The Tenth Chamber (21 page)

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.

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.

He liked the feeling of her arms around his waist but it didn’t last long. In a few moments they were limping off to their separate rooms.

Gatinois was almost hoping his phone would ring again to give him an excuse to extricate himself from his brother-in-law. The man, a wealthy blow-hard with a gaudy apartment, was some kind of international currency trader. The fellow had given him the particulars of his job a hundred times but Gatinois shut his mind off whenever his jowly face began to yammer on about weak euros and strong dollars and the like. The idea of making money by electronically shifting pots of currency from here to there struck him as parasitic. What did the man
do
? For the greater good? For his country?

His wife and sister-in-law seemed engaged enough by whatever he was saying, attentively sipping cognac, a final round of drinks after a Sunday night dinner celebrating the man’s promotion to chief of one of his bank’s divisions.

Gatinois had no doubt what
he
did for his country. Today he’d spent hours on the phone, even made an unprecedented Sunday visit to The Piscine for a personal briefing by his staff.

He’d been absolutely correct about Bonnet’s ruthlessness and he liberally reminded Marolles of his prediction. Over the past two weeks he had absorbed each piece of news from Ruac with grim admiration. Now the campsite. The old boy liked his blood.

Well, more power to him.

Almost as if he’d willed it to life, his phone began to ring. He gratefully leaped up, and excused himself to take the call in the library.

His wife told her sister, ‘He’s been on the phone to his office all day!’

The banker seemed sorry his audience had diminished. ‘Oh well. I suppose we’ll never know what André really does for a living, but he’s keeping us all safe in our beds, I’m quite sure of that. More cognac?’

Gatinois sank into one of the banker’s library chairs. The book-cases were stacked with old leather-bound volumes, touched by the cleaner’s feather duster and nothing else.

Marolles sounded weary. ‘Bonnet’s been at it again.’

‘Does he ever rest?’ Gatinois asked incredulously. ‘What now?’

‘There was just an attempt to run down Simard and Mallory on a city street in Cambridge. One of our men saw it with his own eyes. They were only lightly hurt. The driver got away clean.’

Gatinois snorted. ‘So his tentacles reach all the way to England! Amazing, really. He’s got balls, I’ll give him that.’

‘What should we do?’ Marolles asked.

‘About what?’

‘
Our
plans.’

‘Absolutely nothing!’ Gatinois exclaimed. ‘This has nothing to do with our plans. Don’t change a single operational detail. Not one detail!’

The meeting at PlantaGenetics with Fred Prentice, Sara’s biologist friend was set for 9 a.m. The biotech company, founded by a Cambridge University botany professor, was in the business of finding new biologically active molecules from plant extracts. Their labs hummed round the clock with the whirring sound of hundreds of robotic arms bobbing up and down, pipetting specimens extracted from plants collected around the world and sent to Cambridge for analysis.

Sara and Fred travelled in the same botany circles and though they’d never had a chance to collaborate, they followed each other’s work and saw each other at conferences. Truth be told, she knew he fancied her. He had once shyly asked her to dinner once at a congress in New Orleans. She accepted the invitation because he was a sweet man and seemed lonely, and she was saved from a goodnight kiss by his allergic reaction to a spice in his gumbo.

Sitting in the taxi that morning, both of them looked like B-movie zombies. Luc’s forearm and hand were wrapped in a gauze bandage and his hip smarted. Sara had a few Band-Aids here and there. They’d skipped breakfast and met each other in the lobby, both running late. They hurried to get a cab. When they finally got a gander at each other in the back seat they had to laugh.

‘How long will it take to get there?’ Luc asked the driver.

‘Just ten minutes, up the Milton Road to the Science Park. You running late?’

‘A little,’ Sara said. It was already nine.

‘Should you call?’ Luc asked.

Sara took the suggestion.

‘Hello, Fred, it’s Sara,’ she said trying to sound cheery. ‘Sorry, but we’re running a few minutes . . .’

In the distance there was a flash, magnesium-bright. Then a shuddering percussive whump.

A dome of white smoke rose from the top of the trees.

‘Jesus!’ the taxi driver yelped. ‘That can’t be too far from where we’re heading!’

Sara had her phone to her ear. ‘Fred? Fred?’

They never made it to the Science Park. Emergency Services had the road blocked off and all traffic was diverted.

All they could do was return to their hotel, turn to the news on the lobby TV and watch live reports on Sky and ITV accompanied by the noise of helicopters overhead and the wail of sirens.

The explosion had devastated a wing at the Science Park. By 11 a.m. a reporter from Sky read out a list of companies located in the building. One of them was PlantaGenetics.

There was talk of a gas leak or a chemical explosion. The possibility that it was a terrorist attack was mentioned. The wing was a smouldering mess. There were multiple casualties. Burns units in Cambridgeshire and beyond were filling up. Blood donors were needed.

Then at noon, Sara’s phone rang.

She looked at the caller ID and said, ‘Oh my God, Luc, it’s Fred!’

They returned to the Casualty Department at Nuffield. The night before, the waiting area had been speckled with patients with minor problems.

Today it was a war zone. It was a small hospital, only fifty beds and it was melting down in the crisis.