Mario Reading - The Nostradamus prophecies

He checked around for the men one final time and then cut down towards the girl. This was simply too good to be true. They must have known he was coming.

Laid it all on in some way.

He hesitated for a moment, when he was about fifteen feet from the girl. She made a pretty picture, squatting there in her long gypsy dress by the river. A perfect picture of innocence. Bale was reminded of something from the long-distant past but he couldn’t quite identify the scene. The sudden lapse disturbed him, like an unexpected current of cold air travelling through a tear in a pair of trousers.

He ran the last few yards, confident that the girl hadn’t heard his approach. At the last possible moment she began to turn around but he was already on top of her, pinning her arms to the ground with his knees. He had expected her to scream and had taken the precaution of pinching shut her nose – it was a method which nearly always worked with women and was far better than risking one’s hand over a panic-stricken person’s mouth – but the girl was strangely silent. It was almost as if she had been expecting him.

‘If you cry out, I shall sever your spinal cord. Just like I did to your brother. Do you understand me?’

She nodded.

He couldn’t see her face properly, as he had her pinioned down from the back, with her body underneath him and her arms stretched out in a cruciform position. He rectified this by angling her head to one side.

‘I’m going to say this once and once only. In ten seconds time I am going to knock you out with my fist. While you are unconscious I am going to raise your skirt, take off your underpants and conduct an exploration inside you with my knife. When I encounter your fallopian tubes I am going to cut them. You will bleed badly but it won’t kill you. The men will probably find you before that happens. But you will never be a mother. Do you understand me? That will be gone. Forever.’

He heard rather than saw her evacuating her bladder. Her eyes turned up in themselves and started fl uttering.

‘Stop that. Wake up.’ He pinched her cheek as hard as he could. Her eyes began to refocus. ‘Now listen. What did you find? Where are you going? Tell me these things and I will leave you alone. Your ten seconds have started.’

Yola began to moan.

‘Eight. Seven. Six.’

‘We’re going to Rocamadour.’

‘Why?’

‘To the Black Virgin. Something is hidden at her feet.’

‘What?’

‘We don’t know. All it said on the bottom of the coffer was that the secret of the verses is at her feet.’

‘The bottom of what coffer?’

‘My mother’s coffer. The one my mother gave me. The one that belonged to the daughter of Nostradamus.’

‘Is that it?’

‘That’s everything. I swear to you.’

Bale took some of the weight off her arms. He glanced back-up the valley. No sign of the men. Kill her? No point really. She was as good as dead already.

He dragged her to the edge of the riverbank and tumbled her in.

‘I hope to Hell this is worth all the trouble we’re going to.’

‘What? What are you talking about? The verses?’

‘No. The wild asparagus.’

Alexi circled his fingers. ‘You can bet it will be. Yola cooks good. All we need now is a rabbit.’

‘And how do you propose to catch that?’

‘You can run it over. I’ll tell you if I see one by the roadside. But don’t squash it – you’ve got to time it just right so that you hit its head with the outside of the wheel. The flesh won’t taste as good as one that God Himself kills, but it’ll be the next best thing.’

Sabir nodded wearily. What the Hell had he expected Alexi to say? That they’d go into the next town and buy a shotgun? ‘Can you see Yola? We’d better be going.’

Alexi straightened up. ‘No. She went down by the river. I’ll go and call her.’

Sabir trudged back towards the car, shaking his head. It was an odd thing to admit but he was slowly beginning to enjoy himself. He wasn’t a great deal older than Alexi but there had been times in the past few years when he’d realised that he was starting to lose his zest for life – his sense of the absurd. Now, with the loose artillery of Alexi and Yola acting in counterpoint to the still lurking threat of the police, he suddenly felt all the excitement of the unknown bubbling up again in his stomach.

‘Adam!’ The shout came from just beyond a small stand of trees down near the river.

Sabir dropped the asparagus and started to run.

The first thing he saw was Alexi floundering in the river. ‘Quickly, Adam. I can’t swim. She’s in the water.’

‘Where?’

‘Just below you. Her face is down but she’s still alive. I saw her arm move.’

Sabir crested the bank and executed a clumsy leap into the slow-moving river. He reached Yola with his first surge and levered her up into his arms.

She raised a hand as if toward him off, but her eyes were dead when they looked up at him and there was no real force left in the movement. Sabir clutched her to his chest and allowed the force of the river to sweep them back towards the bank.

‘I think she’s had a fit of some sort. Run up to the car and get a blanket.’

Alexi floundered out of the water. He gave a single, anxious glance backwards and then pounded up the hill towards the car.

Sabir laid Yola down on to the sand. She was breathing normally, but her face was sheet-white and her lips had already turned an unhealthy blue.

‘What is it? What happened?’

She began shaking, as if, with her retrieval from the water, some other non-mechanical process had been triggered.

Sabir glanced up to check on Alexi’s progress. ‘Look, I’m sorry. Alexi’s bringing a dry blanket. I’m going to have to get you out of these clothes.’ He had expected – even hoped for – an argument. But there was no response. He began undoing Yola’s blouse.

‘You shouldn’t do that.’ Alexi had reached Sabir’s side. He proffered the blanket. ‘She wouldn’t like it.’

‘She’s cold as ice, Alexi. And she’s in shock. If we leave her in these clothes she’ll catch pneumonia. We need to wrap her up in this blanket and then get her back to the car. I can start driving with the air conditioning set to full heat. She’ll warm up quickly then.’

Alexi hesitated.

‘I’m serious. If you don’t want to embarrass her, turn away.’ He eased off her blouse and then worked the skirt down over her hips. He was surprised to notice that she wore no underwear of any sort.

‘God, she’s beautiful.’ Alexi was staring down at her. He was still clutching the blanket.

‘Give me that.’

‘Oh. Okay.’

Sabir wrapped Yola in the blanket. ‘Now take her legs. Let’s get her up to the car before she freezes to death.’

‘Don’t you think it’s time to call in back-up?’

‘We’re forty-five minutes behind them. What sort of back-up do you think we need, Macron? A jet fighter?’

‘What if the eye-man strikes again?’

‘The eye-man?’ Calque smiled, amused by Macron’s unexpectedly creative imagination. ‘He won’t.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘Because he’s achieved his purpose. He’s bought himself a few hours’ leeway. He knows that by the time we’ve restored…’ Calque hesitated, searching for the right word.

‘GPS trilateration?’

‘GPS trilateration… exactly… and caught up with the car, he’ll have what he wants.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘Search me. I’m after the man, not his motive. I leave all that sort of rot to the judicial courts.’ Calque made a pillow of his jacket and placed it between his head and the window. ‘But I know one thing for certain. I wouldn’t want to be in Sabir or the girl’s shoes during the next sixty minutes.’