I saw him only briefly through the crowds of outer city tourists on day passes to Notre Dame.  He didn’t fit, his longer coat, unshaved face and oily snake like dreadlocks standing out from the gaggle of sycophants worshipping a dead church.

I knew it was him.  It was Marc, a man with a normal name but an unnormal career.  The last time I had seen him was in a corner of a café in the warren of the old Gare Du Nord station.  I still remembered the moment when he leaned across the table and tapped me once on the side of my face as he muttered ‘There will be no guards at the drop off point, Monsieur Bastard will be traveling light, no problems’.

I still remembered when The Bastards guards opened up on my men with the sort of heavy weaponry you only saw in war films, leaving the floor of a warehouse littered with shell casings and the bodies and blood of my friends.

I dropped the pie I was eating so quickly the vendor swore and a passing cop nearly stopped.  As I turned and began threading my way through the crowd I pulled myself together, realizing this was my only chance to get to the man who betrayed me.  I shrugged into my coat and set my sights on Marc as he strode off, heading for the nearest Skytube entrance.

He was keeping his head down, glancing up as floatcams hove into view over some billboards proclaiming ones ability to ‘Choose a Destiny!, Choose Life!’.  I wondered if he knew of the underglass droids, the small surveillance pods which skimmed under the giant glass surface we were now walking across, picking up subversive activity above for control centre cops to radio in to the beat cops to vector in on.  I was sure they would have picked me up, noticed my sudden change of direction and noticed the determined way I was walking.

He reached the skytube entrance, buying a newspaper and a choko bar from one of those antique booths the authorities still permitted in this sector.  He flashed his probably fake ID at the entrance scanner.  I waved my own at the scanner and with a polite beep and verbal reminder to keep moving the gates slid upon.  Marc was heading up the escalators to the trains, his coat tail dragging past the families and office workers.

I just managed to get into the carriage he was on, three doors down from the one he used.  Fortunately he took a seat facing away from me, a space clearing around him as other passengers tried to shrink into their e-sheets and holospaces, their collective subconscious sensing his danger.  I wished they could sense his willingness for betrayal, his coldblooded desire to sell other lives for the highest offer.  I knew he had been there when The Bastards men had slaughtered us in the warehouse, watching the outcome of his work, a concerned proprietor checking that his customer was happy with the death and blood he had bought.

The skytube was taking the route north to the decommissioned Charles De Gaulle Airport, now used by the military for their ‘peacekeeping’ ventures into the tenements of the south of France and by Avalon punks for their jaunts to the man-made pleasure islands tethered in the Med.  I remembered stories my construction worker father had told me of the gangs of Mindwipes he had slave driven to death in the construction of giant artificial paradises built from material dredged from the bottom of the sea.  I had only ever seen one video clip he had smuggled back home, the ranks of blank faces of men and women who had taken the Aids cure pill invented in 2015, only for the pill to leave them less than a year later with a cured body but a destroyed personality and a mind blank of anything other than a desire to follow commands beamed into their brains from implants coupled to the back of their necks.

I shook my head, the brief trip into my past a respite from the task I had now.  Marc was moving up ahead as the train came to the Montmarte stop.  I wasn’t surprised, the old streets of the once famous tourist district being a frequent haunt for a man accustomed to the evil and pain one could find layered onto the ancient cobblestones.

I followed him out of the station, keeping my distance as the workers heading home began to dissipate across the walkways that stretched across the open spaces towards the cheap flats built on giant stilts and pylons that stabbed into the darkness of the old buildings below.  As the orderly influence of the skytube station began to fade, so did the cheap flickering neon and prostitutes begin to emerge from the darkness until behind a grimy REM-hit café I saw Marc come to a stop at an elevator shaft.  I hid behind the sleep junkies slumped at the tables, dream chemical tubes with suction pads clamped to their eyes.

He took one of the shafts down and I followed in another.  It was one of those open shafts and as we descended I could peer out the graffiti encrusted window and through the girders slowly passing by down to his car.  I inwardly grinned as I remembered something my dad once said to me shortly before he jumped from our apartment to his death.  ‘Vengeance comes from above … ‘

We reached ground, and I moved out of the bright light of the lift car into the street.  I saw Marc, his bulk threading his way through the abandoned cars occasionally passing under a light from a shop or brothel window.  It was beginning to rain now, a soft almost peaceful drizzle falling from the darkness above to the darkness of the streets.

He stopped in the square of Abesses by a bar which surprisingly was still trading, despite the closure of the metro stop.  In the brighter light of the bar I could barely make out that he was openning a door set into the wall.  Losing my sense of caution I half ran forward and as the door began to close behind him I managed to jam my foot in and with pure adrenaline slammed the door open.

Marc was just on the other side and the door caught him hard.  He staggered back, some blood on his chin.  We stood there, incomprehension on his face as he struggled to realize what was happening.  In that moment of hesitation I rushed him, smacking into him as we tumbled down some stairs, his body below mine as we surfed down the concrete before crashing into a wall.

I got up, seeing more blood on his head but remarkably he was alert almost straight away, a snarl and a swear word beginning to spit out before I hit him hard.  He slumped a bit but not too far for me to haul him to his feet and push him ahead of me down the steps and into the darkness.

It was the noise which hit me first before the smell.  I could hear the rattling screech of the ancient metro trains thundering by in the crumbling damp tunnels ahead.  Carriages jammed full of the lower class, the criminal and underpaid near slaves who would emerge from unseen exits in the smarter parts of town to clean and fix and carry and sweat and if necessary die in the service of the glass clad rich.  The smell followed soon after that as we arrived at the door to the tunnel.  The dank musty mold of millions of passengers lives trapped in the concrete and stone.

Marc stopped before the door and turned back on me.  He stopped when I drew my gun on him.  His reaction showed me he wasn’t carrying anything.

‘So, stranger with gun, would you like some coffee?’  I nearly didn’t hear him speak over the noise but I saw him smile.  I motioned to him to move and he opened the door and stepped into the tunnel.

I followed behind him at a short distance, feeling fortunate that the light from the trains passing alongside us would not be enough to illuminate two men walking in the space next to the track, one with a gun to his head.

We reached another door, one which looked like an access point for an old storage room.  He lifted the bar across the door and went in.  I quickly used the lightswitch by the door, fearful he would disappear into the dark

It was a safehouse for Marc, a rather cavernous room stacked with dust covered pallets of railway sleepers forgotten about in some old stock take.  In the corner was a threadbare sofa and single campbed, a table with a gas plate and coffee pot.  Porn and the occasional newspaper was strewn by the sofa, a pile of curry containers and beer cans festering a foot or two away.

Marc ambled over to the coffee pot and switched on the gas, watching the steam begin to emerge as he lit a smoke, content to let me stew in my own impatience.  He recognized me then.

‘Ah, Monsieur Gerard, or whatever your name is, I see you are back to finish off some business’

I kept quiet, my emotions in turn running away from me and as tight as my hand gripping the gun.

‘It was nothing personal my friend, a bit of business where you unfortunately were a commodity from which I happened to make a good bit of money from’

I let him talk, knowing that each word which he uttered was giving me reason for what was coming soon.

He was chuckling to himself now, ‘I guess I can’t offer you any money, it would be above your principles! … but what do you want Monsieur? Justice? My death?’

I stepped towards him, my barrel an inch from his face

‘You have no idea how much your death would be justice for me.’

He was shouting now ‘But you cant go do it Monsieur Gerard! Despite all those men and women you shot when serving in the army in Marseille! This is not something in the textbooks of your training camp!’

I backed off, both hands gripping the gun as he continued shouting ‘You cant do it you coward, you cant take another man’s life’

I shot him, two bullets through the chest.  His mouth was still open but now in surprise as he fell back against the sofa, coffee cup clattering across the ground.

I moved quickly, spotting his own gun lying by the bed which I put in his hand, firing a quick shot towards the door.  It was an old trick but I didn’t have time.

It wasn’t long before I could hear at the door to the storage room the repulse lift of a police gun platform as it moved into the room behind me.  Two control droids detached from the platforms body and one flew to the body as the other one hovered in front of me.  Its smooth metal face split in half to reveal a screen onto which appeared the face of a central metro command officer.

‘Identify yourself citizen!’

I produced my holo-id and the droid scanned it.

‘ID confirmed as Detective Barthelemy Karas – Undercover division’

The face blanked off and my boss’s face appeared, his face exploding in anger.

‘Where the fuck have you been Karas?!’

I sighed, the weariness of the chase falling away from me.

‘I trailed a known criminal here in an attempt to gain intel.  I surprised him but before he could shoot me I shot him.  I’ll file the report in the morning.’

And in the red and blue light from the police droids I stepped out into the tunnel, my arms raised as the human cops came rushing towards me.