Read Chapter 14: The Warehouse

The warehouse loomed at the end of a dead-end street, its corrugated steel facade streaked with rust and old graffiti. Camille killed the engine and sat for a moment, listening to the tick of cooling metal. Antoine was already out of the passenger seat, scanning the street with the practiced caution of a man who had learned not to trust quiet places.

“You sure this is it?” he asked, voice low.

She pulled up the decrypted fragment on her phone—coordinates, a date stamp, and a single word: *Niche*. “This is it.”

The front door was padlocked, but the lock was new, gleaming against the weathered frame. Antoine produced a small tool kit from his jacket and worked at it with unsettling efficiency. Thirty seconds later, the shackle popped open with a soft click.

“I’m not asking where you learned that,” she said.

“Good.”

Inside, the air was cold and still, carrying the mineral smell of dust and old wiring. The space was vast and empty—no pallets, no crates, no evidence of any legitimate business ever having operated there. But at the far end, a single server rack hummed in the dark, its LEDs blinking green like a heartbeat in a corpse.

Camille crossed to it, her footsteps echoing too loudly in the silence. The rack was bolted to the concrete floor, cables snaking up to a junction box on the ceiling. She ran a hand over the cold metal casing. It wasn’t Maxime’s setup—too clean, too deliberate. This was a relay point, a dead drop.

“She’s still alive,” Antoine murmured, reading her thoughts. “The machine, I mean. Whatever Maxime left behind, it’s still running.”

“Or someone is running it for him.”

They each pulled a laptop from their bags and connected via the rack’s exposed management port. Camille’s fingers moved fast, the encryption protocols yielding to Maxime’s own backdoor keys—keys she hadn’t known she still remembered until they surfaced from muscle memory.

A directory tree unfolded. Early builds of Sentio, versioned and timestamped, stretching back years before the official launch. Chat logs between Maxime and a username she recognized with a jolt: *LMoreau*. Lucie Moreau. His vanished girlfriend.

“I’ve got something,” Antoine said, turning his screen toward her. “A system access log. This IP range is internal—someone from AlgoSens was pulling files from this rack remotely. Look at the timestamps.”

She leaned in, squinting at the rows. There, three days before the demo sabotage, a session from Hugo’s workstation. And below it, another session, two minutes later, that had piggybacked on Hugo’s credentials.

“Two separate users,” she said.

“But the second one’s session was cloned from Hugo’s handshake. Whoever it was, they knew exactly how to look like him without being him.”

“A third person.” Camille’s mouth went dry. “The one who actually swapped the dataset.”

Antoine nodded slowly. “Hugo was the patsy, or the proxy. But whoever did this? They had root-level access and patience.”

She copied everything—all of it, both directories and logs—onto two encrypted drives. One for herself, one for Antoine. “If this gets seized, at least we both have copies.”

“Paranoid.”

“Correct.”

They unplugged and packed up in silence, the weight of what they’d found settling between them like a third presence. Camille was halfway to the door when a sweep of blue-white light flooded through the grimy windows. The rumble of engines followed, then the slam of car doors.

Antoine grabbed her arm. “Back door?”

They both knew there wasn’t one. The building was a single chamber, and the only exit was now framed by two gendarmerie officers stepping through the open door, flashlights raised.

“Hands where I can see them,” said the taller officer, voice flat with boredom. “We received a call about a break-in.”

Camille’s heart hammered, but she raised her hands slowly. “We have a maintenance contract. This is our equipment.”

“Then you won’t mind showing us some ID, and explaining why the door’s lock is on the ground.”

Antoine shot her a look that said *don’t push it* and complied. The police took their time, checking IDs against a low-band dispatch, patting them down, separating them. Camille watched Antoine through the gap in the room, his face carefully blank, the way he’d probably looked when his former company collapsed under a wave of accusations.

She hated that look. Hated that she was putting it there.

The taller officer returned. “We’re detaining you pending verification. The owner filed a complaint earlier tonight.”

“The owner?” Camille said. “Who filed it?”

The officer consulted his notepad. “Anonymous call. But the property records show the building is owned by a shell company registered in Luxembourg.”

Camille’s stomach tightened. She knew shell companies. She knew anonymous calls. The pattern was too precise, too convenient.

They were cuffed and led outside, placed in separate vehicles. Through the partition window, she watched the warehouse recede, its single lit window glowing like a warning. The ride was short, the station fluorescent and indifferent. They were processed, photographed, and placed in an interview room with a table bolted to the floor.

Twenty minutes passed. Maybe thirty. Then the door opened, and a woman in a tailored grey suit walked in, holding a leather folio and wearing an expression of calm, amused efficiency.

“Mademoiselle Laurent, Monsieur Durand,” she said, placing a card on the table. “I’m Maître Véronique Aubert. Your benefactor sends their regards. You’re free to go.”

Camille stared at the card. No firm name, just a phone number and an embossed crest she didn’t recognize. “Who sent you?”

“Someone who prefers to remain unnamed for now. But they assure me you’ll figure it out.” Aubert smiled thinly and slid a single sheet of paper across the table—a signed release. “Do yourself a favor. Don’t speak to the press tonight. And finish decrypting whatever it is you found before the morning.”

She was gone before Camille could ask another question.

In the parking lot, Antoine lit a cigarette he didn’t usually smoke and watched the station doors. “A lawyer who works for no one, at two in the morning, with a release already signed. That’s not paranoia, Camille. That’s orchestration.”

Camille stood in the cold, the encrypted drive burning against her thigh through the pocket of her coat. Every piece of the puzzle was sliding into place now—the staged job posting, the temp worker, the stale data, the anonymous tip. All designed to destabilize, to discredit, to force the company’s value down so that someone could scoop it up at a discount.

“It’s Lucas,” she said.

Antoine turned. “You don’t know that.”

“I know investors. I know what an acquisition looks like when it’s dressed up as a rescue.” She pulled her phone out, thumb swiping to Lucas’s name in her contacts. “He’s been circling AlgoSens for months. Lowball offers, public skepticism, strategic leaks. And now we get arrested in a building owned by a shell company on the same night we find the evidence that could clear your name.”

The streetlight above them flickered, buzzing like a judgment.

“Then we don’t let him win,” Antoine said, stubbing out the cigarette. “We finish the decryption tonight. And tomorrow, we go to Jacques with everything.”

Camille looked down at the lawyer’s card in her hand, smooth and unmarked. Somewhere, a puppeteer was adjusting their strings, confident in the dark. But she had the files now. She had the log. And she had the address of a third person who thought they were invisible.

She pocketed the card.

“Tomorrow,” she agreed. “We burn it all down.”