The Tenth Chamber

THIRTY-SEVEN

Luc was disorientated.

His shirt felt wet. He instinctively touched the fabric. Blood and bits of gelatinous material.

There were men surrounding him, pointing automatic weapons and roughly shouting at him to drop his gun.

Bonnet’s head was half gone. The detonator wire remained a centimetre from the terminal.

Luc let his hands go limp. The shotgun fell at his feet.

From the circle of men, one came forward. He was tall and erect, unarmed, dressed in dark civilian clothes, a black commando-style jumper with epaulets.

‘Professor Simard,’ he said, in an upper-crust type of accent. ‘I’ve been wondering when we’d meet.’

Luc gave him a once-over. He certainly wasn’t from the village. ‘Who are you?’

‘General André Gatinois.’

Luc looked quizzical. ‘Military?’

‘Of sorts,’ was the enigmatic reply. Gatinois came closer and inspected the mayor’s corpse. ‘Bonnet had a long run at the tables. It had to end sometime. Even for him.’

‘You killed him,’ Luc said.

‘Only after you failed.’ Gatinois observed the peppering Bonnet’s body had received. ‘Bird shot is not an efficient way to kill a man.’

‘It was all I had. He was going to blow up my cave.’

There was a commotion as two men in black dragged a moaning body inside the circle of protection their comrades had created.

It was Pelay, bleeding from a chest wound, gasping for breath. One of Pelay’s handlers gave his M1 carbine to a shorter man who had appeared at the General’s side. It was his aide, Marolles.

‘He had you in his sights,’ Gatinois said, adding matter-of-factly, ‘I saved your life.’

‘Are you going to tell me what’s going on?’ Luc demanded.

Gatinois paused to think. ‘Yes, I don’t see why not. Do you, Marolles?’

‘It’s entirely up to you, General.’

‘Yes, I suppose it is. Where’s the American?’

Marolles spoke into a walkie-talkie pinned to his vest and a static reply followed. ‘We’re bringing her in,’ he told Gatinois.

Pelay let out a pitiful, gurgling cry.

‘Are you going to get him a doctor?’ Luc asked.

‘The only doctor he’s going to see is himself,’ Gatinois replied dismissively. ‘He was valuable, but I never liked him. Did you, Marolles?’

‘Never.’

‘His last useful act for us was letting us know you were coming to Ruac tonight.’

The baker’s Peugeot pulled onto the gravel, driven by another of Gatinois’s men who helped Sara out of the car draped in her bloody sheet. She looked confused and wobbly but when she spotted Luc in the centre of the circle, she had the strength to slip the light grip of her guard and run to him.

‘Luc, what happened?’ she asked weakly. ‘Are you all right?’

He put his arm around her. ‘I’m okay. These men, I don’t know who they are. They’re not from the village.’

She saw Pelay who was curled into a fetal position on the ground, making low, horrible sounds. ‘Jesus,’ she said.

‘No, we’re not from Ruac,’ Gatinois said. ‘But Ruac has consumed us for many years. We are devoted to Ruac. We owe our existence to Ruac.’

‘What are you?’ Luc asked. ‘What do you do?’

‘We’re called Unit 70,’ Gatinois said.

Marolles looked down and shook his head. It was a gesture that caught Luc’s attention and alarmed him. This man, Gatinois, had apparently crossed some line. Some dangerous line.

‘You know, during the war, the Resistance leadership, as loose as it was, gave the Ruac maquis a code for the purpose of their communications. They called them Squad 70. They were a particularly ruthless and effective group. The Germans feared them. The other maquisard distrusted them. When our unit was set up in 1946, our founder, General Henri Giraud, one of de Gaulle’s inner circle, chose the name. Not very creative, but it stuck.’

‘I know about Ruac’s role in the Resistance,’ Luc said. ‘Tell me something I don’t know.’

‘Yes, I’m sure you know quite a lot. We’re going to find out how much.’ He pointed to Pelay. ‘How much do you know about this man?’

‘Nothing,’ Luc said.

‘He’s an old bugger, this Pelay. Maybe two hundred and thirty, two hundred and forty years old. Even he isn’t sure exactly. He became a doctor in the 1930s. They sent him to Lyon for training. They needed one of their kind. They’d never allow an outsider to treat them, of course. But Pelay’s always been a drinker and a talker. During the war, he was Bonnet’s number two in Squad 70. Giraud invited him to Algiers for a sit-down. He got good and drunk one night and spilled the beans to de Gaulle and Giraud! Hundreds of years of secrecy, and this buffoon gets drunk and blows it. Their longevity, the tea, the reasons they’re so aggressive. Everything. So, after the war, de Gaulle remembers this, of course, and decides Ruac needs to be watched, to be studied by the best minds.’

Sara’s head seemed to be clearing. She stood straighter, her eyes were more focused. ‘And that’s what you do?’ she asked. There was a bite of anger to her tone.

Gatinois nodded. ‘Yes, for sixty-five years we’ve been studying the Ruac tea. It’s remarkable really, Professor Mallory, and a testament to modern science that in a very short time you were able to learn many of the features of the tea, things that took us decades because we had to wait for the science to catch up to our needs. So, for example, I believe Dr Prentice would have told you about the activity he found at these so-called longevity genes, the serotonin receptors, the other effects.’

‘And that’s why you killed Fred?’ she asked angrily.

‘Well, we didn’t really have a choice.’ He was casual about it, completely casual.

‘Christ!’ Luc exclaimed. ‘You blew up the lab in England! Over forty people were killed! This was a state-sponsored act of terror!’

Gatinois sighed. ‘I wouldn’t characterise it that way. We have a remit to protect France’s greatest secret. Our methods aren’t subject to review and clearance. Nothing is known higher up. Nothing is official. As long as we are absolutely discreet, all is well.’

Luc felt his fear mounting. This man was telling him too much. The implications were clear enough but still, his desire to know more pushed him on. ‘And you had Bonnet kill my people, and try to kill Sara and me in Cambridge.’

Gatinois laughed at that. ‘Did you hear that, Marolles! That’s a good one! No, Professor. Bonnet didn’t even know we existed. None of them did, except for Pelay here. Pelay was our man. Our informer. Giraud and de Gaulle turned him after the war, after they controlled the government. They gave him money. They gave him secret medals and all the status he never got under Bonnet’s thumb. They buttered him up good, and then they threatened him. They threatened to let Bonnet know he’d talked. He knew Bonnet would carve him up and feed him to the pigs. That was his greatest fear. We’ve used the same approach with the good doctor ever since. So Pelay’s been giving us information for sixty-five years. Every time one of the villagers saw him for a problem, we got a sample of their blood, their urine, their swabs, whatever. We got regular reports. That’s all. What Bonnet did – these murders – he did on his own.’

‘You let him!’ Sara screamed. ‘So you’re responsible too!’

Gatinois shrugged it off. ‘Maybe. In a legal sense, who knows? But this is never going to a court of law. What we do is very secret and very protected. It’s probably easier to get France’s nuclear launch codes! But, yes, we let Bonnet be Bonnet.’

Sara stiffened and leaped forward. Her slight body turned into a weapon, and letting loose a blood-curdling, ‘You fucking bastard!’ she closed the gap between herself and Gatinois, her sheet falling away, and naked she began clawing at his face, his eyes.

Gatinois was too caught off guard to defend himself well so Marolles pulled her off. Others subdued her while Marolles pointed his pistol at Luc and warned him to stay put.

Luc was stunned by Sara’s action, the way she was kicking and screaming at her subduers with wild abandon. ‘Don’t hurt her!’ he shouted.

Gatinois blotted a streak of blood on his cheek with a handkerchief. ‘You see, Professor. That’s a graphic example with one of the problems with the drug. It’s a delayed effect, maybe an hour or two after the high wears off. I’m told it’s the action on the 5-HT 2A receptors.’ He guffawed. ‘You know, this job has turned me into a scientist, what do you think, Marolles?’

His aide grunted and told the men to cuff her wrists and ankles, cover her back up and put her inside the car until she calmed down. She yelled and swore at them ferociously but they managed to remove her from their midst, all the while pointing rifles at Luc and threatening him not to intervene.

‘Good,’ Gatinois said. ‘Much quieter.’

‘You’ve gotten a drug out of the broth?’ Luc finally asked.

‘Not one. Three, actually. We’ve had them since the 1970s but, as I said, it’s taken until now to begin to understand the biological characteristics of the most important compound, R-422. These longevity genes, SIRT1 and FOXO3A were only recently discovered. There will undoubtedly be other important things scientists will come up with in the future. Eventually we’ll understand how 422 works. The other ones are easier, better-defined. The main ergot drug, R-27, makes you high as a kite. It’s quite the hallucinogen, really sends you on a trip. The drug R-220, that’s an interesting one. It works on potency and libido. In fact, we had a bit of a scandal on that one in the late 1980s. We had an outside contractor working on the compound, a university chemist who didn’t have a clue where it came from – that’s the way we like to work – and he apparently passed some information about the chemical structure to some guy he knew at the pharmaceutical company, Pfizer. That, apparently, was how Viagra was invented, so I think we’ve given back to society, wouldn’t you say? But our drug, R-220, though it’s even stronger than Viagra, has a nasty side-effect. It shortens and paralyses the sperm tails, makes the men infertile.’

Luc nodded knowingly.

‘And this you were aware of?’ Gatinois asked.

‘Yes, I knew. From the rapes.’

‘Ah. But from our perspective, R-422 is the real gem. That’s what all the fuss is about. That’s what Unit 70 is about. Imagine! The genuine fountain of youth! Live for two hundred years! Three hundred! In good health! And where are the heart attacks? Where are the cancers? What can this do for mankind, eh? Think about it.’

‘But,’ Luc said emphatically.

‘Yes, but,’ Gatinois agreed. ‘That’s the problem. That’s why there’s secrecy. The violence, the aggression, the impulsivity. These are not trivial effects. The drug can turn a man into a wild animal, a killer if the circumstances are right. And what about other longterm effects on personality, the mind? With Pelay’s help, the people of Ruac have been our guinea pigs for sixty-five years. There’s a mountain of data to sort out. The epidemiologists call it a longitudinal study. But most importantly, we’ve been working very hard to get the scientists to modify the drug, to change its structure to retain the longevity effects and eliminate the serotonin effect. So far, no luck. You lose the rage, you lose the longevity. It’s more complicated than that but anyway, it’s how a layman under-stands it. So you see?’

‘I see that Sara and I have been inconvenient for you.’

‘Inconvenient. Yes, a good word, but somewhat understated,’ he said, waving the hand clutching the blood-stained handkerchief. ‘Your discovery of the cave was a disaster for us, and maybe for mankind. Can you understand this? These plants are everywhere. Anyone with a saucepan can make the tea. Can you imagine what would happen if thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people started taking the Ruac tea? For the sake of your little sliver of prehistory study, you wouldn’t want to bring chaos to the world, would you? Millions of stoned, licentious, violent characters, creating havoc? It’s a scene from a horror movie, no? So we kept it contained within Ruac. Imagine if the genie were out of the bottle for ever. No, it’s up to us to protect the world from this.’ His voice rose. ‘Once we’ve found a safe way to exploit R-422, then France will own it, France will control it and France will do what is right for mankind.’

Luc went silent.

Gatinois stooped over the detonator and pulled the broken wire through Bonnet’s dead fingers. ‘They gave you the tea tonight?’ he asked Luc.

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve shown no signs of it. Why?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Maybe we should study you too,’ Gatinois chuckled. He told one of his men to shine a torch on the detonator while he carefully inspected it.

‘What are you doing?’ Luc called at him.

Gatinois stood and rubbed the dirt off one of his knees. ‘It should work well. Bonnet had some men from the old days, good munitions men. If they said they could blow up the cliff, then they could blow up the cliff. We’ll see.’ He called one of his men forward by name. ‘Captain, get everyone back a few hundred metres and set off the charges.’

‘You can’t do that!’ Luc screamed. ‘This is the most important cave in the history of France! It’s a crime of immense proportions!’

‘I can do it,’ Gatinois said evenly. ‘And I will do it. We’ll blame it on Bonnet. By the time the sun rises we’ll have a credible story for everything that happened tonight. Bonnet, the dealer in stolen Nazi loot. Bonnet, the protector of Ruac’s war crimes. Bonnet, willing to murder to keep the archaeologists and tourists out of his hair. Bonnet, the hoarder of huge quantities of old unstable wartime picratol. It will be fantastic, but partially true and the truth makes for the best stories.’

Luc challenged him. ‘What about me? What about Sara? You think we’re going to go along with this?’

‘No, probably not, but it won’t matter, I’m sorry to tell you. But you knew that already, didn’t you? We’ve got to finish the job Bonnet started. That was always going to be the way this ended.’

Luc lunged forward, determined to try to smash the man with his fist. He wouldn’t let them do this to Sara. Or to him. Not without a fight.

A rifle butt struck his back. He felt a rib snap and he collapsed in agony, struggling to catch his breath. When he was able to speak again, he felt the edge of the manuscript through his shirt, the silver corners biting into his skin. ‘And what about the Ruac Abbey manuscript?’ he asked, wincing through the pain.

‘I wanted to ask about that,’ Gatinois said. ‘We looked for that in Pineau’s factory but never found it. What was it?’

‘Nothing important,’ Luc grimaced. ‘Only the entire history of the tea and its recipe, written by a monk in 1307. It makes for fascinating reading.’

Gatinois’s confident expression sloughed off his face. ‘Marolles! Why don’t we know about this?’

Marolles was tongue-tied. He wilted under Gatinois’s withering gaze. ‘I’m at a loss. We monitored, of course, all the communications between Pineau and Simard, between Mallory and Simard. Nothing. We saw nothing about this.’

Luc smiled through the lancinating pain. ‘The manuscript was in code. Hugo had it broken. If you’d been looking at his incoming emails you’d have seen that.’

There were sirens in the distance.

They all heard them.

‘I called the gendarmes,’ Luc said. ‘They’re coming. Colonel Toucas from Périgueux is coming. It’s over for you.’

‘I’m sorry, you’re wrong,’ Gatinois said with some strain in his voice. ‘Marolles will have a word with them. We’re on the same team as the gendarmes, but somewhat higher on the feeding chain. They’ll stand down.’

Pelay, who had been quiet for a time, began loudly moaning again, as if he’d lost, then regained consciousness.

‘My God!’ Gatinois said. ‘I can’t even think with this noise! Marolles, go and finish him. Maybe you can do that properly.’

As Luc propped himself onto his knees, he saw Marolles march over to Pelay, and without a second of hesitation fire a single round into his head. When the percussive sound of the shot faded, the circle was quiet again – except for the sirens in the distance.

‘You’re nothing but a murderer,’ Luc hissed at Gatinois.

‘Think what you like. I know I’m a patriot.’

Luc got himself upright and used the solidity of the hidden book to splint his chest by pressing it against his ribcage with his elbow. ‘I’m not going to debate you, you son of a bitch. I’m only going to tell you that you’re not going to kill Sara and you’re not going to kill me.’

‘And why not?’ Gatinois asked defensively as if sensing Luc’s confidence.

‘Because if something happens to me, the press will get a letter. Maybe it won’t have anything in it about you, but everything else is there. Ruac. The tea. The murders. And a copy of the Ruac manuscript with its translation.’

The sirens were getting closer, piercing the air.

‘Marolles,’ Gatinois ordered. ‘Go and deal with the gendarmes. Intercept them. Keep them well away from the village. Go, and don’t screw up.’ Gatinois slowly walked to Luc, close enough for either man to strike each other. He stared at him for a full fifteen seconds without uttering a word. ‘You know, I’ve read your profile, Professor. You’re an honest man and I can always tell when an honest man is lying. I believe you’re telling me the truth.’

‘I believe I am,’ Luc replied.

Gatinois shook his head and looked skyward. ‘Then I suggest we find a solution. One that works for me, works for you but most importantly, works for France. Are you willing to do a deal, Professor?’

Luc stared back into the man’s cold eyes.

Gatinois’s phone rang. He pulled it from his trouser pocket. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, on my authority, proceed.’ He pocketed the phone and addressed Luc again. ‘Just wait a moment, Professor.’

First there was a flash.

It was so bright it was as if day had come to night, a premature sunrise, blazing and incandescent.

Then came the sound. And the rumbling sensation.

The shock-wave travelled through the ground, rattled the gravel and for a second made everyone sway.

Gatinois said simply, ‘It’s always been a contingency. Now was the time to end it. Our work continues, but Ruac is gone.’