The Mayan Codex

30

Calque sat in his car, watching the entrance to the Hotel de la Place at Cogolin. It was twelve o’clock. The lunchtime traffic was just building up. He’d tried to contact Sabir three times on the way back from Ramatuelle, but the phone at Sabir’s Massachusetts’ home simply rang in an endless, useless litany.

What would he have said to Sabir, anyway? Watch your back, man? How would Sabir go about doing that? Hire himself a bodyguard? Call in the FBI? Or he could have advised Sabir to take off on an extended holiday. Which was even more pointless. Calque had the Countess’s measure now – the woman was implacable. When and if she ever decided to revenge herself on the man who had killed her son, mere geography wouldn’t act as a deterrent.

In the event Calque didn’t have a single shred of evidence to place in front of Sabir – just a hunch that Sabir felt the same way as he did about the Corpus. That Sabir, of all men, wouldn’t believe that the Corpus’s ambitions had died down there in that cesspit alongside Achor Bale. No. Calque was convinced that they still wanted what Sabir had. They still wanted the prophecies.

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, he realized what a fool he’d been not to trust the girl from the outset. He might at least have got something concrete out of her – some clue as to the Corpus’s true intentions to compensate for his fiasco with the tape recorder. Instead, he’d held back, like the obstinate policeman he still was, and more or less gifted her back to her family. He could feel the frustration eating away at his guts like arsenic.

All Calque’s case notes were up in that hotel room, together with Sabir’s private address, and his detailed annotations about the last conversation they’d had together, including the tantalizing clues Sabir had given him about the 52 lost prophecies – out of Nostradamus’s original 58 – which specifically dealt with the run-up to what may, or may not, prove to be planet earth’s final Armageddon. It had never occurred to Calque to conceal them. He’d been running the show – not the Corpus. Or at least that’s what he’d thought. Now it looked very much as if the hound had become the quarry.

Calque stepped out of the car. His eyes raked the surrounding area. Across the way, a small queue of people was steadily making its way into the adjoining restaurant section of the hotel. Calque felt his stomach turn over with hunger.

He strode across to the hotel entrance and sidestepped through the revolving doors. The concierge wasn’t at his post. Perhaps he, too, was having his lunch? Like any normal person at midday.

Calque scanned the hotel message board. His room key was no longer in place. He had been half expecting that, of course, after the Countess’s hints, but still he found himself having to fight off a strong desire to break into a trot and head straight back out into the street.

Some deep-seated part of Calque’s make-up was still resisting the thought that the prophecies might have any value whatsoever beyond the purely commercial. How could a man born half a millennium ago be expected to predict an accurate series of events 450 years in the future? No rational person could entertain such an idea. Adam Sabir had been in a post-traumatic state, and still recuperating in hospital, when he had told Calque of Nostradamus’s prediction of the 52-year run-up to the Great Change in 2012. Third Antichrists? Second Comings? The whole thing was insane. Calque wondered whether he wasn’t suffering from the early onset of senile dementia. That would explain why he had temporarily suspended all rational judgement and allowed Sabir and the Gypsies to get so deeply under his skin.

But belief or non-belief was no longer the point. Crimes had been committed. People had been killed and injured. Incipient dementia or not, Calque’s sole remaining purpose in life must be to stop the commission of yet more crimes. He owed his late assistant that much, surely? He owed Paul Macron the courtesy of a significant death.