Read Chapter 6: The Dummy Run

The mizzle had turned the cobbles to glass by the time Sarah reached the statue of Henry IV. Luc watched from the shadow of a shuttered tabac across the square, his breath fogging the collar of his coat. She moved well—no hesitation at the approach, no glance over the shoulder that a trained eye would catch. She paused, checked the time on a wristwatch that caught the lamplight, then crouched as if to tie a shoe.

The pickup point was a drainage grate behind the statue’s plinth. The dummy message—a folded receipt from a laundry that didn’t exist—was wedged under the third slat. Luc had timed the run himself. A competent courier should be out of sight of the grate in under ninety seconds.

Sarah stayed at the grate for nearly four minutes.

She didn’t retrieve the receipt immediately. Instead, she fiddled with her shoe, straightened, walked two paces, then doubled back as if she’d forgotten something. She knelt again, and this time her hand went to the grate. But her head was up, scanning the square, not at the grate itself. Searching. Waiting.

Luc’s stomach turned cold.

He watched her palm the receipt, tuck it into her coat, and rise. She walked northeast, toward the Pont Neuf, exactly as the route dictated. She did not look back once.

He let her get a hundred meters ahead before he followed.

The Pont Neuf was quiet, the Seine a black ribbon below the mist. Sarah crossed at a steady clip, unhurried, a woman out for a late walk. At the halfway point she stopped at the railing, looked out at the water, and removed a glove. She let it dangle from her fingers for a moment, then dropped it.

It was a perfectly natural gesture. A woman adjusting her grip on a chilly evening.

But Luc had seen the drop signal used by a courier in Lyon before the war. A glove over the water meant *contact made, awaiting instructions.*

Sarah retrieved the glove from the stones and continued across the bridge.

Luc stood at the far end of the bridge, hands in his pockets, watching her disappear into the warren of streets beyond the Île de la Cité. His mouth was dry. He had hoped—genuinely hoped—that she would simply fail the run. That she would miss the pickup, or panic at the patrol, or give herself away with a sloppy evasion. Instead she had executed the route flawlessly.

Flawlessly, and with a four-minute hesitation that no honest courier would have risked.

He caught up to her at the corner of Rue de la Huchette, where she had stopped to light a cigarette under the awning of a shuttered bookshop. She turned at his footsteps and smiled—that same practiced, pleasant smile that never quite reached her eyes.

“Still following me, Luc?”

“You took too long at the pickup.”

She blew out a stream of smoke, unbothered. “I was checking for a tail. There was a man on the corner of Rue des Grands Augustins. Dark coat, hat pulled low. He matched me for two blocks. I wanted to see if he’d follow me to the grate.”

Luc forced his voice level. “And did he?”

“He turned off at the baker’s. But I couldn’t be sure he wasn’t doubling back through the alley.”

It was plausible. Almost too plausible. The perfect explanation, delivered without a flicker of hesitation, the way an agent practiced a story in the mirror.

“You watched the grate for four minutes,” he said. “You didn’t look at it. You looked at the square. You were waiting for something.”

Sarah stopped smiling. The mask didn’t drop—it simply sharpened, the corners of her mouth tightening into something harder. “I was waiting to see if the man was going to move. If he had, I would have abandoned the pickup. That’s the procedure you taught me, isn’t it?”

“The procedure is to retrieve and move. Not to hang over a dead drop like a pigeon on a ledge.”

“I did retrieve it.” She held up the folded receipt between two gloved fingers. “It’s here. The run is complete. You’re looking for problems that aren’t there.”

Luc stepped closer, close enough to smell her perfume—something floral, expensive, out of place in a city where soap was rationed. “I’ve been doing this for three years, Sarah. I know what a waiting signal looks like. And I know what a courier who wants to be caught looks like.”

She held his gaze. For a long moment, neither of them blinked. Then she dropped her cigarette, ground it out with her heel, and spoke in a voice stripped of its earlier warmth.

“If I wanted to be caught, you’d already be dead. You followed me onto that bridge. You think I didn’t see you in the shadow of the tabac? You think I didn’t know you were there the whole time?”

Luc’s hand tightened in his pocket. He hadn’t seen her look at the tabac. Not once.

“I let you follow me,” she said. “Because if you’re going to suspect me, I wanted you to have your evidence. I checked the square because there was a man who matched you for four blocks before I reached the statue. And he was wearing a Gestapo coat. I’ve seen those coats enough times to know.”

The words landed like a punch. Luc’s mind raced back to the square—the far corner, the shadow of the fountain. He hadn’t seen anyone. But he’d been watching her, not the margins.

“You’re lying,” he said.

“I’m not.” She stepped past him, close enough that her shoulder brushed his chest. “But you don’t have to believe me. Go talk to Marcel. Tell him I’m compromised. Tell him to burn me. See how far that gets you before the straw-blond man with the file on your face finds you in your shop.”

She walked away into the dark, her footsteps clicking on the wet cobbles.

Luc stood alone under the awning, the receipt still in her hand, the river muttering below the bridge. He wanted to believe she was lying. He wanted to believe the trap was hers, not his own suspicion turning against him.

But she had known about the Gestapo surveillance. She had known about the straw-blond agent. Marcel had told her nothing about that.

He walked back toward his shop, his mind churning. By the time he reached the door, he had made his decision.

He entered, lit a single lamp, and sat at his workbench. The cross was still scratched there, catching the lamplight. He traced its edges with a thumb, then pulled out a sheet of paper and began to write a false message—a rendezvous that would lead to a dead address, a name that belonged to a man who no longer existed.

If Sarah was the leak, she would carry the bait straight to the Gestapo.

And if she was not, he would know by morning.

He folded the paper, tucked it into a hollow tube that looked like a bicycle pump valve, and sat waiting for the hours to pass.