Tom Harper - The Book of Secrets

This was how it would end. Lying in the road, his blood melting into the snow around him until it cooled and froze. He’d never know what had happened to Gillian, never understand why he’d come to this icy corner of France to die. He raged at the injustice of it.

With a scream, Emily flew out of the night and hurled herself against the man. She was too slight to have much effect, but she wrapped herself around his arm and dragged it down, away from Nick.

Nick sprang to his feet and grabbed for the gun. His hand closed around the cold barrel and clung on for his life. For a moment the three of them were caught in a heaving tangle of limbs and steel, swaying and staggering in the snow. Then something gave. Nick lost his balance; the next thing he knew his cheek was planted in the snow, pinned down by somebody on top of him.

‘Are you OK?’

Emily pushed herself off him and stood. Nick scrambled up after her. He still had the gun, holding it by its muzzle like a club. Where was their opponent?

Halfway down the street, a large shadow flitted across the snow under a street lamp. Nick looked around.

‘He’s still got the bag.’

‘Wait,’ Emily called. But Nick was already running. His feet crunched in the snow; his arms pumped so fast he barely noticed the weight of the gun. The man might be strong but he wasn’t quick on his feet. Nick had little trouble keeping him in sight as they sprinted along the empty streets. The black and white frames of the half-timbered houses were skeletal in the gloom, their shuttered windows blind to the frantic chase.

The man glanced over his shoulder, then ducked down an unlit side street. His heavy tracks were printed clearly in the snow – especially here, where few other feet had disturbed it. Nick followed, gaining. He glimpsed the black gleam of water below as he crossed a bridge and turned again.

The houses thinned, giving way to a strip of grass and trees. To his right, he saw a jumble of wooden battlements and turrets – a children’s playground. The chill air rasped in Nick’s lungs. But he could see his quarry clearly now, barely twenty yards ahead of him. He swallowed the pain and kept going.

Between the trees, Nick saw water on all sides. They must have come onto some sort of island in the river. Ahead, a row of high stone towers stood floodlit against the darkness where the island ended.

The man was trapped. He slowed to a walk, then stopped. Nick skidded to a halt on the icy path, keeping well back. He raised the gun as his quarry turned to face him. They stood there among the trees and snow in silence, a dozen paces apart like duellists. But only one of them had a gun.

‘Who are you?’ Nick shouted. The night seemed to swallow his words.

The man didn’t answer. He looked down at the bag still dangling from his hand, then let it drop. It landed in the snow at his feet. The movement drew Nick’s attention; in that moment, the Italian’s hand dipped inside his pocket. Nick’s gaze snapped back. With the sickening knowledge that he’d made a fatal mistake, he raised the pistol. But his finger hesitated on the trigger.

The man hadn’t pulled another gun. Instead, he’d extracted a sheet of paper. His hands scrabbled with it as he folded it over and over, then began tearing it into pieces.

‘Stop!’ Nick shouted. Tiny fragments fluttered to the ground like a shower of snow. Nick jerked the gun – but he couldn’t shoot a man in cold blood.

A brilliant beam of light swept across the park behind him. A barge was coming up the river, its captain taking no chances in the darkness. In a second, Nick would be picked out like an actor on stage. He lowered the gun to his side, into the shadows. Like deer caught on a road, neither he nor the man dared move.

The barge drew level with them. The river was so narrow here that the boat’s hull almost touched the embankment, its deck only a foot or so below Nick’s feet. Floodlights bathed the park in light, blinding Nick. In that moment, the Italian jumped. He heaved himself over the railing and dropped like a stone onto the barge. Nick ran to the rail, but all he saw was a wall of dazzling light blazing back at him.

Footsteps crunched behind him; he swung around. Emily was running across the park, her breath fogging the night.

‘Where is he?’

Nick pointed to the barge, now disappearing around a bend in the river. ‘He got away.’

He walked over to where the bag lay and scanned the ground. As his eyes readjusted to the darkness he found he could pick out a few of the scraps of paper lying limp in the snow. He picked one up. It seemed to be normal office paper, with a fragment of a word on it.

‘What’s that?’

‘Something important. When I had the guy cornered, the one thing he cared about was destroying it.’

They knelt together in the snow, sweeping the ground and gathering the fragments in shivering hands. Nick thanked God there was no wind. When they had collected as many as they could find, they shook the snow off them and bagged them in a pocket of Nick’s backpack. Emily looked doubtfully at the pile of sodden scraps, not much bigger than confetti.

‘Do you think we’ll make any sense of that?’

Nick grimaced. The city glow reflected off the snow and gave his face a ghoulish cast. I piece things together.

‘We have the technology. We can fix it.’

We would tear it up and piece it back together.

By liberating the beasts from the flat cage of their copper plates, Drach could make any card he wanted. Even if only one animal remained, he could print and reprint it as often as he wanted onto the same card. The system was not only perfect, it was infinitely variable.

It was not a new idea. We had started down this road when we divided the indulgence plate into four paragraphs. But we had not gone nearly far enough. One afternoon I counted three thousand and seventy-four individual characters in the indulgence. We would cast each one individually and bring them together to form a single page, as thousand of souls form a single Church.

Hans Dunne disliked the plan. ‘Each time you encounter a problem, you find an answer that creates ten new problems and does not solve the first,’ he warned me. But he had earned more than a hundred gulden from me for creating the copper plates which had proved so troublesome, so I ignored him.

Kaspar did not like it either. ‘You are turning in on yourself. You are trying to climb a mountain by counting pebbles. You will spend the rest of your life making this art so intricate that nothing can be done with it.’

We were journeying through a forest in late October. It was like walking through fire: all around us the leaves burned vivid shades of scarlet, ochre, yellow and orange, shimmering in the breeze. It was a dangerous time to be abroad.

‘And even if you succeed, it will just turn out like the mirrors,’ Kaspar prodded me.

Much had happened since the night Andreas Dritzehn died. His brother Jörg had sued me to be admitted to our partnership – and lost. The judge awarded him fifteen gulden. The Aachen pilgrimage had come and gone, the relics put away for another seven years. Some of the mirrors waved aloft to capture the holy rays had been mine, but not many. First, a good portion of our metals had been sold to pay the interest on my debts. Then we had been swindled by our barge captain and decimated by tolls along the river, before being opposed at every turn by the Aachen guilds. By the time we were finished, the torrent of tin and lead I had prepared to pour down the Rhine had dwindled to a trickle. The torrent of gold I had hoped would flow back to me suffered a similar fate. Once I had paid our costs, paid the investors, paid my debts, including the fifteen gulden to Jörg Dritzehn, only the thinnest residue remained.