The Martyr's Curse (45 page)

Ben ran his hand over Silvie’s pale, blood-spattered face, touched his dripping fingers to her neck and could feel the tiniest pulse. She was still holding on, but she might not for long.

Him too. He could feel strength ebbing out of him about as fast as his blood was leaking out. He was cold and his vision was blurring.

Streicher was gone.

He was escaping with the plague.

He was going to take off in the helicopter.

Ben blinked. He swayed to his feet and staggered a few steps, his feet slipping on the slick wet floor of the armoury. His left arm was dangling from what the shotgun blast had left of his shoulder. Fighting down the pain, he seized his useless hand and shoved it through his belt to stop it swinging about.

‘This is nothing,’ he said to himself, and smiled grimly.

It wasn’t nothing. He knew the darkness would rise again soon, and that this time maybe it wouldn’t give him up. He didn’t give a damn, not about himself. Bring it on, he thought. But first, let’s get this done.

The first thing he saw on the armoury rack was what he took down. It was heavy to carry in one hand. He gripped it tightly in his bloody fist and went after Streicher.

Chapter Sixty-Seven

No air had ever tasted sweeter than the gentle breeze that wafted into the hangar as the shutter door cranked open. Streicher filled his lungs and looked out at the evening light settling over the trees. The moon was out, the night’s first stars appearing against the darkening blue. So beautiful. He laughed out loud and walked back to the chopper.

Within a couple of minutes, the turbine was powering up. He engaged the undercarriage gears and gently taxied out through the open shutter. The rotors began to turn, slowly at first but quickly gathering speed. He’d soon be out of here. The rest would be history.

Turning away from the controls, he made sure that his priceless payload was securely tied down and that none of the twelve canisters could roll or fall out of their crate. Everything was looking good. He turned back to the controls.
Here we go
, he thought. Freedom and victory. It was a wonderful feeling.

The rotor was almost at full speed now.

As an afterthought, Streicher reached into his pocket and took out the little cocaine bottle. Tapped some out on top of the dashboard, poked it into a crooked little line with his finger, then lowered his face to the dash and snorted the powder up. He gasped and threw his head back, closed his eyes and had never felt so elated and happy in his life.

He opened his eyes.

A figure was standing in front of the chopper. Ragged and bloody and unsteady on his feet.

‘You,’ Streicher breathed.

The weight of the ex-Soviet rocket-propelled grenade launcher over his good shoulder was almost more than Ben’s weakening legs could bear. The wind from the chopper’s rotors was like standing on a mountaintop in the middle of a storm. He swayed, then blinked and righted himself. The weapon was angled over his shoulder and pointing straight at the helicopter’s cockpit. At this range, he wasn’t going to need the flip-up sights, even if he’d been able to see them. His vision was badly blurred and darkening around the edges.

Streicher clambered out of the chopper and jumped down on the concrete apron, staring at Ben with an incredulous grin and crazy eyes. His nose and upper lip were dusted with something white.

‘You’re going nowhere, Streicher,’ Ben shouted. The effort it cost him to speak was enormous.

‘You fool!’ Streicher yelled over the din of the rotors, his shirt crackling and hair whipping in the powerful draught. ‘Fire that thing and you’ll blow the canisters. You’ll release the plague anyway.’

Ben was beginning to shake with the feverish cold that was spreading through him and the wind that was chilling his blood-soaked clothes against his flesh. He knew that Streicher was right. Not even an RPG blast at close range could be guaranteed to incinerate all the disease agent. He could visualise the unburned bacteria whipped up and carried high in the smoke from the explosion before slowly dissipating to drift gently on the evening breeze, with nothing but a prayer to stop them from carrying to nearby farms, villages, towns.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I can’t use this thing.’

He let go of the RPG and it slid off his shoulder and hit the ground with a dull metallic thud.

Streicher laughed again.

Ben felt himself losing balance. The darkness was encroaching further around the edges of his vision. He wobbled on his feet and managed to stay upright, the pain getting bad now. Getting worse than anything he’d ever felt before.

‘I’ll just have to use this,’ he heard himself say.

He saw Streicher’s expression change. The man took a step away. Then another, ducking back towards the helicopter.

As if in a dream, Ben felt his good arm reach back to that familiar place behind his right hip and his fingers close on the chunky grip of the Browning Hi-Power. Felt the steel clear the holster, registered the gun appearing in front of his blurring vision as he thrust it out one-handed, barely aware of it except as just an extension of his arm.

The sound of the report was half-drowned by the rotor blast, but Ben might not even have heard it otherwise. He was only dimly conscious of the snap of the recoil in the palm of his hand, and of Udo Streicher’s brains blowing out against the fuselage of his own chopper, and of the man’s knees folding and twisting under him as he went straight down like a sack of laundry, twitched once on the ground and then lay still with blood and pulped cerebral matter spilling over the concrete.

By then, Ben was already falling, falling, backwards off the edge of a cliff and tumbling for ever into nothingness.

Chapter Sixty-Eight

‘Come,’ Roby said, with a sunburst smile, beckoning enthusiastically. ‘This way, Benoît.’

Ben followed the boy over the meadow, wading through verdant grass and sunflowers that grew knee-high and filled the air with their perfume. The mountains twinkled and the sky was an unbroken blue. ‘This way,’ Roby called, further away now, and Ben quickened his pace to catch up with him. ‘Wait for me,’ he called back.

Then he was surrounded by a circle of pearl-white archways that seemed to grow out of the waving flowers, looming tall and splendid all around him. Roby stood waiting for him at their centre, smiling and extending his hand. He took Ben’s arm.

‘See,’ he said, and pointed.

Ben looked, and saw all his old friends stepping through the archways and gathering round to greet him. There was Père Antoine, his flowing robe and mane of white hair catching the sunlight, and his eyes glowing with that inner joy that Ben remembered from another life. Behind him came Père Jacques, and Frère Patrice, and the lay brothers Gilles and Marc and Olivier, the whole gang, all smiling and happy to meet him again. Jeff Dekker was there, too. And Ben’s son Jude, his blond hair shining like gold.

‘Welcome home, Ben,’ Père Antoine said.

Ben asked, ‘Am I in heaven?’

Père Antoine just smiled. He held Ben’s hand and squeezed it tightly with such love in his kind old eyes that Ben could feel his own tearing up and felt like a little boy again.

‘It’s all right, Ben,’ Père Antoine said. ‘It’s all right.’

Then the old man’s voice grew distant and his smiling face seemed to fade into the brightness of the sunlight. The circle of arches melted away, and all his friends, gradually merging into the light until they were gone and all that remained was the brightness.

Ben squinted up at it, blinking. ‘Where did you go?’ he said, confused.

‘I’m right here, Ben,’ said the same voice, only it was different somehow, closer and more immediate. The same warm hand gripped his tightly, fingers meshed with his own.

Ben’s eyes fluttered shut, then reopened. ‘Silvie?’

‘Welcome back,’ she said again, and tears spilled out of her eyes and fell on his skin like the dew from the wildflowers in his dream.

Ben closed his eyes and slept.

He drifted, sometimes on the edge of consciousness, other times floating through more strange dreams, though Père Antoine and the others did not reappear. He slowly became more aware of time passing, days merging into nights and back into days. Through it all he could sense the presence of people around him, and one presence especially.

On the fifth day, he was able to keep his eyes open for longer and sit propped up on an extra pillow in the hospital bed. The private room was white and shiny and full of flowers. Silvie sat at his bedside, where he now realised she’d been sitting for days. Her right arm was in a sling, as his left arm would be when it was out of traction. She moved stiffly, but she seemed not to notice the pain of her injuries now that Ben was going to live. She couldn’t stop crying and apologising for being silly.

‘I thought you were gone,’ he said when he found the strength to speak.

‘Wasn’t as bad as it looked,’ she replied, smiling at him. ‘Streicher was a terrible shot. Both bullets went straight through without touching anything.’

‘Lucky,’ he whispered.

‘It was you I was worried about,’ she said.

He rested again a while. Later, when he was a little stronger, she calmly explained to him how the surgeons had rebuilt his shoulder blade and reset the joint. Hannah Gissel’s shotgun had been loaded with small birdshot. The wound had been spectacular, but the force of the blast had been largely absorbed by muscle and bone and none of the tiny pellets had penetrated with enough energy to find their way to his heart or lungs. It had been the loss of blood that would have killed most men, and things had been touch-and-go for a while. Silvie had been in the room next door until three days ago, since when she’d been at his bedside for as many hours of the day as the nurses would allow her. ‘I’m your guard dog,’ she said.

‘More like guardian angel,’ he replied.

‘Glad I was there after all?’

‘Glad you’re here now,’ he said, and she squeezed his hand.

‘You’re going to be fine, Ben. And so is everybody else.’

He asked, ‘How did we get here?’

‘You can thank Luc Simon for that,’ she said. ‘He was the one who insisted on being kept informed of our movements. Didn’t think you’d take kindly to it. I secretly texted him the location we got from Donath. The police helicopters reached Streicher’s bunker just a few minutes after it all went down.’ She ran through how the cops had safely secured the plague canisters and sealed off the whole area.

‘That Luc Simon is something, isn’t he?’ Ben said, and laughed, and the laugh became a painful cough.

‘You can tell him so yourself. He’s pretty anxious to speak to you. Wants to give you the whole spiel on behalf of the French nation, thanking you for averting such a major disaster, etc., etc.’

‘And then throw me in jail,’ Ben said.

‘I somehow don’t think that’s going to happen,’ Silvie said with a chuckle.

Ben slowly recovered his strength over the next week. Luc Simon did come and see him, and did give him the whole spiel, and made it clear that no charges would be brought for any of the little misdemeanours Ben had committed in the course of saving the world.

‘Cheers for that one,’ Ben said.

‘Oh, I almost forgot to mention. We finally got back the lab results with the analysis of that liquid you were taking. Ever heard of colloidal silver?’

‘No,’ Ben said.

‘Tiny particles separated from pure silver by a simple electrical process, suspended in water. Your friend Antoine used an apparatus he built himself, powered by a nine-volt battery. I’d never heard of the stuff either, but I’ve been reading up on it. There have been a lot of scientific studies that seem to show it’s a pretty potent antibacterial.’ Luc Simon shrugged. ‘Maybe that explains how you were protected from infection down in the crypt. But I guess we’ll never know for sure.’

‘Not while the pharmaceutical industry is calling the shots,’ Ben said.

‘So damn cynical,’ Luc Simon said.

Epilogue

Nineteen days after the operation to put his shoulder back together, Ben was ready to leave hospital. Dressing took a long time, with his arm in a sling and thirty-five stitches pulling whenever he moved. But it felt good to be getting out of here.

‘I suppose you’ll be going home now,’ Silvie said on her final visit to his room.

He replied, ‘I don’t have a home.’

Silvie looked as if she’d been expecting him to say that. ‘But I do,’ she said. ‘Nothing special, but I’d like you to come and live in it with me until you get your strength back. You need someone to look after you.’ She smiled and added in another tone, ‘Besides, I kind of like your company.’

‘What about your job?’ he asked.

‘I quit. Decided to move out of my apartment, too. Fresh start, new job. Full-time in charge of getting you fully recovered.’

‘With just one arm?’ he said, eyeing her sling.

‘Hey, I’m not Superwoman for nothing, you know.’ She looked at him. ‘What do you say, Ben?’

He said yes.

They spent the next six weeks together. Silvie had rented a small beachside place in the Bay of Biscay, near La Rochelle, where she’d spent part of her childhood. As Ben gradually regained his strength, they went walking on the beach, watching the boats and the sunsets over the bay, and joking about how they could still hold hands with their good arms. Her sling came off soon afterwards. Ben was healing well, and not long after that, the doctors said he could start doing without his. His shoulder was very stiff at first, but with time and exercises, full mobility would eventually return.

In the meantime, they had nothing but the warm days, the sea, and the tasty French dishes Silvie regaled him with, to build up his strength and put back on the weight he’d lost. And they had each other. Gentle days, tender nights. For a time, it seemed as if it could go on for ever.

But they both knew that wouldn’t happen. It was too good a thing to spoil it.