The Martyr’s Curse

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Bastards.

Ben made himself remain calm. He stepped around the blood and walked inside the open door of the church. The cool interior smelled of incense and death. The mosaic stone floor laid centuries ago by master masons was smeared with more blood.

There were thirteen bodies inside the church. Either they must have congregated in here when the shooting began or they’d still been at prayer when the attackers hit.

One of the bodies was Père Antoine’s.

The old prior was as dead as the rest. The final expression frozen on the octogenarian’s face was one of serene calm. He looked almost beatific. As if he’d met his end in the quiet certainty that he was going to meet his maker, that this life was just one small stage in the journey and there was nothing to fear in leaving it behind.

That didn’t make it any easier for Ben to deal with. He crouched over the prior for a long moment, remembering their conversations and their chess games and the old man’s kindness to him.

He said out loud, ‘I’m going to find who did this.’

Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. Ben was pretty certain that would have been Père Antoine’s reply. Or words to that effect. He’d have counselled Ben to leave it be. To find within himself the strength to walk away and resist the growing urge that was firing up his veins and making his hands shake and his heart pound and his breathing heave with anger. To go with God, walk the path of peace. Or as Jesus had said, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father in heaven.

Ben wished he had that strength. He wasn’t the man Père Antoine had been. He wasn’t Jesus either. Not by a long shot. And the path of peace was no longer his to walk.

He stood up and left the church. Headed slowly back down the bloody steps. He made his way through the arch that led into the shady cloister and found three more bodies spread out on the stone floor.

Including one in particular who shouldn’t have been there at all.

Chapter Thirteen (#ulink_66978619-e707-52ce-b9f9-49d64e09f06c)

The man was no monk, that was for sure. He was from the outside, but he was no ordinary outsider either. It seemed strange to see anyone here not clad in monastic garb, and even stranger to see a man in black combat trousers, black high-leg military boots, black multi-pocket tactical vest, black ski mask, shooters’ gloves and utility belt. Then again, under the circumstances, maybe not so strange.

The dead man had been packing some sort of semi-automatic pistol before someone had disarmed him and left him with an empty holster. Presumably, the same somebody who had shot him twice in the head with the same nine-millimetre ammunition that had been used to dispatch the other victims. The empty shell cases were lying nearby. His eyes were open and glazed in the holes of the ski mask.

Ben touched three fingers to the guy’s neck and held them there for a moment before he whipped off the ski mask and looked at his face. The guy was somewhere in his mid-thirties, white, dark-haired, not ugly, not handsome, not a memorable face, but one Ben wouldn’t be forgetting for a long time. It wasn’t a monk who’d shot him. Aside from the obvious reason why that couldn’t be the case, Ben could think of an even more compelling one. This guy had been alive much more recently than any of the monastery’s dead residents. He wasn’t quite warm to the touch, but he was in a considerably fresher state than they were. Ben grabbed the black-clad right arm and wagged it from side to side and up and down and then let it flop limply to the guy’s side. No sign of rigor mortis yet. The shoulder and elbow joints were loose and flexible. The blood on his face and all down the front of his combat vest was still wet, barely tacky. He’d been dead for well under two hours. Maybe even less than one.

Which told Ben two things. Firstly, unless something extremely bizarre had taken place involving two rival armed gangs happening to choose this spot for a shoot-out and managing to hit almost nobody except bystanders, this fellow had been killed by his own team. The precision of the gunshot wounds in his head made it impossible that he could have accidentally taken a stray bullet intended for one of the monks. This had been deliberate. Ben had absolutely no idea why.

Second, it told him that the perpetrators hadn’t long since left the monastery. If he’d turned up even just an hour earlier he might not have missed them. In turn, if he was right that the attack had happened at around 4.30 in the morning, it meant they’d lingered here quite some time. After killing everyone and securing the place for themselves, they’d then hung around for the next four or so hours.

Doing what? He had no idea about that either. What had they wanted? What could have kept them busy for so long?

Ben kneeled by the body and removed both gloves to examine the dead guy’s fingers for nicotine stains, wanting to know if this was the bastard who’d stubbed the cigarette out on Père Jacques. No stains. He let the hands flop in the dead guy’s lap and next frisked him for any kind of ID. No big surprise to find none, but he did find a phone. He slipped it into his own pocket with a view to checking through it later, and then turned his attention to the small black zippered haversack the guy had slung over his left shoulder. It felt unnaturally heavy, for all the size of it. The black nylon strap was dragging on the man’s clothing, weighing him down. At first Ben thought of spare armament, extra magazines, boxes of ammunition.

But then he unzipped it and looked inside, and frowned.

Now he was really confused.

There were two items inside the bag, both identical in size and shape, both cool and smooth and hard. Between them, they accounted for the unusual weight. They weren’t boxes of ammo or backup weapons.

Ben lifted one out with each hand and stared at them.

The gold bars glittered in the sunshine.

Chapter Fourteen (#ulink_e2408ca4-b3ad-548a-bfa4-fa6e181929f7)

Ben remained kneeling, the dead man half forgotten, blinking in amazement at the items in his hands.

The last one of these he’d been this close to, years ago, had been part of an old cache of Nazi gold, marked with a German imperial eagle perched atop a swastika. That had made it pretty easy to identify, as well as to take an educated guess that it had been manufactured sometime between 1933 and 1945. He hadn’t known if it had been minted or cast or whether the highly recognisable emblem had been stamped or moulded on to it. Only that it was shiny yellow and damned heavy, damned valuable and had some major history behind it.

These two were shiny yellow and damned heavy as well. They were bright and smooth, each about twelve inches long and about four inches wide by three inches high. Solid, dense lumps of metal. Each weighed somewhere between six and eight kilos, making him straighten up and pivot his body weight slightly backwards to counter the tug on his arms. He put one of the bars down on the ground, rested the other on his knee as he reached into his pocket for the truck ignition key. Gripping the shaft of the key tightly, he dug its tip at an angle into the top of the bar. Steel was much harder than gold. The tip of the key easily left a jagged score mark as long as his thumb and maybe a millimetre deep.

Ben examined the scratch very closely. He was looking for dark grey underneath the gold. He’d heard of solid lead ingots, melted and moulded into the right shape out of wheel weights or roofing lead, being painted or even plated to fool the unwary.

But this was no lead ingot dressed up, and when he tested the second bar he got the same result. Apparently, they were the real thing. Which he had to presume meant they were pretty seriously valuable. At this moment, that was the absolute limit of his knowledge. Neither bar had any visible markings on it anywhere. Nothing to indicate their provenance, their age, or what the hell they were doing here.

That was just one more thing he was going to have to figure out.

Ben laid the two bars side by side in the dead man’s lap and covered them with the bag. He didn’t think the guy would be going anywhere with them. He stood up and walked on down the cloistered passage.

Soon afterwards, he picked up the blood trail. It started out of nowhere, the way blood trails so often did. Its source was marked with a splatter against a wall and a nearby spent nine-millimetre shell case. From there, a heavy line of spots, each the size of a large coin and serrated like a circular saw around its circumference where it had splashed to the ground, led through archways and down steps and along paved aisles for about fifty yards, until it disappeared through an open doorway. There was a russet-coloured partial palm print on the door from where the injured person had stumbled into it with their hand extended in front of them, crashing through in a hurry.

Ben meant to find out where it led. He might find another dead monk at the end of the trail, or he might find a second shooter. Preferably one who wasn’t yet expired, so that he could milk some information out of them before they were. Or before he made them that way.

But Ben knew he had to hurry. Whoever it was, they’d been losing a lot of blood.

The doorway was the one leading down to the cellars, along the same route Ben had travelled back and forth two days earlier with the work party bringing up the beer. He walked in and smelled the faintly musty odours that came up from below. It was full of shadows down here and his eyes were adjusted to the bright sunshine, but he could make out the regular spots of blood that dotted the way ahead. If anything, they were becoming more frequent. As if the bleeding had been getting worse, or the person had been slowing down, or both at once.

The trail led downwards into the maze of passages beneath the monastery. More handprints and smears, the colour of autumn leaves, appeared on the bare stone walls. Ben blinked to make his eyes reset themselves to the growing darkness. His footsteps began to echo more deeply around him as he ventured further underground. He wished he’d had a torch, then remembered that he had the dead man’s phone in his pocket. He paused to turn it on. It had a built-in light that he used as a torch, sweeping the weak beam ahead of him left and right as he made his way onwards.

Without the light there to guide him, he might have tripped over the heavy object that was lying in his path. He nudged it with his foot, then crouched down to examine it. It was another gold bar, apparently identical to the two he’d found on the dead man. He picked it up. Same weight. He brushed it all over with his fingertips. No markings, just plain smooth cool metal.

Ben laid the bar back down and moved on. Down, and down. Then the passage levelled out. He’d been here only once before, but he knew exactly where he was. The place seemed familiar to him, yet different. It wasn’t just the blood trail that hadn’t been here before. It was all the tracks in the dust. Lots of them, adding considerably to those that the work party had made trekking to and fro to shift the beer up from the cellars. It looked as if a whole procession of people had come this way, and back again. Perhaps several times, judging by the confusion of prints. One thing was for sure, these prints hadn’t been made by monks. Monks didn’t wear deep-tread combat boots.

He kept moving urgently forward. The light flicked this way and that, casting shadows on the rough walls and picking out more splashes of blood. And more. The dark passage curved left, then right, carving into the mountain like a mole tunnel. Ben moved quickly but cautiously, one eye on the ground. Any time soon, he’d be approaching the place where the walls opened up into the man-made cavern he’d discovered two days earlier. That seemed to be where both the blood trail and the multiple tracks were leading him.

Now he came to a fork in the path as the blood trail and the tracks diverged. The tracks kept moving straight ahead towards the cavern, while the blood trail veered off to the left, into the craggy entrance of the secondary passage Ben remembered from before. That was the direction he opted for, bowing his head to avoid the low, rough ceiling. The tracks could wait. This might not.

Just a few yards on, he came to the end of the trail.

Ben had thought he would find a dead monk there, or maybe a live bad guy. He found neither.

Chapter Fifteen (#ulink_2ce3b98c-5834-59cc-a681-83caf034200c)

Up ahead in the tight passage, the blood spots terminated in a pool that had spread and gathered in the recesses of the uneven floor. Ben’s light flicked from side to side and settled on what looked like a heap of old sack-cloth dumped against the rough stone wall.

The heap moved. Only very slightly, but it moved.

Ben hurried forward, shining his light. He’d realised who it was.

He said, ‘Roby.’

Falling to his knees next to the slumped figure, he saw he was right. Roby’s eyes were shut and his face was ghastly white and slick with sweat. A fringe of dark hair was plastered across his brow.

Ben understood what the boy was doing here. Pure animal instinct. When any creature, small or large, was frightened or hurt, it was nature’s way for it to return to the burrow. This had been Roby’s little hideaway out of habit, the place he knew his fellow monks wouldn’t come looking. Except that on this occasion, he hadn’t come here to get away from the monks. He’d come here to get away from the men who’d shot him.

Ben shone his phone light over the boy’s robe. The blood was soaked everywhere, the thick material saturated with it. It was a stomach wound. One of the cruellest and slowest and most painful ways to die from a bullet.

Roby stirred. His eyes flickered open, then closed again, then reopened. They were dull, bloodshot and unfocused. He seemed to sense the presence next to him and tried to move his head, but didn’t have the strength. He whispered, ‘Benoît?’ His voice was just a shadow of a breath.

‘It’s me, Roby. I’m right here with you.’

The tiniest of smiles curled the corner of the boy’s mouth and then it drooped, as if even that effort was too much. His energy was almost gone.

‘I knew you’d come back,’ Roby breathed. He tried to reach out his hand. His fingers were thick with blood, some of it dried, most of it fresh.

Ben swallowed. ‘Stay still. You’re going to be okay.’ Which he knew was a lie. Roby was not going to be okay at all. He was going to die. It was a miracle he’d lasted this long. Or maybe it was just a cruel prolongation of his agony. Ben knew he couldn’t move him and that nothing could save him. They could have been within yards of a hospital, and the outcome would still have been the same.

But Roby was fighting it. He hadn’t had sixty years of serene devotional meditation to help him calmly accept, even embrace, death. He was as terrified as most other people would have been. With a supreme effort that must have used up nearly all his fading reserves, he gripped Ben’s hand in his bloodstained fingers. The movement shot a bolt of pain through him that sent a ripple of shock across his face. The agony was awful, Ben could see that. Roby gasped and a stream of garbled words hissed out of him. Ben strained to listen and caught none of it.

‘What happened here, Roby?’ He kept his voice gentle and soothing, fighting his emotions.

Roby’s eyes rolled back and the lids fluttered. His head lolled, and for a bad second Ben thought he’d lost him. But then the boy fought his eyes back open and mouthed more words, almost soundlessly. ‘They came … it was before dawn … I was …’ The whisper trailed off to nothing.

‘Who? Who did this?’

The effort was killing Roby. But he had nothing to lose any more. His breath was coming in gasps and his hand was trembling in Ben’s. Sweat beaded all over his pallid face and pooled in the hollow of his throat. His eyes opened a little wider, and the terror in them flashed brightly for an instant, a gleam that caught the light from the phone Ben was shining over him.

‘Benoît … I saw … I saw demons.’

Ben looked at him. The young man was raving, that was all. His brain was closing down. Random neurochemical impulses firing off as the nerve endings died and the mist of darkness rose up to take him away. People at the very point of death often talked gibberish or seemed to experience hallucinations, for the same reason. ‘It’s all right, Roby,’ was all Ben could say.

But whatever it was that Roby was trying to say, he was desperate to get it out. ‘No … not demons. Ghosts. I saw … they were … all white …’

And then the boy could say no more. His chest heaved with his last breath. His spine arched. A juddering spasm, and then Ben felt the life go out of him and his body go rigid and then relax and become limp.

Ben closed his eyes and held Roby for a few seconds. Then he let go of the dead boy’s hand and let his body slump gently to the floor. He stood up, said a silent goodbye and moved on.

From the mouth of the secondary passage he turned left again, in the direction of the tracks. It was virtually a thoroughfare along here. Twice, he kneeled down to inspect footprints that hadn’t been obliterated by others overlaid on top of them. One set of prints was distinctly smaller than the rest. Which was clear enough evidence that the tracks had been made by at least two people, as opposed to one person doubling back and forth many times. The smaller print had the same kind of large tread as the others, indicating some kind of standardisation of their footwear. Ben thought about the combat boots the dead shooter in the cloister had on. They’d come down here. Why? He thought of the two gold bars in the dead guy’s bag, and of the third one he’d nearly tripped over in the passage. Had there been a treasure buried beneath the monastery? Had the killers come here to raid it?

That would have explained the hours they’d hung around after the killings. Any kind of a sizeable haul of gold would take as long to lug up to ground level as a truckload of beer. Maybe even longer, depending on how much of it there was to shift. Maybe there’d been so much gold that one bar dropped here or there didn’t make any difference.

Maybe so much of it that the killers had begun to argue among themselves. Hence the dead guy in the cloister. There wasn’t always honour among thieves.

Ben moved on a few more yards towards the carved-out cavern he’d visited two days ago with Roby. Two days ago wasn’t a long time for someone who tended to notice small details the way Ben did. And while he could have sworn that the passage walls and ceiling had been smooth and undamaged before, now he was noticing a widespread lacework of cracks and fissures, some only hairline, others wide enough to stick his thumb into, on both sides and above his head. The dust underfoot was deeper and his boots crunched on small pieces of stone that had been dislodged from gaps that hadn’t been there before. Ben might have been worried about it, if he hadn’t had worse things to worry about.

Now the passage opened out into the cavern that had been dug out of the rock. The place Père Antoine hadn’t wanted to talk about. Where Ben had found the skull, and the section of brickwork that walled off the way ahead. The skull was still there, crushed from the rock Ben had dumped on it. It lay half-buried in fresh dust, from the cracks that had opened up everywhere. Next to it lay a fourth gold bar, apparently dropped in the same careless way as the last, gleaming dully in the light from Ben’s torch-phone. But he paid it only a moment’s attention, because he was distracted by a far bigger discovery.

The partition wall blocking off the cavern wasn’t there any more. It had been blown away.

Chapter Sixteen (#ulink_21f8f243-16cb-5b53-92a5-b3483a71d6cc)

Ben held his light up at eye level and examined the hole where the brickwork had been. It was almost perfectly circular, about five feet in diameter, a circumference of just under sixteen feet as neatly blasted away as anything he had ever seen. The rubble lay scattered about on both sides of the hole. It looked as though a giant bullet had punched right through the wall.

Now Ben understood the cause of the cracks he’d noticed in the walls and ceiling of the passage leading up to it. Only one kind of munitions could have produced such a perfect hole. A shaped charge. Plastic explosive, wired in place and remotely detonated. That wasn’t exactly the kind of hardware you could get via mail order. And whoever had rigged it was some kind of artist. It must have been a delicate operation. A fraction too much charge, and he could have brought the whole mountain down on top of himself and his team. Ben could still smell the faint tang of cordite from the explosion.

The tracks in the dust headed right through the hole. Evidently, whatever they’d come for lay beyond. Ben ducked and clambered over the rubble and followed the tracks into the blackness.

The first thing that hit him was the smell. The air had been trapped in here for who knew how many centuries, but that alone couldn’t explain the sickening rankness of the stench that made Ben want to gag almost at the first breath. He pulled up the hem of his shirt and clamped it tightly over his nose and mouth as a rudimentary filter. It helped, but only slightly. He took a few more steps inside and cast the light around him. Its glow didn’t reach the sides, and there was no telling how big the space around him was. The ground sloped away gently, rough and stony. He advanced one cautious step at a time, feeling his way. He could have done with a brighter light, and was certain that the intruders had come a little better equipped than he was. Head-torches, maybe, or six-cell Maglites enhanced with LED bulbs that could slice through the murk as well as a car headlamp. His light was beginning to dim as the phone’s battery faded. Now and then it gave a little flicker, and its colour was yellowing. He might have ten more minutes before it gave out entirely, or he might have five. Either way, it wasn’t reassuring. He could smell and hear better than he could see.

What he could hear was the echo of his footsteps resonating inside the dark space, and something else. A scuttling sound, furtive and intermittent. He raised the light higher and ventured forward a few more steps. His right foot made contact with something soft and mushy. It felt like stepping into a pile of rotten fruit. He shone the light downward, saw the glutinous yuck he’d stepped in and smelled its awful stench through the material of his shirt. It was the decomposing flesh of something furry, half-eaten and extremely dead. Now he understood the cause of the stink in here, and he understood the scuttling noises that echoed all around him.

The place was full of rats. Hundreds of them, or thousands, everywhere. He saw their dark shapes flitting from shadow to shadow as they scattered and hid, disturbed by his presence. The chamber was strewn with their carcasses and bones. A few yards away lay the body of the biggest rat Ben had ever seen. It had to be two foot long from nose to tail, but what struck him more than its size was that it was deformed, twisted and apparently eyeless. They must have been living down here in the darkness for so many generations that they’d lost their sight.

Ben had no great love for rats, but they possessed certain qualities it was hard not to admire in a morbid kind of way. When it came to survival skills, rats left humans far behind, simply because of their sheer adaptability. They could thrive in the very worst conditions, drink water that would poison most other creatures, devour things that not even a starving dog would go near. If required, cannibalism was not an issue for them. And that was how Ben realised they must have been living down here, subsisting off the flesh of their own kind. Which perhaps accounted for the deformities. Maybe eventually they would die out, given enough time, but they seemed to have managed to keep going for a few thousand generations at least. There must have been enough moisture in the dirt to keep them hydrated, just enough oxygen filtering in through minute cracks in the mountain to prevent asphyxiation. Millions of them, being born and surviving and dying and giving sustenance to their fellows, while the sorry saga of human history rolled meaninglessly onwards through the ages, above them and below them and all around them.

Ben lifted his boot from the stinking ooze he’d stepped in and moved deeper into the cavern, straining his eyes to see in the slowly, steadily dimming light.

Then he stopped and stood still and gazed at the sight that greeted him a little way further from the entrance.

A wide section of the cavern floor was covered with human bones. Mounds of them, several feet deep in places. Ribcages and fibias and tibias and sticks of spine and skulls, all piled and tangled up. It was impossible to tell how many skeletons were strewn among the rocks and the dust, because so few of them were still intact. They’d fallen apart with age, or been picked apart by rats. Many of the bones were partially eaten away. There was no telling how many must have been gnawed into calcium-rich dust by generations of sharp little rodent teeth. Maybe they were too ancient now to offer any nutritional value to the rats. Ben didn’t know. All he knew was that he was looking at the remains of an awful lot of people.

He stepped closer and shone his light down at the grisly boneyard. He knew how to tell a female skeleton from a male by the shape and relative width of the pelvic bone, and he could see female remains among the piled mass. Children’s bones were easier to tell apart, and he saw those, too. Then he looked more closely and saw more. Lengths of iron chain, red and pitted with corrosion, lay twisted and coiled among the human remains. Iron shackles were riveted at intervals along their length, still tightly clamped around the skeletal wrists and ankles of men, women and children alike. Iron plates bolted into the rock, with iron rings holding the chains securely to the floor. These people had been bound up like galley slaves.