Cara Black: Murder at the Lanterne Rouge

Aimée had to make her understand. And she didn’t have time. “I found Meizi chained, Martine,” she said. “Treated worse than a dog. The flics snared a few snakeheads to ante up on their taxes.”

Pause.

“No one cares about the women or the men living ten to a room, sleeping under the machines,” Aimée said. “Who’s fighting for them? Or for the unnamed dead in paupers’ graves at Ivry. I sent Prévost proof, he just doesn’t know it yet.”

Another pause.

“But Prévost has connections at Libération ,” Aimée continued.

Martine let out a phfft . “Proving what?”

She had no idea. “I met him there on the roof, stunning view,” she said. “You figure it out.”

A longer pause.

“I doubt he was renewing his subscription, Martine,” she said.

“So you’d like me to take on the Ministry of Labor with a possible ally at the newspaper—some flic you met on a rooftop?”

Aimée gripped the phone in her gloved hand. “Prizes for investigative journalism don’t come from fluff pieces,” she said. “Got a pencil?”

Pause. “Why do I feel I’ll regret this?”

“You won’t.” She gave Martine the addresses, the refuge at the Chinese evangelical church, Nina’s name. “Now anything stopping you, Martine?”

A longer pause. “Just my car. I totalled it yesterday. Gilles threw a fit.”

Aimeé sucked in her breath. “You okay?”

“Shaken up.” Aimée heard the jingle of keys. “But I’ll take Gilles’s Range Rover. Safer.”

Sunday, 11:30 P.M.

AIMÉE USED HER security access to gain entry to the Musée des Arts et Métiers. Vardet, the security guard, nodded from his guardroom.

“Ah, Mademoiselle, un express? Fresh, too. Join me before I do rounds.”

Just what she needed. “You’re a lifesaver, Monsieur.”

He poured her a steaming demitasse. Added a trickle of eau-de-vie . “Let me add un fortifiant , as we say in Lyon.”

A Lyonnais, of course.

“Gorgeous country.” Vardet’s eyes misted. “I miss it. The Rhône gurgling past.”

Perhaps he’d had a little too much eau-de-vie already.

She popped another Doliprane and sipped the espresso laced with pear liquor. Heaven. Vardet pointed out his grandchildren in photos. His old-fashioned alarm clock rang. “Time for my rounds.”

UNDER THE GOTHIC nave, Aimée connected her laptop to the museum’s desktop and logged on. Thank God for the space heater. She scrolled the museum’s archaic database. It was hidden here somewhere.

Impatient, she raced over the keys, scrolling through the documents she’d digitized. Nothing. She, René, and Saj had gone over all of these.

Stymied, she stared at her screen. Think, think like Samour would.

Go back to the source. The file Saj had enhanced.

She hit Saj’s number on her phone. “Saj, tell me this, if I were Samour, where would I hide something in the museum files? Somewhere in plain sight, like on Coulade’s screen saver?”

“I downloaded Stenwiz onto your laptop,” Saj said. His voice crackled. Static buzzed on the line. “Use that. It’s the program I used to crack the trebuchet on …”

The rest ended in fuzz. Then a sharp crack of thunder overhead. She jumped, almost knocking her laptop over. A rain of shots. Ducking, she held her breath until she realized it was hail pebbling the plastic sheeting.

Before the power went out again, she opened Stenwiz. Then she realized what she was missing. She’d gone in chronological order, digitizing and searching from the oldest documents. This time, she scrolled the museum’s database from the most recent item, and after twenty minutes found a nineteenth-century doc, the largest taking up one gigabyte of memory. She searched in earnest. Scrolling, opening, reading, and closing a good fifty years. Then she found it.

The trebuchet matching Coulade’s screen saver. Of course!

Aimée ran the Stenwiz program, used the key Saj sent and followed his attached instructions. Five long minutes later, her screen filled with black-and-gold Latin script, sinuous and slanted. A complete version of the alchemical formula in all its medieval glory. Attached was a page of algorithms in tight script, with Pascal Samour’s signature at the bottom.

She gasped. Pascal had rehidden it where it had lain for centuries. And then added his fiber-optic adaption.

She compressed the file, entered Saj’s address, punched send, and prayed the Ethernet cooperated.

The sounds of creaking and shifting in the building mounted. What sounded like whispers came from the adjoining chapel. The wind again? She stifled her unease and focused on her screen. Like before, she heard a high-pitched whine from a distant fuse box. And again, the building plunged into darkness.

Her desktop computer screen went black. The only light came from her green laptop screen and the chapel’s stained-glass window’s rose-and-blue glow. Ethereal and unnerving. The warmth faded from the heater. Not a good sign. Neither was the fact that her laptop blinked “On Reserve Battery” again. Had Saj received the file? In a hurry, she loaded her laptop into her bag, buttoned Hippolyte’s coat over her Chanel dress, and ran across the old chapel for the exit.

Her penlight beam traced a thin yellow line over the dust, the uneven stone floor, and the metal mushroom she recognized as the base of a crane. Past the excavations for Foucault’s pendulum. Threading her way past the scaffolding bars and more machines and cables, she reached the vestibule.

“ Allo? Monsieur Vardet? Sécurité? ”

No answer.

Had he forgotten her? She shivered, hearing the wind droning outside. Insistent and mounting.

Her penlight found the dark, empty security post. Behind the thick glass slits, she saw the swirling hail, the piled ice bank outside the door. A storm, all right.

She hit the buzzer and pushed at the small exit door in the massive portal. Not even a budge. Of course, the door operated electrically. Where was Vardet? No doubt he’d alerted whomever one alerted about a power outage and was busy dealing with that. But this meant she had to tramp clear across the torn-up museum to the far exit in the old refectory, now the library.

Her footsteps echoed and the wind reverberated like a chant. She pulled her bag higher up on her shoulder and felt her way along the pitted stone wall, shining her penlight on the floor. She narrowly avoided the old, dusty glass display cases, empty and forlorn, in the long corridor.

But it wasn’t the wind; chanting came from somewhere ahead in the dark. The hair rose on the back of her neck. The ghosts of old monks?

“ Allo? Someone there?” Her voice echoed.

She turned left and continued in the direction of the chanting. Wouldn’t the students studying late be in the same predicament as she was? The chanting sounds grew. Choral practice? But this late at night?

She found herself in a humid vaulted corridor, and almost walked into an ancient wooden door with rusted hinges and grimy metal studs. She lifted the hinge handle and parted the velvet drapery. Candles flickered in holders on the bookcases, on the reading tables. Her eyes adjusted from the darkness to see seven or so figures in hooded black robes gathered around a table, chanting in what sounded like Latin. Metallic odors wafted from a glass globe in front of them.

Good God, had she walked into a ritualistic cabal, some ancient occult rite? Or stepped into a Knights Templar ritual like those depicted in the medieval paintings she’d cataloged? Her nose itched from the candle smoke and she sneezed.

The chanting stopped, the last low echo rising in the vaulted Gothic refectory.