Diamondhead (49 page)

Authors: Patrick Robinson

Tags: #Suspense, #Fiction, #Political, #Thrillers, #Weapons industry, #War & Military, #Assassination, #Iraq War; 2003-

When this was completed, he said to the garage owner, “Remember, with a cash transaction like this, you will never breathe one word about it to anyone.”

“Never,” said M. Laporte, who now had the twenty thousand euros stuffed into his pocket. “That will be sixty-two euros for the petrol.”

“Why don’t you go fuck yourself?” said Mack cheerfully, accelerating away into the street and heading east, fast, away from Val André, away from this parsimonious little sonofabitch and the bodies of the two hoodlums he’d just killed.

“Fuck it,” said Mack. “I’ll be darn glad when this French bullshit is over.”

For the moment, he concentrated on what the navy describes as leaving the datum. He drove fast along a lonely country road headed in the general direction of Rennes, remembering how his guidebook on the bench at Brixham had informed him that Brittany’s main city had been a crossroads since Roman times. In his opinion crossroads were good, because he was uncertain in which direction he may need to travel, uncertain where Henri Foche might suddenly show up. However, he guessed the city of Rennes, where the politician lived, would consider him to be permanent news. The Foche travels and speeches would probably be easier to find there than anywhere else.

But first he had tasks to complete, and the first of these involved another killing . . . well, a killing off.
Lt. Cdr. Mackenzie Bedford is pleased to announce the death of Mr. Gunther Marc Roche of rue de Basle, Geneva.

He found a deserted stretch of road and pulled off onto a rough farm track with trees on either side. And there he ripped off, for the last time, his black curly wig, his beard, black T-shirt, and navy-blue sweater, and stuffed the disguise items into the deep recess of the false bottom of his bag, along with the red Swiss passport and the driver’s license.

He pulled on a clean white T-shirt and his lightweight tweed jacket, and then carefully fitted his light-blond wig, the neat mustache, and the rimless spectacles that contained only plain glass. It was just about impossible even to equate him with the black-bearded hijacker who was currently being hunted by the English police, the British coast guard, the entire French government Maritime Services, and the police department of Brittany.

Mack had laid a sensational trail. There were confirmed sightings of him just about every yard of the way from the pub opposite his Brixham hotel to Laporte Auto, now ten miles astern of his new Peugeot. There were waitresses, harbor masters, parking lot attendants, booksellers, trawler captains, even some guy out fishing who’d done his best to help the Saint-Malo coast guard officer. And then there was the garage boss who had dutifully filled in the government forms, inspected his passport and license. In Mack’s view Interpol would be knocking on the door of 18 Basle Street within four or five hours. Gods knows what they’d find, especially since he’d made the address up. He did not even know if there was a Basle Street in the entire mountainous Swiss Confederation.

As far as Mack could tell, there would be a general murder hunt and panic in Geneva, and there’d be a real panic and murder hunt in Rennes, and another in Val André. There’d be a massive alert and attempted-murder inquiry in Brixham, especially when the parking official blew the whistle on the bearded guy with the weird accent, the one who’d left behind a Ford Fiesta with no license plates, no tax disk, no registration, and no fingerprints.

Mack smiled to himself. “And all for a man who never existed, and could never be found—a Swiss ghost.”

He supposed that in the end the English police would strip down the car and find its chassis number, which would, perhaps, lead them to Dublin. And there they would meet Mr. Michael McArdle, who would tell them all about Patrick Sean O’Grady, of 27 Herbert Park Road, Dublin 4, a fair-haired Irishman, slim mustache and rimless spectacles, born in County Kildare, passport number and license registered with the proper authorities.

Mack almost burst out laughing at the compelling thought that Mr. O’Grady had never existed either. And neither did his address or his passport and license.

But the entire exercise was too serious for laughter, and sometime in the next few hours he would destroy the evidence that could link him to Gunther Marc Roche. Right now he needed to complete his second task. Clean-cut in his Jeffery Simpson mode, he drove out onto the road and set forth again, urgently now looking for a French café.

Five miles later he found one, a small country restaurant with a large parking lot and several cars sharing the space with a couple of enormous trucks. He pulled in and parked the Peugeot at the back of the lot, then walked around his vehicle with his screwdriver and swiftly removed both plates. He put them on the backseat and walked to the café for breakfast.

It was a bright, clean, inexpensive place, and it was busy. Mack was shown to a small table for two next to the window. He ordered orange juice and coffee and took a copy of
Le Monde
from the newspaper rack. When the waitress came for his breakfast order he glanced down at the menu and settled for an omelet and bacon with a croissant and fruit preserves.

He turned to the newspaper, and the lead story’s headline on page 3 read:

SECURITY ALERT AS HENRI FOCHE FACES SAINT-NAZAIRE WORKERS TOMORROW

Mack sipped his coffee and grappled with the French language, trying to grasp the gist of the story. In the ensuing ten minutes, before the arrival of his omelet, he learned that there had been unrest among the workforce in the Saint-Nazaire shipyards.
Le Monde
assumed that Foche himself held a substantial shareholding in this sprawling industrial complex, and he was nervous that the dissatisfaction might cause the entire workforce to vote against him in the forthcoming election.

Foche was essentially going to Saint-Nazaire to put out a fire, but he would disguise it with an inspiring political speech designed to convince everyone that life would improve dramatically, for everyone, if they would sweep him to victory and install him in the Elysée Palace.
Pour la Bretagne, Pour la France!

He planned to address the great throng of workers in the Saint-Nazaire yard shortly after five, at the end of the shift. The executive had agreed to postpone the start of the next shift for one hour, with no loss of pay. There was a picture of a wooden stage being constructed with a lectern and microphone, beneath a patriotic red, white, and blue striped awning, and a huge Foche battle banner, as above. The workers interested Mack, all dressed in standard royal-blue overalls.

Mack stepped once more to the newspaper rack, where he could see a selection of road maps of France on the lower shelf. He helped himself to one of these and took it back to the table, just as his breakfast arrived. He told the waitress to add the cost of the map and his newspaper to the bill.

She replied that of course she would, and was there anything more she could bring him? Mack confirmed he was fine for the moment and attacked his breakfast, the first food he had eaten since the fried cod with the overweight chips back in the pub on Brixham harbor thirteen hours before. And he’d been up all night, fighting the elements and local villains.

The omelet was supreme among all omelets, flavored with Parmesan cheese, tarragon, and chives. Mack assessed, conservatively, that he could probably have eaten about twelve of them. But he did not want too much food, because he needed to stay sharp. He ate the delicious French bread with strawberry preserves and said yes to a coffee refill.

Then he asked to pay the bill, and for a large black coffee to go. The waitress brought both, the coffee in a plastic container with a lid. Mack paid, left a tip, and said he’d sit there for a few more minutes and finish his second cup. The waitress privately thought he must be a coffee addict and would probably become a basket case sometime in the next half hour. Wrong.

Two minutes later, Mack watched a small Citroën drive into the parking lot. Two men got out, walked the short distance into the café, and took a small table across the room. Instantly, Mack stood up, took his second cup of coffee with him, and hurried out the door, helping himself to a small book of matches as he went.

He walked casually to the parking lot, where the Citroën was out of the sight line of the café’s main serving area. And then he went to work.

He knelt down at the front and rear of the car, swiftly removed both plates, and screwed them onto his dark-blue Peugeot. Then he took the other plates off the backseat and screwed them onto the Citroën. He poured the fresh black coffee into the hedge, kept the container, jumped into the driver’s seat, and gunned that Peugeot onto the highway at a pace that would have made the late gunman Raymond gasp.

Ten miles later he stopped on a long, quiet stretch of tree-lined road and consulted his map. Saint-Nazaire was about eighty miles to the south, but he no longer needed to head for Rennes. He needed to cut across country to Lorient, and find Brittany’s great coastal highway that runs straight past the ancient city of Vannes down on the Morbihan coast. From there it was a straight shot down the highway to the French shipbuilding hub.

Mack checked his watch and the gas gauge. It was nine o’clock on a bright July morning, and he had plenty of fuel. At least old Laporte had pumped in the right amount, though he had not filled the tank, probably because he guessed he was giving it away to the man who had just paid him six thousand euros over the odds for the Peugeot.

The car would probably take two or three gallons more, and Mack pulled into the next service station and filled up, also pouring a pint of four-star into his empty coffee container.

Three miles farther on, he pulled off into a rest area, retrieved the black curly wig, beard, and black T-shirt, ripped up Gunther’s passport, and wrapped up everything in the pages of
Le Monde,
including the false Swiss driver’s license. He walked over to a metal garbage bin and pushed it all down to the bottom. Then he upended the pint of four-star into the bin, struck one of his matches, and tossed it in, ducking away as he did so. The bin blew with a dull
WHOMPF!
Flames leaped high as it became an inferno, and Mack could feel the intense heat as the last remnants of Gunther were cremated on this desolate French country road.

Leaving the metal bin shimmering hot, he reboarded the Peugeot and headed south.

At 9:15 A.M. a couple of schoolboys on vacation found the bodies of Marcel and Raymond. In fact, they did not precisely find the bodies; they found Raymond’s loaded revolver, safety catch off, lying on the sand. The bodies were strictly an afterthought, and anyway the boys thought the two men were asleep.

Discovery of the heavy revolver was just about the most exciting thing that had happened on this vacation, and one of them, young Vincent Dupres, aged eleven, took aim up over the seawall, pulled the trigger twice, and blew out someone’s upstairs window. The resultant rumpus, which is apt to emanate from gunshots and a shower of broken glass, led to a surge of neighbors swarming out onto the beach-front street of Val André and the subsequent discovery that the owner of the gun was dead and so was his pal.

The police were called immediately, and twenty minutes later two white cruisers from the Gendarmerie Nationale arrived from Saint-Malo. Detective Constable Paul Ravel was temporarily in command, and this was a fortunate move for the police.

Ravel was a quiet, contemplative, often overlooked thirty-four-year-old career police officer. Many of his colleagues thought he should have been promoted much higher, long ago. But Paul Ravel, married with two children, looked at the world with a wry smile, the kind of smile that is often backed up by a heavyweight brain, which his very definitely was.

He was an athletic man of medium height, originally from the southwestern city of Toulouse, where he was educated, and considered to be a rugby fullback destined perhaps to play one day for one of the great French teams. Toulouse scouted him when he was only seventeen years old, the owner of the safest pair of hands schoolboy rugby in that city had seen for years.

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