arrangement to leave all sides in ignorance of where she truly stood – and by that she meant both Laurel and Hardy (aka Sabir and Calque) and the Corpus – with her eyes wide open. The fact that she felt sympathy, affection, and even love for the two men she had always intended to betray, was beside the point. She had a duty to perform, and perform it she would.
She eased herself through into the business-class section and began a steady perusal of all the passengers. Whenever she reached one of the lavatories she waited until it was vacated before continuing with her search of the plane. It took her a full thirty minutes to convince herself that none of her brothers and sisters were anywhere on board – if they had been, she would have escaped back to the first-class section and relied on the stewards to do the rest.
She had been made aware, of course, by Madame, her mother, that the Grand Cherokee might at some point be seeded with a tracker, and so she was labouring under no delusions as regards Abi’s eventual ability to pinpoint her whereabouts at the airport. Her only advantage over both him and Sabir had lain in the speed with which she had made her decision to depart from the touj. Madame, her mother, wanted her to remain a free agent, and a free agent she would remain.
She returned to her seat and adjusted it to the flattest possible position. She needed to sleep. The past ten days had taken their toll on her, and she felt physically as well as mentally wrung out. She closed her eyes.
She was immediately met by the image of Sabir pushing her gently down onto the bed back at the Ticul motel. Of the feel of his hands on her body. Of the gently invasive pressure as he had first made love to her. Of her response to his lovemaking, at first tentatively, and then willingly, enthusiastically, ecstatically.
She shook her head in a violent effort to clear it of the unwanted images, but still they remained, like the fragments of another life.
2
Lamia arrived at Madrid Airport in good time for her connecting flight to Paris. She ignored the transit lounge, however, and after purchasing some clothes, a carry-on bag, and a few essential items at the airport shop, she descended to the taxi rank and told her driver to take her to Madrid’s Atocha railway station.
Whilst on the plane she had used Iberia’s in-flight internet service to book herself a Gran Clas private cabin on the Elipsos Francisco de Goya ‘Talgo Night’ Trenhotel, leaving from Madrid at 6.15, and due to arrive in Paris’s Austerlitz train station at 8.27 the following morning. She was the only one of her brothers and sisters who knew the location and identity of the Second Coming, and she was certain that if she could only evade both them and the French border police – in the unlikely event that Calque had managed to milk some of his old connections for a favour – then she would be home clear. Explanations would come later.
She knew that the ‘Talgo Night’ train made a short stop at Blois, in the Loire Valley, before reaching its final destination in Paris, so she had decided to alight there and bribe a taxi driver to take her straight to Samois. What was it? A hundred kilometres door-to-door? She’d be at the camp in time for breakfast.
She had flirted briefly with the idea of using a public telephone box to call her mother and tell her that everything was still on track, but she had just as quickly discarded the idea. The logic behind all her past actions had been that only Milouins, Madame Mastigou, and Madame, her mother, would ever be privy to her hidden agenda. There were numerous other outside-the-loop servants scattered throughout the Domaine de Seyeme household capable of listening in to a conversation, and who was to say that the French police, given their notoriously cavalier attitude towards personal privacy, weren’t still bugging the house in unconscious mimicry of Joris Calque?
No, blanket secrecy and telephone silence were the only way in which Abi, Vau, and the others could ever have been tricked into keeping all their concentration on Sabir and Calque – and for this they truly needed to believe in Lamia’s role as a fellow traveller in the enemy camp.
Sabir and Calque had had to be won over in the same way. The pair had been justifiably suspicious of Lamia from the very start. Only via the most rigorous self-discipline had it been possible for Lamia to manoeuvre herself into a strong enough position to build up a sufficient reservoir of knowledge about Sabir to be certain of getting the information she wanted – and when she got it, of being able to use it with impunity.
Lamia allowed herself to relax in the comfort of her ‘Talgo Night’ stateroom. It was nice being able to pamper herself again. She’d order an early supper to be brought directly to her suite, and then she’d take two sleeping pills and attempt to sleep a clear eight hours without ever once thinking about Sabir. She could count on the steward to wake her up well before Blois with her breakfast.
She had never killed anyone before in her life – far less a pregnant woman and her unborn child. That prospect, although a necessary one, still caused her some distress. But she was confident that she’d get over it.
3
Yola Dufontaine had spent most of the previous day fighting off a relentless migraine. She had no idea what had triggered it, but it had been accompanied by repeated images of her honorary blood brother, Damo Sabir, wedged inside the cesspit at the Maset de la Marais, just as she had found him, five months before, when she and Sergeant Spola had broken in to rescue him.
In her waking dream, Sabir had once again been dying from the distilled snake venom he had secreted in his mouth to kill Achor Bale with. But this time around, Yola was unable to force him to vomit by drenching him with mustard powder and salt water, just as she had done in real life. Instead, she knew for a certainty that he was going to die. But the curious thing was that in this new, fanciful version of events, it wasn’t Sabir who was taking his leave of her, but rather she of him.
When she told her husband, Alexi, about the migraine and the waking nightmare he had said, quite simply, ‘You are three months pregnant, luludji. The morning sickness has stopped. Maybe hallucinations is the next thing you women get? Nothing can possibly surprise me about pregnancy any more.’
Yola hadn’t known exactly what she had wanted Alexi to say, but it hadn’t been that. Now she wished that she could get back in touch with Sabir and reassure herself that all was well with him. He and the curandero were the only two people on earth who knew her secret – not even Alexi was privy to it, for reasons that still eluded her, but which were probably related to her fears about his occasional proclivity for binge drinking, and the tearaway tongue that ensued. If Alexi even once blabbed in the camp about her being the mother of the Second Coming, the cat would really hit the skylight, showering them all with broken glass. Best not.
The curandero was, as always, on the road to somewhere, and therefore impossible to contact – he would either turn up or he wouldn’t. Sabir, on the other hand, lived a more static life.
Now, still unable to sleep, Yola rummaged around inside her and Alexi’s caravan until she found where she’d hidden the piece of paper Sabir had scribbled his telephone number on. Then, well before dawn, she started down through the woods for Samois and the nearest public telephone booth. Sabir had explained to her that New England was many hours behind France in terms of time, and she wanted to try to catch him before he went to bed.
4
Athame and Aldinach had waited at Paris’s Orly Airport from 16.10 in the afternoon until an hour after the final Iberia flight of the evening arrived in from Madrid at 22.35. In this way they missed both Lamia’s entry into France, via the ‘Talgo Night’ train and the Franco-Spanish border, and also that of Calque and Sabir, who had secured themselves last-minute seats on Aero Mexico’s Cancun to Roissy/Charles de Gaulle flight, which touched down at 23.10 the same evening, but at a different airport altogether.
When they were convinced that Lamia wasn’t going to make a belated exit from the arrivals lounge, the pair
