The Accident Man

8

The first underground sewer was dug beneath the streets of Paris in 1370. Now there were 1,300 miles of tunnels beneath the city, known as les egouts. They carried away 1.2 million cubic meters of water and waste a day, and they directly followed the lines of the roads up above. Every tunnel was signposted with the name of the avenue, boulevard, street, or square whose filth it removed.

If you wanted to have a gun battle right in the middle of a major city, without anyone noticing, the sewers were the place to have it. But Paris went one better. It didn’t just have sewers, it had a sewer museum, a concrete-and-steel warren of tunnels and chambers, right underneath the south end of the Alma Bridge.

Carver scuttled down the narrow stairs, bare concrete walls on either side. At the bottom, the passage turned a sharp left. In front of him was a solid steel door. On it was a white sign with a red banner across it announcing Danger. Below the sign a padlock held a massive bolt in place.

He put a bullet through the padlock, blowing it open, then pushed against the door, which swung away from him into a pitch-black void filled with chill, damp air that smelled of drains. He turned on his dazzler, twisting the end to widen the beam, filling the black void with a ghostly, radioactive green glow. Ahead, the passage seemed to open up into a low, broad chamber. There was another lock on the inside of the door, operated by a metal wheel. Carver closed the door and turned the wheel. There wasn’t much chance the guys who were after him would come in that way. Only an idiot would charge down a narrow, dark corridor toward a man known to have a dazzler and almost certainly a gun as well. They’d find another way in. Even so, it never hurt to cover your back.

Carver walked on into the sewers, his torch in his left hand, the SIG-Sauer in his right, trying to work out the direction from which his enemy’s attack would come.

The first chamber consisted of two old sewer tunnels that ran side by side. The sewer was filled in with concrete to make a flat floor. The wall between the tunnels had been punctured by a series of low, egg-shaped arches to make a single space. Carver walked through one of the arches, then hurled himself to the ground, bringing his gun to bear as he rolled across the concrete. To his left, in the shadows on the edge of the green dazzler light, he’d seen a group of figures in boiler suits and miners’ helmets. It took him half a second to realize they were waxworks, part of the museum’s exhibition.

He got up sheepishly and dusted himself off. To his right there was another, smaller tunnel. A notice: “This Way for the Tour.” Carver followed it and went deeper into the tunnel.

Grigori Kursk had reached the far end of the Alma Bridge a few seconds after Carver. He’d tracked the Englishman right up to the point where he’d pulled that crazy stunt in front of the oncoming bus. By the time the bus had moved out of the way, he’d lost him.

For a second he thought the man had got away. Then, across the far side of the road, he saw Carver’s bike abandoned next to the kiosk. He drove the Ducati onto the sidewalk at the end of the bridge, parking it next to a waist-high metal cage that stood over an open manhole. Beneath the cage a metal spiral staircase descended into the ground.

Kursk gestured to his partner to approach the Englishman’s abandoned bike from the right. He moved left. The two of them dashed across the bridge. Kursk ran around the front of the stranded bus, while his partner darted between the bus and the cars piling up behind. As they approached the bike, they saw no sign of its rider. Then Kursk noticed the open gate and the concrete stairway behind it.

He stared at the signs on the kiosk, trying to work out what they meant from the mass of different languages and symbols. Okay, so this was some sort of visitors’ entrance to something. Which meant somewhere there had to be an exit, or maybe a fire escape. Which would need a manhole. Beneath his helmet, Kursk grinned. Now he knew how to beat the Englishman.

He told his partner what to do. Then he jogged back across the bridge to where his bike was parked against the metal cage. The top of the cage was hinged in the middle. One half opened up to allow access to the manhole underneath, and it was held in place with a padlock and chain.

Kursk took off his helmet, reached into the bike’s top box, and pulled out a tool kit in a black, roll-up nylon pouch. From this he removed a small pair of bolt-cutters, casually leaned over the cage, and cut the links of the chain. He lifted the hinged lid of the cage, stepped over the side railings, and started walking down the metal stairs. Once he was below ground, he reached into his jacket and took out his gun before clipping a small black flashlight onto a mount on top of the barrel.

At the bottom of the shaft, there was a double door that shone scarlet in the beam of the flashlight. It was an emergency exit, opening out, toward him. Kursk fired a three-bullet burst into the locking mechanism.

The sound of the gunfire reverberated into the darkness. The Englishman was bound to hear, but that was good. Kursk did not want to waste time wandering around the sewers of Paris, playing blindman’s bluff. He’d much rather draw his opponent on, tempting him into an ambush. But he still had to find a way of setting up that ambush.

He pulled open the splintered door, walked a few paces forward, and entered a sort of man-made cave, maybe fifty feet square and twelve to fifteen feet high. He could hear the sound of rushing water somewhere beneath him. The flashlight tracked across the concrete floor until it came to an inset metal grille, running the full width of the cave, maybe six feet across. A thick brown soup of sewage and drain water was running beneath it, filling the air with a heavy fecal smell. And people actually paid to come down here?

Kursk looked around for cover. The huge space was almost entirely bare. The only means of access to the cave were two tunnels, one narrow and floored with concrete, the other broader, with another grille floor, directly over the open sewer. They turned to the left, a few feet apart.

On the right was an alcove. Its far wall had a huge circle cut into it, maybe ten feet in diameter. In the middle of the circle, held on a low wooden frame, was a gigantic black sphere, like a huge cannonball, so high that Kursk could not reach its top. There was a scale model of the ball down on the floor, demonstrating that it was made of wooden planks, with a hollow core. An illustrated notice showed how the ball had once been used as a cleaning device, dragged through the main sewers, bashing against the sides and knocking the crud from the walls. Kursk scanned the notice. He examined the ball and the way it was held on its frame. Now he had a new plan.

Carver had heard the muffled echo of gunfire in front of him, somewhere in the distance, just as he emerged from a low, narrow tunnel into an underground plaza. He swept his dazzler around and tried to get his bearings. It looked like some kind of a junction, where a warren of underground routes converged at a single point. On all sides there were arches beyond which he could see nothing but the blackness of passageways disappearing into the depths. But the only tunnel that interested Carver opened directly ahead of where he was standing. He was sure the gunfire had come from its far end.

He moved forward, accepting the implied invitation. Whoever had fired those shots had wanted them to be heard. Carver understood completely: He wanted to get this over and done with too. There was something almost reassuring about the absolute nature of the game they were playing. All the whys and wherefores could be forgotten. He just had to kill the other guy before the other guy killed him. It was a simple, straightforward task. He liked that.

A dozen paces down the tunnel, there was an opening on the left. From it, Carver could hear the sound of rushing water, moving much faster than anything he’d heard so far. He stopped by the opening, flattening himself against the wall. He took a deep breath to calm his pulse, and placed his left hand holding the dazzler directly under his right hand holding the gun, so that each steadied the other. Then he stepped out into the open, feet apart, legs bent, arms straight out in front of him.

There was no one there. In front of Carver stretched another, much bigger tunnel. From the ceiling, placards and display cases were suspended in midair on steel wire, the whole history of the Paris sewers stretching away into the distance. Directly underneath all the displays, thick steel mesh covered a working, gushing sewer. That was where the noise of water was coming from. To the sides, along the walls of the tunnel, concrete walkways kept visitors firmly on dry land.

Carver stepped back into the cross tunnel and walked on. There was still water flowing all around him, but much more sluggishly now. And the smell was suddenly more intense, a nauseating stench of human waste.

Up ahead, a massive pipe hung from the ceiling, banded with striped warning tape to prevent people from banging their heads. Beyond it was another junction, where the tunnel split in two. The left-hand fork was a narrow tube of concrete; the right-hand one was wider, with a walkway running beside a sewer covered with a raised metal cage. Carver went left. There was no big strategic logic, he just figured the concrete tunnel would smell less rank.

Carver went on, shifting the dazzler beam forward and back, listening intently for any sound of human movement. He almost fell into the huge open space at the end of the tunnel, stopping himself just in time before he crashed onto the floor. He pulled back a couple of feet, wondering why there hadn’t yet been a shot. The hostiles must be close now. Why didn’t they fire? Had they gone down the other way without him noticing? Was he outflanked?

He shone the dazzler back the way he had come. No one there. He turned again, hands together, stepped out into the space, and… nothing, just a cavernous emptiness. He stepped forward a few more paces. The beam of the dazzler caught a vast black ball in its alcove and the splintered body of a half-open red wooden door, through which Carver could see stairs curving up to ground level. That was how his enemy had got in, but where the hell were they?

Carver stepped forward, stopped, then began a slow, deliberate rotation, sweeping the whole space with light, his gun following the dazzler all the way. He was halfway around when he heard a grunt behind him, a human sound, like a weightlifter struggling to shift a massive load. It was immediately followed by the creaking of wood under pressure. Carver spun around just as the massive spherical mass came free from its housing and started rolling toward him. He fired four shots straight at the giant black ball, but the bullets ricocheted off the wood, leaving barely a mark on the rock-hard surface, the reverberating gunfire mixing with the deep, hard rumble of the ball against the concrete.

He turned to run back toward the mouth of the narrow tunnel, just a few feet away, but slipped on a patch of water on the bare concrete floor and stumbled. The ball was almost on top of him. Desperately Carver scrabbled to his feet, dropping the dazzler, which was crushed beneath the ball like a tin can beneath a jackboot. The man-made cave was plunged into darkness, and Carver threw himself back into the tunnel. He heard the giant ball smash against the entrance, too big to penetrate any farther.

Frantically, he started running into the pitch-black void in front of him. He shifted his gun into his left hand and placed the fingers of his right hand against the wall to act as his guide. He was totally blind, but he forced himself to sprint flat out into nothingness, though every instinct screamed at him to go slowly.

He reckoned the tunnel was about twenty paces long. Then came the junction. The other guy would be coming that way. Carver listened. He could just hear one set of slow, steady, watchful footsteps – the steps of a man who wants to hunt down his enemy without becoming the prey himself.

Carver looked left and saw a faint flashlight beam emerging from the darkness. It was sweeping from side to side as the man behind it searched for him. He turned toward the opening of the other tunnel and fired three quick shots. He wasn’t expecting to score any hits, he just needed to force the other guy to take cover, even for a few seconds.

He could still make this work. He turned again, reached for the wall, and ran on into the blackness.

Kursk was on the offensive. He had forced his enemy to retreat and smashed his most important weapon. Without the dazzler to light up his target, the Englishman’s gun was far less of a threat. Now Kursk had to press home his advantage.

He had gone no more than five paces down the other tunnel, walking parallel to the one down which the Englishman had fled, when he saw the glint from a pistol barrel in the flashlight beam.

Kursk flung himself to the ground as three bullets ricocheted off the walls around him. The moment he hit the ground, he switched off the flashlight, making himself invisible again.

He heard the Englishman’s footsteps moving away from him, fast. Kursk turned the flashlight back on and kept going to the end of the tunnel. He saw the pipe with its striped tape, but beyond that, nothing. The Englishman must have turned off the passage somewhere, gone down another way.

Ahead on the right, Kursk could see the arch of another tunnel, from which came the sound of fast-moving water. He ran toward it, then, without stopping, flung himself to the floor, rolling across the open arch, firing into it as he went. As he reached the far side, two bullets smashed against the wall, showering him in dust and concrete chips. Well, that answered one question. The Englishman had found a new escape route.

As the echoes of gunfire faded away, Kursk thought he could hear something over the sound of water: a scuffling movement in the darkness, then a louder bang and a muffled curse. It was all he could do not to laugh. The poor bastard had bumped into something, trying to run away in the dark.

Okay, time to see where the Englishman was hiding. Kursk got to his feet, then sprinted back across the open archway, holding his gun away from him, so that anyone aiming at the flashlight would not hit him. This time, he looked down the tunnel, seeing the boards and display cases suspended between the ceiling and the metal-grate floor. Maybe the Englishman thought he could hide behind them. Well, he’d see about that.

He switched off the flashlight. Now they were both blind. He slipped to the floor and slid on his belly to the center of the archway. Then he moved forward until he could feel the surface beneath him change from concrete to metal. A blast of chill, damp, fetid air hit him from the sewage water racing beneath him. He reached forward and felt the first wire, as taut as the guy rope of a tent, holding a Plexiglas display case in place. Slowly, silently, he slithered underneath the case, making his way through the tangle of wire securing it to the floor.

When he came out the other side, into the gap between the cases, he paused, listening for any sound of the Englishman. Where had the bastard gone? Kursk darted his head from side to side, cocking his ear, suddenly nervous that the Englishman was nearby. The two men could be centimeters apart. With the darkness, and the noise and smell of the water, they’d never know it. He willed himself to wait, be patient. This was a matter of who lost their nerve and made the move that gave away their position.

The Englishman cracked first. There was another brief scurry of feet up ahead. Kursk put both hands on his gun and leaned forward into the firing position. He was just about to pull the trigger when the blackness of the tunnel was lit up by a white-hot ball of flame, a deafening crack of explosive, and a sudden blast of air. It picked Kursk up, smashed him against the ceiling of the tunnel, then flung him back down in an avalanche of wire and debris, down through the gaping hole where the metal grating had been, slamming him into the torrent of water and filth down below.