Read The Martyr's Curse Online
Authors: Scott Mariani
‘That’s what I thought you’d say. Then consider Agent Valois a hostage until further notice.’
‘Don’t do this to yourself. We’ll find you. You can’t get away.’
Ben gave a dark smile. ‘I thought you said you knew me, Luc.’
Then the call was over. Ben turned off the phone. There was silence inside the cab of the Hummer. Just the muted growl of the idling motor and the crackle of duct tape as Silvie Valois shifted in her seat and shook her head at him in disbelief. ‘Smart move,’ she said. ‘You just screwed yourself.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Ben said. ‘What I did was to verify that you were telling me the truth. That was worth taking a small risk for.’
‘A small risk? You’re crazy.’
Ben didn’t reply. He went back to thinking. By now, Luc Simon’s office would be a hubbub of burning phone lines as Interpol fell over themselves scrambling troops to the triangulated location of Dexter’s phone. Police could be mobilised on the ground pretty damn fast, twenty-four-seven, even in remote Alpine areas, but not half as fast as by air. Ben knew that the Gendarmerie Nationale airborne division had helicopter bases all over France. Given the local topography, the difficulty in tracking targets by road in a mountainous region, the occasional necessity of locating and rescuing lost climbers and skiers, they’d almost certainly have a helibase in Briançon.
The GN chopper squadrons went all the way back to their role flying combat sorties in Indochina in the fifties, before the debacle of Vietnam had kicked off. These pilots had a long legacy of expertise. It would take just a few minutes before they were in the air, and hardly any time at all before the helicopters were homing in on a target so close to base. Meanwhile, Luc Simon would have been sure to order police roadblocks all around them. Those might take thirty minutes to set up. In that time, on twisty unlit roads, even the most determined driver couldn’t realistically have covered more than about forty kilometres in any direction, dictating a minimum diameter for the cops to encircle. That didn’t give Ben a lot of wiggle room, but it gave a little. The incoming airborne units gave him much less.
In short, it was time to get moving.
‘What are you doing?’ Silvie asked as he flipped open the glovebox and started rooting around for a bit of paper. Finding one of Omar’s insurance documents that had a blank reverse side, he scrolled up the list of contact numbers on Dexter’s phone and used the marker pen he’d bought in Briançon to write them down. The old-fashioned way, untrackable, untraceable. He folded the paper into his pocket and spent exactly two seconds deciding what to do with the phone. Keeping hold of it was out of the question. It was a virtual target hanging around his neck. Destroying it would simply kill the signal, which was the next best option. But he wanted the cops to be deceived for as long as possible into thinking they knew exactly where he was. He stepped out of the vehicle, waded into the long grass at the roadside and dropped the phone into the bushes, still switched on and screaming ‘Here I am!’ to his pursuers.
Jumping back into the Hummer and ignoring Silvie’s questions, Ben took off and drove like a wild man. The road snaked and looped. The Hummer roared up inclines and squealed around hairpin bends. The lights carved a dazzling tunnel out of the trees that hugged the verges. Ben checked his mirrors every few seconds, half-expecting to see flashing blue lights chasing them, but the mirrors showed only darkness.
After a few more minutes, the deserted road climbed steeply for two kilometres and the trees fell away either side to reveal an open vista. The mountains all around them, the forested valley below, the night sky spangled with billions of stars that threw a diaphanous glow over the landscape.
Ben braked to a halt. Silvie watched as he got out of the Hummer, walked round to the front, stepped up on the bumper then on to the bonnet, then clambered up on the flat roof. Standing high above the road, he had a sweeping three-sixty view of the terrain. Everything was still. No screech of sirens, no thump of approaching helicopters. To the west, there was nothing but dark wilderness. North and south, the road was an undulating strip of ribbon shining under the stars. To the east, the ground fell away beyond the roadside barrier in a staggered rocky slope strewn with thorny bushes and clumps of pine. About three hundred metres below and three-quarters of a kilometre away across the valley, Ben could make out the shapes of agricultural buildings clustered under the trees, surrounded by a large walled yard with a farmhouse at one end. Its windows were unlit. The good folks inside were fast asleep, as all good folks should be at this hour.
Ben jumped down from the vehicle and opened the passenger door. ‘Are you going to tell me what’s happening, or what?’ Silvie demanded. Without replying, he took Breslin’s switchblade from his pocket and popped it open, then carefully slashed the tape holding her right wrist and ankle to the seat frame. Then he trotted round to the driver’s door, leaned in over the transmission tunnel and did the same for her left side. She sighed with relief and shook her arms and rubbed her wrists to get the circulation flowing again.
‘Out you get,’ he said. ‘There’s a farm down there. That’s where we’re going.’
Silvie clambered out and started walking towards the edge of the road, peering down the slope. ‘Not so fast,’ he said, motioning her back to the car. ‘Lay your hands flat on the wing.’
‘You love that stuff, don’t you,’ she muttered as he looped a fresh length of tape to bind her wrists together.
‘We get down there, no noise. Any tricks, I’ll snap your neck.’
‘So before you didn’t believe me, and you were threatening to kill me; and now you do believe me, you’re
still
threatening to kill me?’
‘Life’s tough for hostages,’ he said. He tore off another five inches of the broad, strong tape, and before she could dodge backwards he slapped it across her mouth as a gag. ‘Don’t move.’ He grabbed everything necessary from the Hummer. Slung his green bag over his left shoulder and the holdall containing the guns and ammo over the right. He had three pistols in various pockets, the two Glocks and Eriq Sabatier’s Beretta. The combined weight of the weaponry, the gold bar and the stacks of cash he’d stolen from Rollo was close to crippling. About the equivalent of the heavy pack the SAS slave-drivers had expected their recruits to tote up and down the rugged slopes of Pen y Fan Mountain in the Brecon Beacons, way back in Ben’s training days, on the same selection course that had since caused the death of a dozen men from exhaustion and heart failure. But this would be easy, nearly all downhill.
‘Let’s go,’ he grunted at Silvie, motioning the way ahead, and they left the Hummer at the roadside as they stepped over the barrier and started threading a zigzag descent down the slope, Ben leading the way, keeping a watchful eye on his prisoner. His pang of regret at losing the Hummer didn’t last long. Easy come, easy go, just like it had been for Omar. The guy was probably still too much in love with his gold bar to care about a vehicle he’d won in a poker game.
It took more than twenty minutes to negotiate the tricky slope, loose stones and dry earth sliding in miniature land-slips under their boots as they worked their way down to level ground. Where the decline bottomed out, the trees grew thicker and they crossed half an acre of woodland before a starlit meadow opened up in front of them. At its edge was an old post-and-rail fence marking the edge of the farm boundary. They climbed the fence and walked on in silence, cutting due east towards the farm buildings nestling in the trees up ahead. To Ben, laden down with kit, it felt like one of the night marches from his army days. He felt strangely excited, invigoratingly alive. All five senses on full alert, constantly vigilant, taking in every detail, every smell, every sound. Like the distant thud of choppers, at least two of them, bearing down through the night sky on a target they would soon find was nothing better than an abandoned phone tossed in the bushes.
He smiled. Luc wouldn’t be a happy man.
From far above on the road, the farm had looked like a dainty model. Up close, it was a mess. Discarded machinery lay scattered about the yard and the sides of the rough, neglected buildings. The house was old stone, with a red-tiled roof and a squat chimney stack at each end. A dog barked from somewhere inside, but it was ignored and the farmhouse windows remained in darkness behind their louvred shutters. In front of the house was a large vegetable garden skirted by a stone wall. Parked face-out along the wall was a motley collection of tractors and old cars. Last in the line was a battered workhorse of a Toyota Hilux crew-cab pickup. The load bed was empty, apart from a diesel jerrycan and a rolled-up plastic tarp. No flat tyres, no missing lights. It looked serviceable enough. Ben motioned to Silvie to stay in the shadow of the wall. He gave the jerrycan a nudge and heard the slosh of fuel inside. Gently, he eased open the Toyota’s driver’s door and saw the key dangling from the ignition.
Country life. The benefits of a relaxed low-crime environment where nobody expected thieves to come in the night, and few folks bothered locking their vehicles.
Crouching down with the pickup hiding him from the house, Ben unslung his green bag and felt his right shoulder begin to decompress. Rooted around inside, pulled out a brick of Rollo’s cash and split it in half. 2,500 euros was more than the well-worn Toyota was worth. He hoped that the generosity of the exchange might entice the owners not to report the theft to the police. He left the money trapped under a stone on the wall, where it couldn’t be missed in the morning. Eased open the rear cab door and loaded the gear inside. There was a pair of rubber wellingtons in the footwell, crusted with dried dirt. A tattered flat cap and a rumpled boiler suit that smelled strongly of chicken shit lay on the back seat. Ben closed the door, waved Silvie over from the shadows and bundled her into the front passenger seat. He eased in behind the wheel, took a deep breath and twisted the ignition. The diesel started up with a rasp, loud in the night. He quickly engaged gear and they took off. Still no lights came on in the farmhouse. Heavy sleepers.
The farmyard led to a private track that wound its way between sheds and barns and finally out through a set of gates to the open road. Silvie rolled her eyes angrily and muttered from behind her tape gag. Maybe she was complaining about the smell of old boots and chicken shit inside the truck.
The road snaked up the valley until a junction took them back the way they’d come before. Ben drove fast for five kilometres, the Toyota’s maladjusted headlights a pale candle glow compared to the supernova of the Hummer, its worn engine and suspension and tyres all protesting loudly from the punishment. Still ignoring Silvie, he stopped the truck and got out. He reached in the back, removed his jacket, took out the boiler suit and put it on. It smelled even fouler up close, but he’d worn worse things in his life. He unlaced his boots, took them off and slipped his feet into the damp wellingtons, thinking about trench foot. Finally, he opened the passenger door and yanked the tape from Silvie’s mouth.
‘There was no need for that, you know,’ she said irritably.
‘We needed something a little less conspicuous,’ Ben said. ‘Out here in the boondocks that Hummer stuck out a mile.’
‘I don’t mean the car,
imbécile
. I mean the tape. I’m getting tired of being trussed up like a prisoner.’
‘You’re a government agent. As of tonight, I’m effectively a fugitive. Figure it out.’
‘If I wanted to resist you, don’t you think I would have by now? I could handle you.’
‘Don’t even think about it,’ Ben said. He put on the flat cap. Crouched down and poked a hand under the truck’s dirty sill, felt about among the dirt-encrusted suspension members and came up with fingers caked in black grease. He smeared a little on his face and wiped the rest down the front of the boiler suit.
‘It’s a great look,’ she said acerbically.
Ben grabbed the tarp from the load bed. ‘We’ll be coming up on a police roadblock soon. I’m going to have to ask you to snuggle down in the footwell for a while. If I don’t think you can manage that without complaining or making noise, I’ll have to tape your mouth up again.’
‘You’re just going to drive on through? These are trained police officers. Do you think they’re stupid?’
‘If they’re not, then I’ll just have to shoot my way through.’
‘You really are crazy.’
‘You want the tape?’
She shook her head. ‘I’ll be quiet.’
‘Good.’ He racked the passenger seat back as far as it would go to give her space to cram herself down as low as possible, then covered her with the tarpaulin. He got back behind the wheel. Lying in the nook of the steering column and the dusty instrument panel was an old briar pipe, filled with some kind of tobacco that might have been dried horse manure. He clamped the worn stem between his teeth and lit the bowl with his Zippo as he drove. He coughed at the first acrid sting of the awful smoke.
‘Something’s burning,’ said a muffled voice from under the tarp.
‘Shush,’ Ben said. He drove on. The rubber boots gave little clutch or throttle control, but then the pickup was no thoroughbred. After rattling along for another kilometre, they rounded a bend and Ben saw his guess had been right. A pair of Renault Mégane police cars flanked the road up ahead, their headlights bright, their roof bars casting a blue swirl over the roadside bushes and trees. Two uniformed cops saw the truck approaching and stepped up to meet it. They were holding torches and both had holstered pistols on their utility belts. One was carrying the reliable old MAT-49 submachine gun on a sling, dangling at an angle across his chest. The other waved the Toyota down.
Ben stopped, and the two cops walked up to the vehicle. The one with the submachine gun stood blocking the way with a scowl on his face, as if all he wanted in the world was to get into a shoot-’em-up with a carload of villains. This was probably the most exciting night of his career. The other came round to the driver’s door, an older man, paunchy and jaded-looking. Ben wound down his window and a cloud of pipe smoke wafted out to meet the torch beam that panned around the inside of the cab. The light hovered over the plastic tarp that covered a kidnapped government agent, then flicked up at Ben, dazzling him. Then it did a quick tour of the back seats, flashed over the green canvas of Ben’s bag containing stolen cash and gold bullion, and over the black fabric of the holdall stuffed with military rifles and ammunition.