The Alchemist's Secret (30 page)

He slowed. Four police cars, cops with machine-pistols slung low, but ready. They’d stopped a Volvo estate. The driver was out of the car, and they were checking his paperwork. Ben didn’t have any, and as soon as they made him take off his helmet he’d be caught.

Being caught wasn’t so much the problem. It was the kind of trouble he’d bring down on himself if he resisted arrest, as he knew he’d be forced to do. He didn’t want to have to hurt them, and he could ill afford to have a thousand cops and military tearing all of southern France to pieces to find him when he needed every minute to find Roberta and finish what he’d started.

He braked and the bike halted in the road a hundred metres from the roadblock. He sat blipping the throttle for a moment. If he ran the roadblock they might shoot. It was too dangerous. He twisted the handlebar and brought the Triumph round in a tight U-turn. Opened the throttle hard and felt his arms stretch and the back wheel spin and wobble with the brutal power of the engine.

As the bike reached high speed and the road snaked towards him as fast as he could think and react, a snatched glance in the fairing-mounted mirror told him that they’d seen him and were following-headlights and flashing blue, followed by a siren. He opened the throttle harder, daring to release a little more of the Triumph’s power. The high mountain pass plunged downward in a long sweeping set of curves and the rocky landscape flashed out of sight as he plummeted into a wooded valley. The police car in his mirrors, already far in the distance, was fast shrinking to a tiny speck.

A straight opened up ahead, carrying him up a long slope between thick banks of green and gold forest. By the time he had passed through the woods and the road was climbing steeply back up towards the next mountain pass, the police car was gone.

He turned off the road at the next junction, knowing more cars would come looking for him. He rode the winding paths higher and higher until the sweep of the whole Aude river valley was laid out below him like a miniature model. The twisty lane became an unrideable rutted track. He stopped the motorcycle near the lip of a precipice, propped it on its stand, and dismounted, unbuckling his helmet and walking a little stiffly from the saddle.

Here and there in the distance he could make out the ruins of ancient forts and castles, specks of jagged grey rock against the forest and the sky. He walked close to the edge of the precipice, so that his toes overhung the brink. He looked down, a dizzying drop of thousands of feet.

What was he going to do?

He stood there for what seemed an eternity, the chilly mountain wind whistling around him. Darkness seemed to be closing in on him. He took out his flask. It was still half full. He closed his eyes and brought it to his lips.

He stopped. His phone was ringing.

‘Benedict Hope?’
said the metallic voice in his ear.

‘Who are you?’

‘We have Ryder.’
The voice waited for his response, but Ben didn’t offer one.

The man went on. ‘
If you want to see her alive again, you will listen to me carefully and follow my instructions’

‘What do you want?’ Ben asked.

‘We want you, Mr Hope. You, and the manuscript’.

‘What makes you think I have it?’

‘We know what you got from the Manzini woman,’
the voice went on.
‘You will deliver it to us personally. You will meet us tonight at the Place du Peyrou in Montpellier. By the statue of Louis the Fourteenth. Eleven o’clock. You will come alone. We will be watching you. If we see any police, you will get Ryder back one piece at a time’.

‘I want proof of life,’ Ben demanded. As he listened, he heard a rustling sound of the phone being passed to someone. Roberta’s voice was suddenly in his ear. She sounded afraid. ‘
...you, Ben? I…’
Then her voice was cut off abruptly as the phone was snatched away from her.

Ben was thinking fast. She was alive, and they wouldn’t kill her until they had what they wanted. That meant he could buy time.

‘I need forty-eight hours,’ he said.

There was a long pause.
‘Why?
the voice demanded.

‘Because I don’t have the manuscript any more,’ Ben lied. ‘It’s hidden in the hotel.’

‘You will go there and retrieve it,’
the voice said.
‘You have twenty-four hours, or the woman dies’

Twenty-four hours. Ben thought about it for a moment. Whatever plan he might be able to come up with to get her out of there, he was going to need longer than that to put it into place. He’d negotiated many times with kidnappers and he knew how their minds worked. Sometimes they were inflexible in their demands and would execute a victim at the drop of a hat. But that was mostly when they knew they didn’t have much to gain, when the bargaining was breaking down or when it looked as though nobody was going to pay. If these guys wanted the manuscript badly enough and thought he was going to deliver it to them, it was a card he could play for all it was worth. He’d already got the guy backing down. He could push him a little more.

‘Hold on,’ he said calmly. ‘Let’s be reasonable. We have a problem. Thanks to you people, the hotel is crawling with armed police right now. I’m confident I can get the manuscript back, but I’ll need that extra time.’

Another long pause, muffled conversation in the background. Then the man’s voice was back.
‘You have thirty-six hours. Until eleven o’clock tomorrow night.’

‘I’ll be there.’

‘You had better be there, Mr Hope.’

The vending-machine swallowed Luc Simon’s coins and spurted a jet of thin brown liquid into a plastic cup. The cup was so flimsy he could hardly pick the damn thing up without squeezing all the coffee out of it. He took a sip as he walked back down the corridor towards Cellier’s office, and screwed up his face.

On the wall of the corridor was another one of those Missing Person posters he’d been seeing everywhere, about the teenager who had disappeared a few days before. There’d even been one pinned up in the dingy bar in the village where that old priest lived.

He looked at his watch. Cellier was more than ten minutes late now. He needed to share notes with him about the Ben Hope case, and show him the new information he’d just got through from Interpol. Why was everyone always so fucking
slow?.
As he paced up and down, he kept looking at the poster.

He took another slurp from his plastic cup and decided he just couldn’t drink this stuff. He stuck his head around the dimpled glass door of Cellier’s office. The secretary looked up from her typing.

‘Where can I get a decent cup of coffee around here?’ he said. ‘Someone filled your vending-machine with diarrhoea.’

The secretary grinned. ‘There’s a good place up the road, sir. I always go there.’

‘Thanks. When your boss comes in, if he ever does, tell him I’ll be back in a few minutes, OK? Oh, where can I pour this shit out?’

‘Give it to me, sir,’ she said, laughing, and he leaned across the desk to pass it to her. There was a file open on her desk, with a photo of Marc Dubois, the missing kid. Sitting on top of the file was a small transparent plastic bag with some items in it.

‘OK, see you in a bit. Coffee place this way or that way?’ he said, pointing up and down the street through the window.

‘That way.’

Simon was heading out of the door when he suddenly stopped. He turned back towards her desk, and bent down to look at that file again. ‘Where did this come from?’ he asked.

‘What, sir?’

‘This in the bag.’ He jabbed his finger through the plastic bag at the object that had caught his eye. ‘Where did they find this?’

‘That’s all stuff from the Dubois missing persons case,’ she said. ‘Just a jotter and a couple of other things belonging to the boy.’

‘What about this thing here?’ He pointed.

She frowned at it. ‘Think they found it in the boy’s bedroom. They don’t think it’s important, though. I’m just typing up the case notes. Why d’you ask?’

In too much of a hurry to walk the three blocks to the café and back, he jumped into the unmarked car he’d been allocated and drove up. He came out three minutes later with a brioche and a cup of something that smelled and looked a hell of a lot more like the real thing. He climbed back into the car and sat sipping the coffee. Ah, yes, much better. The coffee helped him get his thoughts in order.

He was so lost in thought, he didn’t notice the figure approach the car until Ben Hope was opening the door, getting in beside him and holding a pistol at his head.

‘I’ll have that .38,’ Ben said. ‘Carefully, now.’

Simon hesitated for a second, then sighed and drew the revolver slowly from his holster, keeping his fingers well clear of the trigger and handing it to Ben butt-first. ‘You’ve got a nerve, Hope.’

‘Let’s go for a drive.’

They drove out of the town in silence, northwestwards towards the Bois de Valène and down wooded lanes by the banks of the river Mosson. After a few kilometres Ben pointed to an opening in the trees and said, ‘Pull in here.’ The police car bumped down a dirt road and arrived at a shady forest glade. Ben walked Simon from the car at gunpoint to where the trees opened up onto the riverbank and the sparkling blue water sloshed and burbled against the rocks.

‘Are you going to shoot me,’ asked Simon,
‘Major Hope
?’

‘Been checking up on me.’ Ben smiled. ‘I wouldn’t do a thing like that. You and I are going to have a little talk in this pretty spot.’

Simon was wondering if Ben would get close enough to give him a chance to grab the pistol off him. Didn’t seem likely.

They walked down to the river. Ben motioned the gun at him to sit on a flat rock. He sat a couple of metres away from the detective.

‘What’s there to talk about?’ Simon asked.

‘For a start, we
could
talk about how you’re going to call your dogs off me.’

Simon laughed. ‘And why should I do that?’

‘Because I’m not your killer.’

‘No? It seems that everywhere you go, there are dead bodies in your wake,’ Simon said. ‘And hijacking a police officer at gunpoint isn’t the behaviour of an innocent man.’

‘I won’t come in.’

‘You realize that this points to your guilt.’

‘I know,’ Ben replied. ‘But I have a job to do, and I can’t do it if your people are on me every step of the way.’

‘That’s what we do, Hope. Where’s Roberta Ryder?’

‘You already know that. She’s been kidnapped.’

‘I’m losing track of all the times she’s been kidnapped,’ Simon replied.

‘This is only the first time. She and I have been working together.’

‘On what?’

‘Sorry, can’t tell you that.’

‘I take it you’ve brought me out here to tell me
something?

‘I have. Does the term
Gladius Domini
mean anything to you?’

Simon paused. ‘Yes, as a matter of fact it does. One of your victims had it tattooed on him.’

‘He wasn’t my victim. One of his own people shot him. With a bullet meant for Roberta Ryder-or for me.’

‘What the fuck are you involved in, Hope?’

‘I think they’re a Christian fundamentalist cult. Maybe a bit more than a cult. They’re well-organized, well-financed and they mean business. They’ve got Roberta.’

‘Why? What would they want with her?’

‘They’ve been trying to kill her, and me, for the last week. I’m not sure why. But I can rescue her.’

‘That’s a police matter,’ Simon protested.

‘No, this is my territory. I know what happens when the police get involved in kidnap cases. I’ve seen it often enough. The victim usually winds up in a bodybag. You have to back off and let me handle this. I’ll give you something in return.’

‘You’re in no position to negotiate with me.’

Ben smiled. ‘I’m the one holding the gun.’

‘What makes you think you’ll get away from me, Major Hope?’

‘And what makes you think you’ll get away from me,
Inspector
Simon?’ Ben replied. ‘I could have killed you. And I can get to you any time I want.’

‘Huh. Covert assassination. That’s what they train you to do, isn’t it?’

‘I’m not threatening you. I want us to help each other.’

Simon raised his eyebrows. ‘What’s in it for me?’

‘I’ll give you your cop-killers. The people who killed Michel Zardi, and who also tried to kill Roberta Ryder-when you thought she was just crazy.’

Simon looked down at his feet, feeling uncomfortable at the reminder.

‘That’s just for starters,’ Ben went on. ‘I think you’ll be surprised where the trail leads.’

‘OK, so what is it you want?’

‘There’s something I need you to do.’ Ben tossed him a card with the phone number he’d got from the bald man under the bridge.

‘What’s this?’ Simon asked, reading it and looking puzzled.

‘Just listen. Get your most efficient people in Paris to call this man. He goes by the name “Saul”. Your guy should pretend to be Michel Zardi.’

‘But Zardi’s dead.’

Ben nodded. ‘Yes, but Saul thinks he’s alive. And he probably thinks he’s working with me somehow. Don’t worry about the details. Tell Saul that Ben Hope ran back to Paris, and that you’ve double-crossed him and are holding him. Say he can have Hope for a price. Make it a high one. Arrange a rendezvous.’

Simon bit his lip, trying to fit the pieces together in his mind.

‘Get your men to take Saul into custody,’ Ben continued. ‘Press him hard. Tell him the cops know all about
Gladius Domini
, that the bald man sold him out before he died, and he’d better tell you everything.’

‘You’ve lost me,’ Simon muttered, frowning.

‘You’ll understand, if you do as I say. But you have to move fast.’

Simon was quiet for a few minutes, turning over what Ben had told him. Ben relaxed the gun a little, letting it rest on his lap. He picked up a pebble and tossed it into the river with a splash.

‘So, tell me more about you and Roberta Ryder,’ Simon said. ‘Are you an item, as they say?’