The Tenth Chamber Read Online Free Page A

needed to say was a friendly, ‘Hello.’
    The girl on the aisle bubbled over, ‘Hi. My friend and I were wondering who you are.’
    He smiled. ‘I’m Luc, that’s who I am.’
    ‘Are you in films?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Theatre?’
    ‘Not that either.’
    ‘What then?’
    ‘I’m an archaeologist.’
    ‘Like Indiana Jones?’
    ‘Precisely. Just like him.’
    The girl on the aisle peeked at her friend then asked, ‘Would you like to have a coffee with us?’
    Luc shrugged and thought briefly about his unfinished work. ‘Yes, of course,’ he answered. ‘Why not?’

THREE
    General André Gatinois was taking a brisk stroll through the Père Lachaise Cemetery, his habitual lunch-time routine on fair days. Keeping lean into his fifties was proving nettlesome and he found it increasingly necessary to skip lunch and walk a few kilometrers instead.
    The cemetery, the largest in Paris, was the most visited and arguably the most famous in the world, the resting place for the likes of Proust, Chopin, Balzac, Oscar Wilde and Molière. Much to Gatinois’s irritation, it was also home to Jim Morrison, and he personally complained to the cemetery administrator whenever he noticed another addled Doors fan had spray-painted a TO J IM sign complete with arrow on a piece of masonry.
    The cemetery was only a kilometre or so from his office on Boulevard Mortier in the 20 th arrondissement, but to maximise the amount of time in greenery, he had his driver take him to the main cemetery gate and wait there until he was done with his constitutional. The number plates on his official black Peugeot 607 guaranteed the police wouldn’t bother the idling chauffeur.
    The cemetery was huge, some fifty hectares, and Gatinois could vary his route endlessly. On a sunny late-summer day, the masses of leaves overhead were just starting to turn and were rustling pleasantly in the breeze. He walked amidst a throng of visitors, although his fine blue suit, military-style hair and stiff posture set him apart from the jeans and sweatshirts of the scruffy majority.
    Lost in thought, he found himself somewhat deeper than usual in the grounds so he picked up his pace to make sure he’d be back in time for his weekly staff meeting. A particularly large ornate tomb on a knoll made him slow and stop for a moment. It was open-walled, Byzantine, housing side-by-side sarcophagi adorned by a medieval man and a woman in marble repose. The tomb of Héloïse and Abélard. The twelfth-century star-crossed lovers who so defined the notion of true love that, for the sake of national homage, their bones were sent to Paris in the nineteenth century from their original resting place in Ferreux-Quincey.
    Gatinois blew his nose into his handkerchief. Eternal love, he scoffed. Propaganda. Mythology. He thought of his own loveless marriage and made a mental note to buy a small gift for his mistress. He was tired of her too, but in his position, he was obligated to subject each dalliance to a full security check. Although his colleagues were discreet, he felt somewhat constrained: he couldn’t chop and change too frequently and still maintain his dignity.
    His driver passed through the security cordon and let Gatinois off in an internal courtyard where he entered the building through a huge oak door as venerable and solid as the Ministry of Defence itself.
    La piscine .
    That’s what the DGSE complex was nicknamed. The swimming pool. Although the name referred to the nearby Piscine des Tourelles of the French Swimming Federation, the notion of swimming laps, working your tail off but remaining in the same place, often seemed apt to him.
    Gatinois was somewhat of an anomaly within the organisation. No one inside the Directorate-General for External Security held a higher rank, but his unit was the smallest and in an agency where opacity was a way of life, Unit 70 was the most opaque.
    Whereas his departmental peers within the Directorates of Strategy and Intelligence commanded