“Perhaps you’ll last long enough to talk to her yourself,” he comforted Martin, but the other man shook his head.
“Thank you, my friend,” he whispered. Dexter could barely hear him. “You’ve rid me of the poison after all.”
As the attendants swarmed down from the ambulance and muscled the nearly dead Jacques Martin into a gurney, Dexter stepped away and walked toward Charlotte. She stood several yards from the frantically active scene, staring at Martin. Dexter couldn’t read her expression, but she was so beautiful it made his breath catch in his throat.
Her hair fell over her shoulder in a loose plait, stray curls catching the rays of the cheap floodlight in a halo around her head. The white jacket she wore was fastened up tight against the chill. She wore holsters on both thighs, a pistol in one and a wicked knife in the other, and on the whole she gave the appearance of a dangerous but angelic child. A fierce guardian spirit. A creature of myth.
Too good to be true, he told himself. Too good to be true for me.
“You forgive him, and I can’t,” she greeted him. She didn’t sound angry, just puzzled and exhausted.
Dexter stopped short a few feet away from her. “What makes you say I forgive him?” He wasn’t so sure, himself, that he’d forgiven anything. The man had nearly killed them both, by his own hand or by proxy. He’d chased them, and then drugged and kidnapped Dexter. Charlotte had lost her husband to the man. It would take a great deal to forgive all that.
“Maybe not forgive. But you pity him. I was so frightened when I realized he’d taken you, but all the time you felt for him. I still see a monster.”
“Dubois was the monster. Martin did terrible things,” Dexter said, “but in his own mind he didn’t have much choice.”
“We always have a choice.”
After an awkward silence, Dexter cleared his throat. “This wasn’t quite the greeting I expected. And not the one I’d planned. Thank you for coming to my rescue, Charlotte.”
Charlotte shook her head. “No. I just kept the agents from rushing in. You rescued yourself. You were so reasonable in there. So . . . kind.”
“Why don’t I feel complimented?”
Dexter was irked, in fact. He was tired, very tired. He wanted a substantial kiss and a great deal of coddling, and instead Charlotte seemed too stunned at his forgiving nature, too awed by his supposed kindness to provide those things.
“I’m sorry. You should feel complimented. I’m . . .” She blinked back tears, shaking her head sharply then flinging herself at him in a ferocious embrace. “I’m just so glad you’re not dead!”
“That’s better,” Dexter chuckled into her neck.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
He wrapped his arms around her, dipping down and picking her up by the waist for a few seconds. Amazed, as always, by how light she was. He set her down gently and framed her face with his hands, wiping a tear away with one thumb.
“I just realized, you came all the way here in the submersible, didn’t you? I can’t believe you did that for me. That was very brave of you.”
Charlotte nodded. “Murcheson may be less than pleased, though.”
“You did it without his permission?” Dexter asked, taken aback.
She blushed as she confessed, “I did it against his express orders to stay at the station.”
Dexter frowned. “My knight in shining armor. But you took too great a risk holding the agents off like that. They had their orders to follow. You can’t go drawing weapons on your own side, Charlotte. Murcheson will be even less pleased about that than about the sub.”
“Sir? Ma’am? We’re heading back to the station. We’ll need you to come with us.”
Dexter ignored the agent who’d spoken, and indulged in another few seconds of staring at Charlotte. She licked her lips and offered a tentative smile, and Dexter couldn’t help himself. He bent and kissed her as chastely as he could manage, then pulled away long before he wanted to and nodded at the waiting agent.
“I’ll meet you there, I suppose,” Charlotte said. “I’ll have to take the sub back to base.”
“It’s already on its way there, Lady Hardison,” the agent told her, as he set off for the waiting steam car, clearly expecting them to follow. “I sent Jensen with it. Boss’s orders.”
“Oh. I see,” she responded, and shot a guilty glance at Dexter. “I’m already in disgrace, I suppose.”
He took her hand in his. “Not if I have anything to say about it.”
THE AMBULANCE SPED toward the hospital, steam engine roaring and the stoker working constantly to keep the fuel and water levels steady. Jean-Michel Imbert had just enough consciousness left to wonder why they bothered to hurry. The poison had nearly finished its work inside him, he could tell. He would be surprised to survive the trip.
At least I die as myself, he thought. At least Dubois died first.
He hoped that Hardison would hold to his word and see that his mother got his body. Between the arm and the ear, he was probably carrying close to a pound of gold around inside himself; as the least reactive metal, it was the standard for lining implants, and his were top-of-the-line models.
I always loved you, Simone. He wondered if he would see her in heaven, some special section set aside for people like them who had done terrible things in the service of a greater good.
“Simone,” he whispered.
“Shh,” the attendant sitting next to him said. “Save your strength, monsieur.”
“For what?” Jean-Michel wondered. He thought he said it aloud, but the medic didn’t respond so perhaps not.
For what, indeed? When it came to the moment of truth, it seemed, dying was really quite easy. Painful, yes, but it required no action on his part. He could struggle or he could give in, but he would die either way.
Jean-Michel decided he had struggled quite enough; it was finally time to give in.
Twenty-two
HONFLEUR AND LE HAVRE, FRANCE
TO CHARLOTTE’S DISMAY, once she and Dexter finished their debriefing and returned to Honfleur things seemed to go back to exactly the way they had been.
Dexter slept for half the day then returned to the station, eager to finish the work on his seismograph. Charlotte went to the station as well, where she received an official suspension from duty for her unauthorized use of the submersible and for interfering with the other agents. The paperwork made no mention of her pulling a weapon on them, a small concession to the fact that her argument for not storming the freighter had proven accurate. Murcheson strongly implied she was lucky to get off so lightly, however, and that her interests might best be served by resigning her position as a field agent upon her return to the Dominions.
“I’m better at desk work anyway,” she admitted.
“It was bad luck about the airship,” Murcheson offered, though it was cold comfort. Charlotte missed her dirigible keenly. Martin—Imbert—had admitted to tipping off the press about it. “Perhaps the Agency will be willing to try again in another few years.”
“Will you tell me something?” she asked Murcheson before she left Atlantis Station for the last time. “It’s about Reginald.”
“Anything I can, my dear.”
“When Dexter asked about that night Reginald took the documents, you said something about Reginald going up the side of the Opéra. I was just curious what you meant? Was there scaffolding there at the time? If there was, why didn’t Martin—Imbert, I mean—just follow him up? It must have taken much longer to pick the locks and use the stairs inside.”