Read Chapter 7: The Resistance's Price

The Rue Saint-Antoine safehouse smelled of boiled cabbage and stale cigarette smoke, an odor Lucien had come to associate with every Resistance hideout in the city. He had been waiting twenty minutes in a back room that was little more than a pantry, the walls lined with jars of pickled vegetables that had probably been sitting there since before the Occupation.

When Camille finally entered, she did not apologize for the delay. She simply sat across from him, a small woman with grey-streaked hair pulled tight against her skull, and placed a folded map of the 5th arrondissement between them.

“You kept us waiting at the café last week,” she said. “And you gave the SS enough time to kill your German deserter before he could tell you anything useful. That cost us. The Germans know we’re looking now.”

Lucien rubbed his thumb along the edge of the map. “They knew before I walked into that café. Le Corbeau sold me out, or someone sold him out. Either way, I wasn’t the only one who knew about the meeting.”

“And yet you survived, and your contact did not.” Camille’s eyes were flat, unreadable. “That’s an interesting pattern.”

“I’m very good at running.”

“That’s why I need you to do something else.” She tapped a spot on the map with her forefinger. “There’s a supply depot on the Rue de la Santé. Every Thursday night, the SS move munitions from the rail yard at Denfert-Rochereau to this depot, using a convoy of three trucks escorted by two Kübelwagens. The route takes them along the Boulevard de Port-Royal, then up through the intersection with the Rue de la Glacière, where they pause to check for IEDs before committing to the narrow street.”

Lucien studied the route. It was precise, almost too precise. The kind of detail you only got from someone inside the German command structure.

“You want me to confirm this route is accurate.”

“I want you to confirm it.” Camille leaned back. “You’ve been moving goods along the periphery of the German supply lines for three years. You know which checkpoints are real and which are decoration. If this route is wrong, we lose men.”

“And if it’s right?”

“Then we hit the convoy Thursday night, and you earn your warrant back.”

Lucien traced the line with his finger, feeling the texture of the cheap paper. He knew the Boulevard de Port-Royal better than he knew the back of his own hand. Three years of moving coffee, meat, and forged documents through the Latin Quarter had taught him which streets were safe at which hours. The route on the map was sound. Too sound.

Except that it wasn’t. Not quite.

“The intersection at Rue de la Glacière,” he said slowly. “They pause there?”

“That’s what our intelligence says.”

“They used to. Two weeks ago, the Germans moved their staging point to the Rue du Moulin-des-Prés, three blocks south. They keep the pause at Glacière as a decoy, but only for the lead truck. The second truck actually waits at Moulin-des-Prés, and they don’t stop again until they reach the depot gate.”

Camille’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know that?”

“Because I had a shipment of Argentine beef move through that corridor last Tuesday, and my driver nearly ran into the second truck parked at Moulin-des-Prés with its lights off. He was lucky they didn’t shoot him for coming up on them too fast.” Lucien shrugged. “I made a note of it. Seemed like the kind of thing that might be useful someday.”

It was, of course, a lie. The German convoy had moved its staging point six days ago, not two weeks, and it was a temporary measure while the road at Glacière was being repaired. The route would revert within a month.

But Camille didn’t need to know that.

The map fragment in his pocket weighed nothing and everything. The torn corner of Krause’s map showed an approach to the summit of Montmartre, but the landmark was useless without the rest of the document. He needed time to walk the streets of La Butte and match them to the fragment’s angles. Time that Camille and Sabine were both trying to consume with their demands for information.

“You’re lying,” Camille said quietly.

Lucien met her gaze and let his face go slack with wounded innocence. “I have no reason to lie. You asked me to confirm your intelligence. I’m correcting it. If you hit the convoy where you planned, you’ll be hitting an empty intersection while the real trucks are three blocks away. That’s not loyalty, that’s arithmetic.”

She studied him for a long moment. The clock on the wall ticked. Somewhere in the building, someone was playing a radio at low volume, the tinny voice of a German propagandist bleeding through the floorboards.

“Arithmetic,” she repeated. “That’s what you call it.”

“That’s what I do. I calculate odds and find the best way through.” Lucien folded his arms. “Your ambush works better at Moulin-des-Prés. The street narrows to one lane, there’s a drainage culvert that’ll give your men cover, and the depot guards can’t see the intersection from where they stand. You’ll be able to hit both trucks before the first one even reaches the gate.”

Camille’s expression shifted, just barely, the smallest crack in her professional mask. “You know the depot grounds.”

“I deliver wine to their officers’ mess twice a month. The head steward is a man named Bisset who takes a percentage of every bottle that doesn’t make it onto the official manifest.” Lucien tapped the map. “I know what their schedule looks like. I know how many men are on the gate at night. I know that the guard rotation changes at twenty-three hundred and that for six minutes, there’s only one man watching the perimeter.”

“That’s very detailed.”

“It pays to be detailed. The Germans pay for details too, by the way. You might want to keep that in mind.”

The threat was a calculated risk. Camille had the power to end him with a single phone call to the Avenue Foch, but she also needed him. He was the only one in Paris who had held the gold and let it slip through his fingers, which made him uniquely motivated to find it again.

She let the silence stretch, letting him sweat. But the cold dread he’d expect to feel never came, because his mind was already three steps ahead. She had someone inside the German command. Someone who could read movement orders and patrol timetables with enough accuracy to draw a map like this. That was rare. That was precious.

And that person might be able to get him access to the German records on Colonel Brandt.

“I’ll pass your correction along,” Camille said finally. “If the operation succeeds, we’ll discuss your warrant. If it fails because your arithmetic was wrong, we won’t need to discuss anything.”

“I understand.”

“Do you have anything else you’d like to share?” Her eyes flicked to his pocket, where the map fragment sat. “Anything about a certain discovery you made before your meeting with the deserter?”

Lucien kept his expression blank. “I discovered that the SS are very good at killing people before they finish their sentences. That’s about all.”

“The gold, Lucien. Don’t play stupid with me.”

“I don’t have the gold. I have half a map that might show where it was buried, and I have two other people who are also interested in that half a map. If I told you everything I know, I’d have nothing left to trade.” He stood, brushing crumbs from his coat. “You want my loyalty? Fine. I just gave you a gift worth more than gold. The convoy location is real, and it’s going to save lives that you would have lost at Glacière. That’s my payment for this meeting.”

He was at the door when she spoke again.

“One of my people will contact you tomorrow. If you want to find out where Brandt went before he died, you’ll follow their instructions.”

Lucien paused, his hand on the knob. The crack in her voice told him everything he needed to know. She had been waiting to reveal this card, saving it for when his guard was down, and she’d done it because his route correction had surprised her. She wasn’t offering help. She was buying his silence.

“What’s their name?” he asked.

“You’ll find out when they find you.” Camille turned back to her map. “And Lucien. If I find out you’ve been keeping secrets from me, this warrant will be the least of your problems.”

He walked out into the grey afternoon, the taste of cabbage still in his throat. The fragment pressed against his thigh with every step, and for the first time that day, he felt the odds shifting in a direction he couldn’t quite calculate.

Camille had a spy inside the German command. That was how she knew about the convoy, how she knew about the transport schedules, how she knew about Krause before he did. And if she had access to German records, then she could find out what Colonel Brandt was doing in the weeks before he died.

She wasn’t just hunting the gold. She was hunting the man who had hidden it.

And for the first time, Lucien wondered if Camille had known Brandt personally.