“A map?” Why had Pascal made this so difficult?
Gargoyle-like stone carvings stared down at her, their disembodied faces like masks in the stonework. She rubbed the goosebumps on her arms.
“Long story,” he said. “The map leads through the medieval sewers.”
“They didn’t have sewers then, René.”
“Zut, I know. Now it’s the sewer, going right to rue Charlot, rue Meslay, and along rue Béranger, where he lived.”
“No sewers for me.”
Or army of rodents wintering underground. She’d faced enough of those already.
“There’s more,” René said. “There is one remaining Templar tower Napolean forgot to destroy. The church’s stained-glass window lies in a direct line from the south end of its old wall.
The wind rattled the scaffolding bars lining the nave. Her mind went back to her conversation with Jean-Luc at the piano bar: Samour’s message to Jean-Luc mentioning an atelier. Another piece fitting in Samour’s damned puzzle.
“Of course, that’s it,” she said. “His work studio, René. Where is it?”
“73 rue Charlot. Bring his keys.”
He clicked off before she could ask him if he’d reached Meizi.
All of a sudden there was a high-pitched whine from a distant fuse box. Then the building plunged into darkness. A power outage.
She froze, rigid with fear. She was wrapped in darkness, alone, just as she’d been last night. She recalled the sensation of those huge hands around her neck, the plastic bag over her face, straining to breathe. Had he come back to finish the job? Move, she had to move. Quickly she closed the programs on her laptop, not wanting to linger under the groaning scaffolding lacing the nave. It seemed as if it could topple any minute in this blackness.
Or did she imagine it?
She shuddered. The only light came from the stained-glass window in the chapel. Beautiful and unnerving.
“Monsieur Vardet?” she called out to the security guard. Her voice echoed in the nave. She didn’t like this.
The soft flutter of snow settled like a sigh on the protective plastic sheeting, and again she saw Pascal’s eyes under the snow-dusted plastic. “Sécurité?” Where was Vardet?
“Par ici, Mademoiselle, no cause for alarm,” Vardet’s reassuring voice answered. “You’ll need to exit through the refectory. Let me show you out.”
Thank God.
TEN MINUTES LATER, Aimée stood in the porte cochère of 73 rue Charlot under a clicking timed light. The snow lay upon upturned cobblestones like confectioner’s sugar in the deep courtyard.
“This leads to the tower in the remaining bit of Templar wall, Aimée.” René pointed to the mildewed wooden door. “Try Samour’s keys.”
She felt in her bag for the keys she’d taken from under the geraniums, inserted the largest, old-fashioned one, like the key her grandmother used to the cellar on her farm. She heard a tumble as the well-oiled lock turned.
Winding stone steps, deep and narrow. No handrails but uneven walls to feel their way upward. Like entering the Dark Ages.
On the first landing stood a hinged wooden door with a beaten metal clasp. Original, no doubt. She inserted the key again, turned it, and pushed the door open to a mustiness laced with chocolate.
René hit a wall light switch, flooding the circular tower room with light. Aimée saw a blackboard covered with formulas in blue chalk, and an open laptop with a blinking green light on a long trestle table. Next to it, a distilling apparatus. Test tubes, glass flacons, and copper wires. An alchemist’s lab down to the medieval walls. Then she saw what looked like a small, industrial, high-temperature stainless-steel oven.
She gasped.
“That’s it, René.” She ran forward, excited. “The drawing in the encryption.”
She sniffed the contents of the cellophane bag by the laptop. Chocolate. Popped one in her mouth. “Dark-chocolate espresso beans. Pascal had good taste.”
“Thinking what I’m thinking, Aimée?” René asked.
“That Samour distilled his own absinthe? Not quite.”
But René had opened up the screen on Samour’s laptop.
“Look, it’s the same alchemical formula Saj deciphered. Why did he hide this, yet …”
“More than why, René, from whom,” she said. “Trawl around and see if you find more.”
She stared at the formulas in intricate blue chalk. Meaningless to her. A funnel of white sand, technical magazines, a fiber optics newsletter on an Aeron chair. An incongruous collection until de Voule’s words came back to her.
“He told his classmate no one has invented anything new since the fourteenth century. What if he tried to prove that here?”
René rolled his eyes. “By making stained glass in an ancient alembic? Melting the contents in that machine?”
She remembered the preliminary autopsy report. “He had burn marks on his hands,” she said. “It could have come from this heater. The guilds worked with little more than sand, potash, and fire.”
René put his camera in her hands. “Check out the real masterpiece, from the church. The camera captures little of the star’s clarity. But you get the idea.”
The stained-glass window images conveyed bright, streaming light. “Such radiance. Amazing.”
Perplexed, she picked up the magazines. “It’s all here, but we don’t understand.”
“Think where we are.” René’s finger traced the diagram. “Inside the fortified walls of an old Templar enclosure.”
“Et alors, I took that history class, too, René.” She ran her fingers over the smooth glass alembic. “But it proves what?”
“We’re in the last remaining Knights Templar tower.” René grinned. “It’s part of the prison where Marie Antoinette and her children were kept.”
“Not all that Holy Grail business.”
René snorted. “Think of the Templars as investors in startups,” he said. “They had more money than kings, or the Pope.”
“So you took Medieval Studies 101 at the Sorbonne?”
“Fundamentals of Economics, second semester.” René went on, “So the Templars were venture capitalists, this tower was their Silicon Valley. Instead of developing microprocessors, the Templars built cathedrals, castles, a whole series of industries. They employed the guilds for research and development in architecture, weapons, communication.”
Pascal would have appreciated René’s enthusiasm for his project. René got to work on the laptop. Pulled his goatee. “No wonder there’s been no more activity, his laptop’s frozen.”
“Try mine. See if you can unfreeze and network.”
René stood engrossed at the trestle table, comparing Aimée’s backed-up work from the Musée. She checked the magazines, the newsletter. Nothing jumped out at her. She tried to make sense of this, put things together.
Finally, René broke the silence. “Samour’s search prints show all over the Musée files you digitized today, Aimée.”
So Samour had been looking. “That’s what I’ll tell the DST.”
“Make sure that’s all you tell them. We found this tower on our own.” René plugged a cable from Aimée’s laptop to Samour’s. Hit several keys. “I’m rebooting his laptop and will network it to ours.” He tugged his goatee again. “Why didn’t Mademoiselle Samoukashian tell you about this tower?”
“Pascal protected her,” she said. “Considering his diagrams and secrecy, it’s like he wanted to discover something here.”
“Or prove it before he showed anyone,” René said.
She picked up the newsletter, thumbed through it until an article caught her attention. “Aren’t fiber optics made of glass?”
René looked up, nodding. His eyes met hers and widened.