‘You still there, Luc?’
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.
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 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 muffled 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 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 assignment. 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 Manuscript. He stuffed his letter and manuscript into the two blank envelopes Isaak had given him. On the first he wrote, C OLONEL T OUCAS, G ROUP G ENDARMERIE OF D ORDOGNE, P ERIGUEUX, and the other M. G ERARD G IROT,
L E M ONDE.
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 bloody 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 sparse.
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.
