by Jon Land
She reached Paris without incident and drove directly to Le Jardin D’Amber. Located just outside the wall of the palace at Versailles, Jacques’s small restaurant catered almost exclusively to “soldiering” types as he put it. The building’s facade was stucco, with more than one missing chunk attributed to German shrapnel in World War II. The interior was only about fifteen by thirty feet, allowing Jacques, who doubled as the cook, the freedom to roam about his seven tables greeting most of his patrons by name.
He had been making his rounds when Hedda arrived early Sunday morning. She found that, as always, most of the tables were occupied, at this hour by drinkers rather than diners. The inevitable stares cast her way were now receding, the men returning to their glasses or cards secure in the knowledge she was one of them.
Jacques emerged from the kitchen with tray in hand. He set it down on a stand and placed a thick bowl of soup in front of her.
“I need to speak with Deerslayer,” Hedda said softly, as he leaned over her to put a basket of bread on the table.
“I saw him just the other day.”
“Then he’s in the city?”
“As far as I know.” Jacques wiped his hands on his apron. “Trouble?”
“Bad trouble.”
“How can I help?”
“Make sure no one finds out I was here.”
“Of course.”
“And tell me where I can find Deerslayer.”
Deerslayer’s latest residence was located on a dingy back street called Rue du Chat qui Pêche on the Left Bank in Paris’s Latin Quarter. Hedda slid past block after block of the decrepit buildings, wondering why on earth Deerslayer had chosen such a place to base himself. She could hear babies crying through the open windows, screams and shouts, too. Kids roamed about in packs even at the late hour. A few regarded her briefly, then shied away as if jolted by an electrified fence.
Deerslayer lived on the fifth floor of an apartment building with no lights outside it or within the entrance way. Where a lock had been there was only a hole. The inner door’s window was missing. Hedda held it so it would not squeal upon closing and began her way up the dark and dingy steps. Light from a single bulb spiraled down from the fourth floor, barely enough for even her well-trained eyes to see by. She found Deerslayer’s door and froze; the latch had been shattered. Shards of thin wood hung from the useless door. Hedda eased it open with a hand pressed against its ruined frame.
She stepped through the doorway and pushed the door shut behind her. The room’s only illumination came from the sputtering beams of a neon light across the street sliding through the half-drawn blinds. The room was a shambles. Furniture had been tipped over and shattered. Pools of drying blood soaked the floor, and splashes of it decorated the walls. Hedda leaned over and touched the blood. Barely an hour or two old by the feel of it. She moved on.
The room was a perfect square, unpainted and poorly furnished. The acrid stench of spilled blood became stronger in her nostrils. The blood was thickest in a splotchy line across the floor toward the rear wall, where a single inner door led into a bathroom. That door was open just a crack. She found the knob and pulled it toward her. The invading rays of the neon sign reached inside the bathroom.
Deerslayer was lying on the floor, right hand clinging to the soiled toilet bowl in a death grip. The volume of his wounds was incredible. Drying blotches of blood painted his midsection. A portion of his throat was torn, and the arm still by his side had been shattered.
Hedda backed out from the bathroom and inspected the room more carefully, seeing it all happen in her mind. There had been between four and six attackers. They’d crashed through the door and come in firing. Taken by surprise, Deerslayer had still been able to make a fight of it. The trail of blood near the bed she identified as the first to be spilled. He must have lunged for a gun with the enemy’s bullets slamming his midsection. One had caught his neck and sprayed scarlet across the bedspread. Deerslayer would have emptied a clip, and now Hedda’s attention turned to the ink-blotch patterns against the front wall. He’d killed two and probably wounded another, lunged into the rest with knife in hand when his bullets were gone. He’d been too weak to use it, though, and one of the killers had turned it on him, after a desperate struggle had left Deerslayer’s arm shattered. That’s where it had ended, and then for some reason the killers had dragged him into the bathroom.
Hedda realized her breathing had become thick and rapid. Deerslayer was a link to whatever The Caretakers were involved in, and he was dead. She was a link, and they had tried to kill her.
Her mind shifted in midthought. Time must have been of the essence here. The kill had gotten messy, and the surviving assassins would have wasted no time in fleeing with their wounded and their corpses.
Then why had they bothered dragging Deerslayer into the bathroom?
The answer struck her with a chill: they hadn’t dragged him; he had dragged himself. He hadn’t been dead when they left. He had crawled into the bathroom to, to …
To what?
Had he sensed Hedda was coming? Had he understood what happened to him and wanted to leave her some sort of warning? The cleanup crew would find it if left in plain sight, the floor or wall for instance. But where in the bathroom could he have—
Hedda returned swiftly to the bathroom and looked down at Deerslayer’s corpse, strong and ominous even in death. His hand was cocked near the cracked porcelain of the toilet bowl.
Hedda edged closer. She looked down at the back of the tank. Nothing. She checked the toilet seat. Also nothing. Then she leaned over and inspected the back of the toilet bowl itself. There was blood there, long etches of it in symmetrical designs. No, not just designs—letters, numbers, a message!
Hedda had to get down on her back to read it. She eased Deerslayer slightly away. His upright hand slipped from its perch and touched her cheek. Hedda tried to read the message, couldn’t in the dark, and so chanced turning on the single dangling bathroom bulb.
Deerslayer had penned the message with a trembling hand.
17 Rue Plummet—6A
An address and apartment number. Deerslayer was sending her there for answers, for help, for vengeance perhaps. Whoever lived at the address would know something.
Thump …
A sound in the corridor, on the stairwell perhaps. There was nothing else to hear. Then suddenly heavy, staggering footsteps and raucous laughter. Drunks were stumbling home.
No!
If they were drunks, she would have heard them earlier from the floors below. The men approaching had slipped into this guise after one of them had tripped and made the noise that alerted her.
Laughter echoed through the hall beyond Deerslayer’s apartment.
Hedda quickly smudged the blood-scrawled message and bounded to her feet. They knew she was here; they had probably been waiting for her. She charged into the living room toward the window that opened onto the fire escape. It came up with a squeak and Hedda slid through it.
Four floors lay beneath her. The steel supports were rusted and wobbly. She began to descend, holding fast to the rail with one hand, pistol in the other.
Pfffffft … pfffffft … pfffffft …
The silenced gunshots from below clanged off the steel around her. Hedda managed two rounds in their direction as she ducked low and turned her eyes upward. Through the still-open window in Deerslayer’s apartment, she heard the door crash open. The men posing as drunks would be charging for the window even now. She was boxed in.
More gunshots, from below. Shapes darted down in the street. Now she couldn’t go up or down, which left only sideways. The apartments neighboring Deerslayer’s were accessible by a second decaying fire escape.
Glass shattered above her. One of the drunks plunged onto the fire escape platform, machine gun in hand. Hedda shot him and spun round. Five stories beneath her a pair of gunmen had moved into the open. She dropped them with four bullets, which left her seven in this clip. Enough. The mome
nt was hers, and she seized it.
Hedda fired off five more shots at the shattered window to cover her rush to the rickety fire escape rail. It nearly gave under her weight but held long enough for her to leap outward and grab hold of the neighboring rail. With bullets already tracing her again, Hedda transferred the momentum of her leap into a swing. She kicked out toward a window just beneath her to the right. The glass shattered easily on impact, and she crashed through it into an apartment over and down from Deerslayer’s.
The glass had pricked and scratched her arms and face, but she had managed somehow to hold on to the pistol. She burst into the corridor with a fresh clip jammed home and started for the stairs.
Hedda slowed. The stairwell was a death trap. The enemy owned it. She could make this floor the battleground, but eventually the opposition would wear her down. No, it had to be escape, but how? How?
Built into the corridor wall on her right was a waist-level door that opened from the top. This building must have once been a hotel, complete with laundry chutes on every floor. Of course! Why Deerslayer had chosen to base himself here was suddenly clear to her. The chute would drop into the basement, and from the basement—
Hedda had yanked down the hinged latch just as doors burst open on either side of the hall. In the next instant, she had squeezed herself through the narrow opening and was sliding downward for the basement. At first she managed to slow her descent with hands and feet pressed against the wall, but the last two floors came at a breakneck clip. Impact took her breath away.
Hedda rolled onto her stomach and made it up to her knees. The basement’s blackness was broken only by what little street lighting penetrated the painted-over windows. She began to crawl across the floor with her hands in front of her.
Where was it? It had to be here, had to be!
Near the far wall, her hand scraped against a latch on the basement floor. She knew it! Knowing he was in trouble, Deerslayer would have chosen this building only if it possessed an entrance to the tunnels used by the French Resistance in World War II. It was the way Caretakers were trained to think. Hedda grasped the latch with both hands and began to lift. The hidden door started to give, then held. Hedda let go and tried again. She was running out of time; it would be only seconds more before her pursuers located the basement door and charged down.
Hedda yanked harder this time, and the hidden door broke free. The stink of must, mold, and rot flooded her nostrils. Before her was a ladder, and next to it a flashlight Deerslayer had fastened into place. She had grasped the flashlight when footsteps pounded down the basement steps. Hedda lowered herself onto the third rung and was reaching up to close the hidden door when the rung broke under her weight. She plummeted a dozen feet and slammed her head hard against the ladder’s base. The flashlight slipped from her grip. Its glass cracked and it rolled sideways, casting a spiderweb pattern of light about the cavern. The pistol was gone, too. Above her, shapes were already beginning to appear around the open doorway. Hedda grabbed the flashlight and staggered off.
The tunnels of the French Resistance were a combination of long-abandoned sewer lines and channels linking them together. Some were actually open for public tours, but others, like this, had been forgotten and untraveled for decades. Accordingly, the stench was revolting.
Behind her brighter flashlights pierced the darkness. The sound of footsteps sloshing through wet muck mixed with the clacking of expensive shoes against the still-hard surface of the tunnel. Weaponless, Hedda could never hope to defeat all of them. Nor could this labyrinth of tunnels and channels protect her forever. In trying to lose her pursuers, in fact, she might very well become lost herself.
For now she had no choice but to keep moving. Afraid the flashlight would give her away, Hedda switched it off and felt her way along the wall. A hiding place perhaps. If she could find a hiding place—
The floor in front of her suddenly dropped off, and Hedda fell into a roll. The drop leveled off, and she found herself in what seemed to be a cavernous pool with a stink that nearly choked her. The air was thick with stray sewer gases that must have been collecting here for years. Exposure for more than a few minutes could result in fatal poisoning. A methane explosion was also a very real possibility.
Hedda stopped in her tracks. An explosion! Of course! She began moving faster through the cavern, counting the seconds it took to reach the other side. She reached the upward slope and scaled it just as the sounds of some of her pursuers echoed through the cavern. Hedda squeezed herself against a wall and tore the lower portion of her shirt off. She turned the flashlight back on and pressed the cloth against the exposed bulb. Her fingers were singed through the material almost instantly. When the cloth began to smoke, she laid the flashlight down on the cavern’s slope and backed off, after making sure the cloth was tight against the bulb.
She saw a small flicker of flame before she turned and ran. There was nothing but darkness before her, and she moved with her side scraping against the wall for guidance, rounding corners until she came to a large alcove.
She had barely ducked into the alcove and pressed herself against the inside wall when the explosion sounded. It was deafening. The wall she was lodged against began to crumble, and she turned away in time to see a massive bluish-orange flare shooting down the path she had taken from the cavern.
Hedda felt the incredible surge of heat and thought she was melting. The bright flash poured toward her, and she threw up an arm as if to block it. Then a pool of darkness swept over her, and Hedda plunged into it.
Chapter 13
THEY FOUND CAPTAIN SEVEN sitting atop the main control board outside the entrance to The Locks’ maximum-security wing.
“Nice of you to show up, Ferryman.”
“Get off that!” Dr. Alan Vogelhut ordered.
Captain Seven eased himself down, careful to skirt the various knobs and switches. His sandals clacked against the floor.
“Take it easy, Vogey. Chill out.”
Vogelhut swung toward Kimberlain. “I want this man out of here! As soon as he explains whatever it is he’s discovered, I want him out of here!”
“Glad to go now, Vogey,” Seven said to him, reaching back to the control board for his bong. “Just let me grab one toke for the road… .”
Captain Seven lowered his lips to the bong’s top and sucked down into its water-filled chambers. Instantly the bubbling water produced a misty smoke that vanished quickly into his mouth. He held his breath until his features began to redden, then exhaled.
“Ahhhhhhhhh,” he said with a smile.
“Jesus Christ,” Vogelhut said.
“Just trying to collect my thoughts, Vogey. You should try it someday. Anytime you want a hit, just—”
“Get to the point, goddamn it!”
Captain Seven shuffled forward. The bottoms of his faded bell-bottom jeans scraped at the floor. He was wearing a tie-dyed shirt and had captured his wild hair in a ponytail.
“Better make that two hits,” he said with a wink to Kimberlain. “I’m starting to like it here, Ferryman. Might think about renting one of their many vacant rooms.”
“I’m not going to stand here and listen to all this,” Vogelhut shot out.
He had started back down the corridor when Captain Seven hit a switch that activated all twelve of the television monitors on the wall before him. The glare bathed the corridor in dull light as the pictures came to life. Vogelhut stopped and turned around.
“Look familiar?” Captain Seven wanted to know.
Displayed on the screens were various shots of the prisoners who had escaped from The Locks still in their cells, seen as they had been that last night just prior to the blackout. Vogelhut drew closer and scanned them quickly.
“We make tapes,” he said. “Standard procedure.”
“And this is a recording of the night in question?”
“Right.”
“Wrong, Vogey.”
“What do you mean?”
“Leeds and the others were long gone before the power went south. Thing was, your boys didn’t know it.”
“Let’s start at the beginning,” Seven said over Vogelhut’s insistent protests. “What time were your animals fed that evening?”
“According to the logs, between six and six-thirty.”
“And the blackout occurred at …”
“Eleven-thirty, give or take a few minutes.”
“So that gave our boys a roughly five-hour time frame in which to disappear.”
“But I saw them,” Vogelhut argued. “I saw them in their cells when I got back.”
“You saw them in their cells, Vogey, but they weren’t there. You told me your standard procedure is to make tapes. Twelve cameras means twelve tracks. Pretty complicated stuff.”
“It’s a complicated system. Most technologically advanced in existence.”
“Not quite. NASA’s version has a few yards on yours and so does mine. You coulda done better. Too bad you didn’t.”
“Why?”
“Because it gave Leeds and the others their way out,” Captain Seven continued. “See, there’s a recording device about four times the size of a normal VCR built into the guts of your circuit panel. Tapes are about three times the size. You want to check the animals the next day, you tell the computer which cell you want to peek into and that’s the view comes up on your screen.”
“I know that,” said Vogelhut. “It was designed to my specifications.”
“Bad specs.”
“What?”
“Flaws. Weaknesses.”
“This is crazy!”
“No,” Seven said, tapping the main control board, “this is shit. Seventh grader could have put a better one together for his science fair, you ask me. Jesus Christ, you really don’t get it, do you?” the captain continued. The three men were bathed in the haze of the dozen television screens that flickered around them. “Somebody dipped into your system, Vogey. Somebody did some rewiring that turned your monitor recording equipment into a player.”
