“I don’t believe that.” Drake sat beside her and bumped his shoulder into hers. “We needed that codebook. It’s given us pieces. Perhaps we’re still missing a few others, but we’ll find them.”

“Tomorrow is soon enough to renew the search.” Hall blinked, nodded, and motioned to the door. “Everyone to their beds—that’s an order. And Camden?”

The pilot paused with a foot already aimed for the door. “Sir?”

“Well done.”

His face didn’t exactly soften. The shadows didn’t exactly abandon their posts in his eyes. But a bit of light entered there, alongside them. After a moment’s pause, he nodded. “Thank you, sir.” He strode for the door. Though when he pushed it open, his next words had their usual snarl to them. “Well, look who it is. I didn’t know nursemaids made office calls.”

“Red?” Drake pushed to his feet, brows drawn.

Holmes was pushing past Camden with a scowl. “I haven’t time for your nonsense just now. Elton, you’d better get home.”

Margot slipped the two telegrams no one had picked up into the codebook and stood too. “Dot?” She met Drake’s questioning look. “She was properly upset this morning. Handed in her resignation, gave me a dressing-down, and stormed out.”

“She won’t answer the door.” Red motioned toward the general direction of her flat. “And she must have dismissed the guard you’d posted. But that’s not why I’ve come, actually. There’s an older Spanish gentleman at your building, Elton, demanding to see his grandchildren and causing a terrible uproar.”

Drake actually jerked, as if a bolt of electricity had coursed through him. “Well, it can’t be my grandfather. He never leaves home.”

Red lifted dubious brows. “Then perhaps you can at least come and explain why whoever it is keeps yelling for a dragon. One of your neighbors is convinced he’s calling down dark magic or some such rot, and he keeps lapsing into Spanish, which no one else can understand.”

Drake jolted again, and Margot gripped his hand. “Dragon?” he muttered.

“That would be you, wouldn’t it, Eighteen?” She knew she looked a bit too amused at his expense. But she couldn’t recall ever seeing him caught so off guard. “Looks like your abuelo has a few surprises up his sleeve after all.”

31

Suddenly Drake thought he knew how those pilots with altitude sickness had felt. Utterly disoriented, he could only stand in the doorway to the landlord’s office, sure he was seeing an apparition. Or an illusion. Or a figment of his own imagination. Something other than what his eyes insisted he saw—Francisco Mendoza de Haro. Here, in England, where he had never once deigned to step.

It was Margot who stepped forward first, hand outstretched, and said, “You must be Señor Mendoza. I’m Margot De Wilde.”