The Paris Agent(40)

Noah led one group of local operatives into the facility and I was responsible for the other. We both knew the layout by heart by then, and we’d planned the demolition to ensure all critical infrastructure was destroyed. Sometimes, I felt the handful of weeks of sabotage training we received preparing for the field was laughably inadequate, but as Noah and I planned that operation, I discovered we knew just enough to be very effective indeed.

We had placement of explosives to ensure maximum destruction with minimum manpower. And in the end, even working silently in the dark, it took us less than an hour to rig everything we needed to, and to secure the doors and fasten the padlocks on the gates. The latter was my idea. If any of that external infrastructure survived the blast, say if a gate was discovered intact somewhere, it needed to appear that it had never been unlocked for Sauvage and Jullien’s sakes.

Just before midnight, Noah and I dismissed the workers and they scattered into the night. We continued to work in silence, just the two of us now, rolling ignition wire behind us as we slipped back through the last unlocked gate. I hooked the padlock back on and clicked it closed, then ran to catch up to Noah, who was already in a deep ditch, a few hundred feet away. There was a heavy cloud cover that night. It was dark, but not so dark that I could miss the anticipation in his eyes.

“Ready?” he whispered.

“Do it,” I said flatly.

The explosion was everything we had hoped—maybe a little more. The force of it was phenomenal, like a physical wave had crashed through our chests, even as we crouched there in that ditch. Noah and I were thrown hard against the back wall of the trench, and my ears rang painfully even though I had covered them with my hands. Immense steel factory doors flew dozens of feet into the air, traveling on the force of a massive fireball that triggered secondary explosions in fuel tanks elsewhere in the plant.

“Are you okay?” Noah asked me. It looked like he was shouting but I could barely hear a word. I nodded, and scanned my gaze down his body, searching for injuries.

“You?”

“Better than good,” he said, but then he took my hand and led me toward our bicycles. It was difficult to ride at first—I was still so dizzy. I kept overbalancing, and I’d shoot my foot out to try to steady myself, only to find the ground was not where I expected it to be. But we could not stop—we couldn’t even afford the luxury of riding slowly. We went swiftly over dirt paths and back roads, zigzagging back toward our apartment. The lights were on in the Travers household and the girls were crying, likely roused from their sleep by the sound of the blast. I felt terrible for startling them, and likely other children across the town, but reassured myself: if we had not blown that factory up, we risked a second air strike hitting other innocent children. Disrupted sleep tonight might have saved those children’s lives. As we dumped our bicycles and slipped inside the apartment, I noticed that one of our back windows had shattered from the impact of the explosion, even from more than a mile away.

“Let’s change into our nightclothes then go out into the street,” Noah said, taking my hand and leading me to the laundry room. He wiped a smudge of dirt from my face with a washcloth then I did the same for him, blotting the sweat that had run across his brow. “Everyone else will be outside to see what the fuss is about. We should make sure we’re seen doing the same.”

We left the yard again, this time by the front gate, and found that he was right—bleary-eyed locals were standing along the street. The fire raged so hot and so bright that an orange glow was cast over the entire town, almost as if the sun were rising.

“Fire at the factory,” one of the neighbors, an older gentleman, told us knowingly. “I bet the power plant exploded.”

“I didn’t hear planes,” his wife said uncertainly. “But this surely must have been the British.”

“No way to be sure,” Noah said easily, then he stifled a yawn and tugged me back toward our apartment. “Back to bed for you, Mrs. Martel. I don’t want you out in the cold.”

I stifled a laugh as he drew me back into the apartment, but the laughter faded the minute the door closed behind us. Noah was staring at me with an intensity in his gaze that set my stomach abuzz with butterflies.

“We did it,” I whispered. “Can you believe it?”

He took two steps toward me, slipped his hand behind my neck and pulled me to him for a kiss so fierce and joyous it took my breath away.

Later, when the town was asleep again and the night was still, and the scent of smoke and burning fuel hung in the air, Noah and I lay entwined in our bed, a blanket covering our naked bodies.

“We make a fantastic team, Josie Miller,” he whispered, and I shivered with pleasure as he wrapped his arm around my waist, pulling me even closer.

“We really do,” I whispered back.

Noah and I knew that suspicion would fall on Jullien and Sauvage long before it fell on us. Before the operation had even taken place, we tried to prepare them for their inevitable arrests. I felt preemptively guilty for what they were about to endure.

“Perhaps they pretend they know exactly what involvement you’ve had—but even if their version of events is close to the truth, they’ll probably just be guessing. They might threaten you. Your family. It’s all designed to wear you down, so as it escalates, take that as a good sign, not a bad one. The harder they try and fail to break you, the closer you are to release.”