Inferno

Chapter 29

Rouen, France

Danican froze: outside there were shots. Distant, then many more, closer. This city had always been a dangerous place for a royalist spy and provocateur, and in these fevered days it was even more so. The musket fire hammered into a crescendo and he mopped his brow in relief. This was only the coarse Poznan soldiery using the excuse of Napoleon’s Tilsit triumph to make riot again.

In the shadows of the garret a single candle flickered as he bent to his work, the ciphering of a desperately urgent intelligence. It was from a double renegade Irishman in Paris who had stumbled on a plot so threatening it had to be in the hands of his spymaster on the coast this very night.

It was nothing less than the invasion of Ireland and subsequently Britain. Intricately contrived, its deadly progress would start on the Elbe. Marshal Bernadotte at the head of his fifty thousand would get orders that would see him strike north across the frontier, up the Danish peninsula of Jutland, then on to occupy its main island of Sj?lland. There, he would demand the surrender of the Danish Navy, which would be employed immediately in the conveying of troops on a daring voyage around Scotland to descend out of the mists on the unprotected north of Ireland.

The genius of the plan was that this was not the true objective. While the distracted British scrambled to bring their troops north to oppose them, a force consisting of all French soldiers between Brest and Bordeaux would embark with a full regiment of United Irishmen to come to the aid of a long yearned-for rising in the south.

This stab in the back would give Bonaparte what he’d always craved: a major conflict face to face with the British – on land.

The last code groups were cast. Danican carefully burned the plaintext at the candle and folded the lethal message many times into a tiny square that he hid in a shoe.

Then he crept out into the night.