by Alex Archer
Self-consciously, Annja turned to Edmund. He was smiling, too. “This is magic to me. Tracking something down through history, finding stories that were thought forgotten. This is what I live for.”
“I see that.” Edmund glanced back at the image projected through the dragon’s mouth. “Do you think it’s still there?”
“I don’t know. I hope so. We’ll see soon enough.”
37
Sixteen hours later, jet-lagged this trip, Annja got out of the SUV in an alley not far from the public entrances to the catacombs. She wore black and wore a black watch cap to keep her hair out of sight.
Similarly dressed, Fiona walked at her side. Edmund brought up the rear but did so reluctantly.
They’d landed in Paris at 7:00 p.m. and decided to wait till after midnight to begin their search of the catacombs. Georges had equipped them with urban exploration gear—primarily flashlights, gloves and durable clothing—and small-arms weapons.
So far, there had been no news about Jean-Baptiste Laframboise.
Annja led the way down the narrow alley and flicked her flashlight beam around. Cats and rodents exploded out of the shadows and disappeared. The pervasive smell of rot formed a thick miasma in the alley, pouring off the garbage bins.
Edmund flicked his beam around, as well. “What are you looking for?”
“Markings on the wall. They’ll show us the way into the catacombs.”
“I thought we were going to enter through Place Denfert-Rochereau.”
“It’s locked up this time of night, and we’re going to be wandering off the tourist routes. Exploring the catacombs on your own isn’t legal. If we get caught, we’ll be arrested by the catacombs police, the cataflics.”
“Great. Probably not a good idea to explore at night, either.”
Fiona patted Edmund on the shoulder. “During high noon, the catacombs will still be dark, Professor.”
“Still…I’d feel better if we were underground during the day.”
Annja spotted the markings she was looking for in a space behind a bakery. Urban explorers were obsessed with the vast underground and had developed symbols to help their fellow explorers. Annja had been down in the catacombs before and was acquainted with some of it, but she’d spent some time on Skype with a few people she’d explored with before to bring her up to date. They’d given her this location.
There wasn’t much room behind the bakery, but a manhole cover gleamed under her flashlight beam. She checked around and found a brick with more markings. She removed the brick and took out a crowbar that fit into the manhole slot. Working carefully, she pulled the manhole up and placed the heavy cover aside.
“Those markings told you the crowbar would be there?” Edmund held the flashlight on the wall as Annja returned the tool and replaced the brick.
“Yes. They’re left there by cataphiles.” Annja aimed her flashlight beam down into the manhole. “Urban explorers whose focus is the catacombs.”
“How do you know about them?”
Annja grinned up at Edmund as she climbed into the manhole. “This isn’t my first trip down here.”
Annja shifted her flashlight, gripped the iron rungs mounted on the wall and started down into the waiting darkness. Climbing into the catacombs was frightening, but she relished the adrenaline spike.
* * *
JEAN-BAPTISTE LAFRAMBOISE knelt in the shadows across from the alley where Annja Creed and her companions descended into the underground labyrinth. He watched them through the lenses of night-vision binoculars. Campra, in black Kevlar hung with weapons, knelt next to him.
“Have you ever been in the catacombs before, Gilbert?”
Campra shifted slightly. “No.”
“I don’t care for it very much. I may be a touch more claustrophobic than I care to admit.”
“I’ve been underground before,” Campra said in a monotone. “Out in Africa and the Middle East, a lot of people use catacombs for defense, storage, shelter from the heat…and to bury their dead.”
Laframboise checked his watch after the professor was the last to disappear. Someone reached back up and replaced the cover. “We’ll give them a five-minute head start.”
“They can cover quite a distance in five minutes. They’ve already been to Shanghai and back in the past twenty-four hours.”
That was true. In fact, they’d gotten lucky catching Annja Creed and her companions coming back into the country. Laframboise’s people had been watching for the group to try to leave Paris, not return.
Campra shifted again. “Do you think Creed has solved the riddle of that lantern?”
“Why go down into the catacombs otherwise?” Laframboise glanced over his shoulder at the man. “Are you certain your device will work underground?”
“I’ve used the tracking chips under similar circumstances.” Campra held up the small computer-tablet-size device. “As long as we stay within a quarter klick of our target, I can find them.”
When they’d first captured Professor Edmund Beswick, Campra had insisted on injecting the man with a subcutaneous RFID tracking chip in the event that he escaped. The insertion wound hadn’t been any more noticeable than any of the other damage the man had suffered in London.
Laframboise checked his watch again. “All right. Let’s go.” He led the way across the street. Campra and the other men followed after him. He was excited about the thought of learning what secrets the lantern hid, what the hope was that Magdelaine de Brosses had talked about, but he kept remembering how the fortune-teller had promised him that the lantern would be his death.
But his greed drew him on.
* * *
AS ALWAYS, THE ORDERLY STACKS of corpses on either side of the catacombs inspired Annja with dread and awe. She played her flashlight beam over the wall of yellowed bones. Leg and arm bones lay neatly stacked. Skulls with missing teeth and missing lower jaws sat on top of the walls or were interspersed among the other bones. Given the neat order to the bones, it was almost possible to forget that the bones had at one time belonged to six million people. They seemed like something artificial, like a movie set.
“Oh, my,” Edmund said softly into the emptiness.
Annja turned her beam onto the wall nearest Edmund, deliberately not shining the light on him. “Are you okay?”
“I will be. This is all…just a bit much.”
“On several levels. On one hand, these are the remains of a lot of people. On the other, a lot of work went into bringing them here.” Annja started forward, her voice echoing eerily around them. “Legend has it the priests worked at night so no one would see them disinterring and transferring the dead. The priests supposedly sang the burial service while transporting the bones.” She smiled at Edmund’s discomfiture. “Must have been a sight.”
“Okay, that’s enough.” Fiona stepped between them. “After everything I’ve seen, I don’t blanch easily, but I’ve only been down here once before, and I promised myself I’d never come again.”
Annja grinned and continued down the tunnel. She had the map in her head. During the flight back from Shanghai, she’d studied what she knew of the catacombs and what she could pull up on the internet and through various urban-explorer sites. Some of the people she’d been in contact with had been very helpful.
Certain parts of the map Anton Dutilleaux had left on the lenses weren’t on anyone’s maps, though. That had been expected. There were a lot of areas in the catacombs that were still being discovered—rediscovered.
“Were these tunnels always under Paris?” Edmund flicked his light around the wall of bones nearest him. “Some kind of natural system?”
“No. This is where the stone was quarried that was used to build the city. The construction crews found natural veins of gypsum and plaster.” Annja kept moving forward, halted at an intersection and chose the left fork. The dark pressed in at her, barely kept at bay by the flashlight.
“Why did they dig under the city?”
“The mines were dug in the fourteenth century. Most of them at the time were open-air pits that allowed the workers to haul rock up out of the earth. But the stratification was deep. It made more sense to dig into the side of a hill and empty out all the rock through an underground mine. For the next five hundred years, Paris kept growing, until it finally grew over the mines.”
“It’s a wonder the tunnels didn’t collapse.”
“They did.” Annja turned left at the next turn. Her flashlight beam skated over a wall covered with graffiti, probably kids who came down into the catacombs on a dare, judging by the content. “Sometimes they still do. Erosion is a problem.”
“Lovely thought.” Edmund’s voice was tight.
“Sometimes whole buildings have dropped into the mines.”
“We climbed down, what? Forty, fifty feet?”
“At least. But there hasn’t been a cave-in for a long time.”
“So once they finished taking all the stone out, the city administrators decided that it would be easier to transfer skeletons here to reclaim the land as the city grew?”
“Reclaiming the land was only part of it. Paris, like London, had grown fast. Buildings sprang up almost overnight. The growing population also aged. Bodies had to go somewhere. While it’s true that the graveyards filled up quickly, and funerals were using the same casket over and over again, space wasn’t the most important issue. Buried bodies were decomposing, and the various body matters were returning to the soil. Paris depended heavily on well water. The water table is quite close to the surface. The upside was that wells were easy to dig. However, the downside was that the water table often flowed through the cemeteries.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Annja saw Edmund flinch.
“The resulting sickness from the bad water triggered the removal of the bodies.” Annja couldn’t help smiling. “I guess that kind of lends a whole new meaning to urban decay.”
Edmund sighed. “All right, I am grossed out quite enough, thank you.” He paused. “I don’t know why anyone would want to come down here.”
“Same reason Anton Dutilleaux drew crowds down to watch his phantasmagoria. For the atmosphere. And the illegality of the adventure.” Annja hesitated for just a moment at the next intersection and checked her sat-phone. She no longer had a signal, but she’d uploaded maps into the device’s memory. “One of the caverns down here was even set up as a movie theater.”
“You’re not serious.”
“I am. The police discovered it in 2004. The operation was set up by La Mexicaine De Perforation, the Mexican Consolidated Drilling Authority. It’s just another name for a group of cataphiles, a splinter off the UX.”
“What’s that?”
“Urban Experiment. La Mexicaine De Perforation is dedicated to delivering clandestine artistic events. They had a movie screen, a bar and a kitchen down here.”
Annja continued. “After the police came back for a more in-depth investigation, all the equipment had vanished.”
“Vanished.”
“Like magic. There were whispers that the whole thing was run by ghosts. Rumors get out of hand pretty quickly.”
Fiona snorted. “Children. All for the momentary thrill of being afraid of the dark.”
“A lot of criminals have used the place, too.” Fiona flicked her beam across a section of graffiti. “Marijuana growers, mushroom growers, any number of drug dealers…”
Edmund cleared his throat. “I suppose there’s a chance of bumping into them, too?”
Annja turned another corner and was surprised by the steep descent in front of them. The map hadn’t indicated that. She headed down thirty yards, measuring the distance by counting her strides. If it became necessary, she had a Leica DISTO D2 laser distance meter to measure spans. So far the way had been easy to follow.
A moment later, her flashlight beam revealed the calm surface of a gray-green pool of water that blocked the tunnel mouth.
38
“What’s wrong?” Edmund pressed into Annja, adding his flashlight beam to hers.
“The tunnel’s flooded ahead.” Annja moved her beam around, looking for intersecting tunnels that might offer another route.
Fiona stepped up and did the same. “The walls look solid. It doesn’t appear to be a cave-in.”
“No. Probably caused by the rising water table. Groundwater levels reroute themselves occasionally.” Annja took out her sat-phone and opened the file she had that contained the catacombs maps.
“So the adventure ends here?” Edmund stuck a foot into the water.
“Not necessarily.” Annja slipped off her backpack and set it on the stone floor. She opened it and withdrew a scuba mask and small oxygen tank. There was also a pair of swim fins. “I knew some of the tunnels in the catacombs were flooded. I thought maybe we’d encounter them. So I came prepared.”
Fiona shook her head. “Surely you’re not planning on going down there.”
“I am now.” Annja tied her hair back and pulled on the scuba mask. She took out the yellow-and-black canister of Spare Air. The small tank was a little over a foot long and about two and a half inches in diameter. She slid into a harness and attached the tank over her shoulder.
Fiona looked worried. “That can’t hold much air.”
Annja smiled. “You’ve never used one of these?”
“No.”
“They come with the equivalent of fifty-seven breaths. Three or four minutes if you space it out, and you can’t deep dive because you’ll use the air up faster. Enough for a little exploring.”
“Enough to get you into serious trouble, you mean.”
“That’s why I brought spares.” Annja reached into her backpack and took out another cylinder. She’d left her computer and cameras in the car to make room for the gear. The foray into the catacombs was about exploration, not documentation. “Georges was able to get me a half-dozen tanks. Should be more than enough to get through this.” She attached a second tank. “They transfer quickly. If the dive is longer than that, we’ll come back with proper scuba gear.”
Edmund gaped at her. “You expect to descend into those stygian depths, search for a way through that tunnel and keep track of how many breaths you take?”
“Actually, I figure if I run out of air in the first cylinder, I’ll switch over to the second and head back. Kind of keeps things simple, don’t you think?”
“I think you’re barking mad to even consider diving into that.” Edmund flushed deeply enough to be seen even by the secondhand glow from the flashlights. “No offense.”
“As I recall, I had to watch you do the whole water torture chamber thing.”
“That was staged.”
“I know what I’m doing, Edmund. If I didn’t think I could do this, I wouldn’t.”
Fiona snorted. “I don’t think you’re in any way close to a litmus test for safe precautions.”
“I can do this.” Annja strapped a long knife to her right shin, tested the grip the holster had on it and stood.
Fiona grimaced. “Before you do that, we could look around. There could be another tunnel that intersects this one past this point.”
“That would take time and we could get lost.”
“Annja, that whole tunnel could be flooded.”
“If it is, we’ll come back prepared for that.”
Fiona sighed in resignation. “Show me how to use one of those. In case I have to come after you.”
“You’ve used a scuba?”
“Yes.”
“These aren’t much different.” Annja went through the procedure, showing both of them. Then she strapped on the swim fins. “I’ll be back in minutes.” She turned and stepped into the pool.
The cold water quickly rose to her ankles, then to her knees and thighs and hips. The tunnel took a severe incline down, but she didn’t feel any debris that would suggest there had been a collapse. The flashlight was waterproof and remained on, but the viscosity of the pool dampened the beam so tha
t it only illuminated up to a few feet. She wouldn’t be able to see much underwater.
A few steps farther on, the water came up to her chin and the tunnel roof angled down to meet the pool. She filled her lungs with air, then clenched the Spare Air mouthpiece between her teeth and dove.
* * *
WITH THE NIGHT-VISION GOGGLES in place, the catacombs stood revealed in multiple shades of green to Jean-Baptiste Laframboise. The flashlights held by the two people ahead of him churned his vision with too much brightness when he rounded the corner, though, and he had to raise his goggles.
Campra was at his side, their men behind. Laframboise looked at Campra in the darkness, and the man nodded and raised his machine pistol. Moving carefully, Campra went ahead.
Laframboise trailed after the man. They wore Kevlar vests from neck to knees, and Kevlar military helmets.
In the pool of water, the flashlight Annja Creed had carried with her dimmed and grew steadily smaller.
For a moment, Laframboise wondered if they should have closed in earlier.
Then he decided letting the woman forage on had been best. Although the three people weren’t going to be able to put up much resistance, having them split up—and inattentive—was advantageous. Laframboise could capitalize on surprise, as well.
You will never see the treasure.
He forced Magdelaine’s words away and concentrated. There were riches waiting.
The woman, Fiona Pioche, must have sensed something at the last moment. Laframboise was certain Campra had made no noise, but the woman reached into her pocket and came up with a small pistol as she spun around.
Ruthlessly, Campra moved in and smashed his rifle butt in the woman’s face. She went back and down into the water, and the pistol flew from her hand.
The woman tried to get back up, but Campra pointed the rifle at her and growled, “Stay down or I’m going to kill you.”
For a moment, she looked as if she was going to lunge at him, anyway. Then she remained still. “The water’s cold. May I get out?”
Campra gestured with the rifle and directed her against the wall to the left. They took the professor into custody easily enough.