I got into this because I was on vacation at Argentière in the French Alps and was therefore officially “not doing anything.” Vacationing shooters get no respect. No respect at all.
Thirty-one hours ago I was swooshing down a ski slope.
Now I was sloshing through French poop.
Happy? No, I wasn’t.
Mr. Church had called me to ask if I could check a place under Paris that had once been used as a processing facility for bioweapons and similar threats. The place had been emptied of anything dangerous and sealed off and, apparently, forgotten and left to rot way back in 1983. I was learning how to play with Legos in 1983 and never thought that I’d grow up to be a spotless hero for truth, justice, and the American way. I kicked a dead rat out of my way and plodded on, wishing all kinds of horrible deaths on Mr. Church.
“Fifty feet and left,” said Bug.
“Yeah, yeah.”
I’d asked Church why I had to go and not the French Brigade des Forces Spéciales Terre. This was, as I remembered it, their fucking city. Church took a moment before answering, and when he did that I knew that he was sorting through all the things he knows about something to decide what little sliver of the truth to tell me. Especially about things that happened — or that he might have been involved in — prior to his forming the DMS. I don’t know a lot about his past other than that he was some kind of spook and almost certainly either Special Ops or the equivalent for some deep-cover black ops group. You know the expression “he knows where the bodies are buried”? I made that joke to him once, and he gave me a sad, old smile and told me that, indeed, he should know where they’re buried…he’d buried a lot of them. Anyone else makes a comment like that, you think they’re talking trash.
You never—ever—think Church is talking trash.
I don’t know that he’s ever outright lied to me, but if I had to live on the tiny scraps of information he fed me…I’d starve to death.
What he actually said was, “Captain Ledger, there may be nothing left of value to anyone. However in the remote chance that there is something to find at that lab, we need to put eyes on it first and then either retrieve it or destroy it. This needs to be handled with secrecy, immediacy, and finesse.”
I have seldom been accused of possessing finesse, but I understood his point. This was never going to make it into an official report — even for the eyes-only crowd; and I suspect that his initial involvement back in the eighties likewise was never filed.
I came to the end of one branch of the sewer system. There was a big tank-like chamber from which six side tunnels branched off.
“Bug,” I said, “talk to me.”
“Take the second tunnel on your left,” he said. “Follow that for a hundred and twenty meters, make another left and you’ll be there.”
“You’re sure?” I put just a little edge in my voice. Bug was like a little brother to me, but if I got lost one more fucking time I was going to feed him to the tigers at the zoo.
“The intel’s rock solid,” said Bug.
I followed the second tunnel, took that second left, and found myself in another chamber, this one a reverse of the one I’d just left. Dozens of smaller tunnels seemed to converge here into a larger waterway. If there had been even a light rain, this would probably be a fairly brisk stream. As it was the filthy water merely rose above my ankles to midcalf. Thank Christ, Church gave me enough of a heads up so that I wore a waterproof Saratoga Hammer suit. It was a biohazard rig designed for combat troops. I wasn’t wearing the hood, though, because I needed to see where the hell I was going. As a result I had the full snootful of the aroma of human waste smacking me in the face with every step.
I know, my life…just like James Bond. Beautiful women, clever gadgets, dinner jackets, and martinis.
I climbed onto a narrow stone ledge that ran along the edge of the water. It was wider here than in the tunnel, allowing me to be on moderately dry land. Less noisy, at least. I knelt at the shadowy edge of a spill of yellow light thrown by a bulb in a rusted cage. There was a niche in the wall with a door set into a frame of bricks. Black mold and lichen coated the bricks, and the door was completely covered in dark red rust. The door was at the far end of a small concrete pad just big enough for half a dozen people to stand on, though right now I was the only person down here who wasn’t a rodent or cockroach.
“Cowboy to Bug,” I said. “Target acquired.”
“Proceed with caution,” said a voice in my ear. Not Bug this time. Church.
“Roger that, Deacon,” I said, using his combat call sign.
“Good hunting, Cowboy,” he replied.
Yeah, I thought, hunting for what? E. coli?
I squatted, studied the ground in front of the door, and felt the first tickling of alarm.
A fine sheen of moist grime covered the light gray concrete, and as I bent close I could see the impressions of shoes. Several pairs of shoes, the prints overlapping and partially obscuring each other. Impossible to tell how many.
“Rut-roh,” I said in my best Scooby-Doo voice.
Then I heard voices.
Men’s voices. And, I think, a woman.
Muffled, distant. Impossible to understand.
Any sewer is an echo chamber, and the sewers of Paris are virtually endless stone tunnels in which sounds are distorted, carried for miles, buried, or combined into an auditory mélange that can drive you nuts. I cocked my head to listen, trying to determine from which side corridor or tunnel the voices were coming from.
Then I realized that they were not coming from the tunnels.
The voices were coming from the other side of the rusted door.
I crept toward it, and as I did so it was clear that the door, though closed, was not shut tight. It was slightly ajar, not even enough to slip a business card through but enough for voices to slip out. As I drew closer I could tell why.
The voices were shouting.
Yelling.
And, then one of them started screaming.
The woman.
Before I knew it, my knife was in my hand. There was too much raw methane in the foul air to risk sparks from a pistol.
I pushed the door open and moved inside, fast and quiet, keeping low, taking in everything I could. Church had given me the basic layout of the lab: a short tunnel and then a larger chamber, with many small cubby holes used for storage, bathrooms and utility.
All of the action was happening in the main room.
And I walked into a weird tableau.
Truly weird.
There were ten people in that room. All dressed in black. All men.
Well, all of the people left alive were men. There were three dead people on the ground in space around which ten men knelt. One of the corpses was a woman. From her clothes — satin shorts and a tiny halter — it was pretty evident she was a prostitute. The woman lay in a pool of blood. Her throat had been cut from ear to ear.
On either side of her lay skeletons dressed in the rags of old black clothing. Even from where I crouched I could see that one of the skeletons was busted up — clear breaks in one leg and both arms. The other had a broken neck. From the condition of the bones and the scraps of old clothing, it was evident they’d been here for a lot of years. The vermin in the dark had been busy with them. Now they lay on either side of the murdered woman so that the pool of blood under her touched both sets of bones.