Terror paralysed her. Her hands slid; she couldn’t hold on. She smacked against a conical mound and grabbed at plaster that flaked under her fingernails.
Bumping and clutching at rough ridges and crumbling, gouged surfaces, she slid several meters to a subterranean dirt floor. Scattered gypsum mounds gave it a lunar-landscape look. Dizzied, she gazed up to see the layers of Fontainebleau sand and glistening travertine, packed sandwichlike over the compressed off-white and yellowish pinnacle of gypsum she’d slid down.
She’d landed in an old quarry under the hospital, part of the galleries webbing the underground that had been mined to build Sacré Coeur. There was not much to commend the sturdiness of their foundations to those living overhead in buildings resting on them. Amazing that Sacré Coeur didn’t tumble on its head.
Pounding came from the other side of the huge white flaky mound.
Where was Lucien?
Earsplitting blasts from a generator had masked her descent. On all fours, covered in caked white gypsum, she crawled around the mound, crouched behind rolls of abandoned chain-link fence and hollow metal poles, and then gasped.
A stone’s throw away, men in camouflage fatigues, Eastern European by the look of them, stacked ammunition and dull gray machine guns in metal boxes emblazoned with the slogan ARIEL, SPARKLING LAVAGE POUR TOUTES LES VÊTEMENTS!
Like the washing-machine detergent box on Zette’s table. The killers’ calling card? Worry about that later. She had to stop them. But how?
To the side of the cratered gypsum quarry were split, rotted wood coffins, hoes, shovels, and a forklift. A storage area for grave diggers and their equipment from the adjoining Mont-martre cemetery. Gruesome. The men, intent on loading the boxes, ignored them.
A small open-platform train car sat on tracks leading to a tunnel. She figured the tunnel snaked under the street and went to the cemetery. If she could short out the wires connected to the generator’s battery she’d plunge the cavern into darkness. That would stop the men and allow her to escape through the tunnel. At least, she’d have a shot.
Fear coursed through her. Several feet away from her stood the throbbing industrial generator with rusted wires protruding from it. Cans with funnels were lined up next to it; it ran on gasoline. Even with the men engrossed in their work, she’d have little time to play with the wires. Or to flip the circuit breaker she saw, protected in black housing on the control panel.
She felt in her pocket for a lighter. In the worst-case scenario, she’d knock the gasoline cans over and . . . no, that would be stupid. Live ammunition boxes were stacked by the Ariel cartons!
What could she do? She eyed the corroded metal sprockets and debris in her escape path, memorizing her route. If she got that far!
The generator had a revolving fan, its blades encased in a rusted tan metal frame to cool the exposed motor. She had an idea. She scrabbled her hands around to find something, anything, long enough for what she needed. Found it.
The generator’s noise muffled shouts and swearing in Corsican. She saw Lucien, his arms behind him, thrown to the ground, then shoved behind large metal cable spools. She peered around the side of the generator. Conari, his shirt bloodstained, sat behind the forklift, tied up. She couldn’t make out another figure partially obscured by Lucien. Wait! His shoes. She knew those shoes.
Someone walked toward the generator. A hand leaned down to pick up a gas can. She had to do it now.
With all her might, she shoved a long metal pipe across the dirt, cramming it into the revolving fan. There was a deafening squealing of shredding metal jamming the motor. Then a grinding and crunching, emitting a shower of sparks and spitting shards of metal as the motor ate the pipe. A hail of metal shrapnel rained off the rail car. The man was screaming.
The light wavered. The generator coughed and screeched to a halt, plunging the cavern into darkness. Her whole body tingled and shook. There were shouts and more screams of pain. Twenty seconds had passed but it felt like twenty minutes. Then, a sickening odor of burning oil from the generator. So rank she could taste it. A voice whimpered in pain.
“What happened? Idiots, go to the backup generator!”
Beams of flashlights swept the grayish white smoke-filled haze. She heard an echoing loudspeaker, incomprehensible words. The flics? Morbier? Then short staccato bursts, the thuds of bullets. Mon Dieu. Lucien was exposed to a rain of bullets! She ducked and saw the shoes, running over the gravel toward the tunnel.
He was getting away! She struggled to her feet, coughing, her ears ringing, as she grasped the rolled-up chain-link fence for support.
She caught herself, then ran, hoping she’d memorized a clear path, and took off down the tunnel, following the train tracks. Footsteps pounding ahead guided her. The frigid tunnel narrowed. And then there were no more footsteps.
She stopped, gasping, leaning against the earth wall. She was in the cemetery, its mausoleums silhouetted against the now clear sky, with just a thin tissue of cloud skirting the pearly white fingernail of a moon.
How could she find him in this necropolis?
Crunching sounds of broken glass came from her right.
She tripped on tree roots snaking over a gravestone, tried to still her shaking hands, wipe the damp vegetal humus from her face. She made her legs move but had no clue as to where they were taking her.
Center, she told herself. Focus on the sensations surrounding her, as she had done when she’d been blind: sounds, currents of air, the feel of disturbed earth. The jade bangle on her wrist, an opalescent green, glinted in the thin moonlight.
Her thoughts cleared. A stillness came over her. She guided her feet around the uneven graves without tripping. Then she paused.
She sensed him, hovering. She smelled the sweat of his fear. The scent Laure had caught on the scaffolding.
“Yann, I know you’re there,” Aimée said. “Your jogging shoes gave you away.”
A covey of startled night birds erupted, flapping their wings.
“But you’re brilliant, Yann,” she said. “From me, that’s high praise.”
Ahead, an elongated shadow moved through the damp air.
“The bricklayer from the construction site confirmed that the Dumpster’s emptied on Wednesday. It was impossible for it to have spilled over the night you ‘found’ the diagram. But that’s minutiae, a minuscule detail. Maybe your military service was in Corsica.”
“You knew that?”
She hadn’t. Guessed. Like she had about the Dumpster.
“No wonder you spoke Corsican and discovered the arms cache. My father was hired to find the stolen armaments six years ago.”
“You’re like a ghost,” he told her. He stepped into view.
She realized she was covered in white powdery plaster. A ghost, at home here, with all the others.
“Conari got involved. You threatened him, so he went along. Jacques demanded more money, and Zette knew too much.”
“Jacques wanted to pull out, the fool,” Yann said.
The cold metal of an automatic was pressed against her temple. His breath panted in her ear; her arms were grabbed and twisted behind her. He pushed her forward.
Keep him talking. Anything. Hadn’t René said the Ministry required construction firms with Ministry contracts to use systems analysts? “So ingenious. You’d worked on Ministry contracts. Was that how you tapped into Big Ears?”
“Tap into them?” He rolled his eyes. His ponytail hung over his shoulder. His suit jacket was studded with irregular bits of metal. The tang of burnt oil clung to him. “As it turned out, after all my preparation, I didn’t need to. I installed the communications in Solenzara where I worked with those guys. I just shared a bottle of Courvoisier with them and caught up. Easy.”