Prophecy. An ARKANE thriller. (Book 2) (21 page)

“My gut says he has her, and that’s all we have right now. Martin, I need you to go deeper with Milan. We haven’t broken the data on his past yet, but now I need to know.”

“I’ve started the pattern algorithms but that will take time. We already have all the superficial information, the publicly available stuff.” Martin paused.“Wait. It looks like the car is at Hôpital La Rochefoucauld. If you head down there, I’ll start digging further. We’ll find her, I know it.”

Jake sat down heavily. Just for a moment he needed stability beneath him. He felt JP’s hand on his shoulder.
 

“Mon ami, don’t worry just yet. They want her for a reason, whoever they are. They will keep her alive.”

Jake looked up at his friend.
 

“But for what reason? Why could they possibly need her?”

Catacombs, Paris, France. 11.50pm

Morgan woke in pitch darkness, shivering with the cold, and tried to orientate herself. She was still wearing the flamenco dress from the party and the earth was damp beneath her bare arms. Her shoes and bag were gone. She touched the cross around her neck. At least she still had that. She sat up slowly, her head spinning, bracing herself with both arms on the floor until the dizziness subsided. Her fingers dug into the dirt. It smelled like peat, earthy and pleasant. It was soft from the damp and she could hear the dull thwack of water dripping from a low ceiling nearby. Morgan listened intently. In the distance, she could hear voices muted by the heavy air.
 

She stretched out and shuffled to the right, sweeping her arms in a wide circle before her. Her fingers brushed a cold wall and she moved to face it in the dark, tracing the ridged surface. It felt hard like concrete but the texture was unusual, a repeating pattern of knobs and notches with smooth patches between. She used the wall to pull herself up and then felt along the top of it. There was a gap so she reached an arm out, touching a pile of debris that lay on top, spiky in parts, with irregular shapes and some loose pieces. Picking one up, Morgan ran her other hand over the object. As she felt its smooth length with a ball on one end and scalloped notches on the other, she realized it was a human femur. Fighting the urge to drop it, she focused on the cool of the bone she held. After all, the dead couldn’t hurt her. The dead didn’t drug her and leave her here in the cold and this femur could be a weapon, a makeshift baseball bat.
 

Voices became clearer in the passage and she could see a faint light approaching. Morgan sank to the floor, this time with the femur tucked beneath her. She faced the oncoming light with eyes closed and focused on the voices. A torch shone in her face. She didn’t react.
 

“She’s still out.”

“We’ll have to wake her soon, as the boss is coming down after the party. Did you give her too much sedative?”
 

“No, I swear, I just followed the directions on the bottle.”

“Genius,” the man snorted. “Right then, we’re meant to treat her nice so we’ll have to wake her gently. I can think of more interesting things to do, but that’s orders for now.”

Morgan sensed he was bending down towards her and in that moment, she thrust herself up from the floor, whipping the femur around and catching the man square on the side of his face. It was a powerful blow but she couldn’t put full force behind it from that angle. Nevertheless he grunted and fell sideways. As the torch dropped to the floor, Morgan caught a glimpse of the piles of bones that made up the walls of the tunnel. The man began to right himself and she used the femur again, this time like a battering ram into his lower belly. He doubled over and sank to the floor, winded and gesturing to the other man to do something but he didn’t look keen to engage. Morgan turned and grinned, slapping the femur bone into her other hand, taunting him.
 

“Come on then, what are you waiting for? You want to treat me nicely?”

“Why can’t you just come with us? We’re not going to hurt you, we just need you to see the boss.”
 

He was almost pleading with her, one eye on his friend who was seconds from recovering. Morgan knew she had little time, so she feinted left and as the second man bent to catch her she ducked past him in the narrow corridor. As she went under his arm, she jabbed the femur hard into his kidney and ran down the passageway into the dark. Finding an alcove, she bent her body into it, pressing against the bony wall. She heard them cursing and swearing, then the first man shouted.
 

“We’re going to find you, Dr Sierra. It’s only a matter of time. There are kilometers of tunnels down here. You sit tight now. We’ll be back.”

As their footsteps faded up the passageway, Morgan’s heart rate slowed as the adrenalin of the fight passed. They hadn’t been prepared for her but they would be next time and the chill was starting to penetrate her bones. This dress had been perfect for the Louvre party but was hardly protection against the cold down here. With bare feet and no way of warming herself, she would soon be affected by the cold and they would catch her. She had to find a way out.
 

In the glimpse she’d had of the walls in the torchlight, she realized she must be in the catacombs, deep below the fourteenth arrondissement in Paris. She had been here once, years ago, when visiting the Faculté Libre de Théologie Protestante de Paris, on nearby Boulevard Arago. One of the pastors had given her a tour of this Empire of the Dead. He had told her that the catacombs contained nearly six million skeletons, the bodies moved from public cemeteries at the end of the eighteenth century to stop the spread of disease. Here in the cool darkness, Morgan didn’t feel any sense of dread or foreboding, yet she knew the bones were piled here in corridors stretching for kilometers underground. Morgan had seen pictures of the bodies brought here on carts, only ever at night in order to save the people of Paris from the disturbance. There had been rumors of grave-robbers, the dead rising as zombies and the hand of Satan, but there was a different feeling to the malevolence of the Palermo crypt. These skeletons were witnesses to life but they had passed on. They were architecture now, forgotten individuals but together they became a fitting memorial for the deaths of unknown millions in the Black Death and the poorhouses of Paris.

Water dripped onto Morgan’s shoulder, the freezing chill running down her back. She shivered. Enough dwelling on the past, she thought, it was time to get out of here. Feeling her way along the wall, she started to walk, her fingers lightly touching the arrangement of skulls and femurs as she went. A light glowed up ahead as she turned a corner. She flattened against the wall again, but there was no sound and so she walked towards it on quiet feet. The light permeated the tunnel and soon she could see the walls clearly. A multitude of bodies locked together in death, fitting perfectly like one enormous body with skulls in decorative arches and rows that broke up the pattern. Some had holes in them, some were cracked and others smooth. All had the dull patina of age and they seemed to be cemented together, as if they had sunk into each other after years of standing here, sentinels to death. Morgan saw that the light came from a lamp lit in an alcove and she rounded the corner with the femur held high. Padding forward on bare feet, tiny stones pricking her soles, she moved towards the lamp.
 

“It’s the Sepulcher Lamp,” a voice came from around the corner and Milan Noble stepped from behind a wall of bones. She started towards him, but two men appeared from behind him. Morgan turned to run back into the dark but the two men who had captured her were walking towards her from that direction. She was trapped so she threw down the femur and turned to face him. It seemed best to play Milan’s game, since for now, she was outnumbered.
 

“It watches over the souls of the millions that reside here in the Catacombs,” he said.
 

“And who watches over your soul?” Morgan answered.

Milan laughed, a deep rumble that was dampened by the dead earth. He undid his bow tie and shrugged off his tuxedo jacket.
 

“Oh Morgan, I wanted you to see what I’m building here. This whole thing wasn’t meant to hurt you, but I needed to be sure we weren’t followed. I know you’re working with ARKANE, so I needed to extract you carefully. You can’t stop the plan now, but there’s something I wanted you to see, and maybe even be part of. You seemed quite keen to get to know me earlier.”

Milan offered her his jacket in a gesture of peace. She walked towards him in her bare feet, aware that her dress was now damp and marked with dirt, but she was still an attractive woman and she could use that. Morgan saw his eyes drop to her breasts, nipples hard in the cold air of the buried tunnels. In the half light, with an amber glow from the flickering lamp, he was leonine in looks, a man in his prime. What did he want with her? She turned and accepted his jacket, pulling the fine wool around her, grateful for the warmth.
 

“I’m sorry for the way you’ve been treated,” he said. “But it seems you can handle my men by yourself.” He shrugged in the direction of the now sheepish men who had let her escape. “If you’ll walk with me now, I’ll show you what we’re hiding down here. Few have seen this Morgan, but I feel that you particularly will appreciate what I am creating. It’s not just about destruction but also about new life for those who will remain.”

Milan touched the small of her back and guided her up the tunnel. Morgan’s mind was racing as she walked with him, her fingers delving into the pockets of his jacket in case there was anything that could help her. The tracker wouldn’t work this far underground so how was she going to get word to Jake of where she was? And what did Milan have down here in this underworld of bones? She couldn’t help but be curious.
 

The sepia light of the catacombs made it as unending dusk as Milan steered Morgan along the maze of tunnels. The guards behind now had their guns out at the ready and Morgan knew they wouldn’t let her get away again. At the end of a darkened corridor, Milan flicked a switch hidden behind a pile of skulls and a door opened to reveal a bright, white box room.
 

“Now you will see what I have been working towards behind the clinical facade of Zoebios. Come,” Milan said, stepping inside. Morgan followed him in and found the room was an elevator with retinal scan and voice recognition protection. The guards entered behind them as Milan activated the controls.
 

“So what is this place?” Morgan asked, “and why isn’t it part of the official Zoebios infrastructure?”
 

“This is Sector C, where we work on secret projects that aren’t officially sanctioned, on the fringe of what would be considered acceptable to the global health market.” Milan raised an eyebrow at her. “Actually, some of it would be deemed utterly unacceptable, hence the secrecy of it all.”
 

His words filled Morgan with unease. How could he be taking her somewhere so secret if he meant to let her go again?
 

The door opened onto the atrium of what looked like a high-end medical facility and Milan led her into a further maze of clinical white corridors. Armed guards were stationed outside every room, faces stony, staring straight ahead as they passed. Clearly any problems would be dealt with swiftly and with violence. Opaque glass doors inscribed with the Zoebios logo led to patient rooms and Milan stopped at a wall sized glass window. Behind the barrier, a team of scientists worked in protective clothing on immaculate chrome and silver equipment. There was a hum of controlled activity; the sound of progress or perhaps the sound of descent into scientific insanity.
 

“This is what I wanted you to see,” Milan said with a triumphant tone.
 

“OK,” said Morgan. “But you might have to explain what’s going on. My biological science is a little rusty.”
 

 
Milan smiled.
 

“Of course, you know that Zoebios is the foremost company in family planning, birth and neonatal health and you know of my interest in population control. This is the logical extension of those interests, as we are genetically modifying human embryos.”
 

“That’s not new though, right?” asked Morgan. “Wasn’t that done a few years ago?”
 

“Yes, in a very basic sense but here we are taking it much further. For a start, embryos have actually been implanted in human mothers and the babies will soon be viable, although we are still testing the various batches.”

Morgan stared at him in horror.
 

“What do you mean ‘soon be’? And what’s a batch?”
 

Milan waved her concerns aside.
 

“No matter, but I thought you’d be particularly interested in the genetic material we have found in the cells from the religious relics. It’s one of the test conditions for the embryos. We’re experimenting with enhancing that material to make super-spiritual people and then removing it entirely to see if that creates atheists. It’s only one of the variables of course; we’re testing with many different conditions.” He pointed to the lab. “Here we are designing the future of the human race.”
 

“So this is basically eugenics,” Morgan stated, her mind playing back the conversation with Martin and Jake. It was as they had feared, there was another part of the Thanatos plan, but how far had Milan progressed down this path?
 

“The principles of eugenics are sound,” he explained. “They’ve just been tarnished with the past. But we need to improve the human race, not dilute it with imbeciles, handicapped and the impure. We breed animals with these principles in mind, selecting the best ones to continue the line and slaughtering the rest. The same should be done with humans.”
 

In that moment, Morgan knew that he must be behind the theft of the Devil’s Bible and the suicide attacks. She wanted to goad him on. She needed to know it all and somehow she would get the information out and make it public. Somehow she would stop this madness.