When The Devil Stays

Chapter Five: Before Morning Comes

Anna woke at 2:47 a.m. and knew immediately that something was wrong.

It wasn't a sound - not exactly. It was the absence of the right sounds and the presence of the wrong ones. The building had a rhythm to it, the way old buildings did: the particular creak of the staircase settling, the distant hum of the city outside, the faint ticking of a radiator that worked when it felt like it. She had catalogued all of this in the first twenty minutes of lying in the dark, the way she catalogued everything - methodically, without deciding to.

What she heard now was a footstep on the staircase that landed differently to the settling. Deliberate. Weight distributed carefully, the way someone distributed weight when they did not want to be heard.

She was sitting up before she was fully awake.

The drive. She reached under the pillow and closed her hand around it and held it and thought, very fast and very clearly, the way she thought best when there was no time to think slowly. One door. One window - cobbled street below, two floors, survivable if necessary, not preferable. No weapon. No phone with a number that would bring anyone quickly except the one person whose room was twelve feet down the corridor and who had known about this before she went to sleep and had not told her.

She was going to have extremely strong feelings about that later.

Right now she got up, crossed the room in her socks, and knocked on the wall between her room and Jojo's - three quick sharp raps, the kind that didn't carry past the plaster.

Nothing for two seconds.

Then she heard him move.

She was back at her door, hand on the handle, when she heard his open. A sliver of corridor appeared. His face, half in darkness, looked at her with an expression that told her everything she needed to know: he was already dressed. He had not been asleep.

"You heard it," he said. Not a question.

"Staircase", she said. "One person, possibly two, moving carefully."

He nodded once. His hand closed around her wrist - not roughly, not tentatively, with the precise grip of someone who needed to move her and intended to do it efficiently - and drew her out of the doorway and back against the corridor wall, away from the angle of the staircase.

She let him. She told herself it was practical.

"Claudine?" she breathed.

"Her rooms are on the floor above," he said, equally quiet. "She'll have heard. She has a protocol."

"What kind of protocol?"

"The kind that involves a very old building with a very discreet second exit."

Anna processed this. "You've done this before. Been in this building when this happened."

"Not exactly this," he said. "Something adjacent."

"That is not reassuring."

"It wasn't meant to be. It was meant to be true." He was watching the staircase end of the corridor with a quality of focus that made the air around him feel different – sharper, like a frequency she could feel but not quite hear. "There's a service door at the end of this corridor. Behind the linen cupboard. It goes down to the watchmaker's workshop and out through the back lane."

"How do you know that?"

"I walked every exit when we arrived," he said, as though this were entirely unremarkable. "It's what I do."

She filed that away. Later she would think about what it meant to live in a way that required you to walk every exit when you arrived somewhere. Right now, she gripped the drive and watched the corridor and waited.

The footstep came again. Closer. Top of the staircase now.

Jojo's hand was still at her wrist - not gripping anymore, just there, like a question he hadn't finished asking - and she felt him make a decision before he moved. It was something in the quality of his stillness, a particular density to it just before it broke.

"Now," he said.

They moved. He went first, keeping to the wall, and she stayed close behind him with the drive pressed against her chest and the sock-feet that she was briefly, absurdly grateful for because they made no sound on the wooden boards. The linen cupboard was at the far end of the corridor - six doors, twelve steps, an eternity in the dark - and she counted each one and kept her breathing level and did not look back.

He opened the cupboard. The smell of clean linen and old wood and dust. He pressed the back panel, and it gave - a door within a door, the kind that had been there for a century and looked like it hadn't - and behind it a narrow stone staircase going down into cold darkness.

"Careful", he said quietly, and his hand moved from her wrist to the small of her back as she stepped through - a brief, steady pressure, gone the moment she had her footing.

She noticed it anyway.

The staircase was very narrow. They went single file - him first, her close enough that she could feel the warmth of him in the cold stone dark, which was not something she had expected to be aware of under the circumstances and yet was aware of with complete and inconvenient clarity. At the bottom, a heavy door. He eased it open and cold Geneva air came through and she followed him out into a lane so narrow two people could not walk it side by side.

They stood against the wall of the building and he looked both ways along the lane with the focused efficiency of someone doing a calculation, and then he looked at her.

In the thin grey light of the lane - a lamp somewhere around the corner throwing just enough to see by - she could read his face more clearly than she had been able to inside. He looked, she thought, like a man carrying more than the present moment. Like a man for whom this was not simply a problem to be solved but a weight that had been on his shoulders long enough to have changed his posture.

"Are you alright?" he asked.

The question surprised her. Not the words - the fact that he was asking. That in the middle of a cold lane at three in the morning, with someone moving through the building behind them, this was the thing he led with.

"I'm fine," she said. Then, because he had given her honesty when she'd asked for it on the plane: "I'm frightened. But I'm fine."

He nodded. Not dismissively - the nod of someone receiving information they considered important.

"Good," he said. "Frightened is useful. Frightened keeps you sharp."

"Is that something they teach you, wherever you were trained?"

"It's something my mother told me when I was eight and scared of the dark," he said. "She said fear was just your body paying attention. The problem wasn't the fear. The problem was letting it think for you."

She looked at him. He was already scanning the lane again, already back in the calculation, and she thought: there he is. There is the person under all that precision. He lets it out in small pieces, this man - a sentence here, a half-smile there - and she suspected he did not do that for many people and was not entirely sure why he was doing it for her.

She was not entirely sure she wanted to examine that too closely right now.

"Where are we going?" she asked.

"Claudine has a secondary meeting point," he said. "A café three streets from here. It opens at five. We wait there."

"And if she doesn't come?"

"She'll come," he said. "But if she doesn't, we go to Plan B."

"What's Plan B?"

"I'll tell you if we need it."

"Jojo."

"It involves a contact in Zurich and a considerably longer drive than either of us would enjoy," he said. "So let's hope for the café."

She almost laughed. It surprised her - the nearness of it, the way it arrived in her chest without warning in the middle of a cold lane in the middle of the night when everything was going wrong. She pressed her lips together and didn't let it out, but he saw it - she knew he saw it because something shifted in his face, a softening so brief and so contained that she would have missed it if she hadn't been looking directly at him.

She was looking directly at him quite a lot, she noticed.

"Come on," he said.

They moved through the lane and out onto a side street and through the sleeping city, staying off the main roads, and she kept close to him not because she needed to but because the city was dark and strange and he knew where he was going and she had, for better or worse, made the decision to trust him enough to be here. The cobblestones were slick with cold. At one point she caught her footing wrong and his hand was at her elbow before she'd registered, she was slipping - fast, automatic, the reflex of someone who had been watching her peripherally even while looking ahead.

"I've got you," he said. And then, when she had her balance: "Alright?"

"Yes." She didn't pull her arm away immediately. She was aware of this. "Thank you."

They walked on. His hand dropped. The city was quiet around them and the lake was somewhere ahead, invisible but present - the smell of cold water and winter air - and Anna Jones walked through Geneva at three in the morning beside a man she had known for less than twenty-four hours thinking: I have lost my job, my flat, my engagement, and possibly my mind, and the only thing I am certain of right now is the six inches of air between my shoulder and his.

It was not a comfortable certainty.

It was the only one she had.