The Gilded Seal (46 page)
THE CATACOMBS, PARIS
24th April— 12:01 a.m.
Tom had been right about needing a guide. Archie was
finding that his normally reliable sense of direction had
been totally scrambled by a bewildering maze of intersecting
passageways and corridors. It was only when their fl ashlight
beams pierced the cloying darkness and occasionally re-
vealed a name daubed or carved into the limestone, that he
got some fleeting indication of what street lay above. Down
here, Blanco, for all his dismissive surliness, was indispens-
able.
As well as being disorientating, it was hard going too, the
ground rising and falling through a series of subterranean
hills that followed the contours of the rock strata. And while
in some places they were able to stand up straight, in others
protruding pipes and low-hanging cables forced them to crawl
through centuries of rubble and dirt and wade across stag-
nant pools formed by the sweating ceilings overhead. Not
that anything seemed to break Blanco’s confi dent, loping
stride.
One constant throughout the changing terrain, however,
was the graffiti. In places this amounted to nothing more
than crude tagging and the occasional political slogan, but in
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others surprisingly colorful and accomplished murals stood
out garishly against the anemic, dusty walls. It was a broad
human tapestry, depicting on the one hand a grinning skele-
ton, two cartoon characters chasing each other with an axe
and an oversize marijuana leaf, and yet on the other a Mayan
sun god, a commemoration of the American moon landing
and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Down here, there seemed to
be no distinction necessary between the trivial and the mo-
mentous. This world set its own priorities.
Blanco paused next to a brick wall to let them catch up. An
uneven hole had been punched through it with a sledgeham-
mer.
“The
catafl ics
brick the tunnels over, we break them down,”
he explained. “They try to fence us in like cattle, but the tun-
nels aren’t theirs to control. They don’t understand that this is
frontier country. We make the law down here.”
“How old are the tunnels?” Archie panted as he wearily
checked his watch and saw that they’d been down here for an
hour already. So far this seemed to be the only topic that
Blanco willingly engaged in and the longer he kept him talk-
ing, the longer he got to rest.
“They are mostly Roman-era limestone quarries,” Blanco
answered, “People have been coming down here ever since.
Look.”
He shone his flashlight at the wall. Amidst the kaleido-
scope of spray- painted graffiti, Archie saw a carved name
and below it a date—1727.
“Aristocrats fled here in the Revolution. Peasants took
shelter during the Commune. The Resistance hid here during
the war. Now it’s our time.”
To Archie’s dismay he led them off again in silence, their
footsteps echoing around them, their flashlight beams carv-
ing narrow tubes of light through the darkness. Another
forty- five minutes evaporated away.
“Good. We’re at the bunker,” Blanco suddenly announced.
“Not far now.”
“The bunker?” Archie panted, his hands on his knees.
“The Nazis built an air-raid shelter under a school near the
Luxembourg Gardens.” Blanco shone his flashlight at a cor-
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roded steel door with a wheel-shaped handle that looked like
it had been salvaged from a submarine. It was off its hinges
and resting against the wall next to the sturdy brickwork of
the blast doorway.
Archie peered inside and saw a sign in German high on
the opposite wall:
Rauchen verboten.
“Smoking forbidden,” Tom translated.
“Just as well,” Archie wheezed. “A fag now would fi nish
me off for good.”
“The arrows point to different entrance points.” Blanco
aimed his flashlight at a section of wall beneath the sign where
colored arrows had been painted on to a white background.
“The black ones lead back up to the street,” he said, turning
away impatiently. “Let’s keep moving. You get a lot of kids in
this section and the
catafl ics
are never that far behind them.”
Blanco vaulted over a pile of earth and stone caused by a
partial collapse in the roof above. Tom and Archie followed
him through the narrow gap and then continued a short way,
until Blanco suddenly stopped ahead of them.
“You see, I was right,” he announced, pointing his fl ash-
light ahead of them and revealing a solid wall. A large skull
had been painted on it in reflective paint and it leered at them
tauntingly.
“Are you sure?” Tom approached the wall. “Maybe we
took a wrong turn.”
“I don’t make wrong turns,” Blanco said testily. “It just
ends here.”
“Then what’s this?” Archie shone his flashlight at one of
the bricks. Beneath the paint, a small hieroglyph of a scarab
had been carved in the skeleton’s left eye.
C H A P T E R S E V E N T Y- N I N E
AVENUE DE L’OBSERVATOIRE, 14TH ARRONDISSEMENT,
PARIS
24th April— 12:07 a.m.
Through here—” Jennifer rubbed her wrists as she ran
from the kitchen, her fingers tingling as the circulation
returned.
She stopped in front of the mirror and then pressed on the
bottom right-hand corner of the frame as she remembered
Besson doing. It swung open. From the stairwell came the
sound of heavy footsteps and the whine of the elevator rising
toward them. Takeshi barked an order and his men climbed
through the hole into the small room. Jennifer swung the
mirror shut just as the shadow of the first policeman crossed
the threshold.
She held her finger to her lips. Takeshi nodded and glared
at his men to stay quiet. A six-man hostage rescue team
armed with night-vision goggles and sub-machine guns en-
tered the apartment and fanned out in pairs to secure the
apartment. At each room they came to, one of them took up a
cover position at the entrance, while their partner, weapon
cocked and safety off, swung inside and ensured it was empty.
Besson’s body was in the last room they checked and its dis-
covery elicited a sudden shout. A few minutes later, Ferrat
t h e g i l d e d s e a l
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and a squad of five uniformed policemen appeared at the front
door and were escorted straight to the lab. Ferrat soon reap-
peared, swearing and giving orders. Somebody, presumably at
his instruction, found the light switch and turned it on.
It was strange to be watching them like this, as if this was
all being played out on a huge screen. Takeshi, especially,
seemed transfixed, his eyes barely blinking, beads of sweat
breaking out across his forehead. Ferrat approached the mir-
ror, still yelling instructions as he straightened his uniform
buttons and centered his hat. Jennifer found herself holding
her breath, Ferrat’s eyes seemed to bore straight into hers,
until he eventually looked away, distracted by the forensic
team that had just jogged into the picture.
“Besson told me there was a way out of here,” she whis-
pered. “An escape route.”
“Where?”
“I’m not sure,” she admitted, checking behind a box to her
left. “I just know there is one.”
She pulled another few boxes away from the wall and then
pointed triumphantly at a previously concealed opening in the
left- hand corner just about large enough to crawl through.
“Where does it lead?” Takeshi asked skeptically as he
crouched down next to her.
“Away from here—” Jennifer nodded toward the mirror.
“Right now, that’s all I care about.”
“Then you go first,” he said unsmilingly.
“Fine.” She dropped to her stomach and began to crawl
inside the opening before stopping, having suddenly remem-
bered something. “Is there a painting on one of those
shelves?”
“What for?”
“It belongs to a . . . a friend of mine. He asked me to get it
for him. It’s of no use to you.”
Takeshi eyed her for a few moments, then muttered some-
thing to one of his men. They reappeared a few seconds later
clutching a small crate. In the top right-hand corner she could
see that it had been marked with a large F. F for Felix.
“That’s it,” she said, turning back to the opening.
The passage was perhaps fifteen feet long and just wide
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enough for her to pull herself through on her elbows. It was
filthy though, covered in dust and cobwebs and mouse drop-
pings. She doubted it had ever been used. It ended in a small
grille that a firm shove sent spinning out of sight. She peered
out, first down, then up, snatching her head back just in time.
“It’s an elevator shaft,” she called as the car shot past.
“There’s a door just beneath us on the other side. I think I can
make it across. Hold on to me.”
Checking that the elevator had stopped, she rolled on to
her back and pulled herself forward until she was leaning
right out into the shaft. With Takeshi holding her legs, she
stretched for the steel cable that connected the top of the
cabin to the motor somewhere in the roof.
“Got it,” she called, grabbing on to it gratefully and pull-
ing her legs free.
“You need to press the switch to release the door,” Takeshi
instructed her.
With a nod, she reached with her foot for the trip switch he
had pointed out. The door buzzed open.
“Climb in,” Takeshi called.
She slid a small way down the cable to get to a better
height, the metal cable searing her palms, and then jumped
across through the open doorway, landing in an awkward
crouch and immediately grabbing the sides so as not to fall
back.
“Your turn,” she called.
Helped by the man behind him, Takeshi carefully climbed
across on to the cable and then copied her by sliding down to
a better height.
“Jump,” she urged him.
He nodded but didn’t move, and she suddenly realized
from his bulging eyes and strained breathing that it was all
he could do just to hold on. Maybe all those years of seclu-
sion and lack of exercise had weakened him more than he’d
thought.
He slid down another few feet on the greasy cable, taking
him below a height at which he could easily jump down
through the open doorway. She lay down on her stomach and
reached out.
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“Grab on to me.”
He nodded and this time launched himself across the nar-
row gap, his hands grasping on to hers tightly.
Beneath them the elevator began to rise with a mechanical
mewl. Jennifer quickly braced herself against the doorway
and hauled him inside, his legs flicking through the doorway
just as the empty cabin fl ashed past.
“Thank you.” He stood up and gave her a small bow as he
patted his forehead down with a pristine white handkerchief.
Then, having clearly paused to reflect on it, he removed his
mask and smiled, his teeth narrow and growing across each
other at odd angles. “I don’t easily forgive. But nor do I for-
get.”
THE CATACOMBS, PARIS
24th April— 12:50 a.m.
Do you carry any tools?” Tom asked Blanco hopefully,
rubbing his fingers across the carved hieroglyph.
Blanco nodded and extracted a lightweight hammer and
piton.
“In case I need to rope across something,” he explained as
he handed them to Tom.
Tom set to work, chipping away at the pale mortar with the
metal spike, the rhythmic ping of the hammer strikes echo-
ing around them. Little by little, the stone loosened, until
Tom was able to lever it out on to the floor next to him.
“What’s behind it?” Archie asked, a dark square now vis-
ible where the stone had once been.
Tom leaned forward and plunged his arm into the void.
“Nothing.” He grinned with growing excitement. “Give
me a hand working some others free.”
Archie knelt down next to him to help. Blanco, however,
held back, prompting Tom to wonder if he perhaps resented a
non- believer revealing this hidden corner of his underground
realm.
As soon as they had cleared enough stones away, they
crawled though the narrow gap and stood up in what was
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clearly the continuation of the tunnel they had just been in.
Checking the map, this time Tom led them off. The passage
veered away to the right and widened out, revealing a series
of large, vaulted openings on either side of them. Openings
brimming, Tom realized as he trained his flashlight on them,
with human bones and skulls arranged into intricate dia-
mond and cross- shaped patterns, like the parterres of a
Le
Nôtre
garden. In a few places these arrangements had col-
