The Tenth Chamber

THIRTY-EIGHT

In the morning drizzle, the crater that had been Ruac village reminded Luc of pictures he’d seen of Lockerbie after the Pan Am crash.

There was no main street. There were no cottages, no café, only a vast black, rubble-strewn, car-filled chasm, weeping charcoal-coloured smoke. The firemen were spraying their hoses down onto flaming spots along the length of the trench but due to fears of instability, they weren’t permitted to get close enough to be effective. The fires would have to burn out on their own.

A good proportion of the emergency services capability within the Dordogne was at the site. Access points into the village were choked with gendarmerie vehicles, police cars, ambulances, TV vans and fire brigade equipment. Ordinarily, Bonnet would have been there, tramping around in his heavy boots and tight-fitting uniform ordering his men about, but they had to make do without him.

Colonel Toucas was in charge of the operation, growling at the news helicopters which were thumping overhead and making it difficult to use his mobile phone.

At the dawn’s first light he had told Luc he reckoned that some of the Second World War-era explosives, picratol, more than likely, stored in a cellar by Bonnet and his fellow scoundrels, must have accidentally gone off and started a chain reaction with other caches of explosives hidden in other cellars.

He added in a hushed voice, that he had it under good authority that Bonnet was a trafficker in old stolen goods, that certain clandestine government agencies had him under surveillance. There was talk of hundreds of millions of euros of gold and Nazi spoils that might be found under the rubble.

Luc looked at him blankly, wondering if he fully believed the story that Gatinois had fed him.

Toucas couldn’t imagine there’d be any survivors; the mangled and charred state of the corpses that were readily retrievable seemed to bear this out. But it would be days before they could reasonably change the mission from rescue to recovery.

Toucas framed the catastrophe with his own point of view. ‘This will be my entire existence for the next year, maybe two,’ he told Luc. ‘You and I will be spending a lot of time together. Of course, by your own admission you killed two men last night, but I shouldn’t worry. You’ll come out clean. These men were trying to keep the outside world out of Ruac, out of their business. They resorted to murder. They intended to eliminate your cave. You were protecting yourself, protecting a national treasure.’

Abbot Menaud arrived at mid-morning to offer up the abbey grounds for whatever purpose the authorities saw fit but Toucas didn’t have much time for him.

The cleric spotted Luc near the mobile command centre and spent a few minutes commiserating. With all the loss of life, it seemed trivial that the Barthomieu manuscript was likely in ashes somewhere deep within the crater, but the fellow did seem wistful anyway.

Luc drew him aside and partly unbuttoned his shirt.

‘You have it!’ the abbot cried.

‘And you’ll have it back soon enough,’ Luc assured him. ‘As soon as I know it will be safe.’

Luc borrowed a mobile phone from an ambulance driver. He’d probably never be able to make a call again on his own phone without wondering if Unit 70 was listening in. He apologised to Isaak for losing his car. Then he asked him to tuck away the unopened envelopes somewhere safe. He’d figure out what to do with them later.

Luc borrowed another car from an archaeologist friend at the museum at Les Eyzies. He drove to Bergerac to collect Sara from the hospital where she’d spent the rest of the night.

She was waiting for him in the casualty ward when he arrived, wearing the spare clothes of a nurse who’d taken pity on her. She looked pale and weak, but when they hugged he felt the strength of her young arms around his neck.

They went to the cave.

Munitions experts from the army had worked all day clearing explosives from auger holes in the cliff-top and the area was declared safe.

Maurice Barbier had arrived in a Ministry of Culture helicopter to personally meet with Luc at the old abbey camp site and hand over the new keys and security codes. He mumbled something about Marc Abenheim’s lack of availability, but anyway, he was sure that pending an investigation, Luc would be reinstated as Director of the Ruac Cave.

He listened in a fatherly way to the story Luc and Sara chose to tell, an official version hastily cobbled together with Gatinois in the dead of the night. When Barbier had heard enough to brief the Minister, he kissed Sara’s hand and flew off into the steel-grey sky.

At the cave mouth, Luc pulled the gates open and switched on the master lights. ‘No protective suits,’ he told her. ‘Special occasion.’

They walked slowly through the chambers, hand-in-hand like kids on a first date.

‘How did you know?’ he finally asked.

‘That you wouldn’t be affected?’

He nodded.

‘Your pills for your staph infection. Rifampin. It boosts an enzyme in the liver called CYP3A4. You know what that enzyme does?’

He looked at her, lost.

‘It chews up ergot alkaloids. It inactivates them. If you were being a good boy and taking your pills like you said you were, I knew you wouldn’t be affected by the ergots in the tea. Or maybe the other chemicals too.’

‘I’m always a good boy. Well, usually. But let’s talk about you. You’re a clever girl, aren’t you?’

‘I know my plants.’

Then he got serious. ‘So what was it like?’

She held her breath while she thought then exhaled completely. ‘Look, I know what happened to me, and what didn’t happen to me. The doctors told me there was no rape. Thank you. And mercifully, I don’t remember any of that part. What I remember was glorious. I was light, I was floating, I felt I was on the wind. It was intensely pleasurable. Surprised?’

‘Not at all. I figured as much. Would you take it again?’

She laughed and said, ‘In a New York minute,’ then gripped his hand tighter. ‘No, probably not. I prefer an old-fashioned natural high.’

He smiled.

‘Luc, I feel so bad about so many people – Pierre, Jeremy and the rest – and Fred Prentice’s death is so profoundly sad. That dear man would have had a field day working out the chemistry and everything to do with survival genes.’

‘It’s awful that it’s up to Gatinois to take the science forward,’ Luc said. ‘I have no trust he’ll do the right thing.’

She sighed heavily. ‘Did we do the right thing?’ she asked. ‘To trade for our silence?’

‘We’re alive. The cave is still here. We can study it in peace for the rest of our lives. They would have killed us, Sara, blamed it on Bonnet.’

‘But we can’t study everything,’ she said. ‘We have to play dumb about the plants, suppress knowledge of the manuscript, be a party to a cover-up. All those murders in Cambridge and Ruac are going to go unpunished.’

He said it again, squeezing her arm. ‘Look, I don’t feel clean, but we’re alive! And I hate to agree with Gatinois about anything, but it would be terrible if the recipe for the tea got out. We had to make a choice. We did what we had to do. We did the right thing.’

She sighed and nodded.

He took her hand and tugged. ‘Come on, you know where I want to go.’

In the tenth chamber, they stood in front of the giant bird man and embraced. For the first time, Luc imagined the bird man’s beak was open in a triumphant laugh, a very human expression of joy.

‘This feels like our place,’ Luc said. ‘I want to keep coming here forever to work and learn. I think it’s the most amazing place in the world.’

She kissed him. ‘I think so too.’

‘I’ll be good to you this time,’ he promised.

She looked up into his eyes in an effort. ‘Once burned, twice shy. Are you sure?’

‘Yes, I’m sure. I’ll be good to you for a very long time. As long as I live.’

From her wry smile he wasn’t sure she believed him.