'Your chivalry appears to know no bounds, Monsieur Austin. Have no fear; your friends will only be taken a short distance away where you can see them. I want to talk to you alone.'
Madame Fauchard motioned for him to sit in Skye's vacated chair,
and snapped her fingers. Two of her men brought over a thronelike chair of heavy medieval construction and she settled into it. She said something in French to Marcel, and he and some of his men escorted the prisoners a short distance, but still in view, while others dragged away the suits of armor.
'Now there are just the two of us,' she said. 'Lest you entertain any illusions, my men will kill your friends if you do anything foolish.'
'I have no intention of making a move. This encounter is much too fascinating to end so soon. Tell me, what's with the high priestess outfit?'
'You know how I enjoy costumes. Do you like it?' Austin couldn't take his eyes off Madame Fauchard in spite of himself. Racine Fauchard was stunning in the way a finely crafted wax figure is perfect in every feature considered important, except one. Her soulless eyes held all the warmth of the cold steel that the Fauchards had used to fashion their swords and armor. 'I find you absolutely enchanting, but '
'But you don't readily consort with a hundred-year-old woman.' 'Not at all. You've aged quite well. I don't usually consort with a cold-blooded killer.'
She raised a finely arched eyebrow. 'Monsieur Austin, is this your strange way of flirting with me?' 'Far from it.'
'Too bad. I've had many lovers in the last hundred years, but you're a very attractive man.' She paused and studied his face. 'Dangerous, too, and that makes you even more attractive. First, you must fulfill your part of the bargain. Tell me what you know.'
'I know that you and your family hired Dr. MacLean to find the elixir of life he called the Philosopher's Stone. In the process, you killed anyone who got in your way and created a group of wild-eyed mutants.'
'A cogent summary, but you've only scratched the surface.'
'Scratch it for me, then.'
She paused, letting her memory drift back through the years.
'My family traces its ancestry back to the Minoan civilization that flourished before the great volcanic eruption on the island of Santorini My ancestors were priests and priestesses in the Minoan snake goddess cult. The snake clan was powerful, but power rivals drove us off the island. A few weeks later, the volcano erupted and destroyed the island. We settled in Cyprus, where we went into the arms business. The snake evolved into the Spear, then to Fauchard.'
'How did you get from spears to mutants?'
'It was a logical outgrowth of our arms business. Around the turn of the century, Spear Industries set up a laboratory to try to design a super-soldier. We knew from the American Civil War that trench warfare would make future battles a stalemate. First one side would charge, then the other, with little gain in ground. They would retreat in the face of the automatic weapons that were being developed. We wanted a soldier who would charge the trenches without fear, like a Viking berserker. In addition, this soldier would have super endurance and speed, and fast-healing wounds. We tried the formula on a few volunteers.'
'Like Pierre Levant?'
'I don't recall the name,' she said with a frown.
'Captain Levant was a French officer. He became one of the first mutants your research created.'
'Yes, he seems vaguely familiar. A dashing, handsome young man, as I recall.'
'You'd never recognize him these days.'
'Before you condemn me, you must know that they were all volunteers, soldiers who were excited at the prospect of becoming supermen.'
'Did they know that along with these superhuman powers, their appearance would change rather drastically?'
'None of us did. The science was crude. But the formula worked, for a time, anyhow. It gave the soldiers superhuman strength and quickness, but then they deteriorated into uncontrollable, snarling beasts.'
'Beasts who could enjoy their new bodies forever.'
'Life extension was an unexpected by-product. Even more exciting, the formula promised to reverse aging. We would have succeeded in refining the formula if not for Jules.'
'He turned out to have a conscience?'
'He turned out to be a fool,' she said, with undisguised vehemence. 'Jules saw our findings as a boon to mankind. He tried to persuade me and others in the family to stop the march toward war and release the formula. I led the family against him. He fled the country in his airplane. He carried papers that would have implicated the family in the war plot and intended to use them as blackmail, I suppose, if he had not been intercepted and shot down.'
'Why did he take the helmet?'
'It was a symbol of authority, passed down to the family leader of each generation. He lost his right to the helmet by his actions, and it should have passed to me.'
Austin leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. 'So Jules is gone, along with the threat that the family's war scheme will be exposed. He was in no position to stop your research.'
'He had already stopped it. He destroyed the computations for the basic formula and etched them into the helmet. Clever. Too clever. We had to start all over again. There were a million possible combinations. We kept the mutants alive with the hope that one day they might reveal the secrets of the formula. The work was interrupted by wars, the Depression. We were close to succeeding during World War Two when our laboratory was bombed by Allied planes. It set back our research by decades.'
Austin chuckled. 'You're saying that the wars you promoted hurt your research. The irony must not have escaped you.'
'I wish it had.'
'In the meantime, you got older.'
'Yes, I got older,' she said with uncharacteristic sadness. 'I lost my beauty and became a crackling old crone. Still, I persisted. We made some progress in slowing aging, which I shared with Emil, but the Grim Reaper was catching up with us. We were so close. We tried to create the right enzyme, but with limited success. Then one of my scientists heard about the Lost City enzyme. It seemed to be the missing link. I bought the company doing research on the enzyme, and enlisted Dr. MacLean and his colleagues to pursue round-the-clock research. We built a submarine that could harvest the enzyme and set up a testing laboratory.'
'Why did you have the scientists at MacLean's company killed?'
'We're not the first to dispose of ^scientific team so they won't talk about their research. The British government is-still investigating the deaths of scientists who worked on a Star Wars missile defense project. We had created a new batch of mutants and the scientists threatened to go public with the news, so we got rid of them.'
'The only problem with your scientists is that they hadn't really finished their work,' Austin said. 'Pardon me, but this operation sounds like a clown convention.'
'Not an inaccurate analogy. I made the mistake of letting Emil handle things. It was a big mistake. Once I took control again, I brought back Dr. MacLean to reconstitute a research team. They managed to recoup much of the work.'
'Was Emil responsible for flooding the glacier tunnel?'
'Mea culpa again. I had not brought him into my confidence about the true significance of the helmet, so he never tried to find it before flooding the tunnel.'
'Yet another mistake?'
'Luckily, Mademoiselle Labelle removed the helmet, and it is now in my possession. It provided the missing link and we closed down the lab. So you see, we make mistakes, but we learn by them. Apparently, you don't. You escaped from here once, yet you came back to certain disaster.'
'I'm not certain that's the case.'
'What do you mean?'
'Have you heard from Emil lately?'
'No.' For the first time there was doubt in her face. 'Where is he?'
