The Marie-Louise slammed into a swell, sending a wall of frigid spray over the gunwale.
Elias didn't flinch. He kept his hand firm on the tiller, his eyes locked on the horizon where the grey sky met the darker, churning water of the Channel. Behind them, the walled city of Saint-Malo was shrinking into a jagged silhouette of granite and history.
"How much further?" Sarah shouted over the roar of the outboard motor. She was huddled in the bow, her knuckles white as she gripped the aluminum bench.
"Two miles," Elias replied. "See those breaks in the water? Those are the Plateaux des Noires. At high tide, they're invisible. At low tide, they look like the spine of a sleeping dragon."
He checked his watch. The tide was ebbing fast. If his father's coordinates were precise—and Jacques Thorne was nothing if not precise—the window of opportunity was narrow. The rocks were notorious for shredding the hulls of any boat larger than a kayak, which was exactly why a "Librarian" would choose them.
As they approached, the water changed color from a deep, bruised purple to a sickly translucent green. Jagged black fingers of rock began to poke through the surface, slick with kelp and barnacles.
Elias cut the engine. The sudden silence was jarring, filled only by the slap of water against the hull and the distant, mournful cry of gulls. He picked up an oar and began to guide the boat through a narrow channel between two rising ridges of stone.
"There," Elias said, pointing toward a natural depression in the largest rock formation.
"The 'Tooth.' My father used to take me fishing here when I was a boy. He'd make me stay in the boat while he 'checked the lobster pots' near that crevice."
He brought the skiff alongside a flat ledge of rock. The stone was treacherous, covered in a film of green algae. He tossed a small grapnel anchor into a cleft and stepped out, offering a hand to Sarah. She hesitated, looking at the dark, swirling water below, then took it. Her hand was ice cold.
"What are we looking for?" she asked, her voice hushed by the vastness of the sea.
"A mark. Jacques had a signature for everything."
Elias began to climb the slope of the Tooth. He ignored the wind that bit through his jacket. He was looking for something that didn't belong—a straight line in a world of jagged curves.
Ten feet up, tucked under a natural overhang that protected it from the worst of the Atlantic storms, he found it. A small, rusted iron ring bolted into the granite. Next to it, carved into the stone with a mason's chisel, was a tiny symbol: a stylized 'T' inside a circle.
"The Thorne mark," Elias muttered.
He reached into the crevice behind the iron ring. His fingers brushed against something hard and smooth. It wasn't rock. It was PVC.
He pulled, and a long, watertight tube slid out of a hidden recess. It was weighted with lead shot to prevent it from floating if the crevice ever flooded.
Sarah scrambled up beside him.
"Is that it? The key?"
Elias unscrewed the cap. A faint hiss of pressurized air escaped. Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, was not a book, but a heavy, old-fashioned brass key and a ruggedized USB drive sealed in a vacuum-packed bag.
"My father hated computers," Elias said, staring at the drive.
"If he put something on a thumb drive, he was desperate. Or he knew he wouldn't be around to explain it."
"Elias," Sarah whispered, pointing back toward the mainland.
He looked up. A mile away, a sleek, black rigid-hulled inflatable boat (RHIB) was cutting through the water, its twin engines leaving a massive white wake. It was moving fast—much faster than the Marie-Louise ever could.
"Vauquelin," Elias said. "They must have had a backup tracker on your jacket or the boat."
"We can't outrun them," Sarah said, panic rising in her voice. "That's a military-grade interceptor."
"We aren't going to outrun them," Elias said, tucking the tube into his waistband.
"We're going to give them exactly what they want."
He looked at the brass key in his hand. It had a numbered tag: Locker 402, Gare de Saint-Malo.
"Get back in the boat," Elias commanded. "We need to get to the 'Old Man's Shortcut.'"
"The what?"
"The current. If we hit the riptide at the edge of the plateau just right, it'll carry us toward the Petit Bé fort. It's too shallow for their RHIB. They'll have to go around the long way."
They scrambled back down to the skiff. Elias yanked the starter cord—once, twice—and the engine roared to life just as the black RHIB entered the outer perimeter of the rocks.
The men in the RHIB didn't wave. One of them stood up near the bow, holding a long-range acoustic device (LRAD). A high-pitched, agonizing whistle tore through the air, vibrating in Elias's teeth.
"Cover your ears!" he yelled to Sarah.
He pinned the throttle. The Marie-Louise leaped forward, the small engine screaming in protest. Elias steered directly toward a line of white foam where the tide was crashing over a submerged reef. To an outsider, it looked like suicide. To a boy who had grown up navigating these waters with a silent, stern father, it was a doorway.
The boat hit the current and was suddenly seized by a massive, invisible force. They accelerated, the skiff fishtailing as the riptide dragged them through a gap in the rocks barely wider than the hull.
Behind them, the RHIB slowed down, its pilot unwilling to risk a hundred-thousand-euro boat on a gamble with the granite.
"They're stopping!" Sarah cried out, looking back.
"They're waiting," Elias corrected. "They know there's only one way back to the harbor. They'll just sit at the exit and pick us off."
He looked at the USB drive in his hand. He needed a computer, and he needed it now. He looked at the coastline. He knew every inch of this shore, every hidden cove and every abandoned bunker from the Atlantic Wall.
"We're not going back to the harbor," Elias said, adjusting their course. "We're going to the Grand Bé. We're going to visit a dead poet."
"What?"
"Chateaubriand," Elias said, a grim smile appearing on his face. "He's buried on the island. And more importantly, the island is connected to the city by a causeway that only appears for two hours a day. The tide is almost out. If we time it right, we can walk back into the city while they're still circling the rocks looking for our bodies."
He pushed the Marie-Louise to its limit. The hull groaned, and the salt air burned his eyes. He had the key, and he had the data. But as he looked at the black RHIB sitting like a shark in the distance, Elias knew that the "Librarian's" game was just beginning.
His father hadn't just left him a secret. He had left him a war.