Chapter 4 - Marseille Returned in the Smell of Diesel and Salt

Two days later, Damon took Ivy to the river terminal before dawn.

The decision had produced a twenty-minute argument with Rocco and a ten-minute argument with Ivy, both of whom believed the other was the reason the trip was dangerous.

Damon ended both debates by saying, "We need answers, and the men coming off that ship will only speak to the person who corrected Faucher."

So Ivy went.

Fog lay low over the water. Cranes moved above stacked containers like enormous black birds. The smell of salt was weaker than Marseille, but diesel made memory efficient.

Ivy was fifteen again before she reached the first warehouse.

Damon noticed.

"You all right?"

"No."

He waited.

"But I'm here."

That was enough for him.

A French crew waited inside Warehouse Twelve. Their foreman, Luc Renard, had worked the southern European routes for twenty years and distrusted everyone who owned a tailored coat.

He trusted Ivy slightly more because she insulted his cigarettes in Marseille slang.

Within ten minutes, he was talking.

Three shipments carrying Lantern designations had passed through his people during the previous year. None contained narcotics or weapons, as Ivy had feared. They carried encrypted financial servers and paper archives from companies connected to the Cole organization.

"Where were they going?" Ivy asked.

Renard glanced at Damon.

"Your father used to send them to private storage. Different city every time. Said no one man should hold a map to all the money."

Damon's face hardened.

"My father died nine years ago."

"Then somebody learned to use his ghost."

Renard handed Ivy a photocopy of a manifest.

At the bottom was an authorization mark.

A blue lantern.

Beside it were the initials T.M.

Ivy forgot to breathe.

"Where did you get this?"

"Original came through Rotterdam. Copy stayed with our freight papers."

"What year?"

"This one? Fourteen years ago."

One year before Thomas disappeared.

Damon read over her shoulder.

"T.M. could be anyone."

"It could."

But Ivy knew her father's handwriting well enough to recognize the crooked right leg on the M.

Her hand trembled.

Damon quietly took the paper so she would not have to hold it.

That small kindness almost broke her composure.

A forklift engine started outside.

Renard frowned. "No loading scheduled."

Rocco's voice snapped through Damon's earpiece.

"Move. Now."

The warehouse doors exploded inward.

A forklift came through at full speed, its forks raised high enough to spear the metal shelving beside them. Damon grabbed Ivy around the waist and pulled her behind a concrete support as the machine crashed into stacked crates.

Gunfire followed.

Renard dropped behind a pallet.

Damon drew a pistol from beneath his coat.

Ivy stared at him.

"You brought that into a negotiation?"

"I bring it to breakfast."

"That's not reassuring."

"Stay down."

Two men moved between the containers outside.

Rocco's security team returned fire, driving them toward the river fence. Damon fired once, not wildly but with terrifying calm, and one attacker dropped his weapon with a cry.

The second ran.

Ivy saw him before anyone else saw what he held.

A small black remote.

"Damon!"

She threw herself against him.

The explosion came from the far end of the warehouse.

A container door blew outward. Heat and pressure rolled through the building, showering them with dust and fragments of insulation.

Damon covered Ivy with his body until the noise stopped.

For several seconds she heard only ringing.

Then his voice reached her.

"Ivy. Look at me."

She did.

A cut ran along his temple.

"Are you hurt?"

"You're bleeding."

"Answer me."

She moved her arms and legs.

"No."

Only then did he shift away.

Rocco appeared through the smoke, furious and uninjured.

"They knew the warehouse. They knew the time. They knew which container held the old manifests."

Renard emerged coughing.

The container that had exploded was exactly the one containing fifteen years of Lantern records.

Burning pages drifted through the air like black snow.

Ivy stood among them, heart pounding.

One sheet landed near her shoe.

Most of it had burned away.

One surviving line remained.

THOMAS MARLOWE — CUSTODIAN B.

Below it, another name had been typed.

ADRIAN VOSS — CUSTODIAN C.

Damon saw it at the same moment.

Neither spoke.

Across the warehouse, Rocco's men dragged the wounded attacker upright.

He refused to give a name.

But when Ivy stepped closer, he looked at her and muttered something in French.

She stopped cold.

Damon heard only the sound.

"What did he say?"

Ivy stared at the man.

The phrase had come from Marseille, from men who worked the docks after midnight and believed fear should sound like a joke.

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"He said," she translated, "the custodian's daughter should have stayed invisible."

Renard crossed himself, then looked away as if the gesture embarrassed him. Ivy noticed soot streaked across the copy of the manifest in Damon's hand. The paper had survived an explosion designed to erase it, which felt less like luck than a demand to keep reading.