Rogue Spy

Nineteen

Galba picked up the teapot and weighed it in his hand. “Do you want the last of this?”

“None for me. I’m sloshing with tea.”

“Something stronger?” Galba tipped the teapot toward the bottle of twenty-year-old brandy that inserted itself into a row of books. A general in Napoleon’s army repaid an old debt by keeping Galba supplied.

“I wouldn’t do it justice. I’m tired and I’m headed home to Maggie.” A warm thought on a cold night. Doyle folded his hands across his waistcoat and leaned back, savoring it. “There’s a couple hours of night left. I’ll pluck my wife out of bed and we’ll watch the sun come up.”

“I envy you, Will. You spend too much time away from home. Go to her.” Galba gathered papers together—Pax’s confession, Carruthers’s letter, Pax’s service record, the coded note that had set everything off, still undecoded—and slid them into a file with a red stripe on the lip. “This mess will still be here in the morning.”

“I’ll put people on the street in Soho as soon as Pax makes us some sketches.” Doyle scratched the fake scar that ran the length of his cheek. It didn’t come off in the rain, but it itched. “I’ll pull in everybody who’s worked Paris. If the Merchant is using any of his old crew, one of our men might spot them.”

“Keep Paxton away. If he knows the Merchant, the Merchant knows him.” Galba frowned at the chair Pax had been sitting in. “I applaud Mr. Paxton’s attention to detail, but he’s left his blood in my office.”

“And most likely a trail of it down the hall. Any slice he cuts in himself is going to bleed for a while. He has a genius for authenticity.”

“One of many reasons he is supremely useful to the Service. I will not lose Paxton as an agent because he was a French agent first.” Galba sat scowling a moment longer. Abruptly he slapped his hands flat on the desk, scraped the carved oak chair back, and levered himself up. “This is a damnable business.”

“Couldn’t agree with you more.”

“He allowed a Caché to walk out of a trap he set for her.”

“Using some considerable ingenuity to do it.” Doyle stretched his legs out comfortably. “I’ll just mention that I’m the one who let her wriggle out of the bookshop tonight.”

“I realize that.”

“I backed Pax’s instincts.”

“Those instincts have him lying to us about that woman.” Galba swept the Paxton file into the top drawer of the desk and locked it with a key from the ring in his pocket.

“An exercise in futility, locking things in this house,” Doyle said.

“Adrian stays out of my office. We have an agreement, which he has not yet breached.” When Galba crossed the room to open the door to his office, no one lurked in the hall.

“Hawker’s upstairs, getting Pax bandaged.” Doyle pushed himself to his feet and followed Galba into the hall.

“I don’t have agents. I have a menagerie.” Galba took the lantern from the table outside his office, frowning at Pax’s gun and knives, still piled there. “A French menagerie.”

“Technically, Pax is Danish. Hawker’s Cockney to his fiendish core, so that’s one Englishman. Fletcher claims to be the descendant of Cornish kings. Ladislaus—”

“They planted a spy on me, Will, and I didn’t see it.”

“I had him underfoot for years and didn’t catch it. Makes me look a right fool. If I had any particular faith in my own judgment, Pax would have pulled the bung on it tonight.”

Side by side, down the hallway, they passed old maps on the walls and the bureau at the front that held the gloves and hats of everybody currently sleeping in Meeks Street.

Doyle began to pick his scar off. It left a thin, shiny line where the glue had held it. “I sent him on missions when he was sixteen. Dogged, cold as ice, ingenious, utterly fearless. I could walk off and worry about something else, knowing he was on the job. The perfect agent.”

“We have arrived at the end of that fiction,” Galba said testily. He took the stairs upward.

Doyle followed. “I should have asked myself why that boy came to us knowing how to kill. That’s not what James Paxton would teach his son.” The false scar came off as a thin skin, pale and stretchy. He rolled it between his fingers, making tacky little balls he dropped into the pocket of his coat.

Removing the scar was getting out of disguise. For him it was becoming the man who’d go home to Maggie and the kids.

The second-floor hallway was cool silence with a single candle left burning in a glass chimney at the end. One bedroom showed a bright strip under the shut door and there were low voices inside. No words leaked through, but the tones were clear. Hawker exasperated. Pax determined.

Galba didn’t pause there. He waited till he was halfway up the next flight of stairs to say, “Paxton knows where the Caché woman is, or how to find her. He knows more about the Merchant than he’s saying.”

“We’re all of us founts of mystery and intrigue when you delve deep enough.” The last of the scar was off his face. Doyle rubbed the rough place it left behind. “One of the things he’s not saying is that he plans to kill the man. When Pax was hurt, he sent Hawk to kill the Merchant. Not follow or capture. Kill.”

“It is not his decision to make. I’ll give orders tomorrow.”

“You’ll give orders. Well, that’s the problem solved, then.”

The third-floor hall was another dim, silent corridor, this one hung with lithographs from a manual on the art of the duello. Swordsmen saluted, lunged, parried, riposted. Agents on long-term assignment to London slept here. They were asleep now, or at least staying quiet as men walked past.

The door to the attic was halfway down the hall. Galba pulled up the simple latch and the attic stairs were revealed, steep, narrow, and utterly black. A draft of chilly air hit their faces.

“Either Pax is a Service agent taking my orders or he doesn’t belong under this roof.” Galba lifted the lantern as he climbed. “I have uses for the Merchant alive. Alive, I can question him. I can trade him to the Austrians. I can give him to Military Intelligence and buy future cooperation. Dead, he’s just an embarrassing corpse. I will not have an agent who kills without orders. That is intolerable.”

“He hasn’t done it yet.” Doyle waited till they reached the top of the stairs, beyond range of anyone’s ears, to say the rest. “We didn’t do well by the boy, putting him to the work we did.”

“We have dirty work to do.” Galba’s face was set in a grim expression. “Paxton seemed strong enough.”

“He was nineteen when he began.”

“It wasn’t his first death.”

“It was too many kills,” Doyle said. “Twenty-six in Piedmont and Tuscany. Five more in France, for Carruthers. Hawker said those assignments were tearing at Pax’s entrails like mythical Greek vultures. I should have stopped it long since.”

“If an assassin doesn’t have bad dreams, we’ve created a monster. We’ve both done that work, Will.”

“They can be very bad dreams,” Doyle said.

“We learned to live with them. Paxton will, too.”

The floor creaked underfoot as they walked the narrow hall of the attic. Light from the lantern reached out to hit odd angles of ceiling beam and door frame.

They walked through the long single storeroom that ran the length of the front of the house. Smaller rooms lined up on the other side. Here, everywhere, the Service kept weapons and an eclectic array of clothing and traveling gear. All the bits and bobs a man would keep in his pocket or carry in his valise. The accouterment of a spy.

“I don’t have to tell you why I kept him in place too long.” Galba frowned his way past stores of clothing made in Paris or southern France or Austria. “We sent an assassin to Piedmont and ended up with an Italian folk hero. I ordered a few strategic deaths among the French officers and Paxton attracts a band of Merry Men and rouses up the countryside against Napoleon. Even now, he could whistle a hundred men out of farmhouses from Genoa to Switzerland.”

“Don’t know where he learned to run a secret organization, but he has a genius for it.” Doyle smiled. “We’ll use that. I can always find killers.”

“I agree.” Galba added tartly, “Paxton may celebrate retirement from the trade of assassin by not killing the Merchant.”

They’d come to a door at the end of the passageway, a sturdy door with a grille in it. It looked like it would lead to a prison, and it did. Meeks Street had played host to many unwilling guests.

Doyle said, “Is this what you plan for the cuckoo in the Leyland nest? Put her here?”

Galba fingered the cold iron of the key before he put it in the lock. “She’s a French spy, Will.”

“So is Pax.”

“Pax is ours.” The lock was noisy and stiff. The lantern tossed shadows around while Galba turned the key. “He’s been ours since he walked into my office ten years ago, starved down to a skeleton, with burns festering on his arm. We made him what he is. You made him what he is.”

“Right now, he’s lying up one side and down the other to protect the woman. He doesn’t trust us with her. And he’s right.”

“I am not the archfiend.”

“How hard are you going to question her? Can you promise we won’t turn her over to Military Intelligence? Or let the Foreign Office put her on trial?”

“Not unless I have no other choice whatsoever.” Galba sounded impatient. “I intend to have other choices.”

The prison cell was painted stark white and held a bed, dresser, basin and pitcher, desk, and chair. When they had prisoners, they hung a lantern outside the grille of the door and built a fire on the hearth in the main attic.

Doyle said quietly, “This is what Pax is afraid of.”

“There are worse fates for a spy than comfortable detention.” Galba pushed the door all the way open and brought the lantern inside. The light revealed more detail but didn’t make the space less spartan. “I’ll bring some books up. Paper. Quills.”

“Oh, that’ll be a comfort to her.”

“Cervantes wrote Don Quixote in prison. Maybe she has a book in her. I’ll have George put on fresh sheets and light a fire. It’ll take a day to get the chill out of the plaster.”

Doyle ran his fingers into the grille in the door. “Is this what we’re planning? Because I’ll tell you right now, it’s a bad idea.”

“We are prepared for all eventualities.” Galba studied the room, one side to the other, his eyes unrevealing. “I like this no better than you do.”

“Are you prepared for Pax to break her out of here?”

Galba frowned. “It is more than fellow Cachés, bound by oath, then. Is he épris? Has she seduced him? He’s not indifferent to women, even if he lives like a monk.”

“He’s not thinking of her as a friend who happens to have breasts. And it’s past time he made a fool of himself in that particular way.” Doyle checked the hinges of the door into the white cell. Checked the lock. “When he came out of the bookshop, he looked like a man who’s been with a woman.”

“That is a complicating factor,” Galba muttered.

Doyle gave the lock one final shake and stepped back. “I hate dealing with Cachés in every particular and all directions.”

“It’s just as well you let her leave the bookshop. It delays the moment Paxton is forced to choose between the Service and the woman.”

“When he does, we’ve destroyed him,” Doyle said. “Or we’ve lost him for good.”