Angel City (19 page)

“Notre Père, qui es aux cieux . . .”
Harper listened to the sound of the voice.
“. . . délivre-nous du mal . . .”
Watched Goose's lips forming silent words in perfect unison with Astruc. 
“. . . mais delivre-nous du Mal . . . Amen.”

In the resultant silence, Harper looked at the two of them.
They believe.
Astruc opened his eyes.

“Are you ready to continue, Gilles?”

Gilles nodded, nervously.

“Yes, yes. I am ready now,
et merci
.”

Lambert crawled into the opening, hands and knees making small crunching sounds on bits of bones. At the collapse he lay flat on the clay floor, reached into the gap, and pulled himself ahead. Harper watched him disappear, then he looked at Astruc. The big man stared back.

“Something on your mind, Father Harper?” Astruc said.

“Notre Père.”

“What about it?”

“Haven't heard it in French in a long while.”

Astruc looked at Goose and ripped off a few quick signs—
watch him, be careful
—then he got onto his belly and crawled after Gilles. Harper gave the big man time to pull himself under the rubble pile, and he stared at Goose. Goose signed his own version of Astruc's question:
Something on your mind, fucker?

Harper gave the skeletons a once-over, then crawled into the shaft. At the face of the collapse, he lay on his stomach and targeted his headlamp into the hole.
Like crawling into the belly of a worm,
he thought. He saw the two headlamps of Lambert and Astruc moving slowly forward. Then they began to turn and sink deeper into the Earth. Harper reached in, caught two outcrops of rock, and pulled. He dragged himself over rocky floor, reached ahead again, pulled. There wasn't enough room to raise his head to see the way, or to look behind himself to check if Goose was following him. He reached the bend in the tunnel, then it began to slope downward, then came the rumble of falling rock. A tremor rolled through the close-in walls, and a cloud of thick dust filled the tunnel.

“Oh, shit.”

Harper hid his eyes in the crook of his arm, waiting for the tunnel to collapse on top of him. He heard Gilles Lambert's muffled voice calling back through the dust instead.

“We're at the place connecting to the Lycée Montaigne. The collapse has slipped a little, but I think we can still get through. I need to pull some rocks out of the way.”

Harper heard Goose coming up behind him, felt the kid's hands tap at his legs as if asking what was happening. Harper wondered how the hell you tell a deaf person who can't see your lips or hands that presently, you're bloody well stuck.

The tapping came again, then a shove.

Harper pulled the lamp from his head; he pointed it back over his shoulder. His fingers found the on/off switch. He flipped the light on and off:
Dot, dot, dot. Dash. Dot, dot, dash. Dash, dot, dash, dot. Dash, dot, dash. S-T-U-C-K.
Harper was only half-surprised when Goose answered in dots and dashes:
Roger.
Then Harper wondered: If Gilles couldn't clear the passage and the only way to get through the tunnel was to pull yourself ahead with your hands and there was no way to turn around, how the fuck were they supposed to back up? Then he realized: They wouldn't be able to. He buried his face in the crook of his arm.

“This really is so bloody swell.”

And he couldn't help but laugh to himself when he imagined the dead man who wasn't supposed to be in his head anymore joining in the conversation:
Tell me about it.
There was another shudder through the tunnel, not as bad as the last one, but enough for Harper to feel the walls close in just a bit more.

“It's all right,” Lambert's muffled voice called back. “I've cleared the way.”

Harper heard Gilles and Astruc crawl forward. He grabbed ahold of the sidewalls and pulled himself ahead. The tunnel turned at a sharp angle where it split right and left. To the right, the tunnel angled upward and it was filled with rocks and fresh concrete. Had to be the way to the caverns under Lycée Montaigne, Harper thought. He could raise his head a bit now. He saw Gilles and Astruc in the left tunnel. They were sinking down at a very steep slope. Harper followed. Fifteen minutes later, the tunnel ended at a hole in the wall. He crawled through and came into a corridor of black rock.

Harper got to his feet, stretched his arms and back for the first time since they'd gone underground. His headlamp caught Astruc and Gilles Lambert enjoying the same freedom. As they waited for Goose to clear the tunnel, Harper looked around. They stood at the end of the corridor, angling down at thirty degrees. He stepped closer to the wall. His headlamp caught the hundreds of divots in the stone, as if the tunnel had been hand-carved from solid rock.

Bloody hell,
he thought.
Same damn stone, same damn construction, as the vertical shaft hidden under the well of Lausanne Cathedral.

Goose clawed through the hole with his backpack still lashed to his ankle. He sat on the floor, undid the lashings. He hooked the backpack to his shoulders and got to his feet.

“How far to the cavern now, Gilles?” Astruc said.

“I'm not sure, but it goes quickly.”

Astruc looked at his watch.

“We should hurry, then. We lost valuable time at the collapse.”

Harper checked his own watch. They'd been down for four and a half hours.

“Right. Let's go, then.”

Gilles Lambert led the way, then Astruc, then Harper. Goose kept his position five meters back at the rear. Harper listened to their steps echo off the stone walls, ceiling, and floor. Harper had thought about counting his own steps, passed on it, thinking if this tunnel really was like the tunnel under Lausanne Cathedral, then he already knew how deep it would be: two and a half kilometers. He scanned the dimensions of the corridor instead. The tunnel under the cathedral was rounded and went straight down. This place was a rectangle, angled down a slope. But he'd happily bet a round of drinks at GG's that the dimensions would yield a quotient of 2.5. Same as the Lausanne tunnel again.

He stretched his arms from his sides, his fingertips just touching the sidewalls, feeling those hundreds of divots per square centimeter. He remembered everything Inspector Gobet's research lads from Berne had learned from studying the Lausanne tunnel after the cathedral job. Nothing,
rien du tout
. No idea who built it, no idea how it was made. Only that it had been built long before Harper's kind had come to paradise to hide in the forms of men . . . and that the dimensions of construction, when divided any which way, kept yielding a positive or negative quotient of 2.5, like some mathematical proof of eternal occurrence.

Harper laughed to himself; talk about a higher power. His thoughts faded away, and there was only the sound of steps echoing off stone until Gilles Lambert stopped walking.

“We're here,” he said.

III

A
LOW OPENING CUT INTO A BLACK STONE WALL, STRIPS OF RED
tape stretched across the opening. Words on the tape translated as “Crime scene” and “Do not cross.” Astruc and Goose walked ahead, pulled down the tape. They ducked through the opening, disappeared. Harper looked at Gilles Lambert, saw fear flare in the man's eyes.

“It'll be all right, Gilles. I'm here with you.”

“Oui, merci, mon père.”

Harper ducked through the opening, and Lambert followed.

Four narrow beams of light cut through the immense dark, reflected mirrorlike off the black stone walls and crisscrossed wildly. The effect was dizzying. Gilles Lambert lay his canvas backpack on the ground, pulled out four candles and a book of matches.

“
Attendez.
I found it's easier to see using candles.”

He lit the candles, one by one, passed them out.

“You can switch off your headlamps now,” he said.

The lamps went off.

Slowly, soft light swelled through the darkness and the cavern became visible. Six rectangular walls of equal shape and height were gathered around a conical pillar at the center of the cavern. The pillar was widest at its base and the diameter shrank as it rose tens of meters to the center of the domed ceiling. The dome seemed to glow with candlelight, and so did the walls. The wall with the gate to the outer passage was solid-faced, but Harper saw coves cut into the five other walls. Equal in size and shape, perfectly arranged. Four coves per wall, eight rows, equally spaced from floor to ceiling. He bent down, held his candle into one of the coves. Five chalk outlines of headless forms.
French copper scribble, for sure,
Harper thought. It was the same in the next cove and the next. Harper looked back at Gilles Lambert.

“The way these markings are drawn, it's exactly how you found the bodies, yeah?”

“
Oui, mon père.
There were one hundred of them in the first row of coves. When I was interviewed a few days later by the police, they told me the rest of the coves were empty. Only the first row contained bodies.”

Harper backed out of the cove, looked up at the next row, and the next.

“Empty,” he mumbled.

He stepped back and took in a wide view of the pillar, happy to bet another round of drinks at GG's that the pillar was 2.5 meters in circumference at its base and stood 25 meters high, to the bloody picometer. His eyes followed the shrinking diameter of the thing till it reached a perfect point almost touching the exact center of the glowing dome.

“What is it,
mon père
?”

“It's not a supporting pillar at all.”

Lambert could see it, too.

“Then why is it here?”

“Good question. What's above us?”

“I don't know, why?”

“Because the pillar is pointing to somewhere up there.”

“Oh. Do you know what is up there,
mon père
?”

“No idea.”

Harper watched Astruc and the kid approach and circle the pillar, examining it by candlelight. The big man hadn't even bothered to look at the coves, the ones that contained all that evil he was so concerned about back at Les Deux Magots. Instead, Astruc was walking to the pillar, sidekick in tow. The two of them stopped at the far side of the pillar, seeing something. Harper whispered to Gilles Lambert.

“I want you to stay here, Gilles.”

“Is something wrong,
mon père
?”

“I'm about to find out.”

Harper marched toward the pillar. Goose saw him coming, took three steps back. Astruc looked at Harper.

“Ah, Father, I was just about to ask you to join us.”

Astruc held his candle close to the pillar.

“I wonder if you might have a look at this and tell me what you make of it?”

Harper looked at the pillar. There was a relief set in the stone, the size of a book. And like a book, there were letters carved in the stone. Some of the lettering was ancient, some of it wasn't. Harper scanned it once, then twice . . .
Bloody hell.
Then he saw Goose from the corner of his eye, reaching into the pouch of his hoodie.

Harper looked at Astruc. “What about it?”

“As I said, I wonder if you might tell me what you make of it?”

“In my capacity as a professor of ancient languages at Lausanne University, along with my job advising the Pope, you mean.”

Astruc stared at Harper. “Yes, as you mention it.”

Harper nodded, raised his candle to the pillar, read the words on the tablet again.

“It's interesting.”

“How so?”

“Three things. One: The writing is a variation of the Ge'ez script developed in Ethiopia in the ninth century
BC
. It tells the story of this cavern. Strangely enough it doesn't say anything about this being a place of evil. Quite the opposite, actually. Two: Something was added to the tablet in the Middle Ages. That bit is in Latin, the lingua franca of the day. This was written in the mid-thirteenth century. June 24, 1244, to be precise.”

“You know this how?”

“Roman numerals, there.”

“Could you translate it, please?”

“Sure. It says, ‘The chosen of the fallen ones may recover what is hidden here by placing his hands on the tablet and reciting the sacred words.' Those sacred words are carved into the pillar itself, here; carved by the same hand. And they're in French. Strangely enough, the French words are an exact translation of the last sentence of the tablet, which, as I said, was written in the Ge'ez script. Meaning whoever wrote this in the thirteenth century knew a dead language from a part of Africa he couldn't have known about. It's the third thing that's the most interesting, though.”

Harper sensed Astruc coil like a serpent.

“Which is what?”

“You know all this already, and it's the reason you brought me down here.”

Astruc looked at Harper.

“An interesting syllogism, Father Harper. Though I believe it suffers from the faulty logic of the undistributed middle.”

Harper saw the kid's shadow reflect in the opaque lens of Astruc's glasses, his hands and shoulders making a move, pulling something from his sweatshirt.

“In that case, call it a fucking hunch.”

Harper tossed his candle at Astruc and spun around. He kicked and caught Goose's legs, dropped him to the floor. He pulled a Glock 17 from the kid's hands. He whipped around, targeted Astruc's head. Astruc was holding his candle in his left hand, a Mini UZI submachine gun in his right. Fully auto, thirty-two-round clip, effective range of a hundred meters. It was pointed at Harper.

“You may wish to consider your next move very carefully, Father Harper.”

Harper shrugged. “What's to consider? You cut me in half, I put a bullet in your skull. Amen.”

“This really would have been much easier had you just put your hands on the tablet.”