At the cold campfire, Coutard and Marie were separated from each other’s clutches and prodded at gunpoint into separate caravans.
The old man with a knife watched Pierre bleed to death on the cold hard floor of the tenth chamber.
Bonnet knew the art of killing. A long blade through the kidney, piercing the renal artery. A victim would go down quickly and die fast from internal bleeding. Slashing a carotid was too messy for his tastes.
He was breathless from wending his way through the cave, crawling through the tunnel and killing a man. His knees were sore, his hips ached. He paused to wipe his knife on Pierre’s shirt and let his heart slow down a little. Then he turned his attention to his stricken comrade, turned him over and tried to shake him to consciousness. ‘Wake up!’ he demanded. ‘You’re the only one who knows how to set the damned charges!’
He looked at the tangle of wires and high-explosives and shook his head. He didn’t have a clue how to rig the charges himself, nor would the others. There wasn’t time to summon someone else. All he could do was string together a run of profanities and start shouting into his walkie talkie.
The only response was static; he remembered he was deep inside the cliffs and he swore some more.
Then he noticed the bird man on the wall behind him and instead of marvelling at the image, his reaction was more prosaic.
‘Go screw yourself,’ he said, turning away.
Then he spat contemptuously on Pierre’s body.
TWENTY
Sunday Night
They stayed in a small hotel in the heart of the university. The journey from Ruac to Cambridge had involved changing planes, trains and taxis and when they arrived and checked into their separate rooms they were worn out.
Still, Sara agreed to Luc’s proposal to take a walk in the chilly night air. They were both fond of the city and Luc had a habit of stopping for a pint at the riverside pub, The Anchor, every time he was in town. Years earlier, the British archaeologist, John Wymer, had dragged him there for a few pints of Abbot Ale after a conference. The details of that night were sketchy but Luc had ended the evening waist-deep in the River Cam with Wymer doubled over in hysterics on the shore. Each return visit to The Anchor for an Abbot was an homage to the eccentric Englishman.
It was late and the pub was Sunday-night-mellow. They sat at a window table, unable to see the river in the inky darkness but happy in the knowledge it was there. They clinked their pint mugs three times, toasting Ruac, Zvi and finally Hugo.
‘So, what now?’ Sara asked, wearily.
It was a funny kind of open-ended question and Luc wasn’t sure what she meant or how to answer it. What now for you? What now for Ruac? What now for us? ‘I don’t know,’ he answered vaguely. ‘What do you think?’
‘I think it’s been a crazy few weeks,’ she said. She was drinking the strong beer faster than him. ‘I don’t know about you, but I need a long hot bath and a few days off to read a trashy novel – anything but think about pollen and cave art.’
‘After tomorrow, you mean.’
She agreed. ‘After tomorrow. I wonder what Fred found and why he was so mysterious about it.’
Luc shrugged. ‘Nothing would surprise me. We’ll know soon enough.’
She bore down to the question she was really asking. ‘So, after tomorrow what are you going to do?’
‘The same as always, I suppose. Back to Bordeaux, back to my office, my lab, my papers. We’ve generated an unbelievable amount of data. It all needs to be sorted out, coordinated.’ He looked out the window, trying hard to see the river. ‘The Ministry will be expecting a report. We have to plan the official unveiling of the cave, you know. I’ve got a full voicemail box with French, British and American television companies who want exclusive rights to the first documentaries. Then there’s the manuscript. It’s not fully translated. I’ve got to get in touch with Hugo’s secretary and figure out how to keep in contact with his Belgian decoder. There’s a million things to think about.’
She stared out the window too. It was more comfortable to look at each other’s reflections. ‘We should try to stay in touch. Professionally. You know what I mean.’
Something about what she said or the way she said it made him sad. Was a door opening or closing? Of course he wanted her. She was lovely. But he’d had her before and had forced her away with ruthless efficiency. Why would it be different now?
He escaped from the moment by guzzling his beer and suggesting they ought to get some rest before their morning meeting.
The streets in the centre of Cambridge were nearly empty. They walked in silence up Mill Lane towards the street-facing facades of Pembroke College and when they turned onto Trumpington Street Luc noticed a parked car, a football field away, turning on its headlights.
He thought nothing of it until the car accelerated in their direction and crossed into the wrong lane.
The coolness of the night and the quick rush of adrenalin flushed the beer from his brain. Although the next events happened in no more than five or six seconds he had a beautifully clear, almost slow-motion perception of those moments – and that strange clarity almost certainly saved their lives.
The car was heading directly towards them on a murderous diagonal.
As it jumped the kerb three car-lengths from their legs, two wheels on the sidewalk, two wheels off, Luc had already grabbed a fistful of Sara’s leather sleeve and was flinging her out of the way with all the rotational force his shoulder and torso could muster. She twirled onto the road like a child’s top being released from its coiled string.
He allowed his own body to follow the same path of momentum and at the instant of impact, the fender of the car clipped his hip. The difference of an inch or two, a fraction of a second, or any way one chose to characterise the closeness of it all, was the difference between a bruise and a smashed pelvis.
He tumbled to the road, spun and landed close enough to Sara for both of them to instinctively reach out to each other and try to touch fingertips.
The car scraped and sparked against the limestone blocks of a residential hall of Pembroke College, sheared a gutter downspout, and careened back onto the street where it sped away in a squeal of rubber.
Lying in the middle of the street, Luc and Sara’s fingers intertwined.
Both of them asked simultaneously, ‘Are you all right?’ and both answered, again at the same time, ‘Yes.’
They wouldn’t get to their beds for another four hours.
There were police statements to be given, first-aid to be administered by the ambulance crew who dressed their minor cuts and Luc’s road-burn scrapes and a cautionary X-ray of Luc’s hip to be shot at the Nuffield Hospital casualty department. The young Asian doctor in casualty seemed more concerned with Luc’s red knuckles than his recent injuries.
‘This is infected,’ she said. ‘It’s turned into cellulitis, a tissue infection. How long have you had it?’
‘A week, week and a half.’
She inspected his hand more closely and saw the scar on his fourth finger. ‘Did you cut yourself?’
He nodded. ‘I took some erythromycin. It didn’t do much.’
‘I’ll take a culture but I’m concerned about MRSA. Resistant staph. I’m going to give you different pills, rifampin and trimethoprim sulfa. Here’s my card, call me in three days for the culture results.’
The police took the incident seriously but Luc and Sara’s gut feel of being deliberately targeted was shrugged off by the responding officers who went off looking for a blue sedan and a drunk driver. There were bulletins to put out on police frequencies and CCTV footage from the city centre to review. Luc and Sara would be notified if the culprit was found, etcetera, etcetera.
Mute with fatigue and roughly shaken by their near miss, they found themselves staring at each other in the deserted lobby. He thought about hugging her but didn’t want to add more trauma to her night.
She beat him to the punch.
