The Bergamese Sect (28 page)

The policeman didn’t say another word, just nodded and pulled off again. The vehicle headed out of the parking lot.

Walsh screwed up the sandwich bag, turned the engine on and shifted into drive.

Chapter 16

Matt’s mind was more confused than ever. He still felt like this was all a dream, a nightmare real enough to give him frozen hands, a swollen, throbbing arm. The turmoil raging in him made him dizzy.

He looked up and saw the others sitting on a small outcrop of rock by the side of the trail. They were waiting for him.

‘
We’ll take a rest here,’ Clara said as he approached. ‘Ten minutes.’

He sat on the rock next to Clara and looked around.

The sunlit landscape was vast, a mixture of green and grey topped with shimmering white. The peaks of the Selkirk Range towered above the sculpted valleys like bulbous clouds, looking over the rift of Rogers Pass. Here and there, shingle spilled from moraines down the steep slopes, from a distance looking like refuse tipped from the summits. Summits that were capped with strands of brilliant snow.

Pines, cedars and mountain hemlocks were scattered along the long, winding crevasses and colourful summer blooms bordered the stony trail. Purple and yellow mountain lilies. The landscape looked vibrant, energetic, but somehow faintly untrustworthy, devious. Below them, the fast-flowing waters of the Asulkan Brook pounded the rocks. The milky melt waters reminded Matt of a swirling river into which he’d plunged from a speeding train. The memory caused him to shiver, sending rivulets of sweat running coldly into his underclothes.

‘
How much further is it?’ Matt asked.

Clara glanced at Henric.

‘
Maybe another five miles or so,’ he said. ‘The cabin is just below the glacier.’

Matt looked worriedly up the trail. Ahead, the valley rose toward a series of craggy peaks. And just visible beyond its curve, sat the source of the waters – the enormous Asulkan Glacier, crisp and shimmering in the sunshine. It seemed an enormous distance to the ice fields.

‘
And the disk is in the cabin?’

‘
Not exactly,’ said Henric with a strange smile on his lips. ‘It’s on the glacier.’

Matt just stared at him. ‘On the glacier?’

‘
Yeah.’

‘
What do you mean?’

‘
It’s buried. On the glacier.’

Matt screwed his face up, perplexed. He let out a gust of disbelief. ‘You like to make this difficult, don’t you,’ he said, looking away.

‘
Sorry,’ Henric said, ‘but our friend got scared, thought he was being followed. He panicked, got rid of the disk quickly.’

‘
And you know where to find it?’

‘
Yeah, he sent me the coordinates.’

‘
Jesus!’ Matt said. He looked up at the solid sheet of ice on the horizon. ‘What was he doing up here in the first place?’

‘
Running,’ suggested Clara.

Matt shook his head. ‘Surely it would have been easier to get the one at the farmhouse.’

‘
Too dangerous. The place will be watched.’

‘
What about a bank vault somewhere?’

‘
Bank managers can be bribed. We had to put it out of reach.’

Matt stared at his companions disgustedly. He slipped his backpack off and let it fall onto the grass. But the strap scraped heavily over the wound on his upper arm. He grimaced.

They hadn’t had time to get to a doctor since that dreadful train journey and the escape to Krakow. Henric had examined him at the farmer’s house, after they’d dragged him screaming from the river. Henric thought the bullet had done little damage, just nicking the muscle, and would heal quickly.

But Matt wasn’t convinced. The wound was deep. It sent sharp, cutting waves of pain right into his back. The muscle shuddered with the faintest pressure. He looked at the others, but they were ignoring him. They didn’t give a stuff about him.

Suddenly, he felt an anger building in his chest. ‘I don’t think I can take much more of this,’ he said, squeezing his arm gently to relieve the pain. ‘This arm hurts like hell. And here I am, in the wilderness, pursuing a cause I don’t even believe in.’

His words weren’t directed at anyone, but Clara turned to him. ‘You don’t believe people have a right to know?’

‘
Know what?’ Matt snapped.

‘
The truth. What the governments of the world are doing.’

She was doing it again; assuming Matt’s acceptance of her delusions. That really made him angry. He’d been kidnapped by these people, been shot, thrown from a speeding train and dragged up a mountain. And they thought he was part of their society of believers. That he had become one of them.

His need to scream at them was almost overwhelming. His head was swimming, the pain in his arm stabbing at him, mixing with the slight altitude sickness. The weight of his helplessness descended on him. He was stuck in some kind of Spielbergian screenplay, full of ideas too suburban, too Hollywood, to be part of reality. But this wasn’t the movie theatre; it was his life, a life already emotionally devastated, now being torn into smaller shreds.

Matt’s eyes moved to Clara with a fiery glare. ‘What truth?’ he said. ‘There
is
no truth. People like you will do anything to have a cause to believe in. It’s what makes your lives complete. It’s like some kind of hypochondria. Unless there’s something dark and formidable to believe in, you feel cheated. I think it just stops you remembering you’re like everybody else; that you’re normal.’ There was real venom in his tone.

Clara’s eyes fogged. A dark expression, one Matt had seen before, rolled over her face. ‘I know that’s how it looks,’ she said. ‘But frankly, Matt, I don’t give a shit what you think.’

She jumped up suddenly, reached into her jacket and pulled out a handgun.

Matt was shocked; it was the first time he’d seen her with a weapon since London. The memory of her pulling the trigger that day came back in an instant. The blood-soaked pavement. A man’s head exploding into crimson mist. The perverse detachment as the girl had watched the agent crumple to the floor.

Clara raised the gun to Matt’s temple. ‘Perhaps I’ll just take this gun and put an end to your misery!’ she said through gritted teeth.

Matt was on his feet, his arms instinctively raised. His body went numb, waiting for the moment of death.

Henric stood quickly. ‘Clara!’ he stammered.

There was something unstable behind Clara’s beautiful features. Something that could well up unexpectedly like a hot geyser, scalding him in a rush of torrid emotions. Matt could see in that simmering face the determination, the longing even, to kill him there and then. He stared, caught in the enigma of those brooding eyes.

Then something flashed in her and the darkness left her face, replaced with a sadistic, dormant smile.

Matt felt a lump of panic in his throat and the warm glow of adrenaline dispersing through his veins.

Clara slipped the gun back into her jacket. She didn’t say another word – no apology, no explanation, no reprimand. She just turned away, stared at the distant peaks.

Matt and Henric sat down, unable to speak.

‘
You know, Matt,’ Clara said after a moment, ‘when I was a girl, I had an uncle who had a farm up in Scotland. I used to stay there in the holidays.’

She was still looking out across the mountains, a calm but distant emotion, like recognition, reflected in her eyes.

‘
I loved that place. It was so peaceful. Simple. I used to take the dogs across the hills, jumping over streams, running through the meadows. One day – I was about nine I think – I said something about the woods being magical. My uncle laughed and said there were fairies living there. And I believed him. I used to go down to the trees every afternoon, hoping I’d catch a glimpse of the little people dancing in the shade. Then, one day, I saw them.’

She glanced briefly toward Matt, testing his reaction to her words, but ignoring his empty expression.

‘
Really
I did,’ she went on. ‘Six tiny people, all dressed in green with wings like dragonflies, hopping and skipping on a rotten tree trunk. Singing and laughing. They were beautiful.’

A smile crossed Clara’s lips. Her sight flicked across the green trees around them.

‘
I sat and watched them play, clapping to their rhythms, mesmerised. Then they waved at me and flew off into the treetops. I ran home. I told my uncle I’d seen the fairies. And do you know what he said?’

Matt and Henric remained silent, but Clara wasn’t looking for guesses.

‘
Don’t be stupid Clara
he said,
there’s no such thing as fairies
.’

She paused for a moment, looked at the ground.

‘
I was devastated, not because he’d lied, but because the world had tricked me, made me see things that weren’t there. The next day I went back to the woods. And guess what. There, dancing on a log, were the fairies.’ She looked at Matt, eyebrows raised. ‘But this time I didn’t sit and watch,’ she said. ‘This time I ran home screaming.’

Clara looked back at the mountains. Turning, she sat back down and sighed.

‘
If something’s not supposed to exist,’ she went on, ‘it can become two things. An object of terror or an object of ridicule. There have always been things we don’t understand, that scare us. Devils, witches, ghosts, vampires. These days we like to think we’re above that kind of superstition. We can look back and ridicule because we’ve exorcised those fears. We know they don’t exist. And if we find something new, that defies understanding, we still cling to our view of the universe. We find a way of fitting it into our world, offering ourselves an explanation. If that doesn’t work, we’ll still convince ourselves it’ll eventually be put in its place, become part of the mechanics of reality. Then we ridicule it, to stop ourselves being scared. So we no longer need to worry about it. Maybe there
were
fairies there that day, maybe there weren’t. All I know is that I saw them. But I learnt something valuable that day. It taught me that you couldn’t trust anyone. That whatever anybody says, it’s just the way they see things. It doesn’t mean it’s the right way to see things. And we shouldn’t discount something just because it can’t be explained, or terrifies us.’

Matt was struggling with Clara’s monologue. He couldn’t deny a certain truth in her words. But if he were to accept her view, he would be welcoming a deluge of contradictions. A world where anything was allowable, where all certainties were sacrificed.

‘
Aliens are like fairies,’ Clara said. ‘We know they shouldn’t exist. That’s why most people ridicule the idea. But some of us allow ourselves to believe.’

‘
It’s easy to say you believe in something, Clara,’ Matt said. ‘Convincing people is another thing. If you think you have some evidence, then why don’t you just come out with it, instead of stringing me along like all the other believers you seem to disassociate yourself from.’

Clara stared blankly. ‘I don’t think I have the evidence you’d need. Just a strong conviction.’

Matt pursed his lips in an expression of unsurprise. ‘A strong conviction isn’t good enough,’ he said. ‘It might be, if you were a preacher trying to convert me. But for alien abduction, you’ll need much more than that. Why can’t you see that?’

‘
I do see that,’ Clara answered. ‘That’s why I’m sitting here in the mountains. It’s what I’ve spent most of my life searching for. If I had that evidence, this mission would be over.’

‘
And until you find what you’re looking for, you’re asking me to believe it. Well, I’m sorry, Clara, but that’s not fair. Your crusade is your own business. I’ve agreed to help you, mainly because I don’t want a bullet in my head, but don’t ask me to baptise myself in your church until you’ve convinced me I need salvation.’

Clara’s eyes narrowed noticeably. She seemed faintly disturbed by Matt’s words, somehow troubled by something he’d said.

‘
Church?’ she repeated. ‘Why do you say church?’

‘
It’s just a comparison. You seem to have that kind of blind faith, like a religious conviction, as if questioning your beliefs is heresy. Well, I think any belief that dismisses alternatives is dangerous.’

‘
I don’t think it’s us who are the dangerous ones here. Besides, we’re not people who’ll believe just anything, Matt.’

‘
I don’t suppose you are. Still, you’re fanatical about your beliefs, at least the ones that drive your lives, though you don’t have a shred of testable evidence.’

Clara looked away again. ‘Perhaps that will change once we find who we’re looking for,’ she said, her eyes focussed on the distant glacier.

Matt followed her gaze to the rocky heights above. ‘This man you’re trying to find,’ he said, ‘who is he?’

Clara continued to watch the mountains, though a resigned smile crossed her lips. ‘We don’t know. He reached us about two years ago, by email – an untraceable email. He said he knew the truth and was willing to share it with us. At first, we ignored him, but he became insistent. Eventually he started feeding us information, nothing remarkable, just bits of information to keep us interested. Most of it we managed to verify. But about a year ago he managed to convince us that he really was the person we need to talk to.’

‘
How?’

‘
He put us in touch with some abductees.’

More disappointment showed on Matt’s face. ‘C’mon Clara, we all know abductees are psychotic.’

‘
Well, most of them. But what this man gave us was a list of people. People he said were all victims of abduction, some of them not even aware of it. None of them had ever admitted to anything like this before, nor had they sought any form of publicity. We tracked them down, began studying them, profiling them, without their knowledge. We didn’t use hypnosis, suggestion, anything like that. We just infiltrated their lives, pulling back the layers of secrecy we all hide behind. And it was clear that something
had
happened to them; their memories were missing. They
had
been abducted. The details the contact gave were astonishing. Dates, times, locations, marks on their bodies. In some cases, even details of their individual experiences. It got us thinking; how could this person know these things, unless he really was involved? It proved that he knows the truth. These people were
real
evidence. It’s fine saying someone who claims something is a fraud. But this man had pointed the finger at people who weren’t even aware they were a fraud. Where does that leave you?’