The Lazarus Vault (26 page)

‘
Is there a video camera or something in there?
’ she’d asked when Harry gave them to her. They’d been in the changing rooms at a clothes shop on Oxford Street, pressed into awkward intimacy behind the curtain.

‘The sleeve would obscure a video camera. This is a gyroscope and accelerometer. It measures the pattern of his movements, the distance and direction, and the software can correlate that with the keypad to work out which buttons he’s pressed.’

Ellie had looked doubtfully at the small cufflinks. ‘It sounds like science fiction.’

‘These things are everywhere now – mobile phones, laptops, music players.’ He’d given a sheepish grin. ‘We actually got these from a video-game controller.’

‘And that’s supposed to make me feel better?’

She slid a nail under the circuit-board, pulled it out of the housing and connected it to the computer using a plug that Harry had given her. A window opened on-screen with a picture of a telephone keypad. The virtual buttons flashed; a second later, a number appeared superimposed.

918193.

She swung pack the painting that covered the safe.

Contrary to the office joke, Destrier didn’t live at the bank. His home was a mock-Tudor mansion near the A12 in Essex, which he shared with two Rhodesian Ridgebacks and whoever could be paid or persuaded to share his bed. That night, she was a skinny girl with vacant eyes and no chest; she barely looked thirteen, though the agency had assured him she was old enough. Whatever his impulses, he knew what his employers would do if he got caught out with an underage girl.

And now his phone was vibrating in the darkness. He fumbled for it on the bedside table, rubbing his eyes as he stared at the screen.

INTRUSION ALERT

He tapped the screen to call up the details.

Card 0002 >> facial verification failure

He didn’t have to check the registry to know who card 0002 belonged to. He stared at the picture underneath. The Stanton bitch. Every suspicion he’d entertained for the last six months – every doubt, every worry, every fear – crawled over his skin like lice.

Calm down
, he told himself. He knew she’d been fucking Blanchard that night – had listened to it through the mic concealed in her phone. Her moans had still been in his ears when he screwed his own girl, who’d been limp and undemonstrative by comparison.

Maybe she picked up the wrong card. Perhaps Blanchard sent her to the office to get something.

He left the girl and went to the computer in the room next door. He connected to the office and brought up the security log.

01:09 >> Card 0002 entry to BUILDING

01:11 >> Card 0002 entry to ROOM 5-1

Blanchard didn’t allow cameras in his office, or Destrier could have had a look at what Ellie was doing. All he could do was watch the log to see what happened next.

While he waited, he dialled Blanchard at Claridge’s. He let it ring until the voicemail picked up; hung up; tried again. No answer. He swore, though silently. Blanchard wasn’t the sort of man you cursed out loud, even from thirty miles away.

A new line appeared on the security log. Destrier stared at it in disbelief.

01:15 >> ROOM 5-1 access to SAFE

Ellie lifted the red folder out of the safe and laid it on Blanchard’s desk. She hesitated for a second, reading the gold-lettered L
AZARUS
on the cover and wondering what she would find inside. She felt the leather cords; she tested the seals between her finger and thumb. The wax flexed in her grip: it must have been resealed recently.

No way back from here
, she told herself. On the wall, the damsel tied to the tree tipped her head back in a plea to the knight advancing on her.
Save me? Don’t hurt me?
The paint was silent.

Ellie snapped the seals. Crumbs of wax spilled over Blanchard’s desk, but she didn’t bother to wipe them away. He’d find out soon enough.

She’d never seen a file like it. The earliest pages were sheets of parchment, still supple and smooth to the touch; they gave way to a stiff and brittle paper with an ivory sheen, that gradually softened into creamy writing paper and finally to regular A4 office paper. Some of the paper felt thin and grey, and she supposed that came from wartime. It was like looking at tree rings, history written in cross section.

But she needed the present – and she found it almost at once, a sheet of paper at the back headed ‘Vault Access’. Underneath was a list of strange words, foreign and archaic.
Or, argent, azure, gules, vert …
Each had a four-digit number beside it.

She closed the safe and jogged down the hall to the lift. When she slid Blanchard’s card into the invisible slot in the panel, the button for the sixth floor started to glow.

Her hand hovered in front of it, trembling. The ruby on her finger smouldered like a dragon’s eye. On her wrist, the seconds ticked by.

She stabbed the button.

With the merest tremor, the lift began its descent. Past the basement and the sub-basement, then a long eternity when it was nowhere. Ellie began to wonder if it had stopped, if some hidden sensor had betrayed her deception. Her heart twitched with panic; she gazed at the buttons, overcome with a desperate urge to push them and turn the lift back to the world above. But it was too late.

She didn’t feel the lift stop. The doors glided open, revealing the golden room with its treasures so tantalisingly unguarded.
Every piece triggers an alarm.
But what else might trigger it? She approached the jewelled cup on the plinth in the centre of the room. A movement in the glass made her flinch, but it was only her own ghostly reflection. She unzipped her top and pulled out the key.

Four carved beasts peered from the corners of the plinth: a dragon, a horned serpent that she thought might be a cockatrice, a griffin and a basilisk. Ellie knelt and peered in their mouths. At the back of each stone throat, a small keyhole invited the key. She slid it into the serpent, just as Blanchard had done. Her arm tensed as she reached in, as if the stone jaws might come to life, spring shut.

Nothing happened. The key fit the lock perfectly. She felt the mechanism bite as she began to turn. It was working.

Or was it that simple? It occurred to her that all the vault’s defences were built on illusion. It didn’t block your way: it invited you in, tempting you to betray yourself. The sixth floor that lay three storeys underground; the unprotected treasures on the shelves around her; the door hidden back where you’d come from.

Every piece triggers an alarm.

She eased off the lock and withdrew the key. Trying to stand
where she’d stood before, she examined the cup in the case. It looked different to last time. Halfway up, the stem swelled out in a golden bubble, decorated on four sides with inlaid coloured stones. Ellie was sure the stone facing her before had been emerald green; now it was white, a fat pearl.

The cup had turned.

She circled the plinth, poring over the cup. The other stones in the stem were yellow – she thought it might be amber, though in fact it was a diamond – and a blood-red garnet.

She tried to remember a lecture series she’d been to at university, a wizened old professor who might have come straight from a monastery scriptorium.

Griffins were the guardians of gold.

Basilisks had a white spot on their head like a diadem.

The cockatrice had black eyes. Or were they red? Her memory faltered; she looked to her phone, but of course there was no reception down there.

You don’t even know that any of it corresponds at all.

Her heart thudded inside her chest; with every beat, she felt time racing away. She had to make a decision.

She put the key in the basilisk’s mouth and turned.

Perhaps, somewhere else in the building, an alarm went off or a light began to flash. In the deep vault, Ellie had no way of knowing. Behind her, she heard the hiss as the false door in the lift slid back to reveal the rugged wooden portal behind.

She checked her watch: almost two hours gone. She’d have to hurry.

The Aston Martin raced down the A12 towards London. The road was almost empty at that time of night; the needle hovered well above a hundred miles an hour. Inside, Destrier was barking orders to a chastened security guard. He’d gone to
Blanchard’s office but found nothing, the door locked, the light off. That worried Destrier even more.

The line beeped to announce a new message. ‘Just find her,’ he shouted. He hung up, then glanced down to read the message.

He nearly drove off the road. He slammed the brakes and the rear end started to fishtail on the slick tarmac. He spun the wheel and swerved back, almost into the path of an oncoming lorry. Its horn blasted through the cold night, falling away like a dying breath.

Destrier eased his speed down to ninety while he gathered his thoughts. He glanced at the message again, hardly believing his eyes. Where the hell was Blanchard?

01:29 : Card 0002 entry to FLOOR 6

Ellie had brought a head-torch, but she didn’t need it. The hidden lights glowed into life the moment she crossed the threshold. She moved down the ancient aisle, scanning the vaults above for watching eyes, cameras or beams that would trap her. She saw nothing.

She crossed the transept and reached the back of the vault, under where the old church’s altar must once have stood, before the religion of wealth replaced the religion of charity. She thought of the mosaic half-buried in the floor, and wondered what older, darker faiths had flourished here before that. The iron doors glared at her like dead eyes in the furrowed walls.

Here, time becomes space.

She knew, without ever having being told, which vault it was. She remembered it from her visit with Blanchard: the two double doors in the floor painted with the Monsalvat crest and a steel keypad beside it. A black eagle on a red shield with a
white chevron, clutching a golden spear. She looked at the piece of paper she’d taken from the Lazarus file.

Or, argent, azure, gules, vert
…

Her last contact with Harry had been a CD and a book, delivered in a free newspaper again as she walked past Moorgate Tube station. She bought a portable CD player and sat outside in the Barbican listening to it. High walls of pebbledash and distressed concrete soared all around her. Ornamental water gushed out of a pipe into a series of ponds; wells sunk in the concrete revealed fragments of the medieval walls deep below the twentieth-century monument.

Harry’s voice spoke through the headphones. ‘All the vault codes at Monsalvat are based on heraldry. Each colour in the crest is allocated a number, which changes weekly. You’ll get the numbers from the file. Then you have to determine the correct formulation of the crest, which gives you the order. You’ll find everything you need to know in the book we’ve given you.’

Ellie had read the book like an eight year old, hiding under the duvet with a torch long after she should have been asleep. It taught her a new language, a new grammar – escutcheons and lozenges, charges and tinctures. She learned the difference between engrailed and enfossed, between metals and furs. She marvelled at the precision of it, even as she despaired of its intricacy. But she learned it.

Gules a chevron Argent, overall an eagle displayed Sable, armed and holding a spear both Or.

She consulted the paper from the file and found the numbers that corresponded to the colours. Each had four digits, sixteen in total. She entered them on the keypad,
praying she’d remembered the medieval terminology correctly.

For a moment nothing happened. Then, with a creak that sounded as old as the stones themselves, the doors swung in.

Troyes, County of Champagne, November 1141

The town is packed: All Souls was two weeks ago, and the Cold Fair is in full swing. Merchants have come from all the corners of Christendom to trade their wares. The Count of Champagne has built vast warehouses on the edge of the town to accommodate the trade; his guards are everywhere in their blue and white livery, shepherding the money as it changes hands. You can buy furs, wool and linen cloth, pepper and spices, leather and silk – anything you can imagine.

It’s also a good place to buy men.

The square in the centre of the town has become a cockpit. Four rings have been roped off, where squires and serjeants take turns testing their strength in combat. I manoeuvre my way to the front. A fat man in a leather cap and armour is taking on a young squire, whose face is a mask of concentration. The boy dances and skips, jabbing and parrying. The fat man barely moves, content to swat and bat the boy back. On the far side of the ring, I can see a one-eyed, grey-haired
man in a black coat trimmed with gold. He’s watching the fight, but he looks bored.

With a sudden movement that belies his size, the fat man darts forward. Two strokes and the boy’s clutching his hand in agony, his sword on the ground. He reels away, towards a girl who looks as if she’s having second thoughts.

The crowd applaud; money changes hands. While they’re talking, I duck under the rope and pick up the fallen sword. The weight feels good.

The fat man looks at me. ‘Did you lose your armour?’

I shrug. If I were more extravagant, I’d make some bragging retort.

The crowd are getting interested. There’s nothing they like more than an entertaining mismatch. A proven champion in leather armour, against – what?

They’re waiting to see if I’m just a fool who’s drunk too much, or if I can surprise them.

I stand as stiff as I can and take a couple of awkward, artless strokes. The fat man relaxes. Another novice, he thinks. I retreat from his attacks, skittering around the ring like a frightened fawn. The fat man follows, taking his time. The crowd bay encouragement. From the corner of my eye, I see the man in the black coat watching intently. He’s not deceived.

I start to slow down. The fat man sees his moment and comes in for the kill. He’s agile, but he’s got a lot of weight to carry – and I’ve watched how he does it. I see him coming and drift back. He lands heavily and staggers forward, off balance. I get inside the reach of his blade and grab his arm. I twist it until it’s about to snap, then chop down the hilt of my sword against his wrist. He drops his sword: he’s trying to pull away, but I won’t let go. I knee him in the gut, and for good measure, slam the pommel of my sword into his nose. I don’t think I’ve
broken it, but I’ve made it bleed. The crowd like to see blood.