I figured that after the attack on her husband, the world had become a frightening and chaotic place. She must have wondered about the attack, and the why and who of it. The buzzing trail bikes would have been no consolation, only an increase in the chaos. After my arrival a semblance of order was being rapidly restored, and I could see that she appreciated that.

Even as she was speaking about something mundane, like cheese and salad, in her eyes I could see trust, almost devotion. She was scared, but dealing with it, which was about all anyone can do. She was counting on me to get her through the situation, to the other side—from chaos to order. There was a lot of pent-up fear and anxiety hiding behind the good humor she showed. Which was understandable because she had no training, nothing to prepare her for what was going on.

I began thinking of the end game. If anyone came for us tonight, there would be bodies.

When she had finished cleaning and drying the salad, she put the leaves in a bowl and wiped her hands on a dish towel. I said, “Tell me about the basement ma’am.”

“The basement. You mean the cave.”

I’d forgotten that the French word for basement was cave. “Yes, the cave. You have one?”

“Oh yes. Gilles and Daniel did a real job on it.”

“Can I see it?”

“Of course you can, Tom.” She opened a cupboard door. The inside of the door was a key rack. She held up a long skeleton key. “Voila. The light is on the inside of the door. Do you know where that is?”

I said that I did.

Chapter Forty-Nine

I went back past the stairs to the little door in front of Gilles and Simone Vaugeois’ bedroom, where Nazari and I had seen Daniel and Maria arguing. The key turned easily.

I flipped the lights. Hardwired wall sconces lined a limestone corridor, illuminating the pale stone. I figured there’d be a lot of similar projects around these parts. Homeowners getting obsessed with stuff wasn’t new. Here in France they had all this ancient limestone to preoccupy them.

Simone was right, the basement was a cave. The corridor was almost horizontal, descending gently in the direction of the cliff face beside the house.

I mapped it mentally, based on what I had seen in Gilles’ documents. The cave under Brumaire pushed east into rock. From Gille’s diagrams I knew that the first excavated area was around thirty yards in, and I wasn’t disappointed. A medium-sized room was dedicated to the wine collection. A few hundred bottles stacked in racks on the south side, resting horizontally so that the residue was settled as the bottles were maintained at a temperature of sixty-five degrees year-round. The corridor continued from there, curving to the north twenty degrees so that now the tunnel was running north-east.