The Titanic Secret (Isaac Bell 11)

That just ratcheted up the pressure even more. Bell took a breath. Blew it out. Took another. Tomorrow would just have to work.

As careful as a surgeon, he inserted the long yellow hair back onto the daybook’s first page and gently closed the cover on it so it was once again trapped in place. Bell had touched nothing else, but he swept the room just to be certain he hadn’t accidentally brushed against a stack of papers or knocked a lampshade askew. Everything was as it should be. If he could make his exit as stealthy as his entrance, he’d be home free.

He opened the drapery to the position it had been in when he’d entered, shrugged back into his overcoat, and gently unlocked the door. Like before, he opened it just enough to squeeze his body through. The hallway was dark and deserted. He retraced his steps down the corridor, ever mindful that someone could be approaching through the gloom. He reached the stairs and paused. All he heard was the rush of blood through the vessels around his ears. He started down. He reached the head of the third-floor stairs when his luck failed him. Coming up from below were two men holding flashlights with red lenses to make them harder to detect in the dark building.

“Je déteste la grippe,” one said miserably, and wiped at his nose.

14

In an intuitive flash, Bell understood the security decisions the company had made to protect the building. They pretended that there was no real security, to lure in unsuspecting thieves—likely, industrial spies from Krupp or some other big European conglomerate. The would-be spies make it inside, but guards silently roaming the darkened hallways with blacked-out lights would eventually find them. This way, the Société could get information out of the captured man and the Metropolitan Police would never know a thing.

Had Bell not heard the flu-addled guard sneeze, he’d have assumed he was alone and been far less cautious. In the end, though, it didn’t matter, because the healthy other guard saw him at the top of the stairs in his light’s ruddy glow and shouted in alarm.

Bell launched himself at the two, spreading his elbows just wide enough to hit both in the face. The impact knocked the men back down to the landing below, their bodies cushioning Bell’s as he fell on top of them. He got to his feet and leapt down to the next landing. Reaching out with his right arm, he hooked his hand onto one of the iron elevator shaft stanchions and whipped himself around before launching himself down another eight-stair flight. This was the second floor. He tore around the elevator shaft and leapt to the final mid-stairs landing, needing to throw up his hands to keep from smashing into the wall. He turned and jumped again, landing in position to whirl around another stanchion and gain the main floor. His shoulder felt like it was pulling from the joint, but his reckless flight had captured him seconds.

The lights of Paris beckoned through the lobby windows, and a curtain of fresh rain fell from the heavens. He could hear the guards rushing down the stairs in his wake. Bell raced across the open space.

Once the guards reported that an intruder had been in the building, someone as paranoid and clever as Gly would suspect information about his project had been the intended target and not whatever was kept in the vault. The Scotsman would immediately change his schedule. No meeting at A. C. Bourgault and no motorbus ride to Le Havre.

He had two options. One was just to shoot the men in cold blood, a thought that was tempting but not Bell’s style. These men may work for a ruthless organization, yet that wasn’t enough reason for him to just execute them. His second option was to lure them someplace where he could subdue them and keep them stashed long enough for him to make contact with Brewster. It was the more dangerous plan but his conscience would be clear.

He paused just long enough for the pursuing guards to see him at the door before he pushed through the auto lock and out into the rainy night. He turned left toward the Métro station and started running. Behind him, he heard the door crash open and a shout as they spotted him heading down the middle of the sodden street.

A sudden pistol shot blasted the night. The bullet never came close, but the game suddenly changed. Bell drew his .45 on the fly and kept going. Another shot rang out, and this one was close enough for Bell to hear the hot round sizzle its way through the rain. He quickened his pace. More bullets punched the air around him. He was too exposed. His plan had turned from subterfuge to survival.

He veered at the last second and flew down the stairs under the glass and iron awning of the Métro station entrance. He expected to be able to stop at the bottom and shoot both men when they were silhouetted against the shimmering night sky. But when he got there, he saw a train made of stained wooden carriages with plain square windows was in the station. A couple of people were stepping off while a couple of others waited on the vaulted platform to board. The scene had a sleepy quality of commuters going through routines without thought. At the far end of the station, workers in heavy rain gear clustered around an open door that led to a deeper, hellish realm below the streets.

Bell discreetly holstered his weapon and made his way onto one of the electric train’s four passenger carriages. A few Parisians sat on the benches, owl-eyed with exhaustion or asleep with their heads resting against the car’s interior. One drunk fellow gave him a loopy grin. Bell watched anxiously. The guards would know they’d be vulnerable coming down into the Métro system, so they would be cautious. If Bell had any luck left tonight, the train would glide out of the station before they reached the platform.

He waited. They didn’t budge, even though everyone who wanted aboard had a seat. No one came down the stairs from street level. The car suddenly jolted as the silent train began to pull from the station. Bell felt a glimmer of hope.

The two dark figures hit the platform at full speed and ran along the last car just fast enough to open the door and leap aboard. Bell shrank in his seat, peering over the back as the Société security men began checking passengers, rousing the sleeping men and asking questions in short, explosive bursts. There were only a few passengers in the last car. Two doors connected it to Bell’s carriage.

They were almost out of the station and into the dim confines of the tunnels.

Bell made a snap decision.

The boxy Colt pistol materialized in his hand and he fired three times at the train’s window before rushing at it while the disintegrating glass cascaded out of the frame and onto a hapless passenger sitting below. Bell vaulted over the passenger and threw himself out the now empty widow, tucking like an acrobat as he dove so that his palms hit the terminal’s tile floor first and letting his momentum flip him onto his shoulders, his back, and eventually onto his feet. What he hadn’t been able to calculate was the momentum generated by the train’s forward speed.

He’d cut it too close. When he came fully upright, he continued to lurch hard to the left and slammed into the station wall with a shoulder that would be five shades of purple and blue the next day. The two men would have to remain on the—

A blast like a sudden thunderclap rocked the terminal at the same instant a vibrant explosion of blue light arced from the tunnel where the train had just vanished. Hot air reeking of ozone and something worse—the charred odor of overcooked meat—belched from the tunnel’s mouth. A woman waiting for another train began screaming while white-faced men gazed in wonder down the shaft.

Bell shook off the effects of momentary paralysis. He quickly grasped what had just occurred. The two guards had opened the door at the train’s rear and leapt from it before it accelerated away. One or both had landed on the electrified third, rail and its pulse of high-voltage energy had coursed through their bodies, killing as surely as the electric chair at Sing Sing prison. The lights in the station remained on, telling him it was on a different power system.

The workers who’d been clustered around the door leading deeper into the earth ran past Bell to reach the platform edge and peer into the tunnel.

A couple gasped as a man ran out of the blackness, grim and shaken but still holding a revolver in one hand.

The workers were helping hoist the Société guard off the railbed and onto the platform, clutching his belt to lift him free. The man was on his belly, surrounded by kneeling workers who still weren’t sure what had happened. The guard fixed his gaze firmly on Isaac Bell, standing no more than a dozen feet away. He started to move his arm up along his body so he could aim the weapon from his prone position.

Bell took off through a dank maintenance doorway that led farther under the Parisian streets. At first he found himself in a brickwork antechamber, with another door opposite the first. Tools lay on the floor next to an open hatch with a wooden ladder rising up through it from below. The air smelled of wet decay. A pair of metal hard hats sat on the floor next to the hatch. Each had an electric lamp on the brim attached by wires to a battery pack in a bag that could be slung over the shoulder like a dispatch rider’s haversack. He looped one bag’s single strap over his shoulder before clamping the safety helmet on his head.

He went down the ladder. At the bottom he saw lights strung along the far wall of the tunnel that led off in either direction. The shaft was brick lined and consisted of a platform, where Bell stood, overlooking a wide channel roiling at a level just below his feet. The water was dingy brown and laden with debris scoured off the Parisian streets and sucked down into the subterranean system. Now that he was down in the tunnel, the loamy smell gave way to the sharper acrid stench of a sewer.

Behind him, in the far distance where the lightbulbs appeared like distant stars, the farthest from view suddenly went dark.

The next light in the string was so far down the tunnel that he could only perceive its nimbus and yet he could tell when it too winked out like the one before it. Something was coming down the tunnel. Something big and something utterly remorseless. And the deepest part of Isaac Bell’s brain, the area honed over eons of evolution, told him to run as fast and as far as he could.