The Nostradamus prophecies as-1

by Mario Reading

  ‘If I had these prophecies I would destroy them.’

  ‘But you don’t have them. And you will soon be dead. So it is all an irrelevance to you.’

  54

  Sabir lay on his belly at the edge of the stand of trees, watching. He could feel the horror of his position leaching through his body like a cancer.

  Yola was standing on a three-legged stool. A bread sack covered her head and a noose had been slipped around her neck. Sabir was certain that it was Yola by her clothes and by the timbre of her voice. She was talking to someone and this person was answering her – a deeper, more dominant timbre. Not up and down, like a woman, but fl at – all on one note. Like a priest intoning the liturgy.

  It didn’t take a genius to realise that the eye-man had staked Yola out as bait to catch him and Alexi. Nor to realise that the minute that they showed themselves, or came within range, they would be dead meat – and Yola with them. The fact that the eye-man would thereby inadvertently lose the best chance he had ever had to discover the location of the prophecies was yet another of life’s tender little ironies.

  Sabir made up his mind. He squirrelled himself backwards through the undergrowth towards Alexi. This time he would not blunder in and risk everybody’s lives. This time he would use his head.

  55

  When Macron’s cellphone rang, he was interviewing three reluctant gitans, who had only just crossed the Catalonian border that morning, near Perpignan. They had obviously never heard of Sabir, Alexi or Yola and didn’t object to making this clear. One of them, sensing Macron’s ill-concealed hostility, even pretended to fend him off with the fl at of his forearm – just as if he had the ‘evil eye’. Macron might have ignored the insult in the normal run of things. Now he responded angrily, the concentrated memory banks of his mother’s ingrained superstitious beliefs erupting, uncalled for, through the habitually dormant surface of his own sensibilities.

  The truth was that he felt disheartened and bone-weary. All his injuries seemed to have compounded themselves into one all-encompassing ache and, to cap it all, Calque seemed to be favouring one of the new detectives to make the real running in the investigation. Macron felt humiliated and isolated – all the more so as he considered himself a local lad, whilst the six pandores Calque had seconded from Marseille – his home town, for Christ’s sake! – still insisted on treating him like a pariah. Like a sailor who has abandoned ship and is busily swimming towards the enemy, hoping to give himself up in exchange for preferential treatment. Like a Parisian.

  ‘Yes?’

  Five hundred metres from the Maset Sabir nodded gratefully to the motorist who had lent him the phone.

  Five minutes earlier he had leapt in front of the man’s car, waving dramatically. Even then the man hadn’t halted, but had veered over on to the hard shoulder, missing Sabir by inches. Fifty metres further up the road he had changed his mind and stopped the car, doubtless imagining that there had been an accident somewhere in amongst the marshes. Sabir couldn’t blame him. In his panic, he had forgotten all about his shirt, which was still wrapped around the gelding’s nose – he must have presented a disturbing sight, lurching out of the undergrowth on a minor country road, half naked and in the pitch darkness.

  ‘This is Sabir.’

  ‘You’ve got to be joking.’

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘Lieutenant Macron. Captain Calque’s assistant. We haven’t met, unfortunately, but I know all about you. You’ve been running us a merry little dance across most of France. You and your two Magi.’

  ‘Pass me Calque. I have to talk to him. Urgently.’

  ‘Captain Calque is conducting interviews. Tell me where you are and we’ll send a stretch limousine out to collect you. How’s that for starters?’

  ‘I know where the eye-man is.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s holed up in a house, about five hundred metres from where I am speaking to you. He is holding a hostage, Yola Samana. He has her standing on a stool, with a noose around her neck. She’s lit up like a son et lumiere. The eye-man is presumably hiding in the shadows with a pistol, waiting for Alexi and me to show ourselves. As far as armament is concerned, Alexi and I have got exactly one knife between us. We don’t stand a chance in Hell. If your precious Captain Calque can get some paramilitaries in place and if he can guarantee me that he will prioritise Yola’s safety – and not the capture of the eye-man – I’ll tell you where I am. If not, you can both go and piss against a drystone wall. I’ll go in myself.’

  ‘Stop. Stop. Wait. Are you still in the Camargue?’

  ‘Yes. That much I’ll tell you. Is it agreed? Otherwise I’ll switch this phone off right now.’

  ‘It’s agreed. I’ll go and fetch Calque. There are CRS paramilitaries on permanent standby in Marseille. They can be deployed straight away. By helicopter, if necessary. It will take no more than an hour.’

  ‘Too long.’

  ‘Less. Less than an hour. If you can be accurate about the location. Give me an exact map reference. The CRS will have to work out where to land the helicopter without giving away their presence. And then approach by foot.’

  ‘The man I borrowed the cellphone from may have a map. Go get Calque. I’ll stay online.’

  ‘No. No. We can’t risk your battery running out. I have your number. When I’ve reached Calque I will call you back. Get me that map reference.’

  As Macron ran to where he knew Calque was conducting his interviews, he was already scrolling down for the code to their Paris headquarters. ‘Andre. It’s Paul. I have a cellphone number for you. We need an instant GPS. It’s urgent. Code One.’

  ‘Code One? You’re joking.’

  ‘This is a hostage situation. The man holding the hostage killed the security guard in Rocamadour. Get me that GPS. We’re in the Camargue. If any other part of France comes up on your gizmo, you’ve got interference or a malfunction. Get me the exact position of that cellphone. To within five metres. And inside five minutes. I can’t afford to blow this.’

  ***

  Within thirty seconds of Macron explaining the situation to him, Calque was on the phone to Marseille.

  ‘This is a Code One priority. I will identify myself.’ He read out the number on his identity card. ‘You will see a ten letter cipher when you type in my name on the computer. It is this. HKL481GYP7. Do you have that? Does it match the code on the national database? It does? Good. Hand me over to your supervisor immediately.’

  Calque spent an intense five minutes talking down the phone. Then he turned to Macron.

  ‘Have Paris come back to you with Sabir’s GPS?’

  ‘Yes, Sir.’

  ‘Now phone him. Compare it with the map reference he gives you.’

  Macron got back on the phone to Sabir. ‘Do you have a map reference for us? Yes? Give it to me.’ He marked it down in his notebook, then ran across and showed it to Calque.

  ‘It matches. Tell him to wait exactly where he is until you arrive. Then get into place yourself and call the situation in to me at this number.’ He scribbled down a number on Macron’s pad. ‘It is the number of the local Gendarmerie. I will base myself there, coordinating the operation between Paris, Marseille and Les Saintes-Maries. I have been reliably informed that it will take at least fifty minutes to get the paramilitaries in place. You can be at the Maset in thirty. Twenty-five, even. Stop Sabir and the gypsy from panicking into any precipitate action. If it looks as though the girl is being imminently threatened, intervene. If not, keep your head down. Do you have your pistol?’

  ‘Yes, Sir.’

  ‘Take any of the detectives that you can find with you. If you can’t find any, go alone. I will send them on behind you.’

  ‘Yes, Sir.’

  ‘And Macron?

  ‘Yes, Sir?’

  ‘No unnecessary heroics. There are lives at stake here.’

  56

  The life-transforming idea came to Macron about six minutes into his journey
. It seemed so simple – and so logical – that he was sorely tempted to pull the car over on to the hard shoulder to afford himself a little extra elbow room to consider it.

  Why not think outside the loop for a change? Use his initiative? Why not take advantage of the eye-man’s ignorance about the secret connection between Sabir and the police? It was the single edge they had on him. He would be expecting only Sabir and the gypsy to come riding to the girl’s rescue. Why not make use of that very fact to pull off an ambush?

  Macron had been present at only one single police siege during the course of his career. He had just turned twenty and had passed his police primaries six days before. Neighbours had reported seeing a man threatening his wife with a gun. A building in the 13th arrondissement had been sealed off. Macron had been all but forgotten about. His police mentor at the time had been a trained negotiator and had been called in at the very last moment to defuse the situation. Macron had asked if he might come along as an observer. The man had said yes. Just so long as he kept out of the way. Far out of the way.

  Five minutes into the siege the negotiations had broken down. The wife had made a comment to her husband which had driven him over the brink. He had killed her, killed the negotiator and then killed himself.

  It was the very first time that Macron had seen and understood the innate fallibility of the police machine. Which was only as good as the cogs that made it up. If one of the cogs skipped a ratchet, the whole machine could go kaput. Faster than the Titanic.

  He had liked that mentor. Macron had counted on the man to monitor and encourage his career. Shepherd him through his rookie-ship.

  After the siege he had been forgotten about a second time. As good as abandoned. No more mentors. No more helping hands up the greasy pole. And now it was all happening again. The Marseillais detectives would come in and take over his case. Cosy up to Calque. Shunt Macron to the sidelines. Take all the credit that was his by right.

  The eye-man had hurt him. Once, personally, out in the field and once, professionally, on the road to Millau. And now the man was sitting, like a staked-out pigeon, in a partially lit room, expecting to dominate proceedings for the third time.

  But Macron would be the spoke in his machine. He had a gun. He had the crucial element of surprise. The eye-man had made himself a sitting duck. Who would know, in the chaos of a shootout, what had really gone down?

  If he killed the eye-man, his career would be made. He would forever remain the man who had cracked the twin fatalities of the Paris gypsy case. The gypsy didn’t matter, of course. But security guards were honorary police – at least when it came to being murdered. Macron could already imagine the envy of his peers; the admiration of his fiancee; the grudging respect from his normally detached father; the triumphant revenge of his downtrodden mother who had fought long and hard for his right to leave the bakery and attend police college.

  Yes. This was it. This would be Paul Eric Macron’s moment of truth.

  57

  Sabir was standing by the side of the road, just as arranged. Macron recognised him immediately from the image he kept on his cellphone. Sabir had lost weight in the intervening period and his expression lacked some of the bumptious self-confidence he exuded in the publicity photograph they had downloaded from his agency website. Now his face looked washed out in the artificial light from the stationary Simca’s headlights – an airport face – the face of a man in endless transit.

  The idiot was even stripped to the waist. Why had the other motorist stopped? If Macron, as a civilian, had happened upon a half naked-man, in the middle of a lonely road, at dusk, he would have hurried on past and left him to the next fool down the line. Or called the police. Not risked a mugging or a car-napping by stopping to pick him up. People were strange, sometimes.

  Macron drew up beside the Simca, his eyes scanning the road for traps. At this stage he wouldn’t put anything past the eye-man. Even setting up an ambush, with Sabir as the bait, in order to procure himself a police hostage. ‘Are you alone? Is it just you two here? Where’s the other gypsy?’

  ‘You mean Alexi? Alexi Dufontaine? He’s injured. I’ve left him with the horse.’

  ‘The horse?’

  ‘We rode in. At least Alexi did.’

  Macron sifted a little air through his front teeth. ‘And you, Monsieur. You decided to lend this man your phone?’

  The farmer ducked his head. ‘Yes. Yes. He was standing in the road with his hands held up. I nearly struck him with my car. He said he had to call the police. Are you the police? What is going on here?’

  Macron showed the man his warrant card. ‘I’m going to record your name and address on my cellphone and take a picture of you. With your permission, of course. Then you may go. We will contact you later if we need to.’

  ‘What’s happening here?’

  ‘Your name, Sir?’

  Once the formalities were over, Sabir and Macron watched the Simca disappear into the darkness.

  Sabir turned towards the policeman. ‘When is Captain Calque coming?’

  ‘Captain Calque is not coming. He is coordinating the operation from the gendarmerie in Les Saintes-Maries. The paramilitaries will be here in two hours.’

  ‘The Hell you say? You told me fi fty minutes. You people must be crazy. The eye-man has had Yola standing on a stool for God knows how long, with a noose around her neck and a sack covering her head. She must be scared witless. She’ll fall. We need an ambulance on standby. Paramedics. A fucking helicopter.’

  ‘Calm yourself, Sabir. There’s an ongoing crisis in Marseille. The detachment of CRS we would normally be counting on for operations of this nature are fully occupied with other matters. We have had to address ourselves to Montpellier instead. Permissions have had to be given. Identities checked. That all adds to the time frame.’ Macron was astonished at how easily the lies tripped off his tongue.

  ‘What are we going to do then? Just wait? She’ll never hold out that long. And neither will Alexi. He’ll crack and go powering in. And so will I. If he goes, I go.’

  ‘No you won’t.’ Macron tapped the waist of his blouson, just above the hip. ‘I have a pistol. If necessary, I will handcuff both of you to my car and leave you for my colleagues to find. You, Sabir, are still wanted for murder. And I have reason to suspect that your companions – Dufontaine and the girl – have been using this house illegally. Have you any idea who it actually belongs to? Or have you just been house-sitting on spec?’

  Sabir ignored him. He pointed up the track leading towards the house. ‘When’s your local back-up coming? You need to cut through all this bullshit, surround the place and make immediate contact with the eye-man. The sooner you start putting pressure on him, the better. Make it clear that he will gain nothing by harming Yola. That was the deal we had. The deal I made with your boss.’

  ‘My local back-up will be here in fifteen minutes. Twenty at the outside. They know exactly where to go and what to do. Show me the situation, Sabir. Explain to me exactly what trouble you have all managed to get yourselves into. And then we will see what we can do to get you out of it.’

  58

  Macron had settled on his plan. It was absurdly simple. He had reconnoitred the house and understood the layout perfectly. A wide-open window led to the back of the Maset. He would wait for Sabir and Alexi to show themselves and then he would pass through it, counting on their voices – and the eye-man’s concentration on them – to mask the sound of his movements. The minute he had a clear sight of the eye-man he would take him out – a shot to the right shoulder ought to do it.

  For Macron wanted his day in court. It wouldn’t be enough just to kill the eye-man – he wanted the bastard to suffer. Just as he had suffered with his feet. And his back. And his neck. And the muscle at the top of his buttock that had been crushed by the car seat and which ticked incessantly since the accident – particularly when he was attempting to drift off to sleep.

  He wanted the eye-man to suffer all the
tiny humiliations of bureaucratic procedure that he, Macron, had to suffer in his position as a junior police officer. All the stone walls and the Chinese whispers and the unintentionally intentional mortifications. He wanted the eye-man to rot for thirty years in a ten foot by six foot jail cell and to come out an old man, with no friends, no future and with his health in tatters.

  Sabir had been telling the truth after all. This was a crisis. The girl was obviously on her last legs. She was swinging around like a rag doll on a light bracket. She couldn’t possibly hold out for the twenty-five minutes necessary for the CRS to land a helicopter the full kilometre and a half away from the Maset needed for effective sound containment – and then to hurry into position.

  This had become his call. He was the man the service had in place. Any hesitation would only lead to tragedy.

  Macron squatted down beside Sabir and Alexi. He checked the loads in his pistol, enjoying the feeling of power it gave him over the other two men. ‘Give me three minutes to get round to the back of the house and then show yourselves. But don’t come within the eye-man’s range. Stay near the trees and tantalise him. Draw him out. I want him framed against the front door.’

  ‘If you see him, will you take him out? Not hesitate? The man’s a psychopath. He’ll kill Yola without a second thought. God alone knows what he’s put her through already.’

  ‘I’ll shoot. I’ve done it before. It wouldn’t be the first time. Our part of Paris is no nursery. There are shootings nearly every day.’

  Macron’s words didn’t ring true somehow – Sabir couldn’t quite get himself to believe in them. There was something fervid about the man – something just a little fake. As though he were a civilian who had wandered into a police operation and had decided, off the cuff, to act the part of a participating officer simply for the Hell of it. ‘Are you sure Captain Calque’s okayed this?’