Arkhangel : A Novel (2020)

  Rue du Banquier. Shit.

  It was too tight to turn. I pulled out into the street, over the crossing that cut Gobelins, straight into the motorcycle cop who’d been on my right. SIG drawn, arm out. But my sudden move had wrong-footed him. I veered left, towards him. He fired. The round snapped across my face. As our bikes closed, I leaned out with a straight right. I caught him under the chin, into his neck. His pistol discharged again, high this time; as he toppled backwards, his Yamaha slid out from under him. I looped around him. His stray shot had shattered a pharmacy window. Passers-by lay flattened on the street.

  And then the rev-roar of the second police bike coming at me from the south-east. I’d not seen him pass me. As I doubled back on myself to leave him behind me, the plainclothes rider pulled up ahead. I stopped. He stopped. Blue jeans, black biker’s jacket, mirrored full-face visor. Five-eleven, maybe, and wiry with it. I watched his hands. Tactical Kevlar gloves. Behind, the police Yamaha closed in. I flattened myself against the tank, right hand opening up the revs, left hand on the clutch lever. As I ducked down, I looked around. The motorcycle cop was on me, SIG up. I was stuck there on the street, sandwiched between two would-be killers. I was finished.

  I stared into the cop’s eyes and read the rapt concentration etched across his face that was keeping pistol and pistons moving together. I blinked and saw for a fraction of a second Rachel staring out of the void. And then the policeman’s face folded in on itself, distorting surprise into disgust. His nose, cheek, eye vanished into an eruption of thick, meaty gore as the round ricocheted inside his skull, trapped by his helmet. I hugged the Yamaha hard and snatched the clutch. The BMW rider’s arm swung down. The tip of his suppressed pistol arced across me, but there was no second shot. I pressed on, looking over my left shoulder just long enough to see the policeman I’d punched out spin sideways from a single shot to the side of the head.

  I rode the stolen police bike as hard as the cylinders would let me, plunging along Rue du Banquier, lying flat against the body of the bike, estimating the turn from the space in the buildings and trees above me. I flew past the first right and then down the second; it was flanked by high-rise apartment blocks, and I realized the chopper had banked away, out of sight, looking for a new angle on me. If there was a sniper on board, he was out of luck. I raised my head and checked the mirror. The cop-killing BMW rider was still on me, matching me move for move.

  But I was close now, seconds from my destination. I kicked up into third and ran the intersection at Boulevard de l’Hôpital, swerving a baby buggy. The trees of Rue Pinel loomed up on either side. I asked the stolen Yamaha for everything it’d give me. As the bike growled, I sat up straight, put my hands down on to the saddle and leapfrogged backwards. The heavy police machine sped away from me between my legs. I found the road feet first – then with my left shoulder, back and right shoulder. I spun head over heels, twisted face down, braced with my forearms – and stopped. I pushed up. Hands bleeding. The elbows of my jacket ragged, knees of my jeans scuffed. Nothing broken. I stood, staggered, righted myself, and brought the M4 up as the BMW behind me hit the crossroads.

  Inhale. Exhale. Settle. Fire.

  As my finger squeezed the trigger, the rider pulled up on the handlebars, rearing into a roaring wheelie. Instead of shedding his sternum, the suppressed 5.56 round tore the front tyre apart. The handlebars jerked. The fork twisted. The bike was too heavy to hold. The BMW jackknifed and went over, the plainclothes rider with it, pitching him out of sight behind a delivery van. Meanwhile my bike had carried on to the next, wide junction, smashing into a row of parked cars, triggering a slew of alarms. The chopper buzzed above them, out of sight, zooming in on the crash site, not on me. I turned to get my bearings and ducked right, under the trees and scaffolding at the back of the ParisTech engineering college.

  The street was deserted.

  It had been nearly twenty-eight years since I’d stood in front of that white panelled door and old stone wall. It had been dark then – exactly three a.m. on a warm summer night. I didn’t know who lived there in 1990, and I didn’t now. It wasn’t what was in the house I needed. I dropped to my knees to the right of the door, kneeling in front of three adjacent manhole covers. I took the screwdriver from my coat pocket and quickly put the tip under the wide lip of the cover furthest to the left … and took the longest shot of my life.

  15

  Sparks of light erupted across the emptiness. Deep greens and reds brightened, swirled and died. Yellow flares twisted into nothingness. All I could see was a patchwork of fractals spinning away from me.

  I closed my eyes.

  Nothing changed.

  I blinked hard and waited for my eyes to accustom to the dark. Eventually the crazy patterns dancing across my retinas spun themselves into oblivion. As they faded, my heartbeat steadied. And then there was nothing except darkness. No shapes, no depth, no shadows. No light at all. I was engulfed in perfect pitch blackness.

  I stood at a half-crouch, stock-still, and cocked my head and listened – but there was nothing to hear. No sirens. No alarms. No helicopter. Silence so profound I could feel it on the edge of my teeth. The fast buzzing of the road had evaporated. All that was left was the high-pitched whine that the firefight in the café had scored into my eardrums.

  But then, close, very close: the unmistakable sound of breathing.

  I tensed, right hand on the pistol grip of the rifle. I held my own breath and strained into the void. The rasping stopped. I waited – and then exhaled in a rush of relief. It was my own lungs I could hear. There was no one nearby, no one in pursuit. I laughed out loud – just as I’d done when I first stood there.

  But an entire lifetime had elapsed since then. This time I was alone.

  My voice went nowhere, bouncing back at me in a flat, close echo. I checked with my thumb that the fire selector was still on semi-auto, brought the rifle up, pressed my back against stone and went white.

  The LED torch beam stretched out from under the barrel of the M4 along thirty metres of low, limestone tunnel – illuminating, at its furthest point, what looked like a dog-leg in the passage. There was just enough clearance for the barrel to traverse the hundred and eighty degrees to light up the other direction. As I whipped the rifle round to my left, the wall directly in front of me flared up in a bright white hotspot. In the middle of it a circle of slack-jawed skulls stared back at me – empty eye sockets filled with deep, moving shadows; teeth missing, broken, discoloured by cave-slime; craniums cracked and mouldy. Around the skulls a ragged circle of femurs set them off like a shield on the passage wall. As I moved the LED beam across them, the shadows made the dead eyes flit this way and that, as if they were following the rifle, examining me.

  It was exactly as I remembered. I jumped, anyway.

  I was neither in the sewers, nor in the shafts servicing the Métro. I hadn’t ended up in a basement or a siege tunnel. The manhole I’d slipped through wasn’t a door so much as a portal, because it wasn’t just an entrance to an underground passageway; it was a gateway into a parallel Paris.

  Beneath the capital’s pavements limestone quarries mined centuries ago to build the houses and churches above spread out in a network of caverns and wells, galleries and caves – all connected by three hundred kilometres of pitch-black passages. But all that, my father had told me as we sank into the darkness together that first time twenty-eight years ago, wasn’t what made Paris unique.

  It was what happened after the quarries were dug, he said, that was truly remarkable. The basements and cellars of huge swathes of the city south of the Seine sat on top of – and in many cases, were connected to – more than just an ancient mining complex. In the eighteenth century the abandoned chambers were used as the perfect solution to an unspeakable problem: what to do with the horror show of the capital’s overflowing cemeteries. Into those acres upon acres of suburban caverns had been interred the bones of six million bodies.

  It was not a journey to be unde
rtaken without maps – though maps alone, my father had impressed upon me, were not enough to save anyone down there. Most of the tunnels were hardly tall enough to stand up in; some shrank to barely a foot high. Seemingly bottomless wells that plumbed the black abyss of underground aquifers; cave-ins; flooded tunnels; eye-gouging metal spikes; ankle-breaking holes; and deep, dark pits that could swallow a man all lay in wait. The fresh corpses of careless explorers were easily added to the ancient, unnamed remains.

  All those years ago we’d emerged from that vast, random city of the dead in Montrouge Cemetery, south of the centre near the Périphérique – the busy highway that ringed Paris. If I could escape the city, I could escape – period.

  The stretch of tunnel where I stood formed the elbow of a bend. Right led south-east; left, north-west – where, barely two metres further on, the continuation of the tunnel was also masked by a crook in the stone passage. I straightened carefully from my crouch, turned about face – and looked up. The footholds I’d used to drop down the shaft disappeared into the blackness above. I killed the torch, and kept staring up, listening, squinting into the darkness.

  Still nothing.

  If anyone had followed me underground, they’d used a different entrance. I switched the torch on again and played the beam across the rock around the crude ladder. The name of the street above was chiselled into the stone in mid-nineteenth-century letters, along with the date the passage was reinforced: 1865. But in between these signposted convergences, the routes of the tunnels and the city streets diverged wildly. I looked carefully around the inscription, putting my hand on the cool stone as if that would guide my eyes. I found what I was looking for almost immediately: two small sets of letters carved at head height.

  MMG JMG

  Max and John Mac Ghill’ean. The initials were scratched deeper than I remembered; and although covered with fine green moss-like mould, they were as clear as the night we’d cut them, if you knew where to look. I traced my fingers over my father’s initials and slipped into a kind of shock. It was the only physical trace of him that remained. Beneath the letters we’d carved a St Patrick’s Saltire. To the left of where the two arms of the cross joined, a dot, bored into the stone with the punch of a Swiss Army knife.

  Turn left.

  And in the V that made the top of the cross, another.

  Climb up.

  It was an adaptation of the same simple system of waypoints he’d first taught me as a child. Together we’d marked the tree trunks in the plantation that stretched out behind our house in County Wicklow so that I could find my way home again if I lost my compass. Alone, I’d mapped on to the bark of the trees themselves vast tracts of the woodland that swallowed me for hours. My wanderings were stopped abruptly when my mother had realized how far from home her nine-year-old was venturing.

  ‘If you did this where mamka and babushka grew up, you would have been eaten by wolves,’ she told me firmly in Russian – which meant there was no arguing with her. I never looked at the forest in the same way again.

  I snapped out of the reverie and willed myself to concentrate. The calm of being underground was deceptive. Only a couple of minutes before I’d been running a full-scale escape and evasion. Just because I’d paused didn’t mean my pursuers would, too. The gunfight was bound to trigger a manhunt on an epic scale. The helicopter, the police vans, the army and the Foreign Legion would all still be up there – but that was just for starters. They’d already been joined by the mystery bike rider and whoever else had been stirred up by Benjamin Franklin.

  The Navy SEAL, if that’s what he was, could have still been working for the Americans if he was out, or he could have been working freelance. The guys in keffiyehs, the phoney cop – all of them could have been on anyone’s payroll, from the Brits to the Bulgarians, the CIA to the FSB. In a strange twist of irony probably the only people not after me were the IRA – although I wasn’t ruling them out, either.

  But sting-ball grenades and tasers weren’t what I usually went up against. And if I’d been on the other end of that sniper rifle, I’d have shot me dead vaulting that bar. The only firm conclusion I could draw was that the people actually trying to kill me were the French. And fair enough.

  I steadied myself against the wall, and slowed my breathing.

  Clarity in darkness.

  I’d dropped twelve metres under the city streets – if not out of mind, then at least, for the moment, out of sight. But the city wasn’t simply hiding me now, it had buried me: no satellites, no thermal imaging, no cell phone signal – and no CCTV. It was as if modern technology had never happened. Above all, my one advantage persisted: they didn’t know where I was going, or why. The fact that I didn’t either was, I tried to convince myself, neither here nor there. All I had to do was stay the one step ahead that I’d kept up since diving into the Channel, and hope that I might find some answers before I was tripped up for good.

  I turned my back on the crook of the passage. So many of the tunnels around the Place d’Italie were blocked off that travelling in a straight line was impossible. It had been years since I’d been down there, too – and although the tunnels had been hewn out over two centuries before, they’d never stayed the same for long. An organic, ever-changing network, it was more like the intestines of the city than its foundations. Ultimately, I needed to be going south-west, but to take that bearing I’d first have to head south-east and then loop round.

  I set off into the world’s largest catacombs still guided by my father’s helping hand. But the sheer immensity of the labyrinth was almost overwhelming. The rough earth floor was strewn with small loose stones; the walls were mined rock, patched with brick and injections of cement. I walked slowly, head down. After twenty metres a short passage opened up on the left, which terminated in a T-junction after only a few paces. On the wall to the right of the entrance, another cross, with another marker.

  Keep going, it said.

  Ten metres more and the tunnel made the dog-leg I’d seen from the foot of the ladder. The passage sloped downwards; the earth underfoot gave way to mud; the ceiling height fell rapidly. I stopped and listened and went dark again. There was a decision to make. Keep the torch on and move faster – but risk being seen. Or go dark and rely on only the M4’s laser sight – that would allow me to see basic changes in the tunnel terrain, like a blind man sweeping a stick in front of him, but it would slow my progress to a crawl.

  Slow and steady wins the race.

  I killed the light and switched on the red laser, dropped to a walking crouch, and carried on, one short step at a time. The wound in my thigh burned from the strain. I moved the rifle barrel from the roof to the floor, the left wall the right wall, cutting a bright crimson sign of the cross in the passageway ahead of me over and over again. It was tiring, disorientating. The laser marker danced in front of my eyes in duplicate, triplicate, so that I had to stop and blink to reduce it to one clear signal. And all the while the roof got lower, and the floor wetter. After barely any distance at all I was ankle deep in water, and getting deeper.

  I carried on. The floor began to slope down steeply. Since I’d last been there, nearly three decades before, the muddy puddles my father and I had splashed and waded through had expanded into a full-scale flood. The water reached waist level – which meant, bent over to keep clear of the tunnel roof, I would soon be completely submerged. I combed the surface of the water with the beam of red light. It was crystal clear and smelled slightly of sulphur. The laser cut through it perfectly. There were no ripples ahead of me, and not even a mote of dirt suspended in the stone-filtered deluge. It would be different behind, though. Each step would have stirred up the chalky clay on the still-sloping tunnel floor. I ran the red light down the ceiling until it found the surface. Five metres, after which the passage was completely inundated.

  ‘Fuck!’ I swore under my breath. ‘What is it with fucking tunnels?’

  I’m frequently scared – anyone who tells you they are not af
raid in a firefight is either an idiot or a liar. But I have no phobias: no entrenched dread of snakes or spiders, water or flying; no terror in the daytime of the horrors that haunt my dreams at night. But death by drowning was different.

  ‘Be careful when you go under, Max,’ my father had said to me that night in Paris, suspecting, perhaps, that one day I’d want to try it alone. ‘The surface can be hard to find.’

  How I wished it had been my mother he had warned instead.

  Drown.

  It was a word to gulp down, to choke on; a word it felt like I had been born with under my tongue – tethered to, like my mother had been to the stones in her pockets. I scanned the water for her face, but there’s no use in looking for the dead. I backed up.

  Find another way, I told myself.

  But I knew there wasn’t – neither in the tunnel nor back in the world. I remembered Colonel Ellard’s mantra, repeated endlessly to any trooper who asked what to do when their officer or their radio died: ‘Always follow the last order.’

  I considered that for a moment.

  For whatever reason, Frank was unresponsive. He’d either cut me off or been disconnected himself. His last order was to go dark. And releasing my photograph had forced me to go about as dark as it was possible to get. He might have turned me into a fugitive in the process, but depending on who had been sent to kill me, and why, I had to accept the wild possibility that Frank had actually done me a favour.

  But I wasn’t going to get far working out who was after me, and what skin they had in the Benjamin game, while I was buried in a pitch-black grave with the whole city piled up on top of me. In any case, supposing Lukov was telling the truth, there were only three conclusions to be drawn: Frank had set me up; Frank had been set up himself; or, for whatever reason, Frank couldn’t trust me with the target’s real name. Working blind wasn’t unusual: turning up to find my target already dead and his killer lying in wait to ambush me was. Any way I looked at it, going on the run had either been the smartest thing I’d ever done, or the stupidest.