The Alchemist's Secret

  She got back to her apartment at around 5.30. Her legs felt heavy as she climbed the spiralling, echoing stairs to the third floor. It had been a tiring session that day, and she was hot from the rush-hour traffic.

  When she reached her landing and took out her keys, she found the door unlocked. Had Michel come back for something? He was the only other person with a key, apart from the concierge. But it wasn’t like him to leave the door open.

  She went inside, peering into the lab room through the slightly-open door. ‘Michel? You there?’ There was no reply, no sign of him. She went into the lab.

  ‘Oh, Jesus’

  It had been turned over. Files spilled all over the floor, drawers up-ended, everything gone through. But that wasn’t what she was standing gaping at. It was the big man in the black hood who was rushing towards her.

  A gloved hand shot out towards her throat. Without thinking about it, she blocked the move by throwing her hands up and outwards to deflect his arms aside. The surprised attacker hesitated for half a second, long enough for her to follow up her move with a low stamping kick to his knee. If it had landed it would have ended the fight there and then. But he skipped backwards just in time and her foot only grazed his shin. He moved back with a grunt of pain, stumbled and fell heavily.

  She turned and ran. But he threw out a big arm and tripped her, sending her sprawling to the ground. Her head whacked the wall and she saw stars. By the time she was on her feet he was just two metres away with a knife in his hand. He came at her, lifting the knife high to stab down at her.

  This was something Roberta knew a little about. A trained knife fighter keeps the weapon close to his body and stabs outwards, using the rotation of his back muscles to deliver lethal force to the blow. Very little can be done to block the move or take the knife off them. But the downwards stab, holding the knife in an underhand grip, was a different matter. Theoretically, she knew she could block this. Theoretically. At the karate club they’d only ever practised this move with a soft rubber blade, and then never at full speed.

  The very real blade flashed down hard and fast. Roberta was faster. She caught his wrist and levered it down sideways while with her other hand she wrenched his elbow the other way with all her strength. At the same time she launched herself into him with a hard knee to the groin.

  The move worked. She felt a terrible cracking as his arm broke. Heard his scream in her ear. His face contorted in agony behind the mask. The knife fell, and his twisting body fell on top of it. He hit the floor, landed writhing on his belly, and screamed again.

  She stood poised over him, staring in horror, as he contorted and rolled onto his back. The knife was buried deep in his solar plexus. He’d landed on it, driven the blade in with his own weight and momentum. He clawed desperately at the handle, trying to pull it out. After a few seconds his movements slowed, the convulsions slackened, and then he lay still. Blood spread slowly outwards in a slick stream across the tiles.

  She screwed her eyes shut, knees quaking violently. Maybe when she opened them, there wouldn’t be a dead guy lying there in a pool of blood. But no, there he was all right, staring up at her glassily, mouth half open like a fish on a slab.

  Every nerve in her body was screaming at her to run, but she fought the impulse away. Slowly, her heart in her mouth, she crouched down next to the body. She reached out a trembling hand and slipped it into the front of the dead man’s black jacket. Inside she found a small diary, half-soaked in blood. She turned the dripping pages, shuddering in revulsion at the blood on her fingers and looking for a name, a number, a clue.

  The diary was almost completely blank. Then on the last page she found two addresses, scribbled in pencil. One was hers. The other was Michel’s.

  Had they got to him? She dug out her phone, feverishly scrolled down her address book entries as far as ‘M.Z’, and hit the dial button. ‘Come on, come on,’ she muttered, waiting.

  No reply, just his answering machine.

  She wondered whether she should call the police. No time for that now, she decided–it would take an age to get through the receptionists and she had to get over to his place right away. She stepped over the corpse and opened the front door a crack.

  All clear. She locked the door behind her and bounded down the stairs.

  The car screeched to a halt at a crazy angle outside Michel’s apartment building, and she ran to the doorway. She buzzed the button next to his name on the intercom panel several times, kicking her heels, tension mounting.

  After two or three minutes a laughing couple came out of the building and she slipped inside. She found herself in a dark, stone corridor leading to the stairway, past the concierge’s door and into the central courtyard. Michel’s apartment was on the ground floor. She thumped on his door. No response. She ran back through the foyer and into the courtyard. Michel’s bathroom window was slightly open. She scrambled up to the window ledge. It was a tight squeeze, but she was slim enough to wriggle through.

  Once into the apartment, she crept furtively from room to room. There was no sign of life. But a near-empty cup of coffee on the table, next to the remains of a meal, was still warm to the touch and the laptop on his desk was running. He must have just gone out, she thought. And if that was the case, it had to mean he was all right. She felt relief unstiffen her muscles. Maybe he wouldn’t be long.

  The phone suddenly rang, making her jump. After two rings the answering machine came on automatic ally. Michel’s familiar mumbled recording came over the speaker, followed by a beep, and then the caller left their message.

  She listened to the deep, gravelly French voice. ‘This is Saul. Your report has been received. The plan has been carried out. BH will be taken care of tonight.’

  What was going on here? What report? What had Michel been sending, and to whom? Was this guy, her friend and assistant, someone she trusted–mixed up in this too? The plan has been carried out. She shivered. Did that mean what she thought it meant?

  She walked over to the desk and flipped up the lid of Michel’s computer. The machine was on standby, and whirred quickly into life. She double-clicked on the email icon on the desktop. Her head swam as she scrolled down through the SENT ITEMS list. It didn’t take her long to discover the whole column of sent messages marked REPORT. They were numbered in consecutive order and dated from a few months ago to the present. Running down the list she saw that they’d been sent at regular intervals of about two weeks.

  She clicked on a recent one, number 14. It flashed up on the screen and she scanned through it. Her heart picked up a beat. She sat on his desk chair and read it again, more slowly, hardly believing what she was seeing.

  It was a report on her latest scientific findings, her breakthrough with the lifespans of the group A flies. It was all there, down to the last tiny detail. Her heart beat faster.

  She opened the most recently sent post. It was dated that day, sent just an hour or so ago. It had an attachment with it. She read the accompanying message first: Today, 20 September, meeting with English journalist Ben Hope. Shaking her head in bewilderment, she clicked on the paper-clip logo in the corner of the message. As the attachment opened up she saw that it contained a series of JPEG files, digital photos. She clicked on each one in turn, and her frown deepened with every click.

  They were shots of her and Ben Hope in her lab. They’d been taken just that morning, and there was only one person who could have done it. Michel, using his phone while he’d been pretending to fetch a file.

  BH will be taken care of tonight, the phone message had said. And now she knew who BH was.

  She stiffened and looked up from the screen. She’d heard something. Someone was approaching the front door. She recognized the familiar tune that Michel often used to whistle to himself at the lab. Keys jangled at the lock, and the door creaked open. Footsteps came down the hall. Roberta dived behind a couch and crouched there, hardly daring to breathe.

  Michel came into the room. He was carryi
ng a shopping bag, and as he whistled his little tune he started unloading groceries. He reached out and played back his phone message. Roberta peeked over the top of the couch and watched his face as he listened to Saul’s voice. There was no emotion, just a nod.

  Her mind was racing, dizzy at the thought that this was the same Michel she knew. She ought to challenge him, have it out with him right here. But it was becoming clear that she didn’t know him as well as she thought. What if he had a weapon? Maybe confrontation wasn’t a good idea.

  He deleted the phone message. ‘Christ, it’s warm in here,’ he muttered to himself. He opened a window across the other side of the room. Then he grabbed a chocolate bar and a bottle of beer from the grocery bag, flopped down in a chair and switched on the TV with the remote. He sat chortling at a cartoon and sipping his beer.

  This was her chance. She ducked back down and started crawling out from behind the couch, keeping low. She was going to crawl right across the room and make it out through that open window while he was distracted by the television.

  She was half out from behind the couch when he shouted, ‘Hey! What are you doing there?’

  He rose from his chair.

  She didn’t dare to look up. Shit, I’m caught.

  ‘You come down from there, now,’ he was saying in a gentler voice. She looked up, startled and confused.

  He was across the other side of the room, by the desk. ‘Come on, my baby, you shouldn’t do that.’ A fluffy white cat had jumped up on the desk and was licking out the plate that he’d left sitting there from his earlier meal. He picked it up in his arms, stroking it lovingly. It meowed in protest and wriggled free of his grip, jumped down on the floor and ran out of the room. He ran after it, nursing a scratched finger. ‘Lutin! Come back!’ He disappeared out of sight and Roberta heard him shouting at the cat. ‘Lutin–come out from under there, you little turd!’

  Seeing her chance, she leapt to her feet and dashed up the short passageway to the front door, silently turned the latch and slipped out.

  12

  When Michel Zardi had first been contacted a few months earlier by the man he knew only as ‘Saul’, he’d no idea who was approaching him, or what they really wanted. He only knew he was being asked to observe Roberta Ryder’s work and send back reports on the progress of her research.

  Michel wasn’t an idiot. He’d been with her project from the start, and he had a pretty good idea of its potential value if she could convince anyone to take it seriously. Now it looked like someone was, although it wasn’t the kind of attention that Roberta would have wanted. Michel was smart enough not to ask too many questions. What they wanted him to do was simple enough, and the money was good.

  Good enough to make him start thinking that maybe he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life bumming around as a low-paid lab tech, especially now that Roberta had been forced to relocate her operation to her own apartment. The project wasn’t going anywhere, they both knew that. He also knew her well enough to know that she’d never accept the reality. Her stubborn pride was what kept her going, but it was also going to drag them both down.

  For a long time, Michel had toyed with the idea of leaving and getting better work elsewhere. Just when he’d been on the brink of telling her it was over for him, Saul had turned up out of nowhere. Suddenly, everything had looked different. The promise of a more stable and interesting future working for Saul and his people, whoever they were, meant that he had prospects. And it had helped to harden his attitude towards the American scientist he’d once thought of as his friend. Every couple of weeks or so he’d send in his report, and at the end of each month the cash-stuffed envelope would appear in his mailbox. Life was good.

  It was a pyramid of power, broad at the bottom, small at the top. At the bottom, it was made up of lots of ignorant, insignificant men like Michel Zardi–little men whose loyalty could be bought cheaply. The top of the pyramid was occupied by just one man and a select group of his close associates. They were the only ones who knew the true nature, purpose and identity of the organization that so carefully kept its activities hidden from prying eyes.

  The two men at the top of this pyramid were now sitting together in a room talking. It was no ordinary room, situated in the domed tower at the centre of an elegant Renaissance villa outside Rome.

  The big authoritative man standing by the window was called Massimiliano Usberti. Fabrizio Severini was his private secretary and the only man Usberti trusted completely and spoke openly with.

  ‘In five years we will have evolved into a far more powerful force than we are now, my friend,’ Usberti was saying.

  Severini sipped wine from a crystal glass. ‘We are already powerful,’ he said with a note of caution in his voice. ‘How do you hope to conceal our activities from those around us, if we should grow even more in size and strength?’

  ‘By the time my plans are in place,’ Usberti said, ‘we will no longer need to worry about concealment. This position we find ourselves in, the need to preserve secrecy, is only a temporary phase in our development.’

  Fabrizio Severini was the closest man alive to Massimiliano Usberti. Now both in their late fifties, they had known one another for many years. When they had first met as young men, Massimiliano had been just another priest, though an exceptionally driven one and with the backing of the great wealth of his noble family to achieve his ambitions. But even Severini didn’t fully know what Usberti’s ultimate objective was, the end goal of these plans he so often alluded to. He didn’t push too hard or inquire too openly. Their relationship as friends had evolved over the years as Usberti had grown in power, self-confidence and–he didn’t like to use the word, but it was the only one to use-fanaticism. Severini knew that his friend, or indeed his master as he’d slowly become, was a highly ruthless man who would stop at nothing. He feared him, and he knew that Usberti secretly enjoyed the fact that he did.

  Usberti came away from the window and rejoined his secretary under the grand dome. On the ornate seventeenth-century gilt wood table sat a laptop computer displaying a slideshow. The photos were of a woman and a man talking. One of them was a familiar face. Dr Roberta Ryder. The soon-to-be late Dr Roberta Ryder.

  The man in the photos was someone Usberti had hoped never to see. He already knew all about the Englishman from one of his informers, who’d told him that a professional investigator was going to be sniffing around. The informer had warned him that Benedict Hope had a specialist background and that he was a man of certain talents. This seemed to be confirmed when the hired assassin sent after him had failed to return or report back. Nobody had heard from him, and then one of his sources in Paris had called to say it had been on the news that a man had flung himself off the parapet of Notre Dame Cathedral. Their man.

  Usberti hadn’t expected Hope to get this far. But it didn’t worry him. He wouldn’t get much further.

  ‘Archbishop…’ Severini began, wringing his hands nervously.

  ‘Yes, my friend?’

  ‘Will God forgive us for what we do?’

  Usberti looked sharply up at him. ‘Of course He will. We do it to protect His house.’

  When Severini was gone, the archbishop went over to the antique gold-bound Bible on his desk.

  And I saw Heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he doth judge and make war.

  And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood: and his name is called the Word of God. And the armies which were in Heaven followed him.

  And he hath a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations: and he should rule them with a rod of iron: and he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God.

  Usberti shut the book. He gazed into space for a moment, a grim, set expression on his face. Then, nodding solemnly to himself, he picked up the phone.

  13

  Paris

  Roberta made it back to the 2CV, glancing over he
r shoulder and half expecting Michel Zardi to come tearing out of the doorway of the building after her. Her hands were shaking so badly she could barely get the key in the lock.

  As she drove back to her apartment she dialled 17 and was put through to police emergency. ‘I want to report an attempted murder. There’s a body in my flat.’ She gave her details in a breathless rush as she sped back through the traffic, driving with one hand.

  An ambulance and two police cars were arriving just as she pulled up outside her building ten minutes later. The uniformed agents were headed by a brisk plainclothes inspector in his mid-thirties. He had thick dark hair brushed back from his brow, and his eyes were an unusually vivid green. ‘I’m Inspector Luc Simon,’ he said, staring at her intently. ‘You reported the incident?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you are…Roberta Ryder? US citizen. Have you identification?’

  ‘Now? OK.’ She fished in her bag and took out her passport and work visa. Simon ran his eyes over them and handed them back.

  ‘You have the title Dr. A medical doctor?’