The Paris Betrayal by James Hannibal (the dot read aloud .txt) 📗

joined the Company, because I thought the man who led us shared my determination to work for the greater good.”

“But he didn’t.”

“No.” Jupiter glanced up at him. “I showed him the data. I brought him the map to control, years in advance. We could have prevented the random devastation of the whole COVID-19 affair by creating an outbreak of our own—a controlled burn to stop a wildfire. But the Director turned me away, and we all felt the result.” His eyes returned to the photo of his parents. “The same as before.”

Terrance turned the tablet, casting the glow of Dr. Kidan’s message across Jupiter’s face. “You didn’t need him. You led us here. You let the wildfire rage and now the world is primed.”

“That’s right, Terrance. The world is primed. If Dr. Kidan has achieved success, then we stand at the threshold of a new era. Instead of a controlled burn, we’ll take complete control of the flames.”

35

Ben sipped his coffee in the back corner of Café Giga in Antwerp. The hot liquid stung his lips. The progressive thaw of frost injuries caused pain for hours, sometimes days. Tiny blood vessels in his lips fought to unclot themselves. Nerve endings in his fingers, sliced and split by ice crystals, reconnected with his brain and screamed their displeasure.

He survived the night, but escaping the fields took time, still exposed to the cold. Now, sitting in the warm café with his coffee and a rented laptop, he could assess the damage. He had first-degree frostbite on his fingers, not too bad. But his nose and earlobes had reached the second-degree stage. For the next few days, he could expect constant pain and some visible side effects—temporary, but ugly.

Not good.

No one could deny looks play a part in the espionage game. Try gaining a mark’s trust with a pus-filled frost blister growing on the end of your nose. His new look would slow him down more than the pain.

Ben set down the coffee and got to work, creating a single-use account for the email address he’d given Sensen. He tamped down his nerves, hoping against hope that a message awaited him with the details for a meet with Hale.

Today’s spies communicate through nanotech with complex encryption algorithms and satellite channels with time-data multiplexing. But when it all goes wrong, there are fallback tricks. A temporary email account works in a pinch. The key is waiting to create the account until after the message you want to hide is sent to the account.

Digital postmen are tenacious. Send a message to an imaginary account, and they’ll keep trying to deliver it for days. Neither rain nor sleet nor the infinite black of a nonexistent local-part@ domain will stop them from making their appointed rounds. While bouncing around cyberspace, undelivered, the message is unlikely to get intercepted, and it can’t reveal the recipient’s physical location. Once you’re ready to receive, create the account using a public hotspot, take the message, then delete the account and run.

He finished creating the account. A welcome email from the server populated the inbox, but nothing more. Ben deleted it and waited, fighting off despair as he stared at the empty folder. “Come on . . .”

The laptop beeped. Sensen’s email popped in. Relief flooded his chest. He didn’t even need to open the message. Using an old Company contingency trick, Sensen had coded the time and coordinates for the meet into the subject line.

Ben jotted down the numbers, deleted the email account, and bolted. He kept his head low as he jogged across the street, wary of the sudden appearance of police cars.

Nobody came.

Why would they? The Company had no reason to come after him now. They could snatch him up at the meeting with Hale—or maybe put a bullet in his brain and be done with it. He didn’t care. He needed to see the Director, and Hale might make that happen. Plus, he wanted to pass on the information tying the Princess and the Behemoth to the Leviathan bombings. The Company analysts needed to take a deep dive into Sea Titan and see what they could dredge up.

Three streets from the café, Ben hopped a tram toward Antwerp Central Station. Hunching over with an arm wrapped around a standing pole, he studied a waterproof map of Europe from his go-bag. Some quick math decoded the string of numbers from the email, giving him the rendezvous time and coordinates. Ben traced a finger down a line of longitude. Zürich. He could refine the rest later. He had eight hours to reach northern Switzerland. With the right train, he could be there in five.

36

A Dutch police diver with the top half of his dry suit hanging from his midsection showed Duval the screen of his camera, thumbing through pictures of a beat-up Peugeot at the bottom of the frozen Haringvliet lake.

“That’s it,” Duval said, nodding. “That’s the one. She’s missing a mirror.”

The diver chuckled and flipped to the next picture. “She’s missing both.”

“Even better.”

Out on the ice, spotters watched anxiously from the edge of a freshly cut hole. A man surfaced and slapped what looked like an ID badge into one of their hands. They conversed for a moment, and then the spotter relayed the message over his radio.

The man with Duval acknowledged the transmission and frowned. “They still haven’t found the body.”

A buzz from Duval’s phone interrupted them. “Excuse me.” He turned away to answer, but the caller had already hung up, somehow leaving a pdf file behind. Interesting. The contents made Duval smile. He clicked off the screen and touched the man’s arm. “Keep looking. Our man is down there somewhere.”

Renard joined Duval on the way back to their rental car. “I heard you identify the Peugeot. I guess our hunt is over.”

“Not in the slightest.”

“But you said—”

“I know what I said.” Duval looked over his shoulder to be sure the Dutch team was out of earshot. “But I have reason to believe Calix