The Lazarus Vault (32 page)

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Translation:
nothing
.

She turned the monitor towards Doerner. ‘What is this?’

His phone rang. He held up a finger and took the call.

‘
Oui
?
J’attends.
’

When he put the phone down, his face had changed. He looked happier, almost eager to please.

‘Can I get you a cup of coffee?’ he asked.

‘Not unless you can tell me about Mirabeau.’

He shrugged. ‘No more than the computer.’

‘Michel Saint-Lazare has just spent over a billion euros buying this company because of Mirabeau. You can’t tell me no one knows anything about it.’

‘Of course, someone will know, if it exists. But to find this person, it is not easy. Talhouett is a big business: we have many operations in many countries. There is probably no one in the company who knows everything.’

‘I need you to let me in to your archives.’

‘All the files are still in the data room. It has been locked for the duration of the takeover battle.’

‘Then take me there.’

‘If you can just wait a few moments. My secretary has gone out with my keys.’

Ellie waited ten seconds – long enough to assure herself that the smile on his face was 100 per cent false. She rummaged through her bag as if looking for her lipstick, until she felt the handle of the kitchen knife she’d bought that morning.

In a single motion, she whipped it out of the bag and held the tip to Doerner’s throat. Doerner went very still.

‘You’re not really working for Monsalvat,’ he said.

‘No. I’m much nicer than they are.’

She watched him, wondering if there was any sort of panic button or alarm he might press. But these were administrative offices in one of the most boring cities in Europe: they didn’t expect people to walk in and hold knives to their throats. Not literally.

‘Who was that phone call from?’ She jerked the knife: she’d only meant to scare him, but she was so tense she broke the skin. He winced. A drop of blood seeped in to his starched shirt collar.

‘Your boss. Christine Lafarge.’

She almost took his head off. ‘Where is she?’

His eyes sidled round to the window, though he didn’t move his head. ‘She said she’ll be here in five minutes.’

For a split second, Ellie really thought about killing him. She saw the choice in black and white: him or her. She’d slit his throat, take his keys, leave his body for Christine Lafarge to find. Show them what they were dealing with. It would be so easy.

A second later, shame overwhelmed her.
What sort of person are you becoming?

‘Give me your keys,’ she ordered him. ‘And your mobile.’

He’d dropped the line about his secretary having the keys. He reached into the suit jacket on the back of his chair and deposited a ring of keys and a mobile phone on the desk. Ellie swept them across and picked them up.

‘Stay there.’

She used the knife to cut the cord on his desk phone, and the cable going into his computer. She couldn’t see anything else he might use to communicate with – and she didn’t have time to look.

‘Which is the key to the data room?’

‘The one with the yellow ring.’

‘And for this office?’

‘The blue.’

She stepped out of the office and locked it.
Five minutes
, he’d said. How many had gone already? She ran down the corridor and found a bank of lifts at the back of the building.
How long?

The data room was just as she remembered it, though somehow more forlorn. She locked the door behind her and turned on the lights, taking in the cheap tables and the long ranks of mechanical shelves. There must be a million pieces of paper in here. She’d have five minutes, if she was lucky.

But at least she had an idea where to start. She was sure she’d seen Mirabeau doing the due diligence. She ran to the shelves and punched in the rack she wanted on the keypad.

‘Open sesame,’ she murmured to herself.

The shelves rumbled into life, like giants woken from their sleep. They groaned and clattered, rolling themselves apart so that an aisle opened between them. Even that seemed to take forever.

Ellie pushed in before they’d finished moving. There’d been
stacks like this at university: she’d never quite shaken the fear that they might suddenly to decide to spring shut and crush her. Now that was the least of her worries. She found the accounts folders halfway down the aisle and started pulling them out.
Mirabeau
. Where had she seen it? She’d always had a good head for archive work, a recall that allowed her to find things again. She’d never needed it so desperately.

She turned the pages, searching for something to jog her memory, forcing herself not to go so quickly she’d miss it. She felt as if a giant fist had clenched around her heart, squeezing each time there was a noise in the corridor. She saw a jagged graph shaped like a mountain range and thought it looked familiar. She slowed down.

Two pages later, she found it. A single line in the budget for one of Talhouett’s French subsidiaries. Mirabeau Exploratory (Ref 890112/A/F2727).

She knew the way their record-keeping worked. F2727 was the file reference. She consulted the shelving list.
F2650-F2900: Stack 7
. She went back to the keypad on the end of the stack and pressed the button to open up the new aisle.

A fraction of a second before the shelves started to move, she heard a noise at the door. The handle was turning. Time had run out.

Christine Lafarge snapped the door open and pushed Doerner through. He stumbled in. Nobody stabbed him. He gazed around the empty room, unused chairs at dusty tables.

‘You said she’d be here.’

Doerner had never heard a woman growl before. He remembered Ellie:
I’m much nicer than they are
.

‘She said this was where she was coming. And the lights are on.’

A book lay open on the floor. Christine Lafarge picked it up and swept her gaze over the page. A long fingernail rasped down the entries – and stopped.

‘Mirabeau.’

‘I told you. She wanted to know all about it.’

‘What did you tell her?’

‘Nothing. I have never heard of this project. Talhouett is a big company. We –’

‘What does this reference mean?’

‘It’s the file location.’ A pause, a consultation. ‘Stack 7.’

Five feet away, in Stack 4, Ellie lay hunched up on the empty shelf under the accounts folders and tried not to shake it with her trembling. She lay there, entombed in paperwork, and listened.

Doerner’s footsteps proceeded down the aisle. She could hear him counting off the file numbers under his breath. She clenched her fists, digging her nails into her palms in frustration. She’d led them right to it.

Doerner knelt. She heard the shuffle of files – and then, unexpectedly, a curse.

‘The file – it’s gone.’

Ellie went still as stone.

‘She must have taken it.’

‘How long since she left your office?’

‘Five minutes. Maybe ten.’

‘Did you tell Security to stop her at the exit?’

Doerner, plaintively: ‘She took my phone.’

‘Is there any other way out of this building?’

A silence as Doerner thought about it. ‘There is a fire door at the back of the south corridor. It is supposed to be alarmed, but we disable it for the smokers. She maybe could have got out that way.’

Ellie could only imagine the look Christine Lafarge was giving Doerner. She almost felt sorry for him.

‘If she has escaped, every person in this building will be out of a job. Do you understand?’

Ellie heard the clack-clack of high heels receding, Doerner’s footsteps squeaking behind. The door opened and closed. She was alone.

She waited two minutes to be sure they wouldn’t come back. She would have waited longer, hours if necessary, but she had a more pressing concern.

How am I going to get out?

The aisle was between stacks seven and eight. She was in stack four. There were three shelves of files between her and freedom, and no other way out. She could wait for someone to come, but the room hadn’t been used in months, might not be used for months again.

And if anyone does come, I probably don’t want to meet them.

She’d thought she’d already squeezed up as tightly as possible, but she found that if she pushed herself back she could make a small opening at the head of the shelf. That gave her space to reach through to the next shelf and start manoeuvring the files through, filling them in around her.

She felt like a worm, gobbling the earth in its path and squeezing it out behind. A bookworm. That’s what her mother always called her. The memory spurred her on. She pushed herself over the divider into the cavity she’d dug out and started attacking the next shelf.

The second stack went more quickly than the first, and the last was easiest of all. With a couple of heaves, she pushed through, spilling a cascade of paper across the floor and slithering down on her stomach like a polar bear coming out of its cave. Dust and paper dandruff covered her. Her mouth
tasted of paper, and she couldn’t be sure when Christine Lafarge might come back. All she wanted to do was go.

But there was one thing she had to check. She moved along the aisle to where file F2727 ought to be.

Doerner had been right. There was nothing – only a thin gap where file F2726 leaned against F2728.

Who took it?
Not Doerner. Not Christine Lafarge, or Blanchard.

She felt ill. So much effort, so much danger – for nothing. A gap on a dusty shelf. She crouched down and stared at the space, as if she could will the file back into its place.

A small bump on the shelf caught her eye. She reached in a finger and felt it. The waxy hardness of dried chewing gum.

Brittany, 1142

The abbot isn’t happy. He sticks his hand in the pockets of his white habit; he blows out his cheeks, like a cat fluffing its fur to make itself seem bigger. He looks at the hermit, a biblical figure in his brown tunic and long white beard; and at the man beside him: the scars, the nose that didn’t set right after a shield boss broke it, the strength in the arms.

‘The monastery is full,’ he says.

He’s a fat man in a lean land. He didn’t get that way by taking in monks who couldn’t earn their keep. He wants younger sons from established families: youths who’ll bring donations, patronage, bequests. He doesn’t want an orphan grubbed out of the forest – disruptive, burdensome, and with who knows what sins on his conscience. But the hermit carries spiritual weight. The abbot has to at least pretend to listen to him.

‘What is your name?’

‘Chr
…
Chrétien.’ The name doesn’t fit me yet, though I’m determined it will. The abbot makes a face. He thinks I’m trying to impress him with my piety.

He stares at my head. The hermit cropped my hair almost to the skull, but there’s still a remnant of the false tonsure I had for the assault. Does he think I’m a miscreant monk who fled his former home? Or has he heard of the men who dressed as murdered monks and slaughtered the garrison of the Île de Pêche? I think probably not. I doubt Malegant left witnesses.

‘Have you taken orders before?’

‘Minor orders. A long time ago.’

I look around the Abbot’s room. He may be fat, but he isn’t prodigal: the room is as Spartan as you’d expect. The only indulgence I can see is books. He has the usual literature of his office – Bible, missal, breviary and account books – but also many more: fine volumes bound in leather. I can see Vergil, Ovid, Cicero and Caesar.

He follows my gaze. He wonders if I’m planning to rob him.

‘I can read and write,’ I volunteer. ‘Both Latin and Romanse.’

The abbot licks his lips. ‘Brother Edward, who worked in the scriptorium, died two months ago. It’s hard to find someone to replace him around here.’

‘At least take him as a novice,’ the hermit suggests.

I still don’t understand what happened in the field of stones – if I left this world for a time, like the men in my mother’s stories; if I dreamed it; or if, even more strangely, it might have been real. However it transpired, Peter of Camros died that night.

The birth-pangs of my new life were hard and painful. The hermit served as midwife. He found me in the forest and took me to his home, a turf cell by a spring. For six days I lay on a fern bier delirious with a fever. He kept me alive with honey and bread dipped in milk; he used his arts to make salves, which he
spread on my forehead; he whispered prayers in my ear.

When the fever left me, he suggested I make a confession.

‘Something inside you is blocking your heart like a stone. You have to remove it if you want to be whole again.’

His hair grew wild, matted and long and streaked with mud. But there was a profound stillness in his deep brown eyes. A trust.

I knelt in front of him in the forest. I told him how for years I had hated God, how I wandered blindly without knowing where I was going. How everything I did was evil. I confessed it all. My adultery with Ada. The men I killed, from Athold du Laurrier to the Count’s guards on the Île de Pêche. Long before I finished, tears were streaming down my face. The sins had taken deep hold on my soul, but I tore them up by their roots and cast them out for the hermit to see. I wondered if there would be anything left to hold me together without them.

The hermit heard me out in silence. When I had finished, I looked into his eyes to see what he thought. He’d closed them: but even his powers of self-will couldn’t mask the horror on his face. A hermit, not a saint.

‘Terrible crimes,’ he murmured.

The words struck me like a lance. My face grew hot. Part of me wanted to hit him, to break his sanctimonious body and beat the forgiveness I craved out of him. Part of me, perhaps the greater part, knew I didn’t deserve it. I curled over, rocking on my knees.

Something fluttered against my forehead like a moth. I reached up to swat it away, but it resisted me. I opened my eyes. The hermit’s hand was trembling with the effort as he laid it on my head.