Twenty litres of spilled Eurosuper 98 caught light almost instantly with a big, gushy WHUMPF and a hot expanding breath that Ben felt on his face as he retreated to a safe distance. The fire spread everywhere at once, licking and rolling and consuming all it could find, until the Belphégor and the picnic table next to it could hardly be seen behind a curtain of flames that danced and leaped up high in the centre of the clearing. A tower of black smoke caught the breeze and drifted and dissipated over the forest.
Ben gazed at the blaze for a few moments, then turned, picked up his bag from the foot of the tree, slung it over his shoulder and started walking back towards the road.
Chapter Twenty
The underground passage beneath Udo Streicher’s hangar was like a subway tunnel, its curved walls tiled shiny white, brightly lit by rows of neon strips that ran its entire considerable length. The floor was made of a rubberised compound, allowing the buggy’s chunky tyres to adhere to it safely as it plunged down over a hundred metres at a steep angle into the ground. By the time the tunnel levelled out it was already far from the hangar, directly beneath the fields, with an impenetrable thickness of reinforced concrete between it and the distant surface.
For all his wealth, Udo Streicher couldn’t have come close to affording the subterranean complex that stretched far and deep and totally hidden below the rolling greenery of the beautiful Swiss countryside. Rather, it had been the brainchild – and in retrospect the ruinous folly – of a business entrepreneur named Helmut Batz.
Batz had made the bulk of his money in shipping, an occupation that enriched him magnificently but failed to satisfy deeper needs. By the time he’d reached the age of fifty in 1977, he was not only one of the wealthiest men in Europe but also one of the most profoundly unsettled, convinced as he was of the imminent total war set to engulf the world at any time. In 1982 he finally completed work on the giant bunker in which he planned to harbour, in long-term safety, an extended circle of his relatives and friends in the event of the much-anticipated nuclear holocaust. Unfortunately for Batz, not even his robust shipping fortune could survive the project’s astronomical costs, while meantime his business interests suffered due to his single-minded obsession with it. Financially crippled and suffering from depression, he somehow managed to hang on for another eighteen years before his spiralling debts and failing health finally got the better of him and he was forced to sell up for a painful fraction of what he’d ploughed into his pet project.
One man’s loss is another man’s gain, and for Udo Streicher the chance that had come his way that fateful day in October 2000 had been the golden opportunity of his life, one he’d unhesitatingly snapped up. Never mind the hundred acres of prime pastureland and the farmhouse that came with the property: the bunker itself was what drew him, and couldn’t have been better suited to his unique needs. Thanks to Batz’s almost maniacal perfectionism, the place had been built to such high-level specifications that it would last literally for ever. It was a veritable fortress, capable of withstanding a one-megaton bomb blast detonated half a mile away: the equivalent of seventy Hiroshima bombs dropped all at once right on his doorstep. Not that Streicher worried about nuclear war, unlike his predecessor. He had other interests.
In addition to luxuriously appointed reception rooms and sleeping quarters for up to eighty people, the bunker’s grand design comprised a command post and armoury, a gym, an operating theatre and medical lab, and even a cell block in case the long-term cohabitation of an isolated community anxiously facing a post-apocalyptic future led to cabin fever and social disorder. Necessities such as a richly stocked wine cellar had not been overlooked either, along with the essential gigantic food storage facilities, tanks for water and for fuel to power the generators and heating system. The water-purification and air-filtration systems had been space-age technology back in 1982 and were still highly advanced even by modern standards.
In short, the bunker was a self-contained haven for a man of Udo Streicher’s disposition and future plans. Secrecy was, always had been, his highest priority. Just days after the property had been officially transferred into the untraceable company name he’d carefully set up in advance, the architect’s offices in Geneva where the plans were stored had burned to the ground in a mysterious night-time fire. Soon afterwards, the one-time engineer in charge of the building project, one Leon Landenberger, now retired, had fallen to his death from the high Titlis suspension bridge in an apparent suicide while on a skiing holiday. The unfortunate Helmut Batz himself had perished later in the same year when his Porsche had spun off a twisty section of mountain road near Chamonix. One by one, all remaining ties to the existence of Streicher’s new subterranean paradise were severed.
Meanwhile, he sold off the penthouse apartment in Lausanne and the chalet in Zermatt. He no longer needed them. At the age of thirty-one, as far as official records showed, he became homeless. The richest homeless person in Switzerland.
Now, fifteen years later, far below the rich organic pastures where cows grazed contentedly against the mountain backdrop, the golf buggy whooshed silently through a storage warehouse that resembled the hold of a giant supertanker. Streicher had not been idle for the last decade and a half. He’d spent a great deal of that time, and a great deal of money, in vastly supplementing the existing stores he’d inherited from Helmut Batz with enormous quantities of equipment and materials. He’d travelled to Colorado and Montana to learn from hard-core survivalists there, folks who’d left behind conventional living to fence themselves off from a world they regarded as doomed by coming catastrophic events, natural or otherwise. He’d learned a lot from them, returning to Switzerland full of ideas about the requirements for long-term post-apocalyptic survival.
And not just survival. Streicher wasn’t simply a ‘prepper’. His ideas went much, much further.
Mere survival wasn’t the issue.
And to that end, the bunker’s storage spaces were filled floor to ceiling with industrial shelving packed with anything and everything that could help him in his quest. The armoury section alone was more than fifty metres from end to end, three racks high, along both walls. It housed enough military-grade small arms to comfortably equip a medium-sized private army. The guns that didn’t stand in glistening oiled rows, butt down with their muzzles pointing upwards, were still packed in their original armourers’ crates, unfired and untouched until the day they’d be put into action. Everything that could ever be put to good use in the afterworld, as Streicher called it, was stockpiled there. Each variety and calibre of weapon was amply catered for among the endless stacks of olive-painted ammunition boxes. Streicher prided himself on what was most certainly the largest and most secret private arsenal in Europe. He often thought about the man who’d helped supply much of it. Miki Donath, his friend, close ally and future lieutenant, tem-porarily indisposed at the hands of a corrupt judiciary system that treated great men like common criminals.
Hannah’s thoughts echoed his own as their conveyance glided between the towering racks of hardware. ‘Poor Miki,’ she mused out loud. ‘I wonder how he’s doing right now. I can’t bear to think of him rotting in that prison.’
‘When the time comes, he’ll be back with us,’ Streicher said. ‘None of us is going to have to wait much longer.’
Hundreds of metres further on, he braked the golf buggy to a smooth, silent halt as they reached the part of the bunker he and Hannah had come down here to visit. Until now, it was a section that had stood empty, like a missing tooth in an otherwise perfect smile, an ever-present symbol of failure that he’d found hard to bear. Not any longer.
The massive safe stood as tall and wide as a very large human being. Its steel walls could neither be drilled nor pierced with the hottest cutting torch. Nothing short of a tank shell could have busted the hinges and locks that held the thick door in place.
The two of them stepped out of the vehicle. Streicher walked over to the safe and entered the combination code he alone in the
world knew. The steel door swung open, revealing its electronically temperature-regulated interior and four shelves, stacked vertically one above the other.
Streicher turned back towards the cart. Carefully, he picked up one of the eight white containers from its carry rack and placed it on the upper shelf. Hannah passed him another. He laid it delicately beside the first. They took their time filling each shelf in turn, neither of them speaking, each smiling a little smile of pleasure. This was a moment to be savoured.
Afterwards, in the warm luxury of their personal quarters, reclining on a soft rug in front of a crackling log fire with a Chopin Nocturne playing in the background, Streicher and Hannah clinked glasses. The champagne was an old vintage, one that he’d been storing for a long time in the hope that, one day, this celebration would be a reality.
‘To the future,’ Streicher said. ‘To our dream of the afterworld, soon about to come true.’
‘The afterworld. And to the martyr’s curse,’ Hannah said, raising her glass, which sparkled in the firelight.
‘Yes, indeed. To our dear Salvator. If he had only known that his words would one day make history.’
‘To Salvator.’
They clinked again with the delicate, chiming ring that only the best crystal can produce. The two of them, far below ground, hidden from the world, safe and secure and completely in control. Not only of their own personal destinies, but those of millions of other human beings. It was a heady feeling. Streicher took a long sip of the ice-cold champagne, feeling the bubbles on his tongue.
‘I’m so proud of you,’ Hannah said.
He grinned and shrugged modestly. ‘I’ve been working on my revised list. Would you like to see it?’
Her eyes sparkled. ‘I’d love to.’
He slipped the piece of paper from his pocket, and carefully set down his glass. The writing on the list was messy, with a lot of corrections and crossings out. ‘Eight cities,’ he said. ‘That’s just to begin with, of course.’
‘Tell me them,’ purred Hannah, raising her glass to her lips. They’d been having this discussion for years, but only now was it finally becoming a reality. Lottery winners got to indulge themselves by spending hours picking out the model and colour of that Bentley or Ferrari they’d always wanted. For Udo Streicher, for whom wealth had been a fact of life since childhood, self-indulgence came in other forms.
‘Here they are,’ he said. ‘Berlin, Brussels, London, Madrid, Paris, Rome, and Vienna.’
Hannah pursed her lips. ‘That’s only seven, Udo.’
‘So it is. I left out Prague.’ He looked up from the list. ‘Do you approve of my choices?’
‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘It’s a bigger world than that, my love. What about China and Japan and Australia? What about America?’
‘It’ll take care of itself, you know. By its very nature.’
‘Darling, of course it will. But we want to give it all the help we can, don’t we?’
He frowned at his piece of paper. ‘You’re right. This list is too thin.’
Hannah took another sip of champagne and fell silent for a moment, her brow furrowed with reflection. ‘I’m thinking, only one in the whole of the United Kingdom? London’s right down at the southern end of a long, thin island. Think of the more northern populations.’
‘Leeds, Manchester, Edinburgh,’ he said, nodding. ‘We should probably fit one more in, at least.’
‘This is fun, isn’t it? So exciting.’ She beamed, and the firelight gleamed on her teeth and in her eyes. He’d never seen her looking so beautiful.
‘You might say it’s intoxicating,’ he said, and they both laughed for a long time.
Chapter Twenty-One
Ben had a way to walk before he was able to thumb a lift from a passing car. His rescuers were two elderly and quite batty sisters in a Renault 5 who obviously weren’t afraid of picking up lone male hitch-hikers carrying military haversacks, somewhat dusty and battered and smelling faintly of petrol and smoke. Ben smiled and tried not to look like someone who’d just disposed of a dead body in the woods. The only occupant of the Renault who seemed suspicious of him was the cantankerous white miniature poodle who sat guarding him in the back seat and bared its teeth at his every move.
After listening politely to their life stories for a dozen kilometres, Ben parted ways with the sisters on the edge of the village where they lived. They drove off with big smiles and waved goodbyes, and he watched the Renault disappear before setting off in search of a bus stop. His map told him he was still sixteen kilometres from Briançon, which was where he was headed on his next set of errands.
He found the bus stop and spent half an hour waiting on a bench in the sunshine, hunched forward with his elbows on his knees and his bag between his feet, systematically working his way through the pack of Gauloises. They tasted good, and he needed the lift they gave him. By the time the silver Autocars Resalp coach finally rolled up the dusty road and halted by the stop with a squish of airbrakes, he was buzzing and light-headed from the nicotine. He flicked away his half-smoked cigarette, boarded the bus and settled in a vacant window seat near the back, then closed his eyes and didn’t open them again until he was in Briançon.
The town’s main bus station was a busy place, the hub of routes radiating in all directions, to Grenoble and Avignon, all the way north to Paris, south-eastward into Italy and north-eastward into Switzerland. Ben made his way to the exit through the crowd of travellers and headed on foot towards the centre of town. His bruises ached and the weight of the bullion in his bag was pulling on his shoulder. His body was telling him he was hungry, but he had no stomach for food.
He soon found the place that was to be his first port of call. The office supplies store was empty, cool and airy. Beyond the racks of shelves for computer sundries and print cartridges and stationery, various kinds of paper and packaging materials, there was a separate workstation area offering do-it-yourself photocopy and fax services. The shop was staffed by a young woman with a pleasant smile and shoulder-length fair hair. Hers evidently wasn’t a very busy job, as Ben could tell from the half-read romance novel propped open on the desk in front of her. He smiled back and did his best to look friendly and inoffensive.
He bought the thinnest sheaf of plain white general-purpose office paper he could find on the shelf, a black permanent marker pen and a little set comprising a stamp and inkpad. He asked if he could use the workstation, and the pleasant young woman said that of course he could, showed him a sheet of tariffs and gave him brief instructions on how to use the all-singing, all-dancing combined photocopier and fax machine.
He walked over to where the machine sat just below chest height on a worktop surface and dumped his bag at his feet, glad to be relieved of its weight for a couple of minutes. It had been a while since he’d used technology like this, but he knew more or less what he was doing. The copier was a large cream-coloured plastic cube with rounded edges and a top lid that opened to expose the flat glass scanner screen. He flipped it up to hide behind, then dug nonchalantly in his pocket, took out five sausage-sized packages rolled in absorbent paper towel and laid them in a little row on the worktop. Then he opened the stamp and inkpad set and placed it beside them. He wouldn’t be requiring the stamp, only the pad, which was just a rectangle of some kind of felt material soaked in black ink. He tested it with his fingertip. It was moist and his finger came away stained black. He wiped it on his jeans. Next, he opened up the thin sheaf of office paper, drew out a single sheet and laid it down beside the other items. Finally, he took out the phone he’d inherited, turned it on and scrolled through the menu to bring up its own number.
So far, so innocuous.
Before he went any further, he glanced over the top edge of the open lid at the woman behind the counter and saw that she was engrossed in her romance novel and not paying him any attention. He unrolled the first package.
The severed finger was pale and bloodless. The small amount of fluid that had leaked
from its raw end had been absorbed into the paper. Index finger, right hand. Ben casually picked it up, like the uneaten cold chipolata left over from last night’s barbecue. He pressed the fingertip into the pad, made sure it was good and inky, then carefully applied it to the paper, rolling it gently left and right the way cops did when they were fingerprinting suspects. Lifting it away, he saw that it had made a pretty good impression, the minute lines and grooves and whorls showing up neatly on the paper. One down, four to go. He replaced the ink-stained finger in its wrapping, laid it to one side and moved on to the next, and repeated the operation until he had a row of prints that any jailhouse duty officer would be proud of. One hand was enough, for his purposes.
As he waited a moment for the ink to dry, he noticed the shop assistant glancing up from her book and smiling at him. He smiled back. This could turn into a beautiful friendship. He picked up the marker pen and wrote in capitals beneath the line of prints: THE LONE WOLF SAYS HELLO. Below that, he copied out the number of the phone.
He placed the sheet on the scanner, made sure it was properly squared up, then lowered the lid. Took out his wallet and riffled through the pocket containing the various business cards he’d collected over the years, found the one he wanted and slipped it out. It had been waiting in there for a long time. The top right corner of the card bore a little emblem of a blue globe nestling in a laurel wreath, superimposed over a set of golden scales and pierced vertically by a golden sword. The scales and sword of justice: at least, that was the principle. It was the emblem of Interpol. The name on the card was Commissioner Luc Simon.
Luc Simon was that rarest of creatures, a senior police officer whom Ben had worked with and come away liking and respecting. When Ben had first crossed paths with him, Simon had been a simple Detective Inspector in Paris. Nowadays he was well up the food chain and riding a desk somewhere on the top floor of the Interpol HQ in Lyon, almost exactly a hundred miles north-west of Briançon. His promotion hadn’t come as any surprise to Ben at the time: the guy wasn’t just a flashy dresser. He was as skilled and clever and rigorous as they came. Good-looking bastard, too, oozing Gallic charm like a leading man from the heyday of French cinema.