• Shortlisted for the Michael Van Rooy Award for Genre Fiction

While Canadian history professor Andrew Stanhope is doing research in Paris on the German invasion of France, his interest is piqued when he stumbles upon an odd exchange of correspondence between Colonel Marius Michel, principal deputy in the Deuxième Bureau, France’s counter-intelligence agency, and Louis Chastenet, Directeur général of the Val de Grâce military hospital. The Colonel wants Chastenet to warn the incoming Prime Minister, Philippe Pétain, that there is an active spy in the French war ministry and that Pétain’s  own ring of advisors includes at least one Nazi sympathizer. In flashbacks to 1940, the story of Marius Michel unfolds as he attempts to track down the traitor, whose passing of military secrets surely contributed to the swift and ignominious defeat of the French by the Germans. Working undercover in occupied Paris, Michel discovers a puzzling connection to the high fashion house Ariège, and its treasonous owner, Louis Loriot.  Michel is convinced that the recent deaths of Ariège employees were anything but accidental, and he knows his own life is in peril.

Since their last conversation about how best to proceed, the Colonel explained to Michel, he had come up with a way to exploit Renaudel, a way partly inspired by Michel’s own earlier suggestion of a planted document. While they did have enough circumstantial evidence to support shifting him to an office where he could do no harm, they had no concrete proof of his treason, certainly not enough to arrest him. Shifting him, as the Colonel had originally planned, would have had the singular advantage of depriving the Germans of further leaks, but the disadvantage of letting Renaudel go more or less unpunished — thereby leaving the defence ministry forever ignorant of how top-secret information was spirited away to the Germans once it arrived in the House of Ariège. A full-scale raid on the fashion house was out of the question. Such a step would be politically embarrassing to the government — to say nothing of its counterintelligence service — would surely provoke Monsieur Loriot to defend his legitimate enterprise through the courts, and would almost certainly take a huge amount of time to inspect every physical nook and cranny, every drawing, every fabric, every piece of equipment. What they needed was a secret of their own creation — Michel’s idea — one that might prove to be traceable from beginning to end, right through the system, much like the radium cocktails used for x-raying.

“Here’s the cocktail,” the Colonel said, waving the document from the Quai d’Orsay. “It’s a fake, and we’re going to plant it on Renaudel.”