Glenn Cooper - The Tenth Chamber

Luc looked at him blankly, wondering if he fully believed the story that Gatinois had fed him.

Toucas couldn’t imagine there’d be any survivors; the mangled and charred state of the corpses that were readily retrievable seemed to bear this out. But it would be days before they could reasonably change the mission from rescue to recovery.

Toucas framed the catastrophe with his own point of view. ‘This will be my entire existence for the next year, maybe two,’ he told Luc. ‘You and I will be spending a lot of time together. Of course, by your own admission you killed two men last night, but I shouldn’t worry. You’ll come out clean. These men were trying to keep the outside world out of Ruac, out of their business. They resorted to murder. They intended to eliminate your cave. You were protecting yourself, protecting a national treasure.’

Abbot Menaud arrived at mid-morning to offer up the abbey grounds for whatever purpose the authorities saw fit but Toucas didn’t have much time for him.

The cleric spotted Luc near the mobile command centre and spent a few minutes commiserating. With all the loss of life, it seemed trivial that the Barthomieu manuscript was likely in ashes somewhere deep within the crater, but the fellow did seem wistful anyway.

Luc drew him aside and partly unbuttoned his shirt.

‘You have it!’ the abbot cried.

‘And you’ll have it back soon enough,’ Luc assured him. ‘As soon as I know it will be safe.’

Luc borrowed a mobile phone from an ambulance driver. He’d probably never be able to make a call again on his own phone without wondering if Unit 70 was listening in. He apologised to Isaak for losing his car. Then he asked him to tuck away the unopened envelopes somewhere safe. He’d figure out what to do with them later.

Luc borrowed another car from an archaeologist friend at the museum at Les Eyzies. He drove to Bergerac to collect Sara from the hospital where she’d spent the rest of the night.

She was waiting for him in the casualty ward when he arrived, wearing the spare clothes of a nurse who’d taken pity on her. She looked pale and weak, but when they hugged he felt the strength of her young arms around his neck.

They went to the cave.

Munitions experts from the army had worked all day clearing explosives from auger holes in the cliff-top and the area was declared safe.

Maurice Barbier had arrived in a Ministry of Culture helicopter to personally meet with Luc at the old abbey camp site and hand over the new keys and security codes. He mumbled something about Marc Abenheim’s lack of availability, but anyway, he was sure that pending an investigation, Luc would be reinstated as Director of the Ruac Cave.

He listened in a fatherly way to the story Luc and Sara chose to tell, an official version hastily cobbled together with Gatinois in the dead of the night. When Barbier had heard enough to brief the Minister, he kissed Sara’s hand and flew off into the steel-grey sky.

At the cave mouth, Luc pulled the gates open and switched on the master lights. ‘No protective suits,’ he told her. ‘Special occasion.’

They walked slowly through the chambers, hand-in-hand like kids on a first date.

‘How did you know?’ he finally asked.

‘That you wouldn’t be affected?’

He nodded.

‘Your pills for your staph infection. Rifampin. It boosts an enzyme in the liver called CYP3A4. You know what that enzyme does?’

He looked at her, lost.

‘It chews up ergot alkaloids. It inactivates them. If you were being a good boy and taking your pills like you said you were, I knew you wouldn’t be affected by the ergots in the tea. Or maybe the other chemicals too.’

‘I’m always a good boy. Well, usually. But let’s talk about you. You’re a clever girl, aren’t you?’

‘I know my plants.’

Then he got serious. ‘So what was it like?’

She held her breath while she thought then exhaled completely. ‘Look, I know what happened to me, and what didn’t happen to me. The doctors told me there was no rape. Thank you. And mercifully, I don’t remember any of that part. What I remember was glorious. I was light, I was floating, I felt I was on the wind. It was intensely pleasurable. Surprised?’

‘Not at all. I figured as much. Would you take it again?’

She laughed and said, ‘In a New York minute,’ then gripped his hand tighter. ‘No, probably not. I prefer an old-fashioned natural high.’

He smiled.

‘Luc, I feel so bad about so many people – Pierre, Jeremy and the rest – and Fred Prentice’s death is so profoundly sad. That dear man would have had a field day working out the chemistry and everything to do with survival genes.’

‘It’s awful that it’s up to Gatinois to take the science forward,’ Luc said. ‘I have no trust he’ll do the right thing.’

She sighed heavily. ‘Did we do the right thing?’ she asked. ‘To trade for our silence?’

‘We’re alive. The cave is still here. We can study it in peace for the rest of our lives. They would have killed us, Sara, blamed it on Bonnet.’

‘But we can’t study everything,’ she said. ‘We have to play dumb about the plants, suppress knowledge of the manuscript, be a party to a cover-up. All those murders in Cambridge and Ruac are going to go unpunished.’

He said it again, squeezing her arm. ‘Look, I don’t feel clean, but we’re alive! And I hate to agree with Gatinois about anything, but it would be terrible if the recipe for the tea got out. We had to make a choice. We did what we had to do. We did the right thing.’

She sighed and nodded.

He took her hand and tugged. ‘Come on, you know where I want to go.’

In the tenth chamber, they stood in front of the giant bird man and embraced. For the first time, Luc imagined the bird man’s beak was open in a triumphant laugh, a very human expression of joy.

‘This feels like our place,’ Luc said. ‘I want to keep coming here forever to work and learn. I think it’s the most amazing place in the world.’

She kissed him. ‘I think so too.’

‘I’ll be good to you this time,’ he promised.

She looked up into his eyes in an effort. ‘Once burned, twice shy. Are you sure?’

‘Yes, I’m sure. I’ll be good to you for a very long time. As long as I live.’

From her wry smile he wasn’t sure she believed him.

Rochelle, Pennsylvania

Nicholas Durand dried while his wife washed.

He’d faithfully helped with the dishes ever since they were first married. Creatures of habit, they always did them by hand. He couldn’t recall ever using the dishwasher their daughter had bought and installed for them. Husband and wife were white-haired, stooped with age, moving through their chores slowly and deliberately.

‘Tired?’ his wife asked.

‘Nope. I feel good,’ he replied.

It was night-time. They’d had a late supper following an afternoon nap, their usual routine on barn nights.

Rochelle was a speck of a town in central Pennsylvania, a farming town nestled in rolling hills. It was founded in 1698 by Huguenots, French Protestants who couldn’t abide the Catholic Church. It was off the beaten path, just like the founders had wanted. There’d never been more than a few hundred residents, then or now.

Pierre Durand, the town’s founding father, had left his own village in France for the Huguenot hot-bed of La Rochelle on the Bay of Biscay back in the 1680s. He hadn’t wanted to leave his village in the Perigord but there’d been a terrible dispute involving the village’s leading family over money and there was violence in the air. Although he’d never been religious, he settled upon a Huguenot woman in La Rochelle and she wound up turning his head and his beliefs. They set sail for North America in 1697.