Floyd digested this while he drained his coffee cup. “There’s something about Cardinal Lemoine,” he said. “Blanchard said he’d seen Susan White behaving very oddly near that station. He saw her enter the station with a heavy suitcase and come out a few moments later with an empty one. It can’t be a coincidence.”
“But why would a woman disappear into a Métro tunnel?”
“For the same reason anyone else would: there’s something in it that matters to them.”
“Or else they were both mad,” Greta said.
“I can’t discount that possibility, either. Did you see her come out again?”
“I waited forty-five minutes. There was some kind of interruption in the service for a couple of minutes, but then the trains started running normally again. Several dozen trains went through. No one came back out of the tunnel.”
“And no one thought to report any of this to the station staff, or the police?”
“Not the man I was talking to,” Greta said. “He wasn’t the sort you’d catch doing anything so responsible.”
Floyd called for the bill. “All right. The way I see it, we have two choices if we want to find Auger again. We can cover the hotel in case she goes back there, or we can cover Cardinal Lemoine and hope she comes out of the tunnel or goes back in again, if somehow we missed her coming out.”
“What about the next station up the line? What if she walked all the way through?”
“I’m hoping she didn’t. Anyway, that would make even less sense than going into the tunnel in the first place. I can only assume that she must have arranged to drop off or collect something from inside the tunnel.”
“You talk about ‘covering’ as if we have limitless manpower,” Greta said. “Whereas in fact we have two people, and one of them needs to be looking after her aunt.”
“I know,” Floyd said. “And I won’t ask anything else of you. What you’ve done already has been a great help.”
“But I lost her,” Greta said.
“No. You established that there’s something going on with Verity Auger that doesn’t fit with her story. Until now there was still a faint chance that she might have been telling the truth about being Susan White’s long-lost sister.”
“And now?”
Floyd wiped his upper lip clean of the moustache of coffee froth that had gathered there. “Now? Now I’d put good money on both of them being spies.”
“You’re in much too deep,” Greta said. “If Custine was here he’d tell you exactly the same thing: take what you have and hand it over to the right people, Floyd. They have no axe to grind with you.”
“I have to get Custine off the hook, Greta. And the only way I’m going to do that is by following this woman.”
“You liked her, didn’t you?”
Floyd reached for his coat. “She wasn’t my type.”
“Maybe so, but you liked her all the same.”
Floyd shook his head, laughing at the thought of it. But he couldn’t look Greta in the eye.
In the armoured glass bulb of the recovery bubble, the status lights of the transit ship blinked on and off with hypnotic regularity. “Rotating,” Skellsgard said, leaning against one of the high-level consoles. “You sure about this, Auger?”
“Just tell me what to do. I’ll take care of the rest.”
The bee-striped holding cradle began to swivel, turning the ship through 180 degrees. Unlike the gleaming machinery surrounding it, the transit ship looked like some impossibly battered relic from a museum of space history: the kind of capsule that would have been flown back from space by seat-of-the-pants jockeys relying on grit and slide-rule calculations to get themselves home. Auger had to remind herself that the ship had accrued all this damage during a single passage between portals, and that it would be approximately twice as battered by the time it emerged on Phobos, about thirty hours from now.
“Ship looks healthy enough,” Skellsgard said, tapping through monitor options. “Which is a good thing—we have enough problems with the throat without having to worry about the ship as well.”
“You think you can last all the way home?”
Skellsgard nodded. “I’ll make it. It’s not as if I have much of a choice, is it?”
“This is the way it has to happen,” Auger said. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t want a rescue party launched the instant you get through.”
“They’ll be on their way as soon as is humanly possible. You have my word on that.”
“All right. Let’s get you strapped in.”
Auger helped Skellsgard along the high-level catwalk that led to the airlock set into the side of the recovery bubble. Skellsgard was getting weaker, Auger noticed: even with the attention she had received from the first-aid kit, she was clearly sliding towards unconsciousness. Auger just hoped she could get the woman underway before that happened. She was still hoping for another run-through of the commands required to keep the throat from sphinctering tight.
The airlock clammed open on heavy-duty piston-driven hinges. Auger barely remembered dragging herself out of the ship, it seemed so long ago. Gently, she assisted Skellsgard through the lock and into the pressurised connecting bridge that crossed to the waiting ship. “I think maybe I should splint that leg before I zip you in,” Auger said.
“No time. I don’t want to delay your rescue by one second more than is necessary. Anyway, they might have shredded me pretty good but I don’t think anything’s broken. Stop worrying on my account, all right? You’ve already helped me enough.”
Inside the ship was the arrangement of three acceleration couches Auger had come to know so well on the way over. Blotting out the woman’s moans of discomfort, she laid Skellsgard on the right-hand couch, buckled the restraints securely around her and then folded down the navigation and communications panel. Auger reached for the loose tangle of the in-flight catheter system, assuming Skellsgard would not have the strength to crawl back to the tiny toilet. “You want me to plug you in before you fly?”
“I’ll manage,” Skellsgard said, grimacing. “And if I don’t, I think my dignity will take it. You have any thoughts about what I should tell Caliskan when I get back?”
Auger reached into her jacket and took out the one piece of paper she had been able to salvage from the attack. “Can you hold out a minute? I need to write something down.”
“Just in case I fall into a coma?”
“That’s one consideration, but I also need to write something down for myself.”
Auger left the ship and returned to one of the high-level consoles, where she had seen a notepad and pen. She ripped out a clean sheet of paper and wrote down everything she thought she had gleaned from Susan White’s paperwork. Then she unfolded the piece of paper she had retrieved from the tunnel—the letter from the manufacturing works in Berlin. She flattened the letter on the desk and on another sheet of paper took down the particulars of the plant, including the address and the name of the man who had written to White. Then she jogged back to the ship, relieved to find Skellsgard still conscious.
“This is the only piece of documentation the war baby didn’t make off with in the tunnel,” she said, slipping the letter into Skellsgard’s chest pocket. “Don’t forget it’s there.”
“I won’t.”
Auger then folded the sheet containing her observations and placed it with the letter. “This is everything I’ve figured out so far. It’s not much, but maybe Caliskan can work out what’s going on. Anyway, I might know a bit more when I get back from Berlin.”
“Who said anything about Berlin?”
“I’m following one of the leads Susan White never got around to herself.”
Skellsgard shook her head warningly. “That’s extremely dangerous. In Paris you’re never more than an hour away from the portal if anything goes wrong. How long will it take you to get back from Berlin?”