Page 205 of Secrets Beneath the Waves

“Copy that,” says SEAL two. “Manifest confirmed.”

The men quickly pull two of the crates off the container, then place thermite charges in the remaining wooden boxes, enough to melt the metal and leave nothing usable. Timed triggers will ensure the charges won’t go off until the SEALs are long gone. Leaving behind no signatures. No trace.

“Team Bravo, fall back to waterline. Crates are on the sleds.”

“Well done,” Hawke says. “We just stopped a proxy war.”

I frown. Done for now. This might be a significant blow, but it’s not the end.

One of the screens switches, and I walk up to the monitor, locking eyes with a pixilated face.

Rourke.

“I hear congratulations are in order,” Rourke says.

“You might have helped stop a war today, but don’t think for a second this makes us even,” Hawke says.

Rourke grins. “I never said it did.”

Hawke signals for Lizzie to cut the feed.

Lizzie bites her lip. “Before we celebrate, I just received verification on the ID of the woman who was posing as Mariam. Her name is Zahra Coello, and I looks like she was working with Ibrahim. I’m still working on details off the phone you brought back that was on her body. GPS shows where she’d been the last twenty-four hours.”

“And that’s significant because. . .” I ask.

“If she had Mariam, and her last location was with Mariam?—”

I grab my coat. “We might have just found her.”

The last fewdays have felt more like a script from a Hollywood spy movie, not my day-to-day life that is normally spent vetting people and translating information. While I’m praying Mariam is alive, the location has me concerned.

The Paris catacombs are located under the city, where most of the passageways were sealed off from the public decades ago. Originally, they were limestone quarries, dozens and dozens of miles of tunnels, carved out to provide the stones to build the city, and then eventually abandoned. Later, they were used to relieve overcrowded burial grounds that had become a public health crisis. They were supposed to take care of two main problems, sink holes and the surplus of dead bodies. Not exactly a place where I want to be.

And if Mariam has been shut up inside one of the tombs. . .

The stone walls are wet and our footsteps echo as Graham and I maneuver through an abandoned street-level entrance that is hidden behind a boarded-up storefront. My headlight catches the steel grate leading down into the catacombs, and I can see that the chain that secured it has been cut. We keep walking, headlamps flashing on the walls as we descend down narrow stairs and unearthly silence through the maze of forgotten tunnels. Definitely not your typical tourist site. The city might be noisy above us, but here it’s absolute silence.

“Be careful,” Graham says. “There’s our way down.”

He descends the steel ladder, and I follow him down the narrow shaft.

“Remind me why we didn’t wait for the tactical team?” I ask once we reach the bottom.

Graham doesn’t have to answer. We both know why. If Mariam is here, she’s been without food and water potentially for days. We can’t afford to wait to get permission to go after her.

I shiver, trying not to think about the fact that I’m surrounded by layers and layers of bones beneath the bustling streets of Paris.

There are signs that people have been down here recently like empty liquor bottles and cigarette stubs. I keep walking past a wall with graffiti. I hear dripping water and the clatter of stone from a tunnel nearby.

Graham holds up his hand, and I stop. I shiver in the darkness, straining to see what’s ahead of us.

She’s sitting in a side alcove, next to a crumbled wall. Graham signals for me to go to her while he makes sure there isn’t someone else around. I check her breathing, grateful she’s alive, though she’s clearly dehydrated. Her hands and feet are zip-tied.

“They told me no one was coming. I thought I was going to die down here,” Mariam says, barely able to get the words past her dry throat.

I quickly cut off the zip ties and help her sit up. “They were wrong. You’re safe now. We’re here to help.”

I pull a water bottle from my backpack and give it to her.