Rogue Spy

Seventeen

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.”

“Oh, that’s good advice. A veritable fount of wisdom is what you are. Having failed to get yourself killed in Paris, you come riding in from France like a bloody migrating sparrow to see if they’ll do it here.” Hawker spat that out. “You couldn’t just walk over to the Police Secrète and let your erstwhile employers do the job, because they might not make you suffer enough. No. You come to let the Service do it. God, if I ever met such a pigheaded cully.”

Doyle used his teeth on a fingertip to take his glove off. “‘Erstwhile.’ I like that.”

“My never-ceasing endeavor to expand my grasp of the King’s English,” Hawk said. “What’d you grow up speaking, Pax? French?”

“Danish.” A relief to tell some truth. He was tired of lying to his friends . . . to the men who would have been his friends if he’d been honest.

Hawk said, “Not my first guess. We are in for some interesting revelations, aren’t we?” And to Doyle, “Do you know what Galba’s planning to do with him?”

“No idea.” Doyle switched the lamp to his other hand to take off the right glove. “He’ll do it whether you’re there or not.”

“So I should wander off and warm my feet by the fire while you and Galba gut him like a mackerel. I think not.”

Doyle, imperturbable, stuffed the gloves into the pocket of his coat. “I won’t kill him at headquarters, will I? Not when I got all London to be murderous in. I’ll let you know what’s decided. Trust me with this.”

“I do. I’m coming in there anyway. You’d have every agent in England in that room if they could fit.”

“Which would serve no purpose, except irritating Galba.” Doyle’s eyes slid toward the office of the Head of Service at the end of the hall. “I’ll speak for you, Hawk.”

His friends. He’d wondered where Doyle would stand in the matter of punishing the traitor in the British Service. Now he knew. Doyle and Hawker were going to fight for him. Madmen, both of them. Legendary madmen.

They’d picked the wrong battlefield. They didn’t know how much he had to confess. They didn’t know he had more lies to tell.

Doyle said, “What Pax has to say will be easier if you’re not hearing it.”

“Embarrassing revelations in the spy trade. We’ll all be awkward together.” Hawker hadn’t even slowed down.

The mirror at the turn of the hall showed their approach, Doyle a little behind him, Hawker a little ahead. When they got there, his reflection pulled the knife from inside his coat and laid it on the table. His gun went beside that. Then the wrist knife from its sheath. The boot knife came next. The wire in his sleeve. A pointed steel needle eight inches long. Vérité wasn’t the only one who walked around armed to the incisors.

Doyle caught the significance at once. Hawker, a second later. An agent goes armed. An enemy under parole doesn’t carry weapons into the office of the head of the British Intelligence Service.

Doyle set his hand flat on the door of Galba’s office. “You ready?”

The house was silent. If anyone was awake upstairs they were staying out of this. He was acutely aware of Galba, on the other side of the door, listening and waiting for him.

He caught a last glimpse of himself in the mirror. This is what a man looks like when he walks out to face a firing squad. “Let’s get this over with.” He pushed past Doyle into Galba’s office.