Dead Run (9 page)

And the clashes
were
bewildering. They’d never argued so much in the entire course of their partnership. Nor after they’d become lovers. Now, when they should have been making every moment count, they couldn’t seem to get through more than a few hours without an explosion.

They couldn’t afford this, couldn’t afford to waste this time together. Likely neither of them would have a shot at leave for another year.

On the Métro, Will kept finding himself watching Taylor. Every once in a while Taylor would give him an odd, cool look in return. For the first time Will could remember, he didn’t know what to say to the person he would have said knew and understood him better than anyone else in the world.

It was a lonely feeling.

Tara had selected the restaurant. L’Arpège, specializing in vegetarian and seafood dishes, was another very well-known Michelin three-star eatery—although it was probably grounds for an international incident calling it an
eatery
. It was a small, unassuming building across the road from the Musée Rodin.

Will held the door for Taylor, and Taylor went in, scanning the packed tables. Apparently disposable income was still alive and well in this part of the world.

The decor was simple and modern. Etched glass, polished steel, pearwood paneling, a few bold strokes of color and surprising objets d’art like large squash rather than flower arrangements on the tables.

Tara and James were already seated. Tara waved when she spotted them.

“Wow. Why so serious?” she asked as Will and Taylor seated themselves. “Is there some kind of national emergency we should know about?”

Will liked Tara. She was smart, funny, candid, and generally easygoing. Much like her little brother. She was also quite beautiful with long dark hair and those wide, exotic bronze-green eyes she shared with Taylor and the rest of the MacAllister clan.

Taylor didn’t look at Will. “Our leave has been rescinded.”

Tara looked from Taylor to Will. “What? They can’t do that!”

James said, “It’s the American government, hon. They can do anything they want.” James was a nice guy; at least that was Will’s impression. He didn’t know him well, but according to Taylor he was intelligent, capable, ambitious, and openly adored Tara. Will could see that open adoration for himself every time James looked at Tara.

“Where are the kids?” Taylor asked.

“The hotel has a babysitting service.”

Taylor looked disapproving, and Tara rolled her eyes. “You can tell me how to raise my kids once you’ve started raising your own,” she said without heat.

James cleared his throat, and Tara’s cheeks got a little pink. Taylor changed the subject without missing a beat, bringing Tara up to speed on the man he had chased through the airport in Los Angeles.

They briefly discussed the case before the waiter arrived, and then there was a lengthy question-and-answer session that Will could have done without. At last they ordered and went back to debating what would bring a man like Helloco out of hiding after forty years.

“The woman, of course,” Tara said. “
Cherchez la femme
, like they say over here. He’s come back for his ex-lover.”

“If that was the case, why’d he wait all these years?” Will asked.

“Why’d he marry someone else?” Taylor put in.

“Maybe he had to.”

“Why would he?”

Tara looked at her brother and shook her head. “For his cover.”

“Then why’d he wait forty-something years to come back? Why come back at all?”

“Because he never forgot the woman he truly loved.”

Taylor put a hand to his stomach. “I feel sick,” he complained.

“How do you put up with him?” Tara asked Will.

“He grows on you,” Will admitted.

Their meals arrived at last, perfectly prepared and artistically arranged as one would expect given the prices of the place. The chef’s specialty was vegetables, and Will listened patiently, occasionally exchanging tolerant glances with James while Taylor and Tara raved on and on, both of them part-time vegetarians. Then it was his and Taylor’s turn to be patient while James and Tara, who referred to themselves as foodies, went on at great and exasperating length about tasting menus and amuse-bouches and nose and palate and degustation.

Will regarded Taylor, and Taylor gave him a droll look. Will tried not to laugh. Once again he felt one of those rushes of…well, love.

Yes, love. Of course, love. Whatever was wrong between them, they needed to work it out because what they had together was just too good to lose.

“How long are you staying in Paris, Will?” Tara asked somewhere between the departure of the
aiguillettes de homard
and the arrival of mustard ice cream on a tomato gazpacho.

Taylor was looking at him, brows raised in polite inquiry. “Another two years at least, right?”

“Oh, that’s a long time.” Tara was giving her brother a commiserating look.

Taylor shrugged.

To his amazement Will heard himself say, “I’ll resign right now, this week, if you will too.”

Tara gave a startled squeak. Taylor was staring at Will in disbelief—and not thrilled disbelief either. “Say what?” he said.

“You heard me. I’m willing to resign if you are.”

“
Quit
?”

“What would you do if you didn’t work for the State Department?” James asked.

“Good question,” Taylor said. “Any ideas, Will?”

As confounded as he was to have proposed such a thing, Will now found himself arguing its merits. “It’s a dangerous world. We’ve got plenty of marketable skills.”

“I’m not resigning. And neither are you.”

Tara said, “I thought you liked your job, Will?”

“I do. I can always get another
job
.”

His cell phone went off, thus delaying the impending explosion from Taylor. Taylor waited, steam all but pouring from his ears, as Will took the call.

Alice Stone’s terse voice ordered them to the Denfert-Rochereau Métro station. “We’ve got another bomb threat. This time Finistère is claiming they’ve rigged the Paris catacombs to blow. We need some kind of token American presence on the scene. I’m sending Arthur and Han as well. They’ll meet you there.”

Will disconnected. “We’ve got to go,” he told Taylor.

Taylor nodded crisply, all business again.

“Why? What’s going on?” Tara looked from one to the other of them.

“Hopefully nothing,” Will told her. “But do us a favor and steer clear of the Paris catacombs tonight.”

Taylor’s attempt to leave money was impatiently waved off by James.

They walked out of the restaurant, heading briskly for the Métro. Will brought Taylor up to speed.

“What the hell are
we
supposed to do?” Taylor inquired. “We don’t even speak French. Well, I don’t.”

“Moral support? I’m not sure. Here’s the problem we’re all facing. There’s no definitive map of the complete catacombs. We’re talking nearly two hundred miles of labyrinth. The tour of the catacombs that most people go on is just a fraction of the actual maze of underground tunnels. There are secret entrances and passageways all over the city that can be accessed through the sewers or Métro tunnels. There are even manholes that lead into the catacombs.”

“
Great
.”

Will was mindful that Taylor wasn’t too keen on enclosed spaces after falling into an underground cave during their pursuit of a fugitive in New Mexico.

“Hey.”

Taylor looked at him in inquiry.

“Are you going to be okay?”

Taylor’s face changed. “No, Will. I’m going to go home and wait for you because I’m afraid of the dark. And then I’m going to call my boss and resign because my boyfriend thinks there’s a chance I might get killed in the line of duty one day. Maybe I’ll just give up going outside altogether. I mean, a plane might fall on me. Or a bird might crap on me.”

“Can we
not
fight about this?” Will requested. “Because we need to be focused. This might be another false alarm or it might not.”

Taylor gave him a narrow look and then nodded.

They weren’t speaking when they reached the catacombs, but they weren’t arguing either, so…win.

Most Parisians didn’t bother to visit the famous catacombs any more than most Californians visited Hollywood. Will had been once, mostly because of the grandfather who had been stationed in France during World War II. His granddad had talked about the Resistance using the tunnels—ironically at the same time the occupying Germans were building a bunker in another section.

Will had found his one visit creepy. The tour was relatively short—a hundred and thirty steps down, eighty-three steps up, and a mere mile-and-a-half-long maze of obscure galleries and narrow corridors all made of bones, the skulls and femurs arranged in romantically macabre designs set off with graveyard urns and funerary statuary. Rusted gates blocked access to passages deemed unsafe or unnavigable for tours.

Creepy, in a word.

And all the sniffer dogs and cops and military police in riot gear and special units and all the flashing lights and radios and loudspeakers blasting their warnings and instructions didn’t appreciably reduce the creep factor.

Everyone was edgier because of the false alarm earlier that day. Opinion was divided as to whether that upped or reduced chances that this was the real thing. Special Agent Arthur was of the opinion it reduced chances. Special Agent Han was of the opinion it upped them. Taylor had not vouchsafed an opinion. He had that innocent, interested look he always wore when he was about to kiss off every moment of training and all thought of self-preservation and go flying faster than a speeding bullet into the most dangerous situation he could find.

Will gave Taylor a grim look that Taylor didn’t even notice; he was too busy checking out and comparing the arsenal the French cops were wearing. Never happier than when anticipating all hell breaking loose, that was Taylor.

“Some vacation for your partner,” Arthur said. “And the thing of it is, it’s not even a DSS operation.”

Will nodded. What kind of luck had put Taylor in a line at LAX in time to see and recognize Helloco? It was like fate. Not good fate. Fate with a capital
F
. Or maybe something else with a capital
F
.

“We’re going in now,” Taylor said, coming over to speak to them. “It looks like I’m with the guys in the big Plexiglas helmets. You’re going with the Foreign Legion.”

“Those are gendarmes.”

“I know. I’m kidding.” Taylor peered at him through the strobe-lit dark. He rammed the hard edge of his shoulder into Will’s in a gesture of solidarity—or maybe just
snap out of it!

“Helloco’s not going to be down there waiting for us in these tunnels.”

“Good by me. We’ll finish up here and go find some joint that serves beer and nachos and then go back to your place.” Taylor was being summoned. He nodded to Arthur, gave Will a crisp, “Watch your back.”

“MacAllister.”

Taylor turned.

“Keep your head down.”

Taylor gave him a thumbs-up.

* * *

The sign at the entrance of the catacombs read
Arrête, c’est ici l’empire de la Mort
. Stop, this is the empire of Death.

The creak of body armor, the thud of riot boots, the jingle of dog tags, and the dying gurgle of a hidden aqueduct were the only sounds as Will and the gendarmes descended a narrow spiral stairwell.

The ghostly lighting was dispelled by the white-hot lights of the police torches flitting across the walls of carefully arranged bones. Wet glistened and dripped from the ceiling that was only about six feet high. Will had to stoop to keep from braining himself. In some areas the limestone domes had been reinforced to keep sections of the cavern from collapsing.

“I always wanted to see this place,” Arthur said under his breath to Will.

Gee, how nice that someone was having a good time. For Will it brought back way too many memories of patrolling IED Alley.

Damp gravel crunched underfoot. A radio crackled. Overhead the water continued its
drip-drip-drip
to the ground. They moved slowly, meticulously, room-by-room, searching for explosives but finding nothing.

The next tunnel made a ninety-degree turn to the right and then, a short way on, to the left. More yellowed, cracked skulls gazing with empty eye sockets into the abyss.

The rich, the poor, the great, and the humble, all stacked like firewood, like bricks in a wall.

Sixty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong.

In fact, there were only supposed to be six million interred in the tunnels; even that number was unfathomable—three times the number of those living in the city above.

The commander whispered into his radio, “
Espace libre. Déplacement à la prochaine section
.”

They shuffled on a few yards. The dogs whined, tugged at their leads, and they moved to investigate another of the many tunnel offshoots. In the parts of the catacomb not open to the public, the bones were not arranged in designs. They were not arranged at all. They were simply dumped like Pick-up Sticks. To cross some of those galleries meant crawling over the scattered bones. Will told himself it was just like climbing over rocks.

He wondered how Taylor was doing. This was a very tight fit. Many of the tunnels were not even eight feet across. Usually no more than two hundred sightseers were permitted in the catacombs at one time. There had to be double that many law enforcement officers moving through the shadowy passages now.

“How far do you think we’ve traveled?” Arthur whispered.

Will shook his head. He checked his watch and was startled to see they’d been underground for over two hours. It really didn’t feel anything like that long, but this was tiring, painstaking, and stressful work. They had to check every possible hiding place, every indentation in the earth, every mound of bones, and every bit of debris that looked a little too artistically placed.

The smell was strange. Mold, damp earth, something funky—not death, or at least the smell of death that Will knew—and the chill was pervasive.