by Gregg Loomis
Guillaume nodded again. "Yes."
Not quite true. Being a licensed guide required the payment of an annual fee, one much more expensive than simply having a commercial driver's permit. But then, who could distinguish between a professional guide who drove his customers around the area and a driver who simply pointed out the sights as he drove? Only governments could make such distinctions.
Instead of asking about specific locations, the man glanced furtively around the room before laying his hand on the table. Beneath his palm was a stack of euros. No matter how hard he stared, the man's hand prevented Guillaume from ascertaining exactly how much money he was seeing.
''You had customers today?" the man asked. Guillaume was trying, with little success, not to appear overly focused on the bills on the table. "Qui." The man thumbed the currency, letting Guillaume see the thickness of the stack.
"Who were they?"
Guillaume's eyes flicked to the man's before returning to the money.
"Information, like anything else, has its price."
The man across the table twisted his lips into what might have been intended to be a smile. It reminded Guillaume of a dead shark he had once seen washed up on the beach. He used one hand to slip a bill from the pile. "I agree. Who were your customers today?"
Guillaume pursed his lips, trying to feign indifference even as he slipped the money into his pocket. ''A man, an American, and a woman. I think she was German." He had the distinct impression the stranger was not surprised.
He dealt another bill. "Where did they go?"
"They were interested in the ruins of old castles and fortresses."
This time there was no move to hand over more money. "I know where they went. I want to know what in particular interested them, where was their attention?"
For an instant, Guillaume considered the possibility of holding out for more money. A look at the stranger's face told him that might be both unwise and unhealthy. He told him about Montsegur.
Guillaume's dinner, demipoule en vinblanc, half a chicken roasted with vegetables in white wine sauce, arrived as the stranger stood up, pushing the remainder of the euros across the table. "I paid you to remember. This is to forget-forget you ever saw me."
For the first time in his life, Guillaume was oblivious to food and a bottle of wine in front of him. Hardly noticing the savory aroma, he watched the man's back as he walked across the square and disappeared into the deepening shadows. Minutes ago, Guillaume had been ravenous. His appetite had somehow disappeared.
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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Southwestern France
Montsegur
The next morning
Lang had insisted on spending the night in Lyon, where they had taken up the earlier part of the evening shopping for equipment: several lengths of nylon rope, flashlights, heavy work boots, and a grappling hook, the sort mountaineers might use. He then visited a camera shop. It was only when he backed out of the parking space on the town square that he remembered he had made similar purchases at both stores the year previous, only to leave them on a hillside.
That, as they say, was another story. Before the sun was up, they were on their way back to the same hill they had visited the day before.
Gurt climbed out of the car, a large, comfortable Mercedes with such little power, Lang was certain that was the reason the class and number were not on the trunk, as was customary with other models of the marque. The factory was ashamed of the thing.
Gurt yawned and drained the dregs of cold coffee from a paper cup. "This has been here how long? Seven, eight hundred years?"
Lang was unloading the trunk. "The ruins? Yeah, I guess so."
She wadded the cup with a crunching sound and tossed it into the rubbish bag hanging from the glove box. "Then why so early do we come?"
Lang shut the lid with a soft thump. "I'd just as soon finish whatever we're gonna do before anyone knows we're here."
Gurt followed him into the entrance they had found. She squatted as he tied the rope around his waist and stuck a flashlight in his belt. Climbing the first two steps, he swung the hook on a rope, tossing it upward. He was rewarded with the dull clunk of metal on stone as the hook fell back.
Two more attempts and he gave up. "Shaft's too narrow; I can't swing the rope with enough velocity to get to the top."
Gurt tied one end of rope to her belt. "We climb, then." Lang shook his head. "I climb. If I fall, I want to be sure there's someone to drive me to the nearest hospital."
"If you fall from there, a hospital you will not need," she observed.
Lang tried to ignore the truth in her observation as he sat so that his back was against one wall and his feet against the opposite. Using hands and feet pressed against the stone, he began to work his way upward and then stopped, reaching to the back of his belt.
He pulled out the Glock, holding it where she could see it. "I need to get rid of all the weight I can. Take this."
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She caught it neatly, stuffing it into the back of her pants. She watched until he was nearly indistinguishable in the shadows above her head, playing out rope as he climbed. Soon she could mark his progress only by the grunts and exhalations of breath echoing down the shaft. Finally, it was quiet.
"Lang?",
There was a tug on the rope. "Gimme a minute. There! I've secured the rope to a boulder. Now I can pull you up."
Although she knew he could not see, she shook her head. ''A pull I do not need. I went through the same training as you and am even younger than you. I can climb myself."
There was a properly abashed silence from above as she began.
The top of the shaft opened onto what Lang guessed had been the courtyard. The destruction of the Cathars' redoubt had been complete: Cut stones were strewn in a semicircle, few of which still rested on another. The keep's tower had presented more of a problem, probably because of the attackers' impatience with tearing it down starting at the top. Instead, it looked as though it had been split lengthwise. Behind the courtyard yawned the mouth of a cave, not particularly deep, but as tall as Lang guessed the keep had been, located so that, once encircled by the outer wall, the defenders of this hill would have had a fortress assailable from only one direction.
As their guide had said yesterday, part of the top ofthe hill had fallen in, leaving the center of the cavern open to the sky and filling the interior with rubble of white stone. Anything that had been under the collapsing part of the cave's roof was going to remain there.
Without spoken agreement, Gurt and Lang separated, each slowly walking along the inner perimeter of the wall and into the shadowy darkness of the cave. Since the collapse, the white stone sides had become streaked, crumbling under the relentless force of the elements. Vines had managed to take root in what appeared to be solid rock. If this was the cave shown in the photograph on Blucher's CD, any inscriptions on its walls were going to-be difficult to find. In another year or two, exfoliation would obliterate them forever.
Lang swept his light from the top of the cave downward and across the rubble-strewn floor. Twice he stopped, thinking the beam had picked up what he was looking for, only to find that the natural fissures in the walls could briefly assume the appearance of human-made letters just as rocks on the floor took on the look of handmade objects. If Skorzeny had filled four truckloads from this cave, either he was taking largely geological specimens or the cave had deteriorated greatly in the last sixty years.
Problem was, which was it?
"Lang, here!" Gurt's voice had the tinge of an echo.
Impatiently, Lang picked his way around piles of debris to where she stood, her light steady on a section of wall no more than four or five feet above the floor. There was no doubt he was looking at man-made letters over holes carved into the stone.
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"Is like a bee, bee ..." Gurt was pointing to rows of evenly spaced holes cut into the rock.
"Honeycomb," Lang supplied, forgetting the i
nscription for a moment as he inserted a fist into one of the holes.
It was about two feet deep and perhaps ten inches across. Gurt looked puzzled. "A rack for wine?"
Lang shook his head. "Wine would have been somewhere underground to keep it as cool as possible. This would have been a library."
"For books?"
"For scrolls, I think."
"They did not have books?"
Lang nodded absently. "Of course they did. You've seen those beautifully illuminated Bibles. But in ancient times, libraries, like the one at Alexandria, would have had racks like these where scrolls could be stored in clay tubes."
The mystery of what Skorzeny may have needed trucks to haul away may have been answered, but that raised an even more perplexing question, one Lang voiced.
"Problem is, why would Cathars in the thirteenth century be writing on loose parchment when the rest of Europe had started using bindings?"
Gurt pointed to the carved letters. "There the explanation may be."
He reached out and touched some sort of growth that obscured part of the inscription. "We're gonna have to cut this away."
Gurt grabbed several sprigs and started to pull before Lang could grab her arm. "Cut it, not pull it loose. Shallow as those roots are, they have to be widespread. Yank them hard enough and the face of the rock will crumble."
Nodding her understanding, she handed him her flashlight and took a small knife from her pocket. Where had she gotten it? He had never seen it before and, harmless enough, it was not something that would have cleared airport security. Whatever its source, it sliced cleanly through each branch and root. In minutes, the wall in front of Lang was clear of vegetation.
Lang stepped back, the better to play his flashlight across the lines of letters. His first impression was of precision. This inscription was not some ancient graffiti scratched into rock but the measured characters of a professional mason. Time, moisture, and other natural forces had effectively erased several letters, their former presence noted only by blank spaces.
IMPERATORIULIANACCUSAT(-) REBILLISREXUS
IUDEAIUMIUBITREGI (-)UNUSDEISEPELIT
"Julian, Emperor ... ," he read aloud. Gurt followed the flashlight's beam with interest. "Who?"
Without looking away, Lang said, "Julian. Roman emperor in the late fourth century. In Christian writing, he's always referred to as 'Julian the Apostate.' He was the first non-Christian emperor since Constantine, the last pagan, reinstituted the persecution of the followers of Christ."
Gurt looked closer, playing her own light along the lines. "This was here
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cut by a Roman emperor?"
Absorbed by the antiquity of what he was reading for the second time, Lang shook his head. "Most likely at his order." He pointed to a word. " 'IUBIT,'
he commands. I doubt Julian ever came here after he took the throne. Before then, he was governor of this part of Gaul. He wasn't emperor long. An inscription attributed to him is rare."
"How do we know it wasn't actually written here by the Cathars? Anyone could have, er, forged such writing. It could be a forgery. Then what?"
"Send it to Dan Rather."
"Who?"
"Never mind."
Lang frowned. Either he was misreading the Latin or something was wrong.
A light breeze hummed across the opening above while he ran his fingers along the words.
"What does it say?" Gurt asked.
"I'm not sure. I can't tell, for instance, whether this
word, accusat, is missing the ending. It's chipped off. I can't tell if someone is making an accusation, made an accusation, or of whom. Likewise, the word regi. It has something to do with a palace, a feminine, first-declension noun. But without the last two or three letters, I can only guess if whatever Julian's talking about belongs to the palace, is in the palace, and so forth."
Gurt understood that the endings of nouns denoted not only the gender of the thing in question but also case-nominative, genitive, dative, or accusative. Although frequently dropped in conversation, German still had endings that indicated whether the thing possessed was being subjected to or was simply mentioned. The few remaining equivalents in English were like. the" 's" added to denote possession-that is, the dog's bone or the "s" or "es" to create the plural.
"Is Latin like German in that the whole sentence has to be read before you can put the words into the order that makes sense in English?" Gurt asked.
"No," Lang responded, too occupied to engage in a discussion of linguistics.
In German sentences containing more than a single clause, the verbs were frequently stacked at the end so that the reader had to pair them up and determine what made the most sense. This, of course, in addition to infinitives that were not only split but permanently rent asunder. A German would to the railroad station quickly go, for example.
"There's not enough light to read all of this in con
text," Lang finally said, putting down his flashlight. "If you'll move your beam slowly, I'll copy down the words and then we can photograph them."
It took Lang about ten minutes to carefully transcribe the inscription, underlining letters that were too worn or chipped to positively identify. He then used the camera he had purchased the previous night to take two shots directly in front of the carving before moving to each side, letting the small flash
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attachment cast shadows that would make the words more legible.
He was stepping up to take close-ups when he and Gurt exchanged puzzled looks, unsure if the other heard the sound that seemed to be getting closer, the beating whup-whupof a small, non-turbine-powered helicopter. What, Lang wondered, would be so pressing in this rural community as to justify a chopper?
The answer came when the sound became stationary directly overhead. As one, both looked up to the jagged section of sky that showed through the now-open cave roof. Lang recognized the aircraft hovering like a huge insect as one of the smaller Sikorsky models available for personal transportation worldwide. From the angle at which Lang was looking, he could not see the identifying letters or numbers.
"Who ... ?"
Lang's question was cut short as a man, his face masked by goggles, leaned out of the open doorway of the 'copter and dropped something. For only a millisecond, the object was silhouetted against the sky, but that was long enough.
Lang shoved Gurt into one of the natural niches in the wall, shallow but better than nothing. The second he heard an impact nearby, he sprung. He had less than five seconds, considerably less if the man in the aircraft above had enough experience to count off two or three so the weapon would explode on impact. Lang saw the plastic cylinder perhaps eight or nine inches on the cave floor not a foot away. In a single motion, Lang scooped it up and underhanded it toward the opening of the cave mouth. He watched it describe a gentle parabola before he threw himself flat, ignoring the sharp edges of rock.
He never knew whether he hit the floor of the cave before the ground shook with an explosion that, even from outside the cave, sent rock fragments buzzing through the air like angry bees.
Instantly on his feet, he raced to where Gurt was shaking her head, attempting to clear her ears of the concussion. "What in ... ?"
He propelled her toward the opening. "Later."
No time to explain that he had instantly recognized the object launched from the overhead chopper as an "offensive" hand grenade as distinguishable from the more familiar fragmentation "pineapple" that was basically unchanged since World War Two. The grenade the unknown people overhead had chosen had the same "pin"-activated fuse with the same delay, but contained high explosives in a plastic wrapper rather than cast iron intended to shatter. The choice of such a weapon revealed a plan: to use the MklIAl offensive grenade's content to collapse the cave, burying him and Gurt alive if they were not already dead from the shrapnel-like chips of rock. Either way, they would never be found.
Her hand in his, they sprinted across the c
ourtyard. Behind them, a muffled explosion told them the men above had no intention of giving up.
The malignant shadow of the helicopter beat them to the shaft, its patient
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hovering an announcement that. there was no escape. Lang glanced around. To try descending through the narrow hole would be suicidal. Even if a near miss failed to collapse the tunnel, its tight confines would make it impossible to avoid the rock shards. Between their escape route and the cave was open ground littered with the evenly carved stones that had been the wall. There was not so much as a tree or bush to provide shelter.
The helicopter's passenger leaned out again, lobbing another grenade, and Lang threw Gurt to the ground, partially covering her with his own body. The following explosion seemed to jar even his teeth, but he was thankful he was still alive. The cordite-tainted air was welcomed as he forced breath back into lungs the concussion had emptied.