The Nemesis Program

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:

‘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.’

‘We have to get back and check it all out,’ Roberta said. ‘Whatever’s there, Claudine wanted me to see it.’

‘There’s a computer in storage at the safehouse,’ he told her, slipping the hard drive into his bag. ‘With any luck, we’ll be able to access the files.’

Roberta was about to reply when a juddering crash shook the tomb and made them both whirl around, startled.

The massive iron door had been slammed shut from outside. And no gust of wind could have pushed something so heavy.

Someone had deliberately shut them in.

Clutching the flaming Zippo, Ben raced through the darkness towards the entrance and leaped up the steps to throw his body weight against the door.

Too late. Even as he reached the door he could hear the clang, clang of someone on the other side hammering the bolt shut. He pressed his ear to the cold iron and caught the sound of footsteps walking away through the chapel.

Ben pounded on the door, but he might as well have tried to punch his way out of an Abrams main battle tank. They were closed inside the tomb, and there was no way out.

‘Ben?’ Roberta’s panicked voice cried out from the darkness.

‘Stay calm,’ he said, running back down the steps to join her. She latched onto his arm, gripping him tightly. ‘Who’s up there? Who closed us in?’

‘Let’s just say it’s someone who doesn’t want us to get out again,’ Ben said grimly. ‘But we’ll find a way out of this.’ He winced as the hot metal of the lighter singed his fingertips. The flame was beginning to gutter. Their only light source was soon going to run out.

‘You smell that?’ she said suddenly.

‘Smell what?’

‘Something’s burning,’ she said.

Now Ben could smell it too. And it wasn’t the flesh of his fingers smouldering from the heat of the lighter. The sharp, dense odour of burning was coming from somewhere else.

‘This isn’t good,’ he muttered under his breath. Breaking loose from Roberta, he ran back towards the steps and held the dying flame up high.

It was as he’d feared. Wisps of smoke were already beginning to trickle in, under and around the edges of the tomb door. The acrid stench was becoming stronger, and so was the growing crackle and roar he could hear from outside. He touched his hand to the iron door and felt the heat spreading through it.

Whoever had shut them in wasn’t content with merely letting them starve to death among the corpses.

The chapel was ablaze above them.