The Tenth Chamber

TWENTY

Sunday Night

They stayed in a small hotel in the heart of the university. The journey from Ruac to Cambridge had involved changing planes, trains and taxis and when they arrived and checked into their separate rooms they were worn out.

Still, Sara agreed to Luc’s proposal to take a walk in the chilly night air. They were both fond of the city and Luc had a habit of stopping for a pint at the riverside pub, The Anchor, every time he was in town. Years earlier, the British archaeologist, John Wymer, had dragged him there for a few pints of Abbot Ale after a conference. The details of that night were sketchy but Luc had ended the evening waist-deep in the River Cam with Wymer doubled over in hysterics on the shore. Each return visit to The Anchor for an Abbot was an homage to the eccentric Englishman.

It was late and the pub was Sunday-night-mellow. They sat at a window table, unable to see the river in the inky darkness but happy in the knowledge it was there. They clinked their pint mugs three times, toasting Ruac, Zvi and finally Hugo.

‘So, what now?’ Sara asked, wearily.

It was a funny kind of open-ended question and Luc wasn’t sure what she meant or how to answer it. What now for you? What now for Ruac? What now for us? ‘I don’t know,’ he answered vaguely. ‘What do you think?’

‘I think it’s been a crazy few weeks,’ she said. She was drinking the strong beer faster than him. ‘I don’t know about you, but I need a long hot bath and a few days off to read a trashy novel – anything but think about pollen and cave art.’

‘After tomorrow, you mean.’

She agreed. ‘After tomorrow. I wonder what Fred found and why he was so mysterious about it.’

Luc shrugged. ‘Nothing would surprise me. We’ll know soon enough.’

She bore down to the question she was really asking. ‘So, after tomorrow what are you going to do?’

‘The same as always, I suppose. Back to Bordeaux, back to my office, my lab, my papers. We’ve generated an unbelievable amount of data. It all needs to be sorted out, coordinated.’ He looked out the window, trying hard to see the river. ‘The Ministry will be expecting a report. We have to plan the official unveiling of the cave, you know. I’ve got a full voicemail box with French, British and American television companies who want exclusive rights to the first documentaries. Then there’s the manuscript. It’s not fully translated. I’ve got to get in touch with Hugo’s secretary and figure out how to keep in contact with his Belgian decoder. There’s a million things to think about.’

She stared out the window too. It was more comfortable to look at each other’s reflections. ‘We should try to stay in touch. Professionally. You know what I mean.’

Something about what she said or the way she said it made him sad. Was a door opening or closing? Of course he wanted her. She was lovely. But he’d had her before and had forced her away with ruthless efficiency. Why would it be different now?

He escaped from the moment by guzzling his beer and suggesting they ought to get some rest before their morning meeting.

The streets in the centre of Cambridge were nearly empty. They walked in silence up Mill Lane towards the street-facing facades of Pembroke College and when they turned onto Trumpington Street Luc noticed a parked car, a football field away, turning on its headlights.

He thought nothing of it until the car accelerated in their direction and crossed into the wrong lane.

The coolness of the night and the quick rush of adrenalin flushed the beer from his brain. Although the next events happened in no more than five or six seconds he had a beautifully clear, almost slow-motion perception of those moments – and that strange clarity almost certainly saved their lives.

The car was heading directly towards them on a murderous diagonal.

As it jumped the kerb three car-lengths from their legs, two wheels on the sidewalk, two wheels off, Luc had already grabbed a fistful of Sara’s leather sleeve and was flinging her out of the way with all the rotational force his shoulder and torso could muster. She twirled onto the road like a child’s top being released from its coiled string.

He allowed his own body to follow the same path of momentum and at the instant of impact, the fender of the car clipped his hip. The difference of an inch or two, a fraction of a second, or any way one chose to characterise the closeness of it all, was the difference between a bruise and a smashed pelvis.

He tumbled to the road, spun and landed close enough to Sara for both of them to instinctively reach out to each other and try to touch fingertips.

The car scraped and sparked against the limestone blocks of a residential hall of Pembroke College, sheared a gutter downspout, and careened back onto the street where it sped away in a squeal of rubber.

Lying in the middle of the street, Luc and Sara’s fingers intertwined.

Both of them asked simultaneously, ‘Are you all right?’ and both answered, again at the same time, ‘Yes.’

They wouldn’t get to their beds for another four hours.

There were police statements to be given, first-aid to be administered by the ambulance crew who dressed their minor cuts and Luc’s road-burn scrapes and a cautionary X-ray of Luc’s hip to be shot at the Nuffield Hospital casualty department. The young Asian doctor in casualty seemed more concerned with Luc’s red knuckles than his recent injuries.

‘This is infected,’ she said. ‘It’s turned into cellulitis, a tissue infection. How long have you had it?’

‘A week, week and a half.’

She inspected his hand more closely and saw the scar on his fourth finger. ‘Did you cut yourself?’

He nodded. ‘I took some erythromycin. It didn’t do much.’

‘I’ll take a culture but I’m concerned about MRSA. Resistant staph. I’m going to give you different pills, rifampin and trimethoprim sulfa. Here’s my card, call me in three days for the culture results.’

The police took the incident seriously but Luc and Sara’s gut feel of being deliberately targeted was shrugged off by the responding officers who went off looking for a blue sedan and a drunk driver. There were bulletins to put out on police frequencies and CCTV footage from the city centre to review. Luc and Sara would be notified if the culprit was found, etcetera, etcetera.

Mute with fatigue and roughly shaken by their near miss, they found themselves staring at each other in the deserted lobby. He thought about hugging her but didn’t want to add more trauma to her night.

She beat him to the punch.

He liked the feeling of her arms around his waist but it didn’t last long. In a few moments they were limping off to their separate rooms.

Gatinois was almost hoping his phone would ring again to give him an excuse to extricate himself from his brother-in-law. The man, a wealthy blow-hard with a gaudy apartment, was some kind of international currency trader. The fellow had given him the particulars of his job a hundred times but Gatinois shut his mind off whenever his jowly face began to yammer on about weak euros and strong dollars and the like. The idea of making money by electronically shifting pots of currency from here to there struck him as parasitic. What did the man do? For the greater good? For his country?

His wife and sister-in-law seemed engaged enough by whatever he was saying, attentively sipping cognac, a final round of drinks after a Sunday night dinner celebrating the man’s promotion to chief of one of his bank’s divisions.

Gatinois had no doubt what he did for his country. Today he’d spent hours on the phone, even made an unprecedented Sunday visit to The Piscine for a personal briefing by his staff.

He’d been absolutely correct about Bonnet’s ruthlessness and he liberally reminded Marolles of his prediction. Over the past two weeks he had absorbed each piece of news from Ruac with grim admiration. Now the campsite. The old boy liked his blood.

Well, more power to him.

Almost as if he’d willed it to life, his phone began to ring. He gratefully leaped up, and excused himself to take the call in the library.

His wife told her sister, ‘He’s been on the phone to his office all day!’

The banker seemed sorry his audience had diminished. ‘Oh well. I suppose we’ll never know what André really does for a living, but he’s keeping us all safe in our beds, I’m quite sure of that. More cognac?’

Gatinois sank into one of the banker’s library chairs. The book-cases were stacked with old leather-bound volumes, touched by the cleaner’s feather duster and nothing else.

Marolles sounded weary. ‘Bonnet’s been at it again.’

‘Does he ever rest?’ Gatinois asked incredulously. ‘What now?’

‘There was just an attempt to run down Simard and Mallory on a city street in Cambridge. One of our men saw it with his own eyes. They were only lightly hurt. The driver got away clean.’

Gatinois snorted. ‘So his tentacles reach all the way to England! Amazing, really. He’s got balls, I’ll give him that.’

‘What should we do?’ Marolles asked.

‘About what?’

‘ Our plans.’

‘Absolutely nothing!’ Gatinois exclaimed. ‘This has nothing to do with our plans. Don’t change a single operational detail. Not one detail!’