Delphine Dryden - Gossamer Wing

Three of the four walls were covered with blackboards, on which nearly every square inch of available space was taken up with equations and more hasty sketches. A bleary white underlayer of smeared chalk dust suggested that many, many erasures had taken place since the boards had last been cleaned. The men, even the officers, appeared bloodshot and slightly bedraggled, and all of them looked up like hunted animals when their workshop door opened to admit Dexter.

“Gentlemen,” the polite young lieutenant began, “May I present Baron Hardison?”

When he got no reaction but a room full of blank stares, Dexter cleared his throat. “You may know me as Mr. Dexter Hardison.”

And they were off.

“ALL WE KNOW of Dubois,” Murcheson told Charlotte, gesturing to the thick portfolio he’d slid across the desk toward her. He’d come back to the submersible bay after seeing Dexter settled, and pulled Charlotte into his office for the briefing she’d been expecting since her arrival. “In addition to what you already have, of course. Three months ago, we intercepted some correspondence between Dubois and Maurice Gendreau, who’s been in voluntary expatriation on St. Helena since the end of the war. It’s almost laughably obvious that the letters are in code, though we haven’t worked it out yet. They’re far too bland and patently harmless to be real. Especially not given what we know of Gendreau’s politics, and what we’ve long suspected about Dubois’s.”

Charlotte pulled a sheaf of letters from the file and flipped through them, taking a moment to establish the time frame and chronology of the missives. “Voluntary expatriation” was a nicer way to say “exile,” she supposed, but it amounted to the same thing, and Gendreau certainly seemed unhappy in his exile. Dubois asked after Gendreau’s health, Gendreau lamented his business prospects and intimated he was homesick for France—particularly the food and wine. They seemed to be hinting around the possibility of a partnership, though the terms were very sketchy. Something to do with a steam car engine improvement Gendreau wanted funding to develop, and Dubois seeking assurances of exclusivity. It was all boring stuff indeed. Suspiciously so, as Murcheson said.

“The clincher is that the improvement he’s discussing is a technical nonstarter, according to a few experts we’ve consulted. It was one of the first indications we had that something was afoot. Clearly a code phrase. You know who Gendreau is, I trust?”

Charlotte nodded. “I know who he was, at least. The old post-royalist French regime’s pet scientist cum makesmith. The man who was deemed most likely to develop a large-scale weapon against the British.”

“If he’d succeeded,” Murcheson continued, “the war would have ended very differently. Or rather, it might well still be raging. If there were any people left on either side to wage it. And Gendreau’s recently built a workshop on St. Helena to rival the one he left behind in France. We haven’t been able to get inside yet, but it’s not hard to guess what he’s attempting to build there.”

“But my notes indicate Dubois is now working with the current government intelligence agency in France. If he’s working for the Égalité government, why is he contemplating going into business with Gendreau? Why would he foster such a risky connection?”

“We’d very much like to find out.”

Noting the grim set of his mouth, Charlotte prodded a bit. “You have a theory, though?”

Murcheson shrugged. “There’s always a theory, Lady Hardison. In this case, rumor has it that certain elements within the government are not as hostile to the old post-royalist viewpoint as they’ve made themselves out to be. Indeed, we’ve heard enough to be concerned that there’s a significant faction of leaders here who would still be happy to see the treaty with Britain broken. They miss the unregulated freedom they used to enjoy, and they’d be more than happy to go back to essentially owning their workers even if it meant losing more of them to battle.”

“They always did see the peasantry as fungible.” The wealthy post-royalists were little better than the aristocracy they’d replaced, in that regard. In fact, most of them were just aristocrats with a thin veneer of republicanism; only the actual royal family had been formally deposed.

“Precisely. On the surface, Dubois seemed to have turned into a good little member of the more moderate Égalité-era elite, content to profit less but more steadily, in a country free from the uncertainties of war. We know he must be working with the current crop of spymasters, because he’s in constant contact with several agents. We assumed he was still working as a contractor, making gadgetry and vehicles for them. That’s a longstanding relationship, since before the treaty as far as we can make out. His personal secretary is a known active French field agent, and he has other positively identified former agents working on his security staff, so the arrangement isn’t even particularly sub rosa.”

“But if he’s meeting with Gendreau,” Charlotte surmised, “he’s either playing Gendreau for the Égalité government, or playing the current government for the old regime.”

Murcheson nodded. “And we need to find out which, because the last thing we want is for the post-royalists to regain their influence in government here . . . or for them to develop anything like the weapon Gendreau was working on before the war ended.”

LE HAVRE AND HONFLEUR, FRANCE

THE AIR OVER Le Havre was nothing like the air over Upstate New York. Charlotte fancied it was uniquely French, this air. She had risen from a blanket of fog over the channel offshore from Honfleur, and within minutes she was soaring, feeling at home again despite the foreign sky. Her body eased into the familiar harness, her senses expanded with the use of her equipment, and all was well.

She was finally beginning it, the job she had trained for. Charlotte thought of Reginald, bent over a codex with his fine brow furrowed. She thought of him lying in their berth on the riverboat, gray and cold, so very obviously beyond the help of any doctor. She had distracted him, and he had died. Perhaps now she could begin putting that memory to rest, and her own guilty conscience at ease. But first, she had to jump through the hoops Murcheson had set her, and demonstrate her abilities with the stealth airship by gathering intelligence on Dubois here in Le Havre. Only once she’d done so would Murcheson approve her to embark on the main leg of her mission, over the rooftops of Paris.

Countering automatically against a buffeting wind, she took the Gossamer Wing higher still as she followed the terrain toward Le Havre. The city was of little interest to her, just the zone nearest the harbor, in which Murcheson had pinpointed the offices of Companie Dubois.

Only Murcheson’s insistence had overcome Whitehall’s reluctance to assign a female agent to an active field surveillance position, much less to the trickier job of retrieving the long-lost weapon plans. That had been Charlotte’s good fortune. The geography of Companie Dubois’s dockside buildings and some rather tight security measures had thus far thwarted all infiltration attempts from the ground. Charlotte, on the Gossamer Wing , wouldn’t have to infiltrate. She would simply float and watch and listen, all while taking deep, refreshing breaths of fine French coastal air. If her efforts were successful, she might gain some critical information for the Agency; more importantly, she might help usher in an entirely new era of remote information-gathering.

The first day of her daring new assignment, however, was less exciting than disconcerting. Once aloft and in place over the appropriate building, she tuned her exquisitely precise equipment to the correct office, expecting to hear intrigue and see dastardly espionage in the making. Instead she overheard the infamous Roland Dubois planning to sneak his secretary away for the weekend. Then she turned away rather than watch him commit a lewd act with the secretary in question on his vast mahogany desk. If the young woman was indeed a French agent, Charlotte thought, she certainly seemed willing to give her all to foster an association between the French government and Companie Dubois.