Clive Cussler - Lost City

"This is my colleague, Joe Zavala," Austin said. "Joe, meet Racine Fauchard, the owner of this charming pile of stone."

"Madame Fauchard?" Zavala's mouth dropped down to his Adam's apple.

"Yes, is there a problem?" she said.

"No. I just expected someone different."

"Monsieur Austin no doubt regaled you with descriptions of me as a bag of bones," she said, her eyes flashing.

"Not at all," Zavala said, absorbing Madame Fauchard's slim figure and striking features with wondering eyes. "He said you were charming and intelligent."

The answer seemed to please her because she smiled. "NUMA evidently chooses its people for their gallantry as well as their expertise. It was a quality I saw in you, Monsieur Austin. That's why

I knew you would try to rescue yon fair maiden." She eyed their purple-stained skin. "If you wanted to sample our grapes, it would have been far less trouble to buy a bottle of wine than to bathe in them."

"Your wine is out of my price range," Austin said.

"Did you really think you could enter the chateau without being detected? Our surveillance cameras picked you up after you crossed the drawbridge. Marcel thought you would climb to the outside wall and come in that way."

"It was kind of you to leave the stairway gate unlocked."

"You were obviously too smart to take the bait, but we never dreamed that you could find your way through the catacombs. You knew the chateau was well defended. What did you hope to accomplish by coming here?"

"I had hoped to leave with the mademoiselle."

"Well, you have failed in your romantic quest."

"So it seems. Perhaps, in the interests of romance, you would offer me a consolation prize. At our first meeting, you said you would tell me someday about your family. Here I am. I'd be glad to tell you what I know in exchange."

"You could never equal what I know about you, but I admire your audacity." She paused a moment, crossed her arms and lightly pinched her chin. Austin remembered seeing the old Madame Fauchard make the same gesture of thought. She turned to Marcel and said, "Take the others away."

"I wouldn't do that if I were you," Austin said to Marcel.

He stepped protectively in front of Skye. Marcel and the guards moved in but Madame Fauchard waved them away.

"Your chivalry appears to know no bounds, Monsieur Austin. Have no fear; your friends will only be taken a short distance away where you can see them. I want to talk to you alone."

Madame Fauchard motioned for him to sit in Skye's vacated chair,

and snapped her fingers. Two of her men brought over a thronelike chair of heavy medieval construction and she settled into it. She said something in French to Marcel, and he and some of his men escorted the prisoners a short distance, but still in view, while others dragged away the suits of armor.

"Now there are just the two of us," she said. "Lest you entertain any illusions, my men will kill your friends if you do anything foolish."

"I have no intention of making a move. This encounter is much too fascinating to end so soon. Tell me, what's with the high priestess outfit?"

"You know how I enjoy costumes. Do you like it?" Austin couldn't take his eyes off Madame Fauchard in spite of himself. Racine Fauchard was stunning in the way a finely crafted wax figure is perfect in every feature considered important, except one. Her soulless eyes held all the warmth of the cold steel that the Fauchards had used to fashion their swords and armor. "I find you absolutely enchanting, but "

"But you don't readily consort with a hundred-year-old woman." "Not at all. You've aged quite well. I don't usually consort with a cold-blooded killer."

She raised a finely arched eyebrow. "Monsieur Austin, is this your strange way of flirting with me?" "Far from it."

"Too bad. I've had many lovers in the last hundred years, but you're a very attractive man." She paused and studied his face. "Dangerous, too, and that makes you even more attractive. First, you must fulfill your part of the bargain. Tell me what you know."

"I know that you and your family hired Dr. MacLean to find the elixir of life he called the Philosopher's Stone. In the process, you killed anyone who got in your way and created a group of wild-eyed mutants."

"A cogent summary, but you've only scratched the surface."

"Scratch it for me, then."

She paused, letting her memory drift back through the years.

"My family traces its ancestry back to the Minoan civilization that flourished before the great volcanic eruption on the island of Santorini My ancestors were priests and priestesses in the Minoan snake goddess cult. The snake clan was powerful, but power rivals drove us off the island. A few weeks later, the volcano erupted and destroyed the island. We settled in Cyprus, where we went into the arms business. The snake evolved into the Spear, then to Fauchard."

"How did you get from spears to mutants?"

"It was a logical outgrowth of our arms business. Around the turn of the century, Spear Industries set up a laboratory to try to design a super-soldier. We knew from the American Civil War that trench warfare would make future battles a stalemate. First one side would charge, then the other, with little gain in ground. They would retreat in the face of the automatic weapons that were being developed. We wanted a soldier who would charge the trenches without fear, like a Viking berserker. In addition, this soldier would have super endurance and speed, and fast-healing wounds. We tried the formula on a few volunteers."

"Like Pierre Levant?"

"I don't recall the name," she said with a frown.

"Captain Levant was a French officer. He became one of the first mutants your research created."

"Yes, he seems vaguely familiar. A dashing, handsome young man, as I recall."

"You'd never recognize him these days."

"Before you condemn me, you must know that they were all volunteers, soldiers who were excited at the prospect of becoming supermen."

"Did they know that along with these superhuman powers, their appearance would change rather drastically?"

"None of us did. The science was crude. But the formula worked, for a time, anyhow. It gave the soldiers superhuman strength and quickness, but then they deteriorated into uncontrollable, snarling beasts."

"Beasts who could enjoy their new bodies forever."

"Life extension was an unexpected by-product. Even more exciting, the formula promised to reverse aging. We would have succeeded in refining the formula if not for Jules."

"He turned out to have a conscience?"

"He turned out to be a fool," she said, with undisguised vehemence. "Jules saw our findings as a boon to mankind. He tried to persuade me and others in the family to stop the march toward war and release the formula. I led the family against him. He fled the country in his airplane. He carried papers that would have implicated the family in the war plot and intended to use them as blackmail, I suppose, if he had not been intercepted and shot down."

"Why did he take the helmet?"

"It was a symbol of authority, passed down to the family leader of each generation. He lost his right to the helmet by his actions, and it should have passed to me."

Austin leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. "So Jules is gone, along with the threat that the family's war scheme will be exposed. He was in no position to stop your research."

"He had already stopped it. He destroyed the computations for the basic formula and etched them into the helmet. Clever. Too clever. We had to start all over again. There were a million possible combinations. We kept the mutants alive with the hope that one day they might reveal the secrets of the formula. The work was interrupted by wars, the Depression. We were close to succeeding during World War Two when our laboratory was bombed by Allied planes. It set back our research by decades."