Delphine Dryden - Gossamer Wing

A light drizzle had started. Charlotte pulled a tarpaulin from the equipment locker beneath her seat and tucked it over the packing cases, ensuring the Gossamer Wing didn’t get too damp. It wasn’t cold. In her snug, white leather flight suit, she wasn’t bothered by the rain. Dexter, though not in waterproof gear, seemed unperturbed by the weather.

“Lovely day for a sail,” she remarked, tipping her head back and letting the rain fall directly on her face.

She heard Dexter chuckle, the sound barely registering over the creak of the boat, the snap of the wind in the sail and the splash of water against the bow as they tacked. “Lovely,” he agreed. “My sentiments exactly.”

“MURCHESON IS UP to something,” Dubois fretted.

Martin, with his face turned safely to the window, rolled his eyes. “What makes you think so?” he asked his employer, biting his tongue before he could add “ this time.”

“He’s always up to something, of course. But now, just when we should have him in our sights, he disappears inside his factory for days on end with Hardison. He suspects something, Martin. You or your men, somebody must have been spotted tailing him.”

After a moment of keen fear, Martin calmed himself. He knew none of his men had been spotted tailing Murcheson, for the simple reason that he had posted no men to watch Murcheson. Those who weren’t watching Hardison were detailed to follow the Baroness, though Martin hardly planned to tell Dubois that. “He’s simply courting Hardison,” the former spy reassured his employer. “Murcheson and the Dominion baron share many obsessions. More important is the fact that no French officials have been seen entering the factory. There have been no meetings between the government and Murcheson or Hardison. The steamrail contract is still up for bid.”

“So you say,” Dubois grunted. “We should be keeping a closer eye on your former agency colleagues, Martin. Perhaps they are slipping in and out of the factory unnoticed by your team? Negotiating in secret on behalf of their turncoat masters? It wouldn’t be the first time.”

Those turncoats are the ruling party now , Martin thought. And my former colleagues are already as close as you might wish. Why, young Marguerite sat right outside Dubois’s door each day, and a great deal closer than that on occasion, earning her keep on her back as Dubois’s “secretaries” had always done and relaying everything she learned back to the Égalité spymasters who were her true employers. Martin had recognized the girl for what she was very early on. It amused him to think that the Égalité still thought Dubois merited that sort of attention. Dubois had no idea he was under such close surveillance. He had always had a blind spot when it came to female agents. Even after Simone . . .

“Monsieur Martin?”

The girl’s soft voice startled Martin, who glanced away from the gray sky outside the window to see her bland, unremarkably pretty face just a few feet away. She was holding a cup of tea toward him, and he wondered how long she’d been standing there with it as he woolgathered.

“Thank you.”

He took the cup and waited until Marguerite turned her back. Then he poured the tea into the soil of the large potted fern by the window, as he always did. He didn’t trust the little agent not to poison him, to get him out of the way. Sometimes Martin wondered whether he was the one being spied upon, not Dubois. He wouldn’t put it past his former employers to keep a watch on their not-so-lost lamb.

“Hardison isn’t spending all his time meeting with Murcheson,” Martin offered up, ready to give up a piece of his carefully hoarded knowledge if it meant a few days’ respite from Dubois’s sniping. “He’s using one of Murcheson’s boats, and leaving from a little-used dock near the factory. He and his new baroness have been spending quite a lot of time sailing on the harbor, it seems.”

“In this weather? Why?”

“It’s their honeymoon. Who knows why they’re doing anything? Perhaps they simply enjoy fucking on boats in the rain. You know how odd Americans can be.” Martin looked out the window again, noting that the rain had died down once more. A hint of blue peeked through the oppressive clouds here and there, and even the occasional beam of sunlight. He had always enjoyed the view of the harbor from this window, but today it seemed too exposed for some reason. Tiny hairs on Martin’s back rose as he registered a growing sense that he was being watched by unseen eyes.

Marguerite . He turned to catch a glimpse of her face looking in his direction, barely visible through the open door between Dubois’s office and the anteroom where the girl sat at her desk. She looked away instantly, but not before Martin saw the open curiosity, the sharp intelligence, the face she hid from them every day as she pretended to be a secretary with loose morals.

“I don’t want you here when Gendreau arrives tomorrow,” Dubois said, reclaiming Martin’s attention. “He might recognize you, and that would make him uneasy. He’s certain to suspect you’re still working for the government, no matter how I reassure him. Never mind that nothing could be further from the truth, eh?”

“Why is he coming to see you here? It seems too public.”

“He swears he’s turning legitimate,” Dubois replied with a snort. “He even traveled back to the country under his real name. He’s already run through all the money he earned from skimming and bribes and side contracts during his years as a public servant. Now he wants a chance to do the same thing in private industry. He comes on bended knee, for all he pretends to be a powerful man. He claims to have a business partnership in mind, but he has little to offer. He’s all but destitute, and the market for his more specialized trinkets is nonexistent where he is. My man in Portugal says he’s spent all his remaining capital on a workshop, but it’s useless to him at the moment. Gendreau was never more than a middling tinkerer himself, his real talent was in finding and hiring geniuses who lacked the common sense to realize he’d steal all the credit for their work. “

“I see,” Martin nodded. His own contacts had already suggested as much. He had learned never to rely on Dubois’s information alone. “Then why are you agreeing to see him ?”

“He still knows people. I think this engine design of his is unpromising, but he may have made progress with other inventions during the war. And he still has some powerful friends who may be useful in encouraging the new steamrail minister to show preference to the local bidder.”

“These friends of Gendreau’s are the same people you supported before the Treaty of Calais was signed? The ones who didn’t want the treaty at all, and would be just as happy to see it violated? If those are Gendreau’s friends he may be more dangerous than useful in the current political climate, monsieur.”

Dubois’s piggy little eyes narrowed even more as he glared at his pet spy. His fingers strayed as if instinctively to the jacket pocket where he kept the remote control that determined whether Martin lived or died. “I’ve warned you before, Martin, not to talk politics. I don’t pay you to see eye to eye with me, I pay you to do what you’re told.”

He liked it, Martin knew, when he could throw Martin’s Égalité loyalties back in his face. Dubois might act offended, but he enjoyed the fact that Martin despised everything he stood for. Not that Dubois stood for anything on principle; it was all self-interest with him, and always had been. Martin often wished he’d learned that about Dubois a bit sooner.

“My only concern is your safety, naturally,” Martin demurred, pretending to ignore Dubois’s smirk. “I’ll be out of sight for the meeting, but never too far away.”