The Mercy Price

The chain caught before the door reached my foot.

“Leave it there,” I told the gap, in the voice I keep for people who think a hotel door is a suggestion.

The man outside pushed again, testing how much of the frame would move. Through the gap I could see a dark sleeve and a narrow strip of his face. He wasn't smiling anymore. “Ms. Voss, this is an authorized recovery. You're making it harder than it needs to be.”

“Then you can wait while the local liaison confirms it. Waiting is very easy. People manage it in airports every day.” I pointed Ilias toward the bedroom without looking at him. He took both versions of my warrant with him, keeping them folded together. “Your name again.”

He gave his name and the mission reference with his chin up. I repeated both for Nomi, who was listening through the phone in my pocket.

“A name isn't authority, and neither is a number. I have a reference somebody used to put a death order on a man who's been giving statements voluntarily. That's why we're having this conversation through a door. I'd have it through a wall if the hotel offered one.”

A corrupted amendment to my warrant against yacht owner Cassian Rell now named Ilias Vale, the engineer I love: TERMINATE IF RECOVERY FAILS.

Behind him, a woman said something I couldn't hear. He turned enough for me to see the earpiece against his collar. I moved away from the gap with the pistol Daniels had lent me still pointing at the floor and spoke toward the phone in my pocket. “Nomi. We're using the bedroom door. Tell the staff to stay out of the stair.”

“Already doing it, baby.” Her voice came up small and furious through the fabric. “Idrissi's officer is coming from the front desk. She's walking like she's late for something she intends to win.”

“Is the car clear?”

“I checked it myself. Under it, inside it, the glove box, the little tray where people keep coins. Come down.”

I followed Ilias into the bedroom. He had the service door open and was looking across the landing toward Nomi's room and the stair beyond it. “Left, then down,” he murmured. “The manager walked us through it when we checked in. He was very proud of it. He called it the discreet route.”

“Then let's be discreet. Go. I'll be behind you. I'm slower on the stairs.”

“Then I go first and you use my shoulder.” He didn't move off the threshold. “We don't get separated, Sable. Not on a staircase, and not for the sake of being quick.”

Something struck the main door hard enough to shake the picture above the table. I put the pistol back in its holster before taking hold of him. I needed my hand more than I needed the gun out where a hotel maid might walk into it.

We went down sideways, one step at a time. My calf pulled beneath the stitches on every other step. Ilias kept his injured hand against his chest and gave me his other shoulder without pretending it didn't hurt him too.

On the landing his hand came to the small of my back, flat and steady, the way it had in a mirrored elevator on the Riviera with one hand and nothing else the whole way up. My body remembered it before I did. “Don't.” I didn't stop walking.

“Don't what?”

“Put your hand there while I'm concentrating on not falling down a staircase.”

“It's holding you up.”

“It's doing a great deal more than that, and you know it.” I took the next step down. “Get us out of this hotel and I'll tell you exactly what.”

“You're doing the face,” I told him through my teeth.

“I don't have a face.” He was making it while he said so.

“You have a face you make when a load is wrong and you're too polite to mention it.”

“The load is fine.” He took the next step down with me. “The load is complaining. That's a different condition.”

On the landing below, a housekeeper stood with a basket of towels pressed to her front. She looked at us, then at the blood beginning to mark my pant leg. “Madame. Do you need a towel?”

“I need you behind that door.” I said it as kindly as I could manage with my leg shouting at me. “There are police coming. Let them come to you. Don't go up, whatever you hear.”

She set the basket down and went into the linen room. I heard the lock turn.

At the bottom of the stair, Nomi held the outside door open with a chair while she waved a kitchen worker back from the courtyard with her other hand. She saw the folded pages in Ilias's fist before she saw his face. “You brought the paperwork. Good. I didn't want to hear anybody suggest going back for it.”

“Nobody was going to suggest that,” Ilias told her mildly.

“Somebody always suggests it. Usually her.” She jerked her chin at me. “Get in. Rear door, the side away from the stair, and keep your heads down like you mean it.”

The sound of breaking wood came from above us. I took my hand off Ilias and crossed the last stretch to the car on my own, because there wasn't time to argue about whether I could. My phone rang as I sat. Leila Daniels, the Directorate investigator who'd issued my original warrant, was calling. I put her on speaker so Ilias could hear every word.

“The escort is real.” She didn't waste a greeting. “Both officers are Directorate. Their order exists in the current system.”

“That was a short investigation.”

“I didn't say it was lawful, and I didn't say I accepted it. I said this isn't somebody wearing our clothes. Idrissi has issued a local instruction to prevent your removal. On his ground, his paper outranks ours, and he knows exactly how much.”

Nomi got behind the wheel. Through the rear window, I watched the recovery officer come down the service steps with the woman behind him. She had one hand raised toward her collar, listening to somebody who wasn't there. “They're in the courtyard. Both of them.”

“Do not shoot your way out, Sable. Idrissi's liaison officer is there. The one who brought the packet.”

“I wasn't planning to shoot anybody.”

“You were planning not to rule it out.” Daniels's pen tapped once against something hard. “I've read your reports. I know the difference.”

The officer who'd carried our packet up to the room stepped between the car and the service door before Nomi could move. Inspector Moreau, the French policeman who'd helped us after the first attack, had put us in touch with Idrissi. The liaison officer spoke to the recovery officer in English, loud enough for me to hear through the open front window. “You have no authority to remove these witnesses. Step back inside.”

“This is a Directorate matter, officer.” The recovery officer didn't move his feet.

“This is a hotel in Tangier.” She didn't raise her voice. “Step back.”

He reached inside his jacket. The liaison officer drew her weapon. The woman behind him caught his elbow and said his name sharply, the way people call a dog back from the edge of a road. He stopped with his hand still inside the jacket. I stayed low in the car and watched Idrissi's officer. She didn't look at me for help. She had given him an instruction and was waiting to see whether he'd obey it.

“I'm going to show you my identification.” He kept his eyes on her gun while he said it.

The liaison officer didn't take her eyes off his hand. “Slowly. On the ground, where I can see it.”

He set the credential down on the stones and stepped back from it. His colleague kept her hands where they could be seen. A second local officer came out of the kitchen passage and told both of them, in French and then in English, to move away from the stair.

The liaison officer glanced toward Nomi without lowering her weapon. “Go to the address Inspector Idrissi gave you. He will meet you there. Don't stop for anybody who isn't him.”

“Not even for coffee?” Nomi already had the car rolling.

“Especially not for coffee.”

Nomi drove through the open gate without making her repeat it. I watched the courtyard shrink behind us until the turn hid her from view, and only then did my hand leave the holster.

“Still with us?” Daniels asked from my lap.

“Still here. What happens to the one who broke the door?”

“Questioning. And you should hear this part, because you'll want to hate all of them equally and it isn't accurate. His colleague requested direct verification before he broke the door. She asked twice. It's in the log.”

“That matters,” I admitted after a moment. “So does the door.”

“Idrissi agrees. He used a word about the door I won't repeat on an open line.”

Ilias had the warrants flat on his knee and was smoothing the crease with his good hand, as if paper might lie straighter if he asked it nicely. “Daniels. Will they try again?”

“Somebody will. I'd rather it happened in a building with Idrissi's name on the front. And keep both pages together, please. I want the original and the amendment in the same hand until I've had them copied.”

The address was an administrative building with a courtyard too plain for anybody's travel photograph. Idrissi met us inside. He took one look at my leg and sent an officer for medical supplies before he asked for a single page.

“You are bleeding on my floor, Madame Voss.” He held a chair for me himself. “It's a municipal floor. It has survived worse. Sit.”

I sat, since he'd already decided for me. “I was going to sit.”

“You were going to stand and explain things to me. Moreau warned me about that.” He turned to Ilias. “Monsieur Vale. You have papers.”

Ilias laid both warrants on the desk, the original underneath and the amendment on top with its last line showing. “I want a lawyer before another formal interview. I don't want that mistaken for refusing to cooperate. I'll answer everything you ask. I'd just like somebody beside me who's paid to stop me answering badly.”

“It won't be mistaken.” Idrissi didn't touch the amendment. He read it where it lay. “Your lawyer can sit in that chair. Nobody is taking you to an unidentified room. Not from my building, and not while I'm in it.”

“And when you aren't in it?” Ilias didn't make it sound like a challenge.

“Then my officer will be. She has already shown you what she does with Directorate credentials.”

Daniels arrived while the nurse was replacing my dressing. She came in with her coat still buttoned and a fresh sheet in a plastic sleeve, set it beside the warrants and waited until I looked at it. “The lethal amendment is contested and held from execution within the channels I can reach. Your original mission authority remains under review. That's all of it.”

“Within the channels you can reach.” I gave her own words back so she'd hear them.

“That's what I can promise and mean.” She didn't dress it up. “I won't hand you a bigger sentence than I can carry, Sable. You'd catch me at it before lunch.”

Ilias read it upside down before I'd picked it up. “Protected cooperating witness. That's an improvement on the other page.”

“It's a better sentence.” I read his name there and wanted it to cancel the first one. “It doesn't make the other page any less real.”

“I'm not accepting field orders through that desk.” I put the new sheet down on top of the amendment so I wouldn't have to see the old line. “Not while somebody can take your name off a review, put his name on a kill order and call it delivered to me.”

“Then we work through named contacts and national authorities. Decisions you can challenge before you act, from people you can phone back.” Daniels sat at last. “It'll be slower.”

“I can do slow.” I meant it at least partly.

Nomi made a noise in her throat. “She can't do slow.”

“I can do slow when the other choice is shooting a Directorate escort beside a hotel kitchen.” I turned back to Daniels. “And if somebody upstairs tells you I'm refusing because I'm sleeping with him?”

Daniels looked at Ilias, then at me. Ilias, to his credit, didn't look anywhere at all. “I'll tell them the problem is an undisclosed execution order. They can be embarrassed by the right thing.”

“They'll be embarrassed by both.”

“Then they'll have a very full afternoon.” Daniels didn't smile, but it was close.

Nomi pulled a chair over and sat beside me. A small piece of broken doorframe was stuck to her sleeve. I picked it off and dropped it into the wastebasket under Idrissi's desk. “Souvenir?”

“I'm not keeping anything from that hotel. Not even the soap, and it was good soap.” She folded her arms. “We need somewhere to sleep. We need somebody who isn't Sable to decide when her leg works. And we need to know whether Rell can explain why a recovery crew wanted his engineer badly enough to break a door for him.”

“Rell has asked to speak through counsel,” Daniels told her. “He wants protection from Sorn.”

“He's late.”

“He's alive. Sometimes that's enough to begin. He'd also like it recorded that he never meant anybody to be hurt. I've recorded it, right beside the list of people who were.” She opened the folder from the shore station and turned a page toward me. “And he isn't the only name Sorn wants. There's another designer on the transfer list. Tokyo. Dr. Ren Ito.”

Ilias knew the name before she finished it. He sat forward with one hand already lifting toward the page, then stopped himself. “I've never met him. He wrote the inspection standard half my drawings had to pass, and he didn't care for some of them.” His hand stayed where it was. “May I photograph that for my lawyer? I'd rather not carry the original out of this building.”

“Yes.” Daniels slid it nearer.

He took the picture where all of us could watch him do it, then handed the page back to her and folded his hands on the desk.

I leaned against the chair and let the nurse finish with my leg. For the first time since the lock had turned, nobody in the room was trying to decide where Ilias belonged without asking him.