The Martyr’s Curse

Chapter Fifty

There was silence in the room. The two men were watching Ben closely for his reaction. He leaned back deeper in his chair and sipped his coffee. It was going cold and tasted suddenly bitter.

‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’ Luc Simon asked him.

Ben waited another full minute before replying. He wanted to be sure he understood this right. ‘The two of Streicher’s men we found at the safe house, Roth and Grubitz. Were they infected with what you’re talking about?’

‘And now both dead,’ Oppenheim said with a nod. ‘The entire area has been evacuated and sealed off by specialist biohazard teams. It’s a particularly virulent strain that attacks the system with extreme aggression.’

‘And if you’re not showing signs of infection within twenty-four hours, you never will,’ Ben said. ‘Hence the short quarantine period. Correct?’

‘Correct.’

Ben was silent a while longer. Thinking hard. Whichever way he came at it, the conclusion seemed inescapable. He could only pray he was wrong. ‘How long can something like this remain dormant and still survive?’ he asked Oppenheim.

‘Plague is a bacterial disease,’ Oppenheim said. ‘Its active agent is the bacterium Yersinia pestis, Y pestis for short. Unlike a virus, even without being kept sustained by a host, it can stay buried in the ground for centuries. Far from losing in virulence, it can actively evolve and mutate during that time, ready to spring back into action in strengthened form as and when the opportunity arises. Basically, it’s a survivor.’

Ben sucked in a deep breath. He hadn’t been wrong, and it wasn’t a good feeling. ‘The monastery,’ he said. ‘It was the source, wasn’t it?’

Luc Simon nodded gravely. ‘That’s what we believe, too.’

‘I lived there for seven months,’ Ben said. ‘There was nothing, no mention, no clue. Except for the walled-up crypt.’ He spent the next few minutes explaining to them what he’d found down there. Père Antoine’s reticence about discussing the monastery’s past. The dark secrets on which he wouldn’t be drawn. Then Ben told them about the errand that had taken him away from the monastery during the crucial hours of Streicher’s attack. He described what he’d found on his return. The slaughtered monks, the skeletal remains of the plague dead. And the gold bars.

‘We found one in your bag,’ Luc Simon said.

‘They were scattered about the place,’ Ben said. ‘The way they would be, if you were in a hurry to transfer a large haul of them from deep underground to a waiting truck, with the clock ticking. As if one accidentally dropped here or there didn’t really matter because there were so many of them.’ He shook his head. ‘I was so sure. And I was so wrong.’

‘Streicher is a man of many parts,’ Oppenheim said. ‘Not least of which are that he’s extremely wealthy and extremely cunning. Red herrings don’t come much more expensive than planting gold bars about your crime scene to create a false trail.’

‘But it worked,’ Ben said. ‘It worked very bloody well indeed. It stopped me from thinking about the reason for the second explosive charge. The one that sealed up the hole and nearly buried me. He didn’t want the cops to see what was down there. The bastard covered his tracks beautifully.’

And the cigarette too, Ben thought. The planted black Sobranie that had almost led him to declare war against every Russian mafioso from Nice to Marseille. Another piece of artful distraction dreamed up by a deviously calculating mind. Ben almost had to admire it.

‘Let me reveal some further information I don’t think you’ll be aware of,’ Oppenheim said. ‘Very few people are. It concerns a discovery made in 2012 by an ecological survey team in the mountains surrounding Chartreuse de la Sainte Vierge de Pelvoux, who were there to assess the increasing wolf population in the Hautes-Alpes area. Since it became illegal to hunt the damn things, they’ve turned into more and more of a problem for livestock farmers. Anyway, during an expedition on foot, the survey team came across the body of a strange creature. A rat, physically very deformed and apparently eyeless.’

‘I saw rats like that in the crypt before it blew up,’ Ben said. ‘They must have been breeding down there for a thousand generations.’

‘When the rodent’s body was taken for analysis, it was found to be harbouring a rare and aggressive strain of plague bacterium,’ Oppenheim said, ‘which in fact infected the survey team leader and two of his colleagues. None of them survived,’ he added dryly. ‘The incident was given only light coverage in a handful of scientific journals and wasn’t allowed to reach the mainstream media, for fear that it could affect the Alpine tourism industry.’

‘But the information is out there nonetheless,’ Luc Simon said. ‘And we think that it was while he was holed up in hiding after the crushing defeat of his failed Korean mission that Streicher must have come across it, and it pricked his interest.’

If Streicher makes it his business to find out about something, believe me, he does. Silvie’s words echoed in Ben’s mind.

And: Ancient secrets. Ones that had been almost completely forgotten over the course of centuries. Only he had been able to connect the facts. How he was going to make history. How he was going to be remembered.

‘Streicher’s a researcher,’ Ben said. ‘He must have devoured everything he could find about the area, to figure out where that rat had come from. Starting with internet searches using obvious keywords like “rat” or “plague”. That’s how he eventually worked out that the source of the infection was right underneath the monastery, that the rat must have crawled through a crack in the mountain and died out there in the open. It was the connection with the old forgotten story of the martyr’s curse.’

‘The what?’ Luc Simon said. Oppenheim was quiet, listening.

‘The prophecy of a dying man as he burned at the stake,’ Ben said. ‘That a thousand years of pestilence would descend upon the land and bring his revenge on the descendants of the people who’d betrayed him. It was only six hundred odd years ago. Maybe Salvator’s timing wasn’t so wrong, after all.’

‘What are you talking about, Ben?’ Luc Simon said.

‘The reason the contamination was down there in the first place,’ Ben said, ‘is that within just a few months, in 1348, the curse appeared to come true. It was a Plague year. The dead and the dying alike were walled up in the crypt underneath Sainte Vierge de Pelvoux. Sealed off from the outside world and left there for their bones to be gnawed by a thousand generations of rats. One of which happened to escape centuries later, giving Streicher the tip he’d been waiting for. It was an easy target. All he needed were the right people for the job, which he already had. Plus the right equipment.’

Now Ben realised what had been haunting him. Roby’s last words as he’d lain bleeding to death from the gunshot wound in his belly. He’d said, I saw ghosts. All white.

Not strictly white. More silvery-white. Streicher’s team members in hazmat suits, foraging deep under the monastery to gather all the toxic samples of dead and decomposed rat tissue they could pack into the white cases Silvie had later seen inside the assault vehicle. Containers for the transportation of biohazard materials. Meanwhile, the hazmat suits, masks, footwear and gauntlets had been in the bags that she had been tasked to burn after the raid.

‘So now you understand what we’re dealing with,’ Luc Simon said. ‘A lethal infectious pathogen in the hands of a maniac who wants to rule the world.’

‘It was a devastatingly simple plan,’ Oppenheim said. ‘If you can’t get hold of modern biological warfare agents, you source some ancient ones of your own. We can only assume that Streicher must have on his payroll at least one expert capable of processing the material. A chemist, or a biologist, or both. We can further speculate that he may have these people at work, even as we speak, on a vaccine or serum that he intends to use to protect himself and his fellow Parati members before unleashing this thing.’

‘Which potentially buys us time,’ Ben said.

‘Potentially, yes. How much time is an open question. If our speculations are correct, Streicher must have access to some kind of private laboratory facilities. We don’t know what, or where.’

‘But you do know that what he’s got is the same pathogen as the medieval Black Death,’ Ben said. ‘Bubonic plague. Which is presumably a disease well known to medical science, and highly treatable.’

Luc Simon looked down at his feet.

Oppenheim pursed his lips.

‘What?’ Ben said.

‘Mr Hope,’ Oppenheim said. ‘I wish it were bubonic plague.’