by By Jon Land
“Then how do we get inside?” Danielle asked.
Mathieu dangled a tarnished key before her. “One of the advantages of being on the museum’s board of directors.”
They walked around the side of the building to a service entrance. Mathieu fitted his key into the lock and the door opened with a click.
“This isn’t a very well-known museum,” he explained, as he switched on a bank of lights, “and not well appointed by European standards. It mostly contains archaeological finds of local interest like statues, busts, friezes, tools, coins, and pottery.”
“No manuscripts?” Danielle prodded.
Mathieu smiled. “Just one.”
They wound their way through an exhibit hall. The display cases interested Danielle the most, since it was logical to assume that the completed manuscript to which Mathieu was referring would be contained within one. But he trudged past all of these in favor of a smaller wing of the museum that contained waxwork re-creations of famous area residents through history.
“This is the closest museum to Nostradamus’s home in Salon,” Mathieu told her. “As such we’ve adopted the prophet as one of our own. See for yourself.”
He stopped before a glassed-in, sealed exhibit with a black curtained backdrop featuring an elegant reproduction of a sixteenth-century room. A wax figure sat at a writing desk, pen in hand, a quill pen touched to the top of a hefty stack of pages.
“Inspector Barnea, may I present Michel de Nostredame, captured in his thirties at the height of his powers.”
The bearded figure wore a tie shirt and open vest, his captured pose appearing almost trancelike.
“The pleasure’s all mine,” Danielle returned. “But that’s not what I came for.”
“Oh, but it is, mademoiselle,” Mathieu said, and moved to a door, the contours of which were disguised by the glass.
He slipped a key into a slot Danielle had first taken to be a chip in the glass and opened the door. Then he entered the room and beckoned Danielle to join him. She felt a gush of cool, dehumidified air and followed Mathieu to the writing desk. Once there, he gently removed the thick stack of pages from beneath the wax figure’s pen and extended them toward her.
“I give you the lost prophecies of Nostradamus,” said Mathieu. “In their entirety.”
“Interesting hiding place,” Danielle noted, when they had exited the exhibit.
Mathieu locked the glass door behind them and laid the pages down atop a small table upon which rested a tablet outlining the life and works of Nostradamus. “I thought you’d like it. The last place, I’d venture to say, anyone would ever expect to find a priceless document.”
“You’ve kept the manuscript all these years, since you were a boy, haven’t you?”
“My father must have returned for it before we fled the abbey for good. He never actually told me about the manuscript. I found it among his possessions after he died. Even though the translation was difficult to manage, I knew it could only be one thing. I’ve been its keeper ever since.”
“The condition of the pages . . .”
“I treat them regularly with a special preparation to make sure they are preserved.”
“And you never considered sharing the manuscript with the world?”
Mathieu’s gaze grew somber. “I had experienced what the prophecies could do in the wrong hands, Inspector. The only thing that kept me from destroying them altogether was their historical value, not their monetary worth.”
“And you were never once curious about what they had to say?”
Mathieu shrugged. “Curious? Not really. I do not believe the future is meant to be known before it happens. But I can tell you over ninety quatrains are contained in the pages.”
“I’m only interested in one.”
Mathieu led her to an upstairs office that featured a PC workstation rigged into the museum’s central server. Danielle had no idea how much memory was required to run Henley’s encryption software but fully expected the capacity of the server would be more than enough.
She carefully removed the pages of the manuscript recovered in Buchenwald from the lockbox and laid it down next to the thicker pile Mathieu had removed from the exhibit. Danielle then quickly matched the last prophecy in her stack to one two-thirds down in the larger one. She switched the machine on and inserted Henley’s disc into the drive. Seconds later the program was running, cueing her to enter the desired item. Danielle carefully typed in the fourth line of the prophecy exactly as Nostradamus had written it in the original manuscript. The machine whirred, a lightbulb icon flashing to indicate the information was being processed.
Danielle felt her heart thudding as she awaited the result.
In an age of two’s four, in a land of many
An army rises from midland afar on a day of equal light and dark
Beneath the flames of the bringer of fire, a darkness will reign eternal
Danielle recited the three lines to herself while she waited, stopped when the computer had stopped whirring. The lightbulb icon no longer flashed. On screen the fourth line of the prophecy had been decoded and translated into English. Danielle leaned forward and read.
Went cold.
Because everything was clear.
“Do you believe now, mademoiselle?” Mathieu asked calmly, reading over her shoulder.
“We’ve got to go,” Danielle said, ejecting the disc and then gently smoothing the original manuscript back into a neat pile. “Can I take this with me?”
Mathieu frowned, seemingly about to reject her request when he suddenly shrugged. “I suppose so. It’s not doing the world any good here, is it?”
Danielle shook her head and they retraced their route downstairs, then through the exhibit halls, turning off lights on the way. Danielle focused on what she had just learned, contemplating the steps available to her now that the prophecy’s translation was complete. She considered the plot in its entirety, the sheer simple madness of it lying in its utter simplicity. The fourth line holding the final key to why the old veterans of the 121st Evacuation Unit had to die, the roots of their deaths forged long, long before.
Finally she recognized the door through which they had entered the museum. Mathieu yanked it open and light flooded in, blinding Danielle long enough to keep her from seeing the four armed men standing directly in front of her.
“A pleasure to see you again, Inspector Barnea,” greeted Klaus Hauptman, stepping between them.
* * * *
Chapter 64
T
he four men now standing rigidly behind Hauptman looked oddly Western. Oddly because there was something forced and uneasy about the way they held themselves. But they were professionals; the way they held their pistols told Danielle that much.
“Ironic, isn’t it?” Hauptman asked Mathieu. “First our fathers meet and now, in another age, we follow the same path in a virtually identical pursuit.” The men behind Hauptman stiffened perceptibly, as he returned his attention to Danielle. “I assume you now have the complete manuscript in your possession. If you’d be so kind as to hand it over . . .” When Danielle held her ground, his eyes moved to her backpack. “I assume the lockbox is inside that, Inspector.”
Danielle reached inside and removed the lockbox slowly, still weighing her options. “You’re a part of this,” she said, extending it toward him.
“I’m a part of something, yes. What it is, I don’t really care.” Hauptman snatched the lockbox from her grasp and stepped back beyond her reach and closer to his armed escort. “For me it’s a simple exchange of merchandise. I’m just a broker.”
“Bullshit. You got innocent people killed,” Danielle accused. “Old men and women, war heroes in the United States.”
“Who had the unfortunate occasion to stumble upon a relic of history uncovered by my father.”
“You mean stolen from mine,” Mathieu sneered, trembling with rage and fear.
“Alas, history repeats itself,” Hauptman gloated
. “I wonder if even Nostradamus could have seen such a thing as he gazed into the future. First Henley contacts me about his lost prophecies, then a second party offers infinitely better terms.”
“What’s your fee, Herr Hauptman?”
“Isn’t it obvious, Inspector?” He held up the lockbox she had just handed him. “The contents of this. I can’t even imagine what an original copy of the lost, final prophecies of Nostradamus might yield in the open market. Millions, tens of millions if advertised and auctioned properly.” He stared Danielle right in the eye. “Not bad in exchange for the life of whoever delivered it to me. My employers will be most pleased. They wanted to take action in Berlin, move on you at your hotel, but I talked them out of it. Convinced them you might be able to uncover materials far more interesting to them in France.”
“You knew I had the complete manuscript,” said Mathieu, shaking his head in disbelief.
“I knew it existed somewhere and that a man like you would be stupid enough to hide it from the world.” Hauptman turned his gaze on Danielle. “Inspector Barnea here was kind enough to aid me in this pursuit. I owe her quite a debt.”
“My father should have killed yours when he had the chance,” Mathieu threatened. “I won’t make the same mistake.”
And then he barreled forward awkwardly into Hauptman, throwing his entire weight into the smaller man as he lashed out with his cane toward the gunmen.
“Run!”
Danielle lurched away and rushed down the narrow street. She hated leaving Jacques Mathieu behind, but knew she had no other choice. The clack of gunshots echoed well before she reached Boulevard de l’Amiral Courbet, forcing her to run in a crouch and pin herself as close to the building as she dared without sacrificing speed. A pair of bullets cracked into the brick and showered her with dust and fragments. But an instant later she had swung onto the main road and was swallowed by the marchers in the parade.
Rat-tat-tat. . .
The sound stopped the breath in her throat, submachine gun fire surely. But another series of bursts made her realize it was nothing more sinister than firecrackers being set off by joyous revelers awash in celebration and alcohol. Both simply dressed and costumed parade participants jaunted along the street, a springy hop to their step courtesy of the hefty mugs of sangria wine each of them toted.
Danielle surged on, slicing her way through the crowd as her feet mashed orange rinds, lemon peels, and strips of ribbons and crepe paper— the residue of spilled sangria and marchers. She gazed backward in search of the gunmen who had accompanied Klaus Hauptman here, but could make out nothing through the cluster of revelers.
Who are these men?
Danielle had no doubt that they were part of whatever was about to befall the United States, dispatched by the force behind the strike. But there was something oddly familiar about the way they held themselves and their weapons, as well as the insolent glares plastered across their faces. They reminded her of the Hezbollah soldiers or Syrian secret police she had come up against so often through the years.
Danielle decided her best strategy was to retrace her steps as well as she could back to her abandoned car. Assuming the nearby streets were clear by now, the car would afford her the safest and quickest means of escape.
Passing the next cross street, though, showed her this was not to be. Partying tourists and locals had clogged roads and snarled traffic as far as the eye could see. With no other choice, Danielle continued to move with the flow of the parade crowd east toward the Arènes, or Arena, considered to be the best preserved Roman amphitheater in the world.
A miniature of the Coliseum in Rome, it was the size of nearly three football fields and still boasted a seating capacity of nearly twenty-five thousand. Legendary gladiator battles and wild-boar chases had once packed its bleachers full. More modern times, though, had left it as little more than a historical artifact except for occasional performances and this annual spring homage to Spain when fans packed its seats for la corrida, largely ceremonial bullfights that formed the highlight of these festival days.
Ahead, Danielle could see a steady stream of parade goers pouring into the Arena. The sounds of cheers and applause from within it rose above the revelry, drowning out another series of firecrackers.
Danielle heard a gasp and saw a man on her right tumble to the street, his hefty pitcher showering those around him with sangria the same red color as the blood that speckled the back of his shirt.
Not firecrackers this time, then: bullets!
Danielle quickened her pace, slicing through the drunken crowd for the Arena.
* * * *
Chapter 65
I
nside the cavernous Arena’s dark underbelly, the air was rife with heat and sweat. The stench of urine drifted in the air, evidence of revelers using darkened corners and the cover of ancient columns to relieve themselves.
Danielle could see that the crowd, while mostly men, contained enough women so she wouldn’t stand out terribly. The problem was that virtually all the women were dressed in the comfortable flowing skirts and print shirts of Spain, in stark contrast to her slacks and boots. She stayed on the move, hoping for a quick exit through which to duck back out, but quickly realized the ancient Arènes had not been constructed with such conveniences in mind.
The flow of the crowd banked upward onto a ramp that rose back toward the sunlight and spilled out on the Arena’s lowest tier. Below on the dusty grounds that had once grown wet with blood, at least a dozen bulls jousted with brilliantly costumed matadors and handlers in the oddly restrained choreography that formed in this area the essence of la corrida. Danielle knew the men, professionals all, were in little danger. But the mere possibility of being gored by a razor-sharp horn, combined with the ever-dwindling space between man and charging beast, left the celebrating crowd in awe. At times, the fights crisscrossed with matadors exchanging bulls, or aligned so the beasts converged from two directions at once.
Danielle slid on with the crowd’s flow, still in search of the nearest exit.
“Hey, watch the fuck where you’re going!”
The protest, yelled in French, made her twist to the right in time to see the darkened barrel of a submachine gun appear. She dove sideways, just beneath a burst of gunfire which singed the air over her head as she fell to the ground.
Screams rang out. The crowd suddenly shifted en masse and seemed to surge mindlessly in all directions at once. Heavy footsteps nearly trampled her before Danielle somehow regained her footing. The surge of the crowd was downward now, toward the ground of the Arena itself, and Danielle was swallowed up by it, lifted briefly off her feet. Ancient Romans knew nothing of safety rails and she felt herself slammed into a short retaining wall. The force of the crowd spilled her over it to the dusty earth below, wet with a recent hosing and stinking of animal feces.
Danielle crawled for a brief time, climbing back to her feet just in time to see a charging bull further enraged by the chaos lower its head into a bystander immediately on her right and gore him straight through. The man’s screams echoed in her ears, as handlers rushed to his aid.
Another burst of submachine gun fire sliced through the air and two men on Danielle’s right collapsed, taking another half dozen drunken revelers down with them. Before Danielle could twist around in search of the gunman, the thundering of hoofbeats made her whirl just in time to lunge from the path of a rampaging bull. Another animal in the center of the Arènes gored a fleeing matador from behind, then pitched the man up and over its haunches. He landed hard alongside the sword from which he’d been separated and didn’t move.
Danielle burst toward him, pushing her way through the panicked crowd. In one single swift motion, she reached down and swept the sword from the dirt, then immediately twisted back into the crowd and the approximate path of the gunmen pursuing her.
The flow of the panicked crowd was sideways now, heading for the exit, and she melted into it, bending at the knees to keep herself from
view. She caught brief glimpses of two of the gunmen slicing toward her and angled herself to take full advantage of both human cover and the blind spots of her pursuers. She attacked from the side instead of dead on, positioning herself so that one man was between her and the other.
She lashed out with the sword’s tip before her first target was even aware of her presence. Her aim, while slightly off, still raked across both his eyelids and brow, blinding him in an agonizing wash of blood. The second man twisted toward his screams, gun angling directly for her. But Danielle jabbed the tip, of the matador’s bloodied sword straight through the soft flesh in the center of his throat. She yanked it outward and saw a fountain of scarlet spray outward, as the man’s hands clutched for the wound.
