Read Chapter 25: The Debt Due

The safehouse smelled of damp plaster and stale coffee. Bleached light filtered through a single grimy window that looked out onto a dead-end alley in a Paris suburb that didn't bother with a name. The British contact—a wiry man with a pencil mustache who went by the name "Barrow"—had disappeared into a back room to make calls and had not emerged for an hour.

Mercer stood at the table, field-stripping one of the two Berettas Barrow had produced from a locked cabinet. Camille sat on the edge of a sagging cot, nursing a cracked rib and a look that said she was two seconds from asking the question she'd been chewing on since the sewers.

"You knew Fournier better than you said," she finally said.

Mercer didn't look up. "I knew him."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I've got."

Camille stood, wincing. "I watched you lie to me about Doucet for a day and a half. I need to know what else you're carrying that might get us killed."

Mercer slid the magazine home with a click. He met her eyes. "Fournier was my mentor. He trained me. He also owed money—serious money—to people who don't send reminders. When he died, the debt didn't die with him. It came to me."

"Because you were his protégé?"

"Because I signed for it." Mercer set the Beretta down. "That's what the cufflink was. It was a key to a safety deposit box in Geneva. In it, there's a promissory note dated three years before Fournier died, and a payment schedule that keeps certain people from breaking my legs or worse."

Camille's jaw tightened. "You've been paying your dead mentor's gambling debts."

"Something like that."

He wasn't going to tell her the rest. That the note wasn't for money. That it was for a service. That Fournier's debt had been paid in favors, not francs, and that Mercer had inherited the obligation to complete one final task on behalf of a creditor who had never once made contact—until now.

The back door of the safehouse opened.

Barrow did not come back through it.

Remi stepped into the room with the casual confidence of a man who had never once been surprised in his life. He was lean, mid-fifties, wearing a charcoal coat over a dark sweater, and he held no weapon. That was worse.

Camille's hand went to her hip. Mercer raised the Beretta a fraction.

"Barrow's fine," Remi said, closing the door behind him. "Tied up in the kitchen. He'll have a headache but no permanent damage. I needed a quiet word."

"With who?" Mercer asked.

"With you, Alex." Remi moved toward the table, uninvited, and pulled out a chair. He sat. "Sit down. You'll want to hear this before you decide whether to shoot me."

Mercer didn't lower the weapon. "You handed a briefcase to Sokolov in the depot and then ambushed us in the warehouse. Forgive me if I'm not in the mood for chit-chat."

Remi's mouth twitched. "The briefcase was empty. Sokolov knows that now. The ambush was theater." He tilted his head toward Camille. "You needed to be pushed together. You were circling each other like dogs over a bone. I just made the leash shorter."

"Who are you?" Camille asked.

"A concerned third party." Remi's eyes returned to Mercer, and the lightness faded. "Fournier's creditor, actually. The one whose note you've been paying on for the last four years."

Mercer felt the air in the room shift. The Beretta dipped, just slightly, before he corrected it. "You're the financier."

"I'm the financier," Remi confirmed. "And I'm here to collect."

Camille moved closer, her own weapon now in hand. "Collect what?"

Remi ignored her. He reached into his coat with slow, deliberate movements and produced a folded envelope, yellowed at the edges, sealed with a spot of wax that had long since gone brittle. He placed it on the table.

"You know what that is," he said to Mercer.

Mercer knew. He'd seen it once, in Fournier's handwriting, before his mentor had died in a Paris stairwell with a knife in his ribs. The letter had been left with the creditor, sealed, with instructions to deliver it only when the debt came due.

"This is the due date," Remi said.

Mercer holstered the Beretta. His hands were steady, but his pulse had picked up. "What does it say?"

"Open it."

He didn't want to. Every instinct screamed that this was a trap within a trap within a trap. But Fournier had been more than a mentor. The man had pulled Mercer out of a burning safehouse in Istanbul when he was twenty-two, carried him three blocks with a bullet in his own shoulder, and never mentioned it again. Whatever Fournier had owed, Mercer had promised to pay.

He tore the seal and unfolded the letter.

The handwriting was Fournier's—unmistakable, tight and precise, the letters leaning slightly left the way they did when he wrote in anger or fear. The letter was dated eleven days before his death.

*Alex,* it read. *If you're reading this, then the debt has come due, and I'm not there to pay it. Don't feel sorry for me; I knew the cost when I made the deal. The favor was always going to have a price. In 2011, in Istanbul, I pulled you out of that fire because I owed your father. He saved my life in Belfast in 1994, and I never told anyone. I couldn't. You went into that burn because I sent you there—the intel was bad, and I'd known it was bad for three days. But the operation needed a sacrifice, and your father's son was the acceptable loss. I couldn't let them die like that. So I pulled you out, and the debt moved from your father to me. And now it moves to you. Forgive me, if you can.*

Mercer read the letter twice. The second time, his hands were shaking.

Camille read over his shoulder. She went very still.

"This wasn't about money," she said softly.

"No." Mercer's voice was flat. "It was about a life." He looked up at Remi. "Fournier saved my life to pay his debt to my father. And now you're calling in the note."

Remi nodded. "The terms were simple. One debt, one life, one service. Fournier's death created an opening. I need someone inside MI6's Paris station to perform a single task. One that will have no direct bearing on current operations but will alter the future of a certain file."

"What file?"

"A dossier compiled by a man named Garrick." Remi's eyes were unreadable. "It contains evidence that would destroy several careers if it ever saw daylight. Two of those careers belong to members of the Channel Transport Commission who are currently on that train."

Mercer stared. "You want me to steal the dossier."

"I want you to retrieve it from the MI6 safe deposit section in the Paris embassy, deliver it to me, and forget you ever touched it."

Camille stepped between them. "He's not doing that."

"It's not her choice," Remi said, still watching Mercer. "The debt is his. Fournier paid your father's debt. You pay Fournier's. That's how these things work. You break the chain, and the interest compounds—your father's secrets, your own, everything you've buried since Istanbul. I have all of it. I've been holding it for four years."

Mercer looked at the letter in his hand. At Fournier's impossible revelation. At the man who had carried him through fire and never told him why.

The train was still hurtling toward the Grand Palais. Doucet was still programming its waypoints. Somewhere out there, a plan was ticking that would kill hundreds of people—and Remi, whoever he truly was, was asking him to walk away from it.

"Say I do it," Mercer said slowly. "Say I steal the file. What happens to Doucet?"

Remi smiled. It did not reach his eyes.

"That's not your concern anymore, Alex. Your concern is the debt." He pushed the envelope across the table. "You have ninety minutes. The train will stop one way or another, and when it does, Garrick's dossier goes to an intelligence oversight committee. If you want to protect the man who saved your life—and the family you protected by faking Doucet's death—you'll be at the embassy by then with the file before I am."

Mercer felt the weight of the choice press down on him like the pressure change before a storm.

Camille was watching him, waiting.

The Beretta was heavy at his hip.

The task would take him away from the station—away from the train, away from Doucet, away from the woman who'd trusted him despite every lie.

And the debt was due.