The Tenth Chamber (40 page)

‘I see that Sara and I have been inconvenient for you.’

‘Inconvenient. Yes, a good word, but somewhat understated,’ he said, waving the hand clutching the blood-stained handkerchief. ‘Your discovery of the cave was a
disaster
for us, and maybe for mankind. Can you understand this? These plants are everywhere. Anyone with a saucepan can make the tea. Can you imagine what would happen if thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people started taking the Ruac tea? For the sake of your little sliver of prehistory study, you wouldn’t want to bring chaos to the world, would you? Millions of stoned, licentious, violent characters, creating havoc? It’s a scene from a horror movie, no? So we kept it contained within Ruac. Imagine if the genie were out of the bottle for ever. No, it’s up to us to protect the world from this.’ His voice rose. ‘Once we’ve found a safe way to exploit R-422, then
France
will own it,
France
will control it and
France
will do what is right for mankind.’

Luc went silent.

Gatinois stooped over the detonator and pulled the broken wire through Bonnet’s dead fingers. ‘They gave you the tea tonight?’ he asked Luc.

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve shown no signs of it. Why?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Maybe we should study you too,’ Gatinois chuckled. He told one of his men to shine a torch on the detonator while he carefully inspected it.

‘What are you doing?’ Luc called at him.

Gatinois stood and rubbed the dirt off one of his knees. ‘It should work well. Bonnet had some men from the old days, good munitions men. If they said they could blow up the cliff, then they could blow up the cliff. We’ll see.’ He called one of his men forward by name. ‘Captain, get everyone back a few hundred metres and set off the charges.’

‘You can’t do that!’ Luc screamed. ‘This is the most important cave in the history of France! It’s a crime of immense proportions!’

‘I can do it,’ Gatinois said evenly. ‘And I will do it. We’ll blame it on Bonnet. By the time the sun rises we’ll have a credible story for everything that happened tonight. Bonnet, the dealer in stolen Nazi loot. Bonnet, the protector of Ruac’s war crimes. Bonnet, willing to murder to keep the archaeologists and tourists out of his hair. Bonnet, the hoarder of huge quantities of old unstable wartime picratol. It will be fantastic, but partially true and the truth makes for the best stories.’

Luc challenged him. ‘What about me? What about Sara? You think we’re going to go along with this?’

‘No, probably not, but it won’t matter, I’m sorry to tell you. But you knew that already, didn’t you? We’ve got to finish the job Bonnet started. That was always going to be the way this ended.’

Luc lunged forward, determined to try to smash the man with his fist. He wouldn’t let them do this to Sara. Or to him. Not without a fight.

A rifle butt struck his back. He felt a rib snap and he collapsed in agony, struggling to catch his breath. When he was able to speak again, he felt the edge of the manuscript through his shirt, the silver corners biting into his skin. ‘And what about the Ruac Abbey manuscript?’ he asked, wincing through the pain.

‘I wanted to ask about that,’ Gatinois said. ‘We looked for that in Pineau’s factory but never found it. What was it?’

‘Nothing important,’ Luc grimaced. ‘Only the entire history of the tea and its recipe, written by a monk in 1307. It makes for fascinating reading.’

Gatinois’s confident expression sloughed off his face. ‘Marolles! Why don’t we know about this?’

Marolles was tongue-tied. He wilted under Gatinois’s withering gaze. ‘I’m at a loss. We monitored, of course, all the communications between Pineau and Simard, between Mallory and Simard. Nothing. We saw nothing about this.’

Luc smiled through the lancinating pain. ‘The manuscript was in code. Hugo had it broken. If you’d been looking at his
incoming
emails you’d have seen that.’

There were sirens in the distance.

They all heard them.

‘I called the gendarmes,’ Luc said. ‘They’re coming. Colonel Toucas from Périgueux is coming. It’s over for you.’

‘I’m sorry, you’re wrong,’ Gatinois said with some strain in his voice. ‘Marolles will have a word with them. We’re on the same team as the gendarmes, but somewhat higher on the feeding chain. They’ll stand down.’

Pelay, who had been quiet for a time, began loudly moaning again, as if he’d lost, then regained consciousness.

‘My God!’ Gatinois said. ‘I can’t even think with this noise! Marolles, go and finish him. Maybe you can do
that
properly.’

As Luc propped himself onto his knees, he saw Marolles march over to Pelay, and without a second of hesitation fire a single round into his head. When the percussive sound of the shot faded, the circle was quiet again – except for the sirens in the distance.

‘You’re nothing but a murderer,’ Luc hissed at Gatinois.

‘Think what you like. I know I’m a patriot.’

Luc got himself upright and used the solidity of the hidden book to splint his chest by pressing it against his ribcage with his elbow. ‘I’m not going to debate you, you son of a bitch. I’m only going to tell you that you’re not going to kill Sara and you’re not going to kill me.’

‘And why not?’ Gatinois asked defensively as if sensing Luc’s confidence.

‘Because if something happens to me, the press will get a letter. Maybe it won’t have anything in it about you, but everything else is there. Ruac. The tea. The murders. And a copy of the Ruac manuscript with its translation.’

The sirens were getting closer, piercing the air.

‘Marolles,’ Gatinois ordered. ‘Go and deal with the gendarmes. Intercept them. Keep them well away from the village. Go, and don’t screw up.’ Gatinois slowly walked to Luc, close enough for either man to strike each other. He stared at him for a full fifteen seconds without uttering a word. ‘You know, I’ve read your profile, Professor. You’re an honest man and I can always tell when an honest man is lying. I believe you’re telling me the truth.’

‘I believe I am,’ Luc replied.

Gatinois shook his head and looked skyward. ‘Then I suggest we find a solution. One that works for me, works for you but most importantly, works for France. Are you willing to do a deal, Professor?’

Luc stared back into the man’s cold eyes.

Gatinois’s phone rang. He pulled it from his trouser pocket. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, on my authority, proceed.’ He pocketed the phone and addressed Luc again. ‘Just wait a moment, Professor.’

First there was a flash.

It was so bright it was as if day had come to night, a premature sunrise, blazing and incandescent.

Then came the sound. And the rumbling sensation.

The shock-wave travelled through the ground, rattled the gravel and for a second made everyone sway.

Gatinois said simply, ‘It’s always been a contingency. Now was the time to end it. Our work continues, but Ruac is gone.’

In the morning drizzle, the crater that had been Ruac village reminded Luc of pictures he’d seen of Lockerbie after the Pan Am crash.

There was no main street. There were no cottages, no café, only a vast black, rubble-strewn, car-filled chasm, weeping charcoal-coloured smoke. The firemen were spraying their hoses down onto flaming spots along the length of the trench but due to fears of instability, they weren’t permitted to get close enough to be effective. The fires would have to burn out on their own.

A good proportion of the emergency services capability within the Dordogne was at the site. Access points into the village were choked with gendarmerie vehicles, police cars, ambulances, TV vans and fire brigade equipment. Ordinarily, Bonnet would have been there, tramping around in his heavy boots and tight-fitting uniform ordering his men about, but they had to make do without him.

Colonel Toucas was in charge of the operation, growling at the news helicopters which were thumping overhead and making it difficult to use his mobile phone.

At the dawn’s first light he had told Luc he reckoned that some of the Second World War-era explosives, picratol, more than likely, stored in a cellar by Bonnet and his fellow scoundrels, must have accidentally gone off and started a chain reaction with other caches of explosives hidden in other cellars.

He added in a hushed voice, that he had it under good authority that Bonnet was a trafficker in old stolen goods, that certain clandestine government agencies had him under surveillance. There was talk of hundreds of millions of euros of gold and Nazi spoils that might be found under the rubble.

Luc looked at him blankly, wondering if he fully believed the story that Gatinois had fed him.

Toucas couldn’t imagine there’d be any survivors; the mangled and charred state of the corpses that were readily retrievable seemed to bear this out. But it would be days before they could reasonably change the mission from rescue to recovery.

Toucas framed the catastrophe with his own point of view. ‘This will be my entire existence for the next year, maybe two,’ he told Luc. ‘You and I will be spending a lot of time together. Of course, by your own admission you killed two men last night, but I shouldn’t worry. You’ll come out clean. These men were trying to keep the outside world out of Ruac, out of their business. They resorted to murder. They intended to eliminate your cave. You were protecting yourself, protecting a national treasure.’

Abbot Menaud arrived at mid-morning to offer up the abbey grounds for whatever purpose the authorities saw fit but Toucas didn’t have much time for him.

The cleric spotted Luc near the mobile command centre and spent a few minutes commiserating. With all the loss of life, it seemed trivial that the Barthomieu manuscript was likely in ashes somewhere deep within the crater, but the fellow did seem wistful anyway.

Luc drew him aside and partly unbuttoned his shirt.

‘You have it!’ the abbot cried.

‘And you’ll have it back soon enough,’ Luc assured him. ‘As soon as I know it will be safe.’

Luc borrowed a mobile phone from an ambulance driver. He’d probably never be able to make a call again on his own phone without wondering if Unit 70 was listening in. He apologised to Isaak for losing his car. Then he asked him to tuck away the unopened envelopes somewhere safe. He’d figure out what to do with them later.

Luc borrowed another car from an archaeologist friend at the museum at Les Eyzies. He drove to Bergerac to collect Sara from the hospital where she’d spent the rest of the night.

She was waiting for him in the casualty ward when he arrived, wearing the spare clothes of a nurse who’d taken pity on her. She looked pale and weak, but when they hugged he felt the strength of her young arms around his neck.

They went to the cave.

Munitions experts from the army had worked all day clearing explosives from auger holes in the cliff-top and the area was declared safe.

Maurice Barbier had arrived in a Ministry of Culture helicopter to personally meet with Luc at the old abbey camp site and hand over the new keys and security codes. He mumbled something about Marc Abenheim’s lack of availability, but anyway, he was sure that pending an investigation, Luc would be reinstated as Director of the Ruac Cave.

He listened in a fatherly way to the story Luc and Sara chose to tell, an official version hastily cobbled together with Gatinois in the dead of the night. When Barbier had heard enough to brief the Minister, he kissed Sara’s hand and flew off into the steel-grey sky.

At the cave mouth, Luc pulled the gates open and switched on the master lights. ‘No protective suits,’ he told her. ‘Special occasion.’

They walked slowly through the chambers, hand-in-hand like kids on a first date.

‘How did you know?’ he finally asked.

‘That you wouldn’t be affected?’

He nodded.

‘Your pills for your staph infection. Rifampin. It boosts an enzyme in the liver called CYP3A4. You know what that enzyme does?’

He looked at her, lost.

‘It chews up ergot alkaloids. It inactivates them. If you were being a good boy and taking your pills like you said you were, I knew you wouldn’t be affected by the ergots in the tea. Or maybe the other chemicals too.’

‘I’m always a good boy. Well, usually. But let’s talk about you. You’re a clever girl, aren’t you?’

‘I know my plants.’

Then he got serious. ‘So what was it like?’

She held her breath while she thought then exhaled completely. ‘Look, I know what happened to me, and what didn’t happen to me. The doctors told me there was no rape. Thank you. And mercifully, I don’t remember any of that part. What I remember was glorious. I was light, I was floating, I felt I was on the wind. It was intensely pleasurable. Surprised?’

‘Not at all. I figured as much. Would you take it again?’

She laughed and said, ‘In a New York minute,’ then gripped his hand tighter. ‘No, probably not. I prefer an old-fashioned natural high.’

He smiled.

‘Luc, I feel so bad about so many people – Pierre, Jeremy and the rest – and Fred Prentice’s death is so profoundly sad. That dear man would have had a field day working out the chemistry and everything to do with survival genes.’

‘It’s awful that it’s up to Gatinois to take the science forward,’ Luc said. ‘I have no trust he’ll do the right thing.’

She sighed heavily. ‘Did we do the right thing?’ she asked. ‘To trade for our silence?’

‘We’re alive. The cave is still here. We can study it in peace for the rest of our lives. They would have killed us, Sara, blamed it on Bonnet.’

‘But we can’t study everything,’ she said. ‘We have to play dumb about the plants, suppress knowledge of the manuscript, be a party to a cover-up. All those murders in Cambridge and Ruac are going to go unpunished.’

He said it again, squeezing her arm. ‘Look, I don’t feel clean, but
we’re alive
! And I hate to agree with Gatinois about anything, but it
would
be terrible if the recipe for the tea got out. We had to make a choice. We did what we had to do. We did the right thing.’