Spy School British Invasion Page 15

  Rather than obsess about all that, though, I turned my attention to the one thing I could handle at the moment.

  Zoe was bringing up the rear of our team as we headed through the sewer. I fell back and joined her. “I need to explain why I was holding Erica’s hand,” I said quietly, hoping we were far enough away that the others wouldn’t hear.

  Zoe gave me yet another glare in the dim light. “I know exactly why you were doing it. Because you two like each other and you always have.”

  “Erica couldn’t see anything,” I said. “She was temporarily blinded by that blast at Orion’s house. The one in the kitchen.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “I’m telling the truth. Think about it. I wasn’t holding her hand before that, right?”

  There was a long silence. When Zoe spoke again, there was no longer an edge to her voice. “No.”

  “She needed my help after that. She couldn’t see anything.”

  “Then why didn’t she say anything to us?”

  “Because she’s Erica. She didn’t want everyone to freak out when there was already so much going on. So she only told me.”

  “And not her parents?”

  “Her parents probably would have freaked out the worst. No matter how competent Catherine is, Erica’s still her daughter.”

  There was another silence. Then Zoe said, “Ben, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.… ”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I understand why you got upset.”

  “Back in Mexico, when you were trying to explain how relationships mess everything up in this business…This is the sort of thing you were talking about, right?”

  “I guess so.”

  Another silence followed. But instead of saying anything at the end of this one, Zoe slipped her hand into mine.

  I laced my fingers through hers and held tight.

  We continued on like that through the darkness. I wasn’t sure if we were holding hands because we were friends, or if we were doing it because we wanted it to be something more. But for the time being, it made me feel better.

  That lasted until we came upon the cavern filled with human skulls.

  We were alerted to its presence by Mike completely flipping out. He was a little bit ahead of us and a little bit behind Catherine and Erica, and he suddenly shrieked at the top of his lungs. “There are dead people in here!” he howled.

  Zoe and I let go of each other’s hands and raced up to where he was. A tunnel branched off of ours there, but it was much older, rougher, and narrower. It looked like it had been hacked through the rock with pickaxes centuries before, and then at some point, whoever had put the sewer line through had run across it. The old tunnel had been gated off, but the chain that held the gate shut had been clipped open by someone with bolt cutters.

  That all might have been eerie enough, but to top it off, the walls of the tunnel were lined with human skulls. Hundreds of them. Like they were some horrible form of wallpaper.

  “Oh, that’s just one of the catacombs,” Catherine said pleasantly. “Paris is filled with them. There are thousands, really.”

  “There are thousands of tunnels lined with the skulls of dead people?” Mike asked, horrified. “And everyone in Paris is totally fine with that?”

  “I’m not sure everyone knows about them,” Catherine said. “The tunnels weren’t originally dug out as catacombs. They were quarries for all the rock that the city is built from. But then the city grew out over the quarries. And at some point, some religious sects decided it’d be nice to inter their dead down here.”

  “And they did it by stacking their skulls up along the walls?” Mike asked. “How mentally disturbed were these people?”

  “Someone’s gone through here,” Zoe observed, pointing to the severed chain.

  “There are a lot of people who like to explore these catacombs,” Catherine explained. “It’s illegal, but still quite popular. I understand that there are even a few communities living down here.”

  “Living down here?” Mike repeated. “With hundreds of skulls lining the walls and the stench of sewage everywhere? Man, there are some really deranged people out there.”

  “At least they’re not trying to make money off of human misery,” Catherine said. “Unlike SPYDER. Speaking of which… ” She paused and checked her phone. “According to my GPS, the location of those coordinates is directly above us.”

  “You mean… ,” Zoe began.

  “That’s right,” Catherine said. “We’re on the doorstep of Mr. E.”

  15 ANALYSIS

  The sewer

  Directly underneath Quai de Montebello

  Paris, France

  April 1

  1430 hours

  A new feeling crept over me, replacing the sense of the willies the skulls had given me. I now felt excitement at the prospect of being so close to the leader of SPYDER. The rest of the CIA had barely been able to confirm that Mr. E even existed until I had come along (except for the agents who’d been corrupted by him, of course), and now we were right outside his house.

  My excitement was tempered with a great deal of fear as well. Mr. E ran one of the most evil organizations on earth, so chances were good that we were in for some trouble.

  There was a manhole directly above me, fifteen feet over my head, with a ladder of iron rungs leading up to it. A few feeble beams of light filtered down through the holes in the cover, though they blinked out every few seconds as a car drove over us.

  “Let’s see what security Mr. E has.” Erica withdrew yet another device from her utility belt: a very small camera with a long, thin cable attached. She handed the end with the plug to her mother, then scampered up the ladder of iron rungs with the other end. When she reached the top, she fed the camera through one of the holes in the manhole cover.

  Catherine jacked the cable into her phone. The image from the camera came up on the screen. It was of quite high quality, allowing us a good look of the buildings above, although it was a very low worm’s-eye view. Mike, Zoe, and I huddled around Catherine to look at it.

  The first thing Erica did was turn the camera in a full circle, giving us a 360-degree sweep of what was above. The road was directly along the edge of the right bank of the Seine, but since the banks were built so high, street level was a good three stories above the river.

  Directly to the north of us, a large pedestrian bridge—the Pont au Double—extended over the Seine to the grand plaza in front of Notre Dame. Once again, I was close to a tourist attraction I had always dreamed of visiting, and yet I was stuck in a sewer, viewing it through a camera.

  Even seen this way, the famous church was beautiful, its graceful stone spires, buttresses, and gargoyles gleaming in the sun. Hundreds of tourists were teeming around it, taking group shots and selfies with their phones in the plaza, streaming across the Pont au Double, and crowded all along the bank of the Seine.

  The raised riverbank had a wide pedestrian walkway that was lined with booths selling everything from fruits and vegetables to paintings of street scenes to secondhand books. On the opposite side of the road was a small park (though we couldn’t see much of it given our low angle).

  Finally, on the corner across the street from the park was the building in question, the home of Mr. E and thus the power center of SPYDER.

  Frankly, it didn’t look like much.

  It appeared to be a decent enough building, and it certainly had an incredible view of Notre Dame, but I had expected something more. I had thought that the head of SPYDER might live in some place large and lavish, like Orion’s palace. Or perhaps a heavily armed fortress. Or maybe a remote chalet at the top of a mountain in the Alps. This building was simply, almost disturbingly…normal.

  Which, I suddenly realized, was exactly what I should have been expecting all along. SPYDER was never ostentatious. The organization always hid in plain sight, whether it was building its own gated community in the suburbs of New Jersey or renting a suite in the midd
le of a Mexican vacation resort. So it made sense that Mr. E would, at least on the surface, live someplace as normal-looking as possible.

  The building was six stories tall, although the first story was a restaurant. This being Paris, I would have expected a nice little bistro where everyone was eating brie and baguettes and sipping coffee at outdoor tables. Instead, it was a Burger King.

  Above the restaurant, there was nothing particularly intriguing about the building at all. It looked like a million other buildings in Paris: It was made of dull beige stone, the windows had wrought-iron railings, and the balconies were so small and narrow that there was barely room for a person to stand on them. The front door was wedged between the Burger King and a Starbucks.

  “Are we sure this is the right place?” Zoe asked.

  “Definitely,” Catherine answered. “I’ve counted at least seven men guarding it so far.”

  “Really?” Mike asked.

  Catherine said, “There are two sitting outside the Burger King, three in the park, and two on the bank of the river, one of whom is pretending to be a used book dealer and one of whom is posing as a grocer. They look relatively normal, of course, but they’re all packing heat. I recognize two of them from the British Museum.”

  “So…Those guys were working for SPYDER then,” Zoe surmised.

  “I suppose so,” Catherine said. “And that’s just the ones I’ve detected in a cursory sweep. I’m sure there must be at least a dozen others.”

  “That’d make sixteen people!” Mike exclaimed.

  “Nineteen,” I corrected. “At least.”

  “Nineteen,” Mike agreed. “Sorry. Math’s not my best subject. Point is, that’s an awful lot of bad guys protecting one building. How are we supposed to get past them all?”

  “Especially when the building probably has a dozen separate security systems?” Zoe added. “We’ll never get in off the street.”

  “Then let’s not go in off the street,” I said, suddenly struck by an idea.

  The others looked to me, intrigued.

  “What are you thinking?” Catherine asked.

  I said, “When we came across SPYDER’s old headquarters in New Jersey, it looked completely normal, but there was a whole lot hidden beneath the surface. I’m guessing that’s the case with this place too. There’s no way Mr. E is living in a completely normal building. SPYDER must have altered that place somehow. At the very least, there’s bound to be a secret entrance, so Mr. E can sneak in—or sneak out if he thinks there’s trouble. And where’s the best place to put a secret entrance?”

  Everyone realized what I was talking about at once. “Underground,” they all said.

  “Right,” I agreed. “If Paris really does have this whole maze of sewers and catacombs and other tunnels down here, then that’d be the perfect way for Mr. E—or any other members of SPYDER—to get around unnoticed.”

  “And it’d be a good way to move all sorts of illegal goods as well,” Erica added. She yanked the camera back through the manhole and then climbed down the ladder of rungs. “Although it doesn’t look like there’s an access from the sewer.”

  “No,” Catherine said thoughtfully. “It’d be too hard to build that without someone from the sanitation department noticing. And that doesn’t seem like SPYDER’s style, either. I doubt Mr. E likes the idea of coming and going through a tunnel filled with sewage.”

  “The catacomb!” Zoe exclaimed. “That goes right along the basement of the building.”

  “Buildings in Paris don’t have basements,” Catherine said, but then caught herself and added, “but perhaps this one does.”

  We all returned to the catacomb. The tunnel seemed even creepier than before, knowing it might provide access to Mr. E’s home somehow, but we headed into it anyway.

  The only light we had was from Erica’s and Catherine’s penlights, which wasn’t much. It turned out, the walls weren’t only lined with skulls, but with a whole assortment of human bones, which were stacked up like firewood. And occasionally, a rat would scuttle past our feet. Heading through a narrow, dark, rat-infested tunnel lined with human bones was so unnerving, it actually made me nostalgic for our trip through the sewer.

  About twenty feet along, we came to a fork in the tunnel where some ancient, depraved interior decorator had arranged the bones into a pattern, with the skulls making a series of concentric circles, like a target. Erica paused there, scrutinizing the wall on the opposite side of the tunnel, right where the basement of Mr. E’s house would have been. This side had no decorative patterns, only a random assortment of skulls.

  “What’s wrong?” Zoe asked.

  “These skulls are newer than the ones on the other side,” Erica observed.

  “How can you tell?” Mike asked, then said quickly, “Come to think of it, don’t tell me. I really don’t want to know the answer to that.”

  “Really?” Erica asked. “Because the forensics are quite fascinating.… ”

  “I agree with Mike,” Zoe said. “I’m perfectly happy not knowing.”

  Erica sighed with disappointment. “Fine. The point is, these skulls have been put here relatively recently. I’d say they’re only a few years old.” She grabbed one by the eye sockets and gave it a good, hard yank. It stayed right where it was.

  “It’s bolted to the wall, too,” Erica said. “I’ll bet the ones on the other side of the tunnel aren’t. Ben, check and see.”

  “No thanks,” I said. I really didn’t want to stick my fingers into the cranial cavity of one of my great-great-great-great-great-great-ancestors.

  “Ben,” Erica said firmly.

  “Okay. I’ll check.” I reluctantly stuck my fingers into a random skull and tugged on it.

  It was mortared to the wall, but the mortar was hundreds of years old and crumbled. The skulls popped free relatively easily, revealing the stone behind it. I quickly replaced the skull and wiped my hand on my shirt. “This is sooo not how I wanted to spend my first day in Paris.”

  “You should consider yourself lucky,” Catherine told me. “My first day in Paris, I was undercover with a group of neo-Nazis who didn’t believe in bathing. That was no picnic.”

  “The way this day’s going, we’ll probably run into them by dinnertime,” Mike muttered under his breath.

  Catherine aimed her penlight between the newer skulls and examined the wall behind them. “That looks like concrete to me. Must be the wall of Mr. E’s basement.” She turned to Erica. “Now might be a nice time to use that C-4 explosive of yours.”

  “All right,” Erica said.

  “Wait!” I exclaimed. “You’re going to blow through that wall?”

  “I’d ring the doorbell, but it doesn’t look like there’s one down here,” Erica said.

  “I thought the whole idea was to sneak in,” I said. “If you blow the wall, won’t that alert everyone?”

  “The idea is to get in, period,” Catherine informed me. “Maybe this will trigger the alarms. Maybe it won’t. But it will at least get us inside. If we move fast, we might be able to get a jump on Mr. E before his security team can react.”

  “Might?” Zoe repeated, concerned.

  “We’ll have to figure this out as we go,” Catherine said. “I know that’s worrisome, but I don’t think we have the time to wait around for another option to present itself. With all the various factions of rogues and scoundrels on the hunt for us, as well as the police, we’re on borrowed time as it is.” She stepped aside and looked to Erica again. “Darling, do the honors.”

  Erica removed a wad of C-4 from a small bulletproof case she kept in her utility belt. She broke it into four chunks, jammed each one into the skulls, and then jabbed wires into them. “Get back,” she ordered us.

  We all hurried back toward the sewer. Erica followed us, playing out more wire, until we were a safe distance away. Then she connected the wires to a small detonator. “Here goes nothing,” she said, and pressed the plunger.

  The explosion w
asn’t as loud as I had expected, but it was big enough to jolt the earth around us. The skulls in the tunnel rattled, and tiny flakes of stone rained down on us from the ceiling. A large cloud of dust, debris, and human bone fragments billowed through the tunnel in the distance.

  No alarms went off, though.

  We pulled our shirts up over our faces so we wouldn’t breathe in any dust—or human bone fragments—and hurried back through the cloud. It was dissipating as we got to the place where the explosives had gone off.

  The skulls had all blown away, revealing a relatively new concrete wall behind it. That wall now had a hole in it big enough for us to climb through.

  So we climbed through it.

  Catherine went first, and when no one jumped out from the shadows and clubbed her unconscious, Erica followed. The rest of us filed through after her.

  For once, luck briefly seemed to be on our side.

  We didn’t find ourselves surrounded by enemy agents lying in wait for us with all sorts of deadly weapons pointed our way. Instead, we were in a storage room in Mr. E’s basement. It was a rather normal storage room, with concrete walls and fluorescent lights and lots of shelves. It was filled with items that had been smuggled into the country, but in this case, most of it wasn’t illegal contraband; it was American junk food that the French didn’t approve of. There were plastic bins filled with Hostess Ding Dongs, nacho-flavored Doritos, peanut butter, Pop-Tarts, and Hershey bars.

  “From the looks of this, Mr. E is American,” Catherine observed quietly.

  “Or he knows Murray is coming to visit,” I said.

  There were many household items in the storage room, like cleaning supplies and toilet paper—and, because it was SPYDER’s storage room, there were also weapons. One wall held an array of guns, crossbows, grenades, explosives, and a flamethrower.

  “Who on earth needs a flamethrower?” Zoe asked. “I mean, I know SPYDER is evil and all, but honestly, when does that come in handy around the house?”

  “You’d be surprised,” Erica said, taking a bit of C-4 to refill her utility belt. “We’re just lucky all this wasn’t on the wall we blew open, or this entire place would have come down on top of us.”