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.”