Read Chapter 22: The Informant's Return

The service depot stretched wide and black before them, its ceiling lost in shadow. Mercer moved low along the rusted track bed, Camille a breath behind him. Ahead, the warehouse stood like a coffin stood on end—corrugated steel, one rolling door half-cracked, yellow light spilling from within.

Sokolov's voice echoed off the walls, Russian words clipped with fury. The thin man answered in French, pleading. Mercer pressed himself against the cold wall beside the door gap and peered through.

Inside, crates formed a labyrinth. Sokolov stood at its center, the briefcase Remi had handed him resting on a crate, unopened. The thin man—pale, sweat-slicked—held his hands up as if warding off a blow.

“You told me the exchange was here,” Sokolov said, switching to accented English. “You told me the informant would be waiting with the files. Instead I find an empty warehouse.” He stepped closer. “Where is Emil Doucet?”

Mercer felt Camille stiffen beside him.

The thin man swallowed. “He was here. He said he needed to retrieve something from the vault. He’s still in the tunnels below. I swear it.”

“You swore before. Your promises are worthless.” Sokolov drew a pistol from his coat, slow and deliberate, and pressed the muzzle against the thin man’s forehead. “I will ask once more. Where is Doucet hiding?”

A voice answered from the shadows deeper in the warehouse—calm, French, unhurried.

“He’s not hiding. He’s working.”

A man stepped out from behind a stack of crates. Fiftyish, gray at the temples, dressed in civilian clothes that hung loose on a thin frame. He moved like someone who had spent years learning to be invisible.

Emil Doucet.

Mercer’s chest tightened. Doucet looked exactly as he had in the file photos Fournier had shown him six years ago—before the staged death, before the family in Lyon, before the lie that had bought them safety.

Sokolov turned, pistol swinging toward the new arrival. “Doucet. You’re alive.”

“Disappointing for some,” Doucet said. He held a tablet in one hand, the screen glowing faintly. “You came for the records, Sokolov. I have them. But I needed to be sure you came alone, with no entanglements.”

“Your intermediary promised a clean exchange. Instead I find nothing but dust and promises.”

“You found me.” Doucet gestured at the crates. “That was the test. If you’d brought Garrick’s people, I’d have been gone before you crossed the threshold.”

Camille shifted beside Mercer. Her voice was barely a whisper. “This changes things.”

Mercer didn’t answer. His attention locked on Doucet, on the easy confidence in his posture. The man Fournier had called his most valuable asset—the one who had fed him everything about Garrick’s network, right up until the night the Frenchman was supposed to die.

The night Mercer had made the call to fake it.

Doucet walked toward Sokolov, tablet extended. “The vault beneath the depot has records going back fifteen years. Every transaction, every name, every operational cell Garrick kept off the books. It’s all here.”

Sokolov didn’t take the tablet. “And what do you want in return?”

“Protection. From Garrick, from MI6, from anyone who wants me dead again.” Doucet’s eyes flicked toward the door gap—toward Mercer’s position. “I know you brought someone with you, Maxim. I heard them come in over the loading ramp.”

Mercer cursed silently. He pushed the door wider and stepped through, hands visible. Camille followed, her expression unreadable.

Doucet’s face shifted when he saw them—recognition, then something harder. He looked at Mercer for a long moment.

“Alex Mercer,” he said. “The man who killed me.”

“The man who saved your life,” Mercer said. “Your family is alive because of me. Your children have birthdays because of me.”

“My children think their father is dead. My wife mourns a corpse that walks and breathes.” Doucet’s voice was flat, but his hands trembled slightly. “You made me a ghost, Mercer. You didn’t save my life—you stole it.”

Camille’s head turned sharply toward Mercer. In the low light, he could see the calculation in her eyes, the same cold arithmetic she brought to every interrogation. She was watching the lie collapse in real time and wondering how much of Mercer was still standing on it.

“He had a family, Alex.” Her voice was quiet, controlled. “You told me he was dead. You told me you’d confirmed it yourself.”

“I did confirm it,” Mercer said. “I confirmed he wasn’t dead, and I made sure nobody else would confirm that.”

“You made his family grieve. You made them bury an empty coffin.”

“I made them safe.” Mercer’s voice came out sharper than intended. He forced himself to meet Doucet’s gaze instead of Camille’s. “Garrick had already killed two other informants that month. He was closing in on Doucet’s identity. There was no extraction window, no safe house, no way to move the family without drawing attention. The only way to cut the thread was to cut it completely.”

“You didn’t ask me,” Doucet said.

“You wouldn’t have agreed.”

“No. I wouldn’t have.” Doucet’s jaw tightened. “But you didn’t give me the choice. You decided that my family’s safety was worth my life. You decided that a false grave was better than a real one.”

Mercer had no answer for that. It had seemed so clean in the moment—a forged death notice, a witness who saw the body, a quiet burial in a small cemetery outside Lyon. The cost had been Doucet’s life, but the life itself had been preserved. That had felt like enough.

It had never felt like enough.

Sokolov watched the exchange with cold amusement. “I came for records, not family therapy. Doucet—the tablet.”

Doucet handed it over. Sokolov swiped through screens, his expression shifting from skepticism to something resembling satisfaction.

“This is extensive,” he said.

“It’s everything,” Doucet said. “Including the lab’s location and its true purpose.”

Mercer stepped forward. “The decommissioned lab on the French side that Garrick’s train was heading toward.”

Doucet looked at him, surprised. “You know about that?”

“I know it exists. I don’t know what it was for.”

“Neither did I, not fully. But the records show Fournier was building something there in the final years of his life—something he didn’t want anyone to know about.” Doucet paused. “Something he was using Garrick to fund.”

The words landed like a physical blow. Mercer felt the floor shift under him.

Fournier—his mentor, the man who had given him the cufflink, who had taught him how to survive in the field—had been using Garrick?

“Fournier was MI6,” Mercer said. “He was Garrick’s handler.”

“No.” Doucet shook his head slowly. “Garrick was Fournier’s. The control officer was a front, a cover identity. Fournier built him to run operations without leaving fingerprints. The cufflink you wear—the one Garrick turned into a tracker—it was Fournier’s key to everything. His master key.”

Camille’s eyes went wide. Mercer’s hand moved instinctively to the cufflink at his wrist.

He had worn it for years, believing it was a gift from a dying mentor. A reminder of the man who had shaped him.

It was a key.

A key to something Fournier had built, hidden, and died before he could claim.

Sokolov was watching Mercer now with new interest. “It seems we all want the same thing, Mr. Mercer. The records, the lab, and whatever Fournier locked away inside it.”

“We want different things,” Mercer said. “You want to sell it. I want to bury it.”

“Then we have a problem.” Sokolov raised his pistol, aiming at Mercer’s chest. “Because I am done negotiating.”

Behind him, the warehouse doors began to slide shut with a heavy mechanical groan.