The Sacred Sword

Chapter Thirty-Nine

It was in moments like these that the principles of physics fell away, milliseconds suddenly became like hours and you really did have time to review your entire life in the time it took for a bullet to cross the space between a gun muzzle and your brain. In stop-frame slow-motion, Ben saw Gant’s face split open and the blood fly from the impact of the kick. Felt his knee connect with his enemy’s ribs and the cold steel of the submachine gun in his hands as he wrestled it violently from the man’s grip. He heard the report of the first silenced pistol shot and the searing whistle of the bullet pass his ear. And heard Jude’s scream from somewhere a million miles beyond his reach at the other side of the church.

Gant kicked and struggled. Ben ripped the gun from his hands and rolled across the floor. Whumph. Whumph. The silenced pistols letting fly.

In a semi-instant snatched in his peripheral vision Ben thought he saw a figure standing in the church archway. Then through the mayhem sounded a percussive, ear-shattering boom. A flash of white-orange flame and a rolling mushroom of smoke. Then another, crashing through Ben’s eardrums like a clap of thunder.

Ben didn’t know what was happening. He only knew that he had control of the MP5 now. He could virtually feel the dreaded knife blade cutting into Jude’s flesh, as though it were his own. Driving another pitiless blow into Gant’s bloody face he raised the submachine gun and took instinctive aim at the big guy with the knife. In the semi-darkness, disorientated by the explosions and the flashes, he couldn’t even see the sights. He felt the trigger break under the pressure of his finger and the weapon gave a judder in his hand as it spat a three-round burst of 9mm shells in less than a fifth of a second.

Jude fell to one side, the knifeman to the other. Jude hit the floor with his shoulder and rolled. The knifeman hit the floor flat on his back and didn’t move.

Ben whipped around to see one of the two pistol shooters lying twisted on the ground. The other squeezed off a shot that ricocheted off the stone wall. Ben realised he was shooting at the figure who’d appeared in the archway and was half-hidden in swirling white smoke.

A third crashing fiery blast filled the church. The pistol shooter was lifted off his feet and sprawled backwards in the dirt.

By then, Ben had was already running over to Jude, calling his name. He saw the blood soaking Jude’s clothes — then realised that almost all of it was spatter from the dead knifeman. The cut on Jude’s neck was superficial. Ben dropped the MP5 and helped him to his feet.

As quickly as it had kicked off, the fight was over. Three men lay dead on the floor of the church. One killed by Ben, two by the mysterious new arrival, who was still standing near the archway, holding a large revolver. White smoke trickled from its barrel and floated up to join the pall that drifted in the air. It smelled pungently of rotten eggs. Old-fashioned gunpowder, the stench that had filled a million battlefields of days gone by.

Gant, the leader of the men, was on his knees and elbows groaning and bleeding liberally from his smashed nose and teeth. Injured and groggy, but still a threat. Seeing one of the fallen pistols nearby he made a sudden and surprisingly fast lunge for it.

‘Ah, non, non. Pas si vite,’ said the figure in the archway, raising the smoky revolver and deftly cocking the hammer with his thumb. Flame burst from its barrel. The gunshot flattened Gant into the dirt like a crushed beetle.

Ben left Jude standing propped against a stone wall and turned to face the new arrival. ‘Thanks, but I might have wanted to talk to him,’ he said sternly, pointing at Gant’s bleeding body.

The man shrugged. ‘That is no way to greet someone who has just saved your life,’ he said gruffly in French.

Ben peered at him. Where had he seen him before? He was about Ben’s height, ten or a dozen years older, bearded and dark and wearing a chequered work shirt. Then Ben remembered: he’d been one of the group standing at the bar in Saint-Christophe that evening. The guy who’d been doing some kind of business with Moustache and left counting his money.

‘Who are you?’ Ben asked.

‘My name is Jacques Rabier. I knew Fabrice Lalique, and like you, I would like to discover the truth about what happened to him.’ He kicked one of the corpses as if it were a sack of grain. ‘It seems I was not the only person interested in talking to you tonight.’

‘Was it you who called me?’

Rabier shook his head. ‘I think perhaps it was one of your friends here, no? You have walked into a trap, mon vieux.’

‘How did you find us?’

‘This is a small village. I knew where you and your son were staying.’

‘He’s not my son,’ Ben replied with a total lack of conviction.

Rabier raised an eyebrow. ‘He looks like you.’

‘What’s he saying?’ Jude groaned in the background, nursing his cut neck. He looked pale and shaky.

‘Nothing,’ Ben told him. ‘Keep talking,’ he said to Rabier in French.

‘I was coming to speak with you when I saw you leaving the hotel in a hurry, and I followed you here. I thought this was a strange place for you to come, so I watched to see what you were doing. Then these men appeared from the trees. I thought that was strange too. Then when I saw them make a grab for the boy there, I thought perhaps it was time for old Jacques to give you some help.’

‘I’m obliged to you, Jacques. One thing, though. If you were just coming to talk to us, why the six-gun?’

Rabier hefted the revolver in his fist and gave a crooked smile. Ben had never seen a weapon like it in action before, the type of old-fashioned cap and ball pistol that harked back to the 1860s and the days before modern cartridges and smokeless gunpowder. In Britain you needed a stack of authorisations to own one; in France they were completely unrestricted. ‘I carry this everywhere with me now,’ Rabier said. ‘It is a precaution I have been taking ever since those men threw Fabrice off the bridge.’

‘That’s what you believe?’

‘You do not?’

Ben took out his pack of Gauloises, offered the Frenchman one, took one for himself and lit them both up with his Zippo. ‘I’m taking it that you’re not the kind of guy to be calling the gendarmerie in such situations,’ he said, motioning at the dead men on the ground.

Rabier let out a short laugh. ‘Bernard, the Chief of Police, is one of my best customers.’ He spat on the ground. ‘But the rest of them are no better than the Nazis who butchered my grandfather and grandmother during the occupation. We have the new Gestapo now, only their masters are in Brussels instead of Berlin.’

Ben didn’t ask in what capacity Bernard was one of Rabier’s best customers, but he had the impression that his new friend was in the illicit booze business. Ben had lived in rural France long enough to know that black market alcohol was a growth industry there.

‘You have no more social engagements planned for this evening?’ Rabier asked.

‘This was it,’ Ben said.

‘Then come back with me to the farm. We can dispose of these connards there, and we will talk. You can stay the night.’ Rabier went to fetch his pickup truck from where he’d left it hidden among the trees, and backed it up to the entrance to the church. Jude retreated to the far side of the ruin and didn’t watch as Ben and the Frenchman grabbed each corpse in turn by the collar and ankles and flung them in an undignified heap on the flatbed of the pickup. Rabier seemed quite unperturbed by the grisly work, and puffed happily on his cigarette. ‘You have done this before?’ he asked Ben. That crooked smile again.

‘Funny, I was just about to ask you the same,’ Ben said.

‘The answer is no, but I have often thought about where I would bury any salopard who fucks with me,’ Rabier said. He covered the bodies with a tarp, lashed it down at the corners, and the load was secure.

They agreed to drive back in tandem to Saint-Christophe so that Jude could pick up his rucksack from the hotel. ‘Are you all right?’ Ben asked him as they drove towards the village, Rabier’s pickup truck leading the way. Jude had gone very quiet and was holding a handkerchief to his neck. The knifeman’s blood was still dripping off his clothes. The folks at Hertz weren’t going to be overjoyed about the state of their seats.

Jude let out a grim laugh. ‘My parents have been murdered and I can’t go to their funeral. I’m on the run from bad guys who want to kill us because of some stupid sword. I’m covered in the blood of yet another person that’s just been slaughtered in front of me. Is it eight now? I lose count. I’ve stolen cars and smuggled guns and now I’ve had my throat cut. I’m doing just great since I met you.’

The count was ten, Ben thought, but he kept that detail to himself.

Jude pointed through the windscreen at Rabier’s pickup. ‘And you do realise that this guy is insane?’

‘I’ve known worse.’

‘Unfortunately, I can believe that.’

Once they’d retrieved Jude’s things from the Auberge, they rejoined Rabier where he was waiting for them on the edge of the village, and followed him to his place. It was a half-hour drive through the lanes before the pickup truck veered in through a gate and bounced up a track towards a large house and clustered outbuildings. The stonework of the house was badly in need of repair, and one of the window shutters was flapping loose in the breeze.

‘It’s worse than Black Hill Farm,’ Jude said.

‘I don’t think there’s a Madame Rabier,’ Ben said.

Rabier led them inside. Wooden crates were piled high in every corner. Ben decided his guess about Rabier’s occupation had been correct. The Frenchman directed Jude towards a bathroom and offered him a pair of overalls to change into. His clothes were ruined. ‘We will burn them later,’ Rabier said, then turned to Ben. ‘Come. We have some dead rats to bury. Then we will talk.’