The Lazarus Vault Part 31

Mirabeau site, France The shoes were miniature works of art. On the Boulevard Saint-Michel in Paris, a wizened cobbler had personally measured the feet, cut the leather, st.i.tched them by hand and polished them until he could see his client's satisfied face reflected in their toe-caps. 'Every pair is as individual as the man who wears them,' he liked to boast. If he could have seen them now, almost buried in silt and ash, he would have wept.

Blanchard didn't care about his shoes. If he even noticed the mud soaking through the hand-tooled leather, ruining them irreparably, he didn't show it. He stared at the rubble of the chapel, the tail-fin of the helicopter rising out of it like a twisted cross.

Night had fallen, but there were no stars: they were hidden, or perhaps they had fallen to earth. The rim of the lake had become an unbroken ring of fire, the wastes of the dead forest still smouldering. Overhead, rotor blades thumped the air where his own helicopter hovered, unable to land. The downdraft blew smoke in his eyes.

The Talhouett security chief came up beside him. 'There were three of them. Our guards shot one, but two others escaped.'

'Did they chase them?'

'Our job is to protect the site not be the police. My men tried to put out the fire.'

Blanchard took out a cigar, then put it back in his pocket. There was too much smoke already.

'I want this church completely excavated. Bring in cranes, dredging equipment, whatever it takes.'

'It will be some time before they can get through, Monsieur. The fires are still blocking the access roads.'

'Then fly them in. Or bulldoze the trees. Money is no object. I want to see every stone that survives.'

The security chief was a blunt man who'd served twenty years as a paratrooper in the French army. He'd spent half his career in Africa, overthrowing tyrants and defending democracy, or vice versa, as his government demanded. It had brought him into contact with some of the most brutal megalomaniacs in the western hemisphere. But even in their air-conditioned palaces, with machete-wielding bodyguards cocained up to the eyeb.a.l.l.s, he hadn't felt this afraid.

Out of an old habit he thought he'd forgotten, he saluted and ran off, talking urgently into his radio.

Blanchard stared at the devastated church. Billions of euros blown to nothing by a cowboy helicopter pilot and a flare gun.

The improbability of it nagged him. Why send Ellie here, when they knew how hard he, Blanchard, was hunting her?

And what was the Luxembourg break-in about? Again, why Ellie? It was almost as if they were trying to draw attention to the thing they wanted most to hide.

Was it a bluff? A trap gone wrong? Or 'She's on her own,' he murmured to himself. A smile spread across his face. 'She's looking for the same thing we are, and she doesn't even know what it is.'

Near Lyons Ellie reached her foot under her seat to make sure the bag was still there.

'You think I've got the greatest legend in history sitting in a cardboard box under my chair?'

Doug nodded. The sheepishness had gone: his face was alight with purpose. She could see he'd convinced himself. For herself, she wasn't sure she even believed it existed.

But what if it does? a voice inside her demanded. What if it's all true, right there, in your bag? The greatest legend in history and you've got it.

'So what do we do with it?' It seemed like such a feeble question.

'Save the world? Achieve spiritual union with the G.o.dhead?' Doug tried to smile, but his tension was manifest.

Ellie slumped in her seat. The magnitude of it was overwhelming.

'I stole it,' she murmured, almost a whisper. 'I went down there and I stole it.'

Another realisation: dark clouds rus.h.i.+ng in, piling up like a thunderhead. 'Monsalvat are never going to let us get away with this.'

'We have to get it to the Brotherhood. If only we knew how.'

Ellie pushed back her chair carefully. 'To start with, let's find an Internet cafe. Whatever else is in the bag, we've still got Joost's camera, and he died to get those photographs out. The least we can do is send them on to his friends.'

The only Internet cafe they could find had big windows and bright fluorescent lights, which lit it up like a TV screen. Ellie and Doug paid three euros and took a machine near the back. It didn't take long to find the Green Knights' website. The homepage showed a scan of a legal firm's cease-and-desist letter, with f.u.c.k YOU scrawled over it in red crayon.

Doug took the memory card out of the camera and slid it into a slot on the computer. A folder opened on screen.

'There's a ton of stuff on here lots of video, too. If we try to upload it we'll be here until next Thursday.'

Ellie clicked through a few more pages on the Green Knights' website. 'There's a post-office box in Utrecht listed. We can send them the card in the post.'

'What about us? That card's got the only pictures we're likely to get of the chapel.'

A sign above the cash register advertised discs, memory sticks and other peripherals for sale. Doug bought a replacement memory card and started copying the files across. Ellie went to a newsagent across the road and bought a jiffy envelope. When she came back, Joost's video of the chapel was playing silently across the computer screen. There she was, scrabbling away with the nail file. She was glad Joost had stayed behind the camera. The memory of his death was too raw.

The camera swooped around and zoomed in until the mosaic filled the screen: a sharp tangle of black lines. Doug hit pause and took a screen capture. Twenty cents bought him a printout of the image. He picked it up off the printer and stared at it. Ellie watched him.

'What are you thinking?' A crease had appeared above the right side of his mouth, a little tic Ellie had seen so often when he was poring over some notes, or staring into s.p.a.ce at the dinner table.

Doug looked up, caught in the act. 'I was thinking of a woman called Annelise Stirt. She's an expert on Chretien and the Grail legend. When I was studying the poem for Mr Spencer, everything I read seemed to lead back to one of her books or articles.'

'Did you contact her?'

'I wanted to, but I'd signed Mr Spencer's non-disclosure agreement.' A rueful grin. 'I don't suppose it applies any more.'

'Where can we find her?'

Doug tapped the computer. 'The all-seeing eye of the Internet.'

He went to a search engine and typed two words.

Holy Grail.

The pointer hovered over the Search b.u.t.ton.

'If only it was that easy.'

He added 'Annelise Stirt' to the query and clicked Search. A couple more clicks brought up a page from the Literature Faculty at the Universite de Reims Champagne-Ardennes. It listed an e-mail address and a phone number, beneath a photo of an owlish woman with round gla.s.ses and long grey hair.

Doug checked his watch. 'Six o'clock. Let's hope she works late.'

The cafe had headsets you could use to make phone calls over the Internet: Doug thought it would be pretty much untraceable. He bought some credit, hooked on the headset and was just about to dial when Ellie grabbed his arm.

'Are you sure this is a good idea? You said she's the world expert on Chretien de Troyes. What if Monsalvat know about her?'

'We're running out of options.' Doug turned out his wallet on the tabletop. 'I've got seventy-seven euros and change. You?'

Ellie checked her purse. 'About fifty.'

'That's a couple of tanks of petrol, or maybe a couple of nights in a hotel. And we need to eat. Unless we can find the Brotherhood soon, we're going to end up out of money, out of time and out of luck. Then what do we do?'

Ellie thought, burrowing through her memories for any clue Harry might have given her. All she found were blank walls.

'Mirabeau didn't pan out,' Doug said. 'The box isn't going to open any time soon. All we've got to go on is the poem.'

He squeezed her shoulder. 'Look on the bright side. Monsalvat don't know how desperate we are they probably think we're safe with the Brotherhood. This is the last thing they'll be expecting.'

Reluctantly, Ellie nodded. Doug pressed the b.u.t.ton and made the call.

'Annelise Stirt.'

She sounded friendly enough. Perhaps it was the Scottish accent.

'My name is Dr Douglas Cullum. I'm a fellow at St John's College, Oxford.'

'I don't think I'm familiar with your work.'

'I'm researching the poetry of Chretien de Troyes. I've made a rather extraordinary discovery that I'd like to get your opinion on. I think you might like to see it too.'

A pause. 'What is it?'

'It would be easier to show you.'

'Can you come by?'

'We're some distance from Reims at the moment.' Doug checked his watch. 'We couldn't be there before about ten o'clock tonight.'

'Even I don't work that late.' She sounded amused. 'But I'll still be up. If what you have to show me is that important, why don't you come to my house?'

Doug took down the address, printed off a map and disconnected. His eyes met Ellie's. Somehow, through the tiredness, they managed to share a smile.

'This is mad,' she said.

'I'm beginning to lose my ability to tell.'

XLIV.

Near Winchester, England, 1143 I almost get a dagger down my throat for my pains. When I go back to the inn, Hugh has me pinned to the wall virtually before I've stepped through the door.

'Where were you?'

He thought I'd left him. He thought I'd betrayed him to Malegant again. After what I did on the ile de Peche, I can't blame him.

I wait for him to take his arm away, then tell him what I heard. His body relaxes, though his face grows grimmer.

'I didn't understand it,' I confess. 'One moment, Alberic was preaching war; the next he was talking about the king's victory.'

Hugh strides round the room, putting his few possessions into a bag.

'Does it make sense to you?'

'It does.'

'Then what are they doing?'

I don't expect an answer at best, another riddle. Instead, Hugh turns and looks me straight in the eye.

'They want to kill the King.'

And now we're riding through the night, borrowed horses on borrowed time. Four knights, two pack horses loaded with our armour and me. The wind sings in my ears.

Somewhere in the depths of the night I find myself riding beside Hugh. We're pus.h.i.+ng our horses as fast as we dare, but there's a long way to go at the moment, our pace isn't much more than a trot.

'Why are we doing this? I thought we were hunting for Malegant.'

'We are.' Two battling lions are traced in bra.s.s on the bow of his saddle. Their outlines make an eerie glow riding beside me. 'What Malegant stole is a weapon of extraordinary power. Now he wants to use it.'

'To kill the King?'

'Malegant hates order. He wants a lawless, broken world where his evil can flourish unchecked.'

'Will killing the king do that?'

I wait. When Hugh speaks again, his voice is fainter, distant like a prophet.

'Power flows through the world like water. Sometimes it evaporates; sometimes it pools in deep reservoirs. It acc.u.mulates in people, but also in objects. Some of those objects and people bind the fabric of our world together; others try to rip it apart. When two come together, in violence ... The wounds never heal.'

He falls silent. Afterwards, I can't quite be sure if I dreamed it.

At dawn we find ourselves riding through a broad valley. It looks familiar, and then it hits me with a great pang of loss. I've been here before years ago, a young squire fetching a bride for his lord. Then it was summer; now, a white h.o.a.r frost covers the hedgerows and the trees. In the darkness, I didn't recognise it. Not so far from here must be the hall where I first met Ada, where she braided her hair with gold and carried a grail-dish like a servant.

The sun rises behind us, licking away the frost. Up on the ridge, it touches the flanks of a gleaming white horse carved into the hillside, as big as a church. I wonder who made it, who keeps it so white. I wonder if in the night I crossed the invisible boundary into a different world, a world of signs and marvels. I wonder if I'll ever escape.

We reach a village, a wretched place near the river. Even the church is miserable: all that distinguishes it from the surrounding hovels is that its roof is intact. The other buildings languish half-open to the sky, as if someone started to rethatch them all at once and then abandoned it. But who thatches a house in January?

'What happened to the roofs?'

'They pulled the thatch off to feed their animals.'

I glance around. 'I don't see any livestock.'

'Then maybe to feed themselves.'

It's a town of living ghosts. As we ride in, villagers creep out of their homes to watch us pa.s.s. The clothes they wear aren't nearly enough to keep out the January cold. Ahead, a knot of them spills into the road, blocking our path. I tighten my grip on the reins, but they don't look hostile. They're so thin, even my tired nag could skittle them out of the way.

'Where are the women?' Anselm murmurs.