Read Chapter 20: The Secret Meeting

The grinding of the train’s wheels against the rails had settled into a low, mournful hum—the sound of a beast resigned to its fate. Mercer leaned against the cold steel wall of the maintenance cubby, his breath shallow, the bandage on his side darkening at the edges. Camille sat across from him, knees drawn to her chest, her pistol resting loose in her fingers.

No one spoke for a long moment. The intercom was dead. The world beyond the carriage was a black tube of concrete and cable.

“Fournier sent you,” Mercer said finally. It wasn’t a question.

Camille looked up. Her face was drawn, hollowed by the last eighteen hours. She gave a single nod.

“He didn’t tell me everything,” she said. “He told me to find Vernet. To bring him back alive. That if I did, he’d clear my file. Wipe the Prague incident clean.”

“And you believed him?”

“I believed he had the power to do it.” She paused. “I didn’t believe he’d keep his word. But it was the only leverage I had.”

Mercer shifted, a wince crossing his face. “My mission was the same. Capture Vernet. Extract him quietly. No noise, no trail.” He laughed, a dry, broken sound. “We were both sent to catch the same ghost.”

“For different reasons.”

“For different masters,” he corrected. “Or so I thought. Fournier’s dead. Garrick’s pulling strings from the grave’s anteroom. Whoever owns that lab in Calais is the one who actually wants Vernet.”

Camille’s eyes narrowed. “You think Vernet is at the depot.”

“Remi said the records vault was there. Vernet was the man who kept the files. If he’s still alive, that’s where he’d be. Hiding in the one place no one thinks to look—the place that already burned.”

She was quiet, turning it over. The train shuddered beneath them, a distant rumble echoing through the carriage floor.

“You trust Remi?” she asked.

“No.” Mercer’s voice was flat. “I trust that Garrick has a plan, and I trust that Remi’s story fits it too neatly. But it’s the only lead we have. If I wait for certainty, the train hits the wall and we’re all paste.”

Camille studied him. There was something in her gaze—not trust, not suspicion, but a kind of weary acknowledgment. The expression of a woman who had been lied to so often that a straight answer, even a dangerous one, felt like a luxury.

“We go to the depot,” she said. “Together. But if this is a trap, Mercer, I want you to know I’ll put a bullet in you before Garrick gets the chance.”

“Noted,” he said. “Same to you.”

She almost smiled. Almost.

They moved through the darkened service corridor, the air thick with dust and the smell of burnt rubber. The train’s autopilot had no interest in them anymore—their only concern was reaching car three, where the weld between carriages waited.

Mercer’s side throbbed with every step. He pressed a hand to the wound, feeling the damp heat of blood that refused to clot. The cufflink in his pocket felt heavier than it should, a leaden anchor of dead men’s secrets.

“We need weapons,” Camille said, stopping at a supply locker that had been pried open—the work of earlier scavengers. Inside, among scattered papers and ripped seat cushions, were two fire extinguishers and a long steel pry bar.

She pulled out the pry bar, testing its weight. Mercer grabbed a fire extinguisher, hefting it. Not elegant. But in close quarters, a steel cylinder filled with pressurized chemical could crack a skull just fine.

“Better than nothing,” he said.

They reached car three’s coupling. The gap between the carriages was sealed by a heavy metal plate, welded at the seams. Mercer knelt, ignoring the fire in his ribs, and pulled the cufflink from his pocket. The bezel caught the dim emergency light, a glint of silver.

He pressed the bezel against the weld. It wasn’t a key in the traditional sense—the micro-engravings were a pattern, a coded instruction. But the physics of it was simple enough: the bezel was made of a tungsten alloy, harder than the mild steel of the weld. With enough pressure and leverage, it could cut.

“How long?” Camille asked.

“Depends how bad I want to live.”

He began to work the bezel along the seam. Each pass sent a jolt of pain up his arm, but he kept going. The metal groaned, then gave. A thin line of orange light appeared at the edge of the plate.

“It’s giving way,” Camille said. She moved to the train’s side window, peering through the grime. “We’re slowing down.”

Mercer felt it too—the subtle deceleration pulling at his knees. The autopilot was engaged in something. A maneuver. A stop.

“Where are we?” he asked.

“No markings. Just concrete and pipes.” She paused. “There’s a platform ahead. Old, abandoned. Looks like a service depot.”

Mercer’s hands stilled. Fournier’s records vault sat in an old Calais service depot, Remi had said.

“It’s a stop,” he said. “We take it.”

The train shuddered to a halt. The platform outside was lit by a single, flickering fluorescent tube, casting long shadows across cracked concrete. Dust hung in the air, undisturbed for years, until now.

Mercer finished the weld just as the train’s brakes sighed to silence. He pocketed the cufflink, wiping blood from the bezel—his own, from where the metal had bitten into his palm. He and Camille exchanged a look, then slid the door open and dropped onto the platform.

The air was cold, carrying the scent of oil and old earth. The train sat behind them, a dormant metal serpent. Up ahead, the platform widened into a cavernous space lined with shuttered maintenance bays. A single set of tire tracks cut through the dust, fresh.

“Someone’s been here recently,” Camille said.

They crept forward, hugging the wall. The pry bar felt heavy in Mercer’s grip, the fire extinguisher slung over his shoulder by its strap. Every instinct screamed that they were walking into something—but walking was all they had left.

A noise echoed from ahead. Boots on concrete. Multiple sets. Voices, low and guttural. Russian.

Mercer pressed himself flat against a support pillar, Camille beside him. Through a gap in the shuttered bay doors, they watched a group of men in civilian clothes but military bearing fan out across the platform. They moved with practiced efficiency, scanning corners, checking angles.

At their center, unmistakable in his bearing, stood Sokolov. The Russian handler from the other train car, now at ground level. He spoke into a radio, his voice too low to catch the words.

Beyond him, parked in the shadows of the loading dock, was a Russian military vehicle—a UAZ light truck, its engine still ticking as it cooled.

“He’s meeting someone,” Mercer breathed.

Camille’s hand tightened on the pry bar. “We wait.”

They didn’t have to wait long. A second vehicle approached—not from the surface road, but from a ramp deeper underground. Its headlights cut through the gloom, and the black sedan pulled to a stop beside the Russian truck.

A man stepped out. Older, distinguished, dressed in a perfectly tailored coat that had no business being in a dust-choked service tunnel. He moved with the easy confidence of a man who owned the space—and everyone in it.

Sokolov stepped forward, and the two men shook hands. There was no warmth in it. A transaction, nothing more.

“Do you know him?” Camille whispered.

Mercer’s eyes were fixed on the newcomer. The face was familiar, in the way a photograph is familiar—studied, committed to memory, filed away in the back of a dead man’s desk drawer.

“Fournier’s cleaner,” he said slowly. “The man who called himself Remi.”

Camille looked at him sharply. “Then it is a trap.”

“Or a meeting we were meant to overhear.” Mercer’s jaw tightened. “Either way, we’ve found the right place.”

The two men exchanged something—a briefcase, passed from Remi’s hand to Sokolov’s. Then Remi turned, walked back to his sedan, and disappeared down the ramp without a backward glance. Sokolov gestured to his men, and they began loading equipment from the underground platform into the truck.

Mercer felt the train’s massive body shift behind them. The autopilot was re-engaging, preparing to depart. They had minutes at most before it left without them—either aboard, hurtling toward the collision course, or staying here, alone, in a depot that suddenly felt far less abandoned than it looked.

“We stay,” Camille said, reading his hesitation. “We find Vernet. We find the vault. We end this here.”

Mercer looked at the train, then back at the platform. The cufflink was warm against his chest. Somewhere in this depot, Fournier’s records waited—proof of Garrick’s crimes, the truth of Anna Kessler’s death, the name of the person who had been paying off his debt all along.

“If the train leaves,” he said, “we lose Garrick. The trap collapses.”

Camille watched Sokolov’s men load the last of the equipment. A Russian armored truck, a dead train, and a meeting that should never have happened.

“Garrick’s already gone,” she said. “The train was never the endgame. This is.”

The train’s brakes released with a hiss of pressure. The carriages began to slide forward, slowly, gathering momentum for the next leg of an unfinished journey.

Mercer watched it go. He didn’t chase it. Instead, he turned, facing the dark mouth of the depot beyond the platforms—where the UAZ truck was already starting its engine, and Sokolov’s men were climbing aboard.

“We find another way to move,” he said. “We follow them.”

Camille nodded. They slipped into the shadows as the train’s taillights vanished down the tunnel, swallowed by the dark. Behind them, the depot’s fluorescent light flickered, buzzed, and steadied—a single cold sun over a space that had seen secrets buried for a long time.

They were about to unearth all of them.