A door banged open, and a fourth Marine popped into the hall, moving fast like he’d heard something and come running.
He turned on Tom and three unconscious men, one of whom Tom was ballroom-dipping to the floor. The Marine leveled his rifle. There was a burst as Tom took a step and flattened himself behind the corner of the hallway.
A bullet hit the man on the ground. His leg twitched, and the backside of his pants exploded like a small firecracker had gone off inside them. But the fourth Marine was still firing.
Keeping as much of his body safe behind the corner as he could, Tom reached around with the rifle to shield the downed Marine’s head. He had just lowered the M-16’s stock in front of the man’s face when the rifle spun out of his hands.
As it rattled on the floor, he saw the split polymer on the stock. The firing stopped, and Tom slipped back around the corner. He could hear the fourth Marine yelling their location into his radio. There was another stairwell off a second hallway. Leaping down another flight of stairs, he finally reached the boiler room. The door was locked. He kicked it open and closed the door behind him. Then he gripped the doorknob and bent it against the frame like he’d done with the door to the war room.
He knew the Paris underground was a giant honeycomb, and only 170 miles of those tunnels, caves, and catacombs were charted. The rest of it was so vast and forgotten that, just last month, Paris police had discovered an underground restaurant, complete with electricity, phone lines, and motion-triggered barking to keep the mole people away.
In this particular section, there was an extensive sewer system that emptied into the Seine River. The embassy at one point had multiple entrances to this part, but they’d since been sealed for security reasons.
Tom was looking to open one of them back up.
There was a metro stop directly east of the embassy. For safety reasons, the large drainage tunnels were unlikely to be near subway lines. So he went to the west wall and found the section where a door had been bricked over. He ripped a fire axe off the wall and swung at the brick until the only thing he could feel was the vibration in his arms.
Eventually the brick spread. He pulled down a large section of the wall and found the door. He hacked at the door’s lock until he could push it open. He stuck his head through. There was just enough light from the boiler room to make out a round tunnel. He climbed in and went right—away from the Seine.
Using the light from his cell phone, and praying he was too far underground for the phone to transmit his location, he followed the tunnel to a large cavern. It was the nexus of forty-odd crudded pipes and passages spewing dark liquid. Water dripped, flowed, and crashed. The sounds converged into a single overwhelming roar. It smelled like filth that was still alive.
All the water shot into one large canal. And flowing through it was a river of blackish chum that rushed into a massive mouth-like opening that was stretched wide to suck it all in.
There was a heavy metal door on the other side of the water, the kind with bolts in the frame. The kind he could maybe—maybe not—get through somehow. The walls were slick. He looked up. The ceiling was a large dome with a network of piping running across the whole thing.
He took off his belt, looped it through the handle of the metal case, and improvised a shoulder pack. Then he jumped and grabbed a pipe. He used it to pull himself up the slope of the ceiling. By the time he was forty feet high, almost halfway across, his hands were useless with slime. He looked down. The black water rushed below him.
When he got to the top, the piping ended abruptly. There was a gap in it. He looked around frantically for some way across, and as he stopped and rested both hands and feet on a pipe, they started to slip. Every few seconds, he had to re-grip just to stay in place.
Shadows hid most of the other side of the dome, but he thought he could see another pipe.
And what if there was nothing but smooth ceiling?
He looked down at the water, calculated his odds of drowning.
Carefully he rocked his weight back and forth, then launched himself across to the other side of the dome. He stretched out, his fingers disappearing into the shadows. He clawed at the wall for a half-second before his hands closed around a pipe. He tried to grip it as hard as he could, but as the rest of his body swung below him, his momentum unbalanced him.
The pipe shot out of his grip.
As he fell, he clawed at the wall again. One moment, he felt nothing but air. Then the tips of his fingers found something. And just as he realized he was safely hanging by one arm, he also became aware that his other arm, which was supposed to be securing the case, had been whipped away from his side. He felt the weight of the case dig once before it slipped off his shoulder.
He couldn’t really see the loop on the case, only the motion of it, but he shot his right arm out and somehow stabbed two fingertips through the belt loop. On instinct, they curled around the leather.
He dangled, wincing as his body rotated and torqued his other arm. Then he pulled himself up and reattached himself to the wall. He was reaching for the next hold—
There was a ping against the pipe.
Karl watched the pipe vomit up a wall of dirty water over Tom’s face. After the initial geyser, the pipe continued trickling water, forcing Tom to squint through it. Two Marines flanked Karl. Both had flashlights attached to their rifles. The lights never left Tom’s face and hands.
“Agent Blake,” Karl yelled—he could barely hear himself over the crashing water—“stand down or we will shoot you down.”
Tom didn’t move. He put a hand up to block the lights on his face.
“Whatever you’re doing, you’re about to die for it.”
Tom shifted along the ceiling, and Karl and the Marines all started screaming over one another.
“Keep your hands in view.”
“Stay where you are.”
Tom froze.
Karl: “You have ten seconds to start climbing down. Then we’re going to engage.”
Tom shifted again, and this time Karl thought he was going to climb down. But instead Tom paused. His eyes moved around the cavern. There were two ways out as far as Karl could tell: a bolted door on the other side of the water, which Tom couldn’t reach, and the way he’d come, which was where Karl stood. “The only reason I haven’t fired is because I want those files,” Karl said. When Tom didn’t do anything, Karl turned to the Marines and nodded.
Tom’s eyes dropped down to the water rushing below him. When he looked up, he stared at Karl for a moment.
Then he let go.
As he hit the river, the water parted and came back together with a slurp. The first Marine shook his head and was saying under his breath “Jesus fucking Christ” over and over.
Karl walked to the river and peered into the water. “Where does this drain?”
“Probably directly into the Seine, sir,” the second Marine said. “But it’s a quarter mile away.”
Karl watched the water. He’d never seen anything so black and lifeless. He didn’t even want to put his hand in it.
“Get me a diver.”
“A diver?” The Marine paused, thought about how to put what he had to say. “We don’t have a diver. This is France, sir.”
“Go find Martin Litvak and tell him to get me a diver. He can rent the equipment if he has to.”
“Sir, you’re aware there might be an issue on account of the Seine River being smack in the middle of Paris?”
When Karl turned and stared at him, the Marine took one look at his face, then disappeared back up the tunnel toward the boiler room.
Karl turned to the water. It was rushing at twenty miles per hour at least. He couldn’t get the look on Tom’s face out of his mind—it made him think of something D. H. Lawrence had written a long time ago: “I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough. Without ever having felt sorry for itself.”
Karl thought maybe he had just watched a y
oung man do the same thing.
CHAPTER 9
The pipe didn’t run straight. It split and twisted. A mile as the crow flies became four as the shit flowed. Tom tried to force his head upward—or at least in the direction that felt upward. But there was no way to tell what was up and what was down because there was no light. His head bounced off the pipe walls, and his lungs shrieked until his eyeballs shook. When he did get his face into the air trapped above, he sucked a mixture of water and oxygen. Then he did everything in his power not to do anything that might make him take a breath underwater, like cough.
The goal was simple. Air pocket to air pocket. Gulp air and brown water in one pocket. Exhale and maybe puke in the next. Make it for thirty seconds—until the next pocket. It didn’t matter where the pipe led or even if it ever stopped. He just wanted those thirty seconds.
The pipe split, and the back of his shirt caught on the bottom. He forced his eyes open. Pitch black. Nothing to see, just the sting of water running over his eyes.
The realization came to him like underwater scream bubbles in a horror movie. Trapped. Underwater. In the dark.
He scrambled in every direction, but he was caught like a child hung by the back of his belt on a coat hook. The current was so fast his arms were pinned to his sides.
He was going to take a breath.
Already the need was there. He started shaking his head from the pain. With all his strength, he reached forward through the current. His hand brushed something round. It skipped through his fingers, and the current powered his arms back to his sides. He started shaking his head harder.
He wanted to scream. His face contorted, letting water leak into his mouth. He raised one arm—raising both was too hard—and using his other hand, he lunged off the bottom, tearing himself free. The round thing hit him in the forearm, and he grasped it and pulled himself up. He felt the surface tension of the water break over his face. There were five inches of air at the top of the tunnel.
He hung there in a chin-up position, gasping into darkness.
Part of him wanted to hang there forever, just cling to the iron rod until his arms gave out. He looked around for a ledge or a passageway. He didn’t care if it led anywhere so long as it allowed him to never go back in the water again.
He laughed mutely at himself.
Yeah, that’s it. Maybe you can make a home down here and live like that freak in Phantom of the Opera. You can eat trash. And as for water, well, you are practically drowning in it, now aren’t you?
But the only way out of the pipe was to go back in it. Once he stopped shaking, he let go.
When he was finally dumped into the Seine, he opened his eyes. There were shards of light in the water. Air bubbles passed in front of his face.
They were descending.
Which didn’t make sense. Air bubbles ascend, move toward the surface. It was basic physics: the air is less dense than the water—
He was swimming distance from the surface, but he wouldn’t reach it because he didn’t know which goddamn direction it was.
Then the obvious occurred to him: he was just upside down. He rolled over and started swimming down into the depths, or what felt like down into the depths. Twenty seconds later he was in daylight, sucking oxygen like a newborn, so happy he thought he might cry.
Exhausted, he dog-paddled to a pier. As soon as he pulled himself up and rolled onto it, he threw up: brownish water teeming with little brown solids. He waited on his hands and knees until he was functional.
He knew the embassy would be moving to phase two. And, whatever that entailed, he wasn’t ready for it now that he realized he’d gotten out of his depth somewhere back in the computer room, when he pulled a gun on a man who’d killed so many people that his life had maybe collapsed under the weight of all their souls.
The briefcase.
He looked over at his shoulder and saw the briefcase pinned by the belt against his body. And now that he had it, the words came that every freak with a dream in a basement somewhere never imagines he’ll say and really believe:
You’re actually pulling this off…
Those words got him up off the dock. The plan had been to piggyback off the CIA until the end, take the ride from Kotesh to Nast to Sarmad, get the whole network, and find the last man. Of course the plan was also stupid and arrogant, and he was lucky to have survived it. But you work with what you have, and up until he’d gotten the briefcase, what he had was squat.
As he jogged down the pier, water ran off his shoes like he was in an unusually gradual process of pissing his pants. A man painting a picture stared at him in horror. Tom’s brain was still about ten seconds behind his body. He realized he was listening for a siren and had to remind himself that whoever was coming for him now would not be announcing themselves with one of those.
He remembered his cell phone and took it out and pitched it in the water. Then he turned down a side street. As he passed parked cars, he tried the driver’s-side doors. Fifteen cars later, he found an unlocked old orange-brown Citroën and slid behind the wheel. He flipped the visor down. No keys. He looked under the seat. He got out and checked behind the tires. Nothing. So he tore the cover off the steering column with one swipe.
And froze.
His ability to do this so easily surprised him, even now. His hands were shaking, something they were doing more and more often. He took deep breaths until his hands were still enough to open the glove box.
There were four wires running up the steering column: two red, one brown, one green. He stripped the reds with his fingernails, stabbed them with the tip of a pen from the glove box, and tore them each apart. Then he twisted their wiring together. The lights on the dash came on: he had power. He stripped the brown wire and touched it to the two reds until the engine shook.
He pulled onto another side street, opened the briefcase, and started flipping through files. Alternating his attention between the road and the file, he went through the addresses. He had maybe another forty-five minutes in Paris, and he wasn’t coming back.
Silvana Nast.
His eyes paused on her picture. This was the woman he’d seen outside Jonathan Nast’s house. He wasn’t 100 percent on that, but he sensed it somehow. She was Nast’s sister, and for a moment he realized she probably didn’t know yet that her brother was dead.
She had just graduated from Skema Business School with a bachelor’s in marketing and had interned with Ogilvy & Mather. No full-time job was listed, so like millions of young French people in the current economy, she was probably unemployed and still desperately looking for something entry level. There were records of all her travel in the last three years, including one trip with her brother to Nice.
Someone had been keeping track of her.
Under “Suspected Contacts,” Tom found what he was looking for: Alan Sarmad. Nice was one of the three cities Sarmad was known to operate out of. Silvana and her brother might have met Sarmad there. Which meant she might know where to find him.
He checked her address. She lived in the Latin Quarter—only ten minutes away.
Karl slipped two divers into the Seine and stood thinking up an explanation in case the cops came and wanted to know why two men who didn’t speak a lick of French were bobbing around in the middle of Paris with thirty pounds of scuba gear.
It was a stupid thing to do, but he had to check the immediate area. A fugitive’s odds of escape increased the farther he traveled. Unfortunately the water turned out to be too dirty to see anything, so the divers were basically feeling around the drainage gates to see if Tom’s body was trapped against them.
Karl pulled out his phone and dialed Marty.
“Yes?” Marty said.
“Was there someone in those files with a Paris address?”
“Are you on a cell phone?”
“We have one shot at this, Marty.”
“If he goes to an address in Paris, he’s either very smart or very dumb.”
“Tell m
e you have another copy of those files.”
“No, I’m afraid you actually caught me telling the truth about that.”
“I’m going to be researching this myself. Am I going to find an address for anyone who could be even accidentally connected here? Tell me now.”
Marty hesitated. “Nast has a sister in the city. Her address would’ve been logged when we ran a utilities search.”
“I need your response team.”
Marty was silent. Using a quick response team would result in a detailed report.
“What do you have in mind?” Marty said.
“Locals.” Using assets rather than agency personnel meant they could keep this off the books.
“Are you sure about this? Paris, Karl, Paris.”
“He just escaped a lockdown. He has the only set of Prometheus files in existence, and he hustled his way onto the investigation of a crime he himself committed.”
“It’ll be tough to black-bag him. They may have to go all the way.”
“I can live with that.”
The line went dead.
Tom drove by Silvana’s street once to see if anything looked funny. This was cursory and sloppy, but he was on the clock. There was no one sitting in the parked cars that lined both sides of the street. No one walking outside. Compared to the rest of the neighborhood, the street looked deserted.
He left the Citroën running in a no-parking zone. As he got out, water that had pooled on the seat spattered onto the pavement. He went to Silvana’s building and hit the buzzers to the other apartments until he pissed off one of the tenants enough to buzz him in just to get him to stop. He went up to Silvana’s floor and knocked on the door. No answer. He dropped to the floor and waited for a shadow to move past the strip of light under the door. But there was nothing, and he didn’t hear anything in the apartment. He decided she wasn’t home and went back outside.
The Prometheus Man Page 8
