Read Chapter 6: The Informant's File

The train creaked around her—metal groaning against metal in the deep silence of the tunnel—and Camille pressed her back against the control room door, feeling the lock give way under the tension wrench she’d bent from a coat hanger in the attendant’s cupboard.

Two minutes. Maybe less before someone noticed the red status light blinking on the door panel.

The control room was a coffin of flickering screens and dead monitor glow. A single engineer’s seat sat empty before a console bristling with toggles and readouts. The air smelled of burnt coffee and stale sweat. Whoever had been here had left in a hurry—a half-eaten croissant curled on a napkin beside a mug gone cold.

Camille locked the door behind her and moved to the main terminal.

Her fingers flew across the keyboard. The Eurostar’s passenger manifest scrolled past in a blur of names, seat numbers, nationalities. She cross-referenced the boarding list from Calais, then the original reservations, then the no-shows flagged by security.

Nothing.

She pulled the encrypted file from her own service—the one she’d threatened to show Mercer but never had. Her thumbprint unlocked it. A single name blinked back at her from the screen.

SOKOLOV, VIKTOR. Freelance. Last employment: SVR, cash basis. Known aliases: the Crow, the Undertaker. Last known activity: Berlin, three months ago—a defector who never reached the safe house.

Her stomach tightened. Sokolov wasn’t on the manifest. But his patterns were. She pulled the passenger list again, sorting by boarding anomalies, and a name jumped out at her: a passenger who had booked a ticket from Brussels three hours before departure, boarding in Calais anyway, paying in cash, no luggage.

Édouard Lambert.

The booking was made from a terminal linked to a known SVR front company in Prague. Lambert’s passport was flawless—she’d seen the work before. Sokolov was good. He was aboard under a name that almost passed, a face that probably matched a file stolen from a Belgian civil registry eighteen months ago.

Camille glanced at the compartment assignments. Lambert—seat 14A, coach five.

Right next to where Dr. Vernet had been seated before her disappearance.

She sat back, breath slow, mind spinning. Sokolov wasn’t here for a ransom. Freelancers didn’t work for HLF—not for a fragment like that. They worked for money. For someone with a buyer for whatever was in that silver container.

Which meant Vernet wasn’t just a missing doctor. She was the payload.

Camille’s fingers hovered over the keyboard. She could send everything to DGSE. She could flag the train, abort the crossing, flood the tunnel with armed police. They’d burn Sokolov and their own operation in one move, but they’d save the doctor—and whatever else was on this train.

Her thumb brushed the send icon.

Then she stopped.

Mercer had lied to her. Three times now. He recognized the queen of hearts and gave her nothing. He’d told her London confirmed a fiction. He’d hidden evidence from her, and he’d done it smoothly, professionally, the way men did when they had something to protect that wasn’t the mission.

She trusted him about as far as the next lie.

But if she sent the DGSE file now, she’d burn her own access to the operation—and whatever Mercer was hiding would vanish with him into the French legal system before she ever got the truth out.

She cleared the send command.

Instead, she opened a second window and began copying the manifest file. Sokolov’s alias. His seat. His history. Her own notes, marked with timestamps. She saved it to a USB drive she kept behind the lining of her jacket.

Camille Moreau didn’t believe in secrets. She believed in leverage.

A hand rapped on the door.

She spun, heart hammering. The engineer’s voice came muffled through the steel: “Occupé? I need the control board—safety system check.”

Camille closed the file, wiped the terminal history, and stepped back from the console. The door unlock clicked under her thumb. She smoothed her jacket, tucking the USB into her sleeve, and slipped past the engineer with a murmured apology in French about a lost passenger and a locked door.

She didn’t look back.

Coach five was a cathedral of green seats and dim emergency light. The train had been still for minutes now—long enough for the passengers to grow restless, for conversations to rise and fall in a dozen languages, for the stale air to thicken with suspicion. Camille walked with purpose, eyes scanning seat numbers. Fourteen A was empty.

She slid into the seat.

The cushion was still warm.

Sokolov had been here recently—within minutes, maybe. She ran her hand along the armrest, searching blind, and found a seam where the fabric had been slit and resewn with thread that didn’t match. She worked her fingernails into the gap and pulled. Inside the padding, a single folded page of paper.

The informant’s file.

It was handwritten, compact, in a script she recognized as tradecraft shorthand—the same cipher used by half the intelligence agencies in Europe when they didn’t want a digital trail. She decoded it line by line as she read: a list of names. Three of them. All French scientists, all working on tissue regeneration, all reported missing in the last eight months.

Vernet was the fourth.

But the page didn’t just list the missing. It listed the buyer. A bank in Luxembourg, a shell company, a signature that meant nothing to her—but the account code, the pattern of withdrawals, the timing of each disappearance…

Camille’s blood went cold.

The purchases had been made with funds tracing back to a British military research program, closed and buried since 2009.

Mercer’s government.

She read the last line twice. It was a hand-drawn spider diagram—lines connecting each doctor to a single endpoint. A facility in the Scottish Highlands. Underneath, a single date: three weeks from now.

They weren’t stealing doctors for HLF, or for any ideological client.

Someone was building a team. A research team. And whichever agency had hired Sokolov had hired him to collect—not to kill. Vernet wasn’t a hostage.

She was a recruit.

Camille pocketed the page. The seat creaked as she stood, and she looked down the carriage toward the dining car, where she’d last seen Mercer disappear. He’d told her London confirmed Vernet was aboard. If he was telling the truth, he was working his own side of the operation. If he was lying, he was protecting something bigger than a missing doctor.

Either way, he wasn’t the man she thought he was.

And Sokolov was walking the same train, wearing a dead man’s face, collecting doctors like specimens.

The train shuddered.

Lights flickered. The emergency system kicked in with a low hum, and Camille felt a lurch forward—power returning, brakes releasing. Through the windows, black tunnel wall began to slide past in a blur.

The train was moving again.

But not toward France.

Camille checked the control panel display above the door. Route overlay, next stop, estimated arrival. The destination had been altered—the next string read GARE DU NORD, but the route beneath it had been overridden. A secondary waypoint, inserted by an administrator override code she didn’t recognize.

The train wasn’t docking at the platform.

It was stopping at a maintenance spur, three kilometers before the station, in an access tunnel the public never saw.

Someone had planned this down to the minute. Sokolov’s extraction point wasn’t in Paris. It was here, in the dark, with the power out and the world sealed miles above them.

Camille pressed the USB against her palm, felt its edges bite her skin. She had a name, a buyer, a destination—and a plan that had nothing to do with Mercer.

She turned toward the luggage car and began to walk.