After a shopping spree at Au Vieux Campeur, where Gaëlle had them buy enough equipment to scale Mount Everest, she drove them south through place Denfert-Rochereau. She parked on avenue Jean Moulin, where the street passed over railroad tracks. Both sides of the embankment were lined with cyclone fencing.
The three of them got out wearing blue coveralls and calf-high steel-toed rubber boots. In their heavy-duty nylon backpacks, they had helmets with headlamps, kneepads and elbow pads, industrial rubber gloves, plastic goggles, dust masks, reflective flagging tape, canteens, flashlights, and first-aid kits. Gaëlle also made them throw in ropes, chest and waist harnesses, ascender clamps and descender clamps, caving hammers, and carabiners just in case they wanted to rappel down to the center of the earth.
“This is the Petite Ceinture, the ‘little belt,’ a rail line built by Napoleon the Third. It followed the walls that once encircled Paris,” Gaëlle said, leading them over a bridge. “It was basically abandoned in 1934, but the tunnels, stations, and tracks all still exist.”
On the other end of the bridge, the cyclone fencing had been cut, creating a flap that could be pushed open. Gaëlle crouched down and climbed through. Kate and Nick followed. Gaëlle led them down the chipped concrete steps that ran alongside the graffiti-covered footings of the bridge to the tracks below.
“There are many levels to the underground,” Gaëlle said as they walked along the tracks. “The sewers, aqueducts, and metro lines are closest to the surface at thirty to fifty feet below. There are some church crypts, utility tunnels, and underground garages that go just as deep. The limestone quarries and ossuaries are fifty to ninety feet below the streets and are interconnected by Inspection Générale des Carrières, or IGC, access tunnels. The IGC monitors the below-ground quarries for public hazards like extraordinary contamination or possible collapse.”
The embankment seemed to get deeper as they walked, and the streets above began to fade away in the upper periphery of Kate’s vision. The weedy, rusty tracks and the overgrown plants on either side of her made it easy to imagine they were in a postapocalyptic world where nature had taken back everything that man had built. As they neared the mouth of a railway tunnel, Kate realized that there were no longer any buildings around, only trees and dense shrubs, and that the street noise was nearly gone.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“Parc Montsouris,” Gaëlle said and stopped in front of the railroad tunnel. “Time to suit up.”
She unzipped her backpack and put on her gloves, helmet, and kneepads. Nick and Kate did the same.
Gaëlle flicked her helmet light on and walked into the dark tunnel. The walls were covered with graffiti, and the air was heavy with the stench of urine and stale beer. The floor of the tunnel was littered with mattresses and discarded cans and bottles. Midway down the tunnel, Gaëlle stopped in front of a piece of plywood wedged up against the wall near her feet.
“There are many ways into the catacombs. You can get in through basements, parking garages, metro tunnels, sewer lines, and manholes. We are already forty feet below street level here, so this saved us a descent.” She slid the plywood aside to reveal a jagged hole cut into the stone, barely large enough for a person to fit through. “Go in feetfirst and drag your pack in behind you. Watch your head when you get up.”
She took a rag from her pocket and tied it in a knot around her neck.
“What’s that for?” Kate asked.
“Habit and tradition,” Gaëlle said. “The sewer men began wearing these knotted rags centuries ago to protect themselves from the biting spiders that can drop on them. But mostly I do it because I’d feel naked without it under there.”
Terrific, Kate thought. Biting spiders. How fun was that?
Gaëlle climbed in, followed by Nick and then Kate. It was a tight fit, opening to a passage that was barely three feet high. They walked in a crouch for about twenty yards, their helmets scraping against the stones sticking out of the ceiling, before they reached an intersection with another corridor where they could stand upright. The walls in this corridor were a mix of carved rock and stacked stone reinforcement.
Gaëlle stopped and pointed to an engraved plate in the wall that read Avenue d’Orleans. “In many places, the names of the streets above are engraved in the walls.”
“By whom?” Nick asked.
“Miners, sewer workers, smugglers, resistance fighters, the IGC doing inspections, or just somebody handy with a hammer and pick,” Gaëlle said. “You’ll find signs here going back centuries. This is an old one. Avenue d’Orleans was changed in 1948 to avenue du Général Leclerc. It’s easy to find your way around in the sewers. For every street in Paris, there is a matching sewer underneath, right down to the street signs on the corners.”
They entered a corridor with knee-high water and sloshed through it for a while until they reached some dry tunnels that spilled out into a series of larger caverns, all covered with artwork. Sculpted gargoyles peered out at them from one cavern. In another, limestone pillars sculpted to look like people holding up the earth.
“How often do the police patrol down here?” Nick asked.
“Police patrols are limited,” Gaëlle said. “And there’s a lot of ground to cover. Since the Paris terrorist attacks, the police are less interested in writing tickets for trespassing than making sure nobody puts a bomb under the Louvre. So they tend to patrol under important buildings now.”
“Can we turn off the lights?” Kate asked. “I’d like to see the darkness and hear the silence.”
They turned their helmet lights off and then the lanterns. The blackness that came was the most complete Kate had ever experienced. The only sound she heard was their breathing.
They turned their lights back on and Gaëlle led them out of the cavern, down a long, low corridor, and across another gallery and into one of the many tunnels. She stopped in front of a chest-high hole cut in the wall. The hole was about the size of a doggy door. When they emerged on the other side of the hole they were standing in a river of dry human bones that rose as high as Kate’s ankle. The floor of the entire corridor, as far as their headlamps could reveal, was covered with bones.
“You get used to it,” Gaëlle said, heading on down the tunnel. “After a while, you forget they are bones.”
Kate and Nick followed Gaëlle out of the ossuary, up a ladder of iron rungs embedded in the wall, to another level. This was a more modern passage, finished in smooth concrete and lined with all kinds of pipes, wires, and electrical conduits.
“This is a telecom and utility corridor,” Gaëlle said. “Built about thirty years ago, but workmen are always down here, adding new lines for cable television, high-speed Internet, whatever. You’ll also find cables like these running through some of the ossuaries.”
“In case the dead want to check their email,” Nick said. “Or binge on The Walking Dead.”
“I’ve done both,” Gaëlle said.
“I thought you came down here for the solitude,” Kate said.
“Not always,” Gaëlle said. “Sometimes I just want to relax, watch a movie, and really crank up the sound, so I bring down my laptop and hijack a movie off one of the cables. The acoustics down here are great.”
“You’re not worried about anyone hearing you?” Nick asked.
“We’re under thirty feet or more of limestone. You could bring a band down here for a concert and nobody will hear a thing.”
They went down several intersecting utility corridors, some of them lit by lights on the walls, until they came to a door that looked like a watertight hatch from a submarine. Gaëlle spun the wheel, opened the heavy door, and they stepped into a wide, arched chamber with a river of sewage running down the center. The smell wasn’t as a bad as Kate had expected. It wasn’t much worse than a men’s locker room. A blue plaque with white letters on the wall read Boulevard Saint-Jacques.
“This is one of the sewer lines,” Gaëlle said. “The sewer men walk along the side paths with paddle tools to move the muck along. Or a bunch of men will drag a sluice boat through the center channel with ropes to do the job. The work hasn’t really changed in centuries.”
They walked along the concrete banks, which were dimly lit every few feet by industrial lights on the wall. Gaëlle pointed out the huge pipes above them that carried freshwater and a series of tubes that used to be part of the post office’s vast abandoned pneumatic network for delivering letters to buildings by compressed air.
They crossed a bridge over the sewer channel to a ladder built into the wall that went up about twenty feet into a circular shaft. Kate looked up and saw a pinhole of sunlight streaming through a manhole cover.
Gaëlle climbed up the shaft, moved the manhole cover aside, and they were bathed with sunlight and blasted with noise. Kate and Nick followed Gaëlle up and found themselves standing on the sidewalk of boulevard Saint-Jacques, facing place Denfert-Rochereau and the Lion of Belfort. Kate had to squint and hold a hand up to shade her eyes. The sunlight seemed unusually harsh after the pitch-darkness of the underground.
“I brought you up here because this spot is unique,” Gaëlle said and pointed to the train station across the street. “That’s the regional rapid transit system line, the RER. There’s also a metro station here, a subway line, the sewers, an aqueduct, utility corridors, and, below it all, the catacombs. All the levels of the underground world come together here. It also used to be the entrance to Paris. It’s a short walk back to the car from here, or we can go through the sewer instead.”
Kate wanted the fresh air but the sewer would give them more privacy for the conversation they still needed to have. “Let’s take the sewer.”
Gaëlle seemed surprised by the answer, but shrugged and headed back into the manhole. “As you wish.”
Kate followed her down, and Nick brought up the rear, sliding the manhole cover back into place behind them. They walked alongside Gaëlle on the concrete banks to the sewer underneath place Denfert-Rochereau, then crossed a metal bridge to follow the line that ran under avenue du Général Leclerc.
“We didn’t ask you to show us the underground out of idle curiosity or for the unusual experience,” Kate said.
“I assumed there was more to it,” Gaëlle said.
“Nick and I are operatives for an international private security company, and we’ve been hired to prevent a biological attack on the United States. The group that’s planning this attack intends to steal the killer virus for their weapon from a basement lab at the Institut National pour la Recherche sur les Maladies Infectieuses.”
“On Denfert-Rochereau,” Gaëlle said, putting the pieces together. “They’re going to dig their way in.”
“They are and they aren’t,” Nick said. “We’ve infiltrated the group to trick them into breaking into a fake lab in the basement of another building on the same street. We need you to help us fool them.”
“What could I do?” she asked.
“You’d be their guide. You’d lead them to the dig site by a different route each day, supposedly to avoid attracting attention, but really just to confuse them,” Nick said. “We could also switch out some of the street signs underground to add to their confusion.”
“After what we’ve experienced today,” Kate said, “I don’t think confusing them is going to be that hard.”
“If what you are saying is true,” Gaëlle said, “why is a private security firm stopping this terrorist attack and not the police? Who hired you?”
“We can’t tell you who our client is,” Kate said. “But I can say that we’re often hired because we can ignore laws, jurisdictions, and national borders that restrict the ability of law enforcement agencies and governments to do their jobs.”
“We aren’t accountable to taxpayers, either, and have very deep pockets,” Nick said. “We’ll pay you a hundred thousand euros to help us.”
Gaëlle stopped and stared at him. “How much?”
“One hundred thousand euros.”
She kept staring at him. “Mon Dieu. Vraiment?”
“Oui,” Nick replied.
“Before you get seduced by the money,” Kate said, “you need to know that what we are asking you to do is extremely dangerous. You’ll be undercover among killers. We’ll be there with you, and we’ll do our best to protect you, but we can’t guarantee your safety.”
Gaëlle narrowed her eyes. “How do I know you’re who you say you are?”
“You don’t,” Kate said. “You’d have to trust us.”
“Two complete strangers that I just met,” Gaëlle said. “Telling a pretty fantastical story.”
“That’s right,” Kate said.
“But once you’re involved, you’ll see the inner workings of the con and the time, effort, and expense that’s going into it,” Nick said. “It will be immediately clear to you that we couldn’t be doing anything else except what we say we are.”
“There will also be nothing stopping you at any time from walking away or going to the police or telling the bad guys who we are,” Kate said. “So the trust works both ways. We’ll be trusting you with our lives and those of our team.”
“You have other people involved in this?” Gaëlle said.
“People we’ve recruited for their special skills,” Kate said. “Just like you.”
Gaëlle thought about it for a long moment. “I haven’t done much with my life. I just drive people around and wander through dark tunnels, lost in the past or myself. What good has it been? What have I achieved? If I can use that experience to save lives, then everything I’ve done up until now has actually meant something. So yes, I’ll help you, and I’ll take your money, too.”
Nick shook her hand. “Welcome to the team.”