“And they were right,” Jean-Luc said. A strong flashlight beam blinded her. Her blood ran cold. Cornered like a rat, no way out and the killer in front of her.
“You expected me, Jean-Luc?” Her hand gripped the lock pick in her bag. She slid it up her sleeve. “So you know I just found the document Samour stole from you.”
“Bien sûr,” he said, his voice soaked up by the densely packed earth. She couldn’t see him behind the flashlight beam. “We can’t have you interrupting our ritual, you know. That’s not allowed.”
“My mistake. I need to show you this, upstairs.” She tried to sound more confident than she felt with her back to the wall. “There’s more light, still some power in my laptop,” she said, trying to buy time.
“I told them I’d deal with you,” he said.
Like he dealt with Pascal? Her heels hit the wall, nowhere to go, no way to see him. Did he have a gun?
Her breath came in short spurts.
Jean-Luc had wanted to steal the formula from Pascal Samour, not the other way around. He was desperate to jump ahead in fiber optics. Why hadn’t she put it together? How could she have ignored the obvious signs? She was furious with herself.
“You don’t understand,” Jean-Luc said. “Pascal didn’t follow rules. Never had. He wouldn’t listen. I caged him up, like we’d always done. But he’d changed.”
Caged him? So for once Pascal stood up to him, refused to act the doormat. And paid.
“As his Mentu, his mentor, you tried, didn’t you?” she said.
“You found the backup he promised me, like I knew you would,” he said, his tone matter-of-fact.
“Promised you?” She had to keep talking. “But you told me he stole this.”
How much longer until he attacked her? Here, vulnerable, with the light blinding her as the car’s headlights had blinded Meizi.
“C’est vrai, but I’m the only one who ever listened to Pascal.”
“Becquerel believed in him.” Then it hit her. “But you took care of Becquerel,” Aimée said, taking a guess. “Smothered him with a pillow in the nursing home, didn’t you?”
“That shouldn’t have happened.” His bittersweet tone surprised her. “We’re trained engineers, not killers.”
“But Pascal was brilliant,” she said. “He discovered the ancient stained-glass formula and applied the concept to the principles of fiber optics.” She was perspiring in the coat.
“So simple, when you think about it. The greatest discoveries are. The rest, so unnecessary.” Jean-Luc’s voice dropped, almost sad now. “I listened to Pascal, I was the only one.”
“Wrong again. The DST listened,” she said. “He worked for them.”
“The DST? Too late to the party.” His voice hardened. “The Chinese military offered me a contract. It’s the Year of the Tiger, auspicious.”
“Chinese? Was Meizi involved?”
He snorted. “A sweatshop girl? But convenient for me. Who’d care about an illegal immigrant like her but Pascal? The bleeding-heart Communist.”
Anger filled her. The pompous ass. Meizi had been an unknowing pawn in his game. It made her sick. He’d planned it to the last detail.
“With your technical know-how, you worked the plastic wrap machine like a snap,” she said, her high heel working the dirt. “Yet you made a mistake. You were surprised when Clodo appeared. You dropped your cell phone.”
“Who?”
“Don’t tell me you forgot the homeless man you pushed onto the Métro tracks?”
“Vermin,” Jean-Luc spat. “He stank.”
“But Clodo sold your phone. Now the flics have it.”
He didn’t have to know Clodo replaced the SIM card.
Close humid air mixed with the wet fur smells from Hippolyte’s coat. She heard the patter of crumbling dirt.
“Now you’ll put down the laptop,” he said.
She crouched with the laptop bag. One hand behind it, fingers scrabbling for clumps of dirt. The dense air in this narrow tunnel and the ragged, stinking fur nauseated her.
“Closer,” he said.
Still blinded by the beam, she pushed the laptop bag forward.
“Unzip the case.”
Shaking, she took the laptop out. Prayed Saj had received the file she sent.
The flashlight beam focused on the laptop, revealing Jean-Luc’s leaning silhouette. She flung the handful of dirt in his face. Catching him off guard, she lunged and shoved him against the wall.
“Bitch!” His arm lashed out, whacking her ribs and throwing her off balance. Struggling, she shook him off, stumbled and ran, pushing herself off the wall. Her adrenalin kicking in.
Darkness except for her thin penlight beam. Perspiration, the hot fur coat, the thick air. She saw the ramp. Ran up it, pushed the door open. Back in the refectory, a few candles sputtering, the odor of melted wax.
She slipped behind the first thing she saw, a bookcase, eyed the stone steps leading to the pulpit. Her adrenalin ebbing, she grabbed her side. This pain.
“We’re playing cache-cache now? Hide-and-seek?”
She couldn’t see him in the shadows. Her mouth felt like cotton, bile rose in her stomach. Her legs wobbled.
“Don’t you understand?” Jean-Luc said. “Pascal lied. That’s how he repaid me. No gratitude after I helped him learn to weld, mold, machine-design, to calculate, to construct machines.”
Keep focused. Keep him talking. Find his inner geek. “You mean like the guilds?”
“Our heritage comes from the guilds,” he said, his voice impassioned. “Even the classic freshman problem of how to drill a hole at a ninety-degree angle in a piece of metal. An old guild secret.” A short bark of laughter echoed. “But I tried to guide him, be a parrain, a godfather to him at school.”
“So you caged him?”
Weakness sapped her. Pain knifed through her side.
“Pascal wanted to give this formula away free!” Jean-Luc shouted. “To the world! Can you imagine?”
The glass globe and a leather scientific tome the size of Miles Davis lay within reach on the table. Either one could …
Jean-Luc shoved the bookcase back and smiled. He wore glasses now. Thick lenses. For the first time, she saw his face up close, saw the violent anger contorting his eyes. His dilated pupils. Why had she ever considered him handsome, vulnerable? She’d even felt sorry for him.
“Scream as loud as you like,” he said. “No power. We shorted the power grid.”
Smart ass. She maneuvered the lock pick from her sleeve. “You brainwashed your disciples. Pitiful. You attacked me.”
His knife blade glinted in the candlelight. “Too bad things didn’t work out more smoothly. I wish I had taken care of you then.”
Pascal, Meizi, now her. She felt blood rush to her face. She tried again to stall him. “You ran over Meizi …”
He snorted. “Like she matters. Or you, for that matter. All you did was complicate the means to the end. But nothing I can’t handle.”
He rushed at her with his knife. She threw up her arms to ward off the blow. His glasses went flying.
But his knife blade pinned Hippolyte’s ragged coat sleeve to the bookcase. An odd look spread on his shadowed face. His mouth twitched, contorted. “What did … you do?” he gasped.
She twisted and turned, but she couldn’t move. Stuck.
And she realized the lock pick in her other hand had gone into his eye. All fifteen centimeters of it, up to the handle. His eye was a mashed purple globe.
“Call it luck,” she said. “Auspicious.”
Horror sticken, she shoved his body away. Jean-Luc sagged in a little pirouette, then crumpled against the bookcase, lifeless. A thin line of vitreous and blood trailed onto the stone.