The Nostradamus File Read online

  The

  Nostradamus

  File

  By

  Alex Lukeman

  http://www.alexlukeman.com

  https://wwww.facebook.com/alexlukeman?

  http://www.alexlukeman.blogspot.com

  Copyright 2013 by Alex Lukeman

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means except by prior and express permission of the author. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or used as an element of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  CHAPTER 1

  This part of Paris hadn't changed much since the Revolution. Faceless tenements brooded on either side of the street. A thin stream of dirty water ran along a channel worn into the middle of the ancient lane. The leather soles of Nick Carter's shoes made a flat, hard sound on cobblestones that had echoed with the rumble of carts ferrying victims to the guillotine. Selena Connor walked beside him.

  Selena wore a casual outfit she'd picked up in one of the designer salons. Designers loved making clothes for women like her. She was the kind of woman people noticed, with the elegance and body to carry it off. Sunglasses hid her violet eyes. Her reddish-blonde hair and tall, athletic grace turned heads wherever they went.

  Nick had on a gray sport coat Selena had seen in one of the shop windows. It was always hard to find something that handled his broad shoulders but this one had fit perfectly, right off the rack. It matches your eyes, she'd said. His eyes were gray, flecked with gold, so it was close enough. He'd bought it to please her, because she liked it. Secretly, it pleased him, too. The European styling of the jacket and a half-day's black stubble on his chin almost made him look like a local.

  They came to a shop window where a leather-bound edition of Voltaire's collected works was displayed on a bed of faded red cloth.

  "This is it," she said.

  The shop looked like it might have been new when Marie Antoinette was telling people to eat cake. It had a wooden door painted blue and old iron hinges. There was a sign in gold leaf written on the dusty glass of the window.

  Jean-Paul Bertrand, le Propriétaire

  Livres Rares et Curieux

  Selena reached for the bell pull and stopped.

  "That's odd," she said.

  "What's odd?"

  "The door is open," she said. "That's not right."

  It was, by about two inches.

  "Jean-Paul said to ring and he'd let us in. He keeps the door locked. You can only get in by appointment."

  She pushed the door open the rest of the way and they entered the shop.

  "Jean-Paul?" Selena called.

  Her voice was clear, vibrant. There was no response.

  The front room of the shop was deserted. Shelves filled with books lined two of the walls. An antique oak reading table with carved feet took up space in the front, near the window. The place smelled of old books, of dust and paper. In the back of the room was a zinc counter. Behind it, a beaded glass curtain hung in front of a passage leading to the rear of the shop.

  "Jean-Paul?" Selena called again. "Hello? It's Selena."

  Nick's ear itched. "Something's not right," he said. He tugged at his scarred ear. Without thinking, he reached for his gun. It wasn't there. They were on vacation. No guns.

  "He's an old man," she said, "and he doesn't hear well. He's probably in the back."

  Selena stepped around the counter and parted the beads. The hall was narrow and dark and close. There was a light at the end. She walked down the hall and pushed aside another curtain. Nick bumped into her as Selena stopped short.

  Selena's friend lay on his back on the floor, mouth gaping. His teeth were yellow from years of nicotine and coffee. His eyes were open, staring at the ceiling. Blood covered his white shirt and spattered the walls. Books and papers littered the floor. The room stank of death.

  "Jean-Paul," Selena said. Her face was white. She started toward him.

  Nick stopped her with a hand on her shoulder. "Better not touch him." He went to the body.

  "Look at this."

  She came over and looked down at the floor. Letters and a number were written there in blood.

  "Does it make any sense to you?" Nick asked.

  EX 25

  "No. Who would do this? I don't think he had an enemy in the world."

  "He had at least one."

  Nick gestured at the mess. The room had been searched by someone who didn't care about cleaning up afterward.

  "Whoever killed him was looking for something."

  "He had some valuable first editions. It must have been a robbery."

  "This is over the top for a lousy book, even one worth a lot of money. An old man like this, they didn't need to kill him. Makes me angry."

  "He sounded stressed when I talked with him. He was insistent that I come see him today."

  "You didn't tell me that."

  She looked at the body of her friend. "I didn't think anything of it." She bit her lip.

  "I'm sorry, Selena."

  "What now?"

  "We call the cops. Then I'm going to call Harker. I don't want to spend the night in a French jail."

  Director Elizabeth Harker was their boss. She ran the Project and had the clout to get the French cops to back off. The President's authority went a long way.

  Four hours later, the police let them go back to their hotel. They were staying in the Le Marais District, on the Right Bank, in the kind of European hostelry where you left your key at the desk when you went out and the desk clerk was always courteous. It was a friendly place. It didn't hurt any that Selena spoke French like a native.

  "Bon jour, Madame," the clerk said. "Something came for you."

  He took a package from under the counter. It was wrapped in plain brown paper and addressed to Selena. There was no return address.

  "By messenger. It arrived this afternoon, while you were out." He handed it to her with the room key.

  "Merci."

  She looked at the address on the package. "This is from Jean-Paul," she said to Nick. "I recognize his writing."

  The hotel had an ancient cage elevator. They clanked at a snail's pace to their floor.

  Their room was large and looked out over a narrow balcony onto a quiet street. There was a private bath, a dresser and television, a wide bed covered with a patterned comforter and two comfortable armchairs. Nick sank into one of the chairs. Selena came out of the bathroom and sat on the bed.

  "I wonder what this is?"

  "Why not open it and find out?"

  "Smartass." She gave him a look and tore off the wrapping.

  "It's a file."

  She took out a file folder tied with a length of red string and undid the tie. Inside the folder was a manuscript, yellowed and brittle, written in a cramped hand in black ink.

  Selena looked at the first page. Nick heard her take in a deep breath.

  "I don't believe this." There was excitement in her voice. "This was written by Nostradamus. I think these might be the lost quatrains."

  "Nostradamus? The prophet?"

  "Yes."

  "What are the lost quatrains?"

  "Nostradamus published his prophecies in groups of one hundred, called centuries. Each prophecy had four lines."

  "A quatrain."

  She nodded. "The Seventh Century is incomplete. There are 58 quatrains missing. No one has ever seen them. This manuscript is beyond rare."

  "Rare enough to kill for?"

  "Oh, yes. There are collectors who would give anything for this. Not only that, I think the writing is
by Nostradamus himself. A hand written manuscript by Nostradamus would be worth a lot. The lost quatrains in his own hand would be priceless."

  "This is probably what Bertrand's killer was looking for," Nick said. "Why send it to you?"

  "I've known him since I was a child. He and my uncle were old friends."

  "Maybe he meant it as a gift."

  "No. If it were a gift he would have given it to me in person. He must have wanted to get it out of the shop." She paused. "Whoever murdered him could come looking for it. If they know he sent it to me."

  "We should take it to the Embassy and send it home in a diplomatic pouch. "

  "You want to keep it?"

  "You want to find out who killed your friend? There's a reason he sent this to you. We won't know what it is unless you read it."

  "No one just reads Nostradamus. He was worried about the Inquisition. He played word games and wrote in Greek and Latin and Provencal. Everything is deliberately obscure."

  "Can you do it?"

  Selena was a world class authority when it came to translating difficult texts and languages.

  "Probably. But if we keep it, we're holding back evidence."

  "If we don't keep it, the French police will keep us. Cops are suspicious. They'll think we killed him to get our hands on this."

  Selena looked out the window. "You're right. Let's go to the Embassy."

  She put the manuscript back in the file and the file back in the box. She tucked the box under her arm. They went downstairs and handed in the key and left the hotel. They started down the street to find a cab.

  Movement in an alley on the right. A man came at them, knife held low, the blade gleaming in the afternoon light. Nick parried with his arm, the move born of years of practice and training. The blade sliced through the new jacket, into his arm. He followed through with an elbow strike to the skull that numbed his arm. He stiffened the fingers on his other hand and drove them like a spear up into the man's diaphragm, trying to rupture it. The attacker doubled over and Nick brought both hands down and drove a knee into his face. The man went down, blood pouring from his nose. The knife clattered away on the sidewalk.

  A second man went for the package under Selena's arm. She let it go, twisted and kicked out from the hip and landed on the side of his chest with her foot. His ribs made a dull crunching sound. He screamed in pain and fell to the ground. She kicked him in the head. He stopped screaming.

  Nick rubbed his elbow and looked down at them. One man was unconscious, the other moaned and writhed on the sidewalk. The whole fight had taken less than twenty seconds. Across the way, an elderly couple stared at them.

  Selena's face was tight. She was breathing hard, her breath pushing out between half open lips. She looked at his arm.

  "You're bleeding," she said.

  Dark blood oozed through the rip in his sleeve.

  "It's just a scratch."

  Selena bent down and picked up the box with the Nostradamus file. Nick looked up and down the street. A crowd was beginning to gather.

  "We need to get out of here," he said, "before the cops show up."

  "Some vacation," she said.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The new Project headquarters sat on eighty acres of prime countryside in the County of Fairfax, Virginia, within easy commuting distance of the Capitol.

  A twelve foot chain link fence all around the property served to keep animals and the curious away. The real security was automated and invisible. The main building looked like a private home. It was vaguely colonial in style, with a columned front porch, white siding and a sloping green shingle roof. False wooden shutters painted green accented the windows.

  A wide, paved driveway ran from the entry gate and guard station to the house. Across from the house was a low concrete building with overhead doors. It was empty, a space waiting for a purpose. The drive ended in a cement helipad marked with a wide, yellow circle. Washington and the White House were minutes away by helicopter.

  During the Cold War the property had been a Nike missile site, with three 5000 square foot underground magazines of hardened concrete and steel. Two of the magazines had been covered over and landscaped, the only clue to their existence a series of low ventilation pipes rising from the garden and lawn. The house sat over the third.

  The previous owner had converted the magazine directly below the house into an emergency second home. It came with a kitchen, bath, bedrooms, swimming pool and independent power supply. The living area served as an operations center. A second magazine housed the Project's Cray computers and communication gear. The third contained a workout room, an armory, and a pistol range. Access to the lower levels was from inside the house, down a spiral staircase. A tool shed in the flower garden outside concealed an emergency exit from below.

  Selena and Nick had come straight from the airport. Selena was behind the wheel of her burgundy-colored Mercedes. Nick eyed the house as they drove in. After the old headquarters had been destroyed, Harker had found a more secure location.

  "I'm still not used to this," he said. "When Harker said we needed to go underground, I didn't think she meant it literally."

  "You have to admit it's great camouflage. Lamont really likes the pool. So do I." Lamont Cameron was part of the team, recruited after he'd left the Navy Seals.

  She parked in front of the house. They went up the steps onto the porch. A camera over the entrance tracked them. There was a biometric reader and facial recognition scanner by the door. Selena placed her thumb against the reader and leaned in to the scanner. The door opened with an oiled whisper of retracting bolts.

  Director Elizabeth Harker's new office was in the back, on the ground floor. Elizabeth was at her desk, facing out through a wall of French windows onto a wide flower garden. The windows looked like regular windows, but even a fifty caliber round would have trouble getting through them. Elizabeth had decided the risk was worth it. In the old building, she'd been without a window for years.

  Harker was a small woman. She was dressed in her usual outfit of black suit and crisp white blouse. She had milk white skin and emerald earrings that picked up the color of her eyes. Her hair was deep black with streaks of gray and white. There was a dimpled scar above her left eye, where an assassin's bullet had failed to kill her.

  Nick thought she was the most competent woman he'd ever known. Her looks and small size deceived people who didn't know her into thinking she could be manipulated. It didn't take long for them to find out they were mistaken. Elizabeth Harker was nobody's pawn.

  A large, flat screen monitor took up most of one wall in the office. A leather couch and three chairs were arranged near the desk. On Harker's desktop were the Nostradamus file, a pen and pad, and a picture of her father in a silver frame. The picture had replaced a photograph of the Twin Towers on 911, lost with everything else on the day the old headquarters was destroyed.

  Elizabeth drew strength from the picture of her father. He'd had a practical way of getting to the heart of any problem with a quote or a quiet conversation. The Judge had died years before, but she still thought of his advice at times when she needed to make a critical decision.

  She looked up as Nick and Selena came in. "The French are unhappy," she said. Harker never wasted words

  They sat down on the couch.

  "Hello to you too," Nick said. "What's their problem?"

  "You mean aside from the fact that you put two of their nationals in a hospital and disappeared?"

  "I thought it was best if we got out of the country."

  "Fortunately for you, the two who attacked you were on Interpol's wanted list. What got the French upset was finding out Bertrand sent a package to your hotel the afternoon he was killed. They want to know what it was."

  Elizabeth picked up her new pen. Her silver pen had been lost with everything else in the old office. She'd replaced it with a Mont Blanc, black with the trademark snowcap on the end. She began tapping it on the hard wooden surface of the d
esk.

  "It seems that Selena's friend had some questionable contacts."

  "What kind of contacts?" Selena asked.

  "There's an underground black market trade in Europe for rare books. Interpol was keeping an eye on Bertrand."

  "I don't believe Jean-Paul was dealing in the black market," Selena said. "He was an honest man. His books had provenance. All his contacts were legitimate."

  "Not all of them. The police looked through his phone records. He got a call from someone connected to the Union Corse the morning of the day he was killed."

  "What's the Union Corse?" Nick asked.

  "The French Mafia. They're based in Corsica and Marseille. Big in the narcotics trade, art theft, prostitution, money laundering. The men who went after you were gangsters, members of the mob. It can't be a coincidence."

  "You think the Union Corse killed Jean-Paul?"

  "Yes. I told the French I'd talk to you. I didn't tell them we had this." She tapped the Nostradamus file with her finger. "Have you figured out what Bertrand meant by what he wrote on the floor?"

  Selena brushed a hair from her forehead with the back of her hand. "No. It makes no sense to me."

  Harker pushed the file folder across the desk. "I want you to translate this. We might learn something."

  "I can translate it, but I can't guarantee I'll understand it. Not with Nostradamus."

  "Work with Stephanie. Use the computers to speed things up."

  Stephanie Willits was Harker's deputy and the Project's resident computer guru. One of the old Nike magazines contained a bank of Crays with enough computing power to rival Langley.

  Harker set her pen down and looked at Selena. "You handled that attack in Paris. Are you fit to go back in the field?"

  Selena had been badly wounded the year before. A bullet had clipped her spine and almost killed her. For a while, it looked like she'd be in a wheelchair for life. She hadn't been in the field since then.

  Selena took a breath. She'd known this day would come.