Nefertiti’s gigantic silhouette stood there, shaped by night currents. Her empty eyes swarmed with the nothingness of the tomb, and when she spoke, her breath tasted like Seth’s decomposed body.
“Don’t forget me, Sixtine,” Nefertiti’s voice ordered. “Don’t forget me. Don’t forget me. Your destiny must be fulfilled. Ignore your vocation and you will remain a shadow. Ignore your vocation and you will live forever with the shadows. Fulfill your destiny and you will receive the keys of your kingdom. What you desire most in the world will be yours, here, now and for all eternity. Trust the eye I gave you.”
The eye Oudjat, the eye of the falcon god Horus, took over the darkness, up to what was hidden at the bottom of the Sixtine gorge, at the birth of her cries. Through the mists of her terror, her eyes exhorted by fever, Sixtine saw the other side of the world, an endless corridor. Another woman ran, out of breath, looking for an invisible way out; her steps disturbed the traces of fresh blood on the ground.
Her name was Florence Mornay.
5
Far from the Vatican, far from Cairo, far from Falmouth Manor and far from everything she knew, Florence Mornay ran as fast as her painful legs allowed her. She was trying to control her heart, which raced like a crazy, bewildered horse.
There had to be an explanation. There had to be a way out.
Her last memory was at dusk in the colonial house in Cairo, where she had stayed with her father. She remembered Vivant’s notebooks and sending a long letter to Jessica Pryce, whom Max called Sixtine. She remembered the vague satisfaction of having solved the incomprehensible, but Max’s abandonment mixed with regret at having betrayed her at the very moment she understood that she loved him had painted her entire recent past with the color of bitterness. Then out of nowhere, a pair of arms had grabbed her and she heard her father’s voice in the distance.
She woke up in a rather luxurious room, but in bad taste. Without a window, just a tiny opening for ventilation, mounted above an antique chest of drawers. She must have left town, because outside, in the night, everything was dark. Only a greenish and distant glow illuminated strange shapes. Her instincts told her she had to escape; she would find a way back to Cairo, if only she could get out of this sordid hotel. So she ran down an endless corridor, to an invisible exit.
Suddenly, on her right, a door. After a moment’s hesitation, she opened it. Golden wall lights lit up and revealed a narrow staircase going down in a spiral pattern. About twenty steps later, Florence sighed with relief. The emergency door was open, and she could finally breathe the open air.
Except she didn’t recognize anything.
The sky was black, but it wasn’t at night. Things hung in the darkness, strange and orange shapes, gigantic shadows as if in suspension.
Before she could understand where she was, she heard a voice on her left, from which the light emanated. She walked along the wall, to remain hidden and to find her way in the darkness. At the corner of the wall, she dared to move her face just enough to see where the voice came from.
A man in a black robe, who looked like a priest. His hands were joined and raised above his head and he seemed to be praying aloud.
Were there other people around him?
Florence focused on his features, as he seemed familiar somehow. She had seen him somewhere before, she was sure of it. She did not get any relief from it, because there was something terrible in this man’s expression, something terrifying. She was desperately trying to remember the circumstances of their encounter, when her gaze noticed a shadow right in front of him, only lower. She barely had time to put her hand in front of her mouth when the priest lowered his arms. With all his might, he pushed a knife into the chest of a naked man lying on an altar.
Florence glued her sweaty back to the corridor wall. She had fled as fast and as far as she could, her body making decisions for her as her mind paralyzed by the shock. She swallowed hard, listened to all the nuances of the silence, but could only hear her pulse drumming in her temples. The images attacked her like sharp daggers, just like the priest had stabbed the man in the chest.
She bent over to check the rest of the corridor. It led to a circular lobby with five doors.
Did she have to choose, like in fairy tales?
Was it a challenge?
Was this minimalist labyrinth part of a great cruel enigma, of which she was the pawn?
Maybe she had gone mad. For the naked man had not even reacted, or flinched. Yet, she could have sworn that when the priest carried his heart dripping with blood in his hands, he was still alive.
Maybe she was dead. If that was it, hell, with a crime behind every door, it was a bad joke, to have made it look like a report from a luxury decorating magazine.
She walked towards the five doors, her hands trembling with fear and panic. Behind her, further down the corridor, someone was approaching, which made her jump. Two voices, one male and one female. She rushed to the door in front of her, but it was locked. The other three as well. She grimaced and turned around in a hurry. The voices were getting closer. She was surprised to see the fifth door wasn’t locked and opened it.
After stepping through the doorway, she closed the door behind her as quietly as she could. She turned the key in the lock of the door and locked it with a sigh of relief. She rested her head against the wall to try to calm herself down and regulate her breathing. The salty taste of sweat stung her dry lips and she looked around her. Another room with no windows.
An icy current grew in her veins as she recognized the voice on the other side of the door. The memory was more than twenty years old but its furrow had deepened wounds that would never close again.
Her mother’s voice.
II
6
The tip of the pencil was so sharp that it broke immediately upon contact with the sheet of paper. Aziza Rust swore under her breath, flipped the page over from her yellowish notebook and took out another pencil, just as sharp.
“I’m listening,” she told Franklin.
He touched his gold earring, tapped the rim of his whiskey glass with his fingertips and took a deep breath. Smoking was banned in this bar in the Meat Packing District in New York, yet the air was thick and pungent. The men standing at the bar had been checking out their table for a while as each new beer made them less discreet. A sublime black man sitting with a white female must have bothered them, especially here, this time of the day.
Franklin was hoping they’d start jerking them around, just to see their faces when they realized they were cops in civilian clothes. Of course, he had given his badge back to the FBI a few years earlier, but they didn’t need to know that.
“Seth Pryce knew he had an incurable disease and only had a few months to live. Since he adhered to the Egyptian belief of a life after death, he wished to take his wealth to the grave – part of his fortune as well as his wife, who was an orphan. Well chosen because no one would miss her. Through De Bok, he traded all his money for the real Tutankhamen mask. He got married and took advantage of his honeymoon to cover their tracks in Mexico, orchestrated his own death, drugged his new wife. And all this was found in the pyramid of Cheops, with staging, lotus flowers, et cetera. The Seth Pryce case was therefore an assisted suicide, but since he took Jessica with him, it is an attempted premeditated murder. Then, De Bok closed the room by activating the mechanism. What did the young architect call it?”
“Gradual collapse,” Aziza said as she scribbled in her notebook.
“That’s it, gradual collapse. In the end, a block of several tons sealed the room forever. As we saw on the granite plaque, Seth and Jessica were the last on the list of a practice dating back to the eccentricities of Vivant Mornay, an English gentleman, who created a secret society organizing suicide murders nearly two hundred years ago.”
Franklin glanced down at the notebook; Aziza drew a diagram in the form of a snowflake. On one of the branches, she wrote the names Franklin mentioned; Seth P, Jessica P, Tut, Viva
nt M.. “Until then, all the elements fit together quite well. But there’s a big inconsistency, right in the middle of the scenario. The autopsy report,” he said as he straightened up.
“The bruises on Pryce’s body,” Aziza added.
“The care with which this case was organized is admirable, no detail has been spared, you agree with me. Given the condition of the body, Pryce must have been beaten up. It doesn’t make sense.”
“He was a perfectionist,” Aziza said. “Interviews with all his relatives confirm this.”
“Pryce is guilty of attempted murder of his wife, not necessarily in execution since he was dead, but with intent. That’s a fact. On the other hand, to organize his own suicide, he needs the assistance of an accomplice, and euthanasia is atrocious, whether by accident or not.”
Aziza was still scribbling in her notebook, adding more details to her diagram, which became more and more detailed.
“Seth Pryce is a member of a secret society,” she muttered to herself. “A secret society necessarily means resources, members. Hierarchy. And of course, at the very top, an individual who is the guardian of the ideology or mission that drives him.”
“A Grand Master, or something like that,” Franklin added.
“That’s right,” Aziza said, thoughtful, scribbling “secret society” in one of the branches of her diagram. “I know someone who is an expert in these types of organizations.”
She stopped for a moment, as if a thought had just occurred to her. But she did not share it.
“Keep going, Hunter.”
Franklin twisted his neck to try to read on the young woman’s notebook.
“What is that?”
“It’s a fractal,” she replied, without looking up from her drawing. “The pattern is the same regardless of the scale.”
Aziza did not give any other explanation. Franklin suspected that this was her personal method of solving murders, and that it was necessarily intellectual, mathematical and infallible. She was trusting her instincts.
“Let’s start again. To organize this suicide and murder, Pryce needed an accomplice. It’s De Bok. And De Bok, we now know he is the greatest counterfeiter among counterfeiters, Oxan Aslanian. It is necessarily linked to the hierarchy of the secret society, and perhaps even at the top,” Aziza said, without looking up from her notes, as if she only needed confirmation of her own analysis.
“The resources he seems to have… And the guy’s name is everywhere. And it seems to be able to be in several places at the same time. We find his traces in the Nefertiti case, the pyramid, the police station, the Sculptor, Mexico – ”
“The murder of El-Shamy,” Aziza added.
“El-Shamy?” Franklin asked.
“Yes, El-Shamy, I am convinced of that. Andrew Sheets told anyone who would listen he met Oxan Aslanian in Paris, that the guy drugged him and framed him for the murder. That is plausible. Who believes in Sheets’s guilt?”
“Let’s not forget that Sheets had a heavy file,” Franklin added. “Several charges of statutory rape and sexual harassment, amongst others.”
Franklin nodded and agreed, “You’re right. No reason to kill El-Shamy. Sheets was the perfect pigeon.”
“Let’s focus on De Bok,” Aziza suggested. “And Seth Pryce’s wild euthanasia.”
“Question, Agent Rust, if a man wishes to be euthanized, but whoever he chooses to do so must butcher him to death. Euthanasia or murder?”
“Euthanasia comes from ancient Greek which means sweet death. So here, the term is problematic. From a strictly criminal point of view, this depends on the laws of the territory where death occurs, of course. In most countries, the practice is not recognized, so assisted suicide is treated as an assassination. But even in the most liberal countries on the issue, the suffering visibly inflicted, since it was not necessary, further reinforces the idea of intentional homicide, even though the victim wanted it.”
Franklin smiles with admiration in front of Aziza.
“You never disappoint me. So there are two guilty parties to this homicide. The victim herself, Seth Pryce, and perhaps Oxan Aslanian. He too is out of harm’s way.”
Franklin sat on the back of his chair, stretched his legs. On the television screen above the bar, a football game was coming to an end. A group of young people in suits and ties, who could smell Wall Street in their faces, had just settled in.
“I still have a problem with Oxan Aslanian,” Aziza said, solemnly. “And with Nefertiti.”
“Nefertiti,” Franklin said, shaking his head. “As if the case wasn’t complicated enough.”
“He’s a genius forger, a master, no doubt about it. He is responsible for the greatest fraud of the century with this affair. And yet, he puts a contemporary body in the sarcophagus. You heard the curator, it’s a gigantic mistake that brings down the whole building.”
“For the average person, Egyptian mummies do not run the streets, but for Oxan Aslanian, he had the resources to find a body that could have deceived everyone. It’s like he wanted to be caught.”
“And somehow he was caught,” Aziza added. “But there’s something wrong with his death. He was desperate, on the run, hastily preparing his fake papers. That doesn’t fit with the master forger’s idea. The master assassin.”
“Nice formula, I’ll take it out,” Franklin said. “Any leads on who killed him, by the way?”
“Yes, the person is in jail,” Aziza replied. “A local thug. Mexican police say they knew from the beginning that the souvenir shop belonged to a gang, the guy would have fired because De Bok was running away without paying.”
She scribbled a few black lines on the margins of her notebook. “If he was so good, why didn’t he make the fake papers himself? I have the impression that there was someone else pulling Oxlan Aslanian’s strings.”
“But there is one thing we must not forget,” he says. “While we are sipping our beer, somewhere there is a secret society which buries women alive. Our duty is to find the others. The victims and the killers. Which brings me to – ”
“To the woman who was found in the sarcophagus.”
“Elizabeth von Wär. Daughter of Helmut von Wär. The link cannot be a coincidence.”
“No. But she’s different from the other victims.”
“What do you mean?”
“Pretty girls are only concubines in death, and our mummified lady is alone, she does not accompany anyone. On the other hand, it represents Nefertiti, the greatest queen of Egypt after Cleopatra. You heard Cheryl, there’s a lot of work on this mummy, hours and hours of work on the body. Which makes me think that she was either the love of his life, or her greatest enemy.”
“Maybe,” Franklin pouted. “One last thing: Florence Mornay-Devereux. The descendant of the founder of the secret society at the right time, in the right place, to save Jessica Pryce? I don’t believe in coincidence either.”
“I’ll take care of the secret society and the Mornay people,” Aziza said. “You take care of Nefertiti and the girl from the sarcophagus. What about Jessica Pryce?”
“Sixtine Desroches,” Franklin corrected and Aziza raised an apprehensive eyebrow at him. “Desroches is her maiden name,” he rectified. “And Sixtine, well, I guess she wanted to put her old life behind her by changing her first name.”
“Whatever her name is, maybe she can help us,” Aziza said and Franklin watched her trace the letters of Sixtine’s name. “The key to all the secrets, she has it, I’m sure. One day, the whole building will fall, and it will be thanks to her.”
7
It was the moment when hesitation wasn’t on the cards.
Livia was there, less than six feet away from Max, in her red bikini. He had traveled seven thousand miles for her, and waited three days to find her alone. Now she was at his mercy.
But Max was unable to articulate anything.
He had left on a whim, after hearing Livia’s name and that of her husband, Alfred-Jean de Stehl, at the airport
. The same names as on the granite plate found in the pyramid. She was beautiful, she was young, and she was more than likely and orphan. Her husband was almost sixty years older than she was, and was so rich that he should have traveled by private plane. But the vicissitudes of the Egyptian revolution had forced him to take a charter flight to Vietnam. This unexpected event had put them on Max’s path.
Max had felt so powerless after the meeting with Sixtine that he had spent half of his savings to follow the couple to this luxurious hotel in the middle of Asia.
His decision was made immediately: he was going to save her.
Max had done some research on the internet and interviewed the hotel concierge to try to guess their final destination. De Stehl must have wanted to be buried in the pyramids, like Seth Pryce, but the chaos in Giza must have forced them to change their funeral plans.
But why Vietnam?
The country had no shortage of imperial tombs, but was closer to Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi than to Dong Hoi, the city where they were located. Dong Hoi was deeply ordinary. There was indeed a church in ruins, but it was seriously lacking in mysticism. Only bullet holes from the Vietnam War were left for posterity.
Seth Pryce had wanted to appropriate the majesty of the pyramid of Cheops, Mornay the posterity of Ancient Greece. Alfred-Jean de Stehl was not going to be satisfied with a country church. He needed something amazing.
For example, the imperial city of Hue, a three-hour drive from Dong Hoi.
Hue, located on the bank of the Perfume River and with direct access to the sea, had been the capital of Vietnam at the time of the Nguyen dynasty. It was also a spiritual and religious center, just like the pyramids, Max had thought. But more than its history, it was the associated symbols that caught his attention. The hills around Hue were called “blue dragon” and “white tiger”, and legends wanted them to protect the imperial city from evil spirits. The monuments themselves had been aligned in accordance with a complex cosmology.
Sixtine- The Complete Trilogy Box Set Page 50