David Gilman - Ice Claw

Max felt overwhelmed. Star charts, predictions and heavenly conjunctions of planets. It might be more ooby-gooby stuff. Messages and influences from the stars weren’t something he could see as solid, no-nonsense facts. One thing was certain, though. Enough people believed in this stuff to have Zabala murdered and send attackers after Max. Those were facts. That was something he could believe in.

“And someone has killed him to retrieve the information, and has sent people after you because you now hold his secret.”

“Maybe this is what they’re looking for. I have a birth chart exactly the same,” Max said, pulling out the drawing he’d found at d’Abbadie’s chateau.

Max put the two pieces of paper side by side. The sketches seemed identical and made by the same hand. Although he knew nothing about astrology, he realized that with a bit of practice he’d get the hang of it. Maps, sea charts, star maps, they all had a logical system to them.

Max traced the symbols he didn’t understand.

“There’s a difference,” he said. “On Zabala’s original drawing I’ve got there’s an extra triangle drawn inside the circle of the birth chart. On yours, it’s missing. They’re not the same.”

“So that’s why he sent me this chart. You must have something else, something that shows the difference between these two predictions. The first was incorrect, but the second …”

Fauvre glared at Max. He realized Zabala’s pendant was missing.

“Where is the stone? Did you lose it during the attack?”

“No, Sophie took it. That’s why she ran. And I need to see her room.”

The stone-walled room was once part of a cluster of single-story houses. Ruins on each side blocked any means of entry other than the one door. Like other teenagers, Sophie Fauvre kept her room locked. It was her sanctuary. One of Fauvre’s men brought bolt cutters and squeezed the blades over the padlock’s thick shackle.

Two of the walls inside were plastered with an ochre-colored clay screed. Small windows, covered by muslin curtains, allowed a faint light to penetrate the darkness. Max tried the light switch; nothing happened. In the cool, shadowy room he could see a single bed covered with a brightly embroidered cloth. Books filled shelves on one wall, and CDs another. Candles, trapped in their own spilled wax, were dotted around the room, many of them barely puddles of color from being burned so low. A faint scent clung to the airless room. Max realized it was Sophie’s fragrance.

A makeshift desk was used mostly as a dressing table, its top cluttered with makeup, a glass pot full of an assortment of combs and brushes, while a mixture of dust and body powder showed where essential oil bottles-lavender, marjoram, thyme-had left sticky ring marks.

Fauvre had edged his wheelchair into the room. He gazed as mesmerized as Max at the unfolding world of his daughter. Photographs, posters, the girl’s drawings and sketches-slashes of color on squares of canvas, muted pages of charcoal anger scribbled by a furious hand-a world of pain and despair.

Max looked at family pictures from when Sophie was obviously a child. The strongly muscled Fauvre before his accident, the beautiful, dark-haired woman without a face. Every picture showing parents and child, right up to what were obviously recent years, had the mother’s face burned out or scratched away.

But Max’s attention was fixed on the wall above Sophie’s bed. Clustered together were pictures taken far from Morocco’s sun-baked harshness. They were of startling white landscapes, prickly green fir trees dusted with snow and brightly dressed skiers in competition. But this was no downhill racing; these skiers stretched their limbs across differing terrain. Some of them knelt in a firing position, a rifle to their shoulder, others stood and aimed at targets, while in the same picture skiers pushed away into the background.

“This is a cross-country skiing competition,” Max muttered to himself.

“That’s right,” Fauvre said. “A biathlon. Last year in Norway. Sophie was a junior competitor in the fifteen-kilometer ski and shoot. She didn’t get placed. She had the stamina, but her target shooting was not good.”

Max looked closer. A figure had been captured in one of the photographic sequences. Flurried snow indicated the skier had had to stop and shoot at a target. It was a standing pose, rifle to shoulder. Max’s stomach fluttered. It was almost a mirror image of when the killer shot Zabala.

His eyes followed the sequence of pictures of the shooter’s progress downhill to the marksman range, until finally the same competitor, cheek nestled against the target rifle’s stock, was in close-up.

This skier’s Lycra race suit was the same scattered white-on-black design as the murderer’s, but the face was clearly in focus.

Max’s breath was trapped in his chest; his heart tried to hammer it free.

He knew the clear-eyed girl with her finger on the trigger.

The killer whose name he couldn’t pronounce-Potyncza Jozsa.

Peaches.

That was what was so wrong.

Peaches had run back to the van with Sharkface’s men. Sayid gulped. Something invisible gripped his throat and stabbed him in the heart with an icicle. The look she gave him didn’t need words.

The vans burned rubber, found the nearest exit from the motorway, took it easy along country roads for the next fifty kilometers and slipped back on to the silky-smooth blacktopped autoroute.

Sayid’s mind was in turmoil. Bobby was probably dead, another man injured, and Bobby’s girlfriend was part of this whole terrifying mess. Desperately alone, he began to shake with fear. The shock was going to shut him down and he couldn’t help but let out a gulping sob.

“Shut up, you sniveling brat!” one of the bikers yelled from the front seat.

The tone in the boy’s voice had an unusual effect on Sayid. In that brief moment of temper, he realized they were rattled. Things hadn’t gone to plan, had they? No, they hadn’t. These evil, violent people had been as shaken by events as had Sayid, but for a different reason-the fear of being caught in an unexpected situation far from home. There was still time for other things to go wrong. For someone to stumble on them.

He brought his scattered thoughts back under control. The magic square numbers burned even more brightly in his mind: perhaps they held essential information that might stop these killers.

Sayid concentrated-the heat-seeking missile was back on target.

Max had to fight the obvious: Sophie was in league with Peaches, involved in killing Zabala and a member of Sharkface’s gang. Bobby Morrell hadn’t abandoned him and Sayid at Hendaye, he had been betrayed, maybe even killed by Peaches. These thugs worked for someone so powerful his reach could stretch across the world to get what he wanted by any means possible. Zabala’s cry, Trust no one-they will kill you , had even more resonance now. Had the whole thing been a charade? Sharkface’s gang attacking Sophie, Max riding like an idiot to the rescue, drawn in and seduced by her vulnerability, only to be used as a means to an end-to find Zabala’s secret?

Obvious? So it seemed, and he wished it weren’t. Distrust eats away at you like a terrible disease.

“Why did she take it?” Fauvre demanded once they were back in his office, his hands sifting through the old monk’s papers. “She must have known its importance. There can be no denying that! Damn her! She’s selling it for money, isn’t she? She’s found a buyer for something invaluable. Selling a man’s life!”

The distraught man’s anger was at a destructive level.

Whatever Sophie had done, Max convinced himself she was not a killer. She could have cut his throat when she took the stone. That gave him some hope, a glimmer of understanding.