“I thought you were giving up the microwave for me.”
“I never said that and, besides, you don’t microwave Pop-Tarts,” Kate said. “How can you be a criminal mastermind and not know that? They are a tasty toaster treat.”
“Forget about Pop-Tarts,” Nick said. “I’ve got the plot all worked out. It doesn’t matter where the lab is, or where they keep the smallpox, because we don’t need to know any of that to pull off this heist.”
“Maybe I’m tired, and in desperate need of caffeine and sugar, but I think I’m missing something,” Kate said. “How can we break into a lab and steal the smallpox if we don’t know where the lab or the smallpox are?”
“Because we’re not tunneling into the lab.” Nick pulled over his Paris map and circled a building next door to the institute on avenue Denfert-Rochereau. “We’re going to tunnel in here.”
Kate looked at the map. The building wasn’t labeled. “What’s in there?”
“It was a terrible Indian restaurant for a while,” Nick said. “Before that it was a travel agency. Now it’s vacant and available for rent. But soon there’s going to be a world-class level-four biocontainment lab in the basement.”
Now it was all becoming clear to Kate, and she couldn’t help smiling at the beauty of the con. “We’re going to break into a fake lab and steal fake smallpox.”
“That’s the idea,” he said.
“It’s so wonderfully simple.” How did he come up with that so fast? It was one of the things about him that used to aggravate the hell out of her when she was trying to arrest him.
“It’s not quite as simple as it sounds,” he said. “To succeed, we have to pull off a dangerous balancing act that could go wrong in a thousand different ways.”
“Creating the fake lab is the kind of thing we’ve done before,” Kate said. “We’ve got a crew we know can do it.”
“The trick isn’t building the set, it’s making the Road Runners, a group of very smart professional thieves, believe that they’re tunneling into the real lab and that the smallpox is genuine,” Nick said. “The heist needs to feel completely authentic in every way. Not just the work itself, but the palpable risk, the ever-present sense of danger. We have to create a totally immersive physical and emotional experience. One false note and it’s over.”
“So where do we start?”
“With omelets and espresso.”
Uber driver Gaëlle Rochon was on her way to pick up a couple at the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. She thought this was a charming name for what was once an abandoned limestone quarry used as a garbage dump and a pit for dead horses. In 1867, the putrid site was transformed into a popular Paris park, a romantic landscape painting come to life with a faux Roman temple atop a lushly landscaped, dramatic peak on a mountain in the center of an artificial lake. When Gaëlle looked at that lake, she imagined the dead horses floating just below the surface.
Of course, she’d always been more interested in what lay beneath Paris, and in the city’s past rather than its present. It was her father’s fault. The widower had spent his life as an égoutier, a worker in the sewers, pushing muck along the channels with his ever-present rabot, a pole with an angled paddle at the end. On nights and weekends, he and his beloved precocious daughter explored the secret world of the catacombs. When her father died five years ago, she followed his final wishes and scattered his ashes in the ossuary beneath place Denfert-Rochereau. Now, when she wasn’t driving the streets of Paris, she spent every free moment wandering the two hundred miles of forbidden catacombs beneath them, the sewers, subways, canals, quarries, and crypts that made up the underworld. She was twenty-seven years old, five foot three, blond, and slim. Maintaining her weight was important for crawling through some of the tight tunnels between chambers without getting stuck.
She knew her way around Paris much better from below than she did from above, except when it came to the nineteenth arrondissement, where Parc des Buttes-Chaumont was located. This was her neighborhood, and this Uber pickup was her first of the day. She pulled up to the park’s entry gate at place Armand Carrel in her rented Peugeot 508 sedan and got out to greet her clients.
Gaëlle wore a gray pantsuit and an open-collared white shirt so that she looked more like a personal chauffeur than a taxi driver.
The stylish young couple, obviously Americans, immediately double-checked her identity from her photo and the make of the car that popped up on the Uber app on the man’s iPhone. She opened the back door of the Peugeot for them in the meantime.
“Good afternoon,” she said. “Where can I take you?”
“Au Vieux Campeur, 48 rue des Écoles, s’il vous plait,” the man said.
“Oui, monsieur.” He got extra points from Gaëlle for having a perfect French accent.
She knew Au Vieux Campeur well. It was a sporting goods shop that sold a lot of the equipment that cataphiles like her needed to explore the underground. The store was in the heart of Saint-Germain on the Left Bank, which was great news, because getting there would take the couple past a lot of Paris highlights, like the Pompidou Centre and Notre Dame, and that usually led to a more generous tip. She got behind the wheel and headed west on rue Armand Carrel.
“My name is Nick, and this is Kate,” the man said in English.
“Nice to meet you,” Gaëlle said.
“We’re thrilled to meet you, too, Gaëlle,” Kate said. “We’re looking forward to you showing us around after we do some shopping.”
“Are you interested in a city tour?” Gaëlle asked them.
“Definitely,” Kate said.
“I can show you the sites, but I have to warn you, I’m not a tour guide,” Gaëlle said. “You’ll get better details from your guidebook.”
“Not for the catacombs,” Nick said. “We’d like to see what lies beneath Paris.”
She eyed him suspiciously in her rearview mirror. Who were these two? How did they know she was a cataphile?
“There’s a tour of les catacombes ossuary at place Denfert-Rochereau,” she said. “I can drop you off out front. Tickets are twelve euro. I can pick you up at the exit on rue Rémy Dumoncel when your tour is over.”
“We want to see more than the bones,” Kate said. “We’d like to get a feel for the catacombs as a whole, the entire network of subways, sewers, quarry galleries, and access tunnels under Denfert-Rochereau.”
“What makes you think I know anything about that?” Gaëlle asked.
“Because you were practically raised down there, and the sewer workers are like your family,” Kate said. “That’s why the police and the agents of the Inspection Générale des Carrières turn a blind eye to your trespassing. Anybody else who spent as much time down there as you do would have been put in jail or bankrupted with fines by now.”
It was obvious to Gaëlle now that it was no coincidence they’d ordered an Uber pickup at Buttes-Chaumont Park. They knew she’d be the closest Uber car because they knew that’s where she lived. They were waiting for her. That creeped her out big-time.
“How do you know who I am?” she asked. “Who are you?”
“Two fun-loving, adventurous people who are very curious about the underground,” Nick said. “And who have the resources to find the best person in Paris to be our guide.”
“We’re sorry if you feel we’ve invaded your privacy,” Kate said. “We meant no offense or harm. We’ll make up for it by paying you your day fare plus a thousand euros to take us on a guided tour of the underground.”
The money was definitely enticing, but she couldn’t shake the uncomfortable feeling that came from these two Americans knowing so much about her.
“I don’t have the gear for it, and neither do you,” Gaëlle said.
“That’s why we’re heading to Au Vieux Campeur,” Nick said. “We’ll buy whatever is needed for ourselves and for you. So you’ll also be getting brand-new spelunking gear out of this on top of what we’re paying you.”
The deal was getting bett
er every minute, but even so, it felt wrong, like she was betraying something sacred. The catacombs were her sanctuary.
“If you’re looking for a place to take that unique Paris selfie that nobody else has to show off to your Facebook friends, then forget it,” Gaëlle said. “The real catacombs, not the cleaned-up, well-lit portion that’s open to the public, are not a tourist attraction. It is a very special place that needs to be respected.”
“We’ll treat it like a church,” Nick said.
“It’s also rough and dangerous down there. There are no bathrooms, drinking fountains, or places to get a latte. The air can be dusty and foul. You’ll have to crawl through some tight spaces, wade through raw sewage, and walk through unstable caverns that could collapse at any time. If you’re the slightest bit claustrophobic, you will be entering hell,” Gaëlle said. “It’s a rugged wilderness. It’s not a walk in the park.”
“We can handle ourselves,” Kate said.
Gaëlle glanced back at Kate and Nick and appraised them. They were fit, and there was a steely confidence in Kate’s eyes. Gaëlle believed they could take care of themselves. Even so, she didn’t like it.
“The spiders down there are as big as your hand and have a nasty bite,” Gaëlle said. “The rats aren’t afraid of people and will attack if they feel cornered. There’s rat feces and urine everywhere and, if it gets in an open wound, it can kill you.”
“And yet, you love it underground,” Kate said.
“The catacombs are left over from underground quarrying for limestone that began in the thirteenth century and didn’t end until 1860. For centuries, people have worked or sought refuge in the catacombs. There’s sketches, murals, carvings, and graffiti from the Prussian war, the storming of the Bastille, the German occupation during World War II, the riots of the 1960s, every historical event you can think of and some you never heard about.”
“It’s a natural museum,” Nick said.
“It’s much more than that,” Gaëlle said. “There’s also the bones of six million Parisians down there, nearly three times the living population of Paris. Maybe their ghosts are there too, and that’s what makes the silence so profound. It’s an escape from everything, true peace. There are places so quiet, it feels as if you’ve escaped from your body and merged with the earth and everybody who has ever walked on it. The past is alive down there in ways no museum could ever be.”
“Now you know why we picked you as our guide,” Nick said. “Do we have a deal?”
“If I see you take a single selfie,” Gaëlle said, “I’ll smash your phone with a rock.”
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.”