The Julian Secret (Lang Reilly Thrillers) (18 page)

Guillaume screwed up his face in thought. “It was
shortly after Easter the year my sister’s first child was born.”

Lang waited, hoping for a date of somewhat more general recognition.

“Two, no, three years ago,” Guillaume said, now nodding. “We made much rain.” He spread his arms as though precipitation came in armloads. “The Aud flooded and much mud washed onto the road from the hills. I was driving past one day and noticed I could see sky where before there had been only the top of the cave.”

“The same thing that caused mud slides caused water to fill the tunnel inside that mountain,” Lang said, “washing away the rocks and junk that covered the entrance that leads to the top.”

“You hope,” Gurt said. “Part of the tunnel could also have washed away. If that is actually a tunnel.”

Lang was bending over, looking inside again. “Has to be. Place was besieged for over a year, if I remember from the last time I was in the area. The Cathars had to have a way to get supplies and water up there. If there had been an outside way to the top, the king’s army would have found it long before a year.”

“They also would have found that entrance,” Gurt said.

“It was probably pretty well hidden behind rocks and vegetation. Even if the entrance was found, no more than one man at a time could have gotten through, and the stairs wind counterclockwise so that only a defender at the top could use his right hand, his sword arm.”

Lang looked from Gurt to Guillaume and back again. “Well?”

Gurt squatted, duck-walking into the tunnel.

Lang followed, pausing only long enough to ask Guillaume, “Coming?”

Guillaume shook his head. It was a long way to the top, if the stairs were sufficiently intact to be usable.

Inside, a gray light filtered down a narrow, round shaft no more than three feet across. Carved into the wall were steps, each no more than a foot long and perhaps ten inches wide. They ended in rubble around the first turn. It took Lang only a couple of minutes to realize a slip in the dimness was likely to be fatal.

He stopped. “Let’s go back down. I’d feel safer with a couple of flashlights and rope.”

Gurt was backing down the stairs uncertainly. “Rope?”

“Tie ourselves together so if one slips, the other can arrest the fall.”

“Or fall, too.”

Gurt, the optimist.

Although he missed his wife, Fabian, Guillaume was glad she had chosen this particular week to visit her sister in Rochefort. Now there was no need to tell her how much money the American had paid him this afternoon and he could enjoy as much of it as he wanted. Or all of it, for that matter.

That was why he had made an unaccustomed trip to the town’s bistro to let someone else prepare his dinner while he drank wine and shared local gossip in the cool of sunset. Moving inside the restaurant, he was wondering how much of the American’s money he should put aside to buy a gift for Fabian, if any. Although only about half of the place’s eight tables were occupied, a man he had never seen before motioned him over, indicating he should have a seat.

“You are Guillaume Lerat?” the man asked in French marred only by an accent Guillaume had never heard before.

A quick look at the stranger’s clothes also told Guillaume that the man was not local. No one around here
could afford American-made jeans. Guillaume nodded and gave the man a smile, fueled partially from the wine he had consumed and partially from the prospect of another well-paying customer.

“You are a licensed guide for this area.”

It was a statement, not a question.

Guillaume nodded again. “Yes.”

Not quite true. Being a licensed guide required the payment of an annual fee, one much more expensive than simply having a commercial driver’s permit. But then, who could distinguish between a professional guide who drove his customers around the area and a driver who simply pointed out the sights as he drove? Only governments could make such distinctions.

Instead of asking about specific locations, the man glanced furtively around the room before laying his hand on the table. Beneath his palm was a stack of euros. No matter how hard he stared, the man’s hand prevented Guillaume from ascertaining exactly how much money he was seeing.

“You had customers today?” the man asked.

Guillaume was trying, with little success, not to appear overly focused on the bills on the table.
“Oui.”

The man thumbed the currency, letting Guillaume see the thickness of the stack. “Who were they?”

Guillaume’s eyes flicked to the man’s before returning to the money. “Information, like anything else, has its price.”

The man across the table twisted his lips into what might have been intended to be a smile. It reminded Guillaume of a dead shark he had once seen washed up on the beach. He used one hand to slip a bill from the pile. “I agree. Who were your customers today?”

Guillaume pursed his lips, trying to feign indifference
even as he slipped the money into his pocket. “A man, an American, and a woman. I think she was German.”

He had the distinct impression the stranger was not surprised.

He dealt another bill. “Where did they go?”

“They were interested in the ruins of old castles and fortresses.”

This time there was no move to hand over more money. “I know
where
they went. I want to know what in particular interested them, where was their attention?”

For an instant, Guillaume considered the possibility of holding out for more money. A look at the stranger’s face told him that might be both unwise and unhealthy. He told him about Montsegur.

Guillaume’s dinner,
demi poule en vin blanc
, half a chicken roasted with vegetables in white wine sauce, arrived as the stranger stood up, pushing the remainder of the euros across the table. “I paid you to remember. This is to forget—forget you ever saw me.”

For the first time in his life, Guillaume was oblivious to food and a bottle of wine in front of him. Hardly noticing the savory aroma, he watched the man’s back as he walked across the square and disappeared into the deepening shadows. Minutes ago, Guillaume had been ravenous. His appetite had somehow disappeared.

Southwestern France
Montsegur
The next morning

Lang had insisted on spending the night in Lyon, where they had taken up the earlier part of the evening shopping for equipment: several lengths of nylon rope, flashlights, heavy work boots, and a grappling hook, the sort mountaineers might use. He then visited a camera shop. It was only when he backed out of the parking space on the town square that he remembered he had made similar purchases at both stores the year previous, only to leave them on a hillside.

That, as they say, was another story.

Before the sun was up, they were on their way back to the same hill they had visited the day before.

Gurt climbed out of the car, a large, comfortable Mercedes with such little power, Lang was certain that was the reason the class and number were not on the trunk,
as was customary with other models of the marque. The factory was ashamed of the thing.

Gurt yawned and drained the dregs of cold coffee from a paper cup. “This has been here how long? Seven, eight hundred years?”

Lang was unloading the trunk. “The ruins? Yeah, I guess so.”

She wadded the cup with a crunching sound and tossed it into the rubbish bag hanging from the glove box. “Then why so early do we come?”

Lang shut the lid with a soft thump. “I’d just as soon finish whatever we’re gonna do before anyone knows we’re here.”

Gurt followed him into the entrance they had found. She squatted as he tied the rope around his waist and stuck a flashlight in his belt. Climbing the first two steps, he swung the hook on a rope, tossing it upward. He was rewarded with the dull clunk of metal on stone as the hook fell back.

Two more attempts and he gave up. “Shaft’s too narrow; I can’t swing the rope with enough velocity to get to the top.”

Gurt tied one end of rope to her belt. “We climb, then.”

Lang shook his head. “I climb. If I fall, I want to be sure there’s someone to drive me to the nearest hospital.”

“If you fall from there, a hospital you will not need,” she observed.

Lang tried to ignore the truth in her observation as he sat so that his back was against one wall and his feet against the opposite. Using hands and feet pressed against the stone, he began to work his way upward and then stopped, reaching to the back of his belt.

He pulled out the Glock, holding it where she could
see it. “I need to get rid of all the weight I can. Take this.”

She caught it neatly, stuffing it into the back of her pants. She watched until he was nearly indistinguishable in the shadows above her head, playing out rope as he climbed. Soon she could mark his progress only by the grunts and exhalations of breath echoing down the shaft. Finally, it was quiet.

“Lang?”

There was a tug on the rope. “Gimme a minute. There! I’ve secured the rope to a boulder. Now I can pull you up.”

Although she knew he could not see, she shook her head. “A pull I do not need. I went through the same training as you and am even younger than you. I can climb myself.”

There was a properly abashed silence from above as she began.

The top of the shaft opened onto what Lang guessed had been the courtyard. The destruction of the Cathars’ redoubt had been complete: Cut stones were strewn in a semicircle, few of which still rested on another. The keep’s tower had presented more of a problem, probably because of the attackers’ impatience with tearing it down starting at the top. Instead, it looked as though it had been split lengthwise. Behind the courtyard yawned the mouth of a cave, not particularly deep, but as tall as Lang guessed the keep had been, located so that, once encircled by the outer wall, the defenders of this hill would have had a fortress assailable from only one direction.

As their guide had said yesterday, part of the top of the hill had fallen in, leaving the center of the cavern open to the sky and filling the interior with rubble of white stone. Anything that had been under the collapsing part of the cave’s roof was going to remain there.

Without spoken agreement, Gurt and Lang separated, each slowly walking along the inner perimeter of the wall and into the shadowy darkness of the cave. Since the collapse, the white stone sides had become streaked, crumbling under the relentless force of the elements. Vines had managed to take root in what appeared to be solid rock. If this was the cave shown in the photograph on Blucher’s CD, any inscriptions on its walls were going to be difficult to find. In another year or two, exfoliation would obliterate them forever.

Lang swept his light from the top of the cave downward and across the rubble-strewn floor. Twice he stopped, thinking the beam had picked up what he was looking for, only to find that the natural fissures in the walls could briefly assume the appearance of human-made letters just as rocks on the floor took on the look of handmade objects. If Skorzeny had filled four truckloads from this cave, either he was taking largely geological specimens or the cave had deteriorated greatly in the last sixty years.

Problem was, which was it?

“Lang, here!” Gurt’s voice had the tinge of an echo.

Impatiently, Lang picked his way around piles of debris to where she stood, her light steady on a section of wall no more than four or five feet above the floor. There was no doubt he was looking at man-made letters over holes carved into the stone.

“Is like a bee, bee . . .” Gurt was pointing to rows of evenly spaced holes cut into the rock.

“Honeycomb,” Lang supplied, forgetting the inscription for a moment as he inserted a fist into one of the holes.

It was about two feet deep and perhaps ten inches across.

Gurt looked puzzled. “A rack for wine?”

Lang shook his head. “Wine would have been somewhere underground to keep it as cool as possible. This would have been a library.”

“For books?”

“For scrolls, I think.”

“They did not have books?”

Lang nodded absently. “Of course they did. You’ve seen those beautifully illuminated Bibles. But in ancient times, libraries, like the one at Alexandria, would have had racks like these where scrolls could be stored in clay tubes.”

The mystery of what Skorzeny may have needed trucks to haul away may have been answered, but that raised an even more perplexing question, one Lang voiced.

“Problem is, why would Cathars in the thirteenth century be writing on loose parchment when the rest of Europe had started using bindings?”

Gurt pointed to the carved letters. “There the explanation may be.”

He reached out and touched some sort of growth that obscured part of the inscription. “We’re gonna have to cut this away.”

Gurt grabbed several sprigs and started to pull before Lang could grab her arm. “Cut it, not pull it loose. Shallow as those roots are, they have to be widespread. Yank them hard enough and the face of the rock will crumble.”

Nodding her understanding, she handed him her flashlight and took a small knife from her pocket. Where had she gotten it? He had never seen it before and, harmless enough, it was not something that would have cleared airport security. Whatever its source, it sliced cleanly through each branch and root. In minutes, the wall in front of Lang was clear of vegetation.

Lang stepped back, the better to play his flashlight across the lines of letters. His first impression was of
precision. This inscription was not some ancient graffiti scratched into rock but the measured characters of a professional mason. Time, moisture, and other natural forces had effectively erased several letters, their former presence noted only by blank spaces.

IMPERATORIULIANACCUSAT
(
—
)
REBILLISREXUS IUDEAIUMIUBITREGI
(
—
)
UNUSDEISEPELIT

“Julian, Emperor . . . ,” he read aloud.

Gurt followed the flashlight’s beam with interest. “Who?”