Delphine Dryden - Gossamer Wing

PARIS, FRANCE

SNOW WOULD COMPLICATE everything.

Jacques Martin kept an eye on the heavy clouds, but his primary focus remained on the hunt. The scrawny Dominion rat had left him with a knot the size of an egg on his head, and the sickest of headaches. He was keen to return the favor.

And he has my freedom in his hands.

The documents, all wrapped up and tidy in their leather pouch, that Martin had planned to present Dubois once he knew their agreement was at an end . . . the boy had them, and probably didn’t even know their importance. Didn’t know an agent—a brilliant agent, a beautiful woman, Martin’s friend—had died for the information on those sheets. He’d taken them because they were there, because they might be worth something to his employers.

The cold raged through Martin’s arm and raised a scorching chill below his elbow where metal met skin. He’d forgotten to oil the spring-clamp hand again this morning, and he’d left off the compression sleeve because of the itch. Never again. Already he felt the thing seizing up, become less instead of more , defeating its own purpose.

Martin ran through the streets of Paris, light and silent on his well-trained feet. Even with his enhanced ear he could barely make out his own footsteps, but he suspected the boy from the American colonies would not be so quiet or so fleet of foot. He’d looked like an analyst, a desk clerk, not a field agent. He could never have defeated Martin in a fair fight. He’d barely gotten away as it was, even with Martin’s head still reeling from the first crack it had received.

Idiot , Martin chastised himself. His ears had been covered by a cap, again because the cold made the metal unbearable where it met skin. He hadn’t heard the boy sneaking around the corner, had been so certain of his own security that he’d literally plowed into the fool. Then, caught off guard, he’d careened into the sharp brick corner of Dubois’s building.

There it was, the sound he sought. A patter of rapid footsteps on a parallel street, the rough breath of a man near the end of his endurance, trying to be quiet as he pushed past his limit. The rat was fitter than Martin had thought, he had to give him that. They were a block apart, Martin calculated, but he could catch up to the boy on the Boulevard des Italiens, which was only a few paces away.

Martin paused at the intersection as the fool broke from the shadowed side street and darted across the broad boulevard, making straight down the block for the Opéra Garnier. Steam cars rattled by, not many of them at one in the morning but enough to make Martin proceed with more caution than the American had demonstrated.

“Paul Girard,” the boy had introduced himself two days ago, in flawless unaccented French. He’d cornered Roland Dubois at the opera, as ambitious young men were wont to do on occasion. This young man had raised alarms in Jacques Martin’s mind. His French was too smooth, too perfect. The cut of his costly clothing was off, a few years out of fashion. Most of all, Martin had been struck with an impression that the boy was both smarter than he presented himself to be, and lacking in the particular type of puffed up, self-important false confidence that invariably filled these up-and-coming industrialists.

With his enhanced ear covered by a prosthesis and his judgment still cloudy from the morphine he’d taken to manage the pain from his new implants, Martin had been far from alert. When Dubois dismissed his caution about the boy, he didn’t pursue it. Dubois had been late for a rendezvous with his new mistress. Martin had been late for his next dose of morphine.

He felt vindicated now, in an ironic way, remembering the young man’s startled curse when they collided.

“Bloody hell,” the rat had hissed, revealing his true accent in that moment as clearly as if he’d hung a sign around his neck. It was always those little things, those unguarded seconds, that tripped one up. The American boy was still a baby spy, evidently. Martin would not enjoy killing him. But the baby spy had made a mistake in not killing Martin when he had the chance, and Martin would not make the same mistake.

Untimely traffic made crossing the boulevard impossible for several tens of seconds, and Martin cursed under his breath as the boy disappeared around the side of the Opéra. The brief rest refreshed him, however, and he sprinted after his quarry with new vigor once the street cleared.

This time he swung wide around the corner of the building, half expecting the boy to jump out at him. Instead Martin drew to a slow halt, staring at an empty plaza and the street beyond. Nothing. No boy, no cars, no sound from so much as a cat to disturb the night.

He’d lost him. He’d lost the documents.

Horror as cold as the metal biting at Martin’s skin filled his mind as he contemplated what Dubois might do if he returned without those pages. Without proof of the device that could secure the martial future Dubois so fervently desired, a weapon of such breathtaking potential that it could change the course of this war . . . and all wars.

“A little insurance,” Dubois had told him while he was still groggy from the anesthesia. “To make sure you do follow through on your promise to surrender the papers Simone stole from those English scientists, I had the good surgeon-engineer provide you with an additional implant.” His piggy eyes had squinted in delight as he told Martin of the vial of poison planted in Martin’s body, and the radiomagnetic trigger device that he, Roland Dubois, would carry with him until Martin had delivered on his end of their exchange.

Martin had gambled with the devil and lost, it seemed. He’d persuaded the engineering giant to provide a pair of implants his own employers refused him, enhancements he thought would make him the greatest spy the world had ever known. Without the documents, however—or perhaps even with them, Martin acknowledged—he was now bound forever to Dubois unless he wanted to die.

Martin did not want to die. He sent up a silent prayer to a God he wished he could still believe in, and like an answer to his prayer he heard a soft scuffle overhead.

The Dominion rat was scrambling up and over the lip of the roof, high atop the Palais Garnier. How he’d scaled the wall Martin couldn’t begin to guess, unless the baby spy was an unparalleled second-story man.

Martin didn’t linger to guess. He was no second-story man, because he didn’t need to be. He could pick any lock ever made and was as silent as death. Within seconds he was inside the building, darting up the stairs that led to the roof. The Opéra was dark that night, but warmer than the outside air, and Martin felt almost hot by the time he topped the final stair and leaned, listening, on the door leading to the roof.

The scuffling sounds of feet on slate told him the boy was still up there and not close to the door. It was as good an opportunity as Martin would get. He swung the door open, silently praising the worker who must have recently oiled the hinges, and scanned the dark rooftop in front of the green glass dome. He saw nothing at first, then movement near the abutment on the opposite side from the wall the American had climbed.

The boy had evidently planned to go up and over, escaping on the opposite side of the building once Martin had given up the search. A decent strategy, Martin supposed, if it hadn’t been for the implant that allowed Martin to hear him. That implant, and the metal throughout his forearm, were already chilling again as he crept across the roof toward his prey. Though it felt almost too cold for it now, snow started to fall, dusting all the surfaces. Martin slowed even further to minimize the risk of slipping. His head and arm started to throb all over in the bitter wind.