“So that’s why you’re doing this, is it?”
He spun on his heel, fixing the girl with a needling stare. She was straining against the bonds securing her to the ironwork beside the elevator doors, but it was a futile effort, one that only allowed her to believe in the illusion of hope. The auburn tresses hanging down about her head shook as she raged, giving her the appearance of some wild, red-haired Celt – a Boudicca for the new steam age.
Le Papillon admired the Queen of the Iceni. She would have appreciated what he was attempting to do here, he was sure of it. She had been an agent of chaos too. All she had wanted to do was watch the world burn, just like him.
“I thought your actions might at least have been driven by some political or philosophical ideology,” the prisoner went on. “A bold, if misguided belief in something. At least then the hundreds of deaths you’ve caused might have meant something.”
“Hundreds? Try thousands.”
The girl blinked back tears of rage. “But it all boils down to money in the end, doesn’t it? You’re just a common thief. A petty crook.”
The terrorist froze. “There is nothing common or petty about me, I can assure you.”
“Alright then, try amoral, psychotic, or simply downright evil.”
“Labels, that’s all they are. Words. They mean nothing!” Le Papillon spat, surprising himself with the vehemence of his response.
The girl had touched a nerve. But he was better than that; he was beyond such primitive animal responses. He would not give her the satisfaction of seeing him rise to her goading. And he would not let her stop him from enjoying his moment of satisfaction as his ultimate plan came to fruition.
“I can’t believe my uncle trusted you!” his prisoner cried.
“Yes, but he did. And now he’s dead and soon you will be too.”
When Le Papillon had interrupted her, she had been on the verge of stopping the countdown and disarming the bomb altogether. The ape could easily have killed her with nothing more than a flick of the wrist, but at the last moment Le Papillon had stayed its hand.
The girl – what was the word? – intrigued him. Yes, that was it. Besides, a spectacle like the one he was about to put on needed an audience. Montague Moreau didn’t count – he had been involved in the scheme for months and knew what to expect. And God alone knew what was going through the mind of the ape – other than Moreau’s remote-control-triggered electrical impulses.
The lepidopterist was planning on enjoying the spectacle himself, of course, but a show was nothing without an audience. The general populace of the city would be too caught up in becoming bit-part players in the experience to appreciate the full extent of his accomplishment. But from her prime position atop Monsieur Eiffel’s tower, Cadence Bettencourt would have a grandstand seat at the fall of the second Gomorrah.
There would be time to have her killed once the show was over, the start of which was only a matter of minutes away.
As Paris was gripped by panic the night before, the emergency services rushing to deal with the aftermath of the destruction of the Opera House, Le Papillon, Dr Moreau, Cadence Bettencourt and the Moreau’s pet cyber-ape had made their way to the top of the Eiffel tower, travelling by balloon – the same balloon that was now tethered to the mast that protruded from the top of the tower. The rope ladder that hung from it would be their only escape route when the time came to depart the city once and for all.
The drums containing the different parts of the device had been transported to the tower in the basket of the balloon as well, but days before. Emptied of their contents, they stood stacked neatly in front of the decommissioned lift. Le Papillon didn’t want anybody turning up unannounced just as they were putting the final part of the plan into action.
The device wasn’t particularly large, especially when you took into account what it had been designed to do. But of course the device itself was little more than a receiver-cum-transmitter.
It was humming quietly to itself, generating a fluctuating rising and falling cadence of disharmonics. It had been operational since the night before, receiving the signal being broadcast from the Opera Garnier and the premiere performance of Roussel’s Black Swan, via the adapted pipe organ in the basement and the radio mast at the top of the Eiffel Tower.
“What are you planning to do with that?” Cadence Bettencourt asked, twisting her head in an attempt to see what Moreau was up to.
The scientist gave her a lascivious look. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“To be honest, I think I already do.”
Her bluntness and confident tone caught the cyberneticist by surprise.
“Of course I’m only theorising here, but that box of tricks bears more than a passing resemblance to the kind of recording devices my uncle was working on up until his death. So what I’m thinking is that thing’s been active since last night, that before the organ-bomb in the basement of the Opera House blew up it relayed the performance of Roussel’s Black Swan to this device, which it received via the radio mast up there.” She glanced skyward. “I’m guessing that a recording of that very performance is now stored in that ordinateur memory core ready for you to employ the destructive waves again as you see fit.”
Moreau looked from the girl to his employer.
Le Papillon scowled.
“I’m right, aren’t I?”
“Is it ready?” the terrorist grunted.
“Ready when you are,” Moreau replied, getting to his feet.
“And the balloon’s ready to go?”
“We just have to untie the tether, pull up the anchor and away we go.”
“And the ape?”
Unhurriedly, Moreau put down his toolkit on top of one of the empty barrels and picked up the portable control unit that looked so like a handheld kine-camera. Holding the remote loosely in one hand, the doctor casually flicked a switch.
A large hand grabbed hold of the parapet, making Le Papillon start – although he did his best to mask his surprise – and the massive cyber-altered silverback swung itself up onto the top tier of the tower.
CADENCE GASPED.
The gorilla squatted on the balcony, fixing her with a beady, black-eyed stare.
Unable to help herself, she flinched, even though she couldn’t hope to escape it, tied to the structure of the tower as she was. Or couldn’t she? Her hands out of sight, tied behind her back, she began to move them up and down, rubbing the knots of rope against the rough corner of the pillar.
The huge ape sniffed the air, great nostrils flaring. The lines in its furrowed brow deepened.
The beast seemed to remember the last time they had met as well as she did. The chase. The cathedral. The pursuit. Everything about the disgruntled expression on its simian features told her that there were still old scores to be settled, that it would yet have its revenge.
But for the time being, another directed its actions, if not its thoughts. She was safe for as long as the anarchist dictated that was how he wanted the situation to remain.
“Well, now that everyone’s here” – Le Papillon looked from the ape to Cadence, and finally to the doctor – “let us begin. Activate the device.”
“Your wish is my command,” Moreau chuckled, and flicked a switch.
Lights flashed on the cogitator unit as the ordinateur engine began burbling to itself.
Positioned only a few feet from the device, Cadence heard the ordinateur recording rewinding, followed by a click and a moment’s eerie silence. Then the crackling overture to the ballet began as it was played back through the device, the overlapping melodies and polyphonic rhythms redoubling and redoubling again, creating jarring disharmonics within the acoustics that set her teeth on edge.
She could see that it was having a similar effect on the doctor and the terrorist, although they obviously weren’t suffering as much as she was, not being so close to the machine or actually tied to the vibrating superstructure of the tower themselves.
The ape mo
aned, its face suddenly beset by myriad tics as arcing sparks danced between the electrodes piercing its skull, the metal rods humming in tormented sympathy with the rising acoustic charge.
She could feel the metal at her back throbbing under the stress of the altered acoustics, feel it thrumming through her bones, making her head ache as the sounds grew louder and louder. It seemed to her that the sound was being transmitted through the girders and pylons of the edifice itself, as if the Eiffel Tower was a colossal tuning fork.
Cadence gritted her teeth, biting back a moan of pain. She wasn’t sure how much longer she could take this. Her eyeballs felt like they were throbbing with every pulse emanating from the strange device. She felt dizzy and wondered how long she would be able to remain conscious if this torture kept up for much longer.
Hot spots of blood began to drip from her nose. Unable to wipe them away, she felt the dribble over her lip and onto the rope binding her, or down the front of her leather jacket.
And then, just when she feared she was going to pass out, there was a burst of energy, like the sonic boom of the sound barrier being broken, as a wave of acoustic force was released from the resonating superstructure of the tower.
“Don’t pass out now, Mademoiselle Bettencourt,” Cadence heard Leroux chuckle through the audio haze of white noise ringing in her ears. “You should watch this. After all, it was your uncle who helped make all this possible, who helped turn my dream into reality.”
“More like a living nightmare,” Cadence spat, blood flying from her lips. Then she screwed her eyes shut so as not to witness the end of the world, and in doing so deny the man responsible for her uncle’s death the satisfaction of having an audience to share the spectacle to his hellish show.
THE PULSE RIPPLED outwards from the superstructure, much of the force channelled into the ground through its splayed feet. It was as if a gigantic pile driver had been slammed down into the earth beneath the tower.
Trees surrounding the Parc de Champs de Mars were shaken by the blast, the blast stripping them of their leaves, as surely as if they had been caught in the teeth of a sudden tornado. At the same time, the ground beneath the concrete foundations of the tower fractured and a curtain of earth and water erupted from the expanding cracks, falling back to earth as muddy rain.
Le Papillon heard the distressed cries of early morning dog-walkers and those who took their morning constitutionals in the park at that time, and laughed through his mask as he saw them scurrying like ants in a futile attempt to escape the inescapable.
And that was all they were to him, scurrying ants before the might of his intellect, his ruthless ambition, and the magnitude of the scheme he had put into operation.
The fractures rippled outwards from the tower, sending more fountains of mud into the air, while in the streets beyond the park buildings began to fall.
The whole tower shuddered. Le Papillon tightened his hold on the ironwork of the parapet, as did the adapted gorilla perched on the handrail.
As the feedback loop doubled and redoubled in force, the tower became merely the epicentre of the blast. It stood at the eye of the earth-storm now assaulting the city, spreading out across Paris in rippling, destructive, seismic waves.
Le Papillon peered over the edge, at the ground almost a thousand feet below. Boats bobbed on the Seine as rippling waves spread from the southern bank of the river. The Pont d’Iéna shook, sending a chugging steam-carriage halfway across it slewing sideways, mounting the pavement and colliding with the carved stone balustrade.
A moment later the bridge cracked clean across its middle. In the Jardin du Trocadéro, a six-foot-high tidal wave of rippling earth spread outwards, away from the Eiffel Tower, carrying a crest of turf, broken paving slabs and plants with it.
“Look at that!” Moreau whooped, peering through one of the pivoting tourist telescopes mounted at the corner of the platform.
Le Papillon followed his gaze. In the distance, the façade of the Palais de Chaillot cracked and crumbled as if it was constructed of nothing stronger than royal icing.
The tolling of bells rang out across the city, erratic and out of sync, clearly audible above the lower pitched seismic rumble that could be felt more than heard. The anarchist’s eyes had picked out the shaking steeple of Saint Pierre de Chaillot less than a mile away to the north.
A moment later, under the relentless shaking of the city’s foundations beneath it, the church spire collapsed, toppling into the street below like a felled tree. Tiles and stones came crashing down on to the heads of terrified passersby, whose screams were drowned out by the noise of the death-rattle.
A sound like an eroded cliff face crashing down onto a shingle beach sent Le Papillon hurrying to the other side of the platform.
The grand dome of the Eglise du Dome, at the heart of Les Invalides, had given way and caved in.
Le Papillon’s heart leapt. Everywhere he looked, tenements were toppling, landmarks fractured and fell, monuments crumbled to dust. He had done this. He had achieved this. The death of a city; a metropolis murdered by his hand.
From behind him came the girl’s heavy, heartfelt sobs.
“I told you you shouldn’t miss this, my dear,” he jeered. Far away, the slow-turning sails of a red windmill, visible above the tumbling rooftops, broke off and went spinning into the street below. “After all, the Moulin Rouge never put on a show like this!”
CHAPTER THREE
Earthquake
ANOTHER SHUDDER PASSED through the ground at Ulysses’ feet and the rear wall of the auditorium of the Paris Opera House tumbled into the great depression in the ground.
Arms outstretched for balance, legs braced, the disorientated dandy steadied himself.
Ulysses and Inspector Dupin exchanged glances.
“What was that?” the Inspector hissed. “An aftershock?”
“So long after the initial seismic event? I don’t think so.”
Another tremor passed through the ground like a ripple across a pool, this one stronger than the last.
“A pre-shock then?”
“Is there such a thing?”
“How would I know?” Dupin retorted. “I’m a police officer, not a seismologist. Besides, I thought you said the bomb had already detonated.”
“I did. I mean it did. You know it did,” Ulysses protested, looking to the rooftops around him as another shudder sent tiles and window boxes cascading into the roads demarcating the Place de la Bastille.
The sound of church bells ringing – with no sense of rhythm or timing – reverberated across the city.
How long was an earthquake supposed to last? Ulysses wondered.
Somewhere nearby, a church steeple came crashing down into another street with the roar of a landslide.
Could there have been a second device? But if so, where had it been located?
The beleaguered buildings surrounding the square finally gave up the ghost, their foundations buckling, the tenements toppling like dominoes.
Considerations such as what was causing the earthquake and where were forgotten as primal instinct kicked in. Ulysses and Dupin ran for safety as dust clouds swept across the square, obscuring everything in a dense grey veil.
As the ground bucked and rocked beneath them, like an ice floe on an Alaskan river in the spring thaw, they instinctively ran to the only place they felt was safe, given the circumstances: into the crater in which the ruins of the Opera Garnier lay.
The two of them staggered to a halt as the dust came down around them, unable to see for more than a few feet in any direction, barely able to see each other, let alone the startled gendarmes, medics and rescue workers or their charges now stumbling about in the cloud of debris. It reminded Ulysses of the sandstorm he had run into in the desert during the Paris-Dakar rally years before.
Putting a scuffed sleeve across his nose and mouth, he closed his remaining eye and breathed in through the rough fabric of his battered jacket.
The thunder of
toppling buildings continued, as did the quaking beneath his feet. Underground pipes burst, sending torrents of pressurised water jetting into the air that then fell back to the ground as rainbow-shot showers, suppressing the dust. Gas mains fractured, the igniting hydrocarbons blasting manhole covers from the crazed tarmac streets.
“This isn’t natural,” Dupin coughed through the dust and smoke.
“I thought you weren’t a seismologist. But you’re right. There’s no geological fault line under Paris, is there?”
“None that I know of. I mean, we would have heard about it before now, wouldn’t we?”
“Indeed.” The clouds of dust were starting to clear now, revealing scenes of even greater devastation and more lost souls, made phantoms by the earthquake and the pall of grey that covered them.
Dupin took in the scene, his mouth agape in horror. “Well, I would hazard that Le Papillon is not done with Paris yet.”
“I would agree. A butterfly flaps its wings...”
“But where is he?” The look on Dupin’s face was one of bewildered anger. Anger he felt at the wanton destruction of the city he loved, but directionless; he needed someone to blame, someone to unleash his anger upon.
“I’ll find him. You stay here. Help these people get through this.”
“But where will you look?”
“I’m guessing that if I find the epicentre of this on-going earthquake, our anarchist won’t be far away.”
“How do you know he’s not miles away already?”
“I don’t. But I have a feeling he will have wanted to watch this. He’s been planning this for months. And he likes an audience, too.”
“You think your friend might still be alive?”
“I can only hope,” Ulysses said, feeling his cheeks flush with colour, “but I won’t know till I find the bastard himself.”
Time's Arrow 3: White Noise (Pax Britannia (Time's Arrow)) Page 2