The Titanic Secret (Isaac Bell 11)

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The crack of a pistol and the sting of a piece of concrete shrapnel hitting his calf galvanized Bell into action. Whatever was coming from behind him was secondary to the gunman taking potshots from above. Bell whirled, fired once up at the ceiling hatch, and broke into a run. In just seconds his lungs burned from the noxious nature of the air he breathed.

The heavy battery slapped at his hip, while the hard hat was at least sized right to stay on his head. A second shot rang out, but he’d put enough distance between him and the Société guard that the bullet passed by harmlessly. The man was giving chase, and the both of them were breathing hard and amped up on adrenaline. Firing from anything beyond point-blank range was a waste of ammunition.

Bell chanced looking back a few seconds later and almost stumbled at what he saw. Whatever was barreling down the tunnel was nearly upon him. The dozens of lights he had raced past were all eclipsed by the thing. He could see the guard too, pushing himself, as he also recognized some presence was in motion in the sewer shaft. Bell turned back forward, trying for a burst of speed, anything to stay ahead of the mystery object.

And then it was on him. Bell felt an enormous presence at his side, a surging force that seemed to fill the tunnel. He and it moved parallel for a moment, and Bell finally saw his stalker. It was an enormous wooden ball that rolled along the round channel at the base of the tunnel and it swept past him in mere moments, borne along by a surging slosh of water that washed up onto the platform where Bell was running, soaking him to the knees and slowing his progress. He had no idea of the ball’s function, as it continued down the tunnel, now blocking out the lamps ahead of Bell as it had moments earlier with the ones behind him.

The water following in the wake of the rolling ball grew deeper. Its current was swift, and Bell had to be cautious or he’d be yanked off his feet. Another glance back told him his pursuer was also battling the storm surge but was keeping apace. Now it was a test of endurance.

As the ball moved away, more and more of the light fixtures could be seen ahead, brightening the tunnel enough for Bell to note a pair of objects in the water ahead. They were small rowboats, tied to iron rings in the wall. They had been sitting on the elevated platform above the channel but now floated and bobbed like little toys in it.

When Bell reached the closest wooden skiff, he hauled himself over the low gunwale and sprawled onto the bottom boards and thwart seat. He straightened himself and pulled the knife from the sheath at his ankle. He planned on cutting the second boat loose first, yet as he went to reach for it the guard sensed his intention and began firing with not just his own revolver but also the one he’d scooped up from his dead partner. The air around Bell came alive. He ignored the other craft and instead cut the painter holding his own to the wall.

The boat was instantly grabbed by the current and was soon rocketing through the abyssal tunnel, the lamps on the far wall almost turning into a continuous blur of yellow light. He was certain the Société guard would not give up the chase. Whenever the tunnel curved even slightly, the boat would scrape against the wall and dip enough for some fetid water to slop over the gunwale. To protect himself, Bell found two wooden oars on the floor and fitted them through the metal oarlocks and used them like punter’s sticks to keep his craft from capsizing against the rough brick walls.

His pursuer remained far enough away that Bell could only detect him as a shape in the distance. After two minutes of headlong rushing through

the tunnel, Bell saw ahead that the recessed lamps in the wall came to an end. He found the switch for the light mounted on his helmet and connected to the battery and flipped it on. It cut just a small cone into the inky gloom as he roared past the last lamp and into a differently shaped tunnel. It was tighter, perfectly round, and he realized that the ceiling had dropped. His helmeted head was only a few feet from smashing into the thick iron pipes bolted in conduits along the ceiling of the tunnel.

The tighter confines of the shaft also meant the volume of water rushing through it increased his speed significantly. He was constantly jabbing the oars outward to keep himself from a fatal collision with the walls. He did spare a fraction of a second to look up. The ceiling was closer than it had been just seconds before. The tunnel was filling up with water, and very soon the plucky little boat would be pressed to the top against the pipes and Isaac Bell was likely to drown in a river of stormwater and sewage.

The relentless current suddenly stopped and the crash of water that had filled Bell’s ears went silent. Ahead, in the feeble illumination of his headlamp, he saw the mysterious wooden ball wedged tight in the tunnel, and his skiff almost bumped into it as its momentum bled away. And yet the water level continued to rise, pressing him ever closer to the ceiling.

Understanding came in a rush. The wooden ball was introduced into the system whenever there was a clog. It would roll and rumble along with the current, and when it hit a snag, like a knot of tangled branches or a thick shoal of sand, it would form a plug that would cause water to rise behind it. Once enough water had backed up in the tunnel, the tremendous force of its weight would blast the obstruction free. The ball would once again start rolling and would eventually be recovered.

None of that did him any good in the last frantic seconds before he was swamped. He felt something strike his boat. He turned. It was the guard’s skiff. The man’s face was ashen and his eyes were wide at the inevitability of the situation. Bell ignored him. The rowboat’s gunwales were almost pressed flat to the tunnel roof. At the last possible moment, he realized the oarlocks were still slotted in place. They would hit the ceiling first and allow water to pour in. He popped them free and, lying flat on his back, used his hands along the ceiling tiles to orient the boat so that it ran parallel to the roof’s slight arch.

The skiff’s natural buoyancy pressed the edge of its gunwale tight to the ceiling as the water fully filled the tunnel and began backing up down the passageway. A little water seeped around the sides and into the boat, but the seal was remarkably tight. His fast actions had given him a fighting chance.

The Société guard hadn’t been so lucky. Bell heard his scream as his oarlocks hit the ceiling and water overtopped his craft. Buoyancy would trap him in the boat while he drowned, making it his personal sarcophagus until the water pressure was high enough to release the clog.

Three claustrophobic minutes passed. Bell was grateful for the headlamp. Being trapped in such a predicament in total darkness made him shudder. It was the cold water pooling on the little punt’s bottom boards that made him shiver. The sewers were filled with the icy rain that had been falling for days, and Bell felt the cold sapping his energy.

A great grinding sound, like the gears of some enormous machine come to life, filled the tiny pocket of air Bell had preserved for himself. The great ball had started to roll. Pressed by hundreds and then thousands of tons of water, the ball moved like a grist stone through the clogged debris, grinding it into pieces that would easily flush away.

As the ball was slightly smaller than the diameter of the pipe, and the onetime tent was no longer acting like a gasket, water began to ooze out ahead of the rolling sphere and the level behind it began to drop. Very quickly Bell’s boat came off the ceiling and was again floating freely. He imagined somewhere behind him the guard’s waterlogged craft would tumble in the wake and eventually spill its grisly contents.

Bell rode the diminishing current for a few minutes until the ball emerged into a wider section of tunnel. There was a platform along one wall and lights. A cross tunnel connected to this main line, and he could see green and black signs at the intersection with the names of the corresponding topside streets spelled out in white letters.

He let it pass, but when he came to another intersection, he pulled on the oars to maneuver upstream and away from the ball. He came to another landing near a set of ascending iron rungs fastened to the brick wall. They rose to a hatch in the ceiling. He steadied the little rowboat against the platform and rather than risk standing and capsizing he crawled out on his hands and knees. He gave the punt an affectionate shove back toward the main channel.

“Fair winds and a following sea, mon ami.”

Bell climbed the ladder. With no lock on the hatch, he carefully lifted it. Above was a room. He climbed fully into it and let the hatch lid down softly. The dim headlamp on his hard hat revealed that the room was used for tool storage. There were all manner of wrenches, some the size of baseball bats, and other gear sewer workers might need. He found the light switch by the room’s only door. On a rack he discovered cleaned and folded canvas jumpsuits that the men could wear rather than befoul their own clothing. Bell emptied his pockets and thankfully stripped out of his filthy pants and shirt. He also removed his sodden socks and would just have to brave chilled ankles until he returned to his hotel. The ruined shoes wouldn’t make it past the discreet trash can just outside the Lutetia’s front door.

He tugged on the jumpsuit, buttoning the front up to his neck, and slipped on his wet shoes, making his feet feel like they were being rubbed by the icy hands of a corpse. He secreted his weapons and personal items in the many pockets.

Bell killed the light and cracked open the door. The room beyond was in darkness. He slapped the hard hat back onto his head and shouldered the heavy battery pack. He’d stepped into some sort of operations area. There were large tables covered in poster-sized technical drawings and schematics. There were shelves of hard hats like the one he wore and trays on the floor with ranks of rubber boots. A stairway like one coming out of a root cellar was on the opposite wall. Bell climbed up and came to a metal door painted glossy black. He had to manually unlock it, and when he inched it open, he got a lungful of crisp November air. He quickly stepped out from the stairwell and onto a street. The doorway was wedged into a narrow alley between two buildings. The street was deserted.

The Eiffel Tower loomed large in the night, an ironwork needle bathed in a warm yellow aura. From its proximity, Bell realized his subterranean boat ride had taken him several miles from the Métro stop near the Société des Mines’s building. At this late hour it took him an hour to find a taxi, and the night manager at the hotel, a man Bell had never met, asked for proof of his residency at the upscale establishment. Bell couldn’t blame him. A shoeless man in a sewer worker’s jumpsuit smelling vaguely of rot skulking in at three in the morning wasn’t the Lutetia’s typical clientele.

Bell took three separate showers using three different bars of soap, lathering and rinsing until his body was red and his skin wrinkled like a walnut shell. He dressed in a suit, lacing up a pair of shoes identical to the ones he’d discarded.

He knew that if he crawled into bed, he would shut down for a solid ten hours. It was best to soldier on and find a way to make contact with Brewster after he’d been picked up by Foster Gly.

Bell spent the next hour at the desk in his room meticulously cleaning and greasing his Colt .45—John Browning preferred grease on the slide versus gun oil—and the two spare magazines. He persuaded the night manager to brew him a pot of coffee, which he took in one of the lobby’s public rooms. He brought a notebook and took the opportunity to fill out his post-action report. There were so many ways the night could have gone. Ending up in the Paris sewers, pursued by a man who had to have been the most determined night watchman in the city, was not one he would have imagined.