When The Devil Stays

Chapter Six

The café was called something she didn't catch in the dark, and it was run by a small, silent man who opened it at four-fifty without being asked and set two coffees on the zinc counter without being told and then disappeared behind a beaded curtain as though guests arriving in the grey pre-dawn hours with no luggage and careful eyes were entirely unremarkable.

"Does he know Claudine?" Anna asked, wrapping both hands around the cup.

"He is Claudine's brother-in-law," Jojo said. "Retired. He finds this more interesting than not being retired."

"How many people does she have?"

"Enough," he said. "The right kind."

Anna drank her coffee. It was very strong and very good and it reached somewhere inside her chest and did something necessary. She set the cup down and looked at the man across the counter from her and decided, quietly and without ceremony, that the thing she had been not-asking for the last several hours needed to be asked.

"The message," she said. "Last night. You got a message before you knocked on my door - I saw the light under yours when I went to the bathroom at midnight. You were still awake. You knew they were in the city."

He looked at her steadily. He did not deny it.

"Yes," he said.

"And you didn't tell me."

"No."

"Why?"

He was quiet for a moment. Not evasive - thinking. She had learned, in less than one day, to read the difference.

"Because you had just lost everything," he said finally. "In the space of one conversation with Claudine, you lost your job, your flat, your city. You'd held all of it together with both hands all day without flinching once." He looked at her directly. "I thought you were allowed one night without carrying something else. I thought - eight hours. Eight hours of not knowing, and then I would tell you in the morning."

"That wasn't your decision to make," she said.

"No," he agreed. "It wasn't."

The honesty of it disarmed her. She had been prepared for a justification. An argument. Something she could push back against. Instead, she got this - a simple, clean acknowledgement that he'd been wrong, and the reason behind the wrong, and no attempt to dress either up as anything other than what they were.

She picked up her coffee.

"Don't do it again," she said.

"I won't."

"I mean it, Jojo. Whatever happens from here - I need to know everything you know, when you know it. I can handle it. I have been handling things since I was sixteen years old and I don't need-" She stopped. Recalibrated. "I don't need protecting from information. Do you understand?"

"Yes," he said. And then, quietly, with a seriousness that had nothing performative about it: "I understand. And I'm sorry."

She looked at him for a long moment across the zinc counter in the thin early light and thought about how strange it was, that a man she had met in a coffee shop at an airport less than twenty-four hours ago could apologise in a way that landed like it meant something. Like he had practised meaning it.

"Your mother," she said, without planning to. "The one who told you about fear."

Something shifted in his face. Not pain - too contained for pain. The shadow of it, handled.

"Yes," he said.

"Is she-"

"She's well," he said. "She's in Lyon. She has a garden she's very serious about and opinions about everyone's life choices that she delivers without being asked."

"Does she know what you do?"

"She knows I keep people safe," he said. "She has decided not to ask more than that."

"Wise woman."

"The wisest I know," he said. "Until very recently."

The words landed between them and sat there. Anna felt the back of her neck grow warm. She looked down at her coffee cup and then looked up because she refused to be someone who looked away from things, and he was watching her with that expression she still didn't have a name for - the one that was not quite professional and not quite personal and was entirely, inconveniently both.

The café door opened.

Claudine came in wearing a dark coat and the expression of a woman who had managed worse than this before breakfast and intended to manage this too. She sat down at the counter, accepted a coffee from the beaded curtain without asking, and looked at them both.

"Two of them," she said. "Neither armed, as far as I could tell - they were looking, not moving. Someone sent them to confirm she's here, not to retrieve anything. Not yet."

"Which means they'll report back and someone more serious will come," Jojo said.

"Which means we have perhaps eighteen hours before this location is no longer adequate," Claudine said. She looked at Anna. "The drive. My technical team can have it imaged and copied to three secure servers within four hours. Once that is done, the physical drive becomes significantly less important - they can take it and it changes nothing."

"Then let's do it now," Anna said. "This morning. Whatever needs to happen - let's not wait."

Claudine looked at her. Then she looked at Jojo with an expression that said several things without saying any of them.

"She's right," Jojo said.

"She usually will be, I suspect," Claudine said drily, and drank her coffee.

They went back through the city as the light was beginning to come - pale and grey and tentative, the way Geneva light came in January, as though the sun was proposing rather than arriving. Anna walked beside Jojo and felt the particular quality of a night survived and a morning begun and something else she didn't name yet - the feeling of standing at the edge of a thing that was larger than she'd understood when she'd stepped into it.

At the corner before Claudine's building, Jojo stopped.

She stopped beside him. He was looking at the building, doing whatever calculation he did, and the early light caught the line of his profile and she thought, not for the first time and with no more comfort than the first time: this is a very complicated man to be standing next to.

"Anna," he said, still looking at the building.

"Yes."

"When this is over-" He stopped. Started again with the careful precision of someone who had learned that words, like everything else, should be placed exactly where they were meant to go. "When this is over, and you have your life back, and all of this is resolved. I want to take you to dinner."

The morning was very quiet.

"Dinner," she repeated.

"Yes."

"Not a debrief."

"Not a debrief."

"Not a professional courtesy."

"Anna."

"I want to be very clear about what we're-"

"Dinner," he said, and finally looked at her. "With you. Because I would like to sit across a table from you and talk about something that has nothing to do with encrypted drives or sitting MPs or any of this. Because I think you would like that too. And because I find-" A pause. A beat of silence that he controlled precisely and yet which cost him something, she could see it. "I find that I cannot stop thinking about the fact that you are the most remarkable person I have met in a very long time and I didn't expect that and I don't know yet what to do with it."

Anna Jones stood on a Geneva street corner at six in the morning in yesterday's clothes with an encrypted drive in her pocket and her entire life dismantled behind her and looked at a man who had walked her out of an airport and through a city in the dark and apologised to her correctly and told her the truth when it would have been easier not to, and she felt something shift in her chest - quiet and significant, the way tectonic things were quiet.

"Ask me again," she said, "when it's over."

"I will," he said. No hesitation.

"I'll probably say yes," she said. "But ask me anyway."

Something happened to his face then. Something complete and unguarded that she had not seen from him before - the walls still there but the light coming through them, warm and specific and entirely for her. It lasted only a moment. Then he looked back at the building and the calculation came back and he was himself again - precise, contained, ready.

"Come on," he said. "Let's go finish this."

She fell into step beside him, and they walked toward the building and the morning and whatever came next, and she thought: I walked into an airport yesterday with one plan and no future and the specific particular dread of a woman who has trusted the wrong person and paid for it.

She was beginning - carefully, with both eyes open - to think she might have finally found the right one.

She wasn't ready to say that yet.

But she was beginning to think it.

And that, for Anna Jones, was everything.

"Ask me again when it's over."She would say yes. They both already knew it.The question was whether they would make it that far.