involvement.”
CHAPTER FIVE
The pinnacled towers of the Natural History Museum rose from the foggy heart of London like the ghost of a medieval cathedral. It wasn’t often that Aubrey Belleau had the opportunity to appreciate its ornate terracotta façade acrawl with the sculpted likenesses of apes, fish and human skulls in the blue-gray hours between midnight and dawn.
Sitting in the back seat of his Rolls Royce Silver Spur limousine, Belleau eyed the arches and flying buttresses with appreciation. Heavy yellow fog wafting in from the Thames pressed against the windows. Still, the temperature was moderately warm for London at hard on three o’clock in the morning.
He didn’t find the looming edifice of the museum at all intimidating. Rather, as he was the latest in a long line of Belleaus whose professional and personal life were inextricably linked to the fortunes of the institution, he found the sight inspiring.
Oakshott swerved the Rolls Royce into the private parking lot at the rear of the Darwin Centre. The guard leaned out of his glass-walled booth, recognized the automobile and the ID sticker on the windshield and waved it through the checkpoint.
As Oakshott braked the big car to a stop, Belleau made sure the computer and video uplink were disconnected. Honoré hadn’t asked him from where he was transmitting, nor would he have told her the truth if she had. Neither he nor any member of his family had ever violated the secrecy oath of the School of Night.
Oakshott parked the car and turned off the engine. Quickly, he got out, placing the step stool down before he opened the rear door. A gigantic man in gray chauffeur’s livery, he stood over six and half feet tall and tipped the scales at three hundred pounds. His long face was dead white. In his uniform, complete with a peaked cap and jodhpurs, Oakshott looked like a store window manikin from the late nineteenth century.
Aubrey Belleau slid from the car seat and stepped onto, then off the stool, twirling his miniature silver-knobbed walking stick like a Victorian dandy. He walked with a rolling gait along a flagstone path. “I shan’t be long, Oakshott. Wait in the car, take a nap if you’ve a mind to, that’s a good fellow.”
As he approached the service entrance, he heard the distant bong of Big Ben striking three. Reflexively, he glanced in the direction of the clock tower but because of the fog, he could barely discern its outline.
At the door, he removed the gold stickpin from his scarf and gave it a brief visual inspection. It was tipped with a symbol resembling a caduceus, depicting a pair of serpents coiled around a staff topped by an eye within a pyramid.
Inserting the end of the pin into the keyhole below the doorknob, he probed for a second, then with the click of a solenoid, the door swung silently open. He stepped into a foyer containing janitorial and cleaning supplies and closed the door behind him, the solenoid catching automatically.
Angling his walking stick over a shoulder, Belleau strode into a broad gallery filled with iguanas and tortoises, frozen in attitudes of arrested movement. Masterpieces of the model-maker’s art, the lights of the display cases glittered from their scaled bodies and staring eyes like unfinished gems. Terns and albatrosses hovered overhead, suspended by almost invisible filaments.
He marched swiftly past the reinforced glass tank holding the preserved remains of Archie the squid, the eight meter long example of Architeuthis dux floating in a solution of saline and formaldehyde. He didn’t so much as glance at the thousands of animal carcasses encased within glass. His footsteps echoed and re-echoed within the vast gallery.
Passing beneath an arch, he opened a narrow, nondescript door and entered a big chamber, shaped like the inside of a drum, with oak-paneled walls. High bookshelves rose nearly three meters above the floor. A wheeled library ladder leaned against the far wall.
Bronze busts