Read Chapter 11: The Café Trail

The brasserie sat wedged between a bookshop and a pharmacy, its green awning faded to the color of old moss. Café des Arts, the sign read in curling gold letters, and beneath it, a chalkboard advertised a plat du jour of blanquette de veau.

Camille paused on the threshold, her hand resting on the iron door handle. The street was quiet here, tucked behind the Panthéon, the dome visible above the rooftops like a pale stone moon. She had walked past this café a hundred times in her student days and never once gone inside.

“You’re sure about this address?” Antoine asked, coming up beside her. He was holding his phone with the WHOIS data still on the screen, though they had both memorized the name by now: l.gauthier@cafedesarts.fr.

“It’s the only one we have,” Camille said. “The only link to whoever sent Maxime’s file.”

“Or to whoever cleaned the server logs,” Antoine replied.

She pushed the door open.

The interior was warm and close, smelling of coffee and stale wine and the particular mustiness of Parisian establishments that had never once been remodeled, not in decades. A zinc bar ran along the left wall. Behind it, a man in his seventies was polishing glasses with a cloth that had perhaps been white, once. He looked up as they entered, his face creased with the practiced neutrality of a man who had seen every kind of customer and none of them surprised him.

Camille ordered two cafés crèmes at the bar before she let herself look at anything else. The room was half empty at this hour—a couple by the window arguing in low voices, an old man reading L’Équipe, a young woman with a laptop who glanced up briefly and then returned to her screen.

Antoine took the seat next to her, his back to the wall, his eyes moving across the room in the careful sweep of someone who had learned to watch exits. It was a habit Camille recognized. She had it too.

“Monsieur,” she said, when the bartender brought their coffees. She reached into her bag and pulled out a photograph—Maxime’s company ID photo, printed from his HR file an hour ago. “I’m looking for this man. Did he come here often?”

The bartender held the photo at arm’s length, squinting. His expression did not change.

“Maxime,” he said, and the name was spoken with the familiarity of an old acquaintance. “I haven’t seen him in months. Perhaps a year, now.”

Camille’s pulse quickened. She kept her hands steady around her cup. “That long?”

“He used to come in almost every week. Always sat over there.” He gestured with the cloth toward a corner table near the back, where a stained-glass lamp cast amber light onto the dark wood. “Downstairs, actually. There’s a small salon below. Quiet. He liked quiet.”

“Did he come alone?” Antoine asked.

The bartender shook his head. “Sometimes. More often he came with a young woman. Dark hair. Serious face, like she had unfinished business with the world.” He paused, considering. “They would sit downstairs for hours. Not romantic, if you understand me. More like he was explaining something to her. She took notes sometimes. He drew diagrams on napkins.”

Camille felt the floor tilt slightly beneath her. She had never met Maxime’s girlfriend. By the time she had joined AlgoSens, the relationship was already a rumor, a footnote, something mentioned in passing and never elaborated upon. Lucie had been a name in an email signature on a few old messages, a face in the background of a company party photo she had found once in a shared drive. She was a void in the company history, everyone’s best guess no one’s certainty.

“He spoke English with her,” the bartender added. “The woman, I mean. She was American. Or English. Her accent was strange to me.”

Camille and Antoine exchanged a glance.

“Do you know her name?” Camille asked.

The bartender shook his head. “I never asked. He called her Lucie. That I remember, because my own daughter is Lucie.” He set the glass down and picked up another, polishing it with renewed attention. “They stopped coming around the same time. Both of them. It was sudden—one week they were there every Tuesday, Thursday, sometimes Saturday. And then nothing. I assumed they had moved, or perhaps broken up. It happens.”

Camille pulled out her phone and tapped through to a photo she had pulled from an old company Instagram post—Lucie Moreau standing beside Maxime at a hackathon, holding up a trophy, her smile tight and uncertain, like she wasn’t sure she deserved to be celebrating.

“Is this her?”

The bartender put on a pair of reading glasses from his breast pocket and studied the screen. His eyes flicked to the photo she had shown him earlier, then back to the phone. He nodded slowly.

“Yes. That’s the woman.” He handed the phone back. “Is something wrong? Has something happened to them?”

Camille put the phone away. “We’re just trying to get in touch with Maxime. He was a colleague of ours.”

“Well, if you see him, tell him he still owes me twenty euros for a bottle of wine he never paid for.” The bartender smiled, and there was something almost fond in it. “He was a good customer. Always tipped well.”

Out on the street, the autumn light had shifted, drawing longer shadows across the pavement. Camille stood for a moment near the café’s awning, watching the dome of the Panthéon catch the sun. She felt unmoored, as though she had just confirmed a suspicion she hadn’t known she was carrying.

“She went with him,” she said, to no one in particular. “Lucie went with him. Whatever happened to Maxime, she was part of it. Or she knew.”

Antoine was silent for a long moment. Then he said, quietly, “Or she went after him.”

Camille turned to look at him. He was staring at the café’s door, his jaw set, a muscle working beneath his stubble.

“You knew her,” Camille said. “At your previous company. You said Lucie was Maxime’s girlfriend, but you never told me you actually worked with her.”

“I didn’t,” Antoine said. “I knew *of* her. She was in finance at Rochefort Labs before it was acquired by the Americans. She did diligence on AI startups. She was the one who flagged our product roadmap as overpromised in the internal review. I don’t know how she met Maxime, but when I heard they were together, I assumed it was business. She was a company woman. The kind who kept spreadsheets on her personal relationships.”

“Maybe that’s why Maxime kept coming here with her,” Camille said. “This was neutral ground. Off the books. Somewhere he could show her what he was really building.”

Antoine’s eyes met hers. “Or what he was really afraid of.”

They took the metro back toward the office, sitting in silence as the train rattled through the dark tunnels. Camille’s mind churned through the possibilities, none of them comforting. Maxime had vanished. His girlfriend had vanished with him. An encrypted file had arrived keyed to Camille’s name. And someone had cleaned the server logs around the suspicious AI job.

She composed an email to the board as the train pulled into her stop, her thumbs moving quickly over the screen. *Ongoing due diligence on legacy code and prior architecture decisions. No findings of concern at this stage. Full report to follow before the investor demo.*

It was vague enough to buy time, true enough to withstand scrutiny if anyone pressed. She read it twice, then sent it.

The office was quiet when they arrived, the evening shift already thinning out. A few developers still glowed in the blue light of their monitors. The kitchen smelled of burnt coffee and someone’s forgotten microwave meal.

Camille walked to her desk, her shoulder bag slipping from her arm, her fingers already reaching for the light switch.

Then she stopped.

Her red scarf was draped over her monitor. It hung there like a flag, like a signature, the silk catching the light from the street outside.

She had not worn that scarf since the night of the board meeting. She had not seen it since Julien Perrot’s photograph had appeared in her inbox—proof that it had been in his office, proof that someone had been there. And now it was here, on her desk, in the middle of a floor that should have required badge access to enter.

“Camille.” Antoine’s voice came from behind her, low and tight.

She did not turn. She could not take her eyes off the scarf.

“Whoever this is,” she said, and her voice came out steadier than she felt, “they’ve been here. They’ve been in this office, probably more than once. They have access to our files, they know our schedules, they know where I park my scarf when I think I’ve lost it.”

She reached out and touched the fabric. It was cool and smooth, and it made her skin crawl.

“And they’re telling me they can get to me anytime they want.”

Antoine stepped closer, his hand hovering near her shoulder, not quite touching. “We should talk to Jacques.”

“Jacques is wavering,” Camille said. “We can’t trust him yet. And we can’t go to the board with this—they’ll think we’re paranoid. Or worse, that we’re hiding something.”

She lifted the scarf from the monitor and folded it carefully, the way you might fold something you did not ever want to touch again. She placed it in her bag.

“We have a file we can’t decrypt,” she said. “A café where Maxime used to meet Lucie in secret. A girlfriend who disappeared at the same time he did. And someone who keeps showing up just ahead of us, cleaning up traces, making sure we know they’re watching.”

She sat down at her desk and pulled the laptop toward her. Her hands were still steady. Her heart was not.

“Let’s find out what’s in that file.”