Joanna Bourne - Rogue Spy

When he took the halter, he held the cheroot out to the side where it wouldn’t annoy the horse.

“I am glad you decided to come. You brought the code?” He ventured that as one would hope, politely, that a borrowed book was about to be returned.

“I have it.” She touched the bodice of her dress. That wasn’t where she’d hidden the fake code. One tells many minor lies to hide the great ones. “Show me the woman.”

“In a moment.”

“Now.”

“Patience. All in good time.” He might have been a very nice man, saddened and hurt by her suspicion. He smiled at her and his eyes were most perfectly empty. “I have her inside the coach. Let me . . .” The horse was an orderly and placid mare, but she shuffled hooves and shook her great head at the smell of tobacco and fire. The Merchant waved largely. “You, boy! Come here.”

She’d been aware of a rattle and click along the pavement behind her, but in a situation that held a choice of threats, she’d concentrated on the nearest and most deadly. She glanced over her shoulder, keeping the Merchant in view at the same time.

The boy approached, bowling a hoop, letter perfect in his role of Child Playing on the Street. He was dressed exactly as a loving mother in Semple Street would send her son from the house.

Carlo Baldoni. He was what—twelve? A child in the line of fire. Damn the Baldoni anyway, and damn her for not expecting this.

Carlo propped his hoop against the railing, a convincing, well-used hoop that he’d doubtless stolen. Respectful, curious, he approached. “Yes, sir.”

The Merchant dropped the halter, navigated in his pocket, and found sixpence. “You like horses?”

Breathless and high voiced, with exactly the right accent, Carlo said, “Oh, yes, sir.”

“Then hold mine. This is Dolly. She’s very gentle.” The Merchant sent the coin riding over and under the back of his fingers. Sleight of hand. Pax could do that, too. This might be where he learned it. “You’ll have another like it when I come back.”

When Carlo came to pick up the reins, the Merchant clasped his shoulder in a friendly way and gave him the coin. One could almost see nephews and nieces gathered about the knee of this genial man as he handed out sugarplums. “What’s your name, son?”

“Tommy. Tommy Goodall.”

“Tom. A fine, strong name. Men with that name have been great fighters for great causes.” The Merchant smiled down into the innocent, upturned face. “You’ll do something important in the world, Tom.”

The Merchant’s voice was like the sweetened cream that topped iced cakes. Sweet, cloying, full of wind, amorphous. She heard an inhuman emptiness whistling beneath.

He showed no inclination to reveal his larger plans to her. Not why he needed the Mandarin Code. Neither the purpose nor the location of the gunpowder.

She would make certain this woman in the coach was safe, then let the British Service have him.

Every moment she delayed was an invitation to disaster. Pax stood in the alley with a pistol pointed at the Merchant’s heart. Mr. Hawker would be lethally equipped. Innocent-looking Carlo was Baldoni and thus old enough to carry a knife. There was a sniper three houses down. She was armed herself, for that matter. The potential for death was strewn across the Semple Street landscape like brown leaves in September.

From inside the coach came a faint knocking sound, as if an animal were trapped there. Or as if a woman, bound and gagged, tossed herself back and forth on the seat.

The Merchant walked a little ways from the landau, to smoke his cheroot.

Why was he smoking? Her mind skittered off, pursuing that oddity. A clumsy disguise? A weapon? A signal to his men?

She said, “Show me that woman.”

Amiable as a basking snake, sincere as bread, he held out his hand and made curled beckoning with his fingers. “You will see the woman when I’ve examined the code. Give me the paper, Cami Leyland. Come, I think we must trust each other a little, at this point.”

Horribly, sickeningly, when he wore that expression of grave reason on his face, he looked like Pax.

Like Pax . . . and not like. The Merchant had the square jaw, the lean cheekbones, the long, mobile line to his lips. There was the shared blood, plain to see.

Pax had said, “I am no part of him.”

Different men had been poured into the same vessel—one clean, one unclean. They were nothing alike, Pax and his father, not in the least grain or particular.

She said, “What are you going to do with the code?”

His eyelids drooped. “You know I can’t tell you that.”

“I have to know what I’m risking. I have to know whether they’ll trace this back to me.”

Something ugly curled behind his eyes. His voice held condescending amusement. “I promise they’ll never know it was you.”

He lies. To a Baldoni.

The Merchant was one of those who protected his great lie with many small lies. He lied with the exact opposite of the truth instead of a slight twisting of it. He promised most when he was about to betray. A Baldoni five-year-old would be ashamed to lie so badly.

She furrowed her brow as if she were thinking furiously. “Are the Leylands involved? I can be traced to them.”

“This is nothing to do with the Leylands. The code won’t be connected to them at all.” He scarcely bothered to hide the mockery, he was so certain of her stupidity. “We won’t use it in England.”

Lies. The truth is the opposite. The kegs of gunpowder were in London so his operation was in London. What connected the Mandarin Code, kegs of gunpowder, Camille Besançon, Semple Street, and her? How did they intersect?

“You’ll take this code overseas?” she said.

“I leave for Austria at once. This is nothing to do with England.” With his mouth, with the muscles of his face, with his skilled voice, the Merchant conveyed reassurance. Not with his eyes, though. Never with his eyes. “I promise you will escape harm.”

He plans to kill me. Fear and anger shivered through her. Why hadn’t he already done it? What was he waiting for?

The Baldoni said, To know the purpose of a lie, look at the results of it.

The Merchant’s lies had brought her to Semple Street. So far, they’d accomplished nothing else. Maybe the Merchant wanted her here.

She kept her hands still, not giving the signal. Up and down the street, she was watched through field glasses and gunsights. Two dozen men waited to move in.

He’s stalling for time. Something’s going to happen.

She could sense Pax as if he stood beside her, his finger on the trigger, his eyes on the Merchant, in his belly the ice-cold hatred of a lifelong vendetta.

Don’t kill him, Pax. Not yet. Not yet.

A rider passed, sitting his horse in a sloppy, preoccupied manner. In the house behind her, a baby had been crying for a while. That continued. And down the street, out of sight, a wagon, or maybe a carriage, approached. Four well-paced horses, light on their feet. A coach, then. The noise of their hooves slowed as they approached.

“This gets us nowhere.” The Merchant blew out an impatient breath. “One of us must yield. Come. Look at the woman and be convinced.” He turned on his heel, abruptly, and pulled open the door of his coach.

She could see a human form bundled on the bench seat of the landau, tied hand and foot, gagged.

He said, “Behold the offspring of the counterrevolutionary Jules Besançon, traitor to France, and the Englishwoman Hyacinth Leyland. Poisoned fruit of those poisoned blossoms.”

He leaned inside and fumbled about in the dimness. The stairs flipped down. He drew back.

She said, “I see a woman. Not necessarily Camille Besançon.”

The Merchant flicked his cheroot away, into the gutter. “Question her. Satisfy yourself of her bona fides. I’ll wait at the corner and give you privacy.” He motioned in that direction.

“And the Mandarin Code?”

He’d already turned his back on her and taken the first steps away. He didn’t pause. He just said, “Later.”

The coach she’d heard approaching pulled up outside Number Twenty-nine, the house opposite Fifty-six.

With the arrogance of the servants of the very rich, the coachman stopped in the middle of the road, directly beside the smaller landau. Between them, they did a fine job of blocking Semple Street altogether.

It was a big, rich, well-shined coach with a crest on the door and a team of four black horses. A ridiculously expensive coach for this neighborhood. A coach with a guard next to the driver and a footman behind.

“You there.” The coachman waggled his long coach whip at Carlo. “You there! Move up. Move along. Nobody can get past with you blocking the road.”

She couldn’t see the man inside the coach. Didn’t know who he was. But she knew the kind of man he had to be. Somebody important.

“Damn. Oh, damn.” She understood everything. Saw it all, beginning to end.

It was already too late for her.

She raised her hand into her hair—that was the signal to close in and take the Merchant—and screamed out, “Carlo, run!” and scrambled into the Merchant’s carriage, where she would die.

Pax pushed off from the wall, running. Before he saw Cami’s signal. Before the bloody Merchant took off down the length of the street. Before he knew why.

Cami clambered into the coach. A thousand alarm bells rang in his mind. He could feel death hovering over her like a vulture, claws stretched out.