The Lazarus Vault

by Tom Harper

  ‘Why did Blanchard recruit me?’ Ellie asked.

  ‘We don’t know. We didn’t think he knew you existed, or we’d have protected you better. We never meant for you to get mixed up in this. But now that you have … Damn.’

  He’d twisted the button on his coat so hard the threads had snapped. He looked at it ruefully.

  ‘That was new last Christmas.’

  Ellie didn’t care about his coat. She didn’t care about a nine-hundred year-old knight, or a brotherhood who wanted to bring down the bank.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  Never ask a question if you don’t already know the answer, they’d taught on her negotiating course. But you always knew. Even speaking to Mrs Thomas in the thicket in Switzerland, she’d known what was coming. It was as if, in the intake of breath, you could hear the words that would re-emerge.

  ‘We want you to break into the vault.’

  ‘What’s in it?’

  He dropped the button into his pocket. ‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.’

  ‘You want me to risk my life for it, but you won’t tell me what it is?’

  ‘I can’t.’ Harry shoved his hands in his pockets. ‘When you’ve got it – when you’re safe – I’ll show you everything.’

  ‘But my dad knew what it was.’

  ‘Your father had devoted his life to it.’

  She tried a different tack, pretending she hadn’t already decided. ‘You said you didn’t want me mixed up with this.’

  So often, she’d thought there was something incurably apologetic about Harry: the downturned mouth, the jowly face and eyes that drifted naturally towards his shoes. But there was nothing apologetic when he next spoke: only hard inevitability.

  ‘You’re already mixed up. I’m trying to get you out.’

  XXVI

  France, 1136

  THE NEXT TWO months are the happiest of my life.

  We head south, towards the lands of the King of France. Nowhere’s safe for us, but at least that’ll be dangerous for Guy’s men too. After two days we sell our horses. It’s a wrench, surrendering my status so soon after I won it, but they’re too easily recognised and we attract too many looks. We might just pass as a knight and his lady, but people will wonder where our servants and baggage have gone. They’ll remember us.

  On foot, we’re almost invisible. As spring turns to summer, the people of Christendom pour on to the roads in their thousands. You could travel from Canterbury to Compostela and never be alone. After the first week, when every bump in the road has me looking over my shoulder for the dust of galloping hooves, the crowds start to relax me. The more people who see us, the fewer who’ll notice.

  You can see the change in both of us. I grow my hair long, and let my beard grow out. Ada’s beauty’s harder to disguise, but after two months her skin is harder and darker. We present ourselves as husband and wife, and live accordingly. After so long lurking in shadows, it’s a joy to have it out in the open. It feels right, honest. I can almost forget that Ada has a real husband.

  She never talks about him, but there’s a look she has whenever we pass a church, a quietness, that reminds me she took a vow before God. It still binds her, however much I wish it away.

  For a time, when we stop being children, we wish the world could be other than it is – that wounds could heal without scars, that every love could be a first love, that past sins could be undone with a single confession. I learned the truth when I was young: we can never shed our sins and regrets, only accumulate more, a burden that we grow and carry until our deaths. The best we can do is learn to live with ourselves, to accommodate our pasts.

  At the shrine of Our Lady of Tours, I give Ada a wooden brooch, two birds drinking from a cup. I can’t marry her, but I get down on my knees and promise her, ‘I’ll always love you, I’ll always protect you.’

  But summer fades. One day, I realise the road isn’t as busy as it was the week before. It’s easier to find space at the pilgrim hostels and almshouses; the queues at the town gates aren’t as long. Travellers have begun to return home for the harvest, to wipe the dust off their shoes and lay up stores for winter. The questions that I’ve kept firmly over the horizon now seem urgent. When everyone goes home, where will we go? How will we support ourselves? We’ve stretched the money from the horses as far as we could, but it’s almost gone. On the road, it’s easy to pretend to be a glovemaker and his wife from London, but that won’t feed us through the winter. Ada can sew and weave, but so can every woman. The only trade I know is fighting.

  It’s late August when the answer comes to me. We’re in Burgundy, near Dijon; dusk is falling, earlier and earlier these days. We arrive at an inn. Usually we avoid them because of the cost, but it’s been raining all day and we slept under a hedge last night. Passing the door, I notice a tall blue shield painted with a golden star leaned against the wall. When I’ve haggled with the innkeeper for a bed and some food, I ask him about it.

  ‘Etienne de Luz.’ He jerks his thumb to the back room, where I can hear laughter and singing from behind a curtained door. ‘The Count of Dijon is holding a tourney in three days at La Roche.’

  The innkeeper slouches off to attend to something. Ada grabs my wrist. She can see what I’m thinking.

  ‘It’s too dangerous.’

  ‘No one will recognise me. We’re a long way from Normandy.’

  That’s not what she means. ‘Men die in the tourney all the time.’

  I know she’s right. There are no blunted edges and filed-down points in the tourney. When lances shatter, splinters fill the air like swarms of arrows. But next morning, after a long night arguing with Ada, I’m standing in the stableyard when Etienne de Luz comes to get his mount.

  It’s obvious at once that he’s no warrior. For a start, he’s fully armed: a real fighter would save his strength for combat. His gleaming hauberk and jewelled scabbard can’t hide the fact that his mail coat only has a single layer of rings, and his sword would probably snap in a strong wind. But the men who trail out of the tavern behind him look useful enough.

  I step in front of him. ‘I hear you’re taking a company to the tournament at La Roche.’

  He looks me up and down, then turns to his seneschal. He wants a second opinion. He’s vain, but he knows his limitations.

  The seneschal sees enough to be interested. ‘What can you do?’

  I look around the yard. My eye alights on a dove, perched on the edge of the roof, pecking grubs out of the thatch.

  ‘Give me a spear.’

  The seneschal obliges. I heft it in my hand, testing the weight, finding the balance. It doesn’t have the poise of a Welsh javelin, but it will have to do.

  I crouch, take a half-step back, and let fly. The javelin strikes the dove clean in the breast and goes through, burying itself in the thatch. Blood stains the white feathers. Etienne and his seneschal look impressed.

  Guy would say it’s hardly a knightly skill. But on the tournament field, all that matters is how many bodies you bring in.

  ‘Can you do that on horseback?’

  I don’t tell him how the dove got there – that I snared her last night in the stables and tethered her to the roof-beam with a loop of thread; that I’ve paced out the distance exactly. The storyteller doesn’t have to tell his audience everything.

  ‘Give me a horse, and I’ll show you what I can do.’

  XXVII

  London

  IF IT WASN’T for what came afterwards, the next month would have been the hardest of Ellie’s life. Every morning she was up at five, at her desk half an hour later chewing on a cereal bar and digesting the overnight news stories. At eight she met with Blanchard and the rest of the bid team, then straight on to twelve hours of meetings, conference calls, e-mails and spreadsheets. Every night at nine a taxi came to ferry her to the hospital, where she’d spend an hour at her mother’s bedside: at least, having gone private, there were no restrictions on visiting hours.
Then another taxi home, poring over the messages coming in on her phone, and perhaps a final hour’s work before two or three in the morning.

  She lived in darkness, a world of constant night where she never seemed to sleep. She began walking to the office again, even when it rained, just for ten minutes in the open air. Soon she came to recognise the people who were up at that hour: the streetsweeper on the corner of Gresham Street, making the world new again; the newspaper delivery driver who honked as he drove past; the newsagent lifting the shutter on his shop who never looked at her. Sometimes she remembered to be careful, to watch for following footsteps or shadows in doorways. Most of the time she was too tired to think of it.

  She was in limbo, a tight-stretched canvas on which other men wrote their desires. Some days she thought it would tear her in two. She couldn’t leave Blanchard, not while her mother lay sick in his hospital; she couldn’t ignore Harry. She didn’t even know if she was still going out with Doug. She’d told him about her mother, much later than she should have, garbling the story to hide the fact she’d been in Switzerland for Christmas. He’d wanted to go down and visit, but Ellie told him not to. She could tell he was hurt – he started to say something about the state of their relationship, but bit it back. After that, he called once a week to ask how her mother was doing, but otherwise left her alone. The calls were so formal, so measured, she sometimes wondered if she’d broken up with him in a sleep-deprived moment and forgotten it.

  As the month wore on, Blanchard began to give her unusual new assignments. One night, she found herself outside an office block in Wapping slipping a stiff-backed envelope through a letterbox. Two days later, a newspaper not usually known for its business coverage printed a story about the Finance Director of Talhouett UK. Under the headline BANKER SPANKER it described, with excellently reproduced photographs and eyewitness testimony, the Soho habits he hadn’t thought to reveal to his wife. He threatened to sue, then resigned to spend more time with his family.

  Another day, Ellie spent a morning sitting in the lobby of a hotel on Knightsbridge, watching for the trustee of a well-known pension fund. When he arrived, she followed him into the lift. By the time he reached the seventh floor he owned a new Gucci briefcase so heavy that simply carrying it left him lopsided. A week later, his fund announced that it would use its shareholding to vote in favour of the Saint-Lazare takeover.

  If Ellie had stopped to think, she might have considered the implications of what she was doing. But she didn’t. Her working mind had become a balance sheet: things that progressed the takeover; things that impeded it. Cause and effect barely entered the equation; right and wrong not at all. She was too tired.

  At least she didn’t have to travel much. Talhouett’s headquarters and most of its business were on the continent, but a quirk of history had left its principal share listing in London. There was only one trip, and like most of her travels, it happened unexpectedly, when Blanchard stormed into her office one afternoon. Ellie had never seen him look so furious.

  He knows, she thought. Harry, Newport, everything.

  She shuffled papers and tried to look cool. ‘What is it?’

  ‘A white knight.’ He slammed a folder on her desk. ‘What do you know about the Koenig Group?’

  Ellie swallowed as she tried to pull her thoughts together. ‘They’re private equity, aren’t they? Mainly infrastructure and communications deals.’

  ‘They have tabled a friendly offer for Talhouett. The management is keen – even the German government may consider supporting the bid. One of their politicians thinks we are the unacceptable face of global capitalism.’ He pulled a face.

  ‘That makes no sense.’ Ellie frowned. ‘We’re already offering more than the accretion/dilution numbers say. Koenig don’t have any complementary businesses to create synergies, and if the German government are on board they won’t let them sack workers or break up the company. What’s in it for them?’

  ‘This is not a coincidence, Ellie. Michel Saint-Lazare has enemies: one of them has put Koenig up to this. We must go to Paris at once.’

  ‘I thought Koenig were in Frankfurt.’

  ‘There is no point speaking to them.’ He picked up his file and turned to go.

  ‘Koenig want to play the white knight. You know the easiest way to stop a charging knight?’

  Ellie looked blank.

  ‘Kill his horse.’

  The Bentley purred down Commercial Road towards Limehouse. Traffic was light, but Blanchard ordered the driver to take a detour. When Ellie glanced up from her laptop, she was surprised to see long rows of warehouses crawling past.

  ‘Is this the way to the airport?’

  Blanchard murmured something about roadworks. Ellie went back to her work. When she looked again, the car had stopped at a dead end in a mazy industrial estate. She assumed they’d taken a wrong turn – but Blanchard was staring out the window with purpose, waiting for something. Had he spoken?

  Ellie followed his gaze, through a chain-link fence topped with coils of razor wire. Behind it lay a wasteland: charred bricks and twisted metal beams, the remnant of a warehouse gutted by fire. The breeze blew up flakes of ash, as if the fire still lingered, though it must have happened some time ago. The rubble had been bulldozed into heaps, and the scorch marks on the adjacent buildings painted over. At the back of the plot, a derelict sign advertised Logical Components, a monument to the fallen company.

  But she’d seen the name before. She remembered her first week at work, a proud old man defying Blanchard’s offer so that his son could inherit a business he didn’t want. The Rosenberg Automation Company, which had streamlined its supply chain to remain competitive. A skip behind the factory, waist deep in cardboard looking at logos on boxes. Logical Components – the choice is Logical.

  ‘That was the company that sold logic boards to Rosenberg. Their key supplier.’

  ‘Their factory burned down three months ago. Without their components, Rosenberg were unable to continue manufacturing. Their customers deserted them, the bank denied them credit. They were about to declare bankruptcy when we made one final offer to acquire them. Reduced, obviously. The company was almost worthless.’

  Ellie forced herself to look him in the eye. ‘Why did you bring me here?’

  ‘Rosenberg was your first deal. I thought you would want to know how it ended.’

  ‘Not like this.’ She stared at the wreckage, imagining the flames consuming the building. ‘Did you do it?’

  ‘Of course not.’ He parted his lips, baring his teeth. Daring her to contradict him.

  ‘But if I did – is it wrong? A company, fundamentally, is merely the sum of its assets. An accumulation of value. Let us say I order our trading division to take an aggressive position regarding a certain corporation. They dump the stock, or short-sell it. A rumour goes around the market and others follow suit. In a matter of minutes I have destroyed hundreds of millions of pounds from a company’s assets. All perfectly legally. Why is it any different if I destroy those assets in the form of buildings and machinery, rather than paper? If I use fire rather than the telephone?’

  ‘It’s illegal.’

  ‘Nobody dies. We have a sentimental attachment to physical property, but it is nothing more than an incarnation of wealth. And wealth is the material of capitalism. We create it or we destroy it; we work to acquire it and deny it to our enemies.’

  ‘And what does all that wealth buy you?’ Ellie murmured – more audibly than she’d intended. Blanchard looked surprised.

  ‘Power, of course.’

  Paris

  Ellie had always wanted to see Paris, but not like this. They landed in darkness; half an hour later, a limousine was sweeping through the post-rush hour traffic. She felt on edge. Every time she looked back, a black Range Rover with dark tinted windows seemed to be behind them. If they changed lanes, it followed; when they turned, it turned. When a taxi tried to nip in front, it roared forward to close the gap, almost taking
off the taxi’s front bumper. The taxi veered away with a squawk of outrage.

  ‘Is someone following us?’

  Blanchard glanced back and smiled. ‘Destrier has arranged a babysitter. He says there is a gang of anarchists who have made threats against us. Nothing specific, but Destrier worries. He’s like a grandmother.’

  The Range Rover melted away in traffic as the limousine drew up in the Place Vendôme outside the Paris Ritz. At check-in, their room keys came with a message.

  ‘Mr Lechowski is awaiting you in the Elton John suite.’

  Ellie’s heart sank. ‘Is he advising Koenig now?’

  ‘He was a natural choice. He already knew the company inside out from trying to buy it.’

  ‘Is that ethical?’

  ‘It’s efficient.’

  The Elton John suite was more tasteful than Ellie had expected, a soft-lit symphony of pink and ivory. The heels of her shoes almost lost themselves in the carpet. Lechowski was waiting for them in the sitting room. Through an open door, Ellie could see an eight-foot-wide bed capped with a pink canopy.

  ‘You are looking as beautiful as ever, Ellie,’ he complimented her. ‘May I get you a drink?’

  ‘Just water.’

  He picked up a pink telephone and ordered.

  ‘This is an unexpected meeting. Your assistant would tell me nothing on the phone, but I assume you have come about Talhouett? You did very well in Luxembourg; we were disappointed not to win. Our bid was only five million euros less than yours.’ He watched Blanchard carefully. ‘But perhaps you knew that already.’

  Preternaturally quickly, the waiter came with the drinks – mineral water for Ellie, a brandy for Blanchard and a Jack Daniels for Lechowski.

  ‘This is about Talhouett,’ Blanchard confirmed.

  Lechowski spat out his wad of gum. ‘Off the record?’

  ‘That depends what we agree.’ Blanchard took out his knife and sliced the end off a cigar. ‘Koenig gains nothing by buying Talhouett. Ellie?’