Read Chapter 18: The Mole

The darkroom of the *Atalante* smelled of fixer and brine. Élise pinned the last surveillance photo to the line and stepped back, studying the timeline she’d constructed from the past forty-eight hours. The lab’s flood valve had opened at 03:42. She and Girard had reached the sealed passage at 03:10. Someone had known exactly where they were going—and how to cut them off.

“It’s not a leak,” she muttered. “It’s a pipeline.”

Malik leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed. “You’re sure about this? Accusing someone on this crew of sabotage without proof will fracture us faster than any Navy blockade.”

“I’m not accusing anyone yet.” She turned to face him. “But the timing’s too clean. Whoever flooded that lab knew our route before we did. Girard barely mentioned the tunnel to me before the water started rising.”

“So we bait the hook.” Malik’s eyes flicked to the map she’d spread on the workbench. “What did you tell the crew?”

“Only the skeleton crew who needed to know for tomorrow’s supply run.” She tapped a red X on the chart, a point three nautical miles northeast of the reef. “The forward supply cache. I told them we stashed replacement dive tanks there in case the Navy confiscates the deck equipment.”

“And anyone who radios that position?”

“Is our mole.”

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The *Atalante*’s deck hummed with the usual evening maintenance—lines coiled, winches greased, the restless energy of a crew stuck in port under a suspension order. Élise kept her movements casual as she climbed to the bridge, binoculars in hand. The sun bled orange across the Mediterranean, painting the water in honey and rust.

She found Malik at the helm, tracking the ship’s radar with lazy eyes.

“Anything?” She kept her voice low.

“Just the usual fishing traffic,” he said. “But there’s a trawler about two miles off the cache coordinates. Slow approach, engine throttle inconsistent. Like they’re waiting for something.”

Élise raised the binoculars. The trawler was nondescript—white hull, rusted railing, a faded registration number she couldn’t quite read from this distance. It had no business being this close to the restricted zone.

“Keep watching.” She lowered the glasses. “I’ll be in the lab.”

She crossed the deck, nodding to the dive crew coiling air hoses, smiling at Sophie’s sister Marie who was cataloging samples by the stern rail. Her stomach twisted at the thought that one of these faces was feeding information to the Ministry. She’d slept with these people, celebrated discoveries with them, bled beside them in the murky depths.

The lab was dark except for a single lamp over Girard’s workstation. She settled into the chair by the porthole, darkening the room further, and waited.

An hour passed. Then two.

The radio crackled on the maintenance channel. “Bridge to Renard.”

She grabbed the handset. “Go ahead.”

“Trawler’s moving,” Malik said. “Coming in closer. And we just got a transmission from the deck—someone called in a position report to a non-standard frequency.”

“Who?”

“Kessler’s on deck watch. Says it was Dr. Petit. He’s on the fantail, port side.”

Élise’s blood ran cold. Petit. The quiet osteologist who’d catalogued the bones in the upper temple, who’d spent hours sketching the relief carvings with meticulous care. He’d been with the expedition since the beginning—one of Girard’s graduate students from years ago, a gentle man who stammered when nervous and always brought extra coffee for the night watch.

She moved silently through the corridor and out onto the deck, using the shadows of the winch housing for cover. The fantail was dark, the stern light casting a weak yellow glow over the water. There—a silhouette hunched over the railing, a small handheld radio pressed to his ear.

Petit’s voice drifted back to her, low and urgent. “Yes, the coordinates I gave you are correct. The cache should be accessible for another hour before the tide turns. You need to retrieve the tanks before the Navy patrol makes its sweep.”

A pause. Then: “I’ve told you everything I know about the lab. The flooding was too fast—they got out through an auxiliary passage. There’s another access point near the eastern retaining wall, but I don’t have details yet.”

Élise raised her phone, zooming in on the dark screen, capturing the image—Petit’s face illuminated by the radio’s glow, his free hand gripping the railing with white-knuckled tension.

She stepped out of the shadows. “Dr. Petit.”

He spun, the radio clattering against the railing before he caught it. His face drained of color. “Captain—I—this isn’t what it looks like.”

“Then what does it look like?” She advanced slowly, phone still raised. “Because from where I’m standing, you just gave the Ministry the location of our backup equipment and detailed intel on the passage under the temple.”

Petit’s mouth opened, closed, opened again. A thin sound escaped him—something between a sob and a laugh. He sagged against the railing, the radio slipping from his fingers to dangle by its strap.

“You don’t understand.” His voice cracked. “They have my sister. Claire. She’s in a hospital in Marseille—cancer, stage four. The treatment is experimental, not covered by insurance. I tried everything. Grants, loans, selling my research data to private collectors. Nothing was enough.”

Élise’s grip on her phone loosened, but she didn’t lower it. “So you sold classified findings to naval intelligence instead.”

“At first it was just site coordinates.” Petit’s eyes were wet. “Standard archaeological data, positioning surveys, depth readings. Nothing that would hurt anyone. Then they started asking for more—what Girard was doing, where he was going, who he was meeting. When I refused, they showed me Claire’s medical file. Told me her next round of treatment could be cancelled. Delayed. That the paperwork was very easy to lose.”

He looked up at her, and in the dim light, his face was stripped bare—a man hollowed out by desperation. “I never thought they’d flood that lab. They said they only wanted surveillance—eyes on Girard. When the water started rising, I tried to warn you. But my contact said an automatic protocol had been triggered. That nobody on their end had initiated it.”

“Your contact,” Élise repeated, stepping closer. “Who are you reporting to?”

Petit shook his head. “I don’t know his real name. Only a title—he’s Navy, senior staff. They call him Commander Lefèvre. He’s the one who contacted me originally, two years ago, before I even joined this expedition. He has files on everyone who’s ever worked on Aegis—dating back to the 1960s.”

The name hit Élise like a physical blow. Lefèvre. That name had surfaced in the shell company records, buried beneath layers of holding entities. And in the file photos Girard had shown her, there was a young naval officer standing beside the 1968 survey team—a man who called himself J.L.

“Lefèvre,” she repeated. “You’ve met him?”

“Once, in Toulon. He asked me about a watch.” Petit’s brow furrowed. “A diver’s watch, old model. Said it had belonged to a former colleague and that if I ever saw one like it in the wreckage or the ruins, I should tell him immediately. He seemed almost desperate about it.”

The watch. The Rolex Submariner Élise had found in the silt near the engine core, engraved with the initials J.L., its crystal cracked and face frozen at 3:47. She still carried it in the pocket of her jacket, kept it close as a talisman, unsure why it mattered.

“Did he say what it meant to him?” she pressed.

Petit shook his head. “Only that it was important. That it belonged to someone who had died down there.”

A cold engine of certainty began turning in Élise’s stomach. J.L. Jean-Luc. Jacques Lefèvre’s initials? No—Lefèvre started with L, not J. But the watch was J.L. And Lefèvre knew about it.

“Commander Lefèvre,” she said slowly, “was he present at the site in 1968?”

“I don’t know. He looked too young to have been involved back then.” Petit’s voice was fading, exhausted. “But his office has a memorial wall. Photographs, plaques, a plaque for a woman named Sophie Lambert. He keeps fresh flowers beneath it. I saw it when I visited.”

Sophie. Sophie Lambert. The researcher who’d disappeared. Girard’s former colleague, the one who’d discovered the active breach years ago and vanished trying to investigate it.

“One more thing.” Élise pocketed her phone. “If you have any hope of making this right, you tell me everything Lefèvre has asked you to do. Every transmission. Every file.”

Petit nodded, blinking back tears. “There was one more thing. He wanted me to plant a tracking device in Gérard’s quarters. Yesterday. I haven’t done it yet.”

Élise’s breath caught. She looked across the dark water where the trawler’s lights were already fading toward the horizon—not running away, but repositioning.

They were planning something bigger than surveillance. And Lefèvre, whoever he was, was coming to the site himself.