The Billionaire's Redemption (The Billionaire's Kiss, Book Five): (A Billionaire Alpha Romance) (13 page)

Grant grins. “Not that kind of fencing. He buys and sells stolen items. Diamonds and gold, mostly.”

“Oh.” DUH.

“He will take us in, I am confident,” JP says enthusiastically. “There are rooms above the restaurant. We can stay there.”

“Alright… fine,” Grant relents. “In the meantime, wrap up with the gun guy and let your mole in the police force know how to find you.”

“I need to take the laptop with us,” I say. “But I want to check a few things first, in case we’re away from an internet connection for a while.”

Grant nods. “Sounds good. Let’s aim for an hour from now, guys.”

We break up and go about our separate ways in the apartment.

I’m working on the laptop, checking to make sure I’ve completely covered my tracks, when I run across something really, really weird.

It’s way too complicated to explain what I was doing when I found it, because it involves the deep web, proxies, and a bunch of back doors to servers in Hong Kong.

Long story short: a little black box with white text appears on my screen.

Now, because this is one way Epicurus has contacted me in the past, it freaks me out at first – but I realize within seconds that it’s not someone messaging me directly. It’s more of a tripwire somebody left along a path I normally travel. I only use this particular path when I don’t have access to my normal bag of tricks, and I do it only because I memorized the thirty-digit access code…

…back in high school.

Which means whoever left it for me knows something about my hacking methods.

I know last night was you. Contact me the old school way. We need to talk.

Signed
‘M.’

My heart freezes for an instant.

…Mailin?!

My high school best friend / kinda-sorta platonic wannabe boyfriend?

The one who got caught hacking, and got blackmailed by the FBI to work for them in lieu of a prison sentence?

I don’t know if this is good or bad.

Actually, he works for the FBI, and I assume he’s talking about the Interpol hack. So I’m going with ‘bad.’

BUT… he didn’t mention Interpol by name… which means he’s trying to be vague and sneaky, in case somebody is watching.

Like Epicurus?

Except Mailin doesn’t know about Epicurus. Nobody does except me, Grant, JP, Dominique, and a handful of other people.

So… could the message be from the NSA?

One thing about Mailin is he never ratted me out to the FBI when we were teenagers. He could have named me and probably reduced his sentence – I was a way more dangerous hacker than he was. But he kept me safe.

I’m guessing this is his way of keeping me safe now, even though he obviously wants to talk.

When he says ‘old school,’ there can only be one thing he means. But before I can start, JP freaks out.

“Euh, everyone?” he says shakily as he hangs up the cell phone. “I think we have a problem.”

“What is it?” Grant asks.

“I call my police friend again, he does not answer. Then I call Luc – the contact for the guns – but he does not answer, either.”

Grant shrugs. “Maybe he got drunk last night. Maybe he’s sleeping it off somewhere.”

“No. I call the cousin of Luc, who works with him selling guns. He tells me Luc is dead.”

We stare at JP.

Besides obviously being bad news, the timing is a little too coincidental.

“…
quoi?”
Dominique asks in disbelief.

“There are men now in Paris searching for illegal gun sellers. These men find them, ask questions, torture them, sometimes kill them.” JP pauses, then says shakily, “They killed Luc.”

Grant stands up. “Shit – did Luc know where you live?”

“Non.”

“Anything else about you they could have gotten out of him?”

JP looks stricken. “He has my phone number.”

“Shit,” Grant mutters, then turns to me. “If they have JP’s phone number, what’s the chances they can find us?”

I hesitate. “If they have any sort of law enforcement connections, then the chances are pretty good.”

“They’re torturing and killing gun merchants. I doubt they’re law enforcement,” Grant says. I can tell he’s trying to convince himself as much as he’s trying to convince me.

“I’m including the NSA.”

“The NSA doesn’t torture people.”

“No, but Epicurus does, and he’s mixed up with them somehow.”

“…shit.” He knows I’m right. “Alright, we’re out of here in five minutes. JP – your guy on the police force – do you think whoever’s behind this could have bought him off?”

JP shrugs.
“C’est possible.”

Grant points at me. “Can you break into the French police department servers, and fast? We need to talk to JP’s mole.”

“No, there’s a language barrier.”

“Shit…”

“Why don’t we just call his home?” I ask.

“I do not know his number,” JP says. “It is unlisted. He does not want people to know it.”

“Give me his full name,” I order.

Sixty seconds later, JP is dialing the home phone of his mole. He listens for a moment. When he finally speaks, he speaks in French – but it sounds like he’s talking to a machine, not a human.

Suddenly he stops talking and looks relieved.
“Ah, enfin – Gérard?”

The voice is faint on the other end, but I can hear,
“Oui.”

JP frowns.
“Si tu es Gérard, où sommes-nous allés à l'école ensemble?”

I have no idea what he just said, but it must have been some kind of test, because JP hangs up the phone immediately.

“That was not my friend,” he says, panicking.

“Okay, we’re out of here
now,
” Grant says. “Get your stuff.”

Mailin will have to wait. I unplug the laptop, then stuff it and the power cord into the backpack, the one with the rest of our money.

Suddenly there is a loud chime from the bank of computers against JP’s wall.

All of our eyes are drawn immediately to the monitors and the security footage they show.

At least fifteen masked men with guns are on top of the roof, in the hallways of the apartment building, and outside in the street.

“Knock, knock,”
an all-too-familiar voice says over the computer’s speakers.

“I’m sure you already know my men are here for you, Grant,”
Epicurus says.
“Congratulations – you have one advantage, and one advantage only: they’re going to capture you alive so I can take my time with you later. Fair warning: no such directive extends to the other members of your party. By the way, passable alarm system you created, Monsieur Durand.”

I’m assuming ‘Monsieur Durand’ is JP. So much for ‘no last names.’

“Not good enough to stop me, but not ENTIRELY pathetic.”

JP looks bewildered – like,
Is this guy for real?

“Get her out of here!” Grant orders JP, who clamps onto my hand and pulls me after him.

I resist and look back in a panic at Grant. “What about you?!”

“We’ll meet you at the place we discussed!”

“Run, little pigs! Run from the big, bad wolf!”

 Grant snags the assault rifle off the table and Dominique grabs a pistol.

The last thing I see as I pass the computer monitors is security footage of five men rappelling onto the balcony outside the apartment.

JP is hustling me into his bedroom when I hear gunfire and shattering glass.

“We can’t just leave them here!” I cry out.

“We must,” JP says, locking the door behind us. “Unless you are good with a
pistolet.”

He approaches a massive wooden wardrobe and opens the door. One thing I’ve noticed is that France isn’t really big on closets; they tend to put everything in wardrobes.

Inside the piece of furniture, shirts and jackets dangle from hangers. JP reaches through them, presses three spots on the wooden back, and it swings inward.

Impossible – the wardrobe is standing against the wall. Which means the wardrobe’s back compartment is opening
into
the wall.

“Is that a secret compartment?!”

“
Oui.
Go, go!”

I step up into the big wooden box and then stumble through the rear, the backpack dangling off my shoulder. I feel like Lucy from the book
The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe.
Except I don’t think I’m going to be meeting any fauns on the other side.

Maybe serial killers, though.

Just past the wardrobe’s secret doorway is a four-foot-square ledge cut into the limestone walls of the building. That’s what I’m standing on right now.

Where the ledge ends, an empty shaft stretches all the way up to the roof fifteen feet above us, and descends into blackness below.

The only reason I can see anything around us is because there is some kind of ventilation pipe on the roof at the top of the shaft. Rays of sunlight filter through and illuminate the stone passageway.

A rope ladder is bolted to the limestone at the top of the shaft and dangles down into the darkness.

Behind me, JP pulls the front door of the wardrobe closed and rearranges the clothes so they appear evenly distributed. Then he closes the wooden back of the wardrobe. From this side, I can see a couple of metallic locking mechanisms
click
into place.

“This is like something Grant would come up with!” I say.

“Who do you think built it for me?” JP asks. He picks up a small flashlight lying on the limestone floor and clicks it on. “Go, go!”

“But Grant – ”

“He knows where it is. If he can follow, he will. Now go!”

“Down?”

“Yes, down!”

I slip off my heels, stuff them in the backpack, and start my descent.

It’s hard going. The rope ladder is a bitch to deal with. It’s twisty and shifts under my feet, and feels incredibly unstable. The only light is from JP’s flashlight, which he doesn’t exactly keep shined on me, so I have to feel my way down rather than depend on my eyes.

Not to mention that all I can think about is I’m leaving behind the man I love in the middle of a gunfight.

We climb down the ladder for what seems like forever.

“What
is
this?” I whisper.

“When they made the building almost two hundred years ago, they required ventilation and a way to transport supplies. When they were finished, they sealed it. Grant knew of this from his architecture, and created an escape route, just in case.”

Of course he would. Grant has been obsessed with secret passageways all his life, ever since he was a child. It was the main reason he became an architect.

I just pray I get the chance to tell him
I saw your handiwork, and it saved my life. Thank you.

What is disconcerting is how long we keep climbing down. Every story of the building has its own little ledge, so I can see when we’ve passed another level. I count them off, but when we get to where the lobby should be, we just keep going.

Are we headed for the basement?
I wonder – but then we go another forty feet, which should put us well past any sort of basement. And there’s still more blackness beneath me.

I feel like I’m descending into the Bottomless Pit.

“Where are we going?” I whisper.

“The catacombs,” JP whispers back.

“The
what?!”
I exclaim.

The only thing I know about the catacombs is what I saw in a horror movie from a couple of years ago, called
As Above, So Below
. In it, an archeologist leads her group of expendable co-stars into the 200 miles of tunnels below Paris, where they encounter mass graves and the gates of Hell.

I’m pretty sure the gates of Hell part isn’t real.

But the mass graves are, without a doubt.

Millions and millions of bones stacked along miles and miles of underground corridors.

Oh HELL no.

I stop on the rope ladder. JP almost plants a foot in my face.

“Why do you stop? Go, go!” he hisses.

“No!” I whisper.

“What?! Why?!”

“Because there’s dead people everywhere down there!”

He scoffs. “If you do not go, there will be two dead people
here!”

He has a point. I continue down the ladder until I finally reach the ground.

I try to look around, but it’s pitch black.

Unfortunately, all I can imagine are piles of skeletons surrounding me.

JP jumps off the ladder and sweeps his flashlight in an arc. I can see immediately that there are only rock walls around us, with a rough-hewn doorway leading into a bigger tunnel.

“Let us go,” he says.

“No – JP – I can’t,” I say, freaked out. The idea of having to crawl over piles of skulls is just – I can’t. I can’t do it.

“The bones are only in part of the catacombs,” he says. “The tunnels are mines. The limestone for all of Paris was taken from them hundreds of years ago. We are not going near the ossuaries.”

Ossuaries.

Such a nice word for ‘place to keep skeletons.’

“Are you sure?” I ask, terrified.

Maybe I shouldn’t be so frightened. But we
are
a hundred feet below the ground, in the pitch black, with a serial killer’s mercenaries after us, about to stumble through the remains of a million corpses.

“I am sure,
putain d’merde,
” JP groans, then leads the way into the darkness with his flashlight.

“You know where we’re going?” I ask as I follow right on his heels.

“Of course!
Mon Dieu,
you think I am stupid? You think I construct an escape route, only to become lost in hundreds of
kilomètres
of tunnels?” He points in one direction. “That way is the Lycée Montaigne – ”

“The what?”

“A very famous school. In World War II, the Nazis had a secret bunker in the catacombs beneath the school. This way – this is the way we are going in order to escape.”

“And no bones?”

“
Pas de bones.
”