Carolyn Jourdan - Nurse Phoebe 03 - The School for Psychics (11 page)

She could see herself reflected in his sunglasses.

“Oh, sorry.”

Chapter
15.

They left the building by the
spiral staircase in the northwest interior corner of the complex, between the main block and the courtyard. The stairs were protected from above and on one side by the castle, but the southeast side was exposed to the weather. Phoebe tried to take careful note of the route so she could find her way back later.

She suggested they try to book rooms at the nearby
Hôtel du Grand Saint-Michel and eat there while they waited. There were plenty of rooms this time of year. She got two of them, both with unobstructed views of the château, for all the good that would do J.J.

They ate
a leisurely lunch, responded to email, sent an update to
Le Seigneur
, and did some more research by phone and laptop. Phoebe summarized what was on her computer screen, “That room we were in, the
studiolo
, when it was built it was still a relatively new concept. It was an Italian innovation created for meditation, contemplation, and study.

“
A room like that, a room of one’s own, was said to indicate the emergence of the concept of an educated, thoughtful human individual. The rooms were highly decorated. Apparently the ceiling of Francois’ study is famous—as it should be.”

She surfed some more and said,
“The château was abandoned several times. Louis XIV did some repairs, but lost interest. Then Louis XV gave the place to his father-in-law.”

J.J. suggested they use th
e remaining time for a more thorough reconnoiter of the grounds and the park and a trip to a hardware store. He wanted to be sure they’d combed the whole place and familiarized themselves with it before their nighttime foray and that they had the right equipment for the job.

Phoebe agreed.

When they were out of earshot of anyone, Phoebe said, “From the magnitude of the signal in that room, CR had direct access to it. He worked in there and he personally placed whatever it is that’s hidden in that cavity in the wall. I’d bet money on it.”

There didn’t appear to be security cameras anywhere, what could anyone do with such a gigantic mass of stone?

When J.J. was satisfied that they knew the layout inside the walled park and that Phoebe would be able to return to the
studiolo
in the dark, they drove to the nearby town of Blois for supplies. They needed some tools to remove the mortar around the hiding place and, because stealth would be important during the burglary, Phoebe wanted to get different clothes for them both that would make them harder to be seen at night.

J.J. didn’t
own any black clothes. They would’ve been uncomfortable in Hawaii. “You’ll have to tell me which ones are the black ones,” he joked. Phoebe picked out
his
and
her
sized black jeans, gloves, caps, rubber soled walking shoes, socks, and oversize windbreakers with hoods to go over the tops of their new colorful down jackets. The lightweight sporting gear would make their acrobatics easier.

She looked for rubber suction cups like Tom Cruise used to climb the outside of a skyscraper in
Mission Impossible
, but she didn’t see any.

Phoebe wanted to visit
other châteaux in the area if they had time. She’d made a little list of places, including Villesavin, which was near Chambord, but there wasn’t time before dark. It was late December, near the winter solstice. That meant it got dark early and stayed dark a long time. That was bad for touring, but great for burglary. They’d have all the time they needed.

* * *

They ate dinner at a little restaurant in Blois that was better than almost anywhere Phoebe had eaten in her life, then went back to the Hôtel du Grand Saint-Michel. They went to their separate rooms after agreeing to nap until 2:30 in the morning and reconvene in the hall for their nighttime visit to the château.

Phoebe tried to
stay positive but she was nervous about working in the dark while being held up in the air over J.J.s head. And she was literally sick over the idea of what amounted to vandalism and burglary. She was preparing to take a chisel to the most wonderful room she’d ever seen. Ugh. She didn’t want to do it.

She
couldn’t go to sleep, so she tried to count her blessings. That’s what she always did when she was upset. She gave thanks for being alive and healthy. She had wonderful friends she loved and lived in a great part of the world. She reminded herself that she had a cozy little house and plenty of food and some really nice clothes she’d bought used off eBay. That was pretty good, so far.

She had
a job—that was a biggie. It was interesting and mostly fun. It gave her the opportunity to see the world. For example, she’d always wanted to go to Hawaii, and now, she’d been! It would’ve been nice to have had more than half a day to look around, but Phoebe wasn’t greedy.

And t
his was her second trip to France in six months! She got to travel in a style she’d never imagined, and she was seeing a lot of famous places, but the tour was paced way too fast and there were constant distractions, to say the least. She strayed from thinking about her blessings and switched over to her worries.

This was a morally ambiguous project to
Phoebe’s way of thinking. She was going to be chipping away at a wall in a UNESCO World Heritage Site. At best she was a high-class vandal, and it wasn’t spontaneous, it was premeditated. When she was inside these great monuments she acted like a tourist, but she was constantly dodging guards, guides, docents, and the real tourists.

In her previous mission, she’d done several questionable things and ended up running
for her life from assassins!

Phoebe
was more than a little wary of the people at
The School for Mysteries
, but she reminded herself that she desperately needed a job. At her age and in this economy she’d
never
get another one. And certainly not close to White Oak, Tennessee.

A walk through the monastery was like a living display of religions of the world. They seemed like wonderful people, but she wondered how much she really knew about any of them. Not much, if she was honest with herself.

Jobs were so scarce nowadays, Phoebe felt sort of guilty for having one at all, even a questionable one, because she knew there were so many people who needed money even more than she did. People with kids to feed.

After some reflection
, though, she decided she didn’t have to feel too guilty for taking this particular job and ruining someone else’s opportunity. Most people wouldn’t want to do crazy jobs like this for a bunch of mysterious monks.

And who else would’
ve had the bizarre skill set to have gotten this wacky assignment in the first place? You couldn’t exactly put an ad in the newspaper asking for a Christian Rosenkreutz cold nose tracker.

If
Phoebe allowed herself to think about what the Boss and the people who worked for him were saying, it frightened her. But when she looked at how they behaved toward her and each other, and at what they were doing, even though she didn’t understand much of it, she trusted them.

H
aving a job was really important not only for survival. Phoebe wanted to help people and be part of something good. That was the most important thing in the world to her. That’s why she loved being a nurse. She was good at it because she cared about people. She knew she made them feel better. She was happy being a nurse, but then her new Boss told her he needed her other skills even more!

What was she supposed to do?
Phoebe had been trying to move back to her childhood home for years, but there was never any way for her to make a living. Finally she’d seen an opening at a rural health care service that suited her perfectly, so she’d come home at last.

The little nonprofit
had failed, though, in the wake of health care
reform
where the government continued to mechanize healthcare in favor of computerized record keeping systems. The new system optimized rigid scoring and payment structures for medical
procedures
rather than vague non-procedures like listening or caring or reassuring.

And yet that was what healed
people—attention, concern, a kind touch, love—these were the things that enabled people to get well. The original meaning of the word
cure
was
care of souls
. It had a religious meaning. It was a spiritual activity, healing a person’s soul and spirit, not just performing procedures on a body.

Phoebe sighed.

Ultimately, that was why she hadn’t run screaming from
The School for Mysteries
, or as she thought of it now,
The School for Psychics
. She’d seen too many things herself and heard too many stories from others about events that didn’t fit into rational boxes.

Somehow,
concerns about spirits and souls had gotten dropped in the modern world’s rush to build better machines. And now a growing segment of the population ridiculed anyone who thought there was more to life than rigid logic and blinkered science.

The Boss
seemed to know more about this in-between world than anyone else she’d ever run into. And because of that she was willing to trust him until she was able to form her own judgments about what was what.

* * *

Phoebe must’ve finally managed to drift off to sleep because the next thing she knew, there was a soft tap on her door. She got up and opened the door to find J.J. dressed entirely in black standing in the dim hallway, wearing sunglasses.

“You don’t have to wear your sunglasses
at night.”
“You shouldn’t have to look at the scars.”

“I’m a nurse. You don’t have to hide anything from me.
I’m not gonna faint. Besides, it’s dark.”

“
They also protect my face from falling debris.”

“I
n that case, you should keep them on.”

Chapter
16.

While t
hey reviewed their plan Phoebe kept an eye on the château from her window to confirm the absence of any lights or visible activity. At 3:00 a.m. they left the hotel as quietly as possible.

It
was a five-minute walk to the château. On the way, Phoebe caught herself thinking,
this is
fun
. That surprised her. She wondered if maybe she was a born criminal who’d never had the opportunity to explore her inner felon.

J.J. had her arm and was walking easily at her side. She glanced
over at him and he was smiling broadly. “Your teeth are showing in the moonlight,” Phoebe whispered. He closed his lips immediately, but was still smiling. Obviously he was enjoying himself, too. They were both crazy.

It was below freezing. Occasional gusts of wind made the cold
even more penetrating. Thank goodness they were dressed like mountain climbers. Phoebe snorted softly at the image of them buying a thousand dollars worth of new clothes for the ten-foot climb she was about to attempt.

Their feet crunch
ed on the packed pea gravel road. As they crossed the stone bridge across the wide moat, the clouds moved across the moon and the château loomed huge and not a little menacing.

The cold
night air sinking toward the ground brought with it the smell of wood smoke from the banked fireplaces inside Chambord. The ticket booth was shuttered, but the gate across the wide entrance to the courtyard stood wide open. Good, they wouldn’t have to break in. A three-wheeled maintenance truck sat parked to one side of the courtyard. Phoebe scanned the area again for any lights or activity and saw nothing.

The made their way up
an open-air staircase to the second floor, the
premier étage
, as the French called it. The guardrooms were lit only by a dull red glow from coals in the dying fires and moonlight that shone through the windows. They crept to the north tower. The château stood vast, silent, and empty. They encountered no hindrances. They were lucky and the
studiolo
was not as dark as some of the rooms on account of its small size and large number of windows.

J.J. confirmed
where they wanted to focus their investigative efforts. Phoebe scaled the front of his torso again until she was standing on his shoulders. She grabbed hold of the crown molding to steady herself. She removed a small LED flashlight and screwdriver and set them carefully on the ledge.

She would need to work as fast as possible for this last bit because J.J. would have to hold her in a standing o
verhead press the entire time. Except in this case there was no bar stabilizing the weights on either side. The weight was in two separate pieces—her feet—and each of them weighed over seventy-five pounds.

“Ready,” she whispered. It was the only word they’d
spoken since leaving her room. As soon as he lifted her, she discovered the flaw in their plan. When she was high enough to see over the molding, she was also at the intersection between the wall and the curved ceiling.

It
put her into an awkward position, literally. With J.J. standing close to the side wall, the curve in the barrel vault forced her into a backbend. She’d never be able to see what she was doing in that posture. She whispered a request for him to move a couple of short steps away from the wall, slightly out toward the middle of the room. Losing the support of the wall made his job a lot more difficult, but he didn’t complain.

Phoebe
stood as still has she could and somehow he managed to hold her steady. She shined the flashlight along the part of the wall he’d indicated. If she hadn’t been ten feet in the air, at point blank range, and holding a very bright light she never could’ve seen it. “You’re good,” she mumbled. “I see something.”

“Glad to hear it,” he said in a strained voice, “get it
open as fast as you can.”

Phoebe
held the little flashlight in her mouth and jabbed at the crumbled mortar with the screwdriver. She tried hard, but her progress was virtually undetectable. This was going to take too long, she thought, but didn’t dare say. J.J. slightly adjusted his stance and the small movement threw Phoebe toward the wall.

She
put out a hand to brace herself, dropped her flashlight and gouging tool, and fell hard against the stone just above the one she was working on. It was one among many hundreds of deeply carved stone
F
s that covered the ceilings and doors of the palace lest you manage to forget François Premiere even for an instant.

“Sorry,” J.J. whispered. “Are you okay?”

But this
F
wasn’t just any
F
. It was
the F
. The stone sprang out toward her slightly. She braced herself against the wall with her other hand and when she let go of it, it swung open like the door to a safe. “Oh my gosh!” she blurted out at a decidedly non-stealthy volume. She reached into the dark hole and felt a bundle of something wrapped in cloth. She grabbed it and in her excitement let go of the wall with both hands. That was a mistake.

She
began to fall backwards. She clawed the air for a handhold, but instead of managing to grab hold of the protruding stone door, she succeeded only in slapping it closed. She saw it slam shut as she fell. Since all he had hold of were her feet, there was no way J.J. could prevent her from falling. So he let go of her and held out his arms instead. He managed to catch Phoebe and turn her clumsiness into a perfect cheerleader dismount.

He
held her in his arms for a few seconds until they both recovered from the scare and then lowered her feet to the floor. He kept a secure grip on her until he was sure she was able to stand.

Whew.
They’d found something and there’d been no need to vandalize the place. What a relief! Just as Phoebe started to explain to J.J. what had happened, they both heard multiple footfalls.

By the sound of it,
several people were coming. Phoebe unzipped her jacket partway, stuffed the parcel down the front, and zipped it back up. The screwdriver and flashlight had rolled away into the darkness somewhere. She couldn’t see them and didn’t want to take the time to look.

She
grabbed J.J.’s hand and led him through the door at the far end of the room. She closed it behind them as quietly as possible. They found themselves on the long ramp that sloped gently down to a lower level of the château. They were headed away from the closest staircase, the one they’d used to enter, but Phoebe knew there was another one in a nearby tower.

She found it and looked off the balcony and down into the courtyard.
This exit wasn’t going to work either. Two men carrying flashlights were running across the open space heading for the ground level entrance to the same staircase. The lights danced across the wall beneath the balcony. Phoebe immediately veered toward Leonardo’s massive double helix stair in the center of the main part of the building.

They were moving fast and their rubber soled shoes made little noise. She
hoped they wouldn’t be intercepted on their dash through the open guardrooms that ringed the stairs. They nearly made it to the main staircase before they were seen.

One man was behind them and the other
was in front, between them and the stairs. Phoebe stopped. She looked over at J.J. and saw that he’d lost his dark glasses during the chase or maybe she’d knocked them off in her fall. A blinding flashlight played over her face and then his.

The
men came closer, trapping J.J. and Phoebe between them. The one holding the light said something in French about J.J. and laughed.

J.J. stepped toward him and said
, in English, “What did you say?”

The man replied in a heavy accent,
“I say, ‘You are bl…’.”

B
efore he finished the sentence, J.J. punched him hard in the face. The man went down and lay in the floor without moving. His friend looked to see what had happened and the instant he took his eyes off Phoebe she balanced on her left foot and swung her right leg in a high arc, connecting her heel to his temple.

The second man
went down, too. And stayed there.

“Phoebe
?” J.J. whispered, obviously worried. “What’s happening?”

“You knocked that guy out
!”

“I figured that,” he whispered.
“What about the other one?”

“I kicked him in the head.
Haven’t tried it in twenty years, but apparently it’s like riding a bicycle, once you’ve kicked a man in the head, you never forget how to do it.”

J.J.
snorted. Phoebe took his hand and started down the stairs but he arrested her movement with a painfully tight grip on her hand, whispering, “No, this way.”

She could see him in the moonlight that
was streaming through the high windows of the Guardroom He was turning his head back and forth slightly, like he was trying to understand what he was seeing with his inner vision. He pulled her back up the steps and made a gesture indicating that she should go around to the opposite side of the double helix and use the other staircase instead.

She understood
him. He must be able to tell that someone was coming up the same arm of the double helix she was about to go down. They had to make the right decision, or they’d never get out of the château.

Phoebe
realized she was running for her life, following a blind man. But she did as he suggested and took the lead. She guided him around to the other side of the central stairwell and headed down again. It was dark in the stairwell between floors and half way down she lost her footing. She was so clumsy. It was maddening. J.J. kept hold of her hand so she didn’t fall headfirst, but when she tried to stand, she felt a horrible pain. She’d twisted her ankle. It hurt like hell.

Now
she
was suppressing a scream. Before she had time to think what to do, he picked her up and tossed her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and continued down the stairs. It was quite a ride, upside down in the dark, facing into a blind man’s back as he ran down one of the most famous staircases in the world, away, they hoped, from serious trouble.

When he rea
ched the bottom of the stairs, he stopped and swung her off his shoulder and into his arms. Now that he was carrying her crossways in front of him she could see again. She directed him to the exit by whispering into his ear. When they’d made it out into the courtyard he walked quickly, carrying her toward the exit, staying in the shadows close to the interior wall.