Could she trust those stories that were popping into her head? They were absurd.
Why would Thaddeus want to impose himself between a husband and wife on their honeymoon? Why did the two best friends seem to hate each other so much? And why does this troubled exchange between Thaddeus and herself feel so awkward, as if she had hidden something from her husband?
She had to walk through the boarding lounge without even noticing it, to find herself in the empty restrooms. She splashed water on her face, her complexion pale, dark circles under her green eyes.
She could live without knowing what others had done to her, but she couldn’t live without knowing what she was guilty of.
She stared at her reflection in the mirror, watching the droplets of water run down her face.
Oxan Aslanian had given her three days.
Han immediately answered when she called him. She intimated her orders to him, he promised to do it as soon as possible.
Suddenly screams and yells burst out of the boarding area. Orders were being barked, echoing across the lounge through to the restrooms. Yelps, and rushed steps followed.
Without thinking, Sixtine rushed out of the restroom and easily found the source of the trouble. People knelt beside a body while a hostess rushed to the microphone to ask if there was a doctor in the room, others shouted in their walkie-talkies.
Sixtine stepped forward. The intuition beating in her temples was so strong, she already knew who was lying there.
“It’s too late,” were the words she heard but she already knew that as well.
It was the grumpy man who had appeared to her as if wrapped in a gray fog.
He was dead.
The vibration of her phone startled her. The pilot was ready.
She was going to Mexico City.
11
“See you later,” Max said with a smile.
Naya climbed out of the car without a word, with the camera hidden under her veil. A U-GPS, which was a device which allowed someone to benefit from GPS technology underground, was in her small imitation leather bag. A few days earlier, Max was almost buried alive in a collapsed tunnel, a secret passage to the pyramid was an impossibility and Naya’s promises smelled like a trap. Naturally, and justifiably so, Max had taken his precautions. He would follow in the young woman’s footsteps via video.
But he couldn’t stop the bad feeling which twisted his stomach into knots
The call to prayer echoed in the evening air, and Max turned on the little monitor on his lap. He waited, cradled by the imam’s monotonous song in the loudspeakers. When the image appeared, he recognized the house of the man who had sold him the antiques.
“Damn…” he muttered as he pressed a few buttons without success. The sound didn’t work. He clenched his jaw. It was a bad start. And what was taking Naya so long?
Suddenly, he saw her coming down. Five steps. Not deep enough for a tunnel. The camera discovered an ordinary cellar, perfectly tidy. He squinted, approached the monitor. Had he recognized a lotus flower on one of the boxes? Before he could decipher the inscriptions, Naya headed for a large bread oven. The camera seemed to fall backwards and was now staring at the dark ceiling.
The beep of his mobile phone made him jump slightly, a voice message. He straightened up when he heard Sixtine’s flickering voice.
“Max, it’s Sixtine. We have to stop. Everything, I mean it. You’re putting your life in danger. Get out of Cairo right away. Please, listen to me.”
The determined voice, with its skin-deep intensity and hastily delivered laconic words, suddenly gave a hyper-real dimension to all threats. She was worried about him! She had thought of him!
What did this mean for Naya? Was she the bait or the victim? Max was instinctively instructed to stop her before she ventured any further. His mouth had dried up, his hands had become clammy. Mechanically, he put his hand on the car’s ignition key, but his eyes returned to the screen again. He could still see the bread oven, but the place seemed different to him. He had to get closer to be sure of what he was seeing.
Naya was entering the oven.
He then discovered a tunnel wide enough to accommodate one or even two people on all fours. After a few meters that looked like the Spidey tunnel – dark, dirty, suffocating – the access led to a space wide enough for Naya to stand up in.
At first, the beam of his lamp revealed nothing Max could identify, but he soon realized exactly what it was, and he covered his mouth with his hand.
He saw an antechamber decorated in the most luxurious European classical style, but covered in dust. In the middle of the room stood a sofa with three medallions. Portraits adorned the wall. Maybe 18th century?
Max remembered a television report on the Mafia barons’ bunkers in Italy. Their underground hiding places looked like palaces of bad taste, cluttered with cheap gilding, ostentatious trinkets and marble effects. But here, in this improbable image that kept moving, Max detected an inimitable patina which suggested authenticity. How many years had this strange lair existed?
Naya opened a door painted in trompe-l’oeil which opened onto another staircase. Another tunnel extended in front of her. Finally, Max discovered the passage he had imagined, which was high enough for Naya to walk upright, supported by stone architecture, and blank walls. It looked like the corridor of the Queen’s room, only higher and wider. In short, a gallery on a man’s scale, but with the scent of eternity.
Max was sweating. Naya was right. Her life was in danger as was his own, but he could do nothing more. Even if he had had a gun to his head, he couldn’t resist what was happening on the screen. Before his eyes, Naya was progressing towards the pyramid.
The U-GPS indicated she was halfway between her house and the pyramid of Cheops.
The walls slanted inwards, narrowing the tunnel. The light beam which grazed the walls revealed Egyptian frescoes. These mystical characters seemed to possess under Naya’s lamp a surreal vitality, their gaze endowed with a languor that he had never noticed on the museum pieces. Especially goddesses like Bastet, the one with the cat’s head, who seemed, even in profile, to invite her to discover the mysteries she was protecting.
Max was hypnotized.
Suddenly, an impact shook the car. In a dazzling gesture, Max covered the monitor with his bag. A teenager appears by the window, a soccer ball under his arm. He smiled at Max and raised his hand as if to apologize, then he ran back to the place where his friends played. Max swallowed hard and slowly took the bag off the screen. Naya had started walking again, the tunnel decorated with frescoes seemed to go on forever. Max, with a tight throat, looked at his watch. Naya had turned on the camera thirty minutes earlier. Only a few minutes left on the battery. Had it passed the place where the Spidey tunnel could have opened?
On the monitor, a staircase climbed in a narrow and steep passage. Naya was now entering the great pyramid of Cheops.
At the top of the stairs, the camera came to a rest. The lens set a horizontal corridor extending infinitely in front of her. Max held his breath as Naya resumed her walk. The battery icon had started flashing. A panel in the wall shifted – another corridor perhaps?
No, it was a room overlooking it.
Like room X.
Same dimensions, same blank walls, same emptiness. A glance at the U-GPS data confirmed Naya was parallel to the famous horizontal corridor of Cheops – the room he was certain was between these two corridors, as if in a mirror effect. One side was known, illuminated, noisy of visitors. The other was silent and dark as a grave. How many souls knew of its existence?
Naya still moved forward, into a new room. Then another one.
On the ground opposite each of them, t a slab was missing: a small step a few inches before opening and then a few inches up again to continue in the corridor.
Four bedrooms. Four hollows in the ground.
Suddenly Naya came to a stop in front of a wall. Against the wall was a small mound of sand. Where could this sa
nd come from? Max clenched his jaw when he saw the battery icon still blinking. All these strange elements were part of a whole, of a logic that just needed to be understood, Max felt it. The solution was within reach, he could almost taste it.
“Go Naya, go,” he whispered.
At that moment, the camera began to spin in all directions. Then it stopped suddenly. It had hit the ground, and pointed to the ceiling.
Max tilted his head to better see the image: at the corner of the wall, opposite the opening of the last chamber, there was a stone lintel that covered about eight inches of the wall. In the middle of the ceiling was a space no bigger than a hand. Shadows scrolled in front of the lamp beam, but Max didn’t pay attention. He was trying to guess what was in the hollow of the ceiling. The shadow moved, and he discovered a metal ring. The ceiling had no joints and seemed to have been built with a single block.
Then it was complete darkness.
Max hastily grabbed a notebook in his bag, and feverishly sketched what he had just seen. Where was the entrance to Room X? Where did this limestone block come from? Did the ring on the corridor ceiling operate a system of doors, harrows? Where were they? Where were they? He covered the pages with sketches, sections, plans, possibilities.
Meanwhile, the screen remained black.
When he put the notebook back, he chewed the tip of his pencil. The solution was always out of his hands. And Naya hadn’t come back.
Max waited, his concern grew as the minutes passed. Half an hour. One hour. The scenarios that played out in his head were becoming more and more gloomy. Finally, he received a message from Naya’s cell phone.
She told him to meet her the next day in a park near the banks of the Nile, and Max’s body suddenly relaxed. He had only pierced Cheops’s secret a little when he discovered an improbable passage. And at the heart of this immense success was the certainty that this tunnel was a shortcut to Sixtine.
He had violated his orders to stop, and he was right.
Now it was absolutely necessary to talk to her.
He dialed her number.
Disconnected, of course.
He sent an email, praying that she would receive it.
He stared at the dust, his head full of complicated equations and future threats.
And Florence, where was she?
12
With dark circles under her eyes and her pink hair combed badly, Florence quickly kissed her father on the cheek.
“What are you doing here at this hour?” Charles Mornay gasped.
“Is that how you welcome your daughter who came to surprise her beloved daddy?”
Her father had barely closed the door when she was already running down the hallway with great strides. To catch her, Charles trotted while tying his dressing gown.
“The father in question has no illusions, but let us be naive for a few moments and rejoice in this unexpected visit.”
His sentence had already been lost in the wake of Florence, whose heavy steps echoed through the stone corridor. Charles tried to follow her, growling, “Darling, you wake me up at one in the morning, the least you can do is tell me – ”
“Liar,” she muttered, “I saw you, your light was on. I’m sure you were reading while eating candy.”
“It was strawberries, I’m on a diet.”
Florence narrowed her eyes apprehensively and pointed to his face. “You have whipped cream on your chin.”
“Well,” he muttered, wiping his chin with the sleeve of his dressing gown, “are you going to tell me what you’re doing here in the middle of the night?”
Florence walked even faster when she arrived in the large living room. She grabbed the ladder which rested against the high bookshelf and placed it against the imposing carved mantel, on which was enthroned the mummified shrew bought from Yohannes De Bok in Cairo. She climbed the bars until she came face to face with Vivant Mornay, whose gigantic portrait dated 1811 overlooked the entire living room.
“Florence, for heaven’s sake!”
“This portrait has been retouched, hasn’t it? Over the last twenty years?”
“Don’t say anything stupid. You think if I had, I would have taken off those absurd skunks. Are you going to tell me – ” Florence placed her hands on hips, sighed and finally came down from her perch. “It’s not here,” she announced. “I was sure, though. I’m lost. I’m so lost.”
Charles’s eyes wandered again around the chimney, then he surrendered. Florence slumped down on one of the chairs and found the courage to explain to him the incongruous sequence of events which had led her back to the family home.
Eleven hours earlier, in Paris
When a knock sounded on the door of her hotel room, Florence was immersed in complicated thoughts. She had just hung up the phone after her conversation with Max. The accidental encounter with Jessica Pryce had troubled her, and the discovery that Seth Pryce had only a few months left to live before his murder made no sense.
She opened the door without thinking.
Standing in front of her, looking at her with whiting eyes, stood Andrew Sheets, the hated colleague.
“What are you doing here?” she muttered in irritation, as she immediately knew the encounter would be unpleasant, as he was drunk.
“I got you, Mornay. You’re done.”
“The bender you’re holding, Andy, has nothing to do with me.”
He gave her a crooked smile, but his hand grabbed the door. Fortunately for Florence, he slipped and fell forward, missing Florence. He took a few shaky steps, slumped on the bed, and giggled madly. He rolled over to let himself slide onto the carpet, where he sat against the bed to catch his breath.
His glasses were crooked on his puffy face as he sniggered. “You’re overdone.”
“Yes, it’s always a pleasure to talk to you, Andrew, but I’m going to miss my flight. Should I let you lock up behind me? And please, if you decide to throw up on the carpet, you tell them it’s you. You’re nice, right? Bye.”
“Where are you going? Home to Daddy? Because I know a lot about the little Mornay clan.”
Florence, for whom the subject of the family was very sensitive, turned around. “Clearly, you’ve read too much Horse & Hound. What does my father say in it?”
“What’s your grandfather’s name again?” Andrew asked loudly as he took off his glasses and threw them towards the curtain.
Florence thought of Jack and Peregrine, her two grandfathers who had died and been buried as they had lived, without too much noise, and it made her wonder what this idiot wanted with them.
“Vivant1!” Andrew announced. “Ah, Vivant, that’s a funny name for a dead man. Vivant!”
“There are a lot of generations between Grandpa and Vivant, but go ahead, spit it out. And if you could give me the headlines instead of the whole speech, I’d appreciate it, I’m in a hurry.”
Andrew was always laughing at his own jokes and never finished them.
“Imagine the epitaph, here lies Vivant, rest in peace!”
Florence, exasperated, headed for the exit. In a surprisingly sharp movement, Andrew stood up to slam the door in front of her, and turned the lock. When she tried to push him away, he leaned against the door with his whole large body. He stared at her with his red eyes, which were shaken by the alcohol and smiled as he approached her face. Florence felt his bitter breath on her face and cringed.
“Vivant Mornay,” he breathed. “They’re your family, right? I wouldn’t be surprised if we thought you were the one who planned the whole thing, the discovery and everything. You knew all along.”
“Who told you that nonsense? Let me out,” she said, trying to push him away from the door.
“I have my sources,” he laughed and put his arms around her. “Tell me what you know.”
“Get off me or I’ll scream!”
“That’s right, scream. And then you’ll tell the cops why your family’s guns are tattooed on the bodies of the dead?”
“
I saw the tattoo,” Florence said, who had managed to free an arm and was looking around for a way out. “It’s not my family’s arsenal, it doesn’t even look like it. And Mornay, he was in Greece, not Egypt, and – ”
“Then you must have other weapons,” he interrupted with a snarl. “You’re the one who found the Pryces, do you think that’s a coincidence? Go ahead, Mornay, share some of those secrets you keep hidden so well. And while you’re at it, maybe you can explain to me what Nefertiti has to do with it, it wasn’t very clear.”
Florence noticed the bottle of wine on the desk next to the door, grabbed it with force and swung it against Andrew’s head. The bottle didn’t break, but the journalist collapsed, lying unconscious on the carpet.
Florence dropped the bottle, which hit one end of the bathroom tile and cracked, pouring the wine onto the carpet. With her heart beating in her throat, Florence grabbed her suitcase and rushed out of the room, running through the corridors. When she finally found herself in the elevator, she took a deep breath, tried to calm herself, and glanced in the mirror. Her hands shook as she reached up to rake her fingers through her hair.
She adjusted her sweater, checked all her clothes. Everything was in its place.
“It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay,” she whispered to herself in the mirror, with a dry mouth. “You’re Florence Mornay-Devereux, for God’s sake. You’re a badass.”
Having ancestors with colorful and courageous biographies had always made her want to keep fighting. She was proud of her name – no matter what Andrew Sheets said.
She closed her eyes and recalled the large portrait of Vivant Mornay in the living room, with a conquering and erudite look enthroned above the imposing sculpted fireplace on which she had placed De Bok’s shrew.
It was at that moment she remembered something. Something monumental, and it left her breathless.
The cross in the portrait was the same cross tattooed on Jessica Pryce’s skin.
Sixtine- The Complete Trilogy Box Set Page 35