Read Chapter 26: The Betrayal Within

The cold hit Mercer before the door finished sliding shut—a damp, industrial chill that seeped through his jacket like a bad omen. He spun, hand reaching for the handle, but the steel was already flush against the frame, no seam, no give.

“Remi.” Camille’s voice was flat, almost bored, but her eyes were scanning the room—racks of hanging meat, stainless steel tables, a drain in the center of the concrete floor. A walk-in freezer. Full service.

Remi’s voice came through a small wall speaker, tinny and amused. “You’re both clever. I’ll give you that. You avoided Sokolov’s men, found the relay, and somehow put together half the plan. But you never asked the right question.”

Mercer pressed his palm against the door. Cold bit through his skin. “Which is?”

“Who told Doucet the train’s braking system was even vulnerable? Who gave him the manifests? The timetables? The access codes to the depot’s relay system?” A pause. “You’re standing in a meat locker because I need you to think about that.”

Camille moved closer to Mercer, breath fogging. “You were the one who trained Doucet,” she said. “You were his handler before Mercer’s mentor ever got involved. You’re not just Remi anymore, are you?”

“I’m the father of the idea,” Remi said. “Doucet just built the bomb. I showed him where to plant it.”

Mercer’s mind raced. Fournier’s debt. The favor to save his life. It had been a leash—a way to pull Mercer into the orbit the moment things got complicated. Not a debt of honor. A piece of a design.

“The state dinner,” Mercer said, voice steady despite the shuddering cold. “You don’t want the train to stop at the Grand Palais. You want it to blow through. The British Foreign Secretary, the Transport Commission, and the entire French government’s transport brass in one room. You’re not covering for Doucet.”

“I’m finishing his work,” Remi said. “He’s been dead to the world for three months. I’ve been running the relay, adjusting waypoints, keeping the momentum. He thinks he’s the architect. He’s just the blueprint.”

Camille’s hand drifted to her jacket. Mercer shook his head—no gun drawn yet. The speaker could hear them. And the room was narrowing by the minute. The thermometer on the wall read minus eight and dropping.

“Why?” Mercer asked, teeth beginning to chatter. “What’s at the Grand Palais that’s worth killing hundreds of people?”

“A file,” Remi said simply. “Le dossier Ferrand. A buried audit from the 1990s showing that Channel Tunnel safety checks were systematically skipped to save cost. Twenty-three deaths covered up as industrial accidents. Doucet’s brother was one of them. Fournier was the man who signed off on the cover-up.”

Mercer’s stomach turned. Fournier. His mentor. The man who’d saved his life—or been forced to, by Remi’s leverage. The debt had been manufactured, but the protection was real. Fournier had genuinely pulled Mercer from a sniper’s nest in Odessa. Because Remi had told him to.

“We need to work together,” Camille said, stepping in front of Mercer toward the speaker. “You’re not going to get away with this. Sokolov is still alive. The train is still on the tracks. Even if you crash it, someone will trace the relay—”

“Sokolov is dead,” Remi cut in. “I closed that loose end myself, ten minutes ago. And the relay is already done. The waypoints are locked. I’m not on-site for that anymore. I’m on my way to a car park in Sangatte to watch the show from a nice safe distance.”

A clicking sound. The speaker went dead.

The hum of the compressor dropped to a lower register. Mercer looked at Camille. Her face was pale, but not from fear. Cold, calculation. She was fighting the same frost-induced sluggishness he was.

“The exhaust vent,” he said, pointing to a grating near the ceiling. “It’s for air circulation. If we can jam it open, we can climb.”

“Climb where?” Camille said. “This is a freezer unit, Mercer. It’s sealed concrete and insulated panels. We’re twenty meters from the nearest exit, if that.”

“Then we don’t climb. We break.” He moved to the steel table, grabbed the heavy butcher’s hook that lay across it. The metal was cold enough to sting through his gloves. He swung it at the drain in the center of the floor—once, twice. The concrete chipped. A third strike sent a crack spidering outward.

Camille joined him, gripping the other side of the table to use as a lever. They pried at the floor, grunting against the cold and weight. The temperature was dropping into double-digit negatives now. Ten minutes, maybe less, before hypothermia set in.

The crack widened. Mercer stomped hard. The concrete gave way, revealing a narrow crawl space—a service gap between the freezer’s foundation and the building’s slab. Not a clean escape. But a way.

Camille went first, squeezing through feet-first, dropping into the dark with a muffled thud. Mercer followed, hook still in hand, scraping his ribs raw on the rough concrete edge. He landed beside her in a cramped, dusty space that smelled of rat droppings and old wiring.

They crawled—fast, silent, pressing forward through the dark, guided by the faint glow of a distant light source. Ten meters. Fifteen. Mercer’s fingers were numb, his breath painful. But the cold was easing.

They emerged through a loose maintenance panel into a loading bay. Empty. A single security light buzzed overhead. Beyond the bay’s open shutter: a road, and parked closest to it, a battered Peugeot with the keys still in the ignition—some depot worker’s bad habit now turning into their salvation.

Mercer slid into the driver’s seat. Camille took the passenger side, breathing hard, her hand resting on the Beretta in her jacket.

“Remi,” she said. Not a question.

“The train’s locked. He’s not at the relay anymore. But he’s got to be heading toward Sangatte—the car park overlooks the tunnel mouth.” Mercer cranked the engine. It coughed, sputtered, caught.

“We can’t stop the train from here,” Camille said.

“No,” Mercer said, pulling out hard, tires squealing on the wet asphalt. “But we can stop Remi before he disappears. And then we find another way.”

The Peugeot shot toward the road, headlights cutting into the grey pre-dawn haze. Behind them, the freezer hummed its indifferent tune, a tomb left empty by two people who had just realized the man they’d been hunting had been standing beside them the whole time.