The knife spun.
It wasn't a clumsy throw. It was professional. Aimed at my throat.
I saw the glint of the blade. I saw the indifference in the killer's eyes.
I couldn't move. My legs were dead weight. The wheelchair was an anchor.
CLICK.
Charles didn't scream. He didn't freeze.
He kicked the brake lever on my left wheel.
The chair spun violently to the left.
THWACK.
The knife didn't hit my throat. It buried itself in the leather backrest of my chair, inches from my spine. The handle vibrated with the force of the impact.
The assassin frowned. He reached into his coat for a second blade.
PFFT.
A muffled cough.
The assassin's head snapped back. A small red hole appeared in the center of his forehead.
He stood there for a second, dead on his feet, looking surprised. Then he crumpled. He hit the floor like a sack of wet laundry.
Fouché stepped out from behind a pillar. He held a small pocket pistol. Smoke curled from the barrel.
The gambling den went silent. The roulette wheel stopped clicking.
Every thug in the room looked at the dead man, then at Fouché.
"Apologies for the noise," Fouché said, calmly reloading the pistol. "He was disrupting the negotiations."
I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding. My heart was hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs. One... two... three... Still beating.
I reached behind me. I gripped the handle of the knife.
I pulled it out of the leather. It required force. The blade was serrated. Nasty.
I looked at the assassin's body. No papers. No identification. Just a tool used by a distant hand.
I turned back to Jean Chouan.
The Ferryman hadn't moved. He was still sitting on his crate of gin, cleaning his pistol. But he had stopped smiling. He was looking at Charles.
"Fast reflexes for a child," Chouan grunted.
"I calculated the trajectory," Charles said. His voice was flat. He was staring at the dead man with clinical interest. "The chair has a pivot radius of 0.8 meters. It was the only variable available."
Chouan looked at me. He raised an eyebrow.
"You raise your whelps strange, Miller."
"He learns quickly," I said.
I placed the knife on the table. I picked up an apple from a fruit bowl. I used the assassin's blade to slice a wedge.
Crunch.
I took a bite. It was sour, but I chewed it slowly.
"As I was saying, Citizen Chouan," I said, pointing the knife at him. "We were discussing the terms of your Admiralship."
The room exhaled. The tension didn't vanish, but it shifted. They realized I wasn't going to panic. I wasn't going to call the guards. I was going to finish the deal.
Chouan laughed. A deep, belly-shaking roar.
"You have ice water in your veins, Miller! I like that. The Royals would have fainted."
He stood up. He was massive. He blocked the light from the lantern.
"Fine. You want to break the blockade. You want to move grain."
"And wine," I added. "Rothschild has blocked our credit, but he can't block thirst. The British aristocracy loves Bordeaux. If we can get it to them, they will pay in gold."
"And how do we get it past the Royal Navy?" Chouan asked. "They have frigates. I have fishing boats."
"We don't go through the Channel," I said. "We go through the mud."
I used the knife to draw a map on the dusty table.
"The Scheldt Estuary," I said. "The tidal flats are too shallow for frigates. But your shallow-draft smugglers can navigate them at high tide."
Chouan nodded. "Dangerous waters. If you get stuck, the tide leaves you high and dry for the British marines."
"That's why we do it at night," I said. "And we don't use big ships. We use hundreds of small ones. A Mosquito Fleet."
I looked him in the eye.
"Rothschild is fighting a war of whales. Big capital. Big ships. Big targets. We are going to fight a war of rats. Small. Fast. Invisible."
Chouan stroked his beard. He looked at the knife on the table, then at the dead assassin.
"Admiral of the Rats," he mused.
He extended a hand. It was the size of a ham, covered in scars and grease.
"You give me the pardon," Chouan said. "You give me 10% of the gold I bring back. And you give me the head of the customs inspector at Calais. He owes me money."
"5%," I countered. "The pardon is priceless. And the customs inspector is yours."
Chouan grinned. His teeth were yellow, but his grip was iron.
"Deal."
We shook hands.
"Move the wine tonight," I ordered. "I want gold in the treasury by Tuesday."
"It will be there," Chouan said. "Now get out. Before another one of Rothschild's cleaners decides to try his luck."
We rolled out of the Palais-Royal and into the cold night air.
The silence of the alley felt louder than the noise of the gambling den.
Fouché wiped his pistol with a silk handkerchief. Charles walked beside me, his hands in his pockets, kicking a stone.
"You gave him too much," Charles said.
"What?"
"5% is too high," Charles said. "The market rate for smuggling is 3%. And giving a criminal a government title creates long-term liability. When the war is over, he will be a problem."
I looked at my son.
He wasn't traumatized by the attempted murder. He was annoyed by the profit margin.
"We needed him, Charles. Sometimes you pay a premium for speed."
"Inefficient," Charles muttered.
We reached the carriage. The horses were restless. They could smell the blood on Fouché.
As Fouché opened the door, a sound made me stop.
Flutter. Flutter.
I looked up.
Above the rooftops of Paris, a flock of pigeons took flight. They circled once, then turned North. Toward the coast. Toward England.
Homing pigeons.
"They know," I whispered.
"Who?" Fouché asked.
"Rothschild's spies," I said. "They saw us enter the Palais-Royal. They saw the assassin fail. They are sending word to London."
I watched the birds disappear into the clouds.
"Pigeons fly at 60 miles per hour," I said. "The news will reach London by dawn. Rothschild will know we are using smugglers before Chouan's first ship leaves the harbor."
I felt a wave of exhaustion.
It was a race I couldn't win. No matter how smart I was, no matter how ruthless Charles became, we were limited by physics. Information traveled at the speed of a bird or a horse.
Rothschild had more birds. He had a network of couriers that spanned the continent. He knew the price of wheat in Vienna before the Emperor did.
"We can't beat him," I said.
"What?" Charles looked at me, shocked.
"Not like this," I said. "We are playing tag with a ghost. He moves his money faster than we can move our goods. By the time our gold arrives, the price will have changed."
I looked at the roof of the Louvre.
There, silhouetted against the moon, was a strange skeletal structure. A wooden tower with mechanical arms.
A Chappe Semaphore. The Optical Telegraph.
It was broken. Neglected during the war. A toy the revolutionaries had played with and forgotten.
An idea sparked in my brain. A connection between the 18th century and the 21st.
"Charles," I said.
"Yes?"
"What is the most valuable commodity in the world?"
"Gold," Charles said instantly.
"No," I said. "Information."
I pointed at the pigeons.
"Rothschild wins because he is faster. He knows the future before we do. He trades on tomorrow's news today."
I looked at the broken tower.
"We need to be faster than birds," I said.
"How?" Charles asked. "Nothing is faster than a bird."
"Light," I said.
I grabbed Charles's shoulder.
"The Chappe system. It sends signals using semaphore arms. Telescope to telescope. Tower to tower. A message can travel from Paris to Lille in minutes. Not days. Minutes."
Charles frowned. "It's a military system. It's used for troop movements."
"Not anymore," I said. "We are going to privatize it."
My mind was racing now. The exhaustion vanished, replaced by the manic energy of a breakthrough.
"We are going to build a network," I said. "Paris to Brussels. Brussels to Amsterdam. Amsterdam to Hamburg."
"That will cost millions," Fouché warned. "We don't have the money."
"We don't need money," I said. "We sell subscriptions."
"Subscriptions?"
"To the bankers," I said. "To the merchants. To the news agencies. We sell them speed. If they want to know the price of grain in Amsterdam instantly, they pay us. We build the Victorian Internet, 50 years early."
I looked at the pigeon coop on the roof.
"Fouché," I said.
"Yes, Administrator?"
"Kill the pigeons."
Fouché blinked. "All of them?"
"Every carrier pigeon in France," I said. "Shoot them. Poison them. Introduce falcons. I don't care."
I smiled. It was a vicious smile.
"I want a monopoly on speed. If Rothschild wants to talk to his agents, he can use my network. And pay my toll."
"And we can read his messages," Charles realized. His eyes lit up. "We can audit his communications."
"Exactly," I said.
I climbed into the carriage.
"To the Louvre," I ordered. "Wake up the Chappe brothers. Tell them the Administrator wants to build a web."
As the carriage rattled over the cobblestones, I looked out the window.
The assassin was dead. The smugglers were hired. The pigeons were marked for death.
Rothschild thought he was playing Chess. He thought he controlled the board.
But I was about to rewrite the rules of the game. I wasn't going to just move the pieces. I was going to wire the board with fiber-optics.
"You're smiling," Charles noted.
"I am," I said.
"Why?"
"Because," I said, tapping my cane on the floor. "I just figured out how to bankrupt a ghost."