Read Chapter 18: The Mole

Claire Verdier arrived at the laboratory at seven the next morning, before the mist had burned off the hills. She wore the same weathered leather jacket from the exhibition, carried a slim dossier under one arm, and smelled faintly of espresso and printer toner. Camille had barely slept. She poured three coffees from the machine in the corner while Alexandre pulled up chairs around the small steel worktable.

“I’ve been tracing the leak for six weeks,” Claire said, sliding the dossier across the table. “Not to you. I was chasing the rose source. But the two intersect.”

She opened the folder. Inside were spreadsheets, timestamps, and a series of internal memos marked with the L’Héritage letterhead.

“Thibault has been receiving Roussel formulation data for fourteen months. Cost breakdowns. Supplier contracts. Names of your growers. Nothing public. Nothing you could find in a trade journal.”

Camille’s hands wrapped around her coffee cup. “Who?”

“That’s what I’m here to tell you. I’ve narrowed it to three people with consistent access to all the compromised documents. Your formulation director, Pascale Moreau. Your logistics head, Gérard Vial. And your head of quality control, Sophie Lemarchand.”

Alexandre studied the list, his jaw tight. “Pascale has been with the house for twenty-two years. Her father worked for Marcel.”

“I know,” Claire said. “That doesn’t make her innocent. It makes her capable.”

Camille shook her head. “Pascale would never. She cried when my grandmother died. She helped me crush jasmine petals when I was eight years old.”

“Then it’s not her,” Claire said flatly. “But I need you to stop thinking with your childhood and start thinking with your spreadsheets. Which of these three had access to your mother’s original formula notes before they were supposedly lost?”

The question landed like a stone in water. Camille opened her mouth, then closed it. She looked at Alexandre, who was already pulling up his tablet.

“I’ll run the access logs from the central archive,” he said. “The formula notes were digitized three years ago when insurance flagged them as high value. Every terminal in the building has a unique ID. If anyone opened that file, it’s recorded.”

“Do it,” Claire said. “And don’t tell anyone what you’re looking for.”

Camille stood, pacing to the window. The mist had begun to curl off the hillside, revealing the terraced rows of roses below. “If we pull access logs now, the spy will know we’re onto them.”

“Which is why we won’t pull access logs,” Alexandre said. “We’ll plant false information instead. Something only the real spy would act on.”

Claire raised an eyebrow. “You’ve done this before.”

“I’ve done corporate espionage audits for clients in worse shape than this,” Alexandre said. “The principle is simple. You create a believable lie, give each suspect a slightly different version, and wait to see which version ends up with Thibault.”

Camille turned from the window. “What kind of lie?”

“A formula adjustment,” Alexandre said. “Something plausible. A change in the dilution ratio of the rose absolute. Say we’ve discovered the original formula used a lower concentration than current production and we’re planning to correct it before the private investor presentation.”

Claire nodded slowly. “If the spy bites, we’ll know within forty-eight hours. Thibault will use the information internally, and my contacts inside L’Héritage will hear about it.”

“Forty-eight hours is too long,” Camille said. “The investor presentation is in four days. We don’t have time to wait for a slow poison.”

“We don’t have time for a fast mistake either,” Claire said. “If you accuse the wrong person, you’ll spook the real spy and lose your window entirely.”

Alexandre looked between them. “Camille’s right. We compress the timeline. We throw the bait tonight, at a department-wide meeting. We frame it as a breakthrough—tell the staff we’ve found a way to stretch the rose oil yield by twenty percent. That’s the kind of information Thibault would pay handsomely for.”

Camille caught the glint in his eye. “And we give each suspect a different percentage.”

“Seventeen for Pascale,” Alexandre said. “Twenty for Gérard. Twenty-three for Sophie. We’ll know who talked by what number Thibault’s people mention.”

Claire smiled, a thin, practiced expression. “I like the way you think, Maurel.”

“Don’t,” Alexandre said. “It keeps me up at night.”

---

The meeting was called for three that afternoon. Camille stood behind the wooden podium in the main formulation hall, the long tables arranged in a U-shape before her. The familiar faces looked up at her: Pascale with her silver hair twisted into a loose knot, Gérard with his thick forearms folded over a clipboard, Sophie with her reading glasses pushed up into her hair.

Camille kept her voice steady as she announced the supposed breakthrough. “I’ve been working on the Marcel formula since my return,” she said. “And last night, I found something. A way to increase the yield of the rose absolute by nearly a quarter without compromising the scent profile.”

The room murmured. Pascale’s eyes went wide with hope. Gérard scribbled something on his clipboard. Sophie leaned forward, her glasses catching the light.

“I’m not ready to share the details yet,” Camille said. “But the investor presentation will feature the new numbers. I wanted you all to hear it from me first. You’re the ones who make this house what it is.”

She stepped away from the podium and let the room dissolve into whispered conversations. Alexandre stood near the back door, arms crossed, watching. He gave her a single, almost imperceptible nod.

---

By ten that night, they were back in Alexandre’s flat, the table between them spread with Claire’s dossier and three coffee cups gone cold. Camille couldn’t sit. She paced the length of the small living room, stopping every few steps to glance out the window at the dark city below.

“Nothing yet,” Alexandre said, checking his phone for the fourth time. “Claire said her contacts at L’Héritage are finalizing the day’s documents. She’ll know by morning.”

“Morning is too late if Thibault moves tonight.”

“Thibault doesn’t move at night,” Alexandre said. “He’s a coward. He waits for the daylight so he can claim credit for someone else’s work.”

The bitterness in his voice made Camille pause. She turned to look at him. “You really hate him.”

“I really do,” Alexandre said. “He spent two years at the Maurel house grinding my grandfather’s legacy into shareholder returns. When my father died, Thibault called it a ‘market correction.’”

Camille sat down across from him. For a long moment, neither spoke. The silence between them felt different from the guarded ones of the past weeks—less hostile, more like the quiet before a confession.

“What will you do if it’s Pascale?” Alexandre asked.

“I’ll ask her why.”

“And if she doesn’t have an answer?”

Camille’s jaw tightened. “Then I’ll have to decide if I can fire someone I’ve known my whole life.”

Alexandre’s phone buzzed. He picked it up, read the screen, and went still.

“What is it?” Camille asked.

He looked up, and she saw something in his eyes she hadn’t seen before—not fear, but a cold, careful anger. “Claire. She intercepted a message from Thibault’s office to their production team. He’s telling them to prepare for a ‘significant increase in raw material costs’ and to renegotiate contracts with our rose suppliers.”

Camille’s stomach dropped. “Which suppliers?”

“All of them,” Alexandre said. “He’s moving to corner the market on our rose oil before the investor presentation. If he locks up our supply chain, we can’t produce the scent even if we win the board.”

“Then we’re dead in the water.”

“Not if the spy told him the wrong number,” Alexandre said slowly. “Because if Thibault believes we have a twenty percent yield increase, he’ll aggressively buy what he thinks is a limited supply. He’ll overpay. He’ll overextend.”

Camille’s pulse quickened. “And if the spy told him the right number—if the spy is who we think it is—then he’s one step ahead of us.”

Alexandre set the phone down. “We still don’t know who talked. But we just found out something else.”

“What?”

“Thibault’s financing the supply chain lockup using debt notes that trace back to Roussel accounts,” Alexandre said. “Old debts. The same kind of debts that brought down the Maurel house after my grandfather died.”

The air in the room seemed to compress. Camille thought of the ledger in her father’s study, the pages of owed sums that had grown like ivy over the years, strangling the life out of the family business.

“He’s not just stealing our rose,” she said slowly. “He’s been buying our debts. Our workers’ debts. Our suppliers’ debts.”

Alexandre nodded. “And if he owns the loyalty of someone inside this house—someone who owes him money, someone who feared retirement or foreclosure or worse—he doesn’t need a spy who believes in him. He needs one who’s desperate.”

Camille looked at the three names on Claire’s dossier. Pascale. Gérard. Sophie.

None of them were desperate. They were loyal, steady, the backbone of the house.

But someone had been feeding Thibault for fourteen months. And whoever it was, they had a reason that had nothing to do with loyalty—and everything to do with survival.