The Book of Secrets

by Tom Harper

  ‘The smoke from the gunshots set off the fire alarm,’ said Atheldene. ‘It’s on a hair trigger – as you can imagine, given the contents of that vault.’

  ‘Why didn’t the sprinklers come on?’

  ‘Don’t have them. Spraying water all over those books would be almost as bad as burning them. They seal the storage room, then suck out all the air.’ He rapped his fist on the freeze-drying machine. ‘Much like an overblown version of this.’

  Nick rubbed his head. ‘Lucky I got out when I did.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘What happened to Haltung?’

  ‘They killed him,’ said Emily. Her face was drained. ‘Those men, whoever they were. They shot him.’

  On the far side of the shutter, the roar of air died away. The alarm bell had gone off – or perhaps, Nick thought, sound couldn’t travel in a vacuum.

  ‘What do we do now?’

  Atheldene nodded to the steel shutters. ‘Nothing. The shutters can only be released from upstairs. Even if we could open them, it would be a bad idea. It’s like outer space on the other side.’

  ‘Then how do we get out?’ Nick looked around. There were no doors except the one to the main vault.

  ‘We’ll have to wait for the police to arrive. It shouldn’t be long.’

  That was no comfort to Nick. He might be in Belgium, but the moment the cops ran his name through a computer they’d surely find out everything about him. He stared wildly around the room. There had to be an air vent, an escape hatch, a service tunnel. Anything. All he saw was a concrete prison. The only hint of a break was behind the machine, where a two-foot pipe led into the wall.

  Nick examined it. ‘Almost a perfect vacuum’, Haltung had said. So the air had to go somewhere. There was a steel coupling where the pipe joined the wall, studded with four wing nuts. Nick ran over and twisted one of them. It didn’t budge.

  He searched for something to hit it with and found a fire axe in a recess in the wall. He grabbed it, turned it round and hammered the nut with the flat end of the axe head. It shuddered, then shifted a few degrees. He kept going, bashing desperately until he had turned it a couple of rotations. The bolt itself must have been an inch thick, but now it was loose enough to be turned by hand.

  ‘Over here,’ he called to Emily. He pointed to the bolt. ‘See if you can get that out.’

  She understood at once. Three more to go. Nick looked back at the shutters and wondered what was going on behind them. Had the police arrived? Had the men in balaclavas been asphyxiated, or had they escaped like he had before the vault was sealed?

  The fourth bolt was the hardest of all. By the time he had it unlocked, Emily had removed the other three. He knelt beside her, their hands fumbling over each other like children with a Christmas present. Despite the chill air, Nick was sweating.

  The bolt came free. Nick leapt back, expecting the pipe to drop like a stone. It didn’t move.

  On the other side of the room, something banged against the shutters. In fury and frustration, Nick lifted his leg and slammed his foot against the pipe. It burst free of the coupling with a pop and fell to the ground, just missing his toes. A dark hole yawned in the wall. When he put his hand up to it, he felt a current of cold air.

  ‘Better than nothing,’ he muttered uncertainly. He looked back at the machine. ‘Is the book done?’

  Atheldene looked at the dials. ‘It’ll be at least another hour until it comes up to room temperature.’

  ‘We don’t have time.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Atheldene grabbed his arm. ‘That book’s priceless. You can’t yank it out halfway through the process.’

  Nick shook him off and ran around to the control panel. He scanned the buttons until he found a large red knob labeled NOTAUSSCHALTUNG. Emergency shutdown. He slammed his palm against it. The whirring noise inside the machine died away. The lock clicked. He opened the door and slid out the book. It was cold to the touch, but not hard.

  I don’t even know why I’m taking it, he thought to himself. But someone thought it was worth killing for.

  ‘It doesn’t belong to you,’ Atheldene protested. ‘Just wait for the police.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  Nick put the book in his backpack with the card and handed it to Emily. Then he pushed himself head first into the hole. He was in a narrow concrete tunnel, barely wide enough to fit his shoulders. It went straight back for a few yards, then stopped in a sheer wall.

  ‘Air’s still got to go somewhere.’

  He flapped a hand above his head and felt emptiness. He squirmed around until he lay on his back and looked up. A few feet overhead, he saw a lattice of bars silhouetted against the city glow in the sky. He tucked up his knees and pushed off, wriggling up the shaft until he could touch the grille. It lifted free without resistance. He slid it back, hauled himself through the opening and flopped onto frozen grass.

  He’d come out on the side of the building. While Emily pulled herself out after him, Nick got up and edged his way around to the front. A body lay sprawled on the asphalt beside the guard hut, another by the steps going up to the front door. A black Lexus 4x4 with Italian plates was parked diagonally across the car park, blocking in Atheldene’s Jaguar.

  Sirens wailed in the frozen night – distant, but racing ever closer. How was he going to get out of there? There were no other vehicles in the car park and no signs of life at any of the adjacent units. Deep in the heart of the sprawling industrial estate, they wouldn’t get far on foot.

  And that was when he heard the music.

  At first he thought it was a hallucination, his ears still ringing from the noise in the basement. But it didn’t go away, or start repeating itself the way snatches of songs usually did. He listened. It was Bob Marley, just about the most incongruous thing he could have imagined. It seemed to be coming from the Lexus.

  One track ended and another began. Nick looked closer and saw there was exhaust coming from the Lexus’ tailpipe, clouding the night. Was there someone inside? He crept closer, trying to see beyond the headrest. A floodlight on the wall beamed through the windscreen: if there had been anyone inside, it would have made a perfect silhouette. He couldn’t see anyone. And the engine was running.

  He slid alongside it, keeping below the windows, and reached for the handle of the driver’s door. With a deep breath, he yanked it open.

  Hot air spilled out of the warm interior. The car was empty. Nick jumped into the driver’s seat and threw the gear lever into reverse. The accelerator was more sensitive than he was used to: the car jolted backwards with a squeal of tyres. In the rear-view mirror, he saw Emily running across the grass from the open air shaft carrying his bag. Then, suddenly, she seemed to trip. She pitched forward on her hands and knees and disappeared from view.

  Nick looked around again. The front door to the warehouse had burst open; another man in a balaclava was standing on the steps with a gun in his hand. He looked around wildly; the sirens were getting louder.

  Emily pulled open a back door and hurled herself onto the seat. The moment Nick saw she was in the car, he gunned the engine. In his panic and unfamiliarity, he almost rammed into a lamp post; swung away, only to veer towards the guard hut. His erratic driving probably saved him. The passenger window exploded as the gunman on the steps finally realised what was happening; a shower of glass sprayed through the car, slicing Nick’s arms and face, but the bullet went wide. Nick barely noticed. He was through the gates. He swung the car onto the access road and hit the gas.

  XLIV

  Strassburg

  ‘I feel honour bound to tell you, madam, that I am no longer as secure a prospect as I was. I have made certain investments which have not returned what I hoped. These have incurred debts which will divert most, if not all, of my income. Under the circumstances, I would not blame you if you preferred to break off my suit of marriage for your daughter.’

  Ellewibel’s face never changed as she listened to my rehearsed words.r />
  ‘That is very good of you, Herr Gensfleisch. Such honesty does you credit. Indeed, it only confirms the good opinion I have formed of your character. For that reason alone I would never stand in the way of this match. My late husband was a merchant: I know how fortunes may rise and fall. It is faith and character that make a man what he is. In those I know my daughter will not be disappointed.’

  I bowed deeply, like a man with a knife shoved in his belly. ‘Thank you.’

  *

  I stood at the table in the barn of my house in St Argobast and looked at the wreckage of my endeavours. Kaspar was in Strassburg painting an altar panel; I was alone with my failures. The copper sheet that I had punch-stamped and three of the indulgences that came off it; a few bottles of ink; twenty-six steel rods tipped with the letters of the alphabet; a stack of unused paper weighted down with a stone. I felt an echo of that last morning in Paris. I had sealed all my hopes and labours into that crucible, heated it in the fire seven times. Yet when Tristan smashed it open with his sword the metals had become sludge. Nothing.

  Deep in my soul, a familiar urge began to beat – the same instinct that a rabbit feels when it scents a fox, or a traveller when he hears a branch snap in the forest. It was the instinct that had carried me away from Mainz, from Cologne, from Basle, from Paris – wherever danger threatened. But now I was almost forty, and forty is not twenty. I had a house, a position. I could not live the life of a vagrant again. And I could not bear to leave Kaspar, the only friend I ever had.

  I was trapped. Not by bars or walls, but by remorseless circumstance. A helpless rage welled inside me. I slammed my fist on the table. Glass and metal rattled; one of the ink bottles tipped over and spilled across the worktop. It lapped against the scattered punches coating the tips black.

  I stared. As if in a dream, I lifted one of the punches, upended it and stabbed it onto the tabletop. The table shivered, as if the timber itself understood the import of that moment. I lifted the punch away. A single mark revealed itself, blazed on the wood. The letter A.

  I dipped the punch in the pool of ink again and made another, then another. Soon I had dozens of them stamped across the table. Punch and form, male and female. One enters the other and reproduces.

  I ran across the yard to the stone shed. The fire had been cold for weeks: I had plenty of coal but no kindling. I went back to the barn, gathered up the remaining indulgences and tore them into strips. I knelt before the hearth and scraped sparks over them with my steel. The edges began to smoulder. I blew, coaxing the fire into life, burning away my failures.

  On a shelf by the window I found a bar of lead I had used to blacken the ink. When the fire burned hot, I set the lead over it in an iron bowl. It softened and buckled, melting like butter. I stirred it with a ladle and watched carefully: if it overheated, it would stick too much to the mould.

  I laid the copper plate on the bench, among the pestles and vessels we had used for the ink. I dipped the ladle in the liquid lead and scooped a small amount over the copper. Steam hissed as the metals met, the molten lead channelling its way into the grooves cut by the letters. I tapped it to loose the air bubbles.

  When the lead had cooled, I worked a knife under it and prised it out of the copper. My hands were trembling; I dared not apply much pressure for fear of bending the soft metal. At last I had it out, a flat slug about the size of my thumb. I carried it back to the barn, dipped it in the ink and pressed it against a fresh sheet of paper with the palm of my hand. I held it there, almost too frightened to see what I had made.

  At last I pulled it away.

  It was written backwards, for it is the nature of such impressions that the child is the mirror of the parent. But I could read it easily enough. The words shouted into my soul.

  I FREE YOU.

  XLV

  Near Brussels

  Three police cars raced down the road towards the warehouse. They didn’t see the black Lexus parked down a side alley in the shadow of an industrial gasses unit. Nick waited until they were well past, then pulled out cautiously.

  ‘How did they find us?’ asked Emily. Her voice sounded small and lost. ‘We didn’t even know we were going there until a few hours ago.’

  Nick gripped the steering wheel tighter. Ice-cold air was blasting through the shattered window; the dashboard readout said the temperature outside was ten below. He turned the heater up as far as it would go and aimed the vents towards his body.

  ‘What happened to Atheldene?’

  ‘He stayed behind. He wanted to wait for the police.’

  ‘Great,’ said Nick. ‘At least he can tell them that I didn’t do it this time.’

  An ambulance blazed past them in the opposite direction and he glanced down, trying to shield his face.

  ‘So where are we going?’

  ‘Somewhere we can examine that book. Do we need any special equipment or anything?’

  ‘Books are robust. If it survived the defrosting, it should be OK to touch. Obviously a temperature-controlled, stable-humidity environment would be better than a moving car with the heating on full and an arctic gale coming through the window.’

  Nick saw a gas station ahead. The lights were out, the pumps like standing stones in the darkness. He pulled into the forecourt and parked behind the kiosk, out of sight of the road. Emily came forward into the passenger seat.

  ‘Let’s find out.’

  He was too nervous to touch the book himself: he gave it to Emily. She laid it on her lap and peeled open the cover. Nick stared at the creamy vellum, cast yellow by the car’s map light.

  The manuscript began on the first page.

  ‘“Et si contigerit ut queratur a venatoribus, venit ad eum odor venatorum, et cum cauda sua tetigit posttergum vestigia sua…”’ read Emily. ‘ “And if it happens that the lion is pursued by hunters, he smells their scent and erases his tracks behind him with his tail. Then the hunters cannot trace him.” ’

  She frowned. ‘That’s not how the bestiaries begin.’

  But Nick was hardly listening. Halfway down the page a small illustration intruded on the text. Damp had smudged it so that the picture seemed to melt out into the writing, but it was still distinct. A lion sitting up on its haunches, one paw lifted in the air, staring across the page with teeth bared in an imperious glare.

  ‘It’s the same as the card,’ he breathed.

  Nick watched as Emily turned the pages, through the fabulous menagerie of beasts that inhabited the book. Not every page was illustrated, and some had been damaged worse than others – by the damp, or by other ordeals in their long history. Many of the animals were creatures Nick had never imagined: birds that hatched from trees; a beast with a bull’s head, a ram’s horns and a horse’s body; griffins, basilisks and unicorns. But not all were so fantastical. Two cats, a black and a tabby, chased a mouse across a kitchen floor while a buxom cook slurped wine by the fire. An ox pulled a plough across an autumnal field. A stag stood on a knoll in the forest, while a bear grubbed in the dirt.

  Nick tried not to show his excitement. He knew the bear – and he was pretty sure he recognised the stag from one of the deer suit cards.

  ‘What does it say about the bear?’ he asked.

  ‘ “Bear cubs appear from the womb without form, as tiny white lumps of flesh without eyes, which their mothers lick into shape.” ’ Emily read the Latin effortlessly. ‘ “They crave nothing more than honey. If ever they attack bulls, they know the best areas to strike are the nose or the horns – usually the nose, for the pain is worst in the most sensitive place.”’

  Nick sat back in the driver’s seat. With the engine off, the car had become icy cold again. ‘I think the lion was closer to the mark, obliterating its traces so hunters can’t track it. That’s Gillian. We’ve got her book, we’ve got her card – and we’ve still got no idea what she found in them. And people keep trying to kill us.’

  Emily went quiet. Nick gave her a sideways glance. ‘What are you thinking?’<
br />
  ‘There is someone who could help us. Someone who could analyse this book to see what Gillian might have found. Where it took her.’

  ‘Who?’

  Emily drummed her fingers on the door handle. ‘His name’s Brother Jerome. He’s a Jesuit – or used to be. He’s an expert in medieval books. He was… He taught me at the Sorbonne. He’s retired now.’

  ‘Does he live near here? Is he trustworthy?’

  ‘Near the German border. Probably about an hour’s drive from here. As for trustworthy… You can trust him, I suppose.’

  Nick craned around and stared at her. ‘If there’s something you need to tell me, then tell me. If this guy’s not above board, I’m not going anywhere near him.’

  ‘You can trust him,’ Emily repeated. She sounded close to tears. ‘It’s just… awkward. I was his student, once. He made a pass at me; I reported him. He lost his job.’

  Now it was Nick’s turn to stare at the dashboard in embarrassment. ‘If you think-’

  ‘No. He’s the only man who can help us.’

  Before they left, Nick found a tyre lever under the back seat and smashed out the remained shards of broken glass from the window. From a distance it made the car look a bit more reputable. Then he started the engine and pulled out of the gas station. He could see the highway ahead: trucks thundering across a bridge in the night. Blue signs pointed left and right. Nick slowed the car.

  ‘Which way?’

  Italy

  Cesare Gemato sat behind his desk and stared through the windows of his eighth-floor office. Rain beaded on the bulletproof glass; beyond, the ships crossing the Bay of Naples were mere smears of grey against a grey sea.

  ‘Nessun dorma! Nessun dorma!’

  Pavarotti burst into life on his phone. Gemato saw the number flashing on the screen and grabbed it. He listened for a minute and said nothing, though his knuckles went white.