Rogue Spy

Sixteen

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.

He didn’t so much make a decision as accept an inevitability. He might have been waiting ten years to sit across from Vérité in this pile of straw, talking about friendship and trust, the two of them a bare inch from attacking each other. He knew what he was going to do. Some part of him had planned it before he climbed in the window of Braid’s Bookshop. He said, “I can say anything to you.”

“You’re armed and I’m not. You can recite Dante in the original Italian if you want.”

That made him smile. “Or I can do this.” He kissed the hollow of her hand. Maybe it tickled.

She drew in a breath, sharply. He had her attention.

She said, “Pax?”

The inside of her wrist was filled with the pulse beat. He ran a touch up and down the side of her fingers, between one finger and the next, where it was soft. Sensitive, he thought. She’d be sensitive in lots of places.

“What are you doing?” She frowned down to where he explored her hand.

“This.”

They knelt in the straw, facing. He set two fingers under her chin, lifted her attention up to him, and considered the woman who’d grown from the child Vérité. A tilted nose. Raphael would have put that nose on an impudent cherub. Dark eyes making some realizations. The curve of her cheek that held the sensuality of a Caravaggio.

She looked startled all the long moment he leaned to her and convinced her lips open with his and went into her mouth.

“And this,” he said. He felt her surprise. Her lips were full of tiny shocks and a disbelief that held her still, and then the softening. He pursued that softening, demanded it, gave neither of them time to think or plan. He wasn’t in the mood to trade calculation with her.

“Now this.” He nuzzled across warm smoothness of cheek and forehead and the planes and valleys of her nose. Into the silly, frivolous ears lost in the ocean of her hair. He’d drawn the geography of a face a thousand times. This transformed shape, line, light and dark, all shades of color into texture. It overwhelmed thought.

He sucked her lower lip. Softness and slickness. She was . . . oh, she was remarkable. A thousand distinct complexities of her mouth came to life under his tongue. This is the way it should feel. Every discovery of shape and taste robbed his brain, tugged at his cock, wound the tension inside him tighter and tighter.

After the first surprise, she wasn’t reluctant. She licked into his mouth. Nibbled at the corners of his lips where the skin went thin. Little teeth held his lips, anchoring an instant, stretching, pulling, letting go.

She grabbed her fingers into his jacket. Stretched upward to him. Kneeling, pressed against him. Her mouth became passion incarnate. She was heat and quick breathing and her arms went around him. Under the wool she wore, her shoulders were naked. He pushed the cloak away and put his hands on her and felt her thin bones shaking. Vérité, the great schemer who planned everything, wasn’t scheming this.

He drew back. She was breathing fast, lips slack, eyes open but empty of thought.

He wondered if he looked like that. Stunned.

Awareness crept back into her gaze. He saw the absolute puzzlement, the amazement. Then she blinked and laughter welled up everywhere inside her till it spilled out into the dim air of the storeroom. Deep, husky laughing. That was pure and simple Vérité. Her unquenchable delight in all of creation.

She said, “Why did we do that?”

Because I wanted to. You wanted to. Because I’ve made my choice of betrayals. “You tell me.”

“Are we seducing information out of each other?”

“If we had all night, maybe. But we don’t. We’ll do that next time.” He got up to standing, clumsy about it. Aroused. Vulnerable to attack and knowing that he was. The brush of his trousers across his cock struck like hot lightning. “Think about this. Whatever I am, whatever I’ve done, you know I wouldn’t kiss somebody I was about to turn over to the Service.”

“I am . . . I’m bewildered.”

“We both are. We’ll learn to live with it.” His muscles were dense and heavy, roaring with the need to hold her and get inside her. Looked like his days of being in charge of his body were over. Here and now, with this woman, when he couldn’t afford to be distracted.

Just damn it. He reached his hand down to help her to her feet. It’d be nice to think she wasn’t entirely steady inside her own body right now.

She stood still beside him, cloak discarded, probably cold again, looking suspicious, radiating sensuality and competence. Beautiful.

“I’m supposed to trust you,” she said, “because you kissed me.”

“It worked. Check through your private opinions when you have a spare moment. Right now . . .” Right now, get her covered. Get her skin out of sight. Get those breasts hidden where they didn’t drive him mad.

Her clothes were shoved under the table, out of the way. He retrieved them and tossed them in her direction. He laid her weaponry out on the tabletop, bit by bit, in a line. “You get dressed. Put your arsenal back in its accustomed places. Then we sneak you past four of the best agents in the world, who are waiting outside, alert and suspicious. Don’t use your arsenal on me and don’t kill my friends.”

She burrowed into her dress and emerged. “You left me behind five or six thoughts ago. You’re letting me go. Why are you letting me go?”

“Because you’re going to give me Mr. Smith’s head on a platter. Remember?”

She ran the length of a stocking through her hand, straightening it. Then she stood on one leg and slipped it on. Her garters had fallen on the floor so she stooped to pick one up.

“Meet me tomorrow, at noon, outside Gunter’s.” He looked at the window. It was wholly dark. No sign of dawn. “Or maybe I mean today. About ten hours from now, anyway.”

“I’m a fugitive in London, armed to the teeth, engaged in desperate enterprises, pursued by the British Service. You want me to eat ices with you at Gunter’s, in Berkeley Square, in public, in the middle of London. Perhaps we will share a pot of chocolate. My bewilderment is unbounded.”

“A woman can sit alone in a confectioner’s. Same principle as a church or a public square, but with chocolate and little cakes. And you won’t get rained on.”

“I understand that much.” She sounded annoyed.

“The Service won’t be looking for you there. If I don’t show up at Gunter’s, go to the confectioner’s on Barr Street at five and wait. Tomorrow, the same.”

She wore the expression of someone thinking furiously. “Why would I do this?”

“Because you’re alone, Cami. You have a plan and you need help with it. I know a great deal about Mr. Smith that you need to hear. I’ll share it with you tomorrow, when you show up.”

No expression on her face, but he knew he’d made his point.

He said, “And if you don’t show up, there’ll be broadsides on every street corner with your face on them.”

She maneuvered into the second stocking and slowly tied the garter. “You’re persuasive.”

“But you’ll come to meet me because you trust me.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Cachés trust each other. They never betray each other. Somebody told me that recently. Let me do up the buttons in back. We’re in a hurry.”

Without hesitation, she turned and presented him the nape of her neck, the white triangle with her backbone running down into her shift, the curls above interlocked, every one with a tiny half-moon of light trapped in it. He wanted to close his teeth on her and bite down and hold her there like a tomcat on his tabby.

Her skin drew up and twitched where his fingers ran across, doing up the buttons. Seven buttons. He closed them from bottom to top, working his way upward. There were levels of hell that provided less torture.

He said, “You’ll leave by the front. There are two agents keeping an eye there. The two dangerous ones are at the back.”

“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.”