The Tenth Chamber

THIRTY-FOUR

Luc awoke with a dull throbbing in his head and a sharp pain in his neck. He squeezed the spot that hurt. It felt tender and bruised but his fingers and toes were moving so nothing was broken, he reasoned. He was on his side on an old musty camp bed facing a stone wall. Cold grey limestone, the backbone of the Périgord.

He rolled onto his back. Above him was a bare bulb hanging from its cord. He rolled again, this time onto his right side, and there was that face.

His skin was so white and pure it almost seemed ghostly. The young man was staring back at him every bit as steadily as the Mona Lisa stares down her admirers in the Louvre. It was the Raphael. The Portrait of a Young Man rested on a crate with German stencilling, propped against the damp stone wall as if it were a worthless canvas awaiting the dumpster or a yard sale.

He swung his legs and sat up. His head was pounding but he was able to stand. The room was about the size of Odile’s sitting room, cluttered with crates, rolled carpets and a hodge podge of bric-a-brac: candle sticks, vases, lamps, even a silver tea service. He picked up a candle stick and it was awfully heavy.

Christ, he thought, solid gold.

There was the clunk of a bolt unlocking and the door creaked open.

Bonnet and his son again.

They saw he had a candlestick in his hand. Bonnet pulled a small pistol from his pocket. ‘Put it down,’ he demanded.

Luc snorted at him and tossed it hard on the floor, denting it. ‘There goes half its value.’

‘Who has this letter you say you wrote?’ Bonnet asked again.

Luc thrust out his jaw. ‘I’m not saying anything else until I see Sara.’

‘You need to tell me,’ Bonnet said.

‘You need to screw yourself.’

Bonnet whispered into his son’s ear. Both men left and locked the door again. Luc had a better look around the room. The walls were stone, the floor concrete. The door was a solid-looking affair. The ceiling was plastered. Maybe there was an opportunity there. It wouldn’t be hard to climb up onto the crates and poke around. Then in the corner behind some cardboard boxes he noticed a jumble of hardware and cables. He swore out loud. His computers!

The door opened again.

This time Sara was there with Odile behind her. ‘Ten minutes, that’s all,’ Odile said, giving Sara a small shove. The door slammed again and they were alone.

She looked small and frail but at the same time she beamed at the sight of him. ‘Luc! My God, it’s you!’

‘You didn’t know I was coming?’

She shook her head and lowered it to hide her tears.

He moved forward and pulled her to his chest so she could cry against it. He felt her sobs with the palms of his hands pressed against her shuddering back. ‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be okay. You’re not alone anymore. I’m here.’

She pulled away to dry her eyes and managed to smile again. ‘Are you okay?’ she asked. ‘Did they hurt you?’

‘No, I’m fine. Where are we?’

‘I’m not sure. I haven’t seen anything but the inside of a room like this one and a tiny loo. I think we’re underground.’

‘I’ve been sick with worry about you,’ Luc said. ‘You fell off the face of the earth. I had no idea what happened. I went to your flat. I called your boss. I tried to get the police to investigate.’

‘I never made it out of Cambridge,’ she replied weakly.

She’d stayed at Fred Prentice’s side in the bustling corridor of the Nuffield Hospital. Luc had told her there’d been an emergency back in France. Something bad, nothing more. He had to go, he was sorry. He’d call when he knew the facts, and then he was gone.

Fred saw she was shaken, and in his fractured state, he was the one consoling her.

‘I’m sure it’ll be all right,’ he said.

‘Fred, for God’s sake, don’t worry about me!’

‘You look upset. I wish you had a chair. Maybe they can bring one.’

‘I’m fine.’ She leaned over his railing and patted him on his only uninjured limb. ‘Why don’t you tell me what you found?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’ll do us good to distract ourselves with a bit of science. Have you ever heard of the FOXO3A gene?’

‘No, sorry.’

‘How about SIRT1?’

‘Not in my lexicon, I’m afraid.’

‘Not to worry. It’s a bit specialised. I’m not an expert either, but I’ve been reading up since your sample lit these targets up on our test panel like Piccadilly Circus.’

‘You’re saying there was additional activity beyond the ergot alkaloids?’

‘The ergots were only the beginning. Your broth has quite a few interesting properties. I’d describe it as a cornucopia of pharmacology. Had that phrase on one of my PowerPoint slides, actually. Thought it was apt.’

She wanted him back on track. ‘The genes…’

‘Yes, the genes. Here’s what I know. They’re called survival genes. SIRT1 is the Sirtuin 1 DNA-repair gene. It’s part of a family of genes that control the rate of ageing. If you activate it by revving it up with a chemical activator or, curiously, by calorie-depriving an animal, you can achieve remarkable longevity results. They work by repairing the damage done to DNA by the normal wear-and-tear of cellular processes. You know how it’s said that red wine makes you live longer?’

‘I’m a devotee,’ she chuckled.

‘There’s a chemical in red wine, especially Pinot Noirs: resveratrol.’

She nodded. ‘I’ve heard of it.’

‘Well, it’s an activator of the SIRT1 gene. Hard to do the experiment in humans, but give enough of the stuff to mice and you can double their life spans. And it’s not even all that potent a chemical. Presumably there are better ones waiting to be discovered. And by the way, as a plant person, you’ll be interested in knowing that the Japanese knotweed root is a richer source of resveratrol than wine.’

‘I’ll stick with my wine,’ she scoffed, but he had her attention. ‘And the other gene, FOX something?’

‘FOXO3A. It’s another member of that family of survival genes, maybe a more important one than SIRT1. Some describe it as the holy grail of ageing. There aren’t too many known activators of FOXO3A other than polyphenols in green tea extracts and N-aceytlycysteine so there haven’t been any direct experimental studies done manipulating the gene. But there’s some interesting epidemiology. A study of Japanese men who lived to ninety-five or over compared to chaps who popped off at a normal age showed that the old boys had extra copies of the FOXO3A gene.’

She squinted in thought. ‘So if you could boost this gene artificially, you could achieve longevity.’

‘Yes, perhaps so.’

‘Could a man live as long as two hundred and twenty years?’

‘Well, I don’t know. Maybe if he took your broth!’

‘Okay, Fred,’ she said with rising excitement. ‘What makes you say that?’

‘As I told you, the broth lit up these genes on our screens. It’s not like I’m a genius for testing for SIRT1 and FOXO3A. Our robotic screens test hundreds of potential biological targets all in one go. Once I had that result, I did serial dilutions of the broth and retested for activity, and this is the really exciting thing, Sara: whatever chemicals possess the gene-activating properties, they are extremely potent. Many, many times more potent than resveratrol. And forget about green tea extracts. Not in the same league. Whatever’s in the broth is really extraordinary.’

‘You don’t know what it is?’

‘Heavens no! Our screens only detect activity. It will probably require a small army of smart organic chemists to identify the chemical or chemicals responsible for activating SIRT1 and FOXO3A. These structural elucidations can be devilishly difficult but the academic and commercial interest will be immense. What I would have given…’ His voice trailed off.

She stroked his good shoulder again. ‘Oh, Fred…’

‘My lab, gone. Everything, gone.’

She fished a tissue from her handbag and he daintily dabbed his eyes with it.

‘Do you think it’s coming from the redcurrants? The bindweed?’

‘There’s no way of telling without an awful lot of grunt work. Maybe there’s one compound activating both genes. Maybe two or more compounds. Maybe the molecule or molecules don’t come from either plant but from a chemical reaction involving heating all the ingredients in the soup, as it were. Maybe the ergots from the Claviceps play a role too. Really, it might take years to sort it all out.’

‘So let me understand all this,’ Sara said. ‘We’ve got a liquid rich in hallucinogenic ergot alkaloids which also has unidentified substances which could cause extreme longevity.’

‘Yes, that’s right. But there’re other wrinkles. Two more of my screening targets lit up.’

She shook her head and cast her eyes upwards as if unprepared to absorb any more information. ‘What were they?’

‘Well, one of them was the 5-HT 2A receptor. It’s a serotonin receptor in the brain which controls impulsivity, aggression, rage, that type of thing. Something in your broth was a very potent agonist, or stimulator of that receptor. Not much positive to say about the medical uses there. You might make someone quite nasty with that kind of pharmacology. The other target was rather more salubrious.’

‘And that was?’ she asked.

‘Phosphodiesterase type 5,’ he said with a glint in his eye, as if she’d get his drift.

‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘and that does what?’

‘PDE-5 is an enzyme involved in smooth muscle activity. Something in your broth was an exceptionally powerful PDE-5 inhibitor, and you know what they’re good for?’

‘Fred, this is so not my area.’

He grinned like an embarrassed schoolboy. ‘It would be something like a super-Viagra!’

‘You’re joking!’

‘Not at all. This broth of yours could conceivably make you higher than a kite, turn you into a sex machine with a very bad temper and make you live for a very, very long time.’

Luc watched her channelling Prentice’s pithy summation. An image of the priapic bird man in the tenth chamber flashed in front of his eyes, replaced, with a sad pang, by the thought of the gentle scientist who wouldn’t live to see another morning. He didn’t have the heart to tell her that Fred was gone. He needed her to stay strong.

‘And then you left?’ he asked.

‘Not right away. I stayed until they found a bed for him in the wards, then went back to the hotel to collect my bag. There was a knock on my door. I answered it and two men rushed in. I wasn’t even able to scream. One of them choked me.’ She started crying. ‘I blacked out.’

Luc held her again while she sobbed and told the rest of the story heaving into his chest.

‘I woke up in the dark with tape over my mouth. It was hard to breathe. I must have been drugged because time was way off, all screwed up. I think I was in a car trunk. I’m not sure. They could have taken me on one of the car ferries. I don’t know how long it took but when I got here I was a mess and I was dehydrated. Odile was here. She took care of me, if you want to call it that. It’s a prison. What do they want, Luc? They won’t tell me what they want.’

‘I’m not sure.’ He held on to her shoulders at arm’s length so he could look her squarely in the face. ‘If they wanted to kill us, they could have done it already. They want something from us. We’ll see, but you’ve got to believe me, we’re going to be okay. I’m not going to let them hurt you.’

She kissed him for that. Not a passionate kiss, a thankful one. She held both his hands, then inspected his left arm. ‘Your infection’s improving.’

He laughed. ‘What a small thing to notice.’

‘I was worried about you,’ she clucked.

He smiled. ‘Thank you. The tablets are working nicely.’

The bolt clunked and the door opened. Bonnet was there with his pistol again. ‘Okay, it’s time,’ he said.

Luc moved Sara behind him and took a truculent and threatening step forwards. ‘Time for what?’ he said. ‘What do you want from us?’

Bonnet’s eyes were dull. He looked like a man who was tired and weary but determined to stay awake. ‘You’ll see.’