The Pegasus Secret

by Gregg Loomis

  Standing on tiptoe to bring his eyes even with the stone shoulders, Lang sighted down the damaged arm. It was aimed at a hill somewhat taller than the others. Even from the poor detail of the map, Lang figured he was looking at Cardou, the slope on which Pietro had made his discovery.

  Was the statue a clue or just one more roadside shrine?

  Lang walked back to the cross. Although shorter than the statue, its elevation made the top higher than Christ’s head. From a few feet further up the slope, Lang could line up cross and statue like front and rear gunsights. The place on Cardou, the target, was indistinguishable from the surrounding slopes, nothing but white limestone with a scattering of trees tenaciously rooted in the rocky soil.

  With his hiker’s compass Lang noted he was facing a heading of about seventy-five degrees, a little north of due east. Trying to keep the compass as balanced as possible, he walked around to the front of the cross and squinted closely at the blurred date. It could possibly have been 1838.

  Or it could have been the mathematical equivalent of the word puzzle in the picture.

  1838

  8–1=7

  8–3=5

  Seventy-five. Seventy-five degrees.

  Compass heading or just a date? A few days ago, a week ago, Lang would have seen no encrypted message in a date on a cross. But then, he would never have thought about paintings as maps or Latin anagrams, either.

  Magnetic north, of course, was not only different from true north but it also moved a little every few years. Seventy-five degrees in Saunière’s time might not be the same exact heading today. Also, every compass had its own unique, built-in, degree of error. Without the correction card that came with the compasses on ships and aircraft, there was no way to know how far off the instrument might be. Or that it might not be off at all.

  Returning to the car, Lang picked up the camera and took a number of shots lining the cross and statue up against the backdrop of Cardou.

  Then he drove down a steep descent, crossed the Aude just past the point at which the Sals branched off, and turned almost due east. To his left he could see a silhouette dark against the afternoon sun, a tower of Blanchefort on its white pinnacle.

  Seeing the old castle was a lot easier than getting there. Twice he took white dirt roads which headed towards the top of the mountain but turned out to be disappointing. One ended in a barnyard, leaving him staring at a pigsty with the occupants staring right back. The second was more devious. It headed straight for the old Templar fort, waiting until it dipped over a rise to make a right-angle turn and intercept the same road that had led him not to the castle but to pork.

  Lang remembered something Dawn used to say, that a man would drive to hell before he would stop and ask directions, to which Lang retorted that the last man to ask directions was one of the Wise Men who asked King Herod where the Christ child had been born. The inquiry had a less than salutary effect on a lot of local infants and men haven’t asked directions since. Herod notwithstanding, Lang would have inquired if he could have found someone to ask.

  The third time was indeed the charm.

  No matter how slowly Lang drove, white dust billowed behind the car like a chute behind a dragster. When he stopped to look at the woefully inadequate map, a capricious wind blew the choking, stinging cloud into the Peugeot’s open windows. By the time he was pretty well covered with dust, the road became little more than a path and its grade increased enough to provoke mechanical protests from the car’s already underpowered engine. The path became a track and the track ended at a level spot a hundred yards or so from the summit.

  Lang parked and got out, making sure the Peugeot was in gear and the brakes on. If it took off on an excursion of its own, he was in for a long walk. There were a number of tire tracks in the loose soil but they were rounded, washed out or abraded by the wind, not recent. He began climbing the steep slope to the old fortress, each step sending a cascade of loose dirt and pebbles racing downhill.

  Only the single tower he had seen from below crowned the top of the hill, its white stones reaching maybe a hundred feet before ending in steel scaffolding that had a head start on rusting away. Someone’s restoration project had been abandoned long ago.

  Lang was disappointed.

  He had expected more than this, at least some indication where the walls and buildings had stood. Deep down, at that place where all men are part little boy, imagination had pictured a well-maintained cloister behind a huge portcullis. Perhaps a few men in armor, maybe Pietro himself.

  Instead, he saw stones scattered where they had been pulled down, probably by the locals as material was needed for their own buildings. Rock already quarried and shaped was far too valuable to ignore. The tower, or what was left of it, had been preserved because it would have been difficult to get to the huge stones at the top and pry them loose. Judging from the accumulation of lime splotches, used condoms and graffiti, the inside of the tower had served birds, lovers and political satirists equally.

  Lang smiled at the thought of Pietro and his brethren’s reaction to the frenzied fornication that had obviously taken place here.

  Steps worn by centuries of feet were carved into the stone of the tower’s inner wall, each smaller than Lang’s size tens. At one time, the structure had several stories, as indicated by the square holes cut into the stone that would have held floor joists.

  Lang turned his eyes back to watch where he was going. A misstep would have unfortunate consequences.

  The deck or floor at the top had also long disappeared. The stairs simply ended four or five feet below the crenellated battlements. Lang leaned against the cool stone for support as he turned and surveyed three hundred sixty degrees.

  To his left rear he could see the red tiles of Rennes-le-Château’s few buildings. In front and slightly east of north was the town the map described as Serres.

  Rennes and Serres.

  Pietro had been right: militarily, Blanchefort had not been in a position to defend either. A force sent from here would have had to cross a river, all too easily guarded by a hostile army. Rennes, now Rennes-le-Château, was distant, too far to see what might be happening there. The first notice of an attack to any defender at Blanchefort would have been smoke from a town already sacked and burning.

  If not to defend Serres and Rennes, what purpose had this old fortress served?

  Cardou was close and in full view. Lang couldn’t be certain, but he thought he was looking at the same face of the mountain he had lined up with the cross and statue. From here, he was much closer and could see a spot a couple of hundred yards square where the hillside leveled briefly. It was wide enough to have collected piles of white scree.

  Balanced with one hand against the wall of the tower, Lang took the camera out and shot another series of pictures. It was difficult to exchange the compass for the camera while steadying himself, but he managed without doing more than giving himself a good scare when his hand slipped a few inches. Seventy-five degrees again. Accurate or not, the magnetic needle was telling him the cross, statue and tower all lined up to point to the same place on Cardou’s slopes.

  He had to back down the steps. There was no room to turn around.

  The shadow of the tower had grown substantially. There was not going to be enough daylight left to explore Cardou. Lang gave the slope one more glance and got back into the Peugeot.

  2

  Cardou

  1649 hours

  It was only when the diminutive Peugeot disappeared downhill that the sniper lowered the weapon. It was the first time the telescopic crosshairs and the blunt, flash-suppressed muzzle had been off Lang since he had emerged from the tower.

  The sharpshooter stood, flexing knees that had cramped and gone numb, and put down the Israeli-made Galil. The rifle was not the traditional weapon for longdistance marksmanship. Its light weight made it ideal for carrying but difficult to hold its electronically enhanced Leupold M1 Ultra 10× scope in place for long periods. It re
quired more concentration and control than the heavier, bolt-action .50 caliber Barrett preferred by most snipers despite a nearly five-foot length and thirty-pound weight. But even if the Galil was steadied by a bipod, skill and patience, the sniper’s stock in trade, were still required.

  The shooter’s companion let go of a pair of Zeiss binoculars, letting them hang by the strap around his neck. “You’ll never have a better opportunity,” he said with a grin.

  The marksman folded the rifle’s collapsible stock, unscrewed the barrel from the chamber and removed the twenty-round clip before replying, while fitting each component into its own slot in a customized attaché case.

  “Too late for remorse,” the sniper said, opening the door of an Opel with Paris plates and carefully placing the bag on the backseat. “But tomorrow is a different day.”

  3

  Limoux

  1957 hours

  It was dark by the time Lang found a shop in Limoux that displayed the red-and-yellow Kodak sign. Using more gestures than words, he elicited a promise the film would be ready in a couple of hours, or at least before the store closed at nine o’clock, or 2100 hours. In southern Europe businesses stayed open late after closing from midday until midafternoon.

  In a small bistro, smoky and loud, he took his chances on a less than perfect comprehension of the menu scrawled on a chalkboard. He lucked out with a thick stew washed down with inexpensive and acerbic local wine.

  By the time he finished dinner, the post office was empty of workers and devoid of customers other than a young man muttering angrily into a long-distance telephone. Lang fed a few coins into a vending machine and received a prestamped envelope. A few more coins produced additional stamps, enough to send the envelope on a transatlantic voyage. Taking a blank piece of paper from the service counter, he wrote a lengthy note.

  He finished just as the young man slammed down the phone with an audible “Merde!” and angrily stomped outside. A woman or money or both, Lang guessed, stepping over to a copier old enough to have served one of the French kings with a fairly low Louis number. The insertion of coins produced a protest of whines and clicks as though the machine resented being disturbed at this hour. Lang copied the written pages, stuffing the duplicates into a pocket. The original sheets went into the stamped envelope and then into the international mail slot.

  Lang got the prints at the photo shop, gave them a cursory glance and drove back to the hotel. There, he examined the snapshots in detail. The differences in distance between the two locations from which he had shot the pictures made it difficult to tell if both groups depicted the same spot on Cardou’s slope. Difficult but not impossible. A patch of sketchy green in the photos taken from the roadside could be the grove of stunted cedars recognizable from the shots taken from the tower. A white streak in the more distant view matched a stream of crumbled and fallen white rock. He studied the pictures taken from the tower, particularly anything, including shadows, that looked symmetrical or regular in shape.

  He was disappointed to see nothing that could not have been created by wind, rain and the exfoliation of rock over the centuries.

  Tomorrow he would inspect Cardou in person.

  4

  Toulouse-Blagnac International Airport

  2330 hours

  The airport terminal was closed for the night, the next regular passenger flight not scheduled until the 08:24 from Geneva. Other than a bored watchman who was far too interested in his portable television to pay any particular attention to private aircraft, no one observed the Gulfstream IV when its tires squeaked on the runway and its twin jet engines spooled down as it taxied to the tarmac. Nor was there anyone to notice the slick black Citoën slide out of the shadows like a hawk gliding down on its prey.

  There was the pop of an air seal as the aircraft’s door swung open and wheezed down. Four men came down the steps, the younger three each carrying a small suitcase. From the care each man exercised with his luggage, an observant witness would have surmised that the bags contained something other than clean shirts.

  The oldest of the quartet exited the plane last, carrying nothing other than a raincoat slung over one arm and an air of authority, the manner of a man accustomed to being obeyed. Without a hat, his shoulder-length silver hair reflected what poor light was available. One of the first three deferentially held the Citoën’s passenger door open for the older man.

  The aircraft’s two-man crew stood stiffly on the top step until they were dismissed by a wave of the older man’s hand. The plane’s door shut and the idling engines began to whine. By the time the Citoën was driving through the airport’s open security gate, the Gulfstream was screaming up into the night. It banked sharply to the west and was gone, its strobe lights fading like dying comets.

  The older man was seated next to the automobile’s female driver, the other three in the luxurious backseat.

  “Where is he?” the older man asked in unaccented French.

  “Asleep in his room,” the proprietress of the Hostellier de Rennes-les-Bains answered.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1

  Rennes-les-Bains

  Lang had dreams that left him less than rested. As far as he knew, Dawn had never been to this part of France. Yet she had been waiting for him atop Blanchefort. There was a man with her. Lang couldn’t see his face but, with that baseless certainty of dreams, he knew it was Saunière.

  Lang knew better than to try to figure out what it all meant, other than the hole Dawn had left in the rest of his life would never be filled. Over ten years and not a day passed he didn’t think of her. For that matter, rarely did an hour slide by without his seeing her face. Not the Dawn he had married but the dying bundle of bones and flesh in the hospital. It was becoming increasingly difficult to remember the way she looked before she got sick. Even seeing her that way in his dreams left him with teary eyes.

  Memory has a sadistic streak.

  The brilliant sunshine pouring through the window was of some comfort. Hard to be gloomy when he looked into the cloudless sky. Below the hotel, fog covered the Aude Valley, shimmering in the sun like a blanket of silver wool. It would burn off by the time he dressed and had coffee and a croissant.

  In the hotel’s dining room, Lang sipped coffee strong enough to strip chrome off of a bumper. In front of him was the well-wrinkled photocopy of the Polaroid. It didn’t matter that the faces were now blurred and the inscription fuzzy. He knew both by heart. It was the background, the shape and location of the distant mountains, he was trying to memorize.

  An hour later, the little Peugeot again struggled to reach the flat space below Blanchefort. Yesterday’s tire tracks were partially filled with loose dirt, the erasing effect of the wind. Lang searched for any tracks sharper, more defined, that would tell him someone else had been here. There weren’t any.

  At the base of the tower, he took a compass bearing and set off towards Cardou. Loose pebbles and scrub growth slowed progress along a saddle of rock. Occasionally, he stopped to check the compass and to make sure the rope loop that held the trenching tool to his belt was secure. Twice he sipped from the water bottle, not so much from thirst but because the motion gave him a chance to survey the surrounding slopes from under the hat’s brim without appearing to be looking for anything. He couldn’t shake a creepy feeling he was being watched, the sort of intuition the people in horror stories have when the spooky villain is about to strike. The only thing missing was background music building to a crescendo. He had seen no reflection from a distant pair of binoculars, no brush moving without a wind, none of the things that might betray a hidden observer.

  Overactive imagination, he told himself, too vivid a memory of the grisly last chapter of Pietro’s tale.

  A flash of reflected sun gave him a start that nearly brought the croissant back up. He jumped behind a boulder, squinting into the glare for a full minute before realizing he had only seen the morning’s light on the windshield of a car far below, on the same roa
d he had been on the day before. If he could see the road, he must be . . . Yep, he was. A careful look and he could see the cross, too. The Christ statue was invisible, blending in with the distant trees.

  Lang trudged onward until he was standing in the field of scree he had noticed from the tower, loose rock that appeared as a bare spot from the cross. He took the picture of the painting from his wallet and turned it slowly.

  The peak to the left, no more than a gray smudge in the distance, had the picture’s jagged gap between it and a much closer hill. He leaned over, turning his head to get as close to an upside-down view as possible. The nose wasn’t as sharp and the chin had disappeared but the gap could, conceivably, resemble Washington’s profile on a quarter. It had been, what, four hundred years or so since Poussin had painted that picture? Plenty of time for geologic change.

  This was as good a spot as any.

  A very large spot, the size of a football field.

  Speaking of which, he had to pick his way around rocks and boulders like a kick returner avoiding tacklers. The goal line was the point where the level space met the edge of Cardou’s incline.

  Lang stood there for several minutes. One place was slightly steeper than the rest. Steeper, yet the rock was piled just as high. Wouldn’t loose stones roll until they reached a flat place? So gravity would seem to indicate.

  Lang scrambled over a boulder, leaving a piece of the skin on his knee on a jagged point. Does anyone hear when you curse alone? Maybe not, but it sure made him feel better.

  He was standing in front of a large boulder that seemed to be partially imbedded in the hillside, its top more than head-high. It was the only piece of visible rock that could have been placed over an entrance big enough to admit a man, at least the only rock along the plane where Washington’s profile was recognizable. Leaning against its rough surface, his feet scrabbled for traction in the loose soil and pebbles. His entire weight wasn’t enough to budge it a centimeter.