The Omega Factor(62)

“I made contact today.” He spoke in Occitan, which they both understood.

“What was it like?” Raymond asked, the voice rough and gravelly, as if it hurt to talk. “How did it feel to face him again?”

How had it felt? He’d come to despise Gerard Vilamur, a man who for all his righteous correctness was nothing more than an arrogant hypocrite who preyed on vulnerable women.

“Strange, actually,” he said. “All that anger, which I’ve been amassing for thirty-two years, was instantly replaced by an immense satisfaction. A feeling that I had him right where I wanted him.”

His mother never remarried, raising him alone, then dying of breast cancer before making it to age sixty. To her final breath she never said a foul word about Vilamur.

“He’s your father,” she told him, struggling to breathe. “Find him. Make him accept you.”

“He said he never wanted to hear from us again. He denied everything. He was cruel to you.”

“I loved him, Bernat. God help me, but I did. I still love him.”

“But what of your husband?”

“I loved him too. Only differently.”

Incredibly, in her mind, what happened between her and Vilamur had always seemed her fault. Unhappy in her marriage, she’d tempted a priest and caused his fall from grace. Not the other way around. The burden of raising a child on her own became a sort of penance for that perceived sin, which she’d accepted with the grace of a fool. He’d loved her as a son should love his mother, but the older he became the more he realized where the fault lay.

“The one who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning,” he said.

Raymond smiled. “The Gospel of John is always instructive. Here’s some more. You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”

“That he is. And now I have that cheat and liar precisely where I want him.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself.”

Good advice.

He owed this old man everything. Fifteen years ago, Raymond had been his socius when he’d ascended to the Perfecti. True to the name, the old man had been a comrade who shared both his labors and his hardships. He’d confided in Raymond and told him the truth about himself. Together, over the years, they’d formulated the plan he was now implementing. Raymond had been the one to tell him about les Vautours.

“The Holy Roman Church has always been interested in them. Trust me on this. That curiosity dates all the way back to our time. Before the crusade.”

“Do you know why?”

“I was never told. Only that the group had caused the church many problems and they wanted to eliminate them while they were eliminating us.”

So he’d included a reference in his second communication with Vilamur simply as a misdirection since he could not then reveal the real reason for the extortion, not until they were face-to-face. He wanted to watch the reaction for himself. But it had not been much. Vilamur had stuck to his lie. Which he could, for a few days more.

“I’m having the DNA test run,” he said. “I’ll be taking the samples to a lab tomorrow.”

“That will be the incontrovertible proof,” Raymond said. “Then, and only then, will you have him where you want him.”

Fifty meters away the bonfire continued to burn and the Perfecti were mingling among themselves all around it.

“It’s good to see them all together,” Raymond said.

That it was.

“The sinner priest is dead?” Raymond asked.

He nodded. “Gone to hell, where he belongs.”

Killing had never been part of Cathar doctrine. But allowing a predator like Tallard to continue to live seemed even worse. So they’d compromised and outsourced the task. Good thing he could afford to hire the right people.

“Andre is proving to be an excellent recruit,” he said.

“That is good to hear. I feel for him. He endured a lot. We need more like him.”

“I’ll make sure we get them. There is another problem.”

And he told Raymond about what happened in Ghent.

His old friend was shocked. It had been Raymond who told him about the original Just Judges being hidden beneath the reproduction.

“Why are you telling me this?” he asked.

“You are my dear friend. That masterpiece has lain hidden for a long time. You should be the one credited for its rediscovery. That will help your business immensely.”

Yes, it would.

And he’d appreciated the inside information.

“Are you sure that the original is there?” he asked Raymond.

“Nothing is a certainty, besides death. But I have no reason to believe that what I know is false.”

And Raymond had explained that the creator of the reproduction, Jef Van der Veken, lived to the age of ninety-two, dying in 1964. Van der Veken had continued to ply his trade as an art restorer, copyist, and forger after 1945 until blindness forced him to stop. His son-in-law, Albert Philippot, an artist too, gradually took over his tasks. It had been Philippot who oversaw the 1950 restoration of the Ghent Altarpiece.