Joanna Bourne - Rogue Spy

“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. Caught the windowsill with his fingers and hung. Found a toehold in the brick and pulled himself up.

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.

He said, “Get over by the wall. Leave that cloak where it is. I want to see your hands the whole time.”

“I’m in my shift.”

“I’ve seen you naked.”

They’d all seen each other naked in the spartan dormitory at the Coach House. When they were Cachés. When they were children, spies in training, miserable and deadly. When they’d been friends. “I was twelve. Nobody was interested.”