Read Chapter 23: The Ambush

The warehouse lights cut out a half-second before the doors slammed shut behind them. The sound was hydraulic, expensive, and final. Mercer froze mid-step; the air went cold with the hum of dead fluorescents, and somewhere in the dark, a dozen boots shifted on concrete.

“Well,” Camille said softly, her voice carrying that French flatness she used when she was already calculating odds. “That answers that.”

Mercer dropped into a crouch, pulling her down beside him behind a stack of rusted piping. His eyes adjusted slowly; a faint amber emergency light bled from a strip near the ceiling, just enough to outline the shapes of men spreading into formation across the warehouse floor. Twelve, maybe fourteen. Long gun barrels glinted.

“Remi sent them,” Mercer whispered. “Or Sokolov got tired of waiting.”

“Does it matter?”

It didn’t. A voice crackled from a speaker mounted near the ceiling—tinny, calm, Russian-accented.

“Mr. Mercer. Miss Fournier. You have made this considerably more difficult than it needed to be.”

Sokolov. Of course. His men must have doubled back after the handoff—or the thin man had tipped him off the moment they entered. Mercer’s jaw tightened. He’d walked them into a cage.

“I want the cufflink,” Sokolov continued. “Hand it over, and I will let the woman walk out. You have my word.”

“Your word,” Camille muttered. “Does he think we’re children?”

Mercer’s fingers went to his left cuff. The metal disc was warm against his thumb, still powered from the train’s systems. It had cost him a dead mentor’s secret to unlock. It was the only thing Sokolov wanted, the only reason they were still alive rather than shot on sight.

“You have ten seconds,” Sokolov said. “Then my men will retrieve it from your corpse.”

Mercer looked at Camille. Her eyes were dark, unreadable, that earlier strain still there—the confession about Doucet sitting between them like a wall. But she didn’t look away.

“Trust me,” he said.

“I’m running out of practice.”

“Then start now.”

He turned the cufflink over, found the tiny recessed switch on its edge. It wasn’t just a tracker; the code he’d cracked in the control car had shown him that much. The cufflink was a skeleton key—it could talk to systems, override them, pretend to be something it wasn’t. The security system in this depot was old, civilian, probably tied to the same local network as the warehouse’s locks.

Mercer pressed the switch and held it.

The effect was immediate. The cufflink screamed—a burst of electromagnetic noise that hit the warehouse’s security grid like a brick through glass. The speaker over their heads screeched into feedback. The emergency lights flickered, buzzed, and died. Through the walls, Mercer heard the crack and groan of doors unwinding, alarm bells starting to ring somewhere deeper in the depot.

And the guns opened fire.

Muzzle flashes painted the darkness in strobes of white-orange. Rounds chewed through the piping above them, showering them in rust and steel shavings. Mercer grabbed Camille’s wrist and pulled her low, crawling sideways behind a row of wooden crates that stank of machine oil. Bullets punched through the timber, whining past their shoulders.

“Which way?” Camille shouted over the din.

Mercer’s eyes swept the space. The cufflink had gone dead in his hand, its charge spent—a sacrifice he hadn’t planned to make, but there was no time to regret it. The building’s layout from Remi’s brief, fragmentary as it was, showed a freight elevator at the far eastern wall, past the loading dock. Twenty, maybe thirty meters of open floor.

Open floor full of armed men.

“East wall,” he said. “Freight lift.”

“Through that?”

“You have a better idea?”

Camille pulled a length of metal pipe from the debris, hefted it. She looked almost comfortable with the weight. “No,” she said. “Let’s not give them a second to think about it.”

Mercer counted the muzzle flashes. Three shooters on the left flank, two on the right, more repositioning in the dark. The confusion from the security breach wouldn’t last—Sokolov’s men were professionals. They’d reset, tighten their arcs, and then the crossfire would close.

He grabbed a fire extinguisher from its wall mount, hefted it, and hurled it across the warehouse. It clanged off a steel beam and rolled loudly toward the west loading dock. The shooters pivoted, a full half-second of attention stolen.

“Go.”

They ran low, boots skidding on grit and oil. Mercer’s shoulder caught the corner of a pallet, pain flaring through his ribs, but he pushed on. Camille was faster, lighter, moving in a straight line that cut through the suppressing fire like she’d been born to it. A man stepped out from behind a forklift, rifle raised, and she swung the pipe in a flat arc that connected with his jaw. The sound was wet, sharp, final.

Mercer grabbed the man’s weapon as he fell, checked the magazine, and fired two rounds over his shoulder into the dark to buy them room. Return fire shredded the forklift’s mast, sparks cascading.

The freight elevator was a rusted cage gate set into the east wall, flanked by a call panel with a broken button. Mercer slammed his palm against it. Nothing. He hit it again.

“Dead,” he said.

“No.” Camille shoved him aside, jammed her fingers into the panel’s housing, and ripped the cover off. Wires spilled out, live and buzzing. She’d done this before, clearly—her hands moved with practiced speed, stripping, twisting, bypassing. “Sokolov’s people cut power to this side of the building. The elevator’s on a separate circuit.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I blew a power relay in Lyon the same way once.” She glanced up, a thin, hard smile crossing her face. “I read the manual.”

The cage shuddered. A heavy clunk sounded from the shaft above, and the elevator began to descend—slow, groaning, like a beast waking from sleep.

Behind them, Sokolov’s voice rang out, no longer over the speaker. He was inside the warehouse now, moving through the dark, calm and close.

“The cufflink is dead,” he said, almost amused. “You threw away your only bargaining chip to run from a fight you can’t win. Impressive incompetence, even for you, Mercer.”

The elevator hit the floor. The cage door ground open a foot, enough to slip through. Mercer shoved Camille inside, followed, and dragged the door closed. The metal latch didn’t catch—the cage needed the main power to lock.

“Camille,” he said. “The controls.”

She slammed the button panel. The elevator shuddered but didn’t move.

Sokolov’s footsteps were closer. A rifle barrel appeared in the gap, then a hand pulling the door open.

Mercer dropped the stolen weapon, grabbed the door’s edge with both hands, and put his full weight against it. The rifle fired through the gap, a shot that clipped concrete inches from his skull. He grunted, shoved harder, and the door crushed the man’s fingers on the other side. A scream. The rifle clattered.

The elevator gave a violent lurch. Camille had the panel open, wires crossed, her knuckles white. The floor began to drop.

“This is not going to be a quiet exit,” she said.

A shape threw itself into the gap as the elevator sank—a man, thin and fast, rolling through the narrowing opening with a knife already in his fist. Camille swung the pipe, but he ducked under it and drove her back against the wall. Mercer grabbed the man’s wrist, twisted, felt the blade skate past his ribs and bury itself in the cage’s wood panel.

Below, the shaft opened into darkness. The elevator picked up speed.

“Let go, or I drop you,” Mercer growled.

The thin man smiled. Remi’s smile. The cleaner who had called him, who had handed Sokolov a briefcase, who had lured them into this warehouse.

“The dead man is the live one,” Remi said. “Doucet isn’t hiding from Garrick. He’s the architect. The collision course was never meant to stop the train—it was meant to bleed it dry.”

The elevator hit the bottom of the shaft with a jolt that sent them all flying. Remi’s grip slipped. He fell backward onto the concrete floor of a service room, rolled, and vanished between stacked equipment pallets.

Camille slammed the emergency stop. The cage ground to a halt.

Mercer’s heart slammed against his ribs. His dead informant. The man whose family he’d protected. The man whose death he’d faked.

Architect.

“The train,” Camille said, breathless. “The Grand Palais. If Doucet set the course, then the depot was never the target.”

Mercer looked down at the silence where Remi had disappeared. He would be back. They both knew it.

“We need to reach the surface,” Mercer said. “Now.”