Angel City (29 page)

The more Harper thought about it, the more interesting it got.

“And come to think of it, you have yet to ask me about what happened in the cavern, or what Astruc found down there.”

Harper scanned the room. All eyes on him.

“Let me guess: You already know.”

The inspector nodded.

Harper wanted to rub the back of his neck, gave it a pass with his hands in bandages.

“So what the hell are we doing here? What's the purpose of this debrief? As you already know what there is to know.”

The judge leaned forward “Are you familiar, in any way, with Bernard de Saint-Martin?”

Harper ran the name. “Doesn't ring a bell.”

“Are you sure of that, Mr. Harper?” the inspector said.

Second time the inspector has gone for the “Are you sure?” line in the name game,
Harper thought.

“Bernard de Saint-Martin? Hard one to forget, even for the likes of me. Who is he?”

“He is the leader of this cell,” the judge said.

“He gives you your orders, then?”

“Oui, monsieur.”

Harper looked at the two of them. They'd morphed into police asking questions they already knew the answers to. Harper felt like he'd escaped from one trap, only to find himself being dumped into another.

“So where the hell is he? I'd like to meet him, ask him a few questions. Maybe he can enlighten me as to what the hell this is about. Because I'm telling you, at this rate, my manner of thinking is never going to find its way to whatever timeline it is you two are parked in.”

The inspector and judge didn't respond.

“So, gentlemen, is Bernard de Saint-Martin making the bloody scene or not?”

The judge folded his hands, his index fingers touching and pointing up like the steeple of a very small church.

“Monsieur, when I say de Saint-Martin is the leader of this cell, I mean to say we are the latest disciples to carry out the mission laid out by him when he founded this cell nearly nine hundred years ago.”

“Sorry?”

“Bernard de Saint-Martin appeared in Paris as a homeless beggar at the steps of l'Église de Saint-Germain-des-Prés in the year 1244. It was there that he revealed himself to the first disciples. He showed them the entrance to the cavern and told them the secrets of what had happened at this place in the beginning. He showed them a reliquary box and the ancient sextant inside. He told them it was a sacred treasure from the East, and that he would hide it in the cavern. He charged his disciples to assure the box be kept from the eyes of men, down through the generations, until he returned and was revealed to the world.”

Bloody hell,
Harper thought. He looked at Inspector Gobet. Not a hint of surprise. Harper turned to the judge.

“You know, human history is chockablock with legends and myths, gov. What's to say this isn't one more?”

“There have only been a handful of disciples at any one time, monsieur. Precisely to prevent the truth from becoming legend. And, of course, there is the undeniable fact that deep beneath l'Église Saint-Germain-des-Prés is the cavern.”

There was that.

“All right. But I still don't get how I'm supposed to know him. Where's the connection?”

“That's what we are trying to determine,” the inspector said.

Harper shot a look at him. “What's to determine? If I had come across him at any point in time, I'd see him when you said his name to me. That's the way it works for our kind.”

Inspector Gobet looked down at the file, his thick fingers peeling through the pages in delicate moves:
shhhwip, shhhhwip.
He removed a photograph and laid it on the table for Harper to see. It was the photo of a winged form dropping through the backlit fog that had enveloped Pont des Arts.

“Mr. Harper, the man you met who claims to be Father Christophe Astruc took this photograph and put it on the Internet.”

“How did you find that one out?”

“A tip was left with the judge's office regarding this address. Upon arriving, the judge's men found a video camera connected to a desktop computer. The still grab of you jumping from Pont des Arts had been uploaded onto the Internet not ten minutes earlier. Next to the computer was this particular file, the one the judge read to you when you were arrested.”

Harper looked at the judge.

“The tip came from Astruc. He wanted you to find this place. He wanted you to know what I am?”

The judge shrugged. “I believe there is more to it.”

“Such as?”

The inspector took over: “Such as the attack on Paris being engineered by Father Astruc in an attempt to confirm your identity.”

“You're bloody joking.”

The expression on the inspector's face said he was not joking.

“Our advance intel on the attack, including the last-minute shift of ground zero from Saint-Sulpice to the river Seine, was picked up in pieces. Pieces embedded in hundreds of messages left on certain chat rooms known to be used by the enemy. SX analysis confirms the computer found in this library was the source.”

Harper thought about it. “Astruc chatted about the cavern online, what was down there. He picked up followers, the enemy. By tracking the followers, he hacked into the enemy grid and learned about their plans to attack Paris.”

“That seems to be the timeline of events.”

“So how did we get ahold of attack plans?”

“Father Astruc e-mailed them, anonymously, to my office in Berne. He was kind enough to include a link to an encrypted website where I was invited to log on for updates.”

“You couldn't track him, find out where he was working from?”

The inspector smiled, approving of the manner of Harper's thinking . . . for the moment.

“SX discovered the site was protected by a unique intrusion detection program. Any attempt at tracking the transmission point would cause the site to disappear. We would be in the dark. Our first priority was to assure we were in the loop to intercept enemy operations. Indeed, it was by monitoring Father Astruc's site that we learned of the last-minute change of target zone.”

Harper shook his head.

“Christ, the bloody priest really is insane.”

“Why do you say that, Mr. Harper?”

“Tens of thousands would've died that night, millions more for the next thousand years. Adds up to barking in the first degree.”

The inspector turned back through the pages of the file. He stopped, looked at one page. Harper could see it. It was a piece of old parchment, looked like a medieval drawing. The inspector held it delicately and laid it on the table.

“In fact, Mr. Harper, it would seem that in suspecting what you are, Father Astruc had the utmost confidence that you would manage to save the day.”

Harper looked at the drawing. An angel descending from the heavens and through the clouds, basking in a celestial light. Below him a river in flames; above him, amid the stars, a comet streaking through the sky. He looked closer. Sword in his right hand, raised to strike. Half-hidden by the curl of a wing, the angel's left arm braced against his chest, holding the same damn reliquary box Harper had seen in the cavern. The lid was open; inside was the sextant.

“What the hell is this?” Harper said.

“It was drawn by one of Bernard de Saint-Martin's first disciples, a monk working in the scriptorium of the Abbey at Saint-Germain-des-Prés. It refers to a future event that the descendants of this cell were instructed to watch for: specifically, the reincarnation of Bernard de Saint-Martin in the form of an angel, who would save Paris from destruction.”

Harper's eyes darted between the photo and the drawing. The similarity between the images was enough to make any set of eyes look twice. Harper gave it three.

“You're not actually suggesting this is me.”

“Why not?” the inspector said.

“For starters, there's no way Astruc could know I'd end up jumping from Pont des Arts.”

“Why not?”

“We flash back through time, not into the future.”

“Because?”

“What do you mean, ‘because'? Because the bloody future hasn't happened yet.”

“That would leave coincidence.”

“No such bloody thing. So what are you getting at?”

“Some rather curious intersecting lines of causality.”

“What lines?”

“The counterattack tactical sent to you in Paris wasn't ours.”

Harper added it up. Astruc cracked the enemy's computer grid, downloaded the attack profile, knew the attack would shift from Saint-Sulpice to the river Seine. Left disclosing that bit of news to the last minute, so there'd be no choice but to jump onto the
Manon
.

“Astruc sent you the counterattack plan when he told you the target had shifted; you sent it to me.”

“Oddly enough, it was the most logical of options. It also made it possible for Father Astruc to confirm the connection between you and Bernard de Saint-Martin.”

“You're talking nonsense, inspector.”

The inspector shoved the drawing closer to Harper. Harper gave the drawing another go.

Angel with sword. Burning river. Reliquary box and sextant. Comet amid the stars . . . streaks of fire in the comet's tail forming these words across the sky:

C'est le guet. Il a sonné l'heure.

He flashed back to Astruc lifting the ancient sextant from the box:
It was you who brought this sacred treasure to his place . . .
Harper blinked back to nowtimes. The tramps, Mutt and Jeff, Sergeant Gauer, the inspector and the judge: all eyes on him again.

He stared at Inspector Gobet. “‘The chosen of the fallen ones.'”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Words carved into the tablet in the cavern. That's the only one who could open the pillar.”

“Quite.”

“And you're telling me I'm him?”

The inspector glanced around the room, pointed to the bookcases.

“We've only had sixty-seven hours to go through these files. But we've covered a lot of ground while waiting for you to emerge from the tunnels. From what we've managed to put together, you made an unauthorized apparition in the form of a beggar calling himself Bernard de Saint-Martin in 1244. And that you spent forty days in Paris, forming a cell and engaging in the events as described by the judge.”

Harper thought about it.

“Our kind don't make unauthorized apparitions.”

“No, we don't. HQ lists you as in stasis for most of the thirteenth century.”

“Well?”

“I'm afraid, at present, I have no comment on the matter.”

Meaning the cop in the cashmere coat knew the skinny, but wasn't saying. Harper looked at the judge.

“Who was he, this de Saint-Martin?”

“A knight from Languedoc, listed in the rolls of the Inquisition as burned as a heretic with the last of the Cathars at Montségur in March of 1244.”

“Burned. As a heretic. At Montségur.”

The judge nodded.

“Any witnesses?”

“Ten thousand of them, monsieur, not including the Archbishop of Toulouse and his entourage.”

Harper smiled, shook his head.

“I really hate to rain on your parade, gov, but when we die in our forms, we're dead forever. We're not like you, we don't come back. When it ends for us, it bloody ends.”

“Inspector Gobet has explained this to me. The inspector has also explained that, presently, you are suffering, as it were, from a certain condition that causes you to . . . not die in your form.”

A wave of nausea burned through Harper's form, and he tasted bile in his throat
. Non
mortem timemus, sed cogitationem mortis . . . We fear not death, but the thinking of it.
No idea who said the words, Harper thought, but they were bloody appropriate just now.

“Till quantum mechanics kicks in.”

“Monsieur?”

Harper looked at the judge. “Punch line of a bad joke, gov. I just got it.”

The judge bowed his head, his lips trembling again. He
was
praying, Harper realized. Silently, profoundly. When he finished, he said, “Monsieur, you are the chosen one of the fallen. You are the reincarnation of Bernard de Saint-Martin.”

Harper read the judge's eyes, seeing the man believed his words to be holy truth. Harper felt another blast of nausea, and he rested his head in his hands. He saw the signet ring on the little finger of the judge's left hand. He flashed back to the night he met the judge at Brigade Criminelle, seeing the same ring; this time, Harper could make out the insignia. A conical pillar pointing to a comet. Harper raised his head, looked at Inspector Gobet.

“Right. Any more surprises?”

TGV
9261, P
ARIS
TO
L
AUSANNE:
07:44
HOURS
.

C
OACH 17, LIKE THE REST OF THE TRAIN, WAS PACKED.

Harper sat next to a snoring Chinese gentleman who was busily sleeping off the Kung Pao Chicken takeout he'd carried on board and devoured within minutes of leaving Paris. No worries. Kept him from bumping into Harper's slinged-up arm. Across the table was a retired American couple from Boston, Massachusetts.

Taking a grand tour of the continent, the wife said. They'd done Paris and were now on their way to do Florence, then Venice. On the way they thought they'd take the waters at Leukerbad in the Alps. They'd be staying at l'Hôtel de la Source. Five stars, of course. Harper heard all about it after he'd made the mistake of saying yes when asked by the woman, “Would you happen to speak English?” The woman hadn't stopped talking since, often returning to the subject of Harper's unfortunate accident in Paris. (“Hit by a tour bus on the Champs-Élysées,” Harper had told her.) And each time she returned to the subject, she was reminded of yet another relative or friend dispatched in similar fashion.

“I remember my aunt Dahlia. Charming woman, though somewhat forgetful. She was walking across Madison Avenue in New York, when suddenly, last summer . . .”

Nice thing about a one-sided conversation,
Harper thought,
one doesn't have to pay much attention.
And serious one-siders, of which the American woman was Olympic-class, didn't require any attention at all. Gave Harper an opportunity to take in the English-language newspapers behind which her husband hid. All the papers carried the same picture on the front page: a comet hanging in the night sky above Paris.

Herald Tribune
: “Unknown Visitor Crosses Earth's Orbit”

The Guardian
: “Celestial Wonder Over Europe”

Daily Mail
: “What the Hell Was That?!”

Of the three, Harper thought the
Daily Mail
put it best. Fact was, the comet had come and gone in a most uncometlike fashion. He'd seen that one with his own eyes, back in Astruc's library on Rue Visconti. On top of it, rather. Just after he looked at Inspector Gobet and said, “Right. Any more surprises?”

That's when a section of the built-in bookcases creaked open and from behind it stepped a woman in black leather clothing and boots. Took Harper half a second to clock her as Corporal Mai from the vineyards in Grandvaux. She'd swapped her Swiss Guard camouflage for heavy metal biker gear. She wore it like she was born in it. Her jacket was open and there was a Heckler & Koch MP-5 slung from her neck. Meaning Corporal Mai was as comfortable with an up-close contact kill as she was with the long-range sniper variety. She glanced at Harper, and he almost smiled as he recognized the genetic trait of her half-breed eyes.

“C'est l'heure moins quinze minutes, Inspecteur.”

The inspector checked his watch, looked at the judge. The elderly gent was repacking his pipe with tobacco.

“Thank you, Corporal Mai. We need one minute.”

“Oui, Inspecteur.”

The judge was packing his pipe with Bergerac tobacco, and when finished, he patted his pocket for a light. Inspector Gobet already had a match at the ready.

“My dear judge, allow me,” the inspector said.

The judge drew the fire to his pipe.

As Harper watched the judge disappear into another cloud of head-swallowing smoke, he flashed through his timeline. All the times Inspector Gobet offered a light for one of his own fags, Harper had yet to see the Swiss copper light a bloody match. The fire was just always there, at the ready.
Our kind survive in a world of dual, and sometimes opposing, realities,
Harper thought,
the line between them often blurred.
And for a second Harper wondered which part of his own dual reality noticed the inspector's trick with the match. Was it that eternal being from another place,
knowing
all physical matter could be manipulated by a mastery of gravity? Or was the dead man in his head, Captain Jay Michael Harper, manipulating his imagination to
see
the world for what it truly was?
Doesn't matter a tinker's damn,
Harper thought, or Captain Jay Michael Harper thought, or maybe even Bernard de fucking Saint-Martin thought. The magically appearing flame was a swell trick.

The judge's head reappeared from the smoke.

“Thank you, Inspector. Shall we adjourn to the roof?” he said.

The two gents pushed away from the table and made a move for the exit. Harper didn't get up.

“Wait, are we done here?”

The inspector turned back, raised an eyebrow.

“Not in the least, Mr. Harper. But as I explained earlier, we're on something of a schedule this evening. We'll continue with the debrief later.”

Harper stood, stepped toward him.

“Not bloody good enough, sir.”

Mutt and Jeff jumped, grabbed Harper's shoulders at the brachial plexus, and squeezed. Harper froze, unable to move. The inspector coughed.

“Mr. Harper, we may be dealing with one more legend of our kind, or we may have been handed the key to all there is to know about our being here. I, for one, should like to know which it is. Come along, and do try to make yourself genuinely useful if called upon to do so.”

The inspector turned and walked away. Mutt and Jeff released Harper and walked after the inspector, the two of them looking back at Sergeant Gauer.

“Grab his shit and bring him along.”

“And keep an eye on him. He's the sort that'd get himself lost in a paper bag.”

Sergeant Gauer dropped the respirator tank into a backpack, tossed it over his shoulder. He picked up Harper's sports coat and overcoat, tossed them over his left forearm. He pointed to the passage behind the bookcase.

“Let's go.”

“So what are you, now, my guardian angel?”

“At the moment, I'm your fucking butler. Move it,
s'il vous plaît
.”

Five floors up a creaky wooden stairwell and they were on the roof. It was one story higher than the surrounding buildings, and with a one-meter-tall hedge along the roof's perimeter they were hidden from the surrounding locals. Harper saw the Eiffel Tower above the rooftops to the southwest, just as it began to glitter madly with a billion flickering lights. Maybe not that many, but no matter, he thought. The flickering lights made it the top of whichever hour it was.

Three men on the roof already.

Harper made two of them as Inspector Gobet's boys. They had that too-smart-for-the-real-world look, and they wore the uniform. Black-framed eyeglasses, black suits, white shirts, skinny black ties under black overcoats. Same as the light mechanic who fitted Lausanne's old town with Arc 9 filters; the chap with a fascination for the terminal velocity of falling cats. These boys, the ones on the roof, sat at a makeshift table, banging away at Crypto Field Terminals. For a sec, Harper wondered how he knew what the machines were called. Wondered again how he knew they were top-secret, magnesium-shelled laptops for spooks. The dead British soldier in his head must have used them in Afghanistan, he thought.

The terminals were connected to four twenty-seven-inch monitors displaying numbers, graphs, elliptical patterns overlaying elliptical patterns, and a shitload of chemical analysis data. No clue what the information meant. Next to the table were two parabolic antennae units pointing to the southwest sky, right over the top of the Eiffel Tower. The dead soldier in Harper's head identified the gear as AEHF; Advanced Extremely High Frequency satellite uplinks and downlinks. Meaning whatever Inspector Gobet's computer geeks were up to, it couldn't be tracked, hacked, or jammed.

A third man stood behind the computer geeks. Midthirties, clean-shaven mug. He wore a Barbour coat over a cable-knit sweater and corduroy trousers; there was a pair of Steiner 10x50 binoculars hanging from his neck. He was bouncing on his heels, brown eyes wide, brown hair standing at perpendicular angles from his head. No way this chap was one of the inspector's boys, Harper told himself. This chap was jazzed to the gills. Like a plane spotter just receiving word Amelia Earhart's Lockheed Electra had been spotted after eighty years and was making its final approach at Le Bourget. Not even noticing the crowd of suits, muscle, and guns coming onto the roof to gather behind him. The man in the Barbour coat kept his eyes locked on the monitors, gasping at regular intervals, “Holy crap, holy fucking crap.” His accent was British.

Harper checked the sky as the billion blinking lights on the Eiffel Tower switched off, meaning it was now five minutes after whichever hour it was. No sign of Amelia. Looked like the sky on any night, minus one moon. Given the light pollution of central Paris, it was a night sky minus most of the stars. The judge tapped the giddy man in the Barbour jacket on the shoulder. He turned around, shook his head with disbelief.

“I mean . . . holy fucking shit. How did you know this would happen?”

The judge took his pipe from his mouth.

“Know what, exactly, young man?”

The man pointed to the monitors. “That! If this is real and not a hoax, then we're on the verge of a celestial event of unimaginable proportions.”

Inspector Gobet joined in the conversation. “May I ask why?”

The man looked at the cop in the cashmere coat.

“Who are you?”

“I am Inspector Jacques Gobet of the Swiss Police. I have provided the technical equipment and support staff for tonight's operation.”

“You? You're the one hacking into Blue Brain?”

“My dear fellow . . . By the way, what is your name?”

“Leo.”

“Leo what?”

“Mates, Dr. Leo Mates. But you can call me Leo.”

“Unfortunately, my position requires me to keep things on a more formal level, Dr. Mates. But let me assure you, everything being done here is completely aboveboard. No one is hacking into Blue Brain. We are merely monitoring the activity of two individuals who are.”

“Who are they?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because they're brilliant, whoever they are.”

“I'm afraid information as to their identities is classified. Suffice it to say, you are participating in a joint police operation between Brigade Criminelle of France and the Special Unit Task Force of the Swiss Police.”

Given his clothes still reeked of death and vomit, Harper kept himself well in the shadows and downwind of the conversing men, but he could hear their words. As usual, when the cop in the cashmere coat was speaking, most of the words didn't make sense. Adding the pipe-puffing judge into the equation yielded a quotient of confusion-squared. Harper looked back at Sergeant Gauer.

“The inspector is talking about Astruc and the kid. They're the hackers, yeah?”

“Good guess.”

Harper thought about it.

“So what the hell is Blue Brain?”

“Supercomputer at EPFL.”

“The research center outside Lausanne.”

“Affirmative.”

“What's it used for?”

“Mapping a single synapse of the human brain. Something along the lines of mapping the human genome, only a billion times more complicated.”

“One of the inspector's toys, is it?”

“Do pigs fly?”

“In the inspector's case, all the time.”

“Et voilà.”

Harper thought about it some more.

“Sorry, but what does mapping the human synapse have to do with Paris?”

Sergeant Gauer looked at Harper.

“
Je ne sais pas.
I've been underground for three fucking days trying to dig out your sorry arse, haven't I?”

Harper returned his attention to the conversation on the other side of the roof where Dr. Leo Mates was laying out his CV for the benefit of Inspector Gobet. Astrophysicist from Oxford with three PhD's under his belt. Has his own television program on the BBC explaining the wonders of the universe to the great unwashed. World's leading expert on the composition of ice crystals in the Oort cloud (a theoretical spherical body parked a light-year from the sun, he explained; to which the inspector replied, “Fascinating”). In town to read his latest scientific paper at l'Académie des sciences tomorrow evening (revealing new mathematical models to prove beyond a doubt that the oceans of planet Earth were formed by a bombardment of frozen water comets and asteroids 4.5 billion years ago; to which the inspector replied, “Most impressive”). Arriving at Gare du Nord this evening, he was stopped by members of the French Police and advised his presence was requested by one Monsieur Bruno Silvestre, special investigating judge of Brigade Criminelle, to consult on a matter of great urgency. That being a comet that would appear in the constellation Draco at 03:05:00 hours for a period of sixty seconds exactly. Dr. Mates did have plans to have an early dinner with friends and then retire to his hotel, but considering he was presented with this predictive information at 19:15:17 hours, the eminent astrophysicist was intrigued. He'd spent all night on the roof with Inspector Gobet's computer geeks, taking in the numbers and graphs and ellipses and chemical analysis data. He'd worked himself into such a state, he made a kid waiting for Christmas look bored. Which explained the wild hair, Harper thought, watching Dr. Mates pull at it with disbelief.