But I did have a plan. When I’d learned Dufor was dead, that we had no hope of getting the information from him, my mind had immediately begun formulating.
I swallowed and mustered the courage to speak. “I saw the pickpocket’s face. I can go undercover, find the thief and his gang, and retrieve the drive.”
Her lip curled, and her small nose wrinkled.
“Ridiculous. To search for one pickpocket in a sea of thousands could take weeks. We do not have weeks.”
“Respectfully, Director, it wouldn’t take me weeks.”
“Ah, I see you still think so highly of yourself, despite the utter lack of evidence,” she waved a hand dismissively. “No, it’s impossible. Even if you were as talented as your file claims, it couldn’t be done. Find one pickpocket in the middle of Paris? If that was the extent of your plan,” she spit the word at me like poison, “I am even more disgusted than before. If you had stuck with Dufor and protected him, he could have made another copy. Now we have no informant and no way of retrieving the information.”
I chafed inwardly at her words, but kept my face passive. “Director, I know I made a mistake today, but—”
“A mistake?” Her voice was acid. “A man is dead, Agent Hadden. Where I come from, we do not have tolerance for such a mistake.”
The room was silent for a moment, Director Siron’s recriminations ringing in the air.
Halluis cleared his throat. “If we don’t go after the pickpocket, what hope do we have of retrieving the information? Dufor indicated that what he knew could have serious repercussions for Paris, for all of France. We have to get a hold of that drive.”
I shot him a quick look of gratitude. He hadn’t exactly challenged Siron outright, but his words did lend some support to my plan, and for that I was grateful.
But Siron only shook her head, her stylish brown hair sweeping her shoulders. “The drive is gone. Perhaps in the hands of Dufor’s killers, but most likely tossed into the trash by a disappointed pickpocket. Our only hope of completing this mission now is to root out the original source of the information.”
“You mean—infiltrate Sécurité Un?” I asked in disbelief. It had always been deemed too risky to break into the company itself. The place was a fortress.
“We need this information as soon as possible, and this is the quickest way,” Director Siron said. “This happens tonight. I want the mission plans on my desk within the hour.” She turned to go, then turned back and locked eyes with me. “Agent Hadden, I expect you will apply your remarkable intellect to the task. This is your chance—the only one you will get—to redeem yourself. While there is no way to bring Dufor back to life, you can at least give meaning to his death by retrieving the information he gave his life for. Our best course of action now is to find out what Dufor knew—and to do that we have to get into Sécurité Un. I will tolerate no more mistakes. I need perfection here.”
She turned to Rosabella. “And Agent Cantu, don’t underestimate Sécurité Un. Keep in mind that they found Dufor and killed him and quite possibly sent that pickpocket to retrieve the flash drive Dufor intended to give us. We have to assume they were privy to our plans and thwarted them.”
“Yes, Director.”
Siron left the room, saying, “Plans. On my desk in one hour.”
“Getting inside Sécurité Un is no easy task.” Ace’s grim face turned a shade darker, more like his original color. He immediately started typing something on the keyboard in front of him, and the schematics of the target building appeared on the screen on the wall at the end of the table.
Halluis, on the other hand, looked a bit excited. “Their security is tight, Ace. I don’t know that we can crack it.”
The two of them started tossing out ideas, arguing back and forth about different entry strategies, but I couldn’t get my mind to focus. I fought back waves of nausea as Siron’s words repeated over and over in my mind. I’d ruined everything; Dufor was dead because of me; I was a complete and utter failure. Yet, underneath all the vicious self-recrimination, another thought was fighting its way to the surface.
Siron was wrong.
Trying to break into Sécurité Un was not only dangerous, but likely to prove futile. We had no idea where Dufor would have kept the information—or even exactly what information he’d planned to give us. It was like hunting for a needle in a haystack, but without even knowing which haystack to search. On top of that, I couldn’t shake the idea that Siron was wrong about the drive—she was working on the assumption that the pickpocket was either working for Sécurité Un or that he wouldn’t know the significance of the drive he’d stolen.
It didn’t make much sense for Sécurité Un to send both a thief and a killer, when just one could do the job. I was reasonably sure the kid was acting independently, and he’d had no idea what he was getting in the middle of. But I’d seen the look in his eye—he was clever, and he probably worked for someone smarter still. They wouldn’t just toss away something that could be valuable. That information could easily make its way into the wrong hands. I glanced over at Siron; the door to her office was open, and she was sifting through paperwork at her desk. I thought about going over to her, trying again to make my case, but the futility of it struck me like a blow. She’d made her disdain for me and my ideas very clear.
I wanted to make things better, but how could I if the director thought I was useless? And she was right. Dufor was dead because of
