The Lucifer Gospel (17 page)

“Then I will shoot you.”

“Somebody will hear the shot.”

“You will be dead, however. You will not care if the sound disturbs anyone.” Badir smiled.

“Why are you doing this?” Finn asked.

“Because I am paid to do it.”

“By Adamson?” asked Hilts.

“This way.” Badir waved the gun. “Back.”

“Screw you.”

A car drove into the parking lot, its lights sweeping across the three figures. Badir dropped his hand, hiding the gun at his side. He stepped back into the shadows, invisible again. Hilts and Finn stayed where they were. The car pulled in to a parking spot. The engine died, the lights went off, and a short, pudgy figure climbed out of the car. The man made a great production out of locking the vehicle, then walked toward Finn and Hilts. From a few feet away she could hear Badir’s indrawn breath and she knew that the little man with the car was as good as dead. The little man continued forward, then casually lifted his arm, as though he was going to wave hello. Instead he pointed toward the shadows and a bright flash seemed to erupt from his outstretched hand, followed by a small popping noise, as though someone had exploded a damp paper bag. The first flash-bang was followed almost instantly by a second. Finn heard a sound like air going out of a tire and Badir fell forward into the light. There was a small round hole just above the bridge of his nose and his right eye was a gory mess. The pudgy little man unscrewed the suppressor from his Stechkin APS pistol and dropped the gun and silencer into the pockets of his old tweed jacket.

“Bring him round to the boot, would you?” said Arthur Simpson in a mild tone. “I’m far too old to be lugging corpses about. Plays bloody hell with my lumbago, what?” He smiled, eyes twinkling behind the thick lenses of the wire-rimmed glasses. Finn stared down at Badir. Shortsighted or not it had been amazing shooting, especially in the dark.

“I think you’d better tell us who you are first,” said Hilts.

“I think you’d better think again, young fellow. Don’t want to be found with the dead body of a Libyan thug at your feet, do you? The local gendarmerie would most likely have some rather awkward questions for a pair of fleeing terrorists already wanted for murder.”

“His name is Simpson,” said Finn. “And he’s got a point.”

“You know this guy?”

“We met in Cairo.”

“Nice friends you’ve got.”

“I seem to have rendered myself useful,” Simpson said defensively.

Hilts gave him a long look, then bent down and picked up Badir under the armpits. Finn stepped forward and grabbed the body by the heels. They lugged him across the parking lot to Simpson’s car, a nondescript nineties Mercedes 240D. Simpson opened the trunk and stepped back.

“Mind he doesn’t drip on the carpets.”

“Your car?” asked Hilts. He and Finn dropped Badir. Simpson closed the trunk.

“Stole it from the hotel,” the white-haired man said. “Just in the nick of time apparently.” He went around to the driver’s side, opened the doors, and got behind the wheel. Finn got into the front seat and Hilts climbed in the back.

“How did you know we’d be here?” Hilts asked, closing his door.

“I’ve been following you since you left Venosa,” said Simpson. He started the car, put it in reverse and turned the car around. He stopped, put the shift lever into first, then drove quietly out of the parking lot, turning left and driving right by the hotel where he’d stolen the vehicle. “I saw the fellow in the trunk shadowing you at the station in Milan and started tailing him. Thought I might be of assistance.” They were out of the lights in the valley, swallowed by the night. They drove on for a few minutes, then turned off the highway onto a narrow secondary road that led up into the looming mountains.

“Where are we going, if you don’t mind me asking?” Hilts queried.

“Up,” said Simpson. “And back.”

They drove for the next twenty minutes, the headlights of the old Mercedes revealing a narrow gravel road and a cliff on one side, a low guardrail and a dark abyss on the other. They finally reached a widening of the road like a small plateau on the mountainside, and at first Finn thought it was some kind of lookout designed for tourists.

“Now where are we?” Hilts asked sourly as they pulled off the road.

“Halfway up Les Sarrasins,” replied Simpson in an excellent French accent. “A mountain.”

The headlights washed over a strange, bulbous-looking structure seemingly built right into the side of the mountain. There was a dry stone wall on either side of the concrete bulge, and in the middle of that was a large steel door studded with huge rivets. The structure was clearly very old, the ancient cement dark and spawled, the façade crumbled, the doorway caked with rust.

“What’s that?” Finn said.

“Technically it’s referred to as
un gros ouvrage,
a large fortification. An underground fort containing roughly three hundred and fifty men. This is the main entrance. If you look closely you’ll see what’s left of the narrow-gauge railway tracks that used to bring ammunition and supplies up. There are several miles of tunnels and pillboxes cut into the rock. From here they could pick off anybody coming up the valley. On the backside there’s a route the climbers call the Observatory. Well named. It was designed to be an early-warning outpost for an Italian invasion.” Simpson shook his head. “Never happened, of course. Mussolini had many qualities but bottle wasn’t one of them.”

“Bottle?” said Hilts.

“Courage,” answered Simpson. “What you Yanks generally refer to as balls.” The potbellied man in the tweed jacket pulled the Mercedes to a halt and switched off the engine. He left the headlights on, pointing directly at the rivet-pebbled iron door.

“Why dump our friend in the trunk here?” asked Hilts.

“It’s really quite difficult to dispose of a body these days,” said the elderly man. He leaned across the seat and fished a flashlight out of the glove compartment, then got out of the car. Finn and Hilts climbed out after him and went around to the trunk. “Police everywhere, closed-circuit cameras, quality-control officers in the meatpacking plants. Hard to get any kind of privacy.” Simpson opened the trunk and glanced down at Badir. “Your average forensic expert will have a field day with him once he’s discovered. Not like the old days. Bodies floating down the Seine and up the Spree and no one really took a second look.”

Together Hilts and Finn swung the body out of the car and manhandled it to the big iron door under Simpson’s direction. The door was actually slightly ajar and it was easy enough to get it open. Stepping inside, Hilts swung the flashlight around. Except for the concrete floor the entire vestibule was sheathed in the same studded iron as the door, walls, ceiling, and floor. It was like being in the belly of an old battleship.

“Down the stairs,” instructed Simpson, pointing with the flashlight. At the far end of the twenty-by-twenty-foot room was a massive cage elevator, like something out of a coal mine. Beside it was a circular staircase. Simpson went down first to light the way while Finn and Hilts followed with Badir, grunting under the deadweight.

“You really think he’s going to be found in a place like this?” Hilts panted. “I mean, who the hell even knows this place exists?”

“Oh, good Lord! Thousands of people. Bunker freaks, military types, engineers.”

“Bunker freaks?”

“Rather like people who play video games or chart the lives of serial killers on the Internet, then chat about it. Obsessive. There’s a whole raft of them who make pilgrimages to old underground installations all over the world. They organize tours.”

“How did you know about it?” Finn asked. “Are you, ah, a bunker freak by any chance?”

“I’ve been here before, actually,” Simpson answered. They reached the next level. It was a long, low-ceilinged tunnel that led off left and right. Like the room upstairs, this one was sheathed in iron plate. A set of miniature railway tracks ran down the center of the concrete floor. There was garbage everywhere, fast-food containers, beer cans, and broken bottles. Someone had made a makeshift bar in one corner and there was a rotting old mattress against the far wall. “I came here with Bernal and Solly Zuckerman before the war.”

“Bernal?” said Hilts. “Solly Zuckerman?” He and Finn swung Badir onto the mattress with a thump. Finn shuddered and wiped her hands against her jeans. The iron room was cold and drafty, a fitting tomb.

“John Bernal. He was the man who started me spying at Cambridge. He was also my physics tutor. Solly Zuckerman was an expert in primate anatomy at Oxford. Strange pair.”

“What were a primate anatomist from Oxford and a Cambridge physicist doing in an old bunker in France?” Finn asked.

“Blowing up monkeys to see what happened,” said Simpson. He slipped on a pair of thin leather gloves and started covering Badir with a layer of rubbish. “It was 1938. They were in charge of designing air-raid shelters for the War Office. I think Bernal was talking to agents from Moscow as well. Topping the local birds as well, sly old fox he was. I was their assistant. Their young red acolyte, you might say.”

“What did you do for them?” said Hilts.

“I was the one who actually blew up the monkeys,” Simpson replied, tossing an old square of cardboard over the dead man’s ruined face. “Set the charges and all of that. Messy business. Monkey brains all over everything.” He looked down at Badir. The man was almost completely covered with litter. Simpson nodded. “He’ll keep well enough. Hopefully the rats will do some damage, delay identification for a bit.” The white-haired man glanced at his two companions. “Presumably you didn’t think to pick up your passports when you flitted from Milan.”

“No,” said Hilts. “We were in a bit of a rush.”

“Never mind, young fellow. I know a man down the road in Aix-les-Bains who can fix you up with new ones.”

The first person to see Aix-les-Bains for what it was worth was probably a Roman centurion on his way into Gaul from Italy to conquer the unruly barbarians. When he mustered out of the army he returned to the pretty lakeside spot, built a pool over the hot springs, called it
Aquae Grantianae,
and a tradition was born.

Located under the shadow of Mount Revard by the shores of Lake Bourget, the largest body of fresh water in France, the little town of Aix-les-Bains has been soothing the arthritic joints of its wealthy patrons for the last two thousand years. It came into particular favor in the 1880s after a visit from Queen Victoria of England. She decided she liked it so much Her Royal Majesty attempted to buy it from the French government. They graciously declined, then built a casino and a racetrack to further fleece the charming resort’s guests, renaming the hot springs Royale-les-Bains.

Special trains arrived from Paris full of high society who came to paddle on the
plage.
Steamers churned their way across the English Channel, filled with the straw hat and tennis set intent on wiling away the hot summer months in the refreshing alpine air as wives cheated on husbands, husbands on wives, and best friends on each other while Clara Butt sang “The Keys of Heaven” on the gramophone. It was
La Belle Epoque
and as with all
Époques
it faded away like an old soldier, the gilt in the ceilings beginning to peel, the marble floors cracking, and the pipes carrying the hot-spring water making a terrible clanking noise and sounding much like the joints of the patrons it had once serviced. The small and ancient town hidden away in the mountains was virtually forgotten, which was exactly why Mr. Liam Alexander Pyx, the document provider, lived there; that and the town’s proximity to his numbered bank accounts less than a hundred miles away in Geneva, Switzerland.

Finn Ryan awoke as the first pink rays of the sun rose over the mountains and craggy hills that marked the edge of the French Alps of the Haute Savoie. Somehow she had made her way to the backseat of the Mercedes somewhere along the way, and Hilts was now sitting in the front with Simpson, who was still behind the wheel.

“Good morning,” the elderly man said brightly as she sat up, blinking and looking around. “Almost there.”

“Where are we?” Finn yawned. She stared out the window. They were on a high mountain road. To the left, banks of heavy forest tilted upward; below, in the reaching light, she could see the geometric outlines of a town nestled at the far end of a long, wide lake.

“Aix-les-Bains,” answered Simpson. A narrow gravel road appeared on the left and Simpson took it, guiding the old Mercedes up between the scruffy pines, the road winding around outcroppings of rock until they reached a broad, flat meadow on a small plateau. Directly ahead of them was a classic French country house right out of
Toujours Provence
: a rectangular building of old whitewashed stone, a few deep windows and a steep-pitched tile roof. At the end of the lane a roughly constructed carport with a green rippled fiberglass roof sagged against the side of the house. Under it, gleaming in deep, dark blue was a very expensive two-seater Mercedes SLK230.

“Whoever this guy is he must do pretty well for himself,” Hilts said, spotting the car.

“Pretty well indeed,” Simpson agreed. “The war on terrorism declared by President Bush had much the same effect as Woodrow Wilson declaring war on alcohol. It’s always been the same way: one way or the other, war is good for business. There’s a great deal of demand for Liam’s skills these days.”

There was a wooden sign over the door, a name chiseled out in neat letters: LE VIEUX FOUR.

“What does that mean?”

“The Old Kiln,” Simpson translated. The old man pulled the Mercedes in behind the sports car and switched off the engine, the old diesel dying with a shudder and a cough. They climbed out into the cool of the early morning. Hilts and Finn both stretched and yawned. Simpson lit a cigarette. Pyx must have had some kind of early-warning system because he was already waiting at the door, a broad smile on his friendly face. He certainly didn’t look like a forger to Finn. In fact, he looked more like a rock star on vacation than anything else. He was tall, slightly stooped, wearing jeans and a white shirt with the tails hanging out. There were sandals on his bare feet. He had thick tousled, dark hair, two days’ growth of beard, and behind round, slightly tinted glasses a pair of extraordinarily intelligent brown eyes. He looked to be somewhere in his late twenties or early thirties. Finn felt something stirring in the pit of her stomach and forced the feeling back where it belonged. A few hours ago she’d dumped a murdered body under a pile of rubbish, and there were police all over Italy searching for her in connection with another brutal killing. Rock star or not, this was no time for romance.