The Nemesis Program (Ben Hope) (14 page)

Finally, they arrived at a set of enormous iron gates, black, spiked and forbidding. ‘
Vous êtes arrivés à vôtre destination
’, the satnav announced in an incongruously cheery tone. Ben pulled up outside the gates and killed the engine. He wondered whether their unannounced late-night visit would find anyone at home.

If Fabien was in, he wasn’t expecting anyone. ‘Not again,’ Roberta groaned when she saw the heavily-padlocked chain hanging from the iron bars. ‘That’s the second time today this has happened to us.’

Ben flung open his door and got out, grabbing his bag with the gun inside.

‘You going to blow the lock?’ she asked, pointing.

He shook his head. ‘It takes more than a nine-mil to hurt a big old iron padlock like that. Besides, if this Fabien character turns out to be home, we don’t want to draw attention to ourselves by making a load of noise.’ He gazed up at the wall. The stonework was smooth and wouldn’t be easy to scale, but the gate itself offered plenty of footholds as long as the long spikes on top didn’t get them. He slung his bag strap over his shoulder, grabbed the cool iron bars in his fists and began to climb. Roberta sighed, muttered, ‘Here we go’ and did likewise.

A few moments later they dropped silently down on the other side, unpunctured by the spikes, and started making their way through the grounds. Ben used his torch to light the way down the curving private road. Clumps of weeds had sprouted up everywhere through the gravel and the lawns and shrubs either side were badly overgrown. It didn’t take much to see that this once-magnificent property was sadly neglected by its present owner.

The private road wound through the trees until the house finally came into view. The silhouette of the eighteenth-century château, all spires and turrets and chimneys, stood out against the night sky. By daylight, Ben guessed, the place would probably look as uncared for as the grounds. The façade of the house had at least sixty windows, but none of them was lit. Either their boy was tucked up in bed with a bottle or a dolly bird, or he was away on one of his many socialite expeditions.

‘Let’s not waste too much time here,’ Ben said. He swept the torch beam over the front and sides of the large house, looking for a discreet way in. ‘We need to get inside and start searching for whatever the hell it is we’re here to find.’

‘Shine it over that way a minute,’ Roberta said, pointing into the darkness away from the house. Ben did. The thin, bright beam cast a bobbing spotlight across the grounds: the dismal gardens filled with uncontrolled shrubs and a rampaging topiary, a walled courtyard with a disused old fountain at its centre, a range of stables with a clock tower that had been converted into garages, some parkland and woodland beyond a broken fence.

‘Nothing, damn it,’ she muttered.

‘What are you looking for?’ he asked.

‘I was kind of hoping for a cemetery,’ she replied, squinting through the darkness.

‘A cemetery?’

She nodded. ‘You know, little private family burial plot, fancy markers for the ancestors, spending eternity with the beloved, that kind of thing. Must have been quite a few generations of the De Bourg family that lived and died here over the centuries. These aristocrats would consider it way beneath them to be interred among the common folks.’

Ben scanned left and right with the torch and could see nothing but more walls and buildings and trees. ‘Aside from the riveting insights into French social history,’ he said, ‘why are we looking for a graveyard?’

‘Because I was doing some thinking on the way over here,’ Roberta replied. ‘Bear with me, okay? If I’m right, we don’t have to go into the house. Give me the torch. Let’s walk over that way, see what we find.’

Ben handed her the Maglite and followed, frustrated, as she led the way past the house, following a broad path that skirted round towards the gardens.

‘Check this out,’ she said, stopping suddenly. ‘Look.’

Ben followed the line of the beam at the round building that had come into view behind the house, surrounded by a low wall and flanked by statues. ‘It’s a chapel,’ he said as the torchlight flickered over its ornate stonework and the pointed conical steeple adorned with a tarnished bronze cross. ‘But what—?’ he began, but Roberta was already striding off towards it, leaving him behind. He trotted after her, more and more impatient that she wouldn’t tell him what she was thinking. As he caught up with her, she’d already reached the chapel’s arched doorway and was darting the torch here and there as if searching for something. ‘It’s locked,’ she muttered. The beam landed on something and held still. ‘Hello,’ she said.

Roberta had found a small electronic keypad mounted on the wall. ‘Bet your ass I’m right.’

‘I can’t wait to find out,’ Ben said at her shoulder.

‘Six-nine-eight-two.’ She prodded each key in turn. Nothing happened for a second, then there was a muted beep and the lock opened with a click. Roberta grinned over her shoulder at Ben, pushed the door open and cast the light around the circular walls. There was a small altar, some benches, religious art and crosses everywhere, the usual fixtures of a small private place of worship.

‘You want to say a prayer that my theory’s right?’ she asked. ‘Someone up there might listen to you.’ Her voice sounded echoey.

‘I doubt that,’ Ben replied, more concerned with knowing what she was up to as she avidly explored the inside of the chapel. ‘You mind sharing this theory with me?’ he asked as she let out a yelp of triumph.

‘The two lines of numbers that we couldn’t figure out from the letter,’ she said excitedly. ‘The second line, four digits – we just found out what that was, right? And as for the bottom line, those ten digits that didn’t make any sense before?’

‘What about them?’

‘They’re
dates
, Ben. Two lots of five digits, each consisting of day, month, and year. Just like the GPS coordinates, when you run them all together they look like nothing, but break them down into an ordered sequence and you get a pair of dates thirty-five years apart. Someone’s birth and death. The only part that’s missing is what century the dates refer to. It hit me while we were in the car.’

‘Okay,’ he said carefully, realising she was probably right.

‘That’s why I was looking for a cemetery,’ Roberta said in a satisfied tone. ‘And look what
I
just found.’

He strode over to where she was shining the light on a small archway recessed low down into the wall behind the altar. A well-worn flight of steps led down to a heavy iron door that was held fast by a massive bolt. ‘Now, don’t tell me that’s a wine cellar down there,’ Roberta said, pointing the torch.

‘It’s a tomb,’ Ben said.

Chapter Nineteen

The bolt on the iron door was rusted almost solid and couldn’t be waggled open by hand. ‘I’m going to have to hit it with something,’ Ben said after a few attempts.

‘Try this,’ Roberta said, and stepped across to pick up a hefty bronze candlestick.

‘That should do it.’ He was about to hammer the bolt knob with the candlestick’s heavy base when he noticed something, and shone the torch closely to see. The rusty bolt knob was scuffed with fresh impact marks that had left fresh bare metal. ‘Someone’s been here before us, and not long ago,’ he said. ‘These marks will rust over quickly.’

Three smart blows from the candlestick, and the bolt was forced back. Ben pushed the massive door and it creaked open a few inches. The tomb was blacker than black inside. Cool, stale air wafted up from the entrance.

‘Spooky,’ Roberta murmured.

Ben shone the light on the stone steps that led down to the murky space below. Already he could see more signs that someone had been here recently. The thick curtain of cobwebs that hung inside the doorway had been disturbed. The fresh footprints in the dust on the steps hadn’t been made by a man. They were as small and delicate as the shoes he’d come across in Claudine Pommier’s wardrobe.

He made his way down to the bottom of the steps and shone the torch around inside. On a dusty marble pedestal was an ornamental crucifix, flanked either side by large vases filled with flowers, long since wilted to a husk. Whoever had been down here recently didn’t appear to have come to pay their respects to the De Bourg family dead.

‘I think you’re right,’ he said to Roberta, who was tentatively following him down the steps. ‘Claudine was here.’ Something in the atmosphere of the tomb made him lower his voice to a whisper. The chill in the air wasn’t just a question of temperature. It felt like what it was, a place of death.

And it had been one for a long time, going back three hundred years to when the De Bourgs had buried their dead like kings of old, laying them to rest inside massive stone coffins housed in recesses in the walls. The more recently deceased were sealed in behind marble plaques, or in ornate crematorium urns inscribed with names and dates of birth and death.

The torch batteries were beginning to fade, and there didn’t seem to be any electric light in the tomb. By the yellowing beam Ben traced the direction of the small footprints in the dust. They criss-crossed the flagstones on the floor, as if Claudine – if it had been her – had been hunting around for something. After a few passes to and fro they headed diagonally over to one of the old stone coffins. There were kneel marks beside it in the dust. Ben shone the dim light upwards and saw the scrape marks around the coffin’s thick stone lid where someone had been prying at it with a sharp tool, like a crowbar.

Roberta was standing close to him, almost touching. ‘Look at the dates on the casket,’ she breathed. The carved inscription read:

Germain Christophe De Bourg

Né le 27 Janvier, 1756

Mort le 5 Decembre 1791

‘Born January twenty-seventh, 1756, died December fifth, 1791,’ Roberta translated. ‘Put the dates into figures, take out the century and what’ve you got? Two-seven, one, five-six; five, twelve, nine-one. See? Didn’t I tell you? This is where the letter was leading us.’

‘The lid’s been opened and slid shut again,’ Ben said, noticing that it was slightly askew.

‘Could Claudine have done that?’

‘With a bit of effort, and a decent crowbar,’ he replied. ‘I’d say even a slightly built woman could have prised it open a few inches.’

‘A crowbar like this one?’ Roberta asked, stooping down and reaching into the shadows. There was a soft clang as she picked up an iron wrecking bar, three feet long, curved into a fork at one end and chisel-tipped at the other. ‘Looks like she left it behind in a hurry.’ She handed it to Ben.

‘Now all we need to know is why Claudine might have needed to open a two-hundred-year-old coffin,’ he said. ‘Only one way to find out.’

‘Great. We’re grave robbers now.’

As they’d been talking, the torch had been fading more and more, and now it died completely. Ben reached into his pocket for his Zippo lighter. Its warm, flickering light made an orange halo. ‘Hold this,’ he said, passing it to Roberta. He dug the chisel tip of the wrecking bar between the coffin and its craggy stone lid, and heaved. Claudine must have used all her body weight to lever them apart. With a couple of hard shoves, the corner of the heavy lid lifted far enough to poke the end of the bar into the gap and force the lid sideways. Stone grated on stone. The gap opened, inch by inch, until the lid fell with a grinding crash.

‘Sorry about that, Germain,’ Ben muttered.

Roberta held the light over the exposed inside of the coffin. The soft flame shone on pale bones and tatters of decayed burial shroud. The skeletal remains of the coffin’s occupant grinned up at them. ‘Holy shit,’ she said with a shudder.

‘What’s the matter, you’ve never opened up someone’s coffin before?’

‘It’s not just that. His skull seems to be, uh,
separated
from the rest of him.’

‘Guillotined,’ Ben said. ‘Those were dodgy times for French aristocrats. Germain De Bourg wasn’t the only one who died young in the wake of the revolution.’ He laid down the wrecking bar. ‘Shine the light a little closer,’ he told her, and peered down into the shadows of the coffin’s interior. Then, leaning over its craggy stone edge, he thrust an arm inside to grope around and beneath the decapitated skeleton.

His searching hand brushed smooth bones and wispy cloth, and something else. Something that certainly hadn’t been there since 1791. His fist closed on smooth, soft plastic.

He drew out the bag. It was opaque and had been carefully sealed with tape. Roberta watched as he broke the seal and opened it up.

‘I don’t think this belonged to the coffin’s resident,’ he said, showing her the detachable computer hard drive that was inside.

‘Is there anything else?’

‘Just this,’ Ben said, and pulled it out of the plastic. The rectangular object was metallic, about eight inches in length, shaped at one end like a small hammer, a cluster of tiny switches and buttons and LEDs at the other. ‘Some kind of tool, or gauge,’ he said.

‘Let me see,’ Roberta said, looking at it intently.

The Zippo’s steel case was growing uncomfortably hot in Ben’s fingers and he wasn’t sure how long its fuel reservoir would hold out. He handed her the strange object and held the flame to give her some light as she inspected it from all angles. ‘What the hell is it?’ he asked.

‘I’m not an expert,’ she said. ‘But I think this is an update on the Tesla oscillator.’

‘The machine you told me about? Where did she get it?’

‘She could easily have built it herself. She was certainly smart enough, and she had the technical skills to create something like this. The original Tesla device was steam-powered, but this is electro-mechanical. Apart from that, I’m certain it’s a replica of the very same machine.’ She shook her head in confusion. ‘Jesus, Ben. I just wish I’d been wrong about all this. But I wasn’t.’

‘Let’s go over what we know,’ Ben said. ‘We’re pretty certain that Claudine came out here, sometime within the last week or so, going by how fresh her footprints are. She obviously came alone, probably knowing that her ex was out of the way. He must have shown her all around the place when they were together. Now, believing that she’s under threat, she decides to use the tomb as a hiding place, knowing that nobody would think to search in this particular spot. She goes to all this trouble to hide these items out here, then sends coded information about the location to at least two people she must have known she could trust: namely, you and this Daniel person in Sweden.’