and Red a step behind them.
“Heinrich Regnitz. The one that telegram was about.” Margot had no trouble keeping pace. “And the man we’re looking for must be Dieter Regnitz. His brother.”
“His brother.” Drake’s chest went tight. “I killed his brother. I had to fire off a few shots as cover, to give myself a chance to get away. I must have hit him. Just before he hit me. I didn’t mean to kill him.” He knew well that emotion tightened his voice. Emotion he’d never dare let slip out in the presence of another soldier. But somehow, he thought Margot would understand. “I didn’t even mean to hit him. Just force him down.”
Red’s step faltered. “Wait, you were . . . ? Elton, I believe I require the same explanation you owe your grandfather.”
“Later, Red.” They charged up the final stretch of stairs. First he had to make sure Dieter didn’t take his revenge on the most likely candidate.
Drake’s sister. Drake’s sister for Dieter’s brother.
But the corridor yawned frighteningly empty when they gained it. No guard, as Red had said, even though Hall had stationed one there in Camden’s place last night. Even though Drake had given the chap strict instructions not to let anyone but Red in, not to let her out alone, and not to leave her there alone.
“Dot?” he called through the door even as he inserted his key into the lock and turned. “Dot!”
She didn’t answer, and he knew as he opened the door and stepped inside that she wasn’t there.
The flat wasn’t empty though. Muffled noises came from Drake’s bedroom—a thumping and a muted vocalization. “Dot?” He surged forward, praying with every ounce of hope he had that his certainty had been wrong, that she was there. Bound, gagged perhaps, but there.
Red somehow beat him to the doorway, his face in agony. “Dotty, we’re coming!” He pushed open the door. It swung free about eight inches, then it stuck, and another muffled yell sounded.
Margot stood frozen a few paces from the door. Seeing it, but not just it. Seeing her mother’s door, too, that terrible morning. When she’d pus
hed it open, only to find it wouldn’t go. That it had stuck against her prone figure on the floor.
Her throat went tight. Even though she knew it was different this time, still her throat went tight. And the fingers that Drake had dropped as he vaulted forward curled toward her palms.
Numbers clamored for release. Prayers that had remained too long unprayed. Supplications. Thirteen, twenty-six, thirty-nine. Praises. Three, nine, twenty-seven, eighty-one. Pleas for forgiveness. Eighteen. Eighteen. Eighteen.
Red had squeezed through the opening and helped the blue-clad legs find purchase on the floor. Drake swung the door wide.
It must have been the guard they’d posted. He was clearly a navy man, and even from here Margot could see the bloodied knot on his head. His hands were bound behind him, his ankles tied tight, and a balled-up rag had been tied into his mouth, the poor chap.
Red and Drake soon had the gag removed, the ropes cut. Margot spun for the kitchen, Maman’s voice in her head. Get the poor lad some water, Margot. Can you not see that he will be parched?
Maman had always been wise. The man was managing little more than a few hoarse croaks until she handed him the water, which he guzzled greedily. Then he sank onto the end of Drake’s bed with an audible “Thanks.”
“Tell me what happened, seaman. Where’s my sister?”
The lad shook his head. “I was escorting her home from the OB, Lieutenant, as you’d told me to do. We’d just gotten to the door, and your sister was fishing her keys out of her handbag—she was upset and having a time of it, so I was trying to help. Then, the next thing I know, I woke up here, and it was afternoon already.”
Red spat out his opinion on the matter, shoved agitated fingers through his hair, and spun toward the window. “Where is she? Where? Do you think—is he going to hurt her?”
“I don’t know.” Drake, too, spun. Margot, still on the threshold because it felt too odd to go into his room, watched his eyes flit from left to right, up and down, every which way. Searching for answers. Or, lacking those, for questions. Then the color drained from his cheeks as he stared at something she couldn’t see from where she stood. “Margot. Come here, please.”
The Number of Love Page 33