Chapter 196 The Aristocratic Villain and the Low Miscreant
POV: Callum | Aldgate, private room
Mordaunt stays after the others leave.
This is not accidental. Nothing Mordaunt does is accidental. He stays in his chair at the end of the table and he waits for the room to clear with the patience of someone who has been waiting for specific moments for a very long time and who is practiced at the particular stillness of it.
Tom is the last to leave. He looks at me once on his way out with the expression that means he will be directly outside the door, which is both a security statement and a statement about Tom himself, which is that he does not leave me alone with Mordaunt without backup within reach.
The door closes. The room has the specific quality of spaces that have been vacated by twelve people and which have not yet settled back to their ordinary atmosphere.
"You have information," I say. "You've been holding it since before the Parliament vote. Tell me what it is and what you want for it."
Mordaunt looks at me with the expression he always has in these moments, which is the expression of someone who has expected to be read accurately and who is not displeased that he was. "The Hermetic Order's final facility," he says. "The one that wasn't burned. The one that moved with Fell." He sets his hands on the table in the relaxed posture of someone who is not performing relaxation, who is actually relaxed, because the specific card he is holding has been worth holding for this specific moment for a very long time. "I know where it is. I know the access points. I know Fell's current security arrangements, which are minimal because he is alone and his remaining resources are personal rather than institutional."
I look at him. "How."
"Because I funded the Order for fifteen years before we had a significant disagreement about the direction of the program," Mordaunt says. "And because I maintained certain information channels after the disagreement, because information about people you have funded is useful regardless of whether you remain aligned with them." He does not look away. "I know where Fell is. I know where the embryo is. I know what he is planning and the timeline he is working to."
The disgust is real and I do not try to manage it away because managing it would be dishonest and Mordaunt would see through it anyway. "You helped create the hybrid program," I say. "You funded it. You provided the network access that let it operate for sixty years without exposure. Children died in those facilities. Most of them died in those facilities. And you are sitting here offering the location of the last one in exchange for what?"
"A full pardon," Mordaunt says. "All crimes. All liability. After the war."
"No."
He does not react to the no the way most people react to a no, which is with escalation or retreat. He sits with it for a moment as if testing its weight. "You need what I know," he says. "And I need not to be executed when the war is over, which is the outcome I am currently looking at if the coalition holds and I have no negotiated position within it." He looks at me with the flat directness of someone who has decided that the honest version of this conversation is more useful than the strategic version. "We are not friends. We are not ever going to be friends. But we are in the same room and we both need something from it."
The class of it is the thing that sits underneath everything else, not stated but present, the distance between what he is and what I am and the specific quality of the two of us being at a table as equals because the world has moved far enough in three years that this is what equal looks like now, which would have been impossible before and which is simply true today.
I think about Estella with the blocks rising. I think about Ash saying I'm not a victim anymore. I think about the thirty-one children in Isla's shelter and the one in Fell's facility and Valentina who has been hunting for three months without sleep.
"Tell me where Fell is," I say. "After the war, we'll discuss your future. That is all I will promise."
Mordaunt looks at me for a long moment. Then he reaches into his jacket and removes a folded piece of paper and sets it on the table between us.
I pick it up. I read it.
It is an address in Clerkenwell. It is the same address Jack found on the Order mage's body four weeks ago, which means the intelligence is confirmed from two independent sources, which means it is real.
"After the war," Mordaunt says.
I fold the paper and put it in my pocket and stand. "After the war," I say.