Read Chapter 27: The Trap for Ashwell

The names burned in Elise’s pocket like live coals. Ten families, ten addresses she knew by heart from years of cycling these lanes, and now every one of them was a death sentence waiting to be carried out.

She moved before dawn, hobbling on her injured leg through the back gardens of St. Peter Port, avoiding the roads where the patrols would be looking for a woman without a bicycle, without a uniform, without any reason to be anywhere. Jameson kept pace beside her, his limp less pronounced than hers but present nonetheless.

“We split the list,” she said, pressing five slips of paper into his hand. “The Le Marchant family, the Vaudins, the Huets. I’ll take the others.”

“And then what?” Jameson’s voice was low, urgent. “We warn them, and Ashwell simply finds new names. The binder is still in his office. He’ll—”

“He won’t get the chance.” Elise stopped, turning to face him in the gray pre-dawn light. “I’m going to end this tonight.”

Jameson studied her face. He didn’t argue. Perhaps he’d learned by now that arguing was pointless. “How?”

“Ashwell wants refugees. High-value ones, the kind that earn him passage to Argentina. So I’m going to give him one.”

The plan formed as she spoke, the pieces clicking together like the gears of her bicycle, stripped away but not forgotten. She knew the harbor protocols from her years of deliveries. She knew the coded language the resistance used in their letters. And she knew, from André’s transcribed ledger, exactly what a German transfer authorization looked like.

“I need paper,” she said. “And I need to make it look like it came from London.”

---

The widow LeFebvre’s kitchen smelled of stale bread and fear. Marie stood at the window, watching the street, her hands wrapped around a cup of cold tea.

“You should not be here,” she said without turning around.

“I need your help.” Elise placed the torn page of names on the table. “These families are in danger. And I need to write a letter that will convince a traitor he’s about to catch something valuable.”

Marie finally turned. Her eyes fell on the page, and Elise watched her read the names. The widow’s expression shifted from fear to something harder. Anger.

“My husband delivered letters to half these people,” she said quietly. “Good people. Fishermen. Teachers.”

“I know.”

“What do you need?”

Elise explained. The letter would be written on paper that looked official, folded in the precise manner of military communiqués, sealed with wax she’d pilfer from a church supply cupboard. The content would be simple: a coded message indicating that a high-value escapee — a British intelligence officer with knowledge of German Atlantic Wall defenses — would be landed by boat on the beach at Petit Port at midnight. The signature would be the one name she knew would trigger immediate action.

Bréhaut.

“You’re forging the traitor’s own hand,” Marie said slowly. “To trap another traitor.”

“They’re the same circle. Bréhaut authorizes the shipments. Ashwell sells the names. They’re both pieces of the same corruption.”

Marie nodded once, then pulled a box of writing supplies from beneath her sink. Her husband had been a clerk before the occupation, and his stationery was still here, preserved like a relic of the life they’d lost.

“His writing was precise,” Marie said, sliding a sample of Bréhaut’s handwriting across the table from a letter he’d once sent her husband about harbor maintenance schedules. “Sharp angles. Little flourish on the ‘B’.”

Elise had André’s transcriptions memorized. She’d stared at them for hours in the cave, tracing the loops and lines of Bréhaut’s authorizations until they felt like her own hand. She dipped the pen and began to write.

---

They set the trap in the afternoon. Jameson, using the last of his contacts, passed word through the underground that a message had been intercepted — a high-value refugee would land at Petit Port beach. The rumor would reach Ashwell through his own channels within hours. The forged letter itself was delivered to the harbor master’s office by an unwitting errand boy, placed in the mail slot Elise had used a hundred times as the postwoman.

Then they waited.

The leg ached. Elise had bound it tightly with strips of cloth torn from Marie’s spare sheets, but every step sent a spike of pain through her hip. She would not let it slow her. Not tonight.

At dusk, they positioned themselves above Petit Port. The beach was a crescent of dark sand, backed by granite cliffs and accessible only by a narrow path that wound down from the coastal road. Perfect for a clandestine landing. Perfect for an ambush.

Elise lay flat on the cliff edge, a pair of field glasses borrowed from Marie’s husband’s old hunting kit pressed to her eyes. Jameson crouched beside her, his breathing steady.

“He’ll come with soldiers,” Jameson said. “Ashwell won’t take risks with something this valuable.”

“I’m counting on it.” Elise adjusted the focus. “When he arrives, we’ll see exactly who he brings. And then we move.”

The plan was simple. When Ashwell appeared, they would reveal themselves — not as threats, but as allies. Jameson would pose as a resistance contact who’d been sent to ensure the handoff went smoothly. Elise would play the terrified refugee, waiting on the beach for a boat that would never come.

In the confusion, they would get close enough to take Ashwell alive. To force him to confess. To make him name every collaborator in his network before the Germans realized their prize had turned.

It was reckless. It was desperate. It was the only play they had left.

Hours passed. The moon rose, half-full, casting silver light across the water. Elise’s leg throbbed. Her eyes burned from staring into the darkness. She was about to lower the glasses when a flicker of movement caught her attention.

A figure at the top of the cliff path. Then another. Then a group of them, moving with military precision.

“They’re here,” she whispered.

Jameson tensed beside her. “How many?”

Elise counted. Six. Seven. “Too many for us to fight.”

“Then we don’t fight.” Jameson’s hand found hers in the darkness, squeezed once. “We talk.”

They waited as the group descended the path, boots crunching on loose stone. Elise watched through the glasses as the figures reached the beach. The soldiers fanned out, rifles raised, scanning the treeline and the water.

And then Ashwell stepped forward into the moonlight.

He was exactly as she remembered from the harbor master’s office — neat uniform, neat hair, a man who believed he was the smartest person in any room. He was holding something in his hands. The forged letter.

He read it again, then folded it carefully and slipped it into his pocket. He said something to the soldiers, and they relaxed slightly, lowering their rifles.

Elise felt a cold certainty settle in her chest. The bait had been taken. Now came the hardest part.

She began to rise, but Jameson caught her arm. “Wait. Look.”

He was pointing at the water. Elise followed his gaze and saw it — a boat, small and dark, cutting through the waves toward the beach.

She hadn’t arranged a boat.

“That’s not mine,” she breathed.

Jameson’s face went pale in the moonlight. “Then whose is it?”

Elise watched the boat approach, watched Ashwell turn toward it with a smile of anticipation. And she realized, with a sickening lurch, what she had done.

She had forged a letter to trap a traitor. But she had used Bréhaut’s name, his authority, his channels. If Ashwell had passed the information up the chain — if Bréhaut himself had seen the letter and decided to act on it — then the boat carried not a fabricated refugee, but a real one. A sacrifice she had inadvertently delivered into the traitor’s hands.

“We have to stop them,” she said, scrambling to her feet, ignoring the scream of pain from her injured leg.

“Elise, wait —”

But she was already running down the cliff path, toward the beach, toward the boat, toward whatever fresh disaster her own cleverness had just unleashed.