Prophecy. An ARKANE thriller. (Book 2)

by J. F. Penn

  *****

  As the evening progressed, Morgan was determined not to seek Milan out again, but it was a fine balance between ignoring him and trying to make sure he didn’t disappear with anyone else. She needed to be sure it was her that he left with. If she could just get access to one of his private terminals, they might find the evidence they needed to link him to Thanatos and shut down the audio programs.

  She flitted between the groups of donors, engaging in sparkling conversation with as many eligible men as she could before moving on when they became just a little too interested. Occasionally she spotted Jake through the crowd where he seemed to be paying special attention to the lady in the peach dress. Morgan was sure to always keep Milan within sight and be certain he knew where she was too. Their movements became a dance of courtship, an ever decreasing circle engineered to ensure they ended up together.

  It was getting late and people were finally starting to leave. As Milan helped the Foundation seniority with farewells, Morgan caught his eye and indicated an arched doorway to her right, assuming he would follow when he could get away. A nearby waiter offered her another drink. She took one gratefully and stepped into the next room, away from the crowd at last. She took a long draught, in need of some courage since this femme fatale business was hardly her usual persona. She just hoped she could take it far enough to get the access they needed. Martin had been unable to hack into the deepest levels of Zoebios, so this was their only way in.

  The room she entered was a long gallery, cramped with glass cases and dominated by a tall basalt pillar. Morgan recognized it as the Law Code of Hammurabi from the Mesopotamian court in Babylon, dated to the eighteenth century BC. She went to examine it more closely, expecting Milan to be a little longer. It was the most important legal compendium of the ancient near east, drafted earlier than the biblical laws. The text was cuneiform, containing the history of Hammurabi as well as legal judgments and a lyrical epilogue. She reached out to stroke the ancient surface, giving in to the sensation of wanting to connect with the past.

  There was the sound of a step in the corridor and she pulled back, turning to face the doorway, expecting to see Milan. Instead, a security guard walked in.

  “Are you fine Madame?” the man enquired.

  “Yes, of course, thank you. I was just looking at the stele.”

  Morgan took another long sip of the champagne to hide her nerves, the glass almost empty now. The security guard came to stand next to her at the pillar.

  “It is magnificent, isn’t it,” he said. “Many tourists walk straight past it. Perhaps they don’t understand the unique insight it gives into the ancient culture that had such an impact on early civilization.”

  As the man spoke, Morgan began to feel dizzy. It wasn’t alcohol, she hadn’t drunk that much. The man came closer and clutched her arm. She couldn’t speak, her tongue had grown thick and heavy in her mouth and the strength went from her legs.

  “It’s alright, Madame, just lean on me. Relax now.”

  In a haze of fear, Morgan realized she had been drugged. As she collapsed into the arms of the security guard, her last thought was of Jake, willing him to find her.

  Louvre, Paris, France. 11.15pm

  Sometimes it was necessary to change the plan mid way through an operation. That was the nature of warfare, of espionage and Jake kept colleagues at a distance, preferring to be called aloof than to suffer loss as keenly as he had once before. But these defense mechanisms shattered when he realized that Morgan was gone. He walked down yet another corridor of the Louvre Palace, knowing even as he did so that he wouldn’t find her in this maze of culture. He stopped in front of a striking painting by Delaroche. A young woman in white lay as if sleeping in calm water, her pale face lit by moonlight and the gold of a halo. Her hands were tightly bound with a leather strap and above her a dark figure loomed, looking down on his victim. A portrait of the aftermath of violence, Jake thought, seeing Morgan’s face in the water. He turned away, his stomach clenching. It was time to get some help.

  Martin Klein picked up on the first ring.

  “Jake, what’s happened? Morgan’s gone dark.”

  Even in his concern, Jake smiled at the efficiency of his friend. He knew he had a good team behind him and hope kindled as he explained.

  “We were separated in the crowd as the evening ended. I could see her scarlet dress on the other side of the reception hall but I had to be sociable in order to maintain cover and turned away for a minute. Only a minute Martin…”

  “I know Jake, it’s OK. We’ll find her. What then?”

  “People were starting to leave and then suddenly she wasn’t there. I’ve done a full sweep of the reception area now everyone has left. The Museum staff let me interview the security team once they found out I was on assignment. But there’s no way I can look through the whole of the Louvre and surrounding buildings. It would take weeks, there are hidden passageways everywhere.”

  “Did she go with Milan Noble? After all, that was the point of the evening?” Martin asked.

  “She certainly spent a lot of time talking with him.” Jake remembered the way Morgan had looked at the man, touched his arm, laughed with him. Her hair had caught the light and drowned it in dark waves. He shook his head. “But she didn’t leave with him. I didn’t speak with him either as I didn’t want to blow my cover, but he was one of the party saying goodbye to the donors and he left alone.”

  “He must have a team then or maybe it’s someone else. What about security cameras?”

  “They’re claiming I can’t view them until the morning so I need your help, Martin.”

  “Already on it. Give me ten minutes.”

  “OK, I’ll head back to the houseboat and call you back.” Jake was confident that Martin would find something. He was a virtuoso of code and would hack the Louvre from one of his special terminals, independent of other ARKANE equipment so it couldn’t be traced or hacked back.

  Jake left the Louvre and walked along the embankment path by the Seine. The Paris night would have been beautiful if Morgan had been by his side. He thought again of that scarlet dress and how earlier he had helped her climb out of the boat, holding her hand for the first time since the dying flames of Pentecost. He had been so conscious of her touch but it was brief and she had let go as soon as she was on the sidewalk.

  The houseboat was moored under the Pont des Arts, where couples left padlocks with their names on to lock their passion into the city of love. He could see the Île de la Cité, green trees dripping over mottled grey walls and Notre Dame lit from below, a beacon of faith that Jake just didn’t find inspirational tonight. He knocked on the hatch of the houseboat and heard the sound of the lock being drawn back. A concerned face looked out. Jean Pierre Moreau stood back to let Jake inside.

  “Where’s Morgan? I was going to come and find you. I’ve been going crazy.”

  “You and me both, JP. What time did her tracker go dark?”

  “It was six minutes before you radioed to say she’d gone. Look at the logs.”

  Jean Pierre indicated the tiny computer station they had installed in the houseboat. The mission had only called for a small local contingent and JP had worked with Jake before. The two were fast friends. An empty wine bottle still stood on the table from their dinner last night, strangely out of place with Morgan missing.

  “The trace disappears at the Jardin du Luxembourg.”

  Jean Pierre nodded. “So she’s in a car. It’s too far to make it there by foot in that time. It must mean she’s being held in south Paris or at least heading south.”

  A light pulsed on the console. Jake clicked to answer the incoming call from ARKANE.

  “Spooky, what do you have?”

  Martin’s fond nickname was due to his uncanny ability to find nuggets of information in an infinity of data. He never failed to deliver even if it took him years to do so.

  “I’m sending the raw footage of that time period over now Jake. You c
an click between the windows to see the various camera angles, but there’s no sound.”

  The streaming video popped up in another window and Jake saw the party he had been at only hours before. The quality of the picture was excellent. From one camera angle, he could see Morgan talking to Milan Noble by a statue in the corner. She smiled up at him.

  “Fast forward, this is too early,” Jake said, not wanting to see her flirtatious manner with the man. The footage sped forward. Milan moved away to talk to donors while Morgan walked around the gallery talking to various people but always moving on. Then she stopped and indicated towards another room before heading through an arched doorway, taking a glass of champagne from a waiter on the way in.

  “Stop it there Martin. Is there a view from the room she’s about to enter?”

  “That’s the code of Hammurabi room so yes, there’s a feed.”

  The screen changed to a smaller room, cluttered with display cases that obscured angles. Morgan walked in alone, holding the glass tightly as if it was an anchor for her sanity.

  “Elle est magnifique,” JP whispered. Jake said nothing but watched as she went to stand in front of the basalt pillar. She reached out to touch it, then she pulled her hand away sharply and looked towards the entrance she had just come through.

  “She’s heard something.”

  Jake watched as Morgan’s face relaxed. A security guard came in and she played the part of the interested tourist. He came to stand next to her and she took a larger swig of the bubbles. Then she reached out, unsteady on her feet, her face confused. The guard held her elbow to support her and then put his arm around her waist as she slumped against him. He looked around to see if anyone had seen, then spoke into his radio.

  “The champagne. She was drugged.” Jake banged his fist down onto the table and watched as another guard came in and together they half carried the unconscious Morgan away from the gathering and out another door. “Bastards. They weren’t official security guards either, at least not from the detail that I interviewed afterwards.”

  JP leant forward.

  “Are there any more feeds, Martin? Where did they take her next?”

  “The cameras show them outside entering a small black Fiat. I’m looking for CCTV now to track where it went next.”

  Jake was pacing up and down as far as he could on the tiny houseboat floor.

  “What do you think, JP. Was it Noble? He seemed mightily interested in her.”

  Jean-Pierre shrugged.

  “She’s a beautiful woman and I wouldn’t blame him for being interested. But he didn’t pour the drink and we still aren’t sure that he’s involved in any of this. I don’t think he has to drug the women he’s interested in either. I mean the guy has looks, money, power. Why go to those lengths?”

  “My gut says he has her, and that’s all we have right now. Martin, I need you to go deeper with Milan. We haven’t broken the data on his past yet, but now I need to know.”

  “I’ve started the pattern algorithms but that will take time. We already have all the superficial information, the publicly available stuff.” Martin paused.“Wait. It looks like the car is at Hôpital La Rochefoucauld. If you head down there, I’ll start digging further. We’ll find her, I know it.”

  Jake sat down heavily. Just for a moment he needed stability beneath him. He felt JP’s hand on his shoulder.

  “Mon ami, don’t worry just yet. They want her for a reason, whoever they are. They will keep her alive.”

  Jake looked up at his friend.

  “But for what reason? Why could they possibly need her?”

  Catacombs, Paris, France. 11.50pm

  Morgan woke in pitch darkness, shivering with the cold, and tried to orientate herself. She was still wearing the flamenco dress from the party and the earth was damp beneath her bare arms. Her shoes and bag were gone. She touched the cross around her neck. At least she still had that. She sat up slowly, her head spinning, bracing herself with both arms on the floor until the dizziness subsided. Her fingers dug into the dirt. It smelled like peat, earthy and pleasant. It was soft from the damp and she could hear the dull thwack of water dripping from a low ceiling nearby. Morgan listened intently. In the distance, she could hear voices muted by the heavy air.

  She stretched out and shuffled to the right, sweeping her arms in a wide circle before her. Her fingers brushed a cold wall and she moved to face it in the dark, tracing the ridged surface. It felt hard like concrete but the texture was unusual, a repeating pattern of knobs and notches with smooth patches between. She used the wall to pull herself up and then felt along the top of it. There was a gap so she reached an arm out, touching a pile of debris that lay on top, spiky in parts, with irregular shapes and some loose pieces. Picking one up, Morgan ran her other hand over the object. As she felt its smooth length with a ball on one end and scalloped notches on the other, she realized it was a human femur. Fighting the urge to drop it, she focused on the cool of the bone she held. After all, the dead couldn’t hurt her. The dead didn’t drug her and leave her here in the cold and this femur could be a weapon, a makeshift baseball bat.

  Voices became clearer in the passage and she could see a faint light approaching. Morgan sank to the floor, this time with the femur tucked beneath her. She faced the oncoming light with eyes closed and focused on the voices. A torch shone in her face. She didn’t react.

  “She’s still out.”

  “We’ll have to wake her soon, as the boss is coming down after the party. Did you give her too much sedative?”

  “No, I swear, I just followed the directions on the bottle.”

  “Genius,” the man snorted. “Right then, we’re meant to treat her nice so we’ll have to wake her gently. I can think of more interesting things to do, but that’s orders for now.”

  Morgan sensed he was bending down towards her and in that moment, she thrust herself up from the floor, whipping the femur around and catching the man square on the side of his face. It was a powerful blow but she couldn’t put full force behind it from that angle. Nevertheless he grunted and fell sideways. As the torch dropped to the floor, Morgan caught a glimpse of the piles of bones that made up the walls of the tunnel. The man began to right himself and she used the femur again, this time like a battering ram into his lower belly. He doubled over and sank to the floor, winded and gesturing to the other man to do something but he didn’t look keen to engage. Morgan turned and grinned, slapping the femur bone into her other hand, taunting him.

  “Come on then, what are you waiting for? You want to treat me nicely?”

  “Why can’t you just come with us? We’re not going to hurt you, we just need you to see the boss.”

  He was almost pleading with her, one eye on his friend who was seconds from recovering. Morgan knew she had little time, so she feinted left and as the second man bent to catch her she ducked past him in the narrow corridor. As she went under his arm, she jabbed the femur hard into his kidney and ran down the passageway into the dark. Finding an alcove, she bent her body into it, pressing against the bony wall. She heard them cursing and swearing, then the first man shouted.

  “We’re going to find you, Dr Sierra. It’s only a matter of time. There are kilometers of tunnels down here. You sit tight now. We’ll be back.”

  As their footsteps faded up the passageway, Morgan’s heart rate slowed as the adrenalin of the fight passed. They hadn’t been prepared for her but they would be next time and the chill was starting to penetrate her bones. This dress had been perfect for the Louvre party but was hardly protection against the cold down here. With bare feet and no way of warming herself, she would soon be affected by the cold and they would catch her. She had to find a way out.

  In the glimpse she’d had of the walls in the torchlight, she realized she must be in the catacombs, deep below the fourteenth arrondissement in Paris. She had been here once, years ago, when visiting the Faculté Libre de Théologie Protestante de Paris, on nearby Boulevard Arago. One of t
he pastors had given her a tour of this Empire of the Dead. He had told her that the catacombs contained nearly six million skeletons, the bodies moved from public cemeteries at the end of the eighteenth century to stop the spread of disease. Here in the cool darkness, Morgan didn’t feel any sense of dread or foreboding, yet she knew the bones were piled here in corridors stretching for kilometers underground. Morgan had seen pictures of the bodies brought here on carts, only ever at night in order to save the people of Paris from the disturbance. There had been rumors of grave-robbers, the dead rising as zombies and the hand of Satan, but there was a different feeling to the malevolence of the Palermo crypt. These skeletons were witnesses to life but they had passed on. They were architecture now, forgotten individuals but together they became a fitting memorial for the deaths of unknown millions in the Black Death and the poorhouses of Paris.

  Water dripped onto Morgan’s shoulder, the freezing chill running down her back. She shivered. Enough dwelling on the past, she thought, it was time to get out of here. Feeling her way along the wall, she started to walk, her fingers lightly touching the arrangement of skulls and femurs as she went. A light glowed up ahead as she turned a corner. She flattened against the wall again, but there was no sound and so she walked towards it on quiet feet. The light permeated the tunnel and soon she could see the walls clearly. A multitude of bodies locked together in death, fitting perfectly like one enormous body with skulls in decorative arches and rows that broke up the pattern. Some had holes in them, some were cracked and others smooth. All had the dull patina of age and they seemed to be cemented together, as if they had sunk into each other after years of standing here, sentinels to death. Morgan saw that the light came from a lamp lit in an alcove and she rounded the corner with the femur held high. Padding forward on bare feet, tiny stones pricking her soles, she moved towards the lamp.

  “It’s the Sepulcher Lamp,” a voice came from around the corner and Milan Noble stepped from behind a wall of bones. She started towards him, but two men appeared from behind him. Morgan turned to run back into the dark but the two men who had captured her were walking towards her from that direction. She was trapped so she threw down the femur and turned to face him. It seemed best to play Milan’s game, since for now, she was outnumbered.