Rogue Spy

by Joanna Bourne

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.

  Eighteen

  The width of a blade separates saying too little and saying too much.

  A BALDONI SAYING

  It was as hard as Pax had expected. He walked through the door Doyle held open, took three paces into Galba’s office, and faced the Head of Service. “I have a report to make. You have to hear me out.”

  Galba sat at his big desk, a wide-shouldered, massive man with a mane of white hair, wearing a red banyan and an expression of impatience. “Let us not be dramatic. I have always trusted your sense of what is important, Mr. Paxton. I doubt that has changed. Sit down.”

  “I’d rather stand.”

  Galba said, “I didn’t ask what you’d rather do. I said, ‘sit down.’ You’re bleeding.”

  “It’s not important.”

  “That’s something else I didn’t ask you. Will,” Galba turned to Doyle, “why is he in this state?”

  “He fell asleep on the way here and he needed sleep more than he needed fixing a minor wound.” Doyle divested himself of his greatcoat and looked around, deciding where to put it. He chose a straight-backed chair under the window. “It’s barely leaking by now.”

  “Other injuries?”

  “None.”

  “I need not have asked.” Galba shifted mail from the center of his desk to the side. “Adrian. It appears you expect to join this conference. Why?”

  Hawker had planted himself in the doorway. “I am an ornament to any conversation. And while I’m here, you won’t dispose of him.”

  “It’s too late at night to deal with this,” Galba said. “Will?”

  Doyle eased himself into the shabby, comfortable chair to the right of the desk and stretched his legs out long. “Let him stay.”

  Galba said, “Paxton?”

  It took him a second to realize Galba was asking him whether Hawker should stay. “He’s not necessary.”

  “Well, that’s duly noted.” Hawker walked past him and put his hand on the back of a chair, looking down at Galba.

  Galba’s eyes were chips of blue ice when he contemplated Hawker. “Let me sum this up for you, Adrian. Over the last four days, with considerable effort on everyone’s part, we have closed your bullet wound and brought your fever under control. You were ordered not to leave the house until Luke pronounced you fit for duty. Was there some part of that order you didn’t understand?”

  Hawker shook his head. “No, sir. But I—”

  “You not only disobeyed my direct orders, you did so at Mr. Paxton’s behest. No one is better aware of Paxton’s anomalous position than you, yet you went without hesitation when he called. Do you expect to be rewarded?”

  Hawker never did have the sense to stay quiet. “You’d do the same.”

  Galba’s eyes didn’t waver. “That is the sole reason you’re in less trouble than you deserve. Go. You may return here after—” He interrupted the objection before it was spoken. “After,” he repeated, “you’ve changed clothing and dried your hair. I’m the one who will have to face Doyle’s formidable Marguerite if you die of fever.”

  “I’m not going to die of—”

  “Did I express a desire to discuss this? Go.”

  Hawker left without a word. The hall outside was silent, but he was probably running upstairs, rather than lurking and eavesdropping.

  “Mr. Paxton.” Galba’s eyes shifted to him. “I told you to sit down.”

  “I’ll stand. It’ll keep me awake.”

  Ten years ago, he’d faced Galba across this desk, with Doyle sitting in that same chair. He’d been fourteen and he’d told them he was Thomas Paxton. His life in the Service began with that lie. Tonight, in the same room, before the same men, that life ended. He’d come full circle.

  Ironic. “I’m not Service. I don’t have to obey orders.”

  “An interesting argument. I’d expected a somewhat more penitent return.” Galba removed a packet of papers from the drawer of his desk. “This doesn’t contain a resignation. Does Carruthers have it?”

  “She didn’t ask for one.” His eyes no longer held a scorpion sting from the snuff mixture, but they felt gritty from tiredness. “I’ll write it out when I’m done here.”

  Galba fanned the papers out across the blotter on his desk. “This is thorough.”

  His confession was in tight-written, neat script, inclusive, detailed, and damning. “Carruthers kept me locked up for a week, writing that and making copies. You could call it house arrest. Then she sent me to you.”

  Galba said, “I wondered if you’d show up here. Doyle said you would.”

  “Where else would I go?”

  “You’d see it that way, of course.” Galba selected a page. “Ten years ago, when you first came here, you stole secrets and turned them over to the French. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  Galba looked up. “Expand on that.”

  He fixed his eyes on a point in the bookcase behind Galba, on a red book next to a blue book next to another red book. “I was trained as a French spy in the Coach House in Paris. I came to Meeks Street pretending to be Thomas Paxton, son of James Paxton, British Service agent. You took me in. I used that position of trust to steal confidential information.”

  He’d written that in every copy of the confession. Now the words clenched in his throat when he said them out loud. He had to tear every syllable loose from his gullet and guts. Strange that it came out emotionless and dry as dust.

  “You stole the documents listed here.” Galba slid a dozen pages to the center of his desk.

  “I may have missed some. It’s been a long time.”

  Doyle leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and clasped his hands behind his head. “Twenty-year-old naval deployments. Gossip from the Russian court. Receipts for hiring horses.” Doyle snorted. “Vital secrets, that lot.”

  “I took old files from the basement. It’s still treason. I’ve admitted everything.” He swung back to face Galba. “This is more important. Today, I followed the woman who sent the coded note, to the church in Fetter Lane. I saw—”

  Galba raised his hand and cut him off. “Is further action required between now and daylight?”

  Nothing could be done, no questions asked, no searches made, in the middle of the night. “No.”

  “I have given you four agents and twelve hours to deal with that.” He touched Cami’s coded note where it waited on the side of the desk, still undecoded. “Do you need to return to the streets at this time?”

  “Tomorrow. In daylight. I’ll make sketches.” Sketches of the Merchant. Not Cami. He didn’t want them to find Cami in whatever refuge she’d run to this time. And he had to sleep. He was swaying on his feet . . . and dripping blood. He tightened his hold on his upper arm.

  “Then we will set that aside for the moment,” Galba leveled his hands on either side of the pile of papers that held his history, “and return to your deeds ten years ago. You admit that you met a Frenchman—your surveillant—over a period of five months and gave him various, largely worthless documents. You killed him,” Galba consulted a page, “with a single stab wound under the sternum, on the morning of May fifth. You were fourteen.”

  He nodded. He’d written everything down. There was nothing else to say.

  Doyle opened one eye. “That was the man they found in Swan Alley, a decade or so back. I wondered about it at the time. Nice, professional work if I remember correctly.”

  It hadn’t been his first kill. “We were well trained.”

  “I’ll give the French that,” Doyle said. “They produce deadly fourteen-year-olds.”

  Galba turned a half dozen pages facedown and went onward. “After that, did you provide information to the French?”

  “Never.” He was expressionless. Anything on his face, any nuance of his voice, was there becau
se he allowed it. It could be just another lie. When you lied as well as he did, even the truth was a calculation. “That was the end of it.”

  After he’d killed his surveillant he’d waited, month after month, for the Police Secrète to reach out from France and kill him. No one came. In the end, the Tuteurs had been the ones to die. When Robespierre fell, they fell with him. Their lines of command were broken. Their records burned. They took their secrets and the location of their Cachés to the guillotine.

  Galba said, “Did you lie to me or to your other superiors in the British Intelligence Service?”

  “I lied about who I was.”

  “Other than that.” Galba was impassive.

  “I spotted Cachés twice and didn’t tell you.” He swallowed again. “They’d gone English. I judged they were no threat.”

  “Other than that.”

  They’d come to tonight’s lies and disloyalties, still ongoing. “An hour ago I had a Caché trapped, and I set her free. She’s Camille Leyland, niece of the Leylands. But I need her loose in London.” He shook his head, trying to clear it. Trying to say enough and not too much. “Don’t bring her in.”

  “You will doubtless explain why, eventually.” Galba continued, “Is there anything else you have done in the last ten years to harm British interests or the British Service? Any more lies I should know about?”

  This room, this office of the head of the British Service with its untidy shelves and hundreds of files and reports, the violin case, the matched knife and sword that Galba had carried on assignment thirty years ago—this room held the center of his whole adult life. He’d made himself someone with a right to be here.

  He closed his eyes. Galba and Doyle were both looking at him when he opened them again. “When I reported, I reported as if I were working for you. As if I were an agent. I didn’t edit the truth.”

  “I never caught him at it, if he did.” Doyle slid ink bottle and penholder to the side, clearing a space on the desk. “When Hawker’s reporting, on the other hand, any resemblance to the facts is pure coincidence.”

  The dumbwaiter rumbled in the dining room, coming up from the kitchen. Giles would be here in a minute with tea.

  He turned to the sound and felt the almost weightless burden he wore around his neck. Sometimes the small lies are the hardest to let go of.

  The twine caught in his hair as he pulled it over his head. He’d put the ring under his clothes before he left Paris. He hadn’t felt right, wearing it after he’d been found out.

  He set the ring on the desk. It was solid, heavy gold, bearing a shield with two chevrons and three stars. He’d used it for sealing letters. Everybody in the Service knew it. He’d worn it on his little finger because it couldn’t get past those bony knuckles of his.

  Galba studied it soberly. “James Paxton’s ring.”

  Say it. Just say it. “I took it off his hand. In Russia. When he was dead.” He tasted smoke and death in his mouth again, remembering. The Merchant and his men had brought him to the dacha they’d burned down and the family they’d murdered. They made him bury the bodies and heap rocks on top, so he’d be convincing when he described the scene. They’d held him down and burned his arm. Then they pointed west and told him to walk to England. It had taken him six months. “I didn’t kill him and I couldn’t have stopped it. I’d send it to his family, but there isn’t any.”

  Doyle said, “The Service is his family.”

  That was what Galba had said, ten years ago, to the boy who walked into Meeks Street claiming to be James Paxton’s son. Galba had said, “Now the Service is your family.”

  Doyle leaned across the desk to pick up the twine. He let the ring hang a moment, turning. “We’ll take charge of this.” At the bookcase beside the hearth he took down a plain wood box, put the ring in, and closed the lid quietly. “He was a good man. A good agent. We’ll find a use for that signet someday and remember him.”

  “He wouldn’t begrudge it.” Galba gathered the pages of the confession together and squared the edges. “We must now deal with this deplorable situation. You should have come to me, voluntarily, years ago. Did you really fear retribution for crimes committed when you were fourteen?”

  “Hawker’s still alive.” Doyle settled back into his chair. “I’d call that better-than-average evidence the Service has vast tolerance.”

  “You have made serious errors in judgment, Mr. Paxton,” Galba said.

  A rattle of cups—that had to be deliberate—sounded outside the door. Hawker carried in a tray with bread and ham, teapot and cups.

  His arm ached. His eyes burned. But he couldn’t let that pass. “I’m not Paxton.”

  Doyle snorted. “Like to know who you are, then.”

  “Do you consider yourself Dalgaard? After your mother?” Galba drew in the corners of his mouth. “According to these extensive self-revelations you’ve never lived as Niels Dalgaard and your mother deserted you when you were nine. I doubt you want to answer to the ridiculous name ‘Devoir.’”

  “He could use MacIntosh. Or Ambleside. Dalrymple. Higgins. Widding-Smythe.” Hawker set the tray in the space cleared on the desk. “Or Jones. There’s something reassuring about a Jones.” He lifted the lid off the pot and looked in.

  “Or he could stop trying my patience.” Galba found an empty folder in a pile behind him. “You are not the first man to take a nom d’espion as his own. You have been Thomas Paxton all your adult life. Continue. I have better things to do than cater to your sudden qualms of conscience.” Galba dropped the folder on his desk. “As you seem to have been working for the British Service for the last ten years, you are still my agent and under my orders. You will therefore sit down.”

  The moment stunned him. Tore all his words away. Left him unable to think. He sat abruptly in the straight-backed chair beside the desk.

  Hawker put a cup of tea on the desk in front of him. “Drink this, since I went to the trouble of carrying it in. Not my job, I will just mention.”

  The tea was warm, full of milk, and sugared till it was syrup. He took a sip, then drank the rest in one long swallow.

  “For the moment, Adrian, your job is to be silent. Now . . .” Galba set his hands together. “Mr. Paxton, you do not fail in your assessment of the important. Tell me what we’ve been chasing across London.”

  He was tired so it came out simple and blunt. “The Merchant is alive.”

  Nineteen

  A man who looks only at his goal is blind in one eye.

  A BALDONI SAYING

  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.”