Read Chapter 24: The Sewer Escape

The service tunnel choked with steam and the stench of burnt rubber. Mercer pulled Camille along by the wrist, her boots slipping on the iron walkway as the warehouse’s fire alarms screamed overhead. Behind them, the metal floor rang with the heavy footfalls of Sokolov’s men—two, maybe three, shouting in rapid French.

“Left,” Camille said, yanking him toward a rusted maintenance door marked *EGOUTS—ACCÈS INTERDIT*.

It wasn’t locked. That was never a good sign.

Mercer shouldered through, and the door slammed open into a wall of damp, black air. The sewer stretched before them: a wide concrete artery lined with a narrow brick ledge, a sluggish current of wastewater moving below. The only light came from a distant grate, faint and gray, somewhere above the city of Calais.

He didn’t hesitate. He stepped onto the ledge and moved.

Camille followed, her breath already tight. The door behind them crashed open again, and a flashlight beam cut through the dark, painting their silhouettes against the curved ceiling.

“They’ll have the exits covered,” she said, voice low but steady, even as she gripped the rusted rail with white knuckles. “Unless we get to the junction point before they radio it in.”

“Then we don’t stop.”

They ran. Not a sprint—the ledge was slick with algae and god knows what else—but a deliberate, grinding pace. Mercer’s shoes squelched. Water dripped in eerie, rhythmic plinks from the arch above, a metronome for the chase.

A shot rang out behind them. The bullet sparked off the far wall, ricocheted into the dark, and was swallowed by the current.

“They’re not aiming to miss much longer,” Camille said.

Mercer’s hand found the rail and he swung around a corner into a wider junction chamber. Three tunnels branched off: two concrete, one brick and older, nearly dry. He scanned the walls. Graffiti in French, a painted arrow, the faint stencil of a maintenance code. He froze.

“That one,” he said, pointing to the brick tunnel. “It runs parallel to the old rail spur. It’ll surface near the canal.”

“That’s a mile on foot.”

“Better than a bullet.”

Another shot. This one clipped the edge of the brick arch, sending shards of mortar biting into Mercer’s cheek. He pulled Camille into the tunnel as a third round tore past them and whined down the shaft.

The brick tunnel narrowed. The ceiling dropped. They had to duck, then crawl on their forearms for a stretch where the floor had collapsed. Behind them, boots splashed into the junction chamber. A shout in French. A phone being dialed.

Camille stopped, breathing hard. “I have an idea.”

She reached into her belt pouch—the one she’d kept even after their gear was stripped at the train—and pulled out a slim, metal cylinder. A flare. She twisted the cap, and a red-hot chemical hiss filled the cramped space. She tossed it back the way they’d come.

It struck the wall of the junction room and ignited with a white-bright fury, filling the entire chamber with blinding magnesium glare. The pursuing men yelped, their flashlights swinging uselessly as they covered their eyes.

Mercer grabbed Camille’s hand again. “Go.”

They scrambled forward, no longer worried about silence. The flare bought them maybe a minute, maybe ninety seconds. They burst through a rusted grate at the end of the brick tunnel and spilled out into the open air, landing on the muddy bank of a storm drainage ditch.

Gray dawn light. The smell of diesel and wet stone. They were in the industrial backstreets of Calais, a few hundred meters from the canal.

Mercer pulled Camille up. She was breathing hard, but her eyes were clear. Sharp. He could feel her watching him as they moved along the ditch, waiting for a moment to say what was really on her mind.

It came when they stopped just past a shuttered fishmonger’s stall.

“You told me Doucet was dead,” she said. “You made me believe you’d seen the body. And now Sokolov is walking around in the belief that he’s been working with a ghost who’s been playing him like a puppet.”

Mercer wiped a smear of algae from his cheek. “I didn’t have a choice.”

“You had a choice. You chose to lie.” She stepped closer, her voice dropping below the noise of the wind off the canal. “To me. When we were chained to the same rail.”

“I was protecting his family.” He held her gaze. “Garrick had already killed one informant’s children. I wasn’t going to hand him a second set of targets. So I burned the record. I made everyone—including you—believe Doucet was dead. Because that was the only way his family got to live.”

Camille looked away. Her jaw tightened, but she didn’t argue. Instead, she pulled a mobile phone from inside her jacket—one she’d apparently lifted from the warehouse floor during the firefight, or maybe from one of the men. He wasn’t sure. She tapped a number and held it to her ear.

Three rings. Then a voice. Low, British, clipped.

Camille listened, nodded, and said, “We need a hole. Canal district. Now.”

She hung up. “He’s three minutes out.”

“Who?”

“The contact you pointed me toward in Paris, before we got separated. Turns out he wasn’t just your asset. He’s mine too.” She pocketed the phone. “He runs a safehouse under an old laundry off the Quai de la Citadelle. If we can reach him, we can get clean, get weapons, and figure out what Doucet actually intends before that train crosses the French border.”

Mercer nodded. But he had the feeling he was walking into another arrangement he didn’t fully understand.

A battered Citroën van pulled up a minute later, its paint dulled with road grime. The driver was a small, wiry man in his sixties with a face like a folded map. He didn’t introduce himself. He just said, “Get in.”

They drove in silence along the canal, past moored barges and empty docks. The van turned down an alley barely wide enough for its mirrors, stopped behind a rusted gate, and the man led them into a basement apartment that smelled of boiled cabbage and gun oil.

It was clean. Sparse. A fold-out cot. A desk with a lamp. A radio pinned with a faded map of the Channel Tunnel route.

The man pulled back a curtain to reveal a wall-mounted corkboard covered with aerial photographs, timetables, and a hand-drawn schematic of the Grand Palais.

Camille looked at Mercer. He looked at the schematic.

“The Grand Palais?” Mercer said.

The contact nodded. He pointed to the route marked in red: the train, diverted from its standard terminus at Coquelles, re-route through a forgotten maintenance spur that connected to the historic station beneath the Palais. “You were chasing the wrong target. The depot was a staging area. The handoff was never the point. That train’s destination has always been the Palais—not the depot, not the ends of the line. And Doucet has been programming it for weeks from inside that warehouse, using the depot’s relay system to upload waypoints without ever touching the master control.”

Mercer stared at the map. “He’s not running from anyone. He’s driving something to Paris.”

“And you’ve got,” the man checked his watch, “about forty minutes before it gets there.”

Camille pulled a chair out and sat down, heavily. “What does he want at the Grand Palais?”

The contact folded his arms. “There’s only one thing worth that kind of risk. A state dinner. The Élysée is hosting a banquet for the British Foreign Secretary and the entire Channel Transport Commission. They’re holding it in the glass nave of the Grand Palais tonight.”

Mercer felt the floor drop out of his stomach. “Doucet’s not hiding. He’s aiming.”

He turned to Camille. “Every target in the British and French intelligence chain, all in one room. If that train hits the Palais, it doesn’t just kill the commission. It kills the truth about why Fournier died.”

“Because that was never about money,” she said quietly. “It was about burying the same secret Garrick tried to bury. And Doucet decided to dig it up with a locomotive.”

The contact looked between them. “I’ve got two Berettas under the floorboards and a motorcycle with a full tank. That’s the whole arsenal.”

Mercer looked at the map. Then at Camille.

“Then we’re going to need to move fast.”