‘Nice double-tap,’ Ben commented. ‘Anyone would think I trained you.’
‘Smartass.’
Jafari stood for a moment, staring in dismay at the corpses of his associates. Then he started to back away, but Roth grabbed him by the neck and dragged him down to his knees, grinding the fat silencer tube of his weapon into Jafari’s neck. ‘Now it’s your turn, A-hole.’
Ben wasn’t having that. He slapped down Roth’s gun. ‘No. We need him.’
‘He has it coming.’
‘We all have it coming,’ Ben said. ‘But it’s not time for him to find Paradise just yet.’ He asked Jafari, ‘How close are we to where they’re keeping the Segal woman?’
‘Close,’ Jafari mumbled, sweating.
‘Lead us to her,’ Ben said. ‘Any more tricks, I’ll castrate you myself.’
‘And then we’ll get to work on you,’ Roth growled.
Before moving on, they quickly relieved the dead men of their weapons, unloaded the two Kalashnikov magazines and dumped the loose ammo down a ventilator shaft. Depriving the enemy of useful ordnance was a top rule of Special Forces combat operations.
Jafari muttered, ‘This way,’ pointing nervously into the doorway from which the two terrorists had appeared. Ben shoved him through it and they followed him down an even narrower corridor, which led through a crumbly stone archway into the wider open space of a maintenance bay where two ancient trains stood partially dismantled on a section of track that probably hadn’t been used since before the outbreak of World War II. Only the scuffed tracks of footprints on the dusty concrete walkway by the tracks gave away that anyone had been down here in decades.
Jafari stopped at a grimy, riveted steel door inset into the wall of the maintenance bay. His eyes bulged nervously as he threw a look back at Ben and Roth, signalling ‘This is it. What do I do?’
Ben set his MP5’s fire selector to fully auto and heard the small click as Roth did the same. Then Ben took his left hand off his gun, made a fist in the air and mimicked Knock, knock, knock.
Jafari hesitated, swallowed hard and then knocked three times.
Chapter 41
Jafari’s three knocks made a hollow clang on the steel door that echoed off the tunnel walls.
A gruff voice from behind the door called in Arabic, ‘Who’s there?’
Jafari called back hoarsely, ‘Hasan Jafari. Nazim sent me to check on the hostage.’
Silence from behind the door. It was an anxious moment. If the men inside became suspicious and called Nazim to check, assuming they had any phone reception down here, then the jig was up. It could spell disaster for the hostage, if indeed she was still in one piece. Worse, Ben knew that he and Roth could easily become trapped inside the tunnels as Nazim mobilised his troops to block their escape routes. Roth’s face, half-lit in the murky glow of a wall lamp, showed that he was thinking the same grim thoughts.
The silence dragged on for three long, painful seconds. Then the gruff voice from behind the steel door said in Arabic, ‘Okay,’ and Ben felt the relief melt through him.
Next came the grinding sound of a long, heavy deadbolt being drawn open from inside the door. The rusty hinges squealed as the door opened a crack, and a bearded face peeked out. Recognising the figure of Jafari standing there, the guy pushed the door open the rest of the way. Brighter light shone out from inside, silhouetting the outline of a large, burly man with another stubby Kalashnikov hanging across his chest.
Now was the time to move, and Ben had to move fast. He was on Jafari in two long strides and thrust him violently through the doorway, sending him crashing into the burly guy and headbutting him under the chin. The burly guy sprawled on his back with Jafari on top of him, both of them stunned by the impact. With the doorway clear, Ben and Roth poured through it like liquid, guns raised and marking their targets as they entered.
The holding cell was some kind of storeroom or workshop, with a bare concrete floor and metal shelving stacked ceiling-high with dusty crates and boxes, tools and bric-a-brac. It had an old wooden table at its centre, and some chairs. Sitting on one of them, blindfolded, bound and gagged, barefoot and wearing the nightdress she’d had on when they snatched her from her home, was the woman whose photo Ben had seen on Julien Segal’s office desk. She looked thin and frail and rigid with terror. Ben only gave her the briefest glance, because he had more immediately pressing matters to deal with first. Three of them, including the burly guy on the floor.
The room exploded with the sound of gunfire. Two of the startled guards managed to snatch up their weapons and get off a couple of wild shots before the twinned chatter of the silenced MP5s, like the sound of ripping cardboard, hosed them down with nine-millimetre bullets and sent them spinning off their feet. One of them cannoned against a wall and slid down it with his chin on his chest, leaving an oily smear of blood. Another crashed wildly backwards into the shelving and brought down an avalanche of tools and boxes as he slithered dead to the concrete. The execution was swift and ruthless. Last to die was the burly guy on the floor, who recovered enough from his shock to snatch a pistol from his belt and swing it halfway towards Roth before Ben shot him in the head.
After the violence came a sudden stillness, the only sounds in the room the frightened whimper of the hostage and the tinkle of a spent cartridge case rolling across the floor. Smoke drifted in the light. Ben looked at Roth and nodded. Roth nodded back with a wink. ‘Thanks, buddy.’
Jafari was still lying on the floor, sprawled flat next to the body of the burly guy. Roth grunted, ‘On your feet, scumbag,’ and kicked him in the ribs. When there was no response, Roth crouched down and rolled Jafari over. One of the wild shots fired by his terrorist cronies had gone through his left eye.
‘Whoops. Looks like he made it to Paradise after all,’ Roth said.
Meanwhile Ben had made his weapon safe and gone over to the woman tied in the chair. She was trembling, and flinched at his touch as he gently removed her blindfold, then the gag. He said, ‘Madame Segal?’
She blinked in the light and stared at him with fear-crazed, bloodshot eyes. Her hair was all awry and the nightdress was torn at the shoulder from her struggle against her kidnappers. Tendons stood out on her neck like cords. Her voice was croaky and full of emotion as she replied, ‘I-I’m Margot Segal. Where am I? Oh God, I thought they were going to kill me.’
‘Nobody’s going to hurt you now. You’re safe.’
‘W-who are you? Are you the police?’
Ben hesitated a moment before replying. He’d been thinking about this for some time. Making a snap decision he flashed his fake ID. ‘Inspector Jacques Dardenne, special antiterrorist division. This is my colleague, Mike Anderson, of the FBI Joint Task Force.’
‘Enchanté, Madame,’ Roth said graciously. His French accent was as bad as his acting.
There was a long carving knife on the table. Ben didn’t want to imagine what the kidnappers had been planning on using it for in the event that they decided to murder her. Beheading was the method most beloved by these fanatics. He picked it up to slice the plastic cable ties holding her ankles and wrists. She gasped as her hands were cut free, and began rubbing her chafed wrists.
‘Are you hurt? Did they harm you in any way?’
She shook her head. Trying not to look at the dead men and the blood everywhere. ‘They didn’t do anything to me, but my feet are hurting. They made me walk such a long way. And I’m so cold and hungry. They didn’t give me a single thing to eat this whole time.’
Ben examined her feet. They were dirty and the soles were cut and abraded from the long march at gunpoint through the tunnels. The bastards must have smuggled her inside the République Métro station in the dead of night when nobody was around. He stripped off his jacket and wrapped it over her bare shoulders. She shivered and pulled it tight around herself.
One of the dead guards wasn’t too large a man, with smallish feet that looked about the same size as Margot Segal’s. He was wearing
soft, cushiony Nikes that he wouldn’t be needing any more, so Ben pulled them off him and knelt down to gently slide each in turn onto her feet. It was the best he could do for her for now.
She winced a little as he eased the shoes on. ‘You don’t know how happy I am to see you. Are the other officers coming too?’
‘We’re on an undercover operation,’ Ben said. ‘Top secret. You were kidnapped by members of a terror organisation who may have infiltrated the government and police. That’s why it’s just him and me, for the moment. We can’t afford to take any risks with your safety. Understand?’
‘Oh, my goodness.’ She looked fazed, but seemed to believe him.
‘We need to take you into protective custody. Can you walk?’
‘I’ll try. I’m a little weak. Where’s my husband? Where’s Julien? Is he all right?’
‘We need to discuss that,’ Ben said. ‘But let’s get you out of here first.’ He took her arm and supported her as she stood shakily up out of the chair. ‘I’ve got you. You’ll soon be fine.’
Roth stepped over Jafari’s corpse as though it were a garbage sack and headed out of the cell door, checking left and right. ‘We’re clear.’
‘It’s time to go, Madame Segal.’ Ben helped her thread a path through the dead bodies and out through the doorway after Roth.
‘It’s a long way back, bud,’ Roth said. ‘She gonna be okay?’
‘I’ll carry her if I have to. Let’s get moving.’
Chapter 42
It was indeed a long way back, and Ben did have to carry her. Exhausted after her ordeal, Margot Segal was soon asleep in his arms. Roth held onto both MP5s and walked ahead as they slowly retraced their steps. But with their guide now dead, tracing their way in reverse through the maze of tunnels and passages and doorways was a confusing business. After more than twenty minutes of progress, Roth halted in a dark passage that suddenly looked unfamiliar and said, ‘Shit. I think I led us through the wrong door back a ways. This whole place all looks the same. Damn that asshole Jafari for getting in the way of a bullet.’
‘That’s a nice way of saying you’ve got us lost,’ Ben said.
‘Hey, put it on me, why don’t you?’
‘You’re the point man, Captain. I have my arms full.’ Which Ben did, literally. Margot Segal might have been slightly built, but she was becoming a dead weight. His wounds were hurting him again.
They doubled back and tried what Roth initially thought was the correct doorway. Except it wasn’t. But the wrong turning had led to an important chance discovery.
‘Well, well,’ Roth muttered.
Back in the day, the large brick-built space in which they now found themselves might have been a power substation room, judging by the assortment of clunky old obsolete electrical equipment that had been mostly ripped out and piled to one side as junk.
Much more recently, it had served as something very different. Modern neon striplights had been crudely rigged up to the prehistoric wiring system, brightly illuminating the row of ten heavy-duty metal work benches that were arranged along its entire length. Six of the benches were bare, while the remaining four were covered with crisp new parcel-sized cardboard boxes printed with a company name, ETZ INTERNATIONAL, some of them sealed with packaging tape and others cut open.
‘No prizes for guessing who put this little lot here,’ Roth said. ‘It ain’t the public transport authority, and that’s for sure.’
Curious, Ben rested Madame Segal in a corner, made sure she was comfortable, then joined Roth in examining the contents of the opened boxes.
‘Food baggies,’ Roth muttered. ‘For what? Packing sandwiches?’
Ben popped open one of the sealed boxes. Inside were tightly-rolled cylinders of brick-sized, food-grade plastic bags like the ones Roth had found. The box easily weighed ten kilograms, which amounted to several thousand empty bags packed up inside. He checked two others and found the exact same contents there as well. A fourth box contained dozens of bobbins of sealing wire, pliers, tape and surgical rubber gloves and facemasks. A fifth was packed full of brand new digital weighing scales, still in their factory wrapping. Roth dug inside another and held up a plastic scoop and a funnel for Ben to see.
‘Whatever they’re doing with all this stuff,’ Ben said, ‘it’s no cottage industry. All these empty benches were put here for a reason. There’s enough material here to bag up at least fifty thousand packages, or more. Question is, of what?’
‘It’s a goddamn drug processing lab, is what it is,’ Roth said. ‘Got themselves a nice little production line set up, smack bang under the middle of Paris.’
‘But without any drugs.’
‘Let’s find out.’
They checked every single box, and found no trace of illicit substances inside them or anywhere else. Roth studied the business name and logo on the packaging. ‘ETZ International. No address, no web URL. Is that some kind of shell corporation, or what?’
‘Remember Jafari mentioned some kind of grand plan he didn’t seem to know much about?’ Ben said. ‘This has got to be it.’
‘So what’s the deal? Heroin? Cocaine?’
‘You know as well as I do that’s one of the ways terrorists have been funding themselves for decades.’
‘Three billion dollars a year from the opium harvests of Afghanistan alone,’ Roth agreed. ‘Until our government clamped down on the fuckers so hard we choked off most of their supply. Now if they so much as bend over to blow out a fart or pick a poppy, the CIA knows about it.’
‘Then they’re getting it from somewhere else,’ Ben said. ‘And they mean business, obviously.’
Roth spread his arms wide. ‘So where’s the merchandise? This place is as clean as an anal retentive’s butthole.’
‘They’re waiting for it,’ Ben said. ‘The shipment coming in from Tripoli. That could be what this was about, all along. It could be what Romy overheard Segal and Nazim al-Kassar talking about. It could be the reason they killed her.’
Roth lowered his voice so that Margot Segal wouldn’t hear. ‘If the shipment is drugs, what’s our guy Segal’s part in it? Why involve a freakin’ antiquities expert in a major narcotics smuggling operation?’
‘Good question. From what Françoise Schell told me, I thought Segal was helping Nazim trade in stolen historical relics. If it’s really all about drugs, I can’t understand how the two relate.’
Roth jerked a discreet thumb back over his shoulder in Margot Segal’s direction. ‘You think she knows?’
‘I don’t believe she’s got the smallest clue what he’s involved in. But I mean to find out.’
‘I got another good question for you,’ Roth said. ‘How in hell did they manage to get all this stuff down here in the first place? Not to mention the container-load or two of dope they’re apparently expecting to get their hands on any day now. Don’t tell me they’re fixing to lug it all through the tunnels. There’s got to be another way in, right? One that our friend Jafari didn’t know about. Dollars to doughnuts the morons guarding the lady didn’t know about it either. Operational security. You don’t trust footsoldiers with information above their pay grade.’
Ben knew that Roth had to be right.
And that was when he saw the leaf.
Chapter 43
Autumn in Paris. The stuff of romance. The explosive reds and golds of the capital’s half-million trees at this special time of year had inspired lovers, dreamers and poets going back centuries. Songs had been written and movies made about it. To go strolling beneath the orange-hued canopies of the Tuileries Garden or wander the paths of the Parc Monceau with the crisp crunch of the magical golden carpet underfoot was to drink in the quintessential flavour of the City of Light. From October through November, the autumn leaves were everywhere. Though pretty much the last place one might have expected to find any was sixty metres below ground, in the deep dark recesses where the sun never shone, the rain never fell and nothing grew except mould, mildew and rodent p
opulations.
The single dead leaf was lying on the floor a few steps from where Ben was standing. It was reddish-brown and curled up and brittle-looking. Just one out of countless millions, but the sight of it in such an incongruous setting made him stare. He walked over to it and picked it up, inspecting it between finger and thumb. Odd.
He looked around him and saw where it had come from. A few more steps away, hidden in the shadows away from the glow of the overhead neons, was another door. He could see a dim strip of light shining from the inch-wide gap below it. A couple more leaves were trapped in the gap, brown and curled just like the one he was holding.
‘What’s up?’ Roth said. Ben made no reply. He walked over to the door and tried the handle. It was locked. He crouched down beside it and picked up one of the other leaves, and felt the gentle breath of a draught against his fingers.
‘There’s something behind this door,’ he said.
It took both of them to shoulder it open with a crack of splintering wood. They stepped through the doorway into a concrete space some ten feet square, and for the first time in nearly two hours tasted fresh, cool air. The floor was covered in leaves.
Ben craned his neck upwards as another dead leaf spiralled down like a snowflake to meet him. High above, through the iron grid where the ventilation shaft opened up at street level, he could see stars twinkling. A metal ladder with safety hoops ran part-way up the wall to a grille platform, then another, and a third section extended all the way to the top. Alongside the ladder was a cable pulley system with an electric hoist for lifting equipment up and down the shaft inside a steel cage.
‘There’s your other way in,’ he said to Roth. ‘And our way out.’
‘Well, I’ll be damned. Those wily sons of bitches.’
The hoist system might have looked ancient and ropey, but it was a hell of a lot preferable to trekking all the way back through the tunnels. The big red Bakelite switch on the cage’s rusty old control box still worked fine. Ben fetched Margot Segal from the inner room, and moments later the three of them were riding up the shaft as the cables creaked and the pulleys whirred. The hoist came to a juddering halt at the top landing, just a few ladder rungs below street level. They breathed in the fresh breeze from the ventilation grid, and could hear the sound of occasional passing traffic. Nearly four in the morning, Paris was at its quietest, oblivious of the battles that had been taking place below ground that night.
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