Description

The Chénelle Code

Book Three of The Evergreen Agency

Six months after Prague, Marta Kovács receives an anonymous package containing three Chénelle scarves with unusual pattern irregularities. Her forensic analysis reveals something extraordinary: the legendary Parisian fashion house has been encoding trafficking operations into their designs for eighty years. What begins as textile authentication becomes infiltration of the most sophisticated coordination infrastructure she’s ever encountered.

Paris Fashion Week returns, but this time Marta isn’t just investigating—she’s learning to speak the language of coordinators. To decode Chénelle’s patterns, she must understand not just the technical encoding but the philosophy behind it. She meets with faction leaders who frame exploitation as harm reduction, coordinators who genuinely believe management minimizes suffering, and architects who’ve built systems designed to outlast any single investigation.

The network is fragmenting. Three factions compete for control of Chénelle’s communication infrastructure: Group One maintains brutal traditional operations, Group Two promises harm reduction standards, and Group Three plans technological expansion at unprecedented scale. Caught between them are chaos advocates who believe the only ethical choice is complete system destruction, regardless of casualties.

Marta goes deeper than infiltration. She becomes “the coordinator”—gathering intelligence from all factions, speaking their language fluently, understanding their logic so completely that the line between investigation and complicity begins to blur. She’s offered positions, promised resources, recruited by people who recognize her capabilities and want to redirect them toward coordination rather than disruption.

With help from Léo, a pattern-cutter who stumbles onto the system through curiosity about asymmetrical designs, and guidance from the enigmatic former coordinator Madeleine Duclos, Marta races to document the network before Fashion Week forces a choice: Which faction controls the finale broadcast? Or can she break the system entirely before any faction consolidates power?

But breaking coordination infrastructure requires understanding it so deeply that understanding becomes dangerous. Marta learns their rationalizations, recognizes partial truth in their arguments, and confronts the terrifying realization that she’s becoming what she’s investigating. The psychological cost of learning coordination language is permanent transformation—and she’s already walking closer to that line than she ever imagined possible.

As arrests happen and prosecutions unfold, as Fashion Week proceeds in controlled chaos and patterns walk down runways broadcasting to audiences that now know what they mean—Marta discovers that exposing systems doesn’t break them. It just forces them to evolve. And the question that will haunt her isn’t whether she succeeded in disrupting coordination, but whether she’ll spend the rest of her career investigating networks that rebuild faster than she can dismantle them.

The Chénelle Code is a psychological thriller about the cost of understanding, the seduction of sophistication, and the permanent weight of learning languages you can never unlearn. It’s about the investigator who walked too close to becoming a coordinator—and barely pulled back in time.