Page 89 of The Number of Love
“Only if she’s in there more than half an hour. She knows how to calm herself and never thanks me for interrupting her process.”
Margot clasped her elbows. She still had much to learn about her best friend, to be sure.
Drake slid the tea onto the end table and motioned for her to join him. “Red said he’d be here by six-thirty. If she hasn’t emerged before then, we’ll go in.”
She nodded and forced her feet to move again. Six steps, a two-hundred-seventy degree pivot, and she sat beside him.
He pressed a warm cup of tea into her hands. And waited.
She took a sip and then began, detailing everything she could recall.
“I recognized him,” she said only after the rest had been summarized. She looked up from the tea into Drake’s silver-blue eyes. “It was John Williams. He didn’t look like he had at the Go game—he’d been hunched over then, disheveled-looking, always a bit unfocused in the eyes. He was different tonight. Standing tall—far taller than I thought he was.”
Drake went stiff beside her. “How tall?”
“Probably...” She closed her eyes, visualized the distance she’d had to look up into his face, calculated. “I’d say between six-four and six-four-and-a-half, depending on the soles of his shoes.”
He hissed out a breath. “What about his hair? The color of his coat?”
Her brows drew down. “Dark—longish. The first time I saw him he was in a blue coat, but this one was grey. Why?”
He scooted forward a bit and angled in. “That night you ran from the flat—the bloke you ran into. Was that him?”
“I...” She drew back, and not because it was the first time they’d ever referenced that night when she’d run out into the darkness with her lips still warm from his, with her ears still ringing with his claim that he loved her. She hadn’t been paying any attention at the time. Her eyes had been blurred with tears, and she hadn’t looked up. But she must have had impressions. “I didn’t look at his face. It could have been, I think. The height seems right. Why?”
Drake muttered something in Spanish and looked away.
Margot scooted an inch and an eighth closer. “Drake—why?”
“Because that sounds like the man who’s been watching the flat.”
“Thisflat? Butwhy?” He was just a former emissary to Japan. A sailor. Not right in the head, but harmless, she’d thought.
She’d obviously been wrong. Had he been following her? Andwatching Drake and Dot here? Planning this attack? It didn’t make sense. What could he want?
“I can’t be certain. But I suspect he’s working with the German agent who shot me on the train, the one in charge of getting the anthrax-laced sugar where it was meant to go.”
No, that made even less sense. “That can’t be. He was here before you were shot. And why would you think the man who shot you has anything to do with this?”
“He’s called me on the telephone. It was Jaeger’s voice. We haven’t been able to locate him, but the man you call Williams—he knew who I was that night, and he knew I’d been watching him, that I knew whohewas. Minus the name. He must be an agent on the ground, here, one Hall’s men have missed. We thought we’d identified him as a bloke who’s called Niall Walsh, but he could well have another alias.”
Margot stood, her tea sloshing in its cup. “Why didn’t you chase him down that night? Apprehend him? Get answers?”
“You were more important.” But he winced and looked away. “Though maybe I should have. I’d feared reopening my wound, but I probably could have stopped him, or at least taken his knife. Then he couldn’t have attacked you two today. I’m sorry. At the time, the choice had seemed obvious.”
He’d chosen her, soothing her fears, over the best chance he’d probably ever had to apprehend a German agent hunting him down? “How is that obvious? I was acting like a ... like a sillygirl. You shouldn’t have let that stop you from finding him! Don’t you think I can weigh the situation and see that apprehending a German agent is a bit more important than wiping away my ridiculous tears?”
And for that matter, why hadn’t he bothered mentioning this little detail before now? That he’d been in danger all this time, hunted down? Perhaps they could have pieced it together sooner. Realized that her Go partner was working with his opposite number. She spun away, too many factors enumerating themselves for her to sort while she was looking at him.
His hands rested on her shoulders. “Nothing’s more importantthan soothing your tears, ridiculous or warranted. You matter more than a dozen German agents.”
She tried to shrug his hands away, though they settled right back where they’d been. And she was stupidly glad of it. “Don’t be absurd. One is never greater than twelve.”
“It is when you love the one.”
She huffed out a breath.
“You’re thinking I should have told you all this sooner. About the man following me. About Jaeger.” He pulled her toward him four inches, until her back brushed his chest.
