“—Would send you racing to the nearest port, not trotting tamely up to London. You’ve been ready to run for years.”
He watched her decide what to say, thinking it over carefully. Vérité had been rash sometimes. Cami was older and wiser. She picked out a few words. “He offers me something I want.”
“You must want it badly to come strolling under the nose of the Service.” He let impatience into his voice. “What could be that important?”
“You don’t need to know.” A sharp shake of her head. “It’s something the British Service would toss away without regard or interest.”
“What?”
“Consider this instead.” She raised her index finger. “He still wears French gloves. He hasn’t equipped himself head to foot in English clothes. That argues he hasn’t been in England long.”
“Reasonable assumption.”
Two fingers. “He wants Mandarin. Only Mandarin. He’s gone to remarkable effort to get it. Do you see what I’m saying?”
“One specific code implies one very specific need.”
“One operation. Perhaps the Service can imagine what it is. I cannot.” He heard the small clicking sound of Vérité tapping her teeth together. She used to do that when she was adding facts up, seeing patterns in them. Her mind had always fascinated him.
She held up a third finger. “I have one last conclusion about Mr. Smith. He’s not only newly come to England, he’s working on a tight budget of time. A strict, short allotment of days. Maybe even hours. He was fussy about when and where we meet. It’s important. He was angry. I saw one flash of it in his eyes when I tried to change the place and day.”
He knew that anger. No raised voice. No warning. It only showed in the eyes and in the curl of a lip. To a child, it had been terrifying. For an instant his flesh shrank under old pains. Memories of old beatings. The monster had possessed a heavy, self-righteous fist. “He gets angry easily.”
“You know him well, then. I thought so, from your voice.”
There were spies of skill and training. Spies of intuition. Cami had become both. She tilted her head to the side and studied him. “You hate him.”
He didn’t answer her.
For what the Merchant had done to his mother, he would die. Bare hands, gun, knife. It didn’t matter so long as the Merchant lay dead on the ground at his feet. This time, he’d be sure the job was done right.
“‘It is better to be the rider of a great hatred than to be the one ridden.’ My family says that and I share it with you. They have a great many wise sayings.” She let her hand drop to her side. “The meeting place is the last important thing I know. The only secret I’m withholding. If I tell you where and when the meeting is, will you let me go free?”
“No.”
“I see.” She closed her eyes and put her forehead down on the cloak where it covered her knees. She sat that way, breathing quietly, her eyes closed. When she spoke again, it was in the most ordinary tones and her voice was muffled against her cloak. “If I don’t walk down a certain street, on a certain day, at a certain hour, Smith will turn into smoke and blow away. You’ll lose him.”
“Tell me the meeting place.”
She looked up to study the straw and floorboards in front of her. “My head is so full of secrets it rattles when I walk. Your Service will lock me up like the Crown Jewels. They’ll send a substitute to that rendezvous or try to ambush Smith on the street. And it won’t work.” She met his eyes. “You have to let me go so I can meet Mr. Smith.”
“So you can pursue some private exchange with him.”
“If you let me go, you can make sure he dies. You, yourself. There will be no political bargaining that trades a French spy for an English one. No imprisonment he can escape from. No bribes that open doors for him. If you let me go, here and now, I will give you his death, into your own hands.”
“You’ve found a way to tempt me.” Wise little Vérité, with her pithy sayings, had most certainly grown up. She’d emerged as Cami, with a cynical, supremely clever understanding of her fellow man.
She said, “If you take me to Meeks Street, your superiors will tell the Foreign Office and Military Intelligence. The Police Secrète will know within a day. Military Intelligence is riddled with French spies. Maybe the Service is.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I know two French spies placed right in the heart of the Service.” She grinned suddenly, a wry, feral twist of the lips, and he saw the old Vérité again, inside this new Camille. “We were good, weren’t we? Except, I never spied. I committed a thousand lies, in every way, right and left, but I swear I never passed code to the French.”
“I believe you.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’ll pay for all the spying I didn’t do. If the Service doesn’t kill me—regretfully and humanely, the way you’d put down a good dog—they’ll keep me locked up till my secrets cool. Years and years. Unless the French dispose of me. Unless Military Intelligence gets me, which they will, because my crimes fall within their authority. Then I am dead.” She reached her hand out from under the brown wool and laid it on his arm and watched it there, as if she wasn’t sure what it might do. “Do you remember what we swore, all those years ago, in Paris, in the Coach House? The Oath of the Cachés?”
“Childish drama.”
“Your idea. Your words.”
“I was dramatic in those days.”
When he’d come to the Coach House, the Cachés were preying on each other. The strong ones took food and blankets from the weak.
He’d put a stop to it. He wasn’t the biggest. He wasn’t even the best fighter. But he was used to getting hurt and he had nothing to lose. He fought with a ferocity none of them could match. In a week, he had most of them behind him. In a month, he had them all.
The Oath of the Cachés turned a dozen vicious, broken children into a wolf pack, faced outward against the world. “I made that up because we needed something to believe in. We needed magic.”
She recited softly, “‘To the last extremity, I will never betray another Caché. We are one blood.’” She said it in French, the way they’d said it, crouched in a circle on the floor of that cold attic dormitory.
He hadn’t thought about the words in a long time.
She said, “So far as I know, none of us broke the oath. Will you give me to the British Service?”
“I have an oath there, too.”
“I’m no danger to England. I swear it. I’ll come to the meeting place with you. I’ll be the bait in your trap. I’ll give you Smith’s head on a platter.” Her fingers tightened. “But don’t give me to the Service. Let me go. I’m asking for my life, Pax.”
Sixteen
The obligations of friendship are set in stone.
She said, “I’m asking for my life, Pax.”
She called him Pax, the name of the man he’d become.
He loosened the grip of her fingers but kept hold of her hand. When he turned it over, there were shadows in the hollow of her palm as if she held darkness there.
She was the one to speak. “We were friends once. I would have trusted you with my life. You would have trusted me.”
“Not recently.” But she’d picked the right argument. It was unsettling how well she understood him and he understood her. In the long, lying years in the Service, he’d missed having someone to talk to.
He’d already decided what he’d do.
On her palm the lines of fate and fortune were strongly marked, but imperceptible to his fingers. The tendons under the skin were invisible, but he could feel them with the lightest pressure. So many differences between seeing a woman and touching her.
Vérité knew what he’d been and what he was capable of. She’d seen him curled on the ground, shaking, exhausted, and beaten. She’d seen him commit murder. She’s the one woman I don’t have to lie to.