by Alex Archer
Annja walked softly, tiptoeing around bone fragments out of respect.
The tunnel continued beyond this place, and Annja had just stepped into it when she heard something—an echo? Laughter? She turned to face the bone chamber again and focused on the sound—of voices seeming to come from the skulls. She caught the gist of a conversation. About nearly getting caught on the way in here.
“Where are you?” Annja whispered. “Who are you?” She cocked her head. The voices weren’t coming from either tunnel entrance. Above her? Taking a chance it wasn’t Lawson, she yelled for help in French, English and German, repeating the cycle, then stopping and listening again.
She heard laughter, then voices again. She finally realized they were coming from a level or more higher. The skulls were acting as speakers to funnel the sound. Whoever was talking probably didn’t hear her, but she tried again, anyway.
Nothing.
“Dammit.” She shivered. It was as cold as a wine cellar down here.
Annja’s stolen flashlight died. And now it was pitch-dark.
Chapter 31
“Dammit,” Annja repeated.
She needed to get out and report the liquid nerve gas. “Hey!” she screamed. “Help!”
She dropped the useless flashlight and groped behind her, running her fingers over smooth bones and broken bones, getting momentarily tangled in a rib cage, then finding stone. She traced it—the lip of the passage that would lead who knew where. Running her hand along the wall, she tentatively moved forward. At first she stepped cautiously. Exploring the Paris underground was more dangerous than caving. So many sections had collapsed, and gaps had opened in floors leading to still deeper chambers. One misstep could send her into oblivion…and then no one would learn about the nerve gas until it was too late.
The passage narrowed, so much that Annja scraped her shoulders. She went about a dozen steps before it widened and she couldn’t touch both walls at the same time. Another chamber. “Hello?” Her voice didn’t echo back. She chose to go right, walking that way until she encountered something. Stone, then more bones. Her fingers fluttered up and down; the bones reached from floor to ceiling, feeling as if they were stacked in order, with the largest on the bottom, the skulls at the top. Some were small and fragile, including the skull of an infant.
She continued cautiously, probing ahead with her fingers and feet, finding a mound of…something on the floor and working her way around it. A crunching sound signaled that she’d walked across small bones. They stretched for a few yards, then her feet found stone again.
“Hello!” she called out. “Bonjour! Allô!”
Nothing.
“Anyone here?” A pause.
She listened and tried again.
“I need help! Au secours!”
There was no answer.
Though it was difficult to guess the passing of time, Annja was certain she’d been down here at least an hour. Her teeth continued to chatter, and she’d touched a spot of wall that had frost on it. She was undoubtedly missing other passages, but she alternated going left and right, feeling bones here and there and then nothing but stone for what felt like another hour. She tripped in a depression, picked herself up and felt large, deep scratches on the wall. Initials: JM & BR. The edges were sharp and stone dust flaked away; they’d been carved fairly recently, by cataphiles, most likely.
“Hello! Bonjour! Allô! Anyone here?”
She kicked another helmet with a broken light, a canvas sack. In frustration, she stopped and leaned against the stone.
The cold had seeped into every pore, and Annja’s toes were starting to go numb. It wasn’t in her nature to give up or give in, so she counted to nine, the number of crates filled with liquid nerve gas, and struck out again.
After another dozen yards or so, she hit a dead end. She turned around and followed the other wall back to where she’d been, finding with her feet the discarded helmet and canvas sack. She stretched her right arm out, shuffling forward until she found another wall, then worked her way along it. More carvings. She traced them and read “Jesse, be my wife.”
Annja felt a measure of relief at the evidence that someone had been here. That meant there was a way in and a way out, or at least there had been once. She just had to keep hunting.
Two hours, maybe three. She had to have been stumbling around down here at least that long. Her thoughts drifted to Roux once more and then to Rembert safely back in New York. Had he gotten to hold his grandchild yet?
Her fingers brushed against wood. A ladder! It was old, felt rickety, but it was propped against the wall and would take her to a level higher. She stepped on the first rung and then squeezed her eyes shut as a bright light pierced the darkness, coming from behind her.
Annja turned, cupped her good hand over her eyes and opened them. The person held a high-powered camping lantern in front of him. It cast a blue-white glare against the stone and turned the rivulets of water into molten silver.
“I am so glad to see you,” Annja said.
“The happiness is mine, Annja Creed. Dr. Lawton will be so pleased with me.” The speaker set the lantern down and stepped to the side.
Annja let out a groan.
It was the young woman in Lawton’s service, Sarah something or other. Her face and hands were scraped and her clothes filthy and torn. She’d apparently squeezed through the same impossible tunnel that Annja had forced herself through. So Annja had been wrong; there was one in Dr. Lawton’s company who could fit.
Sarah smiled and drew a sword from a scabbard at her waist, Tiew, once wielded by Attila the Hun. That must’ve been as hard to navigate through the narrowest tunnel as Durendal had been.
“Are you going to come back with me?” she asked.
Annja reached for her own sword, wrapping her right hand around its welcome pommel. Carefully, she lowered Durendal to the ground so she could defend herself unhampered.
“I guess that’s an answer,” Sarah said. “A bad answer. Now I’m going to have to drag your corpse back to the warehouse. Luc taught me everything I know, and if you don’t give up, I’m going to kick your sorry ass.” She made a gesture with her free hand and then stood en garde. “Dr. Lawton made me leave my gun topside, so I’ll just have to cut you up.”
Annja studied their surroundings. The ladder, on her left now, was an old one that must have belonged to a painter, spotted as it was with different colored paint. Dirt was caked on some of the rungs, and a scarf was tied to an upper one. And at the top was an opening…where she wanted to be.
The chamber she and Sarah stood in was small, and graffiti had been painted along one wall, a mix of English, French and something that looked Scandinavian. A dozen half-crushed beer cans were strewn under a quasi-Egyptian symbol—someone had tried to spray paint the Eye of Horus but had gotten it wrong.
“What are you waiting for?” Sarah asked. “Afraid? Just hand over your sword and I’ll let you leave.”
“You’d be a hero, right?” Annja said. She was using these few moments to size up Sarah. The girl had been in the fight earlier, but with a gun. Annja didn’t have a good measure of her skill.
Sarah shook her head, her breath like mist. “The only reward I need is to be one of his paladins.”
“Christ’s disciples, Charlemagne’s peers and Lawton’s band of idiots.”
Annja’s insult worked. Sarah charged her, face red with anger and lips working.
Chapter 32
Annja parried her first blow easily. Sarah was using two hands on her weapon, putting as much power behind the swing as possible. She was pretty strong, and Annja was at a disadvantage, still injured, exhausted and able to use only one hand in the fight. But Sarah wasn’t as skilled as the other swordsmen Annja had faced. Her moves were classic but clumsy in comparison to Luc Niveau.
“You should have studied a little more,” Annja said. She deflected the next three blows and then attacked, trying unsuccessfully to disarm Sarah. The girl clearly wasn�
��t an expert, but Lawton probably figured Annja an easy target, given how injured she was. He likely thought there wasn’t any fight left in her. “Luc apparently isn’t a great instructor…or maybe you’re just a poor student, Sarah. You couldn’t win a match against a five-year-old.”
Spittle flew from the young woman’s lips and she beat her blade against Annja’s faster, with no skill behind the moves now, just anger. Annja parried each time and then traded a few blows back, always trying to knock the sword from her opponent’s fingers.
“I know what you’re doing,” Sarah sputtered. “You’re just trying to piss me off.”
Annja spun to the girl’s side, angling the flat of the blade against her waist and swinging hard. The way Sarah screamed made Annja think she might have broken a few ribs. But better that than killing her. Sarah was young and might find redemption in a prison cell in Paris.
“How about you just give up?” Annja offered. “I really don’t want to hurt you.”
“Pig!” Sarah spat. She tried to vary her swings now, shifting back and forth on her feet, trying to catch Annja off guard.
“What’s Lawton going to do with the nerve gas?” she asked, continuing to knock away Sarah’s blows. The girl was growing tired, and Annja started to press, putting her on the defensive. “What are his targets?”
“Nerve gas?”
Was it possible Sarah didn’t know about it? Maybe Lawton kept some—or all—of his paladins out of the loop.
“The nerve gas under the warehouse.” Annja evaded a few more lunges, then tried to disarm her again. “I found crates of it.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“The cleansing, you know.”
“Rouen is for Christians.” Sarah was slowing, and she tried a feint that didn’t work. “France is for Christians. It’s what Charlemagne wanted, and Dr. Lawton is going to build the City of God that Charlemagne couldn’t.”
Annja kept her talking, wearing her down, swatting at her already-injured side.
“The cleansing, Sarah. He’s going to use nerve gas to kill people. Some Christians might get caught in that. Nerve gas is dangerous.”
“Dr. Lawton didn’t say anything about nerve gas. And the voices didn’t tell me anything, either.”
“Voices?” Annja asked, lunging forward and then back. The other woman didn’t reply. Too busy trying to catch her breath and fend off Annja’s swings.
“But you know about the cleansing.”
“Sure.” She shuffled to her right. It was like a dance, but she was having trouble keeping up with Annja’s footwork. “I’ve been cleansing. Good at it. No regrets.”
“You don’t mind killing for Lawton?”
“Buddhists. They die pretty easily. Scientologists. Muslims—”
“All that blood on your hands, Sarah.”
“Even got a transgender. No worries, it all washes off.”
Annja had had enough. She obviously wasn’t going to get more information out of Sarah this way, and maybe the girl really didn’t know anything about the nerve gas. But she did know where the warehouse was. Annja would get that out of her, climb the ladder, make her way out of the tunnels and find the police.
“It never washes off, Sarah. The blood never washes off.” She could still see the faces of everyone she’d killed and the image of Gaetan falling off the roof.
“It washes off me!” Sarah gritted her teeth, and the muscles in her arms bunched beneath her thin shirt. She stepped back and swept the sword forward, connecting hard with Annja’s blade. She swung again, her breath ragged and her shoulders heaving. Another failed feint, another missed swing, and then she jumped back, dropped the sword and pulled a SIG Sauer from the back of her waistband. She leveled it at Annja.
Panting, she walked backward until she was even with the lantern. “Now, I’d ask you nicely to drop the sword, but you made it abundantly clear that isn’t going to happen. Your blood will wash off just fine.”
Sarah pulled the trigger. Annja leaped and the bullet hit the wall behind her. She dropped and somersaulted toward the girl, daggers of hot pain shooting through her broken arm and down her back. Jumping up, she swung her sword at the gun. But Sarah had shifted and fired again, the bullet whizzing by Annja’s head and hitting stone. A third shot and Annja felt her hair move and pain tear at her temple. The bullet had grazed her.
She adjusted her grip on the sword, pulled back and swung again, slicing open her opponent’s stomach. The girl’s look of horror lasted only a heartbeat, and then she fell dead.
Annja stood over her. “Didn’t leave me a choice.” She couldn’t risk dueling with Sarah any longer. The nerve gas had to be reported.
She stared at the body for a few moments, catching her breath. Dismissing her sword, she retrieved the one Sarah had dropped. She managed to wedge Tiew under her sword belt and did the same with Durendal. Picking up the lantern with her good hand, Annja returned to the ladder and looked up. She held the lantern handle in her teeth, gripped the first rung and started to climb.
The tunnel above was so low she had to hunch over and waddle down its length. She went left at the first intersection, following a trail of food wrappers, an unfortunate sign that people had been this way. Fossils dotted the floor on one side of the passage, while the other was slick mud. The lantern, back in her hand again, revealed a rusty pick stuck in the muddy side, and several feet later, an even rustier horseshoe. A hundred years ago, animals had labored under the streets, hauling stone. Some archaeologists believed that even the Romans brought horses down here to help them haul limestone they’d used to build arenas and bathhouses.
The air was musty now, but Annja imagined that it must have been so filled with dust in centuries past that workers would have choked on it.
Another few yards and she reached a seriously porous section, a length of wall clearly close to collapsing. She knew that very few Parisians living above realized how dicey the foundations of their city had become in places. She’d read about various collapses, one shortly before America had declared its independence from England. Houses and businesses along Avenue
Denfert-Rochereau had fallen. Years later there were more collapses, and King Louis XVI ordered crews down to shore up the quarries. They’d started dumping bones there shortly thereafter.
Work continued to this day to bolster the walls of the catacombs. The most recent collapse of note was sometime in the 1960s, when an entire Parisian neighborhood had disappeared into a big hole.
The corridor branched and Annja looked for more garbage, like a bird following bread crumbs.
She barely avoided falling into a dark hole the lantern light hadn’t penetrated. Annja caught her foot at the edge of it and tumbled, rolling to keep the lantern from breaking. Then she held it over the hole and looked down. The light didn’t stretch to the bottom; it would have been quite a drop. But there were scratch marks along the lip, hinting that somebody had ventured up it. Would have been a tight fit.
Annja picked herself up and continued to follow the passage, seeing more graffiti on the left wall but not taking the time to read it. Soon she came to a pit. It was big, and she had to press herself against the wall and inch around it, shale giving way beneath her toes as she went. Probably what was left of an old well; she saw black water, with an oily residue floating on it.
There was another chamber with bones, this one arranged like an actual crypt, more orderly and with chalk notations near some of the remains. Annja resisted the temptation to read them.
She stopped cold when her lantern revealed a body facedown in the center of the passage.
“Shoo!” The rats didn’t move away until she stamped her feet. A closer look showed him to be a young man, probably dead only a day or two, his head crushed by a rock. Murdered? There was rubble around him, and Annja glanced at the ceiling. No, part of the tunnel had collapsed on him. She’d tell the police about this, too.
There was still no way up, but she saw evidence people
had been here in a crushed cigarette pack and a discarded Coke can. The corridor widened and Annja blinked to make sure she was seeing correctly. Limestone blocks had been carefully arranged like benches, with cushions on them, a lawn chair to one side. A sleeping bag was stretched out across other blocks, with two pillows. On the wall behind was a mural, something abstract like Picasso painted in his late years, all in blues. The smell was different here. The fustiness remained, but with a hint of apples and cinnamon. She saw air fresheners spaced throughout the room.
“Home, sweet home.” There were niches in the wall, recently carved, from the look of the sharp edges. Thick candles sat in them. Another niche contained a big camping lantern. “And why couldn’t the occupant be home now?” He—or she—would know the quickest route out of here. A good sign, though, despite Annja taking issue with the underground being disturbed. She looked for more bread crumbs to follow, taking the middle of three exit tunnels from the unknown cataphile’s quarters.
The tunnel finally started to climb, branched again, and Annja trusted her instincts and picked the left one. She was rewarded more than a dozen yards later when it turned and she was struck by a horrible stench. Wastewater coursed through a channel at her feet, and to the side ran a thick pipe that probably carried water for cleaning streets, watering city properties and supplying fire hydrants.
“Yes!” Her light played on a blue-and-yellow sign that dangled from the ceiling: Rue des Rosier. She tromped through the wastewater and headed toward it. A handful of yards ahead, a ladder led up to a manhole cover. Annja knew the street ran roughly parallel to Rue Rambuteau, a large thoroughfare. She had no idea where she’d traveled, not with all the twisting, turning, doubling back, rising and falling. But she knew where she was coming out. Rue des Rosier wasn’t very long, and there was a police station nearby. “Yes. Yes. Yes.”