“They’ll know you let me go.”
“Not right away. That’s the last of the buttons. Pack up. We’re in a hurry.” He pulled his wrist knife.
She flinched, but he’d already flipped the blade and cut himself high on the shoulder.
She hissed, “Stop that.”
The cloth of his coat and shirt split cleanly. He’d got to the skin underneath, making a fine, long cut that looked authentic.
“What the devil—”
“Distraction and explanation.” He felt the pain and ignored it. He was bleeding down his sleeve. “More blood than I was aiming for.”
She was already pulling a handkerchief from her pocket. “You should have asked me for my knife. Here. Clean your blade. No. I’ll do it. You might leave blood on your cuffs and everybody’ll know what you’ve done.”
He let her clean his knife and slip it back in the sheath on his arm.
She said, “You’re going to lie to your Service.”
“I won’t have to say much.” There’d never been much chance of staying in the Service. Now there was none at all.
“Hold your arm out. Left arm. Turn it a bit.” She picked one of her knives from the table and used it, delicately, to make two long slashes in the sleeve over his forearm. Obvious defensive wounds. “You’re letting me go.”
“This is supposed to make you trust me. Is it working?”
“Yes.” She stashed her knife and shivered, a tremor that ran all through her. Fear and excitement. Maybe other emotions.
While Cami gathered up her extensive collection of weapons, he let himself bleed onto the floor of the storeroom, scuffling the drops around as if there’d been a fight. Then it was through the front room of the shop, walking in a red glow past a thousand books. Cami was behind him, filled with silent concentration. He said, “I’ll stagger out the front door and keep my friends busy. You sneak out behind me.” He smeared his blood on the doorknob. “Ready?”
“Ready.” She patted from one lethal device to another, making certain they were all secure. “First the mélange de tabac. Now they’ll think I’ve stabbed you. Your friends are going to chop me into dog meat.”
“Make sure you don’t meet them on your way out.”
“There she goes,” Doyle said.
“Where?” Hawker used a thread of whisper. “Ah. I see.”
They shared the shelter cast by the bay window of a print shop, across the street, thirty paces from Braid’s Bookshop. From this excellent vantage point they observed the drama Pax enacted with Stillwater and McAllister. Not the details, but the import and tenor of the conversation. While that was going on, a shadow flitted lone and surreptitious from the bookshop to the street and progressed from one pool of dark to the next.
“You going to take the lead on the follow or should I?” Hawk said.
Doyle said, “I’ll rest here.”
Small fractions of time passed. “Looks like Pax wants her to get away,” Hawk said.
“Looks like.”
“There’s a number of good reasons we should interest ourselves in Cami Leyland.” Hawker’s eyes tracked their quarry, shadow to shadow to shadow. He was motionless himself.
Staying invisible was largely a matter of staying still. Pax, the leading practitioner of the art of invisibility, had taught him that.
Doyle nodded. “I can’t recall when I’ve come across someone who needed dragging off to Meeks Street in a more firm and immediate fashion.”
“I’d like a few minutes alone with her, discussing that incident with the snuff in his face.”
“And there is the vexed matter of her knowing all our codes. There. Off she goes, with our Pax covering her retreat. Enough to make a man wonder what Mr. Paxton is up to, unless he’s a French agent, of course, and engaged in treason.”
“Oh, that’s likely, that is.”
They waited. They didn’t see her slip around the corner. They just ticked off enough time to know she must have covered the requisite ground.
“And she is out of sight.” In the dark, unseen, Doyle managed to convey the impression of a nod. “I’d say it’s time to get our boy back to Meeks Street.”
“Let’s go do that.”
Seventeen
A man who says he tells no lies is a saint or a liar.
Pax jerked alert. An instant of confusion and he knew where they were. He’d fallen half-asleep in the hackney.
“We’re here.” Doyle kicked the coach door wide open. “Everybody out.” He swung from the door, hooked his boot into the back wheel spokes to climb down, and walked off to wake up the house, not seeming to hurry but somehow covering the ground fast.
“Back with us, I see.” Hawker scrambled past him, out of the coach, onto the ground. He flipped down the stairs and stood, casually keeping an eye on things.
Streetlamps staked out a series of twenty-foot claims up and down Meeks Street. At Number Seven, they’d lit the lanterns at the door.
He was expected. The prodigal had returned. He didn’t anticipate a fatted calf.
He steadied himself on the coach door getting down. The half hour of sleep had disoriented him. The paving stones seemed to catch at his feet all the way up the walk. The stairs were unfamiliar under his boots, the railing strange in his hand.
He was stupid with weariness, and he still had lies to tell.
The door opened before he got all the way up the stairs. Giles was fully dressed, holding a candle. He’d have slept on the couch in the study on a night like this, when agents were out working. He said, “Galba’s in his office,” and added, lower, to Hawker, “He’s annoyed.”
Giles stood back to let them in. Doyle went first and took the candle from Giles’s hand to light one of the lamps lined up on the table.
“Well, that’s coincidental. I’m annoyed, too.” Hawk walked through the door. “Damn if it does anything but rain in this city. Give me the key and I’ll lock the weather outside.”
I’m wet. He knew that in some distant, unimportant way. He was stiff with cold and just on the edge of shivering. They all were.
He left his hat on the ugliest sideboard in Europe and followed Doyle from the parlor through the door into the hall. He’d been ready to face Galba a dozen hours ago and lay down all the truth he had in him. Now he was going to lie.
Giles locked the parlor door and caught up behind them in the hall. “Food? A bath? Do you want to change?”
He shook his head. “Just Galba.”
Nobody who held the position of doorkeeper was a fool. Ten years ago it had been his work. Now it belonged to Giles. This wouldn’t be the first time Giles opened the door in the middle of the night to an agent, tired and dirty with travel, who needed to talk to the Head of Service.
Probably the first time he’d let in a traitor.
Galba will send the boy away on errands if I have to be killed. They won’t let Giles know about it till it’s over.
He wondered how they’d get rid of the body. That was the kind of job they’d have given him, if he hadn’t been the one getting killed.
Doyle said, “Tea. Food. A dry blanket. Bring them to the office.” Giles took off running, headed for the kitchen. Doyle’s eyes went to Hawk. “You go upstairs and change.”
“Later,” Hawk said.
Doyle said, “Now. That’s an order.” When Hawk just kept walking, he added, “Galba’s going to say the same thing. You’re not part of everything that goes on at Meeks Street.”
“I’m part of this,” Hawker snapped.
“Laisse tomber.” He didn’t realize he’d spoken French till it was out of his mouth. “Let it rest.” He must be staggeringly tired to make a mistake like that. Or maybe he just couldn’t play a part anymore. Not with Doyle. Not with Galba. Not with Hawker. He went on in French, “I’m a spy. I’m a traitor.” Hawk had to understand where they stood. “You can’t help me. Step away.”