The Tenth Chamber Part 25

Luc was in his taxi, a few blocks from the hotel. The sidewalks were full of people with a purpose, heading home, heading out.

'Yeah, I'm here.'

His mind was spitting out fragments.

The bison of Ruac.

Sara's long neck.

A car hurtling towards them on a dark Cambridge street.

Pierre lying face down on the cave floor.

Two hundred and twenty years.

Templars.

Saint Bernard embossed on a red-leather cover.

An explosive concussion and a plume in the distance.

Picratol.

Hugo, laughing.

Hugo, dead.

Zvi's body broken on the rocks.

Bonnet's sneering face.

The tenth chamber.

Sara.

Suddenly, it all came together. It was the moment a mathematician solves a theorem and writes on his pad with a flourish: QED. Quod erat demonstrandum Quod erat demonstrandum.

It has been proved.

'Do you have a car?' Luc asked.

'Yes, of course.'

'Can I borrow it?'

Luc's phone vibrated in his hand. Another call was coming in. He took it away from his ear for a moment to look at the caller ID.

Sara Mallory.

His heart pounded. He hit answer answer without warning Isaak he was dropping off. without warning Isaak he was dropping off.

'Sara!'

There was silence. Then a man's voice. An old voice.

'We have her.'

Luc knew who it was. 'What do you want?'

'To talk. Nothing more. Then she can go. And you too. There are things you need to understand.'

'Let me speak to her.'

There were m.u.f.fled sounds. He waited.

'Luc?' It was Sara.

'Are you all right?'

She was frightened. 'Please help me.'

The man was back on the line. 'There. You spoke to her.'

'If you hurt her I'll kill you. I will will kill you.' kill you.'

The taxi driver shot a look at Luc in the rear-view mirror but seemed determined to mind his own business.

The man on the phone had a mocking tone. 'I'm sure you will. Will you come and talk?'

'Has she been hurt?'

'No, only inconvenienced. We've been gentlemen.'

'I swear. You'd better be telling me the truth.'

The man ignored him. 'I'll tell you where to go.'

'I know where you are.'

'Good. That's not a problem for us. But here's the thing. You've got to come alone. Be here at midnight. Not a moment later. If you bring the gendarmes, the police, anybody, she'll die unpleasantly, you'll die, your cave will be destroyed. There won't be anything left. Don't tell anyone about this. Please believe me, this is no idle threat.'

Isaak left Luc alone in his study for a half hour while he helped one of his children with a homework a.s.signment. Isaak's wife poked her head in to offer coffee but Luc was writing so furiously he hardly had time to say no. It wasn't a polished letter, more of a rough sprawl with partial sentences and abbreviations. He would have liked to consolidate his thoughts into a well-reasoned piece but he was frantic for time as it was. It would have to do.

He used Isaak's printer/copier to run a duplicate and also made duplicates of the Isaak's colour copy of the Ruac Ma.n.u.script. He stuffed his letter and ma.n.u.script into the two blank envelopes Isaak had given him. On the first he wrote, COLONEL T TOUCAS, G GROUP G GENDARMERIE OF D DORDOGNE, P PeRIGUEUX, and the other M. G and the other M. GeRARD G GIROT, L LE M MONDE.

He pressed the sealed envelopes into Isaak's hand and told him if he didn't hear from him within twenty-four hours to see to it that the letters were delivered.

Isaak rubbed his forehead in worry but wordlessly agreed.

Isaak had a good car, a Mercedes coupe. Once Luc was free of the Peripherique Interieur and onto the A20, he began to gun it and eat up the kilometres. The car had a GPS with radar. It told him he had 470 kilometres to go and gave his arrival time at 1:08 a.m. He'd have to make up more than an hour.

Every time the radar detector chirped he let up on the accelerator and took it down from break-neck to legal. He didn't have time for a chat with the gendarmes. A half hour of road-side nonsense could mean the difference between life and death. These people in Ruac were operating with a kind of ruthlessness he'd never experienced.

He'd never been in the military. He'd never even been in the boy scouts. He didn't know how to box or flip a man over his hip. He had no weapons, not even a pocket knife. What good would they do? The last time he'd been in a fight was in a schoolyard and both boys wound up with equally b.l.o.o.d.y noses, he recalled.

All he had to fight with were his wits.

He was in the Perigord again. Familiar ground. He'd made up most of the time he needed but not all of it. He'd have to push it on the smaller roads, but it was late and the traffic was spa.r.s.e.

He still had time to make a call to Colonel Toucas. Maybe that was the smarter play, to leave it to the professionals. It was the countryside but an RAID team could probably muster in an hour. He'd seen these guys in action on TV programmes. Hard young men. What was a middle-aged archaeologist doing storming the ramparts?

He shook off this line of thought. He'd got Sara into this. It was up to him to get her out of it. He gritted his teeth, pushed the accelerator and the car responded to his emotional tone.

He arrived at the outskirts of Ruac at 11:55. For better or worse, he wouldn't be late. He instinctively slowed at the curving hill where Hugo met his end, then guided the Mercedes into the deserted main street of the village.

It was a cloudy night, with a whipping wind. The village had no street lights and every house was dark. The only illumination came from the bluish halogen of the car's headlamps.

Down the street, a single house lit up in stages. First the upper floor, then the lower floor. It was the cottage three doors from the cafe.

Luc slowed and pulled to the kerb.

Instinctively he checked the rear-view mirror. He could make out two men in dark clothes taking up positions on either side of the street. Through the windscreen he saw the same thing playing out down the road.

He was boxed in.

He got out of the car, shaking the pins and needles from his legs.

The front door of the lighted cottage opened. He stiffened. Maybe he'd be met with a shotgun blast. Like his diggers. Maybe this was how it ended.

She was dressed for a party with a festive blouse showing cleavage and a clingy black skirt, tight to mid-calf, almost vampy. She looked like she'd spent a lot of time on her make-up. Her lips were very red, aiming for luscious.

'h.e.l.lo, Luc,' she said. 'You're on time.' She was purring and friendly, as if he was expected for dinner.

He felt a deep queasiness, the kind that ripples through the gut when the first wave of flu hits home.

He forced himself to talk and the words came out strained and dry. 'h.e.l.lo, Odile.'

THIRTY-THREE.

Friday, Midnight Her sitting-room cushions had absorbed decades of fireplace and cigarette residue. Above that smoky staleness Odile's own sweet perfume hung heavily in the air.

They were alone. She gestured towards a wing chair by the front window. It was upholstered in damask with pink roses and green th.o.r.n.y stems, old-fashioned, like everything in the room. Luc half-expected a grandmother to dodder in on a cane.

'Where's Sara?'

'Please sit. Would you like a drink?'

He stood his ground, arms folded. 'I want to see Sara.'

'You will, believe me. But we need to talk first.'

'Is she safe?'

'Yes. Will you sit?'

He acquiesced, his posture rigid, a stony anger on his face.

'Now, a drink?' she asked.

'No, nothing.'

She sighed and sat across from him on the matching sofa. She pressed her legs together and lit a cigarette. 'You don't want one do you? I've never seen you smoke.'

He ignored her.

She dragged deeply. 'It's a terrible habit, but it's done me no harm as far as I can tell.'

'What do you want?' he asked. 'It's Sara I'm interested in, not you.'

If she was stung, she didn't show it. 'I want to talk about Hugo.'

What did she want, he thought. Absolution? 'It wasn't an accident, was it?'

She fiddled with her cigarette. 'It was was an accident.' an accident.'

'But he didn't die in his car.'

Her black eyebrows arched in sharp surprise. 'How did you know?'

'Because he took a photo with his mobile after after he was supposedly dead.' he was supposedly dead.'

'What photo?'

'A painting.'

'Ah.' She exhaled a cloud of smoke that obscured her face for a moment. 'When you get involved with this kind of thing there are so many details. It's too easy to miss one or two.'

'Is that what Hugo was? A detail?'

'No! I liked him. I really fancied the man.'

'Then what happened?'