Ice Claw (7 page)

“I’ll come back and get you. I promise.”

“So you need to buy some time. How long?”

“Another day at least. How are your acting skills?”

“You mean this terrible pain that has suddenly shot up my leg into my back and the terrible headaches I’m getting?”

Max smiled. “Don’t overdo the headaches bit. They might do a brain scan and discover there’s nothing there.”

Bobby Morrell had left messages with the hospital staff when he’d phoned to see how Max was getting along. Max dialed the number of the hostel where he and the other competitors were staying in Mont la Croix. Bobby was on the slopes—where else? Max knew he’d be back once the light faded. He was going to need his help. Making sure the hostel manager repeated everything carefully, he left instructions for Bobby.

Max shed the hospital pajamas and dressing gown, and felt better the moment he pulled on his cargo pants, fleece and boots. He ran his fingers under the tap and mussed his hair. He slipped the brass pendant over his head, tucking it
out of sight beneath his sweat rag, but he wasn’t sure what to do with the broken rosary.

The young Basque nurse walked in with a tray of food, fully expecting to see Max in bed. “What are you doing?”

Max thought quickly. “I have to go and sort out my friend’s equipment. Clothes and stuff. We’ll be going back to England. The doctor said it was OK.”

“But only tomorrow, I think. No?”

She put down the tray of food, shook her head impatiently and placed her hand on his forehead, then held two fingers to his wrist.

The nurse seemed satisfied with his pulse, but she was hesitant about something.

“Is everything OK?” Max asked her. “No snow or ice inside me that needs defrosting?” he quipped, but she didn’t understand.

“It is OK.” She nodded. Her fingers touched the crucifix in his hand. “I have seen this before.” She hesitated. “Did you steal it?” she asked very carefully.

“No! Course I didn’t.” He was more shocked that the crucifix had been recognized than at being thought a thief.

“Will you tell me where you got it?” she asked him, gazing directly into his eyes. Max knew that if you lied, the dead giveaway was in your eyes. So, do what? Turn away, think of an answer, cover your hesitation by doing something else? No. Look her straight in the eye, don’t blink—and don’t tell her the truth.

“I found it on the ski slopes.”

He held her gaze. After a moment’s consideration, she
nodded. “It is possible. I have heard he skis on the high mountains.”

She knew the monk? Max’s heart beat faster. Just as well she wasn’t taking his pulse now. He stayed as nonchalant as he could. “Who?”

She slipped the rosary from his hands, traced a finger down to the bottom of its crucifix. There was a piece broken from the bottom corner. “Once in a while he would come down from the mountains to celebrate Mass in our own language. I have kissed this cross and I have always seen this small piece missing. He is a Basque monk.”

“So, Basque is something different from being French?”

“Of course. We have our own language, our own culture. The Spanish Basques are more aggressive for their independence, some are terrorists, but on this side of the Pyrenees, we love French culture as much as our own. There is no conflict for us.”

“Are you certain it belongs to him?” Max said.

“What is it you are doing? You know something, but you are frightened to say.” She spoke softly, and then, carefully, repeated the warning he had muttered when he recovered consciousness.
“Ez ihure ere fida—eheke hari ere
. Why would you say that?”

Was she suspicious or did her uneven English accent suggest someone who was worried for his safety? Concern or suspicion was all in a person’s voice inflection, and Max wasn’t sure how to read her intentions. He decided to ignore the question. She might well be a big-sister-type caring nurse, but he should trust no one.

Max eased the rosary from her fingers. “I’ll take it back to him,” he said.

“But he is a recluse. He lives somewhere in the mountains. There is a place,
Cîteaux
… You understand?”

Max shook his head.

“It is a place where no one lives except wild animals. He has a sanctuary, a hut, in the Montagne Noire,” she said.

“The Black Mountain? Are you sure?” Max hid his shock. He had been there barely a couple of weeks ago. As part of his altitude and fitness training, Max had hiked for three days, on and off trails of the Montagne Noire, before the competitions started. It was a wild place, subject to sudden snowstorms, but because of its orientation, the effect of Atlantic mists and rain caused snow to settle for no more than a week or two. That meant there was vegetation that supported wild mountain goats, which in turn fed birds of prey. Max had been warned that if he went too high, wolves and bears could still be found. Climate change meant bears were not hibernating as they used to. It was not the place to get injured, for then the chances of survival would be almost nonexistent. Max wasn’t that keen to go back up there.

“Do you know his name?” he asked.

“Brother Zabala. He is a big man with a beard and long hair.”

There was no doubt in Max’s mind that it was the same monk who had saved his life in the avalanche and then fallen so horribly to his death.

Max clutched the rosary even tighter. A warning voice deep inside told him that he was about to plunge into the darkness of a dead man’s secret.

Max was relieved to see the battered blue van at the far end of the hospital parking lot. Snowboards and windsurfers in their covers were strapped on the roof rack. The sliding door was open and Bobby Morrell was sitting in a folding chair, as were a couple of other teenagers Max recognized from the competition. The French police were strict about drinking in public and no one wanted trouble, so Bobby and his friends sipped hot coffee and ate hot dogs.

“Hey,” Bobby said with a big grin when he saw Max. “Got your message. Thought you’d be in the hospital a while—but look at you. Got your backpack in the van.”

Max nodded at them and gratefully accepted a mug of coffee. “I’m OK. Hospital food’s grim and—can you believe it?—they hacked off my jacket.” A hot dog was already filling his mouth—squelching, soggy sausage doused in ketchup. Sweet mush slithering down, satisfying his hunger.

“Yeah? Not a problem,” Bobby said, and gestured to one of the others, who ducked inside the van and came out a moment later with a really cool snowboarder’s jacket. “Try that. One of the guys left his gear in my van. He’s about your size. Take whatever you need; he won’t be back for a couple of weeks.”

The jacket was a good fit. Max nodded his thanks. “Where’s Peaches?”

Bobby shrugged, made a grunting, squashy sound and shoved more food into his mouth. “Cut out. Just a sore loser. We’ll connect in Biarritz at my gran’s place. Girls, eh?”

“Yeah,” Max said, wishing he had Bobby’s experience. “Girls.

“I never had a chance to thank you, Bobby. If you hadn’t alerted the mountain ski patrol, I’d still be out there like an ice cube.”

Bobby spluttered flecks of food. “Nah, that was nothing. Anyway, didn’t think you’d make it with an avalanche like that. But you did. That’s cool. Sometimes you get lucky. I didn’t come down and see you ’cause we had an ace party and did some riding on the new snow. I figured it was no good being here holding your hand. Y’know.”

“Can’t miss a good ride,” Max agreed. He washed down what was left in his mouth with a swig of coffee. “You said you could put us up for a couple of days.”

“Sure. My crazy grandmother has a place in Biarritz. I figured we’d get a couple of weeks’ surfing, then we’ll split and head for the Alps. They’re expecting good snow and we can get work in the chalets. Bed and food and free ski passes.”

Max was silent. He cleaned his teeth with his tongue. The coast was less than two hours away if they went down the
motorway, probably double that if they took the country road. He had everything he needed in his backpack for a couple of days in the mountains, but he wanted to make sure Sayid was looked after until he got back.

By tomorrow the doctors would probably want him and Max on a plane back to England. Trouble was, Max didn’t want to go back. Not yet. The kayak attack was clearly meant to cause him serious injury for saving Sophie in the village that night. If the organized crime gangs dealing in endangered species were using these mountain passes to ship animals through Spanish ports and into France and the rest of Europe, Max was at the sharp end right now.

In his heart he knew that even though animal smugglers might have associated him with Sophie, the real mystery was something entirely different. Pursued across the snow and then shot, Zabala had made an enormous effort to pull the rosary and the pendant from his neck before he died. Max still heard the man’s desperate and insistent shouts just before he fell to his death, telling him to find an abbey and whatever connection it held to a crocodile and a snake. Why? It was something so important the man had taken his dying breath trying to pass it on to him with a final warning about Lucifer. The Fallen Angel—was that part of the mysterious monk’s message? Max knew what his dad would do. He’d honor the dying man’s pleas and try to discover his secret. If the police became involved, any impetus would be lost as they set up a lumbering investigation, so they shouldn’t be told—not yet anyway. Max had to make a decision: stay and find out more about the monk, or go home and forget the whole thing?
There is no choice, is there, Dad?

Fragmented pieces of clues, shards of information like a broken mirror.
How do you put all that back together?
he wondered.

“Keep Sayid with you. I need to go and look for something. It’s important, Bobby. But you have to trust me, I can’t talk about it yet.”

“What I don’t know, I can’t tell.” Bobby smiled. “What do you need?”

Max quickly explained his plan. He had no sooner finished than he saw the distant blue-tinged headlights of a car as it turned off the road towards the hospital. He had run out of time.

It was a black Audi.

Bobby’s van lurched up to the hospital entrance, then stalled. Raucous music blasted the night air as the snowboarders piled out and tried to push-start it.

The two night-duty staff were quickly out of the hospital’s doors, demanding they turn off the music. There were patients sleeping! After some furious gestures from the staff, Bobby finally realized they did not like his taste or the volume of his music. He did as he was told and turned it off, mumbling apologies about being lost, saying that he was an American, that this was a really pretty town but how did anyone find their way around this one-way system? He managed all of this in really bad French, despite the fact he could speak the language fluently.

Finally everything and everyone quietened. Bobby conveniently got the van started just about the same time he saw Max move through the entrance, past the now-unmanned security desk, and into an elevator.

The corridors and wards were quiet and mostly in semi-darkness. Two or three voices murmured somewhere in the distance. There was a clink of metal from a trolley, a sigh from a closing door and the hum of an elevator as it sank down to the basement. Max walked quickly; he did not want to be seen or heard up here on the wards, so he stayed close to the wall, where the downlighters created the most shadow. His father had taught him to stalk animals in the jungle so they could get close enough to capture them in the camera lens. Walking on the edge of the foot lessened any sound of impact and that was what Max did now, but he moved quickly.

The corridor’s windows looked onto the car park, and six floors down he could see the dull sheen reflected from the men’s leather jackets as they got out of their car. Max recognized them instantly as the men from the mountainside road at the kayak rapids. They glanced around the near-empty parking area. One nodded to the other and they split up. The bigger of the two men walked towards the reception area; the other skirted around the back of the building.

Who were these guys?

A chair scraped. Someone moved. Max pressed against the wall and peered round the corner into a nurse’s duty room. A night nurse had pushed her chair back from her desk. If she came out into the corridor she’d walk right into him. Max looked at the room’s reflection in the corridor windows opposite. The nurse tapped a handful of patients’ files into a neat block, tucked them under her arm and moved towards the door. No matter what explanation Max could come up with, she would be suspicious and phone security. Skulking in a corridor was going to be a difficult one to explain.

Max reached into his pocket and found a coin. He lobbed it gently across the doorway, saw it land edge-on and roll against a filing cabinet. The nurse heard the tinkering coin, turned to follow its path, searched for it and finally bent down to retrieve it. By which time Max was gone.

He passed a few private rooms and felt uncertainty tug in his stomach. Was this the correct floor? He couldn’t remember the room; it all looked different at night. Then he heard the sound he needed.