Marcus Webb's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

Marcus reached his safehouse by dusk. The waterfront building sagged on its pilings, plain and gray, the way he liked it. He locked the door, set the bone talismans on the table, and laid the leather case beside them. Blood had dried into the hide. A brass clasp held it shut. He needed to know if it held a lead or nothing before he moved on the spymaster. The clasp resisted his knife. He tried the point, then the flat, then a bent pin from his coat. The lock was old but stubborn. He worked at it for an hour while the tide slapped the pilings below. The pin snapped. Marcus swore and drove his knife under the clasp. Metal screeched. The lock gave. He folded the cover back. Inside were papers. Names, dates, a hand-drawn map of walls he recognized. The spymaster's walls. Someone had been building a case against the man Marcus meant to destroy. This was better than a lead. This was a key. "You always did force locks instead of picking them." Marcus did not turn. He knew the voice. He had trained beside it for six years. Natasha Volkov stood in his doorway, though he had locked that door. She held a small tool between two fingers and smiled. "The window," she said. "You never check the window." He kept his hand near the knife. "You followed me through the woods." "I followed the case." She stepped inside and shut the door with her heel. Her eyes moved to the papers. "That belonged to a man who worked for me. He ran into something in those trees. I came to collect what he carried." Marcus laid his palm flat on the papers. "Finders keep." "He was mine." She crossed the room without hurry. She knew how he stood, which way he would twist, the count before he struck. She had learned it in the same rooms he had. "You want the spymaster. So do I. But you can't read half of that without me. The names are in a cipher we both trained on." Marcus glanced down. She was right. Half the entries were scrambled letters, a code from their old service. He could crack it, given weeks he did not have. "So we share," he said. "We share." She sat across from him, easy, like the years had not passed. "You get inside the walls. I get what the dossier is worth to my people." He watched her hands. She watched his. Neither trusted the other, and both knew it. But the papers were open on the table, and he could not use them alone. Marcus turned the top page toward her. "Read." She leaned in. The lock was broken, the case was open, and the one person who knew all his moves now sat inside his only safe room.