For the past six months, the court glittered with the same rhythm. Yet beneath the marble corridors of Versailles, under the radiant gaze of chandeliers and the polite murmur of courtiers, a shadow grew—a structure neither military nor political, but both. It was the embryo of something that would move silently for the next few years: the Ghost Cell.
This was the period when a mere thought, born in the mind of a precocious boy, began to take the shape of an invisible machine—one designed to strangle an empire without ever firing a musket.
The Dauphin's private study in Versailles was the ornate physical representation of the royal children. The golden moldings and silk tapestries were there, of course, but the boy had transformed the place into something else entirely—a miniature command post. Maps of the British Isles, of trade routes to India, and of the Atlantic coastlines covered the walls. Drawers overflowed with coded correspondence and technical notes disguised as childish sketches.
To the casual observer, it was a young prince's fascination with geography. To those few who knew, it was the center of a covert operation that would one day bleed the British Empire from within.
Louis-Joseph, though barely four, possessed the detached calm of a man many times his age. He spoke little, but when he did, his words carried a clarity that silenced even grown men. His head guard, Jean Dupri, was the only one permitted to cross the threshold without being announced.
Dupri was a man carved out of war, his hands steady even under fire. His loyalty was to the Dauphin, not the crown, and his hatred for England burned in him like an ember that never cooled.
One morning in April, the Dauphin, sat before his desk, beckoned Dupri closer.
"Let us begin," he said simply.
That was the signal. Within days, the outlines of a network began to take shape.
They would not build an army. They would build a ghost—an invisible hand to strangle the arteries of Britain's colonial commerce, to corrupt its supply chains, and to erode the trust between its merchants and its crown.
Dupri began his recruitment quietly. No spies in the classical sense—no daggered men in alleys or masked couriers in taverns—but rather a peculiar breed: saboteurs of the pen, architects of decay.
The first to join was Henri Leblanc, once a humble accountant of the East India Company. He had been dismissed for "creative bookkeeping," a euphemism for the sort of genius the Dauphin needed. Leblanc knew how to make gold vanish, how to conjure debts that never existed, and how to create financial labyrinths so intricate that even the Bank of England should lose its way inside.
Next came Jean-Baptiste Maréchal, an agronomist once celebrated by the Académie des Sciences. Idealistic to the point of ruin, he had turned his mind toward darker experiments. He saw in the project an opportunity to test the resilience of systems—to see how long a vast empire could endure the slow poison of corruption and inefficiency. He would devise seeds that rotted too soon, tools that broke at sea, and charts that contained "honest" mistakes.
Finally, there was Agent 051—his true name erased, his past dissolved into whispers. Once a smuggler in the Channel, later absorbed into the clandestine school "Unit 141," he was the link between the underworld and the court. He could move cargo from Calais to London without a customs officer seeing so much as a shadow. He knew who bribed whom, who blackmailed whom, and which English captains would trade their integrity for a few extra guineas.
By the end of April, the Ghost Cell started existing —small, nameless, and invisible.
The Dauphin's study was no longer a child's room. It was a hive. Letters came and went daily, disguised as requests for toys or rare minerals. Behind each was the pulse of something vast and deliberate.
Henri Leblanc had taken the lead. His brilliance was not in invention but in invisibility. A good deception, he told Jean, was like a perfect painting—every brushstroke deliberate, but no one should ever notice the artist.
Thus were born the first three fronts—each one legal, each one distant, and each one tied by threads so fine they could not be traced.
The New South Wales Provisioning Company – London
The London office was established in a nondescript building off Threadneedle Street. The sign was modest, the ledgers clean, and the staff unsuspecting. Its nominal president, Alistair Finch, was a man of charm and debt in equal measure—exactly the type Leblanc had sought.
Finch believed himself the architect of his own rising fortune. In reality, he was just an unwitting pawn. His role was simple: win government contracts to provision Britain's distant colonies.
Through Finch, the Ghost Cell could flood the British supply chain with subtle rot: biscuits infested before departure, barrels that leaked in tropical heat, rope treated with oils that weakened under salt air. Each failure would appear accidental, each loss merely "the cost of distance."
The British Admiralty, confident in its oversight, would suspect nothing.
VOC Australis Trading – Amsterdam
The second company rose on the canals of Amsterdam, nestled among warehouses that smelled of tar and spice. The signboard read VOC Australis Trading, a name that invoked the once-mighty Dutch East India Company.
Its head, van Dijk, was a merchant of simple creed: profit before principle. His calm indifference made him the perfect instrument. Under his direction, the Amsterdam branch acquired surplus foodstuffs from Northern Europe—grain just on the edge of spoilage, salted meat from decaying stockyards, and barrels of worm-ridden hardtack.
Through labyrinthine channels, these goods were sold to Finch's London company at a modest markup. The accounts were perfect. The goods passed inspection. Only months later, somewhere in the middle of the Indian Ocean, would the degradation reveal itself.
Maréchal called it "controlled entropy."
Société Générale d'Approvisionnement Colonial – Geneva
The third front was the heart of the operation: the Société Générale d'Approvisionnement Colonial, a ghost within the Swiss banking world.
Hidden behind a discreet brass plaque in Geneva's old quarter, it handled the invisible bloodline of the operation—money.
The Dauphin himself never appeared in any document, of course. His involvement was encrypted through layers of letters of exchange, bearer notes, and false loans. The funds that sustained the network came from diverted industrial profits—money siphoned from a "patroness" of the court, an ally whose enterprises provided the perfect disguise.
Through this Geneva hub, payments moved with surgical precision: profits from Amsterdam funneled to London, London's "losses" compensated by anonymous loans, and the surplus quietly redirected to Paris under the name of research grants.
By June, the flow of gold was as smooth as the Seine in summer.
At Versailles, the world above remained blissfully ignorant. While courtiers gossiped about gowns and ambassadors debated precedence, the Dauphin, barely taller than the desk he worked at, was conducting one of the most intricate intelligence operations in Europe.
Only Dupri knew the truth.