Extraordinary Powers

by Joseph Finder

  Everyone seemed to be moving purposively somewhere. Best I could tell, no one inside the station was coming after me.

  So where was he?

  The station was a bewildering array of orange correspondences signs and blue sortie signs, with trains headed toward dozens of different destinations: Pont de Neuilly, Créteil-Préfecture. Saint-Rémy-Les-Chevreuse, Porte d’Orléans, Château de Vincennes … And not just the regular Métro trains, but also the RER, the Réseau Express Régional rapid commuter trains to and from the Parisian suburbs. The place was huge, sprawling, bewildering, endless. And that was to my advantage.

  For a few more seconds, at least.

  I headed in the direction my pursuer would consider most obvious, and therefore—perhaps—least likely: the way the greatest flow of traffic seemed to be heading. Direction Château de Vincennes and Port de Neuilly.

  To the right of the long row of turnstiles was an area marked PASSAGE INTERDIT that was cordoned off with a chain. I sprinted toward it, got a running start, and vaulted over it. A long line of people holding copies of Pariscope snaked around a booth selling half-price theater tickets (Ticket Kiosque Theater: “Les places du jour á moitié prix”), beside an odd bronze statue of a man and a woman, both artistically misshapen, reaching forlornly toward each other. I flew past an exit to the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Forum des Halles, past a cluster of three policemen equipped with walkie-talkies, guns, and nightsticks, who looked up at me with suspicion.

  Two of them snapped to attention and began to run after me, shouting.

  I came to an abrupt halt at a row of tall pneumatic doors, which couldn’t be surmounted.

  But that’s why God invented the Sortie de Secours, the security entrance for officials only, toward which I swerved, and then, to the audible alarm of a gaggle of Métro workers, bolted through.

  The shouts crescendoed behind me. A shrill traffic whistle trilled.

  A clattering of footsteps.

  Past a Sock Shop, then a flower stand (“Promotion—10 tulipes 35F”).

  Now I came to a very long corridor, through which a set of moving conveyor belts—“people movers,” I believe they’re called—were carrying pedestrians up a gradual incline. The adjacent belt carried people back the other way, down in the direction from which I’d come. Between the two conveyor belts was a waist-high meter-wide band of metal that flowed uphill like an endless steel carpet runner.

  I glanced around, and saw that the Métro security officers clambering after me were now joined by a solitary, dark-suited figure vastly outpacing them, approaching me with frightening speed, as I found myself wedged in a crowd of people who were not moving, letting the steel and rubber conveyors do all the work. Stuck.

  The man in the dark suit: the exact one I wanted to lose.

  And as he came closer, and I once again turned to gauge the distance that separated us, I realized that I had seen the face before.

  His heavy, black-framed glasses only partially obscured the yellowish circles under his eyes. His fedora was gone, lost in the chase no doubt, revealing his thin, pale blond hair combed straight back. Gaunt, ghostly pale, thin pale lips.

  On Marlborough Street in Boston.

  Outside the bank in Zurich.

  The same man, no question about it. A man who probably knew a great deal about me.

  And a man—the thought was chilling—who took few if any pains to disguise himself.

  He didn’t care if I recognized him.

  He wanted me to recognize him.

  I wriggled past the bottleneck of people, elbowing them out of my way, and leapt up onto the metal runner between the conveyor belts.

  Stumbling, I realized that the metal surface was broken every foot or so by jutting blades of steel, put there, I was sure, to make what I was trying to do—run atop it—difficult.

  Difficult, but not impossible.

  What had the woman in Zurich called him?

  Max.

  All right, old friend, I thought.

  Come after me, “Max.”

  Whatever you want, come and get it.

  Try.

  SIXTY-ONE

  Unthinkingly, I ran.

  Along the metallic ledge, uphill. Around me, from either side, were gasps and screams and shouts—Who’s the madman? A criminal? What is he escaping? The answer was supplied immediately to anyone who looked a short distance down the commuter beltway and saw the uniformed officers, trilling their whistles like a French version of the Keystone Kops, wriggling through the crowds.

  And now, doubtless to the amazement of onlookers, not one but two men were loping along the metal ledge, the one desperately trying to elude the other.

  Max. The killer.

  Barely thinking about what I was doing, I vaulted across the opposing lane of descending commuters, gaining a tenuous foothold for a second or two before I leapt over the glass siding and down, a good ten feet, to the deep stairwell below, and bounded up the stairs. I couldn’t risk looking back, couldn’t risk breaking my stride for even a second, and so I simply ran as fast as my weakened ankles would take me, all sound around me drowned out by the incessant, rapid staccato of my heartbeat, the wheezing intake and expulsion of breath from my lungs. Way up ahead of me, at the top of the stairs, was a blue sign: DIRECTION PONT DE NEUILLY. A beacon. I was a greyhound chasing a rabbit; I was a prisoner making a jailbreak. I was, in my fevered brain, anything, anything inspirational, anything that would keep me going, through the pain, ignoring my body’s screams to stop, trying to block out the silkily seductive siren calls—Give up, Ben. They won’t hurt you. You can’t win anyway, can’t outrun them, you’re outnumbered, just make it easy on yourself and give it up.

  No.

  He will not hesitate to “hurt” me, I replied in my manic internal dialogue. He will do what it takes.

  A narrow escalator loomed just up ahead, at the top of the stairs.

  Where were the … pursuers?

  I allowed myself a quick glance around, a snap of the head before I headed up the escalator.

  The subway cops, all three—was it three?—of them, had given up the chase. Probably radioed ahead to others.

  That left one.

  My old friend, Max.

  He hadn’t given up, of course. Not old Max. He continued striding up the metal ledge, a solitary coiled figure approaching, accelerating …

  At the top of the escalator was a small landing, and to the right, an escalator marked SORTIE RUE DE RIVOLI. Well? Which way? To the street, or to the train platform?

  Stick with what you know.

  For just a second I hesitated, then instead barreled ahead toward the train platform, where crowds of people were surging into and out of the train.

  He was perhaps ten seconds behind me now, which meant that he, too, would pause at the landing, and if I was unlucky, he would spot me just up ahead, on the train platform, a big fat target in his crosshairs.

  Keep going.

  Electronic tones pealed, signaling that the train was about to depart, and I knew I wouldn’t make it. I put on one last desperate burst of speed, aiming for the nearest open door, but they all slid closed with a brusque finality when I was still twenty yards away.

  And as the train pulled away, and I could hear Max entering the platform, I leapt forward crazily—toward the moving train—and grabbed at its exterior and my right hand gripped onto something solid.

  A handhold.

  Thank God.

  Then my left hand found another handhold as I was whooshed along the platform, leaving Chatelet and Max behind, pressing my body flat against the moving train, and of course luck was no longer with me, it was a terrible idea, I was about to be killed.

  My eyes wild, I saw what loomed just ahead as the front section of the train plunged into the tunnel.

  A huge round mirror jutting out, mounted on the wall at the entrance to the tunnel.

  The train, I could see, cleared it by a few inches, but I wouldn’t, a protr
uding lump of human flesh that would be sheared in two as neatly as a Sabatier knife through a wheel of cheese.

  Some vestige of logic now rose to the forefront of my fevered brain: What the hell do you think you’re doing? What kind of lunacy is this? Gonna ride the train through its narrow tunnel, so you’ll be squashed like a bug, let the stone walls of the tunnel do what Max couldn’t, is that it?

  I heard a long, loud cry escape from my lungs involuntarily, and, just as the enormous round metal disc rushed up to decapitate me, I released my grip on the handholds and tumbled onto the cold, hard platform.

  I barely heard the gunshots around me. I was in another world, an almost hallucinatory land of fear and adrenaline. I cracked into the floor, slamming my head and shoulders, and tears of pain stung my eyes, and the pain was indescribable, white and searingly hot and blindingly bright and all-encompassing.

  PASSAGE INTERDIT AU PUBLIC—DANGER.

  A yellow sign just above me penetrated my haze.

  I could stop, and that would be it. I could lie there, and surrender.

  Or—if my body would permit it—I could plunge ahead, toward the gleaming yellow sign, toward the mouth of the tunnel, and what choice, really, was there?

  Something in me, some great reserve of strength, opened up, and a flood of adrenaline pumped into my bloodstream, and I stumbled groggily forward to a small set of concrete steps. The yellow warning sign was hinged, and I shouldered it aside, almost tumbled down the few steps, into the cold darkness of the tunnel, into the tailwind of the just-departed train.

  There was a footpath.

  Of course there was. What was it?

  The passerelle de sécurité. The gangway. Constructed for Métro repair crews to work while the trains are running if need be.

  As I ran—no, limped, really—along the footpath, I could hear a sound behind me, a pneumatic sound of brakes, the slight squeal of metal, the noise of another train pulling into the platform I had just left behind.

  Coming at me.

  But it was safe, wasn’t it? I was safe here, was I not?

  No. The path was too narrow; my body would be too close to the upcoming train, I could see that even in my adrenaline-and-fear-crazed state. And surely my pursuer wouldn’t be suicidal enough to follow me; he would know that I was as good as gone; he would know enough to just let me plunge on through the tunnels, to my inevitable death, and then I heard something, a thought, and I knew I wasn’t alone.

  I turned back for an instant. He was in the tunnel with me.

  I’m impressed, Max.

  That’s two of us that are going to die.

  And from what was now a good distance I could hear the electronic chimes ringing out, then the clattering of the closing doors, and I froze in the tunnel as the train began to move toward me.

  I felt something akin to vertigo. An itch in the back of my head. All of my synapses were jumping with a chemical message of fear—

  move move move move

  —but I overpowered the instinct, flattened myself against the tunnel wall as the rush of wind heralded the coming of the train and I couldn’t help closing my eyes as the steel skin of the train, a terrifying blur, whooshed by, so close I was sure I could feel it brush against me.

  It kept coming, and coming.

  And I opened my eyes.

  And with my peripheral vision I saw that Max—ten yards away, maybe—had done the same. He, too, had flattened himself against the tunnel wall.

  He was illuminated stroboscopically with a dim, flickering, sickly greenish-yellow fluorescent light from a bulb directly above his head.

  But there was a difference.

  His eyes weren’t closed. They stared straight ahead. And not with fear: with concentration.

  And there was another difference.

  He wasn’t standing still.

  He was sidling, ever so carefully, toward me.

  Coming closer.

  SIXTY-TWO

  He approached, and the train kept coming. It seemed the longest train in the world.

  I felt as if I were frozen in time, standing in the center of a tornado. As I sidled away from him, deeper into the tunnel, I caught sight of something just up ahead. A recess in the wall, illuminated by a fluorescent bulb. A niche. If I could …

  And just a few feet ahead, there it was, a deep niche. Safety.

  A little more effort, crab walking along the footpath, along the horrifying rush of air, the glass and steel and protruding steel handgrips perhaps two inches from my nose.

  And I was there. In the niche. Safe.

  No other underground transport system in the world has this system of gangways and niches, I remembered. I could see the page, the diagrams. There is a niche every ten meters … Between each station is an average of six hundred meters of track … Two hundred kilometers of track comprise the regular routes between stations of the Paris Métro … The third rail is extremely dangerous, charged as it is with 750 volts DC of electricity.

  The recess was three feet deep.

  Positively roomy.

  I was able, now, to pull out the gun, release the safety, cock it, extend my hand out of the recess, and fire.

  Score.

  I had hit him. He grimaced in pain, and teetered forward.…

  And just as the very end of the train thundered past, he fell forward, onto the tracks. But he was not wounded seriously, that was clear at once by the way he braced himself, legs crouched, against falling again.

  The train was gone. It was just the two of us in the tunnel. He stood on the ballast between the tracks; I huddled for protection in the narrow cave. I pulled back, out of his line of fire, but he leapt forward, gun extended, and fired.

  I felt a jab of pain in my left leg: I had been hit.

  Once again I pulled the trigger and heard only that small, flat, innocuous click, that taunting, sickening sound that told me the cartridge was empty. Reloading wasn’t even a consideration; I had no spare magazines.

  And so I did the only thing I could: with a great, open-throated bellow I sprang forward, toward the killer. I could just make out his facial expression an instant before I pummeled him to the ground: a look of dull incuriosity, or was it disbelief? In that split-second interval he tried to take aim, but even before he could raise his pistol, we crashed to the ground, his back thudding against the steel of the tracks and the sharp gray ballast stones, and I heard his gun clatter somewhere out of his hand.

  He reared up with immense strength, but I had the advantage both of surprise and of positioning—I had his arms and legs pinioned—and I was able to force him backward, one hand slamming into his throat.

  He grunted, reared up again, and then spoke for the first time, a few words in a heavy—German?—accent.

  “No—use,” he moaned, but I was not interested in what he had to say, I cared only about what was going through his goddamned mind, but I could hardly draw back and concentrate, there wasn’t time for that, and so I throttled and slammed against his torso.

  Back toward the train platform, a glint of light was visible thirty or forty meters or so away.

  And I heard a few snatches of thought-language, phrases that seemed to come at me with a bizarre urgency, loud and yet not quite distinct. You can kill me, he thought in German, you can kill me, but there is another. Another will take my place. Another—

  —and for just a second, stunned, I lost my grip on his throat. He reared up again, and this time he was able to break my hold, and I fell over backward, my shoes sliding in the gravel as if in a puddle of grease. My right hand flew out as I tried to break my fall, but there was nothing to grab on to except the air, and then—

  750 volts DC of electricity

  —my fingertips brushed ever so close to the cold, hard steel of the third rail, but I managed to yank them away just in time, in time to see him flying through the air toward me.

  I reached around for my weapon, but it was gone.

  With a sudden lurch I propelled m
yself upward, cracking into him, sending him flying over my shoulder toward the electrified third rail as the approaching train was upon us, thundering, unbelievably loud, and I saw his legs shudder from the electricity just a split second before the train, its emergency horn bellowing, bore down on him and, oh Jesus Christ, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, the legs were still shuddering, but they ended at the hips, the lower half of his body shivered, a bleeding stump severed entirely at the waist, a quivering chunk of human flesh.

  Up ahead came the thunder of another approaching train. Serenely, in a glacial calm, I climbed up to the footpath and the safety of the nearest recess. The train came, and I flattened myself against the wall of the niche. When it had passed, I made my way out of the tunnel without looking back.

  SIXTY-THREE

  The village of Mont-Tremblant was a tiny cluster of buildings—a couple of French country restaurants, a Bonichoix supermarket, and a hotel fronted by a green awning, oddly out of place, looking like a scale model of one of the grand hotels in Monte Carlo. Looming all around were Quebec’s Laurentian mountains, green and lush.

  Molly and I had flown separately to Montreal’s two international airports from Paris on different commercial airlines, she into Mirabel via Frankfurt and Brussels; I into Dorval via Luxembourg and Copenhagen.

  I had employed several standard tradecraft techniques to ensure that neither one of us could easily be followed. We’d each used the Canadian passports that my French contact in Pigalle had forged for us, which meant that both sets of American passports—in the names of Mr. and Mrs. Alan Crowell, and Mr. and Mrs. John Brewer—were still virgin; they could be used at some time in the future if an emergency arose. We had departed from different airports, Molly from Charles de Gaulle, I from Orly. Most important, we had flown first-class and on European carriers—Aer Lingus, Lufthansa, Sabena, and Air France. The European airlines still treat first-class passengers as important personages, unlike the American ones, which give their first-class fliers a bigger seat and a free drink and that’s it. As an important personage, your seat will be held until the very last moment; in fact, they usually page any first-class passenger who’s checked in but not yet boarded. For every leg of our journey we boarded at the last possible second, which meant that our forged passports were given only the most cursory of glances as we were ushered aboard.