The Nemesis Program

Chapter Eighteen

Ben didn’t say much during the night drive to the GPS location on the map, and Roberta lapsed into her own thoughts. She spent a while musing over the numbers from Claudine’s letter, then put the crumpled sheet away and gazed pensively out of the window. Traffic thinned out to almost nothing as they left Paris behind, following the Alpina’s satnav system towards the ancestral home of Fabien De Bourg. They passed through the outskirts of a village with a sleepy railway station, then soon afterwards turned off the main road and found themselves meandering down a country lane skirting a high stone wall that seemed to go on and on.

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.