Read Chapter 14: La Dette Payée

The junction smelled of cordite and blood. Sokolov's voice still hung in the air, that last bitter pronouncement about MI6 and debts and fathers, when Camille moved.

Mercer didn't see the blade come out. He saw the result—the nearest operative's throat opened in a dark red smile, the man's hands going to his neck as he crumpled. Before the body hit the floor, Camille had already pivoted, driving the heel of her palm up into the second man's chin. His head snapped back against the steel bulkhead with a sound like a hammer on meat.

Mercer's own man was raising his weapon. A SIG, black and compact, coming up fast. Mercer didn't think. He lunged, got his left hand on the slide, forced it back before the trigger could be pulled. The action jammed—an old trick, one his father had taught him at a shooting range in Hereford that seemed like a century ago. The operative drove a knee into Mercer's gut. He grunted, kept his grip, brought his forehead down hard into the bridge of the man's nose.

Cartilage gave. The operative screamed, dropped the SIG, staggered backward. Sokolov was nowhere to be seen—he'd used the chaos to slip through a maintenance door on the far side of the junction, and the fourth operative was backing toward the same exit, covering Sokolov's retreat.

Mercer went for his holster. Camille got there first.

A single crack from her pistol, and the fourth operative folded at the knees, a red rose blooming high on his chest. The door clanged shut behind Sokolov. Mercer swore and lunged toward it, but something hot and bright exploded in his side.

He didn't hear the shot. He felt it—a punch, a tearing, like someone had driven a red-hot spike between his ribs. He looked down stupidly. The second operative, the one he'd headbutted, had recovered enough to get his own weapon up. The man was on his knees, nose a ruin, but his hands were steady as he fired again.

Mercer threw himself sideways. The round whined off the metal floor, ricocheted somewhere into the dark. Camille's pistol barked twice more. The operative dropped.

Silence, except for Mercer's own ragged breathing. The ringing in his ears was so loud it felt like standing under a bell.

Camille was already beside him, hands on his jacket, pulling it open. "How bad?"

"Like a bastard," Mercer managed, looking down at the wound. The bullet had caught him low on the left side, just above his hip. A graze, maybe, but it had dug a furrow. Blood soaked through his shirt, dark and warm, spreading fast. "It's not—"

She pressed her palm against it and he hissed through his teeth. "You're going to need stitches," she said. "Not now. But soon. Can you move?"

The question was practical, not sympathetic. He appreciated that. He nodded, and she helped him to his feet. The junction swam, steadied. He put his hand over hers, pressed hard, tasting copper in his mouth.

"The rear access," he said. "Sokolov's running for the breach point."

"He's gone." Camille released him, went to the nearest of the downed operatives, started going through his pockets. "He'll have a route to extraction. He knew this junction better than we did." She found a radio, thumbed it off, shoved it in her jacket. "He was baiting us. The ambush was never meant to hold us—it was meant to slow us."

Mercer leaned against the bulkhead, breathing through the pain. "Or to cut us off. We're sealed from the train now. If we don't make the next access point—"

"We make it." She crouched by the second operative, checked his pulse, moved on. No ceremony. "You said the breach section. We have one access point before the mid-tunnel crossover. We get there, we get back on board."

"And then what? Sokolov's already handed off the case. The nerve agent's already moved. We're chasing shadows."

Camille straightened. Something moved across her face—a flicker of calculation, of weighing how much to say. Mercer caught it. He'd spent years reading lies in the field; he knew the shape of one forming.

"What aren't you telling me?" he asked.

She held his gaze for a long moment. Then she looked away, checked the junction's single exit, pretending to assess their route. "When I said I knew Sokolov from Prague—"

"You said you'd worked a joint op. You said he'd gone dark. You said you didn't know where his loyalties landed."

"I said a lot of things." She turned back. Her face was carefully blank. "The informant in Prague. Anna Kessler. She was the one who put me on Sokolov's trail."

Mercer's stomach went cold. Anna Kessler was a name he knew from the file—the Czech asset who'd been burned, found dead in her apartment with a single shot to the back of the head. The operation had been scrubbed. Two MI6 officers had been recalled, one had been disciplined.

The file had listed Camille as a liaison only. It hadn't listed her as present.

"You were there," he said. The words came out flat. "When Kessler died."

A muscle tightened in Camille's jaw. "I was there when we found her. Sokolov had already gone. He'd left a message—careless, or deliberate, I never knew which. A photograph. Kessler, alive, taken an hour before. From the angle, it was taken from a building across the street."

Mercer waited. The pain in his side was a dull throb now, a background beat beneath the rising fury.

"We knew she was compromised," Camille said. "Sokolov had turned her. She was feeding him everything—every movement, every safe house. We just didn't know she was dead until after." She paused. "I never told the officers who took the debrief that I'd been in the building when he killed her."

"You were in the building." Nothing in his voice now. "You watched him kill her?"

"I heard it." Camille's eyes were hard. "Through the wall. Two rooms over. I'd gone to exfiltrate her—my own op, unauthorized, because I thought I could salvage the asset before the local office burned her. I was too late. He was already there. I heard the shot. I heard him leave." She looked at the floor. "I didn't go in until he was gone."

"You let a killer walk out with a clean route because you were afraid?"

"I was compromised." Her voice cracked on the word, and for a second she was not the steady, calculating operative but someone younger, someone carrying weight. "I was young. I was past protocol. If I'd come forward, my career was over. The operation was already a failure. I chose to walk away."

Mercer said nothing. The silence stretched between them, filled with distant mechanical groans of the tunnel, the hiss of ventilation.

"Kessler's file," he said finally. "The one you gave me. It linked to my father."

Camille nodded slowly. "I didn't know that when I gave it to you. I pulled what I could on Sokolov from the archives. The Kessler file was in there because he turned her. Your father's name was in the margins—a meeting record. I didn't read it as—"

"You didn't read it." Mercer's laugh was bitter, short. "You gave me an intelligence file and just happened to include a marginal note connecting a dead man to the man we're chasing. And you didn't read it."

"I'm telling you the truth now."

"After I bled for it." He pushed off the bulkhead, tested his weight, winced. "You want me to trust you, Camille—you need to give me more than convenient omissions."

Her eyes flared. "You came into this op carrying a dead father's debts and a burned bank statement, and you didn't think to mention that to your partner. You kept secrets because they were yours, because they made you vulnerable. I did the same." She stepped closer, unflinching in the lamp glow. "I held back what Sokolov and I were to each other because I didn't want it to color your judgment. That was a mistake. I'm owning it. Now you decide what it's worth."

The pain in his side was a steady fire. Mercer thought of his father's name on the paper, the deliberate plant, Sokolov's grinning satisfaction when he'd watched Mercer read it. Sokolov fed on fractures—he'd chosen this junction, this ambush, to break them apart. Every word out of the man's mouth had been engineered.

Mercer looked at Camille. Her face was honest, tired, stripped of affect. She was waiting.

"Your debt," he said. "Who owns it?"

She blinked. "What?"

"To MI6. To your handlers. Everyone here answers to someone." He kept his eyes on hers. "Who paid your debt?"

A long pause. Then Camille's mouth quirked, almost a smile. "I don't have a debt, Mercer. I have a ledger. And it's been examined." She gestured at the downed operatives. "One of these men will have a radio frequency. The operation center has to know we're still moving. We need to find Sokolov's extraction route before he reaches the surface."

She was deflecting. He knew it. But she was also right, and the wound in his side was a clock counting down.

"Walk with me," he said, and pushed toward the junction's rear door. "We find the access point. We get back on the train. And when this is done—"

"When this is done," Camille said quietly, "I'll tell you the rest of Prague." She moved past him, scanning the corridor ahead. "If we're both still alive."

Mercor limped after her, pressing his palm to His side to slow the bleeding. Sokolov had vanished into the tunnel systems with a head start and a route—but the man had left them a gift in that junction. A lie shaped like a confession, designed to split them.

The problem was, the confession had been true enough. And Mercer didn't know which parts of Camille were the architecture and which were real.

The corridor narrowed ahead, freighted with cables. The rail of the late train was a low hum under their feet. Somewhere above, through layers of concrete and steel, the sea pressed down.

He had a wound, a partner he didn't trust, and a target who was already gone. It wasn't the worst situation he'd been in.

It wasn't far off, though.