‘Does he?’
‘Not so far as we know. Chrétien didn’t finish his poem — it breaks off mid-line. We assume he died writing it, but again we don’t know. Some people think he deliberately didn’t finish it. It certainly adds to the mystery.’
Ellie squeezed her eyes shut; she wondered if she was dreaming. When she opened them, Doug was still staring at her, waiting for her response.
She lowered her voice. ‘You think this poem holds the secret to finding the Holy Grail?’
It sounded insane. She was almost relieved when she saw Doug shaking his head.
‘I think the poem’s got something to do with finding the Brotherhood.’
‘And the Grail?’
Doug stretched his leg forward under the table, as if he was playing footsie. He gave the backpack under her chair a light kick.
‘I think we’ve already got it.’
The shoes were miniature works of art. On the Boulevard Saint-Michel in Paris, a wizened cobbler had personally measured the feet, cut the leather, stitched them by hand and polished them until he could see his client’s satisfied face reflected in their toe-caps. ‘Every pair is as individual as the man who wears them,’ he liked to boast. If he could have seen them now, almost buried in silt and ash, he would have wept.
Blanchard didn’t care about his shoes. If he even noticed the mud soaking through the hand-tooled leather, ruining them irreparably, he didn’t show it. He stared at the rubble of the chapel, the tail-fin of the helicopter rising out of it like a twisted cross.
Night had fallen, but there were no stars: they were hidden, or perhaps they had fallen to earth. The rim of the lake had become an unbroken ring of fire, the wastes of the dead forest still smouldering. Overhead, rotor blades thumped the air where his own helicopter hovered, unable to land. The downdraft blew smoke in his eyes.
The Talhouett security chief came up beside him. ‘There were three of them. Our guards shot one, but two others escaped.’
‘Did they chase them?’
‘Our job is to protect the site — not be the police. My men tried to put out the fire.’
Blanchard took out a cigar, then put it back in his pocket. There was too much smoke already.
‘I want this church completely excavated. Bring in cranes, dredging equipment, whatever it takes.’
‘It will be some time before they can get through, Monsieur. The fires are still blocking the access roads.’
‘Then fly them in. Or bulldoze the trees. Money is no object. I want to see every stone that survives.’
The security chief was a blunt man who’d served twenty years as a paratrooper in the French army. He’d spent half his career in Africa, overthrowing tyrants and defending democracy, or vice versa, as his government demanded. It had brought him into contact with some of the most brutal megalomaniacs in the western hemisphere. But even in their air-conditioned palaces, with machete-wielding bodyguards cocained up to the eyeballs, he hadn’t felt this afraid.
Out of an old habit he thought he’d forgotten, he saluted and ran off, talking urgently into his radio.
Blanchard stared at the devastated church. Billions of euros blown to nothing by a cowboy helicopter pilot and a flare gun.
The improbability of it nagged him. Why send Ellie here, when they knew how hard he, Blanchard, was hunting her?
And what was the Luxembourg break-in about? Again, why Ellie? It was almost as if they were trying to draw attention to the thing they wanted most to hide.
Was it a bluff? A trap gone wrong? Or –
‘She’s on her own,’ he murmured to himself. A smile spread across his face. ‘She’s looking for the same thing we are, and she doesn’t even know what it is.’
Ellie reached her foot under her seat to make sure the bag was still there.
‘You think I’ve got the greatest legend in history sitting in a cardboard box under my chair?’
Doug nodded. The sheepishness had gone: his face was alight with purpose. She could see he’d convinced himself. For herself, she wasn’t sure she even believed it existed.
But what if it does? a voice inside her demanded. What if it’s all true, right there, in your bag? The greatest legend in history — and you’ve got it.
‘So what do we do with it?’ It seemed like such a feeble question.
‘Save the world? Achieve spiritual union with the Godhead?’ Doug tried to smile, but his tension was manifest.
Ellie slumped in her seat. The magnitude of it was overwhelming.
‘I stole it,’ she murmured, almost a whisper. ‘I went down there and I stole it.’
Another realisation: dark clouds rushing in, piling up like a thunderhead. ‘Monsalvat are never going to let us get away with this.’
‘We have to get it to the Brotherhood. If only we knew how.’
Ellie pushed back her chair — carefully. ‘To start with, let’s find an Internet café. Whatever else is in the bag, we’ve still got Joost’s camera, and he died to get those photographs out. The least we can do is send them on to his friends.’
The only Internet café they could find had big windows and bright fluorescent lights, which lit it up like a TV screen. Ellie and Doug paid three euros and took a machine near the back. It didn’t take long to find the Green Knights’ website. The homepage showed a scan of a legal firm’s cease-and-desist letter, with FUCK YOU scrawled over it in red crayon.
Doug took the memory card out of the camera and slid it into a slot on the computer. A folder opened on screen.
‘There’s a ton of stuff on here — lots of video, too. If we try to upload it we’ll be here until next Thursday.’
Ellie clicked through a few more pages on the Green Knights’ website. ‘There’s a post-office box in Utrecht listed. We can send them the card in the post.’
‘What about us? That card’s got the only pictures we’re likely to get of the chapel.’
A sign above the cash register advertised discs, memory sticks and other peripherals for sale. Doug bought a replacement memory card and started copying the files across. Ellie went to a newsagent across the road and bought a jiffy envelope. When she came back, Joost’s video of the chapel was playing silently across the computer screen. There she was, scrabbling away with the nail file. She was glad Joost had stayed behind the camera. The memory of his death was too raw.
The camera swooped around and zoomed in until the mosaic filled the screen: a sharp tangle of black lines. Doug hit pause and took a screen capture. Twenty cents bought him a printout of the image. He picked it up off the printer and stared at it. Ellie watched him.
‘What are you thinking?’ A crease had appeared above the right side of his mouth, a little tic Ellie had seen so often when he was poring over some notes, or staring into space at the dinner table.
Doug looked up, caught in the act. ‘I was thinking of a woman called Annelise Stirt. She’s an expert on Chrétien and the Grail legend. When I was studying the poem for Mr Spencer, everything I read seemed to lead back to one of her books or articles.’
‘Did you contact her?’
‘I wanted to, but I’d signed Mr Spencer’s non-disclosure agreement.’ A rueful grin. ‘I don’t suppose it applies any more.’
‘Where can we find her?’
Doug tapped the computer. ‘The all-seeing eye of the Internet.’