Cradle Of Solitude. Alex Archer

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СКАЧАТЬ and if you don’t get out and have a life one of these days, you’ll end up a stuffed mummy just like those in there, she thought wryly.

      She’d been working straight through since leaving the dojo earlier that morning and only had a few more nights left to enjoy Paris, so it was time to get out and see the sights.

      No sooner had she decided to take a break, however, than she found her thoughts returning to the whereabouts of the missing bullet. The gunshot wound had almost certainly killed Captain Parker and it should have been there with his remains. Not having the bullet irked her; it was like finishing a puzzle only to find out that you’re missing one last little piece. It was a tiny detail, she knew, but an important one, and she was just detail-oriented enough to want to put it to rest.

      You’ve spent all day on this, she thought, what’s another hour or so?

      The spent bullet was probably lying on the floor of the chamber near the wall against which Parker’s skeleton had been resting. It shouldn’t be all that hard to find.

      Go on, take a quick look. If you find it, great, and if not, at least you’ll know you gave it a shot, she thought.

      Decision made, she caught a cab over to the Metro station they’d used to gain access to the catacombs earlier that day. The trains were still being rerouted around the station due to the construction and so her footsteps echoed off the walls as she descended the steps.

      A uniformed police officer was waiting for her at the turnstiles, alerted to her presence by the noise of her footsteps. Obviously bored with the duty he’d been assigned, he told her the station was closed and only looked up at her when she thrust the pass under his nose that she’d been given by Laroche.

      “You’ll be wanting to go into the tunnels, then?” he asked.

      “Yes, I shouldn’t be long.”

      “But it’s after dark.”

      Annja didn’t see how that was relevant. She was going underground, where it was always dark. What difference did it make that the sun had gone down?

      Rather than get into it with him, though, she simply said, “Yes, it is,” and smiled sweetly at him, hoping her charm would get him to open the gate.

      What she really wanted to do was to laugh at his superstitious attitude, for the things she’d faced since acquiring her sword made the idea of roaming around in the tunnels beneath the Paris city streets seem like child’s play, but she knew that doing so would kill any chance she had of getting through the gate.

      Thankfully, her official pass seemed to be enough. He gave her a look that clearly said he thought she had a few screws loose upstairs but he didn’t say anything as he unlatched the gate and let her in.

      She jogged through the station and down to the same platform where Laroche had taken her. Arming herself with a lantern just as they had earlier in the day, she climbed down onto the tracks and set off toward the break in the tunnel that marked the entrance to the catacombs.

      More sawhorses had been set out at the site since she’d been there earlier, their blinking orange lights bouncing down the tunnel and letting her know she was getting close. She followed the glow like a trail of bread crumbs until she reached the spot where the workers had broken through into the older passageway inside the catacombs.

      She was relieved to see the ladder she’d used earlier was still in place and she quickly descended into the lower tunnel. At the bottom of the ladder she paused, glancing back up the way she had come. For a moment she thought she’d heard something, but the sound didn’t repeat itself.

      Probably just a rat, she thought, and shuddered.

      She brushed it off and continued on her way.

      The cemented tunnel had given way at the bottom of the ladder to the smooth limestone of the catacombs themselves. The antechamber where they had found Parker’s remains was just ahead and she found herself hurrying the last few dozen feet to its entrance, eagerness spreading through her veins like a drug. As she entered the room the thousands of skulls stared back at her, eerie in their eternal silence, but her attention was solely focused on what she’d come here to find and she barely noticed.

      She moved over to the spot where the skeleton had been found and got down on her hands and knees. Resting the flashlight on the floor so that its beam filtered across the area she intended to search, she began hunting for the missing bullet. When she’d gone over the entire area in one direction, she went back again in the other, crisscrossing her initial efforts so she could be assured that she hadn’t missed a spot.

      When that failed to turn up what she was looking for, she moved her attention over to the wall against which Captain Parker’s remains had rested. Perhaps the shot that had killed him had actually passed through his body completely, even though they hadn’t found evidence of an exit wound. It was something that wasn’t completely outrageous if it had happened at close range. Perhaps the bullet had embedded itself in the wall instead of falling to the floor when the body decayed.

      Searching the wall, however, proved to be much harder than the floor. Comprised as it was of hundreds of human skulls, there were too many nooks and crannies and shadowed surfaces that could be hiding the impact point of the bullet. With just the beam of her flashlight to illuminate the wall’s surface, there was no way she was going to find something that small amid all the stacked human bones.

      Better to come back in the daytime with a team of grad students and a full bank of lights, she told herself, and decided to really call it quits for the night. The beam of her flashlight swept across the floor as she turned away and out of the corner of her eye she caught the glint of something reflecting back at her.

      She turned in that direction and carefully made her way forward, shining the beam of her flashlight ahead of her, searching for whatever it was. When she reached the wall she slowly spun in a circle, still searching, knowing that whatever it was had to be here somewhere.

      It couldn’t just get up and walk out on its own.

      There!

      It was a heavy gold signet ring set with a dark colored stone. It was lying on the floor near the wall directly across from where they had found Parker’s remains and it was partially obscured by the collapse of several loose bones, which explained why she and the rest of Bernard’s team had missed it.

      She kept the flashlight beam trained on it as she walked over, not wanting to lose sight of it, and then bent to pick it up.

      She turned as she straightened up, ring in hand, and she caught sight of the dark form standing behind her. He was so close and it was so unexpected that she flinched back in surprise.

      The move saved her.

      The fist that came hurtling out of the darkness struck her on the edge of the jaw rather than in the center of her throat, where it would have crushed her larynx. Instead, the force of the blow picked her up and flung her backward, tossing her against the carefully piled bones lining the wall behind her. The whole mess came tumbling down around her in a hard rain, bones bouncing off her head and shoulders in an unyielding waterfall that threatened to knock her unconscious.

      She knew if that happened it was all over, so she fought back against the grayness threatening her sight and struggled to extricate herself from the jumbled pile of human bones.

      The scrape of a shoe СКАЧАТЬ