by Daniel Kalla
“Bien sûr,” Avril said. “I knew somehow they were planning to profit from that water.”
Duncan turned to Sylvie. “How did that ice sample wind up in your freezer?”
“Georges brought it back from the Arctic last summer,” Sylvie said. “He asked Maman to store it in our freezer. She had done the same for him several times over the years.”
“Precisely when did he leave it?” Avril asked.
Sylvie thought a moment. “Early June. Maybe late May.”
“No one became ill until autumn,” Elise pointed out.
“So someone must have doctored the ice after it was first put in the freezer,” Duncan reasoned.
Noah stared hard at Sylvie. “Who would have known of its existence other than Georges, your mother, or yourself?”
Sylvie looked up at him, defeat clouding her features. “I suppose Georges’s colleagues—or anyone who knew him well enough—would know he kept samples at home and elsewhere.” She shook her head. “Georges is not responsible. If you only knew him, you would see that he would never do something like this.”
“Money—especially the promise of it—changes people,” Duncan said. “Your brother stands to make a king’s ransom from this water.”
“But how? Now that you know about the prion.”
“Christ, why do you think we’re imprisoned here?” Duncan exclaimed.
Sylvie’s eyes widened with desperation. “Surely, you have told others about this bottled water?”
Duncan rolled his eyes. “Between the storm and your country’s rudimentary telecommunication system—”
“Duncan!” Noah took a step closer to his colleague. “Someone is probably listening to our every word.”
Duncan’s mouth opened and his wandering eye twitched momentarily. He said nothing, but Avril could see that he was upset with himself for the oversight.
Avril concentrated on the ligatures at her wrists. She tugged hard and felt a tad more give in her left hand. Her heart skipped a beat, as the padding slid up to the base of her thumb. Only a few centimeters more, she thought, working it fiercely.
Elise looked from Avril and Frédéric to Sylvie. “That Dutch woman and the Russian man, do any of you know who they are?”
“No,” Frédéric said. Avril and Sylvie both shook their heads.
“Are there others?” Elise asked.
“As far as I have seen, only Detective Valmont,” Sylvie said.
Avril noticed Noah studying Sylvie intently, but he remained silent.
Elise turned to Frédéric. “You have been here the longest. Have you seen anyone else?”
“No, but twice I thought I heard the Dutch woman talking to someone else. The voices were very low. But it was definitely another woman. She sounded French to me, too.”
Elise viewed Frédéric evenly. “You did not recognize the woman?”
“No.”
Elise indicated the door with a lift of her shoulder. “So there are at least four of them out there.”
Frédéric nodded.
Avril wriggled her left hand harder. Holding her breath, she felt her thumb begin to slip further through the ligature up to the knuckle. Not far now.
Duncan rubbed his bearded chin roughly against his shoulder, appearing to struggle with his own bindings. “They must have collected us here for a bloody reason,” Duncan said.
Elise looked over to him. “Isn’t it obvious?” she said.
“They can’t just make us disappear into thin air,” Duncan said. He indicated Noah with a tilt of his head. “Deservedly or not, after ARCS, this one’s a celebrity.”
Noah said nothing. Elise sighed. “They’ll find an accident or some other way,” she said.
“Don’t know about the rest of you, but I have a family to take care of,” Duncan muttered grimly. “So I suggest we figure some way out.”
Frédéric nodded eagerly. “Other days, the Russian man or the Dutch woman has brought food—milkshakes and soup—for me to drink with a straw.” His voice dropped to a whisper and he glanced around conspiratorially. “Maybe when they come back, we could surprise them?”
“But how?” Elise whispered.
Duncan kicked the air with his right leg. “Our feet still work,” he said.
“But they are armed,” Elise said. “And the Russian looks like he’s a bodyguard or a professional soldier of some sort.”
“We have to try,” Frédéric said.
“Bloody right,” Duncan said.
Elise and Sylvie nodded. “I agree,” Avril said, while still working her hands vigorously. Only Noah didn’t respond. He simply continued to stare at Sylvie.
Sylvie looked around the room at the others. “If one of you had just told someone—anyone—about the Lake, we could maybe bargain our way out of here,” she half pleaded and half accused.
The appeal was met by blank and helpless stares.
Avril squeezed more of her hand through the restraint, almost freeing her thumb and fingers.
“Your brother didn’t write those e-mails to you,” Noah told Sylvie.
Sylvie nodded. “I agree.”
Noah’s lips tightened. “Georges has been dead for a long time now.”
“How do you know that?” Sylvie asked.
“I think he was already infected with the prion late last summer when he met Jeremy Milton for drinks. Milton described him as ‘scatter-brained.’” Noah eyed Sylvie steadily. “In which case, he would have died within a month or so. I bet that’s why his body has never been found. I think he’s only ‘existed’ in sporadic e-mails to you and a few others.”
Sylvie angled her head. “Why do you think that?”
“Because it fits.” His tone was edgy and challenging.
Sylvie said nothing, but Avril stopped struggling with her bonds. She studied the woman with an inkling of realization.
“What fits?” Elise asked anxiously.
Noah snorted. “Why would someone pull their gravely ill relative out of a major hospital and bring them to an ill-equipped nursing home in a small town?”
“Philippe was dying,” Sylvie said. “Besides, I told you, my mother was ill with a heart condition. She could not travel—”
Ignoring the explanation, Noah took a step closer. “Your little brother kept talking about the water. He said that Georges knew. That you knew. He was telling us that the water was poisoned.”
Sylvie grimaced. “Poor Philippe had lost his mind.”
“But he was aware enough to know that his death sentence came from the water. And I think the best way to shut him up was to have him die in a fire.” Noah’s eyes danced with a fire of their own. “You also told us Georges hadn’t had a serious girlfriend in years. You neglected to mention he was dating one of the victims, Giselle Tremblay, until we discovered it.”
Sylvie did not respond.
“You were the only one with access to that ice sample,” Noah went on. “And it only materialized after you heard that we already knew that Georges was handing the water out to the other victims.” His tone sharpened. “When you wanted to steer us away from Vishnov.”
“Holy shite!” Duncan chimed in, stepping closer to Sylvie. “You’re a bloody biologist, aren’t you? You would know enough about prions and mad cow disease to come up with a scheme like this!”
Elise gaped at Sylvie. “You were the so-called elegant woman Yvette Pereau caught in her barn!”
From the floor, Sylvie looked up at her accusers for a long silent moment. Then she gave a sigh. Her expression bordered on relief. She pulled both hands out from behind her back and jumped to her feet. The padded ligatures dangled freely at her wrists, never attached in the first place. “I just wanted to ensure that you had not told anyone else,” she said. “Thank you for confirming that. It has been so tiresome plugging every new leak.”
Sylvie’s hands shot out and she roughly shoved Noah and Duncan to either side, launching them off balance. Darting between them, she ran to the door and poun
ded on it. “Viktor…Martine…open up!” she yelled.
Avril struggled wildly at her restraint, and felt it slide further over her fingers.
Frédéric lowered his head and ran at Sylvie like he was a battering ram. She turned and saw him at the last moment. She lithely dodged to her right. Frédéric hit the door with his head, and Sylvie knocked him hard with clasped hands, sending him face-first to the floor.
“Freddie!” Avril cried. Without fully freeing her hands, she launched herself across the room at Sylvie.
Sylvie dug a small gun from her pocket. “Stop!” She aimed the muzzle at Avril’s approaching head.
Avril stumbled to a halt. Everyone else went motionless. Then the door opened behind Sylvie and the Dutch woman stood in the doorway, also holding a gun. Sylvie looked over her shoulder at the woman, and they shared an amused and intimate smile. “Viktor is outside working on the cars,” the woman said.
Avril tugged her arm and felt her left fingers slip free of the last of the ligature.
Sylvie turned back to the prisoners. “Your wait will not be much longer now,” she said coolly. Then, over her shoulder, she yelled in French, “Oh, and Simon, get back in here and redo the restraints on the detective. Tighter this time! She almost got free.”
52
Lac Noir, France. January 21
As he stared at Sylvie Manet’s gun, Noah’s head swam and his perforated eardrum whistled painfully. He felt as though he had yet to emerge from the tailspin the BMW had launched into back on that snowy highway.
Having regained his balance after Sylvie’s shove, he stood near the far wall, reorienting himself. The Dutch woman leaned against the doorjamb, her gun hanging loosely in her hand. Sylvie stood a few feet from her, arm outstretched with the gun still pointing at Avril. To his left, Elise stared defiantly at both armed women. Frédéric lay on his side by the door where he had collapsed. Duncan rested on his knees where he had fallen after being pushed.
Avril stood still as a statue in front of Noah and a few feet from Sylvie. Noah saw that her left hand was already free but she clutched it in her right hand, pretending otherwise. Aware that she was planning to surprise the captors, he scoured his brain for a way to distract them. “You killed your own brothers, Sylvie,” he said in his most condemning tone.
Sylvie’s head snapped, and her eyes bored into him. “Georges did! He drank the raw water out of the well, and then gave it to Philippe.” She shook her head slightly. “What I did was merciful. I put them both out of their misery. Their brains had already rotted.”
Noah shrugged his bound arms. “And all the others? What did they die for?”
Sylvie viewed him steadily. “The money, of course!” Her voice was deeper, harsher, and far more self-assured now that she had shed the pretense of being a grieving sister. “I have a doctorate and a position at the university in Bordeaux, but I cannot even afford to buy a decent apartment there. I was going to have to sell my father’s prized furniture just to make my car payments.
“Then last winter Georges told me of this pure Antarctic water. He claimed that it has amazing healing powers—which it does—but even without that, I saw the value straightaway.” Sylvie barked a disdainful laugh. “Georges was a socialist. He cared nothing about the water’s commercial potential. So I turned to Claude Fontaine. At first, the arrogant pig wouldn’t listen. I had to call upon my secret weapon.” With a smile, she turned and blew a kiss to the Dutch woman. “I sent my colleague and very good friend, Dr. DeGroot, to reason with him. Within weeks, Martine convinced Claude and his backers to enter into a partnership with us.” She held up her free hand. “And that would have been that—”
From his knees, Duncan scoffed, “Except you found out that your health product was, in fact, lethal.”
Sylvie’s gazed drifted over to Duncan. “Not lethal, Dr. McLeod. It just needed to be purified,” she said. “Much of the food and drink we take for granted would be deadly without pasteurization or preservatives. Vishnov’s water is no different.”
“Purified?” Duncan said. “You must be out of your fucking mind, lass! Heat sterilization is used to kill living microorganisms. We’re talking about a prion here.”
“He’s right,” Noah said. “A prion is not alive in the first place. It’s just a rogue protein. You cannot pasteurize something that is not living.”
Sylvie seemed to waver a moment, but then her smile re-emerged. “You can, gentlemen. Heat denatures the protein. Inactivates it.”
“Not consistently!” Noah said, nauseated by her miscalculation but desperate to string out the discussion for Avril’s sake. “That has always been the problem with trying to sterilize prion-contaminated substances. In hospitals, people have been infected with prions from surgical tools that were both heat- and chemically sterilized between cases.”
Sylvie continued as if he had never spoken. “We knew the water had to be processed from the start. But without consulting me, my foolish older brother gave out raw water to several people here in Limousin. And yes, some became ill.”
Noah swallowed his outrage. “And so you buried it…and them,” he said calmly, as he watched Avril unwind the ligature behind her back.
“What else could we do?” Sylvie shook her head as if she genuinely had no choice but evidence-planting and murder. “We had committed everything. We were desperate to explain away the prion illness before it drew attention to the Lake. So, last fall, when Georges fell ill, we flew him out to the Arctic as he intended.” She shrugged. “I know my brother would have wanted to go that way.”
“How did you stage the BSE outbreak?” Noah asked, trying to keep Sylvie preoccupied and allow Avril a glimmer of a chance.
“Fortunately, at labs in Paris and Berlin, Martine had access to nerve tissue of cows infected with BSE. We liquefied the substrate. It was quite simple after that.” Sylvie smiled, and Noah realized with disgust that not only had she justified the twisted scheme to herself, she was actually proud of it. “We needed our ‘source’ farm, and so we turned to Ferme d’Allaire and its very greedy manager, Marcel Robichard. We injected several of the animals—much as you had postulated—with a needle to their thecal sacs.” She touched the back of her own neck. “Of course, we could not wait for those calves to be sold to market. So, with M. Robichard’s paid assistance, we tracked down a number of farms that had purchased cattle from the Allaire operation. Everything went smoothly, except at the Pereau farm.” She tsked her disapproval. “Yvette Pereau was not supposed to be home the afternoon she surprised me in the barn. Even so, she never saw the needle. And had she not been so irrational and run to the police, there would have been no need for her disappearance. Fortunately, Detective Valmont got wind of the complaint and we were able to deal with it.” She pointed at Avril with a flick of her finger. “Though our luck turned for the worse when her husband wandered into your office.”
Avril said nothing, but her grip tightened on the ligature behind her back.
“But you didn’t stop there, did you?” Noah asserted, anxious to buy Avril more time. “You still had to kill Louis Charron and Pauline Lamaire.”
“Poor Pauline…She was something special before the arthritis turned her into that obsessive wreck. Once Georges gave her the first few sips of Vishnov, she was addicted. After Georges disappeared, she pestered me so much I had to keep her supplied with water—sterilized water—just to keep her quiet. Months passed, and I thought Pauline was going to be all right.” She touched her lip pensively. “This prion is so unpredictable. Some people become sick right away. And others, like Pauline and Georges, take months to show symptoms after exposure. However, once Pauline did become confused we had no choice.” Sylvie shrugged. “As for Dr. Charron, he meddled where he never should have. He had no business going to Ferme d’Allaire and spouting such wild accusations.”
“So you killed them both?” Elise said bitterly.
“We never planned on hurting anyone,” Sylvie said, as if it absolved her of r
esponsibility. “We found out about that wretched prion in our water when it was already too late to turn back. So we did what we had to do to protect our investment…our future.”
“That includes murdering us,” Elise growled.
Sylvie remained unrepentant. “We gave you every opportunity to let this go. All of you.” She looked at Avril. “We went to the effort of shipping Yvette to Amsterdam, just so she would not be considered ‘missing.’ But you wouldn’t listen to your own colleague.” She turned to Noah. “And, Dr. Haldane, you and your team…we built you up to be the heroes of this crisis. We spent a fortune staging events in the Arctic, but you would not accept what the science showed.”
Chest pounding with cold fury, Noah shook his head. “It’s too late, Sylvie. Too many people know,” he said as casually as he could.
“Know what exactly?” Sylvie smiled maliciously. “They think my brother harvested a deadly glacier in the Arctic. No one—except the people in this house—knows differently.”
“Our colleagues do,” Elise bluffed.
“Do they?” Sylvie laughed. “We just saw footage on CNN of people lined up outside a Beverly Hills spa waiting for the first bottles of the Lake to go on sale today.” She looked from Duncan to Noah. “You think your precious WHO would allow that if they knew Vishnov’s secret?”
Simon Valmont appeared at the doorway behind DeGroot. He mumbled in her ear, and then DeGroot called out to Sylvie. “The snow has started to fall again.” She took a step into the room. “Sylvie, you have explained more than enough,” she said, as if the others were not even present. “It’s time.”
Sylvie nodded. She looked over her shoulder at Valmont. “Simon, fixez les attaches d’Avril, maintenant, s’il tu plaît!”
Head down, Valmont stepped around Sylvie and walked toward Avril. With his stooped posture and loping stride, Noah recognized him as the mysterious informant from outside his hotel. A new flood of rage filled him, but he fought it back. “And us?” Noah said, desperate to create a distraction for Avril as Valmont neared. “How did you keep such close tabs on us at all times?”