By September 1785, the center of gravity of the Ghost Cell shifted westward. Paris had served its purpose — a nest where theory became machinery, where accounts were coded and forged under candlelight in Versailles. But now the game moved to its true board: London, the throbbing heart of the British Empire, where every policy, every shipment, and every colonial dream began as an entry in some clerk's ledger.
The man known only as "051" became the new axis of the operation. The name that appeared on his letters was Henri Deleval, a Belgian wine merchant of supposed Walloon origin, with impeccable references and a taste for discretion. In truth, he was a former smuggler turned operative, molded by years of illegal crossings through fog and gunfire. His French accent was faint enough to pass for continental, his manners just refined enough for City gentlemen who distrusted ostentation.
He rented modest quarters on Greek Street, Soho, under a lease managed by a Danish broker. The office above a small coffee house served as his "trading bureau." To the casual observer, he was simply another foreign merchant seeking to profit from Britain's expanding maritime ventures. To the initiated, it was the new nerve center of Opération Nid de Coucou.
Every morning, he played his role flawlessly: browsing newspapers in the Lloyd's Coffee House, exchanging pleasantries with merchants, feigning interest in ship tonnage and exchange rates. Behind the façade, each handshake and each overheard rumor was fed into a quiet network that stretched back across the Channel to Versailles. From this modest foothold, L'Ombre de Versailles — as the French referred to the London cell — began to breathe.
Meanwhile, Henri Leblanc and Lestrac, posing as negotiators for a continental manufacturer of naval hardware, made brief and calculated visits. They avoided permanence, preferring the rhythm of invisibility — a day here, two nights there — always using new lodgings, new names, and always returning with coded notes to be routed through Geneva.
Their goal was simple yet labyrinthine: to infiltrate the administrative arteries responsible for the grand project whispered across the corridors of Whitehall — the establishment of a penal colony in New South Wales, a distant land at the edge of the world, meant to rid Britain of its surplus convicts. The Ghost Cell would never need to fire a musket or sink a ship. Instead, they would poison the empire's bloodstream at its source — the bureaucracy itself.
In early October, 051 assembled his London circle — three men and one woman, each drawn from different strata of the city's underbelly. There was Thomas "Black Jack" Avery, a dockside agent with access to ship manifests and dockmasters' schedules; William Hargreaves, a clerk in a counting house who sold information for brandy; Sarah Kellet, a widow who ran a respectable inn but whose backrooms served as listening posts; and Elias North, a compositor at a Fleet Street press who could replicate official seals with terrifying accuracy.
Together, they became the Mirror Network, reflecting the movements of London's institutions into French shadows. They were never told of Versailles, never of the Dauphin, never even of one another's true allegiances. Only 051 held the entire map in his mind.
He had learned long ago that conspiracies do not survive on trust, only on compartmentalization.
Each week, he gathered intelligence in fragments — a shipment schedule from Avery, a ledger entry from Hargreaves, a list of naval supply bidders from North. When assembled, they painted a living picture of British colonial logistics. From these traces, patterns emerged, and from patterns, the Ghost Cell identified their next targets.
The term appeared first in a coded dispatch from Lestrac to Versailles: "The Silver Wall is the key to the gate of the South."
It referred not to a fortification, but to a barrier of men — clerks, secretaries, assistants — whose control over paperwork made them more powerful than admirals.
Through discreet observation, 051 and Leblanc isolated two such keystones.
Jeremy Walsh, fifty-eight, principal secretary of the Subcommittee on Naval Provisions at the Admiralty. A man worn thin by decades of monotony. His life was a ritual of ink and silence. He lived alone in a brick townhouse near St. James's Square, where his only company was a yellowed copy of The Spectator and a dusty violin he no longer played. He was neither corrupt nor virtuous, merely tired. That fatigue was a door waiting to be opened.
The second was Edgar Thorne, twenty-nine, clerk to the Home Office's logistical bureau. Young, ambitious, and drowning in debts from gaming tables and the illusion of gentility. His charm was his curse — too quick to smile, too eager to impress, always chasing an image of success that his salary could not sustain. The perfect vessel for subtle manipulation.
Together, they formed the Silver Wall — one blocking information through routine, the other channeling it through carelessness. If both could be turned, the Ghost Cell would have a direct artery into Britain's colonial machinery.