The Martyr's Curse (35 page)

Ben said nothing.

‘So here’s what we’re looking at,’ Luc Simon said. ‘We know that Streicher failed in 2011 to obtain biological weapons that he intended to use to carry out his sick personal objectives. The failure cost him some of his best people, and an awful lot of money. He disappeared for a long time, and all efforts to locate him failed. It was as if he’d dropped off the face of the earth. Even his website disappeared, pulled down overnight from the Deep Web. Analysts came to the conclusion that the experience must have completely defeated him, perhaps driven him to drink or suicide. Or that someone within his organisation had killed him.

‘It took many months of intensive police work to discover that he was still active. Whereupon, the joint operation was mounted between French, British and Swiss Intelligence services to plant undercover operatives into the organisation, with a twofold agenda. First, to discover where Streicher had been hiding, and second, to find out what he was up to. They failed on the first count. We still have no idea where he hides out. As for the second, Streicher answered it for us when he carried out the attack on the monastery. Now we know for a fact that he’s by no means given up. All this time, he was simply lying low. Marshalling his forces, forming a new plan in the wake of the failed Korean attack. Looking for an alternative.’

‘And now, it appears,’ Oppenheim said, ‘he’s found it.’

Ben stared at the two of them. ‘You said at the start that you could sum this up in just one word. So cut to the chase.’

Oppenheim glanced again at Luc Simon, as if looking for the green light. Luc Simon again quietly nodded his acquiescence.

Oppenheim turned to Ben and came out with the one word.

It was, ‘Plague.’

Chapter Fifty

There was silence in the room. The two men were watching Ben closely for his reaction. He leaned back deeper in his chair and sipped his coffee. It was going cold and tasted suddenly bitter.

‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’ Luc Simon asked him.

Ben waited another full minute before replying. He wanted to be sure he understood this right. ‘The two of Streicher’s men we found at the safe house, Roth and Grubitz. Were they infected with what you’re talking about?’

‘And now both dead,’ Oppenheim said with a nod. ‘The entire area has been evacuated and sealed off by specialist biohazard teams. It’s a particularly virulent strain that attacks the system with extreme aggression.’

‘And if you’re not showing signs of infection within twenty-four hours, you never will,’ Ben said. ‘Hence the short quarantine period. Correct?’

‘Correct.’

Ben was silent a while longer. Thinking hard. Whichever way he came at it, the conclusion seemed inescapable. He could only pray he was wrong. ‘How long can something like this remain dormant and still survive?’ he asked Oppenheim.

‘Plague is a bacterial disease,’ Oppenheim said. ‘Its active agent is the bacterium
Yersinia pestis,
Y pestis
for short. Unlike a virus, even without being kept sustained by a host, it can stay buried in the ground for centuries. Far from losing in virulence, it can actively evolve and mutate during that time, ready to spring back into action in strengthened form as and when the opportunity arises. Basically, it’s a survivor.’

Ben sucked in a deep breath. He hadn’t been wrong, and it wasn’t a good feeling. ‘The monastery,’ he said. ‘It was the source, wasn’t it?’

Luc Simon nodded gravely. ‘That’s what we believe, too.’

‘I lived there for seven months,’ Ben said. ‘There was nothing, no mention, no clue. Except for the walled-up crypt.’ He spent the next few minutes explaining to them what he’d found down there. Père Antoine’s reticence about discussing the monastery’s past. The dark secrets on which he wouldn’t be drawn. Then Ben told them about the errand that had taken him away from the monastery during the crucial hours of Streicher’s attack. He described what he’d found on his return. The slaughtered monks, the skeletal remains of the plague dead. And the gold bars.

‘We found one in your bag,’ Luc Simon said.

‘They were scattered about the place,’ Ben said. ‘The way they would be, if you were in a hurry to transfer a large haul of them from deep underground to a waiting truck, with the clock ticking. As if one accidentally dropped here or there didn’t really matter because there were so many of them.’ He shook his head. ‘I was so sure. And I was so wrong.’

‘Streicher is a man of many parts,’ Oppenheim said. ‘Not least of which are that he’s extremely wealthy and extremely cunning. Red herrings don’t come much more expensive than planting gold bars about your crime scene to create a false trail.’

‘But it worked,’ Ben said. ‘It worked very bloody well indeed. It stopped me from thinking about the reason for the second explosive charge. The one that sealed up the hole and nearly buried me. He didn’t want the cops to see what was down there. The bastard covered his tracks beautifully.’

And the cigarette too
, Ben thought. The planted black Sobranie that had almost led him to declare war against every Russian mafioso from Nice to Marseille. Another piece of artful distraction dreamed up by a deviously calculating mind. Ben almost had to admire it.

‘Let me reveal some further information I don’t think you’ll be aware of,’ Oppenheim said. ‘Very few people are. It concerns a discovery made in 2012 by an ecological survey team in the mountains surrounding Chartreuse de la Sainte Vierge de Pelvoux, who were there to assess the increasing wolf population in the Hautes-Alpes area. Since it became illegal to hunt the damn things, they’ve turned into more and more of a problem for livestock farmers. Anyway, during an expedition on foot, the survey team came across the body of a strange creature. A rat, physically very deformed and apparently eyeless.’

‘I saw rats like that in the crypt before it blew up,’ Ben said. ‘They must have been breeding down there for a thousand generations.’

‘When the rodent’s body was taken for analysis, it was found to be harbouring a rare and aggressive strain of plague bacterium,’ Oppenheim said, ‘which in fact infected the survey team leader and two of his colleagues. None of them survived,’ he added dryly. ‘The incident was given only light coverage in a handful of scientific journals and wasn’t allowed to reach the mainstream media, for fear that it could affect the Alpine tourism industry.’

‘But the information is out there nonetheless,’ Luc Simon said. ‘And we think that it was while he was holed up in hiding after the crushing defeat of his failed Korean mission that Streicher must have come across it, and it pricked his interest.’

If Streicher makes it his business to find out about something, believe me, he does.
Silvie’s words echoed in Ben’s mind.

And:
Ancient secrets
.
Ones that had been almost completely forgotten over the course of centuries. Only he had been able to connect the facts.
How he was going to make history. How he was going to be remembered.

‘Streicher’s a researcher,’ Ben said. ‘He must have devoured everything he could find about the area, to figure out where that rat had come from. Starting with internet searches using obvious keywords like “rat” or “plague”. That’s how he eventually worked out that the source of the infection was right underneath the monastery, that the rat must have crawled through a crack in the mountain and died out there in the open. It was the connection with the old forgotten story of the martyr’s curse.’

‘The what?’ Luc Simon said. Oppenheim was quiet, listening.

‘The prophecy of a dying man as he burned at the stake,’ Ben said. ‘That a thousand years of pestilence would descend upon the land and bring his revenge on the descendants of the people who’d betrayed him. It was only six hundred odd years ago. Maybe Salvator’s timing wasn’t so wrong, after all.’

‘What are you talking about, Ben?’ Luc Simon said.

‘The reason the contamination was down there in the first place,’ Ben said, ‘is that within just a few months, in 1348, the curse appeared to come true. It was a Plague year. The dead and the dying alike were walled up in the crypt underneath Sainte Vierge de Pelvoux. Sealed off from the outside world and left there for their bones to be gnawed by a thousand generations of rats. One of which happened to escape centuries later, giving Streicher the tip he’d been waiting for. It was an easy target. All he needed were the right people for the job, which he already had. Plus the right equipment.’

Now Ben realised what had been haunting him. Roby’s last words as he’d lain bleeding to death from the gunshot wound in his belly. He’d said,
I saw ghosts. All white.

Not strictly white. More silvery-white. Streicher’s team members in hazmat suits, foraging deep under the monastery to gather all the toxic samples of dead and decomposed rat tissue they could pack into the white cases Silvie had later seen inside the assault vehicle. Containers for the transportation of biohazard materials. Meanwhile, the hazmat suits, masks, footwear and gauntlets had been in the bags that she had been tasked to burn after the raid.

‘So now you understand what we’re dealing with,’ Luc Simon said. ‘A lethal infectious pathogen in the hands of a maniac who wants to rule the world.’

‘It was a devastatingly simple plan,’ Oppenheim said. ‘If you can’t get hold of modern biological warfare agents, you source some ancient ones of your own. We can only assume that Streicher must have on his payroll at least one expert capable of processing the material. A chemist, or a biologist, or both. We can further speculate that he may have these people at work, even as we speak, on a vaccine or serum that he intends to use to protect himself and his fellow Parati members before unleashing this thing.’

‘Which potentially buys us time,’ Ben said.

‘Potentially, yes. How much time is an open question. If our speculations are correct, Streicher must have access to some kind of private laboratory facilities. We don’t know what, or where.’

‘But you do know that what he’s got is the same pathogen as the medieval Black Death,’ Ben said. ‘Bubonic plague. Which is presumably a disease well known to medical science, and highly treatable.’

Luc Simon looked down at his feet.

Oppenheim pursed his lips.

‘What?’ Ben said.

‘Mr Hope,’ Oppenheim said. ‘I wish it
were
bubonic plague.’

Chapter Fifty-One

‘Then what the hell is it?’ Ben asked, staring from Oppenheim to Luc Simon and back again.

‘You need to understand that there are various forms of plague,’ Oppenheim said. ‘The so-called bubonic variety, named after the “buboes” or black lumpy spots that are a characteristic symptom of that particular strain of the disease, is spread by fleas infected with the
Y pestis
bacterium. It can’t be contracted directly from a victim, which significantly reduces the rate and efficiency of the contamination. In effect, the disease is hamstrung by its own infection mechanism. It’s just not enough of a killer to fully account for the appalling virulence of the medieval Black Death, which spread like a bush fire through Europe and beyond and claimed some two hundred million lives during its short but nefarious history. Many scientists now think that the Black Death is more likely to have been a form of
pneumonic
plague.’

‘I’m not a doctor,’ Ben said impatiently. ‘These terms mean little to me.’

‘The diseases have plenty in common,’ Oppenheim explained. ‘Both have been used in biological warfare. In the fourteenth century, the Tartars catapulted corpses of bubonic plague victims over the city walls during the Siege of Kaffa. In World War Two, the Japanese packed infected fleas into bombs with the aim of spreading the disease among allied troops. Suitably callous tactics, but crude and limited due to their reliance on parasitic organisms to carry the contagion. By contrast, when the Soviets experimented with aerosolised
Y pestis
during the Cold War, they discovered they’d created a weapon of a whole other magnitude of lethality.’

‘Pneumonic plague?’

Oppenheim nodded. ‘Same active bacterial agent, our old friend
Yersinia pestis.
But what makes all the difference is that in the pneumonic variety, it’s airborne. You don’t need to be bitten by an infected flea to contract it. This thing is directly communicable from one living being to another, humans and animals alike. Proximity is all it takes. It can spread with incredible speed over a large area, the rate of infection continually multiplying as it takes hold. In short, pneumonic plague is to its bubonic sibling what a nuclear missile is to a handgun.’

Ben stared at him. ‘And this is what we’re dealing with here?’

‘Going by the pathology we’ve seen in both victims, Roth and Grubitz, then I’m very much afraid that that’s
exactly
what we’re dealing with,’ Oppenheim said. ‘It enters the lungs and swiftly takes over the entire system. Coughing and sneezing tend to be the first symptoms, quickly followed by violent fever and nausea, then uncontrollable bouts of seizures and bloody vomiting. Soon afterwards the system collapses into septic shock. Tissues break down and become necrotic and gangrenous. A horrible and agonising death ensues within hours.’

‘If that’s what happened to Roth and Grubitz, they had it coming,’ Ben said.

‘So does half of Europe, if we don’t do something to stop it,’ Oppenheim said. ‘Consider the mortality rates. Bubonic plague kills between one to fifteen per cent of victims if treated, and between forty to sixty per cent in untreated cases. In other words, even without medical aid, your chances can be better than fifty-fifty. Contrast that to pneumonic plague, which has a one hundred per cent fatality rate if the patient isn’t treated within the first twenty-four hours.’

‘Maybe it’s not as infectious as you think it is,’ Ben said, shaking his head. ‘I’m living proof of that. I wasn’t just exposed for those few moments at the safe house. I was down there in that hole, knee-deep in infected rat shit and breathing in God knows what kind of dust and spores and bacteria. So why didn’t I get it?’