Chapter 24 - The River of Broken Glass
The gunshot detonated at the exact moment the flare erupted, but the magnesium glare ruined David’s aim. The heavy slug skipped off the river stones with a vicious shriek, spraying Julian and me with shrapnel-sharp shards of flint and river gravel.
"Down!" Julian roared, tackling me sideways into the frigid shallows just as the two tactical guards unleashed a deafening burst of suppressed automatic fire.
The bullets chewed through the water, throwing up columns of frothing spray that hissed in the freezing air. But the fire wasn't just coming from David’s men. From the girders of the rusted railway trestle overhead, high-caliber sniper rounds began smashing into the mud around the mercenaries with thunderous concussions. One of David’s guards collapsed instantly, his weapon clattering into the rocks as his torso was violently wrenched backward by the impact.
"Move! Clara, into the overflow culvert!" Julian yelled, dragging me by the wrist through the knee-deep current.
Through the curtain of water and gunsmoke, I caught a glimpse of David Vance retreating smoothly into the weeping willows, shielded by his surviving bodyguard, his aristocratic face twisted not in fear, but in cold, calculating disgust. He knew who was on the bridge.
We scrambled through the rushing water toward the yawning concrete maw of the ancient Lyonnais flood tunnel. The storm drain was a cavernous archway built during the reign of Napoleon III, its stone mouth half-submerged in the swelling river. Julian shoved me inside first, then hauled himself over the slime-slick threshold just as another burst of gunfire chipped massive chunks of masonry from the tunnel entrance.
The darkness swallowed us instantly, replaced by the deafening, reverberating roar of thousands of gallons of stormwater cascading through the subterranean labyrinth. The smell of sulfur, stagnant river silt, and centuries of decaying industrial runoff filled my lungs.
"Julian! Are you hit?" I cried out, my hands searching frantically across his soaked torso in the pitch-black void.
"Just grazed... my shoulder," he wheezed, his fingers finding my face, trembling with adrenaline and hypothermia. "The flare... Clara, that wasn't the police. That flare came from an old signal pistol."
"Who was it?"
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A soft, scraping sound echoed from the darkness ten feet ahead of us, followed by the yellow beam of an old miner’s carbide lamp cutting through the gloom. Standing on the narrow maintenance ledge above the churning water was an elderly woman wearing a patched oilskin coat, her face creased like dry parchment, a heavy French hunting rifle resting casually in the crook of her arm.
"It took you children long enough to wash ashore," she said in accented, gravelly French. "Eleanor told me thirty years ago that if her daughter ever showed up in Lyon soaking wet and wearing that cursed spider-silk, I was supposed to aim for David Vance’s kneecaps."
