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.”
Doyle saw it in an instant. “Great gibbering frogs. Camille Leyland.”
“They didn’t slip her into the home of some general or Foreign Office drone, hoping she’d come across a code once in a while. They were more ambitious. She went to the top codebreakers in England. The Leylands.”
Doyle said, “They put her right under my nose.”
“Couilles du diable,” Hawker whispered.
“She played me for a fool,” Doyle said.
“Consistently and with panache,” Hawk said. “She comes from France. She miraculously washes ashore in a shipwreck. She just happens to be the Leylands’ niece. It was always too much of a coincidence. Why didn’t I see that?” Hawker kicked at something in the street.
“Because I told you she was genuine.” Doyle grimaced. “A hundred witnesses saw the girl stagger ashore. She was half-drowned and bruised head to foot from tumbling on the rocks. When I questioned her, I saw a little girl, shaking with fever, letter perfect, and innocent as a rose. I believed her.”
The Tuteurs were meticulous when they made a placement. His own story had been just as good. “You could have talked to her for a week and never caught her in a lie. At the Coach House we were trained to resist interrogation.” He stepped off the pavement into the street. “You can’t imagine how well we were trained.”
Hawker fell into step beside him. “You know where she is.”
“I know where a Leyland would be and she’s been a Leyland for the last decade.” Vérité had become Cami. He knew where a Cami would be.
Doyle, with no break in the appearance of good-natured indolence, was at his other side. “She was ten years old. Even the French didn’t send ten-year-old Cachés.”
“She was twelve and scrawny as a twig.”
“She didn’t sell secrets.” Hawk found another rock on the street to kick. “We’d have spotted her the first time we lost a Leyland code. What the hell has she been doing all these years if she’s not selling English secrets?”
Hiding. “If that bastard gets his hands on her, she’ll spill every code she’s ever seen. Every secret she’s read. He could make stones talk.” They’d reached the top of Paternoster Row, looking down the line of streetlamps. “That’s what the bastard’s after. The Leyland codes. She’s gone to ground at—”
“Braid’s Bookshop,” Doyle said. “Specializing in the literature of France, Germany, and Italy. The Leylands shop there when they come to town.”
“They shop everywhere,” Hawker said. “When I was doorkeeper at Meeks Street they used to send me all over town, looking for some Greek commentary on horseradishes.”
Doyle said, “But Braid’s for the code books. Cheap editions printed in Paris or Vienna. Inconspicuous. Replacements available everywhere. And the owner’s apartment at Braid’s is empty.”
They were walking away from the streetlamp, stepping on their shadows. None of them made any noise except the soft words, back and forth.
“Now, that I didn’t know,” Hawk said.
“You been in France.” Doyle loosened up his coat, making it just that one bit easier to get to his gun. “The finer points of life in this great metropolis have escaped your attention. The old man’s wife died . . . it must be six months ago. He moved in with his daughter and I don’t think they’ve rented out the upstairs. They hadn’t last time I went by.”
They stopped, together, at the alley that ran behind the houses on this side of the street. Braid’s was six houses ahead, marked by a glow of light in the shop window. Wind reshaped the mist, revealing the street for twenty yards, then taking it back again. They were all getting wet.
“I love unoccupied premises.” Hawk patted his chest, checking knives, following Doyle’s example. “As the professional milling cove among us, I suggest we call in Stillwater and McAllister to watch the shop. You, Pax, and I go in the back way. We—”
“I go in alone.”
A long pause.
“You want to do that?” Doyle asked. “She’s already attacked you once.”
“I’ll be more careful.”
Silence. Waiting.
He said, “I may convince her to talk. We were friends once. No.” He cut off what Hawk was about to say. “This isn’t as simple as dragging one more Caché out of hiding. We need the information inside her.” He glanced at Doyle. “It’s important.”
Doyle didn’t point out that a traitor took a lot on himself, giving orders. “We could convince her to talk at Meeks Street.”
“Not by any method you’d be willing to use. She knows how to keep silent. As I say, we were trained.”
Doyle took another half minute, then nodded. “It’s your decision.”
His decision. He imagined the moment of capture. Overwhelming fear and then a fight she had no chance of winning. His gut kept saying it was wrong to give Vérité to the Service. He couldn’t remember a time he’d had to push himself forward on one path when every instinct badgered him to take another. “Give me time with her.”
“Some time. Then you need to report to Meeks Street. Galba’s patience is not infinite.” Doyle paused and said, “Don’t let her get behind you.”
“I won’t.” He pulled his mind to the last details that had to be arranged. This game could end in a lot of different ways. “Put McAllister and Stillwater on the front, left and right. You, if you will, take the far end of the alley, watching the back of Braid’s. Hawk takes this end. That corner, where he’s out of this wind. This isn’t the weather for somebody with a bullet hole in him.”
“Bullet wounds are no match for my well-practiced stoicism,” Hawk murmured.
“I’ll go in the window up there.” It was an upper-floor window on the front. Almost certainly, Vérité was sleeping in the back of the shop, near a fast escape. With luck, she wouldn’t hear him breaking in.
Doyle studied him for one more minute. “You’re sure you want to do this?”
“There’s a good chance she’ll talk to me if I’m alone.” He buttoned his coat so it wouldn’t get in his way.
Hawk said, “Going by past behavior, there’s a good chance she’ll slit your throat.”
The window was fifteen feet up. “I will hold that thought in mind.”
He clamped his throwing knife in his teeth and backed down the pavement. He ran, hit Doyle’s cupped hands, and took the leap upward. Caug
ht the windowsill with his fingers and hung. Found a toehold in the brick and pulled himself up.
Fourteen
It is not enough to know how to ride. One must know how to fall.
A BALDONI SAYING
She slept darkly and dreamlessly. Someone touched her shoulder.
She came up clawing. Hitting out with the heel of her hand. Then he had her wrists trapped, caught, pushed to the straw she slept upon. A ton of solid muscle held her down. Her legs tangled in the wool of her cloak, kicking uselessly.
Shadows resolved into a face leaning over her. He said, “Don’t fight me.”
Devoir. It was Devoir.
She froze.
His fingers settled to a better grip on her wrists. He said, “Hello again, Vérité.”
She could curl upward, ram her head into his face, break his nose . . .
And that was an exercise in the futile. Even if he didn’t know exactly what she was planning, and she was quick enough to batter him raw, he wouldn’t let go. You could grind Devoir neatly into sausage and he wouldn’t let go.
His body pressed like rocks. His breath blew hot on her face. Strands of his colorless hair hung between them. Her gun, loaded and ready, hidden under the rolled-up dress she was using as a pillow, could have been in Northumberland for all the good it did her.
She considered this abrupt reversal of fortune from every possible angle and didn’t like it. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
“You should have.” For a minute, his eyes glittered, fierce and unreadable. Abruptly, his weight was gone from her. He curled to his feet and stood looking down. “We didn’t finish talking.”
The British Service had found her. Her long deception was finished. Time to pay the piper. Icicles of panic shivered in her muscles.
Slowly, she pushed herself up to sitting. Her fingers brushed the pistol grip.
“Don’t,” he advised.
There are opportune moments for violent ambush. This did not seem to be one of them. She stretched her arms out, resting her elbows on her raised knees, on the cloak she’d used as her blanket. She intertwined her fingers, looking harmless.
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