THE FARMER WAS singing a tearful version of "Le Souvenir" when the red blur filled his windshield and his truck's cab reverberated with an ear-shattering roar. He jerked the wheel to the right and sent the heavily laden vehicle nose first into a drainage ditch. The truck slammed into an embankment, catapulting the load of wooden cages onto the ground. The impact smashed the cages into splinters and freed hundreds of squawking chickens. The driver extricated himself from the truck and shook his fist at the crimson plane with the eagle insignia on the tail. He scurried for cover amid an explosion of feathers as the aircraft buzzed his truck again.
The plane climbed into the sky and did a triumphant rollover. The pilot was laughing so hard he almost lost control of the aircraft. He wiped the tears from his eyes with his sleeve and flew low over the vineyards that stretched for hundreds of acres in every direction. With a flick of a switch he sent a cloud of pesticides spraying out from the twin pods under the plane's wings. Then he peeled off in a new direction. The vineyard valleys changed to brooding forest and dark-water lakes that gave the land below a particularly melancholy aspect.
The plane skimmed the treetops, heading toward four distant spikes that rose above the forest on a hill. As the plane drew nearer, the spikes became guard towers that anchored the corners of a thick, crenellated stone wall. A wide moat filled with stagnant green water surrounded the wall and was in turn bordered by extensive formal gardens and woodland paths. The plane buzzed the roof of the imposing chateau within the walls, and then it flew out over the woods, dropped down onto a green swath of grass and taxied up to a Jaguar sedan parked at the edge of the airstrip. As the pilot climbed from the cockpit, a ground crew materialized out of nowhere and pushed the plane into a small flagstone hangar.
Ignoring the crew, Emil Fauchard strode to the car, walking with an athletic grace, muscles rippling under his flying suit of black Italian leather. He whipped his goggles off and handed them to the waiting chauffeur along with his gloves. Still chuckling over the expression on the truck driver's face, he settled into the plush backseat and poured himself a shot of cognac from a built-in^ bar
Fauchard had the classic features of a silent film star and a profile the Barrymore family would have been proud of. For all his physical perfection, however, Fauchard was a repellent man. His arrogant dark eyes had all the warmth of a cobra's. With his handsome, almost perfect face, he was like a marble statue that had been given life but not humanity.
The local farmers whispered that Fauchard had the look of a man who had made a pact with the devil. Maybe he was the devil, others said. The more superstitious took no chances and made the sign of the cross when he passed by, a holdover from the days of the evil eye.
The Jaguar followed a driveway that ran under a long tunnel-like tree canopy, then ascended to the main entrance of the chateau. The car drove over an arched bridge that spanned the moat, then through the wall gate into an expansive cobblestone courtyard.
The Fauchard chateau was feudal in silhouette and had none of
the architectural finesse seen in castles of Renaissance design. It was a stolid, squatting edifice of great size, anchored in place by medieval towers at each corner, mimicking the placement of turrets in the outer wall. Large windows had replaced some of the arrow slits in the exterior, and low-relief ornamentation had been added here and there, but the cosmetics could not hide the brooding, militaristic aspect of the building.
A burly man with a shaved head and a face like a pit bull stood sentry in front of the chateau's ornately carved double doors. He had somehow crammed a body shaped like a refrigerator into the black suit of a butler.
"Your mother is in the armory," the man said in a rasping voice. "She has been expecting you."
"I'm sure she has, Marcel," Emil said, brushing past the butler. Marcel was in charge of the small army that surrounded his mother like a Praetorian guard. Even Emil couldn't get near her without being intercepted by one thuggish servant or another. Many of the scar-faced retainers who filled posts normally reserved for household servants were former enforcers for the French mob, although she favored ex-Foreign Legionnaires like Marcel. They stayed out of sight for the most part, but Emil always sensed they were there, watching, even when he couldn't see them. He despised his mother's bodyguards. They made him feel like astranger in his own house, and even worse, he had no power over them.
He entered a spacious vestibule hung with ornate tapestries and walked down a portrait gallery that stretched along one wall of the chateau and seemed to go on forever. Hundreds of portraits lined the gallery. Emil hardly glanced at his ancestors, who had no more meaning to him than faces on postage stamps. Nor did he care that many of those ancestors had died violent deaths in this very house. The Fauchards had been in the chateau for centuries, since assassinating its former owner. There was hardly a pantry, bedroom or dining hall
where some member of the Fauchard family, or one of their enemies, had not been garroted, st
abbed or poisoned. If the chateau were still haunted by the ghosts of those murdered within its walls, every corridor in the vast edifice would have been crowded with restless wraiths. He went through a high arched door into the armory, an immense, vaulted hall whose walls were hung with weapons that spanned the centuries, from heavy bronze swords to automatic rifles, grouped according to time period. The focal point of the armory was a display of fully armored mounted knights in full charge against an unseen enemy. Enormous stained-glass windows that depicted warriors rather than saints lined one wall of the hall, imparting a religious atmosphere, as if the armory were a chapel dedicated to violence.
Emil went through another door into a library of military history that adjoined the armory. Light streaming through an octagon oculus illuminated the large mahogany desk at the center of the book-lined room. In contrast to the prevailing militant theme, the dark wood desk was carved with flowers and woodland nymphs. A woman wearing a dark business suit sat behind the desk going over a pile of papers.
Although Racine Fauchard was no longer youthful, she was still strikingly beautiful. She was as slender as a fashion model and in contrast to some women, who bend in on themselves as they grow older, she was as straight as a candle. Her skin was covered with fine wrinkles, but her complexion was as flawless as fine porcelain. Some people compared Racine's profile to that of the famous Nefertiti bust. Others said she looked more like the hood ornament on a classic car. Those meeting her for the first time might have guessed from her silver hair that she was of middle age.
Madame Fauchard looked up at her son's entry and gazed at him with eyes the hue of burnished steel.
"I've been waiting for you, Emil," she said. Her voice was soft but the unyielding authority in it was unmistakable.
Fauchard plunked into a fourteenth-century leather chair that was worth more than many people earned in a decade.
"Sorry, Mother," he said, with a careless expression on his face. "I was up dusting the grapes in the Fokker."
"I heard you rattle the roof tiles." Racine arched a finely shaped brow. "How many cows and sheep did you terrify this morning?"
"None," he said, with a satisfied smile, "but I did strafe a convoy and freed some Allied prisoners." He broke into laughter at her blank stare. "Well, all right. I buzzed a chicken truck and drove it into a ditch."
"Your aerial antics are most amusing, Emil, but I'm tired of paying the local farmers for the damage your exploits cause. There are more serious matters that deserve your attention. The future of the Fauchard empire, for one."
Fauchard caught the icy tone in the voice and straightened up in his chair, like a malicious schoolboy who'd been scolded for a prank. "I know that, Mother. It's just my way of blowing off steam. I thinly better up there."
"I hope you have thought about how you might deal with the threats to our family and way of life. You are the heir to all that the Fauchards have built up through many centuries. It is not a duty you should take lightly."
"And I don't. You must admit we have buried a potentially embarrassing problem under thousands of tons of glacial ice."
Racine's lips parted in a thin smile, revealing her perfect white teeth. "I doubt whether Jules would have liked being called an 'embarrassing problem." Sebastian deserves no credit. Due to his clumsiness, we almost lost the relic for all time."
"He never knew it was under the ice. He was intent on bringing out the strongbox."
"An exercise in futility." She flipped the cover open on the battered