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.
“Who’s there?”
She swallowed hard and almost dropped her laptop bag. “Excusez-moi, the power’s out in the museum … and I thought the door here would …”
“Open from here?” said a brown-haired man. He smiled, his face illuminated by a candle, and approached her. “Alors, if the electricity’s out, we’re all stuck. Might need to spend the night here.”
Not in her lifetime. Not with him and these robed figures. They looked like grim reapers to her. All they needed were scythes.
“Time enough for us to get to know you,” he said, with a wink.
Fat chance. “Look, I work here,” she said.
“You don’t look like a construction worker,” he said, sniffing. “Interesting coat. You sure the raccoon’s dead?”
“Digital inventory archive,” she said, impatient. “But who are you?”
By now the robes had come off, and surrounding her were young men in pinstripe suits. The candlelight flickered over their faces. “Gadz’Arts,” one of them said as if assuming she’d understand.
Like Pascal Samour, Jean-Luc, and de Voule, but a few years younger. “What’s going on?”
“One of our traditions,” the brown-haired one said, as if chanting in robes were commonplace. “We’re recent Conservatoire graduates, but part of a long history. One of our customs. Many think them arcane and silly, but we’ve been here since 1789, so to speak.”
With their robes off in the flickering candlelight, they looked like any three-piece suits in the nearby Bourse bars.
He grinned. “We’re trained technical engineers, I’m afraid. This meeting, well, it’s what we Gadz’Arts have done for centuries, nothing so exotic as the Freemasons.” He turned to one of the others, now on his cell phone. “Or so I’ve heard.”
“If you’re engineers, you can figure a way out, non?”
The one with the phone nodded. “Bad news. The hail’s knocked out the grid for several streets.”
Great. “But with your technical savvy, I’d imagine you know how to jimmy the electrical door lock.”
“Why?” the brown-haired one said.
She had no intention of spending the night here with these … whatever they were.
“I’m late,” she said, wishing she’d come up with something more original. Part of her hesitated, held back from mentioning Jean-Luc.
The men exchanged glances.
“Or do I need to learn the secret handshake?”
“Follow us.”
“To where?”
“The tunnel to the street exit.” Two of them moved carved chairs aside, revealing a coved door that clicked open on a spring latch. Beyond it, narrow steps wound down to a subterranean tunnel. Vaulted and dry.
“But how do you know about this?” She didn’t like this plan. On the other hand, she wanted to get out of here.
“Part of our initiation rites,” the smiling brown-haired man said. “After you.”
The tunnel followed the refectory layout above. The men carried candles, illuminating the dirt ground, the blackened stone archways.
“We’re concluding our ritual,” one of them said.
Filing through one cavern, each of the men deposited something from their pockets in a human skull. She backed up against the wall.
“Your turn.”
“I don’t think so.” But before she could turn, he’d pushed her and slammed an old oak door she hadn’t noticed in the shadows. She heard clinking metal as the door locked.
Stupid again! “What the hell! Let me out!”
Laughter. “Part of our rites, Mademoiselle.”
“Rites? Some prank? You’re sick.”
“Non, we expected you.”
Expected her? In rising panic, she pounded on the door.
Then stopped and listened. Nothing. She turned her penlight to the human skull. She shuddered. Inside were wooden matchsticks, written all over with miniscule black script.
Mademoiselle Samoukashian’s words came back to her: the cruel medieval rites of hazing. An overcoat hung dripping on the dirt. A camel-hair coat. Like the one worn by the man darting in the street, the man who’d attacked her.
Her head ached. She had to get out of here. Her penlight battery would last only so long. She inserted her double-sided lock pick and jiggled. The door opened. Thank God centuries-old locks had simple mechanisms.
Meizi had been run down before her eyes, both of them targets. She’d discovered Morbier to be a traître, her mother likely dead. The clueless DST was on her tail for a lead to her mother, or maybe for Samour’s formula. But they weren’t the only ones.
Footsteps pounded behind her in the dirt.
She ran through the tunnel’s forks and twists, trying to visualize what lay above.
She came to a bricked-up wall. Nowhere to go.
Her fingers scrabbled inside her bag for a tool, a weapon. Only the lock pick.
“Are you lost?”
She knew that voice. And in that moment, all the puzzle pieces fit. Her lip trembled. She should have put it together before. But after the attack … Revulsion took over. Now she was trapped. But let him win? No way. She fought the shaking in her legs, her hands. She had to talk her way out of here. “Thank God, Jean-Luc. The power’s out, the Gadz’Arts said—”