“Michel, Michel, tut tut. You are supposed to destroy this as soon as you have memorized it.” Without ceremony, he then twisted his left wrist violently and snapped the pilot’s neck, killing him instantly. But he did not let go of the man just yet. After slipping the sheet of paper into his own pocket, he opened the pilot’s tall locker and jammed the man’s limp body into it. It was a squeeze, and he felt a few more of the dead pilot’s bones break as he thrust his body in there. But soon he was closing and locking the tall thin door and turning to the other dead man lying on the floor.

“Away we go, Etienne.” Jean-Paul said, hefting the still warm body of the copilot up and opening the dead man’s locker. Unceremoniously, Etienne was wedged into his proxy coffin as well.

* * *

It had been a strange four months for Dassault Rafale pilot trainee Serge Latral. Not long ago he had been a happy, hopeful inductee in the French Armee de l’Air, on track to join the prestigious Rafale Attack Group. He had worked hard. He and his young wife had sacrificed a lot. But a few months into his training he had met an attractive, well-dressed executive in a bar, exactly his type, and the beautiful man had attempted to seduce Serge. Tempted after three years of monogamy, the drink had broken through to his vigorously suppressed bisexual urges. The next morning had been one of regret and worry. The beautiful man was nowhere to be found, and Serge had snuck from the anonymous hotel room.

All had seemed well, but it was not long before another, older man approached him from the Direction du Renseignement Militaire, the secretive French military intelligence service. He carried photos of the fateful night and threatened to release them to Serge’s wife and his military superiors, ending the man’s hopes of moving forward in the career he had dreamed of for so long. It was not that the French military was biased against homosexuality; long before such ridiculous policies as ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ the French military had taken up the stance of France’s population as a whole: your private life should be just that. But having a given proclivity revealed once you were already a powerful person was very different to having a reputation hanging over you when you were trying to break into those higher ranks, and such a revelation would have damned Serge in the service as much as it would have in his home.

But the French spy had not been there to crush Serge’s ambitions. He was there at the bequest of a certain French foreign minister to enlist young Serge for an important job. He was needed to shadow another recruit in the Dassault Rafale training program … that is, if he wanted to stay in the program at all.