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He played the light in the tunnel behind them, then up ahead. “Maybe. Havelock knew we would come down here after him. How, I have no idea.”
They found Dendritte in an adjoining tunnel. She was moaning softly. Nicholas knelt beside her, felt the pulse in her throat. It was steady. “Are you all right, Commander?”
“Bad knock on the head,” she whispered. “The Rat must have flung a rock at me. Go, go, find Sophie. I’ll be all right.”
Nicholas said, “Where do we go from here, Commander?”
But Dendritte’s eyes were closed.
“Nicholas, look!” Mike shone her light on the wall, to the spot where the two Rats had burst out. She realized it was cracked open, meant as the escape for the Rats after they’d killed her and Nicholas. “Through here, look, there’s another tunnel. See, the floor slopes down, going even deeper than where we are now. This is it, Nicholas.”
He felt Dendritte’s pulse again. Still steady.
There was nothing they could do for her. He stood. “Let’s go.”
Nicholas shoved against the walled door. It was old, maybe built by Rats in the nineteenth century. Once through, he shined his flashlight on the ground. “Yes, this is it.” Nicholas leaned down to look at the scuff marks in the dirt floor, long drags. “There was at least one more Rat. He took Sophie and dragged her through here. Can you walk, Mike?”
Oh, yes, she could run now, if she had to.
They went deeper, slapping away cobwebs. The smell of rot and slime was nearly overwhelming. Something skittered away from Nicholas’s foot. This narrow tunnel seemed untouched by man for a very long time—maybe since Madame Curie had walked through here a hundred years ago.
The corridor narrowed. Nicholas’s shoulders touched the wet walls. He closed his eyes a moment, breathed through his nose. This was worse than diving to the sub.
Mike called out, “It widens out again down here, Nicholas. And I see it, a chamber.”
He swallowed and followed her. She was right. The tunnel was getting wider, the ceiling higher. His breath came easier now.
Mike was shining her flashlight along one long tunnel wall. They stood shoulder to shoulder, staring at four side-by-side wooden doors, each with warped brown wood panels and rusted black hinges. They looked half a foot thick. On each door was a big lock. “They look like dungeon doors,” Mike said, only to hear her own voice echo back to her. “Why four doors? Are there labs behind all of them?”
“Look above the doors, at the carvings,” Nicholas said. “Gargoyles of sorts, mythical figures—griffins and dragons and chimeras.”
Mike whispered, “They’re meant as warnings, to scare away anyone who stumbled across this place. But why four doors? Are there chambers behind each one? Did she use them all?” She looked back over her shoulder and gave him a smile. “Four doors—you pick the one you think is Curie’s main lab.”
He whispered in her ear, “Step back. I’ll shut off my torch. Radium can be luminescent; perhaps Curie’s new polonium is as well. Let’s see if it can help us choose the right one.”
They shut off their lights, and the world turned black. And they saw that the third door glowed in the darkness, a bluish light that seemed to seep out of the wood itself. They realized the door wasn’t completely closed.
“I have a theory,” Nicholas whispered.
“And what would that be?”
He looked dead serious. “If you do bad things, bad people will come visit you.” He pulled his Glock and started to push the door open.
He sensed the slash of a knife through the darkness.
Another Rat, this one bigger than the other two. He seemed to come out of nowhere, with no warning. Nicholas caught his arm as the blade came down, and the knife disappeared between them.
The man was growling, panting, cursing him in French. They grappled in the dark. Slowly, inch by inch, Nicholas was turning the Ka-Bar knife until he had the Rat pressed back against the tunnel wall. He jerked the man’s hand up, twisted the knife inward and shoved it into the big man’s throat.
88
Madame Curie’s Lost Laboratory
Paris Underground
3:00 a.m.
Havelock was sadly disappointed when he’d unlocked the third door. The lab was old, but then what could he expect? He couldn’t imagine having to work day in and day out in this dank hollowed-out room with its dead air, a hundred feet below the street. There weren’t any precautions then against radioactive materials. He thought of Curie’s long, slow death.
