The Turin Shroud Secret (37 page)

‘No problem.’

‘I got a bill at work for a cloud.’

Mitzi’s not sure she heard her right. ‘A what?’

‘A cloud. I didn’t know Tamara had one but it seems she did. A storage cloud. It’s a digital database – Apple, Google, Amazon
all have them. You upload content – documents, videos, pictures, music, whatever you like. The cloud keeps it safe, so if
you have your laptop stolen or your home burglarised, you can always download your content again.’

‘Wow. They can really do that?’

‘Yeah. You want me to mail you the details of her account?’

‘That would be good.’

‘Okay.’ Sarah looks over her slim, suntanned shoulder at the handsome, naked actor stirring in his sleep. ‘I can’t do it right
now – I’m going to have my hands full – but it’ll be with you in about an hour.’

SAINT-JULIEN-EN-GENEVOIS

Nic’s brain is working at warp speed as he frantically pumps the brake pedal. The V12 is doing seventy and he’s only thirty
feet from the car in front.

He tugs the automatic’s stick down a gear and swerves into the outside lane. It makes little difference. He pulls the eight-speed
transmission down another gear and zigzags violently to try to build tyre friction on the blacktop. The sudden jerking wakes
Édouard and his wife. They look shocked and frightened.

Up ahead, the traffic is pulling to a sharp stop. The BMW’s down to fifty but Nic’s running out of road. He daren’t turn off
the engine, he’ll lose all hydraulic power to the steering. He swerves across the lanes. Dust kicks up as he breaks out onto
a thin strip of hard shoulder. There’s a sickening screech like fingernails over a chalkboard as the BMW clips the side of
someone’s car.

Nic tugs down another gear. He’s still doing forty and isn’t
losing speed fast enough. To make matters worse, the carriageway is sloping and curving downhill.

Édouard starts to panic. ‘Slow down! Slow down!’

‘I’m trying.’ He tries to sound calm. ‘The brakes have gone.’

There’s a police traffic van up ahead, crawling along the dusty shoulder, blocking the only safe route he has. He hammers
the horn and tugs down another gear. It won’t be enough. He knows it won’t. The giant police slug is barely moving. No way
is he going to miss it.

He pulls the handbrake. The Broussards lurch forward. Rubber burns. The limousine twitches. Nic braces himself. Two policemen
spill from opposite sides of their big Renault. Metal hits metal. There’s a loud bang. Then another. And another.

Nic feels a punch in his shoulder. Then his face. Breath whooshes out of his lungs as the airbags pop. He loses his white-knuckled
grip on the wheel. Loses all feeling in his hands. Blackness floods his brain. He can taste blood. The pain, fear and adrenalin
slip away as he loses consciousness.

77TH STREET STATION, LOS ANGELES

Carter gathers his hurriedly assembled team in the Creeper Incident Room to brief them. He’s lessened the pain of
working Sunday morning by getting secretary Alice Hooper to pick up coffees and muffins on her way in.

As the lieutenant goes through the latest news, it becomes apparent to Mitzi that Kris Libowicz and Dan Amis are case vets.
They’re peas in a pod. Both early forties with that softened look that comes from too much fast food on too many stakeouts.
The big differences between the two are that Libowicz has grey-black, razored-short hair, while Amis has a mass of jet-black
curly springs, courtesy of his mother’s African-American parentage. Both come with good reps – stand-up cops who have seen
it all, done it all.

Tom Hix arrives and smiles at Mitzi – a little too much for her liking. Carter saves her further embarrassment by showing
him the bed sheet that needs to be swabbed for DNA. Once the scientist goes about his business, the cops settle down to view
the footage that ruined all their weekends.

‘The sheet thing,’ Libowicz points at the freeze frame on the screen, ‘Why’s he wearing that? Why’d the fool bring that thing
in with him?’

‘Emotional attachment,’ answers Amis. ‘He’s like Linus.’

‘Linus?’

‘Charlie Brown. You know, the dopey kid with the blanket.’

Carter takes a spare coffee from the centre of the table. ‘He chose the sheet rather than pick up a coat. There has to be
a reason for that. You jokers might not remember this but Linus van Pelt was both weak and smart. Charles Schultz cast him
as the strip’s philosopher and theologian – he even went around quoting gospels.’

Libowicz breaks a bran muffin in half. ‘Guess “Thou shalt not kill” wasn’t one of his regular sayings.’

Mitzi can’t take her eyes off the monitor. ‘What’s Deliverance holding in his left hand?’ She points at the screen. ‘Right
there, look, he’s got something hooked around his thumb and dangling.’

They all lean closer to the monitor.

Carter sees it now. ‘Keys. Damn it. Car keys. Why didn’t we see them before?’ He knows the answer. They’re all dog-tired and
you miss things like that when you’re running on empty. ‘Mitzi, contact the desk sergeant, he’ll still have them. Send a uniform
to try the vehicles in the street. There can’t be too many around on a Sunday morning.’

She grabs the remains of her coffee and leaves them to it. On the way down to the front desk she turns her cell phone off
mute and replays a message she missed during the briefing.

‘Mom, this is Jade. I’m sorry we rowed. I love you. See you soon.’

‘Love you too,’ shouts Amber from somewhere noisy. ‘We’re having a good time. Love you.’

That’s all there is. But it’s all there needs to be. Mitzi stops on the stairs and feels a rush of emotion. Thank God she’s
in the middle of a murder case –
two
murder cases – otherwise she might just have a soppy mom moment and cry her eyes out.

SAINT-JULIEN-EN-GENEVOIS

Through the blackness Nic feels something covering his mouth. Choking him.

He opens his eyes in panic. A paramedic is bent over him, pressing an oxygen mask to his face. The young man confers with
a colleague in what sounds like an odd French accent. He listens, then turns back to Nic and speaks English. ‘You are all
right. Don’t move, you’ll be fine.’

The detective realises he’s no longer in the car. He’s outside. Lying down on damp, winter-greyed grass at the side of the
road. In his peripheral vision he sees flashing lights and hears voices – but not traffic noise. Either the crash has blocked
the freeway or the emergency services have shut it down. He tries to move but it feels like an anvil’s on his chest.

‘Stay still.’ The paramedic has one hand on the mask and another on Nic’s wrist.

He forces himself to sit up, and palms the guy away. Pain roars through his chest. It feels like he’s cracked a rib. He pulls
off the mask. ‘The old couple – are they okay?’

The medic tries to ease him back down. ‘They are being checked, as you should be. Now please, stay still.’

Nic tries to get to his feet.

‘Whoa. Sit down. I’m not finished.’

‘Thanks, but you are.’ Nic tries again. This time he makes it. He staggers over to the Broussards, who are sat on the back
steps of an ambulance.

Édouard forces a smile. ‘I never let you drive again,
mon amis.’

‘I may never want to. The brakes completely failed. I put my foot down and there was nothing there.’

Ursula has her hand to her shoulder, nursing a bruise where the seatbelt snapped tight on impact. ‘We are lucky to be alive,’
she says.

‘I’m sorry,’ says Nic, inexplicably feeling compelled to say so because he was at the wheel at the time. ‘I hope you’re not
badly hurt.’

‘We are fine,’ says Édouard. ‘Bumps and bruises, that is all. It’s good that others stopped to help and got the ambulance
people here so quickly.’

‘I think that other driver called them,’ adds Ursula, gingerly rotating her arm.

‘What driver?’

‘He helped us out of the car,’ she explains. ‘Said we should move because it could catch fire.’

‘He even got our luggage out,’ Édouard nods to the banking where their small Louis Vuitton cases are standing.

Nic sees his bag isn’t among them. The one with the DNA profile and documents the scientist gave him is missing.

77TH STREET STATION, LOS ANGELES

There’s a point in every investigation where all you can do is wait. Wait for tests. Wait for results. Wait for a break.

But waiting is something Tyler Carter is not good at. He drums his fingers on his desk and once more goes through all the
actions in his head. Mitzi has uniforms out on the street trying to find which car fits the keys recovered from the suspect.
Tom Hix has taken a swab from Deliverance and is running rush blood and DNA tests on both him and the sheet he brought in.
Libowicz is chasing up fingerprints, though no one is expecting AFIS to come back with a match. Amis is running mugshots lifted
from the surveillance footage through LAPD facial recognition software to see if Deliverance is flagged as a known offender.
Uniforms have been sent to pick up Kim Bass’s friend Jenny Harrison so she can try to ID the guy and Doc Jenkins has just
completed his second review and is about to submit an official report on the subject’s condition.

Mitzi’s every bit as impatient as Carter. It’s already gone midday and she feels they’re still stuck in first gear. If she
were calling the shots, they’d be in there giving the fruitcake hell. She forces herself to sit at her desk and fire up the
computer.

There are a dozen new mails in her inbox, including the information that Sarah Kenny promised to send.

A cloud? Who would have thought such a thing existed?

She pastes a link in her browser and then enters the username and password Kenny’s given her. There isn’t much to look at
– a dashboard of icons for Music, Videos, Photographs and Documents. She clicks the last one and it produces a spread of files:
PDF, Excel, Word, Keynote, Pages, PowerPoint, Numbers, Contacts and something called Scriptmaster. She clicks on it and a
new span of documents fans out on the desktop: ‘The Age of the Rothschilds’, ‘The Duke and the Showgirl’, and ‘The Shroud
(Final Draft)’.

Mitzi wonders if it really is the final draft. Any other day, she’d be excited as hell to be finding out. She opens it.

THE SHROUD

By Tamara Jacobs

FINAL DRAFT

Confidential – not to be photocopied. Only signed
copies to be distributed to authorised personnel.

She flicks through the first pages. It all seems similar to what she’s already read. Boringly so. This really isn’t her kind
of movie. She pulls up a wordsearch function and tries the new
location that Hix added to the puzzle – LEBANON. A fresh page comes up. One she’s not seen before.

LEBANON/BEIRUT. 1176.

EXTERIOR.
Night.

Scene 49

Winter. Snow-capped mountains, forests of Lebanese cedars. (As the camera moves deeper through the forests day turns to night.)

The sound of hymns being sung by male voices is heard in the distance.

Torchlights flicker through the open window slats of a secret Maronite monastery.

INTERIOR.

Scene 50

The singing stops and hushed male voices are heard. Two Maronite monks stand together. A large blood-red crucifix sown over
each man’s heart uniquely distinguishes their full-length brown habits. They are as much warriors as men of God.

The first monk is called
YOUSEFF.
He is a senior in the order. He is stocky and in his mid-thirties. The second,
KHALIL,
is fifteen years younger, and is taller and thinner.

YOUSEFF

Word has come from our Holy leader: it is time for us to pray and ready our brave knights for their tasks. Satan has been
hard at work. He has bestowed the blackest of his evil blessings on the foulest of his bastard offspring – the monster Salahuddin.

KHALIL

Foulest and fiercest. The whole of the Muslim world is gathering behind Salahuddin’s bloody sword.

Bells ring out. It is the call to evening prayer.
YOUSEFF
and
KHALIL
walk the dark passageways of the monastery. Wall torches flicker as they pass. Their shadows grow eerily long on the stone
slabbed floors.

YOUSEFF

The infidel Muslim mocks our Lord, Jesus Christ. He generates grandly the pretence of peacekeeper among those hoards of heathens.

KHALIL

I pray for his downfall. Daily and nightly I pray with all my heart and soul that the great army of Franks, with the proud
Templars and Hospitallers at their head, will burn his camps and ensure the shadow of the True Cross falls upon his sinful
soul.

YOUSEFF

I fear it is not to be. Judging from the request that has come down to us, so too does the Holy Father.

They cross an inner courtyard, where a statue of Saint Maroun stands in the middle of a fountain. Flower petals are scattered
on the water and it is ringed with tall, lit candles.
YOUSEFF
stops to dip his hand in the water and bless himself in front of the statue of their patron saint.

YOUSEFF

Do not be afraid, young Khalil, we will not ride alone. The spirit of Maroun will be with us at all times. He will guide our
eyes and our swords.

He gestures past the statue to the wall opposite. It contains a giant crucifix of Christ and a number of kneelers cut into
the hard stones.

YOUSEFF

It is time to unchain the Knights of the Darkness. Time for them to wield the wrath of God.

On the other side of the fountain they both cross themselves again. They kneel side by side and slide back small iron plates
fitted in the wall. The stench from inside the cramped cells makes both monks wince.