The Pegasus Secret (35 page)

He was disappointed to see nothing that could not have been created by wind, rain and the exfoliation of rock over the centuries.

Tomorrow he would inspect Cardou in person.

Toulouse-Blagnac International Airport
2330 hours

The airport terminal was closed for the night, the next regular passenger flight not scheduled until the 08:24 from
Geneva. Other than a bored watchman who was far too interested in his portable television to pay any particular attention to private aircraft, no one observed the Gulfstream IV when its tires squeaked on the runway and its twin jet engines spooled down as it taxied to the tarmac. Nor was there anyone to notice the slick black Citoën slide out of the shadows like a hawk gliding down on its prey.

There was the pop of an air seal as the aircraft’s door swung open and wheezed down. Four men came down the steps, the younger three each carrying a small suitcase. From the care each man exercised with his luggage, an observant witness would have surmised that the bags contained something other than clean shirts.

The oldest of the quartet exited the plane last, carrying nothing other than a raincoat slung over one arm and an air of authority, the manner of a man accustomed to being obeyed. Without a hat, his shoulder-length silver hair reflected what poor light was available. One of the first three deferentially held the Citoën’s passenger door open for the older man.

The aircraft’s two-man crew stood stiffly on the top step until they were dismissed by a wave of the older man’s hand. The plane’s door shut and the idling engines began to whine. By the time the Citoën was driving through the airport’s open security gate, the Gulfstream was screaming up into the night. It banked sharply to the west and was gone, its strobe lights fading like dying comets.

The older man was seated next to the automobile’s female driver, the other three in the luxurious backseat.

“Where is he?” the older man asked in unaccented French.

“Asleep in his room,” the proprietress of the Hostellier de Rennes-les-Bains answered.

Rennes-les-Bains

Lang had dreams that left him less than rested. As far as he knew, Dawn had never been to this part of France. Yet she had been waiting for him atop Blanchefort. There was a man with her. Lang couldn’t see his face but, with that baseless certainty of dreams, he knew it was Saunière.

Lang knew better than to try to figure out what it all meant, other than the hole Dawn had left in the rest of his life would never be filled. Over ten years and not a day passed he didn’t think of her. For that matter, rarely did an hour slide by without his seeing her face. Not the Dawn he had married but the dying bundle of bones and flesh in the hospital. It was becoming increasingly difficult to remember the way she looked before she got sick. Even seeing her that way in his dreams left him with teary eyes.

Memory has a sadistic streak.

The brilliant sunshine pouring through the window was of some comfort. Hard to be gloomy when he looked into the cloudless sky. Below the hotel, fog covered the Aude Valley, shimmering in the sun like a blanket of silver wool. It would burn off by the time he dressed and had coffee and a croissant.

In the hotel’s dining room, Lang sipped coffee strong enough to strip chrome off of a bumper. In front of him was the well-wrinkled photocopy of the Polaroid. It didn’t matter that the faces were now blurred and the inscription fuzzy. He knew both by heart. It was the background, the shape and location of the distant mountains, he was trying to memorize.

An hour later, the little Peugeot again struggled to reach the flat space below Blanchefort. Yesterday’s tire tracks were partially filled with loose dirt, the erasing effect of the wind. Lang searched for any tracks sharper, more defined, that would tell him someone else had been here. There weren’t any.

At the base of the tower, he took a compass bearing and set off towards Cardou. Loose pebbles and scrub growth slowed progress along a saddle of rock. Occasionally, he stopped to check the compass and to make sure the rope loop that held the trenching tool to his belt was secure. Twice he sipped from the water bottle, not so much from thirst but because the motion gave him a chance to survey the surrounding slopes from under the hat’s brim without appearing to be looking for anything. He couldn’t shake a creepy feeling he was being watched, the sort of intuition the people in horror stories have when the spooky villain is about to strike. The only thing missing was background music building to a crescendo. He had seen no reflection from a distant pair of binoculars, no brush moving without a wind, none of the things that might betray a hidden observer.

Overactive imagination, he told himself, too vivid a memory of the grisly last chapter of Pietro’s tale.

A flash of reflected sun gave him a start that nearly brought the croissant back up. He jumped behind a boulder, squinting into the glare for a full minute before realizing he had only seen the morning’s light on the windshield of a car far below, on the same road he had been on the day before. If he could see the road, he must be . . . Yep, he was. A careful look and he could see the cross, too. The Christ statue was invisible, blending in with the distant trees.

Lang trudged onward until he was standing in the field of scree he had noticed from the tower, loose rock that appeared as a bare spot from the cross. He took the picture of the painting from his wallet and turned it slowly.

The peak to the left, no more than a gray smudge in the distance, had the picture’s jagged gap between it and a much closer hill. He leaned over, turning his head to get as close to an upside-down view as possible. The nose wasn’t as sharp and the chin had disappeared but the gap could, conceivably, resemble Washington’s profile on a quarter. It had been, what, four hundred years or so since Poussin had painted that picture? Plenty of time for geologic change.

This was as good a spot as any.

A very large spot, the size of a football field.

Speaking of which, he had to pick his way around rocks and boulders like a kick returner avoiding tacklers. The goal line was the point where the level space met the edge of Cardou’s incline.

Lang stood there for several minutes. One place was slightly steeper than the rest. Steeper, yet the rock was piled just as high. Wouldn’t loose stones roll until they reached a flat place? So gravity would seem to indicate.

Lang scrambled over a boulder, leaving a piece of the
skin on his knee on a jagged point. Does anyone hear when you curse alone? Maybe not, but it sure made him feel better.

He was standing in front of a large boulder that seemed to be partially imbedded in the hillside, its top more than head-high. It was the only piece of visible rock that could have been placed over an entrance big enough to admit a man, at least the only rock along the plane where Washington’s profile was recognizable. Leaning against its rough surface, his feet scrabbled for traction in the loose soil and pebbles. His entire weight wasn’t enough to budge it a centimeter.

There had to be a way. Saunière had done it alone or his secret would not have been kept. But how?

Had to be a matter of simple physics. But nothing about physics was simple. Lang had nearly flunked it in high school.

He stepped back, looking up the slope until he saw a stone fifteen or twenty feet away, one approximately the size of the one in front of him. Climbing up to its downhill side, he took the trenching tool from its rope loop and began to dig at the rock’s base. After ten minutes of hard labor, he discarded his shirt. After what seemed like an hour, he had undermined the downslope side of that rock with a trench a foot or so deep. If he wasn’t careful, he was likely to be flattened like Wile E. Coyote when he tried something similar to catch the Road Runner. Only Lang wouldn’t be around to hear the “beep-beep.”

Mopping his face with the wadded shirt, Lang took the coil of rope from his belt, looped it around the rock and tied it off. Then he went back down to the lower stone and did the same thing.

Now he had two boulders, one above the other, connected by the strongest nylon rope he could find. A swig from the water bottle celebrated the accomplishment. He
hoped the next step would have made his physics teacher proud.

Picking up the trenching tool, he used it to smooth a path from the upper rock down the slope. Then he went back up and stuck the tool under the boulder, using the shovel’s handle as a lever. That didn’t work, so he pushed the little spade as far under the rock as it would go and stood on the handle, bending his knees and bouncing up and down like a diver about to leave the high board.

Simple physics, a lever.

He had expected his weight to jiggle the thing loose, but he was doing knee bends for nothing, panting in a fair imitation of Grumps. He promised himself he would start working out as soon as he got home. That’s the easiest part of getting in shape, promising yourself you’re going to do it.

He was going to have to think of something else to budge that rock. He stopped for another drink.

The sound of scraping metal made him forget his thirst. Something had shifted. Knees flexing, he felt the huge bulk of the stone move so imperceptibly that he thought it might be wishful thinking instead of motion.

As his high school teacher would have said, simple physics: tons of inertia were about to become kinetic.

With renewed vigor, Lang jumped up and down on the tool’s handle two more times. There was a groan of rock grinding rock. He just had time to jump free before the boulder slowly moved from its resting place and began to inch downhill. In seconds it had the momentum and speed of a freight train on a ten-mile straight.

Now all Lang had to do was pray the fiberglass rope was as strong as advertised.

It was.

Maybe stronger.

The loose boulder crashed past the lower stone and the
rope sounded like a plucked harp string as it went tight. The power of tons of stone in motion snatched the other rock loose and it followed the first down the mountainside in a fury of scree, vegetation, dirt and noise. Fortunately, there was nothing below but the river.

The place where the lower rock had been imbedded into the hillside was hidden in a swirling storm of white grit. Lang sat on a nearby rock and waited. As the dust settled he wondered if Saunière had used the same method without the benefit of technologically enhanced rope. If so, how in hell had he gotten the rock back into place? Maybe he had simply pulled another boulder downhill instead.

A darkness was emerging behind the dust cloud, a blackness that could only be an opening in the hillside, a cave.

Lang stood, feeling that going-into-action sort of tingle. If he had guessed right, he was about to follow not only Saunière but Pietro.

There was enough water remaining in the bottle to soak the shirt before he tied it over his nose and mouth to absorb as much loose dust as possible. Taking the flashlight from its clip on his belt, he checked to make sure it was working and marched two thousand years to the rear.

Cardou

The sniper looked up from the scope. “He’s gone into some sort of cave. I can’t see him.”

The other person took the binoculars from his eyes. “So I see. I’d suggest you keep that thing ready. You may have the opportunity to use it at any moment.”

The shooter put a cheek back against the Galil’s metal
frame stock and moved the barrel so that the scope’s picture was a point a few feet in front of the cave. “I’m not walking anywhere. I’ll be ready.”

It could have been clouds making shadows on white rock, had there been any clouds in the brilliant blue sky. The angle of the sun to any number of rocks could have also been the origin of the shadows. Or, possibly, the shadows could have been the result of a far-ranging sheep, moving from boulder to boulder so quickly that the eye was unsure if it had really seen movement.

The sniper didn’t think so.

The scope moved to a place fifty or so feet from the cave’s entrance.

Cardou

A haze of white dust threw the flashlight’s beam back into Lang’s eyes. He couldn’t see until he was completely inside the cave. He couldn’t see the walls and he certainly couldn’t see the low ceiling. He smacked his head against unforgiving rock. At least the impact made him see something, even if only spinning balls of color.

Wary of another collision, he stooped before moving forward. Of course, he thought. He should have known the damned roof would be low. Men centuries ago rarely stood more than five feet. He had never seen a suit of armor that he could have gotten into.

The dust was settling enough that Lang could see chisel marks, the tracks of the stonemasons Pietro had observed. This cave had been enlarged by a process more laborious than Lang wanted to imagine.

He stepped deliberately, placing each foot softly to minimize stirring the powdery white dust carpeting the floor.
Still, there was enough of it in the air that he didn’t see it until the flashlight silhouetted it against the far wall. A stone box, squarely carved, about twenty inches by fifteen and maybe a foot high. Only its shape distinguished it from the pieces of rock that had fallen from the ceiling as the centuries passed. An indentation in the coat of covering dust indicated it had a lid. Closer inspection revealed irregularities in its coating of grime that may have been letters. With a tentative hand, Lang rubbed the stone, the slightest touch sending motes whirling into the light’s beam. The surface felt warm, almost hot to his touch, in contrast to the cool of the surrounding dark.