The iron shutter screeched with an annoying familiarity. Elias Thorne pushed the mechanism all the way up, ignoring the dull ache in his left shoulder—a souvenir from a winter in Kyiv that had been far too damp, ten years prior. At seven in the morning, Rue des Ormes was still shrouded in that salty mist so characteristic of Saint-Malo this time of year.
Thorne's Hardware didn't look like much. It was an alignment of dark wooden drawers, jars filled with nails sold by weight, and shelves sagging under the weight of tools whose exact purpose no one seemed to remember anymore. To Elias, it was a sanctuary of silence. Here, no one asked him to decode satellite transmissions or translate aggressive interrogations conducted in windowless basements.
He settled behind the counter, poured black coffee into a chipped mug, and stared at the old grandfather clock standing at the back of the shop.
"Still here, aren't you?" he whispered to himself.
The clock didn't answer, but its pendulum seemed to mark time with an almost contemptuous regularity. Elias pulled out a ledger. His father, Jacques, had never been much of a manager. Since his passing three months ago, Elias had spent his nights trying to figure out how this shop had managed to stay afloat for thirty years with such ridiculous margins.
The door chimed. A man in his sixties, wearing a faded yellow raincoat, walked in, rubbing his calloused hands together.
"Morning, Elias. Did my gaskets for the sump pump come in?"
Elias smiled. It was the kind of question that now formed the bulk of his social life. Simple. No double meanings.
"Back bin, Marc. I set them aside for you."
He stood up to retrieve the order. As he passed the bolt and screw section, he noticed an unusual damp patch on the back wall. The building was old, certainly, but Jacques's masonry had always been solid. He pressed his hand against the plaster. It was cold, but not wet. The sensation was different. It was a vibration.
"Everything alright?" Marc asked, placing a few coins on the wooden counter.
"Yeah, just the sea air. You never really get rid of it."
After Marc left, Elias didn't return to his accounts. He grabbed a flashlight and went around the shelving unit. The vibration had stopped, but an intuition—that old professional reflex from the shadows he was trying so hard to drown out—prickled at the base of his skull.
He moved a massive shelf filled with paint cans. Behind it, the partition appeared to have been recently patched. Too recently to be the work of his father, who hadn't had the strength to carry a bag of cement in years.
Elias tapped the wall. The sound was hollow over an area of about thirty square centimeters. He found a flathead screwdriver, wedged it into a crack in the joint, and pried.
The piece of plaster came away in one block, revealing a cavity carefully insulated with rock wool.
Inside, there was no money, nor a weapon. Just a small black leather-bound notebook, protected by a zip-lock plastic bag.
Elias pulled it out with care. Opening the first page, he saw nothing but columns of numbers and dates. To a layman, it looked like a tedious inventory log. To Elias Thorne, it was a sliding-key substitution code. A protocol used by Eastern Bloc intelligence services in the 1980s.
His heart quickened slightly. He closed the notebook and looked around. The shop, so peaceful moments ago, suddenly felt too vast, filled with blind spots.
He wasn't just a hardware store owner discovering a secret. He was a man who had just realized his father wasn't who he thought he was. And in this business, secrets didn't have an expiration date.
He tucked the notebook into his pocket, turned off the light, and returned to the counter. He had eight hours of service left before he could lock himself in at home to crack the code. But he already knew that tonight, he wouldn't be sleeping.
Outside, the mist had lifted, revealing a figure standing at the street corner—a man who seemed to be waiting for neither the bus nor the bakery to open.
Elias took a sip of his coffee. It was cold.