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 protruding 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.