by Ronan Frost
Beside it, there was another photograph; in it, Guérin appeared to be measuring the face of a Tibetan native with a pair of calipers. He didn’t need to be an expert in Nazi atrocities to know what was going on in the photograph.
Rye moved from the photographs to the books themselves, realizing quickly that the subject matter ranged from the esoteric to the astrological. There were countless books by names he recognized—The Voyage of the Beagle and Origin of Species by Darwin, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica by Newton, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems by Galileo, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium by Copernicus, Physica by Aristotle, Relativity: The Special and General Theory by Einstein—and more by names he didn’t recognize. There were religious texts and doctrines side by side with star charts and so much else in this strange room. There were texts by von List, and Lanz von Liebenfels on “Theozoology” and “Ario-Christianity,” both terms he had never encountered before. Another spine was labeled Das Geheimnis der Runen, which, if he was right, translated roughly to something like The Secret of the Runes. He recognized a couple of the Armanen runes that had been co-opted onto SS flags and uniforms.
There was plenty in this room linking Guérin to the Nazis.
There was even an entire section given over to Hörbiger’s Glazial-Kosmogonie, the “cosmic truth” of the World Ice Theory, which had been Hitler’s favored cosmology as it counterbalanced the perceived Jewish influence on the sciences.
He had a quick skim through, though his understanding of the original German was thin at best. As far as he could tell, the basic idea was that the solar system had its origins in a collision of two stars, one gigantic, the other considerably smaller, dead, and waterlogged. The impact caused a huge explosion that saw fragments of the dead star spin out into space, where they froze into vast ice blocks. A ring of these formed the Milky Way. The planets slowly spiraled inward, along with ice blocks. The proof of this seemed to be in the form of shooting stars and meteors—ice moving through space.
One passage he read claimed that the rock strata of geological eras was actually the result of impacts of these ice satellites.
It was absolute nonsense, of course, but it sat side by side on the shelf with some of the greatest thinkers of all time, giving the idiocy a level of credibility that it couldn’t possibly deserve.
There were several other pieces that referenced the Nazi expeditions into Karelia, Bohuslän, Val Camonica, New Swabia, and Tibet. There were several handwritten letters detailing the search for lost Dacian kingdoms, one rubbishing the notion of Atlantis, and several that seemed to document the search of mythical holy relics.
“What on earth was this guy involved in?” Rye said, mainly to himself.
“This,” Vic said, holding up something he’d found.
Rye couldn’t see what it was until Vic put it in his hand, and even then, he wasn’t exactly sure what he was looking at.
It appeared to be a photograph of some sort of half-consumed body, flesh clinging to the bones. The face was unmistakably Guérin’s. There were strange oily umbilici attached to various parts, including a thicker one at the neck that looked like a cord of rope or a power cable in the grainy photograph.
“I’m sorry, dude. This is just too fucking freaky. There’s no way the guy in that chair is the guy in that photograph.”
“And neither of them are our murderous thief,” Vic agreed.
“I’m not loving this.”
Rye crossed the room to leaf through what looked like hundreds of star charts piled one atop another on a ring-stained coffee table. The first half a dozen were of no constellations he had ever seen before, causing him to doubt his first guess that that was what they were. Halfway down the pile he found a pencil sketch that appeared to be some sort of prayer wheel. There were seven sections to the drum, each pockmarked with different constellations, including the ones he didn’t recognize at the extremities. The stars were aligned across all seven segments of the drum.
The word was inscribed on the top—or at least he assumed it was a word, though it was in no language he’d seen before.
“What do you make of this?” he asked Vic.
Vic leafed through the first few pages. “It’s Tibetan,” he said. “Two characters, la-ma, you might recognize the word?”
“Lama? As in the Dalai Lama?”
“The one and the same. It means teacher, though I’m not sure how that can relate to star charts. These are no sky I have lived under,” Vic said with a confidence that suggested a deeper familiarity with the stars than Rye possessed.
He nodded.
“What about the star-drum? Any ideas?”
The big man shook his head. “Some sort of pillar? I don’t know.” He shrugged again. “The drawing is quite detailed, but to be honest it could just as easily be a doodle as the key to the kingdom.”
Rye nodded. Even so, he folded the sheet and put it in his pocket.
“It doesn’t really change anything,” Vic said. “We’re still looking for the same man. He’s obviously stolen a convenient identity, so the threads are going to lead back to him, even if he isn’t who we think he is. He can’t hide.”
“I don’t think he’s trying to,” Rye said, looking out of the window.
He saw a silver two-seater Mercedes sports car, still more than five hundred yards away, crunching along the winding driveway as it approached the chateau. The driver was in a hurry.
Vic joined him at the window.
“I think things are about to get interesting,” the big man said, but it was the way he said that final word that sent a chill right into Rye’s heart.
TWENTY-FOUR
“How do you want to play this?” Rye asked, looking for somewhere to hide in a building so vast a hundred cloned versions of him could have hidden out for a hundred days without being stumbled upon.
The silver Merc approached rapidly. They had maybe a minute, a minute and a half, before the driver was out of the car and walking up the steps to the house.
“Right now, he doesn’t know we are in here,” Vic said, thinking aloud. “And even with the hire car out on the main road, there’s no reason to suspect anything. We were behind him in Stockholm; if you’re him, you don’t expect to be overtaken when you’re being hunted, you expect to be chased. He still thinks we’re behind him. Probably getting closer, but definitely still behind him.” Rye couldn’t argue with any of that. “We didn’t come through the front door. No broken windows. So, we either hide, and hope he leaves again, conveniently leaving the real painting out on a table somewhere, or we get proactive, take advantage of the situation.”
“You mean hit him on the back of the head, tie him up, and ask questions when he comes to, that kind of thing?” Rye asked, and Vic couldn’t quite tell if he was joking or not.
“A cruder version of what I had in mind,” Vic said, “but yes. Take him down, ask some hard questions. We’ve got about sixty seconds to decide. What do you want to do?”
“It’s your rodeo. I’m just along for the ride,” Rye said.
The big man nodded.
Moving quickly and quietly, they took up positions in the grand foyer, out of sight of the door in the deeper shadows that offered concealment, and waited for the thief to enter.
They didn’t have to wait long.
Rye heard the key in the lock, and the heavy click of the ancient tumblers falling into place. The door opened and light slithered in. The door closed, feet scuffed on the mat. Keys rattled in a metal bowl. All the sounds of the little rituals of homecoming.
Rye didn’t move.
He listened.
He waited some more.
He could see Vic reflected in a huge gilt-edged mirror. It took him a moment to realize the dark shape in the man’s hand was a weapon. A heavy silver candlestick. He bit back on a bark of a laugh at the reflection, his mind quickly and inappropriately conjuring the dapper and dangerous Colonel Mustard, in the library, with the candlestick. Vic
bounced the candlestick off the side of his thigh, tense, ready to explode into violence.
The man came into view. He was talking on the phone, walking into the heart of the house, without looking around. He was dressed in jeans and a casual deep blue linen shirt with sleeves rolled up and one button too many undone to reveal a thick tangle of black chest hair. His words were rapid-fire French. Rye couldn’t make head nor tail of them, but there was no mistaking the urgency behind them.
The man stopped between them, his argument spiraling.
Vic made his move, launching out from the shadows beneath the curved stairs. The sudden flurry of motion drew the man’s eye, and even if he didn’t know what he was seeing, he reacted instinctively to the danger, dropping the phone and bringing his hands up defensively to ward off Vic’s clubbing blow. He took the full weight of the first wild swing on his forearm and blocked the immediate follow-up with his other arm. As Vic drew back his fist for a third huge haymaker, the man stepped in close and rammed the heel of his hand into Vic’s jaw, snapping his head back. In close, he countered with three brutal body blows—left, right, left—in dizzying succession. The sheer force of each openhanded punch folded the big man up, diminishing his huge physical presence with shocking ease. A forth blow slammed into his chin, driving Vic’s head back. His legs buckled beneath him and he started to topple with all the grace of a felled oak.
Rye knew he was there to be seen in the mirror. He couldn’t duck out of sight without risking the sudden movement catching the man’s eye and couldn’t just stand there, either. Without dwelling on what he was doing, he launched himself at the man’s back, the sheer momentum of his linebacker-challenge sacking the man.
They went down together, sprawling across the hardwood floor.
Rye saw the glint of silver off to his left—Vic’s candlestick—but couldn’t break his grip on the man for fear he would squirm out from under him, so he concentrated on trying to subdue him.
There was no holding the man.
He writhed and bucked about like an electric eel beneath Rye, struggling frantically to dislodge him. He grabbed a handful of the man’s hair, tangling his fingers in the stuff, and slammed his face into the parquet.
He did it again.
And again.
When he pulled the man’s head back a fourth time he saw the blood.
Gasping, he loosened his grip, and in that moment Vic swung the candlestick, a crunching blow to the side of the man’s head that put an end to any thoughts he had about fighting back. The stiffness went out of the man’s muscles. He lay on the floor in a whorish sprawl.
Leaning against the wrought-iron balustrade for support, Vic offered Rye a hand.
He took it and stood.
“That could have gone better,” the big man said, the blood on his teeth ruining his smile.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Rye said. He leaned down over the unconscious man and turned him over to get a better look at his face.
A froth of white foamed from between his blue-tinged lips.
The man shuddered in his arms.
And then he was gone.
TWENTY-FIVE
Rye looked down at the dead man, trying to understand what had just happened.
“I’m sticking with my first thought,” Vic said. He gripped the dead man’s jaw and pried it open to reveal a wooden peg tooth in the molars at the back of his mouth, which had come loose, spilling its contents. Vic fished the wooden tooth out of the dead man’s mouth and held it between two thick fingers.
“Is that—?”
“A false tooth,” he confirmed. “Whoever this guy was, he really didn’t want to talk to us.”
Rye retrieved the dead man’s phone.
He put it to his ear. The line was still open. “Que ce passe-t-il? Parle moi. Yanis? Que ce passe-t-il?”
“He’s dead,” Rye said, looking at the dead man. “You might as well talk to me.”
“Qui est-ce?”
“Who is this?”
The line went dead. He looked at the handset, thumbing back through the call log. There were dozens of texts he didn’t understand.
“Anything?” Vic asked.
“You speak French?”
“Some,” he said.
“Then maybe.” He handed the phone across.
Vic navigated through the texts. “There’s only one number. He hasn’t made or received a call from any other number. No name in the contacts list. All of the messages relate to the theft of the painting. The second to last is a kill order.”
“For us?”
“No names, but it’s a reasonable assumption,” Vic said.
“Okay,” Rye said flatly. “So, the pressing question, does someone like this work alone, or is the guy on the other end of those texts just going to send another assassin after us?” Rye asked, thinking aloud.
“They send someone else,” Vic said. “Every time.”
“Well, there’s tonight’s motivation then. Okay, let’s think smart. Give me the phone,” he said to Vic, and a moment later was thumbing through the apps for some form of fitness tracker, anything that might be GPS enabled and show where their would-be killer had been over the last week or so. They were all disabled. “Well, that didn’t work…” But that wasn’t the only kind of tracker out there in the modern world. “Stay here.”
“Where are you going?”
“To the car.”
He didn’t waste time explaining any further. He knelt beside the corpse and rifled his pockets for his car keys. They weren’t there. He remembered the rattle of the metal bowl and found the Mercedes sport’s keys lying side by side with the house keys. He scooped them up and rushed across the parquetry floor, out from beneath the shadow of the grand staircase, and through the main doors that the man they’d just clubbed to death had entered by. He took the few stone steps down to the gravel forecourt and crunched across the driveway to the car.
The driver’s-side door was unlocked.
It was important to keep focused on the matter at hand and not get lost in the minutia and let themselves get derailed. They’d come looking for the painting, not the man, so it stood to reason it was in the car.
He opened the passenger’s-side door, bringing the overhead light to life. There was nothing on the seat, or on the bench seat in the back, and nothing in the footwells.
He tried the bench itself to see if it could somehow lever upward to reveal additional storage space, but it was set firm. He tried the trunk, but the only thing in there was the spare and the tire jack. Meaning the man didn’t have the painting on him.
Which made no sense … unless he’d made a stop along the way?
Rye went around to the other side of the car and slipped in behind the wheel.
He checked the dash for some sort of built-in GPS, finding the disabled handset in the glove box. It had been reset, all of the previous journeys wiped from its memory.
The car was fastidiously clean.
The driver was someone used to leaving no trace of his existence behind, which, all things considered, shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise.
He rifled through the contents of the glove box, but there was nothing in it to indicate where the car had been: no gas station receipts, no paper bags from one of the patisseries of Paris or other convenient clue that jumped up and down shouting: over here, look at me.
The only possible thing of interest was the rental service sticker on the manual, and that wasn’t giving much away other than the fact it wasn’t from one of the regular car rental firms.
Rye took his phone from his pocket and called through to Jeremiah Byrne back in the States.
“I need you to do something for me,” he said.
“I’m not sure we’re quite at that stage of our relationship yet.”
“Funny boy. I’m in a deluxe car rental, the GPS has been scrubbed, there’s nothing but the name of the private hire company. But I’m hoping they’ll have some sort of tracking device on it, giv
en it’s a fifty-grand car. I need to know where it’s been. More precisely if it’s made any stops in the last twenty-four hours.”
“Give me the VIN.”
He opened the door again, and read the seventeen characters of the Vehicle Identification Number that were unique to the car he was sitting in. It was better than a license plate. A couple of seconds later, Byrne confirmed, “The registration’s held by Taranis Inc., a small private hire company. They list twenty-four vehicles in their fleet. Shouldn’t be too difficult to find a way into their network. Give me a few and I’ll get back to you.”
“Good man.” Rye killed the call and headed back into the house, where Vic was in the process of cleaning up the scene. He’d moved the body through to one of the kitchens.
“The painting?” Vic asked, blood still on his hands.
Rye made a face that didn’t need a translator.
Before Vic could ask a follow-up question, Rye’s phone rang.
“What have you got?” he asked.
“We got lucky. They use LoJack on all of their cars. Yours was rented out to a Tenzin Dawa yesterday. He made a single stop after leaving Paris, an after-midnight visit to an address in Bussy-Saint-Georges, an hour east of the city.”
Guérin’s estate was an hour south, so worst case they were two hours away from where they needed to be; less, assuming the autoroute avoided the congestion of the city.
“Do we know what’s there?”
“We do indeed, if by we you mean me. Bussy-Saint-Georges is a relatively new city. Dawa visited an area of the outskirts of the place nicknamed the Esplanade of Religions. It’s a sort of holy quarter, which, given the secular nature of France, is something of a miracle in itself. There is a mosque, a Laotian Buddhist pagoda, the largest Taiwanese Buddhist temple in Europe, a Jewish synagogue, and overlooking them all on a grassy hilltop, a Roman Catholic church.”
“Where did he go?”
“Dawa made one stop, which lasted forty-two minutes. The Tibetan monastery.”
