Joanna Bourne - Rogue Spy

Hawker snapped, “It’s Addington.”

The Prime Minister. The big black coach had the Prime Minister in it? That was the Merchant’s target. Assassination and the chaos that would follow Death.

He yelled, “Get him out of here,” in Hawker’s direction and dove through the door of the landau.

A woman, bound, gagged, thrashing, was tied flat to one seat. Cami crouched on the floor of the coach, prying at a hasp on the other seat.

“The gunpowder,” Cami snarled. “It’s here. That’s what he did with the kegs. He lit a fuse and it’s gone under the seat. I can’t get to it.”

The seats were built for storage. Lift the lid to toss a coat or blanket in. This one was locked. A blackened string of fuse hung over the edge of the seat and disappeared underneath.

“Back!” He pointed the pistol.

Cami threw herself over the wriggling woman on the seat, giving what protection she could in case the slug went wild in the coach.

The crack of the gun slapped his ears. The bullet hit the lock and ricocheted out the door.

It didn’t hit Cami. Didn’t hit Cami.

The coach shuddered, tilted up, and tried to throw him to the floor. The horse shrieked. Nobody’s holding the horse. We’re going to go over.

No time to think about that. He’d hit the padlock dead center, shattering the mechanism. In the rocking coach, he reversed the pistol, grabbed the hot barrel, and slammed the butt down, once, twice. The bar snapped open.

The landau thumped down level again. Somebody had hold of the horse. Not Hawker. Hawker was on the street, yelling and throwing rocks. Addington’s coach clattered away to the squeal of horses and the shouts of the coachman.

He threw back the seat and the cushions. The space below was filled with kegs and the smell of gunpowder. The smell of a fuse burning.

Behind him, Cami cut the woman’s feet free, flapped the door open, and pushed her, yammering and limp, out into the street. “Run, you idiot.”

A fuse was nailed to the wood on the underside of the seat, back and forth, back and forth, then down into the keg at the end. A jagged point of flame raced along the course of it. He couldn’t pull the fuse out of the keg. When he tried to pinch the flame out, it just raced between his fingers.

He spat on his fingers and tried again. Again. Searing hot pain and no effect on the white tip of fire. Nothing stopped it. Sparks flashed and fell on the kegs, any one of them hot enough to set everything off.

Cami reached across him with her knife. She slipped the blade under the line of fuse, inches ahead of the flame, between the last two bent nails that held it in place. She sawed at the line. The fire ate its way under the last nail. Inches left before it got past her. Breaths left before it reached the keg.

She cut through.

The line of fuse parted. The fizzing white fire curved down to the hanging end. It burned there for an endless moment. Then, abruptly, blinked out.

One tiny orange spark drifted lazily onto the top of the wooden keg below and went dark.

Silence. Cami’s breathing. His own. A woman screeched outside the coach. There didn’t seem to be a second fuse. He didn’t hear one.

He could notice the pain of burns on his thumb and fingers. “Cami . . .” He took the knife from her and opened her hands to show red burn lines where she’d tried to snuff the fuse before it snaked under the seat.

Of course. Of course. He said, “Good work.”

“You, too.” They were both breathing like bellows.

Somebody started shooting on the street.

Three regularly spaced shots echoed off the brick fronts of the buildings. Rifle fire. That would be Grey, shooting from his sniper roost.

Pax swung out of the coach, hit the cobblestones, sidestepped the woman on the ground, drumming her heels and screaming—Camille Besançon—and ran for the end of the street.

Cami was a step behind him, keeping pace and guarding his back. He didn’t have to see her. He knew exactly where she was. Lately, he always knew.

Maybe the Merchant had expected to slip away in the shock of the explosion, in the pandemonium of fires and screaming horses, houses collapsing, and men and women dying. As it was, he made it less than a hundred yards. He lay on his side on the cobbles, twisted in pain. A pool of blood seeped out under his leg from where he’d been shot in the knee. He wasn’t going anywhere.

The Merchant had been brought down at the outermost edge of rifle range. Grey had held his fire till the last possible minute. He’d fired two warning shots, then placed a hit to the knee. Grey stood in the window, reloading one of his rifles. Another leaned beside him, muzzle upright.

A mixed bag of Service agents and Baldoni stood over the Merchant, making sure he didn’t crawl off and watching for any attempt at rescue. They’d searched him. A wallet and notebook, two pistols, a trio of nasty-looking steel spikes, and some small soft pouches lay on the pavement to the side.

There’d be time to sort it out later. He knelt briefly to check the guns. They were well-kept, expensive pieces, probably Prussian. Neither had been fired. The bastard had been shot himself before he could take hostages or loose a shot at anybody. He cocked one and slipped it carefully into the deep pocket of his greatcoat, holding the grip, his finger beside the trigger.

Men fell back to let Cami and him through into the quiet in the center of this circle. The Merchant lay there, pasty white, sweating, daubed in blood. Nothing redder than blood. Somebody’d tied a rough bandage on his knee.

The Merchant turned his head and looked up. “You.”

It had been ten years since he’d met the Merchant face-to-face. He still had nothing to say to this man.

The Merchant said, “You’ve come to gloat.”

“I’ve come to clean up this mess.”

Down the street, at the landau, Doyle held the horse steady. Hawker and Stillwater slopped in that direction, carrying buckets to wet the gunpowder down. The Baldoni boy sat on the curb, head in his hands, bleeding from his nose. Householders poked heads out their windows to see what was happening.

Cami came to stand beside him, close enough that her shoulder brushed his arm. She held her gun in both hands, cocked, but pointed to the ground. She was intent and deadly, legs braced, ready to run or fight, ready to raise that businesslike gun and shoot. His Cami, at her natural work.

The Merchant dragged himself to sitting. “So. The British Service sends my son to destroy me. My sweet butcher of a son. There’s irony in that.”

I’m not your son. “I sent myself.”

The man in the dirt at his feet could have been a stranger. He felt no connection with this Peter Styles, born to privilege, well and expensively educated. Brilliant fanatic of the Revolution. Cold-blooded murderer. A man-killing dog to be tracked down and shot.

Fifty yards away, the woman they’d freed from the landau knelt on the dirty ground, sobbing. A yapping dog in one of the houses provided a tinny antiphony. Men crossed back and forth with buckets, climbing the stairs of one of the houses. Water dripped from the bottom of the landau onto the street and fingered its way into the gutter.

Addington’s coach had already disappeared around the corner. With luck, the Prime Minister would never know how close he’d come to death.

“He scuttles away to save his miserable life,” the Merchant said. “A pity. Going up in flame would have been his finest hour.” He hacked out a laugh that turned into a cough. “Do you know why your Prime Minister comes to Semple Street every week? Not to visit a mistress. He comes to make a mawkish visit to his old nanny. You are led by a milksop sentimentalist. I leave England in his bungling hands.”

A crowd was gathering. People had come out of their houses, being curious. The grocer’s boy and the grocer. A housemaid from Number Thirty. At the back, peeping from behind everybody else, two old women in black. Nobody got close, being wary of the guns, but everybody watched avidly.

Down the street Hawker was half in, half out of the carriage, pouring out buckets, laying down the law about something. Boys ran by the coach windows, peeked in and pointed, and ran away shouting.

“Political murder,” Cami said softly. “This wasn’t about codes or the Leylands or Camille Besançon. It’s me. He needed me here.”

The final pieces of the puzzle had fallen into place as he walked from the landau to this bloody corner of the street. “He needed Vérité from the Coach House.”

Cami had made the same calculations and come to the same conclusions. “None of this is about killing Addington—who cares what happens to Addington? It’s someone from the Police Secrète killing Addington that is significant. Me, killing him.”

“You, yourself, are nothing.” The Merchant hunched inward, holding his knee. The little smirk stayed on his lips. “You are my puppet, not remotely worthy to play the role I assigned you. You were trained and nurtured by the Revolution, and you betrayed it. But you came to this place, tame and obedient, as I planned.”

“I didn’t die, however, which pleases me.” Cami made an eloquent shrug. She slowly lifted the gun she held, till it pointed at the Merchant’s heart. “I would have felt very stupid when I found myself scattered in small bits from one end of Semple Street to the other, interlarded with scraps of coded paper.”

He touched her arm with the hand that wasn’t in his pocket, holding a gun. Just to feel her being alive. Just to know she was here. “You would have made a convincing French spy.”