Read Chapter 8: The Missing List

The office stank of coal smoke and cheap wine. Lieutenant Garnier stood at the window with his back to Étienne, watching the drizzle sheet over the courtyard where Valeux’s body had been carried away not two hours past. The stain was still there, darker than the cobbles around it, fading under the rain.

“You flew mail over the Prussian lines for three months without a scratch,” Garnier said, not turning. “You know the winds, the altitudes, the blind spots in their patrol schedule. There is no one else I trust to do this.”

“Trust is a funny word,” Étienne said. “Given what happened to the last man you trusted.”

Garnier turned. His face was gray with exhaustion, but his eyes held something harder. He crossed the room and set a folded sheet of paper on the desk between them. Étienne didn’t touch it.

“Twelve names,” Garnier said. “Agents still inside Paris whose cover is burning. Balloon mail is too slow for the ones in zone. The Prussians will be inside the walls within a week if the negotiators fail. These people need to be flown out before then.”

“Twelve people,” Étienne repeated. “In my gondola. One at a time, I assume.”

“You’ll make multiple trips. Weather permitting.”

Étienne picked up the paper. The handwriting was neat, military, each name followed by a code and a drop point. He scanned the list.

Ten names.

He counted again.

“This has ten.”

Garnier’s jaw tightened. “The final name was removed. Even I don’t have it. Only Delacroix holds the full list, and he won’t release it until we prove the leak inside the intelligence bureau is stopped.”

“The leak.”

“The map. The decoy that your passenger stole. Someone on our side knew it was a false target and leaked that information to the Prussians before we could use it. The impostor wasn’t just a spy. He was fed by someone inside Paris.”

Étienne folded the list and slid it inside his jacket. “So you want me to fly ten strangers out of a city under siege while a Prussian agent I’ve already met once is somewhere in the sewers feeding every detail of my face and route to his command. And you want me to do all of this without the final name.”

“The final name is your job to find.”

“I’m a balloonist, Garnier. Not a detective.”

“The men who compose these lists are cautious. Delacroix’s clerk keeps a secondary record of every name removed from the master list—a private insurance policy, in case the war ends badly and the bureaucrats need leverage. That clerk attends the Théâtre des Funambules most nights. He drinks after the second act and talks to anyone who buys him a glass of absinthe.”

Étienne stared at him. “You want me to trick a clerk into revealing a classified name because he drinks too much.”

“I want you to find out who the twelfth agent is. Use whatever skills you have. Seduce him. Bribe him. Follow him home and beat it out of him. I don’t care.” Garnier pulled on his coat and moved to the door. “But you need that name before you lift off. Because if the twelfth agent is who I think it is, they’re the only one who can tell us who leaked the decoy map. And that leak is what is going to get every agent you fly out killed.”

The door closed.

Étienne stood in the silence, the paper warm against his chest.

---

The Théâtre des Funambules was a crooked building wedged between a coal merchant and a shuttered bakery, its marquee burned down to blackened struts from a Prussian shell last month. But the theater itself still ran. Parisians in the eastern districts were determined to keep some semblance of life going, even as the city starved. Étienne paid two francs for a seat at the back and watched a mediocre pantomime performed by actors who looked more tired than the audience.

By the second act, he spotted his target. A thin man in a clerk’s drab jacket sat near the front, an absinthe glass in his hand, laughing too loudly at jokes that weren’t funny. Étienne waited until the intermission, then drifted down the aisle.

The clerk was already deep in conversation with a woman in a red shawl. Étienne stood at the bar nearby, nursing a glass of watered wine, watching the crowd. He didn’t approach directly—too many eyes in the theater, too many hungry ears listening for whispers of names and lists.

The woman in red left the clerk with a hand on his arm and disappeared into the crowd. The clerk looked around, momentarily alone, and Étienne made his move.

“Your glass is empty,” he said, sliding onto the bench across from him.

The clerk blinked. “Do I know you?”

“You know Pierre Davoust.”

The clerk’s face went tight. “Davoust is dead. Died in Metz, they said.”

“No,” Étienne said quietly. “Davoust is sitting across from me, drinking absinthe he can’t afford on a clerk’s wage.”

The man’s hand shook. He set the glass down. “Who are you?”

“Someone who needs the twelfth name.”

“I don’t have—I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do. The master list. Delacroix’s list. You keep the backup record, the one with the erased names. The twelfth agent was removed. I need that name.”

The clerk—Davoust, or whatever he called himself now—looked around the theater like a trapped animal. “I can’t. If anyone learns I told you…”

“If anyone learns you’re alive and working for the bureau under a dead man’s name, they’ll hang you for desertion. So consider the risk you’re already carrying.”

The clerk swallowed. He reached into his coat and pulled out a crumpled cigarette case, flipped it open. Inside, where cigarettes should have been, there was a scrap of paper folded into a tight square.

“The twelfth name isn’t on Delacroix’s official list,” he whispered, sliding the paper across the table. “It was crossed out before the list was even typed. Someone didn’t want it there. Maybe because the agent was compromised. Maybe because the agent was the leak.”

Étienne reached for the paper. A gloved hand closed over his wrist before he touched it.

“Don’t.”

The woman in the red shawl was standing over them. Up close, she was younger than she’d looked from across the room—mid-twenties, dark hair pinned tight, eyes the color of a winter sky. She kept her hand on Étienne’s wrist with surprising strength.

“This man is a fool,” she said, nodding at the clerk. “But he’s my fool. He didn’t tell you where the twelfth name actually lives, did you, Marcel?”

The clerk shook his head frantically.

“The paper,” she said, releasing Étienne’s wrist and plucking it from the table. She unfolded it, glanced at the contents, and tucked it into her shawl. “Your twelfth agent was crossed off the list because they stopped reporting three weeks ago. Not dead. Not captured. Simply silent. And Marcel here was too frightened to tell you that the last address on file for that agent was a boarding house on the Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis.”

“Which is where the leak lives,” Étienne said.

“Which is where you’ll find your answer,” she corrected. “But you won’t get the address from me for free.”

Étienne straightened. “Name your price.”

“Safe passage out of Paris. Tomorrow morning, dawn flight.”

“I’m not flying civilians until the mission is complete.”

“Then you’ll never find your twelfth agent,” she said. “Because I’m the only one who knows the new location. Marcel burned the file paper—he’s not as careful as he thinks. The address lives in my head, and it leaves with me when I board your balloon.”

Étienne studied her. She didn’t flinch under his gaze. Behind them, the third act was starting, tinny music drifting through the theater doors.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Juliette,” she said. “And before you ask, no, I’m not an actress. But I’ve been watching this play long enough to know when it’s a tragedy.”