He stopped the car and crouched by the side of the road. On the ground and embedded in the torn bark of the damaged tree, he found flakes of black paint.
Something dark and glistening on the roadside caught his eye. He dabbed it with his finger. A blob of motor-oil, still warm to the touch. Judging by their width the skidmarks were made by fat, grippy sports tyres. A black performance car, going somewhere in a hurry. It had to be the Porsche.
He found more oil a little way further down the road, regular spots and dribbles leading away in the direction he was going. The driver must have hit a rock and damaged the sump. Why had the car crashed? How badly damaged was it? There might be a chance of finding it broken down further along the road, if it continued losing a lot of oil. But even though the police car was fast and powerful, it was highly conspicuous and he was a sitting duck in it.
He followed the oil trail for a few more kilometres, keeping an ear open for the crackling messages on the police radio. As he’d expected, it wasn’t long before they noticed that the car was missing and were sending more out to find it. He was going to have to switch vehicles, and lose his chance of catching up with the damaged Porsche.
On the edge of a sleepy rural hamlet was a small garage with a single petrol pump and a sign that flapped creaking in the breeze. Just beyond it was a rutted mud track leading off to the side. He swung the car over into it, sighing with frustration. He followed the track for about half a kilometre before it ended in a rock-strewn field of yellowed brush and thorn-bushes. He took off the police uniform and changed back into his own clothes, wiped down everything he’d touched inside the car, then tossed the keys down a ditch and started running back up towards the garage.
The mechanic looked up as the tall blond man walked through the opening in the metal shutter and into the workshop. He rubbed his bristled chin with coarse, blackened fingers, came away from the battered van he was fixing and lit a smoke. Yes, he’d seen a black Porsche come by. It had been a bit less than an hour ago. Nice car, shame about the damage. Seemed like it’d been in a crash, rear wheel-arch all dented in. Something rubbing on the wheel, sounded like.
‘Yeah, Italian plates? Crazy bastard smacked into me,’ Ben said. ‘Ran me off the road some way back. I’ve had to walk miles.’
‘Need a tow?’ The mechanic jerked his chin in the direction of the rusty tow-truck sitting on the forecourt.
Ben shook his head. ‘I’ve got a special deal through my insurance. I’ll give them a call. Thanks anyway.’ As they talked, he cast his eye around the place. There was a little showroom attached to the garage, selling mostly used small cars and pick-ups. His eye lit on something. ‘Tell you what, though. Is that for sale?’
He hadn’t been on a motorcycle for over ten years. The last one he’d ridden was an ancient military despatch bike that vibrated like a pneumatic drill and leaked oil and petrol. The sleek Triumph Daytona 900 triple he was riding now was a different order of machine, brutally powerful and faster than most things on four wheels. He followed the road, keeping a sharp watch for more oil spots. If he was lucky, those small round splashes would be the trail of breadcrumbs that could lead him all the way to wherever the Porsche had gone.
A few kilometres up the road, his heart sank as the oil trail suddenly petered out. He rode on a mile or so, peering down carefully as he backed off the throttle and the Triumph rumbled along at walking-pace. Nothing. He cursed. Either the leak had magically repaired itself, or else the driver had been trailered away somewhere. Roadside service, with a kidnap victim sitting in the car? It seemed unlikely. He must have called a local contact to come and tow him away. And now he was gone.
Ben stopped the bike and sat staring up the empty road.
He’d lost her.
47
Among the trees at the edge of Saint-Jean he eased the big Triumph down onto its sidestand and slung the full-face helmet over the handlebar. The village streets were as quiet and deserted as always. He found Father Pascal at home.
‘Benedict, I was so worried about you.’ Pascal clasped him by the shoulders. ‘But…where is Roberta?’
Ben explained the situation and the priest’s face fell further and further. He slumped despairingly onto a stool. He suddenly looked all of his seventy years.
‘I can’t stay here long,’ Ben said. ‘The police won’t waste any time tracing the Renault at the hotel to you. They’ll come here to question you about me.’
Pascal stood up. There was a fierce glint in his eye that Ben hadn’t seen before. He took Ben’s arm. ‘Follow me. There is a better place we can talk.’
Inside the church, Ben knelt in the confessional. Pascal’s face was half-visible through the mesh window between them.
‘Do not worry about the police, Benedict,’ Pascal said. ‘I will tell them nothing. But what are you going to do? I am terribly afraid for Roberta.’
Ben looked grim. ‘I don’t know what’s best,’ he said. He couldn’t put a dying child on hold. Every minute he delayed was time lost for her. He could walk away and finish his job–but it was signing Roberta’s death warrant. He could go after her, but if she was dead already or he couldn’t find her, he risked sacrificing the child for nothing. He sighed. ‘I can’t save them both.’
Pascal sat in thoughtful silence for a minute or two. ‘It is a difficult choice that lies before you, Ben. But you must choose. And once the decision is made, you must not regret it. There has been too much regret in your life already. Even if your choice leads to suffering, you must not look back. God will know your heart was pure.’
‘Father, do you know what Gladius Domini is?’ Ben asked.
Pascal sounded taken aback. ‘The Latin means “sword of God”. A curious expression. Why are you asking me this?’
‘You’ve never heard of a group, or organization, by that name?’
‘Never.’
‘Do you remember, you told me about a bishop–’
‘Sssh.’ Pascal interrupted him with an urgent look. ‘Someone is here,’ he whispered.
The priest walked down the central aisle and greeted the police detectives under the arch of the doorway.
‘Father Pascal Cambriel?’
‘Yes.’
‘My name is Inspector Luc Simon.’
‘Let us speak outside,’ Pascal said, leading him away from the church and shutting the door behind him.
Simon was tired. He’d just flown down by police helicopter from Le Puy. The trail there had gone dead, but he’d known that Ben Hope would resurface somewhere soon. He’d been right. But why Hope’s footsteps were leading him to this dusty little village in the middle of nowhere was beyond him. His head was hurting and he was missing his coffee.
‘I believe you’ve lost a car,’ he said to Pascal. ‘A Renault 14?’
‘Have I?’ Pascal looked surprised. ‘What do you mean, lost? I have not used it for weeks, but as far as I know it is still…’
‘Your car has been found at the Hotel Royal near Montségur.’
‘What was it doing there?’ Pascal asked incredulously.
‘That’s what I thought you could tell me,’ Simon replied in a suspicious voice. ‘Father, your car is implicated in a manhunt for an extremely dangerous criminal.’
Pascal shook his head blankly. ‘This is all very shocking.’
‘Who were you talking to in there?’ Simon demanded, pointing into the church. He started opening the heavy arched door.
Pascal blocked his way. The priest suddenly seemed twice his normal size. His eyes were hard. ‘I was hearing a confession from one of my parishioners,’ he growled. ‘And a confession is sacred. My parishioners are not criminals. I will not let you desecrate God’s house.’
‘I don’t give a damn whose house it is,’ Simon replied.
‘Then you will have to use force against me,’ Pascal said. ‘I will not let you in until you come back with a proper warrant.’
Simon glared hard at Pascal for a few seconds. ‘I’ll be
seeing you again,’ he said as he turned and walked away.
Simon was fuming as he got back to his car. ‘That old bastard knows something,’ he said to his driver. ‘Let’s go.’
They were passing through the village square when he ordered the driver to stop. He got out and strode briskly to the bar.
He ordered a coffee. At the back of the room, the three old card-players turned to look at him. Simon laid his police ID flat on the counter. The barman glanced at it dispassionately. ‘Has anyone here seen any strangers in the village recently?’ Simon asked, addressing the room. ‘Looking for a man and a woman, foreigners.’
The police were back sooner than Pascal had expected. Less than five minutes later, Simon was striding down the aisle, his quick footsteps echoing in the empty church.
‘Did you forget something, Inspector?’
Simon smiled coldly. ‘You’re a pretty good liar,’ he said. ‘For a priest. Now, are you going to tell me the truth, or would you like me to arrest you for obstructing the course of justice? This is a murder investigation.’
‘I–’
‘Don’t try to bullshit me. I know that Ben Hope was here. He was staying with you. Why are you protecting him?’
Pascal sighed. He sat in a pew, resting his bad leg.
‘If it turns out you’ve been harbouring a criminal,’ Simon went on, ‘I’ll bury you so deep in shit you’ll never get out again. Where’s Hope, and where’s he taken Dr Ryder? I know you know, so you’d better start talking.’ He drew his gun and jerked open the door of each confessional box.
‘He is not here,’ Pascal said, looking furiously at the drawn revolver. ‘I will request you to put that gun away, officer. Remember where you are.’
‘In the presence of a liar and possibly an accessory to crime,’ Simon retorted. ‘That’s where I am.’ He slammed the door of the last confessional box with a bang that echoed through the church. ‘Now–I suggest you start talking.’
Pascal glowered at him. ‘I will tell you nothing. What Benedict Hope has confided in me is between him, myself and God.’
Simon snorted. ‘We’ll see what the judge says about that.’
‘You can take me to your prison if you want,’ Pascal said evenly. ‘I have been in worse jails, in the Algerian war. But I will not speak. I will tell you just one thing. The man you are chasing is innocent. He is not a criminal. This man does only good. Few men I have known are so heroic and virtuous.’
Simon laughed out loud. ‘Oh, really–is that a fact? So perhaps, Father, you’d like to tell me more about this saint and his charitable works.’
48
The Daytona took him far and fast away from Saint-Jean, slicing through the rugged landscape, crouched low across the tank with the wind screaming around his helmet and the road zipping past under his feet. Ben’s face was hard as he rode, thinking what his next move should be. He knew in his heart that there was only one thing he could do, to find Roberta. But she could be anywhere. She could well be dead already.
He backed off the throttle on the approach to a bend, a wall of sandy rock on one side of the road and a plunging drop to the forest below on the other. The motorcycle leaned sharply into the turn, his outstretched knee almost grazing the road. On the apex of the bend he gunned the throttle and the machine straightened up as it accelerated powerfully and the engine note rose to a howl between his knees.
Sunlight glinted off metal in the distance ahead. He swore behind the black visor. Three hundred metres away at the end of a long straight, a roadblock was stopping vehicles. An army of police must have mobilized across the Languedoc by now. Murder at the Manzini villa, kidnapping, and a fugitive on the run. They would have circulated pictures of him to every cop in the region.
He slowed. Four police cars, cops with machine-pistols slung low, but ready. They’d stopped a Volvo estate. The driver was out of the car, and they were checking his paperwork. Ben didn’t have any, and as soon as they made him take off his helmet he’d be caught.
Being caught wasn’t so much the problem. It was the kind of trouble he’d bring down on himself if he resisted arrest, as he knew he’d be forced to do. He didn’t want to have to hurt them, and he could ill afford to have a thousand cops and military tearing all of southern France to pieces to find him when he needed every minute to find Roberta and finish what he’d started.
He braked and the bike halted in the road a hundred metres from the roadblock. He sat blipping the throttle for a moment. If he ran the roadblock they might shoot. It was too dangerous. He twisted the handlebar and brought the Triumph round in a tight U-turn. Opened the throttle hard and felt his arms stretch and the back wheel spin and wobble with the brutal power of the engine.
As the bike reached high speed and the road snaked towards him as fast as he could think and react, a snatched glance in the fairing-mounted mirror told him that they’d seen him and were following–headlights and flashing blue, followed by a siren. He opened the throttle harder, daring to release a little more of the Triumph’s power. The high mountain pass plunged downward in a long sweeping set of curves and the rocky landscape flashed out of sight as he plummeted into a wooded valley. The police car in his mirrors, already far in the distance, was fast shrinking to a tiny speck.
A straight opened up ahead, carrying him up a long slope between thick banks of green and gold forest. By the time he had passed through the woods and the road was climbing steeply back up towards the next mountain pass, the police car was gone.
He turned off the road at the next junction, knowing more cars would come looking for him. He rode the winding paths higher and higher until the sweep of the whole Aude river valley was laid out below him like a miniature model. The twisty lane became an unrideable rutted track. He stopped the motorcycle near the lip of a precipice, propped it on its stand, and dismounted, unbuckling his helmet and walking a little stiffly from the saddle.
Here and there in the distance he could make out the ruins of ancient forts and castles, specks of jagged grey rock against the forest and the sky. He walked close to the edge of the precipice, so that his toes overhung the brink. He looked down, a dizzying drop of thousands of feet.
What was he going to do?
He stood there for what seemed an eternity, the chilly mountain wind whistling around him. Darkness seemed to be closing in on him. He took out his flask. It was still half full. He closed his eyes and brought it to his lips.
He stopped. His phone was ringing.
‘Benedict Hope?’ said the metallic voice in his ear.
‘Who are you?’
‘We have Ryder.’ The voice waited for his response, but Ben didn’t offer one.
The man went on. ‘If you want to see her alive again, you will listen to me carefully and follow my instructions’
‘What do you want?’ Ben asked.
‘We want you, Mr Hope. You, and the manuscript’.
‘What makes you think I have it?’
‘We know what you got from the Manzini woman,’ the voice went on. ‘You will deliver it to us personally. You will meet us tonight at the Place du Peyrou in Montpellier. By the statue of Louis the Fourteenth. Eleven o’clock. You will come alone. We will be watching you. If we see any police, you will get Ryder back one piece at a time’.
‘I want proof of life,’ Ben demanded. As he listened, he heard a rustling sound of the phone being passed to someone. Roberta’s voice was suddenly in his ear. She sounded afraid. ‘…you, Ben? I…’ Then her voice was cut off abruptly as the phone was snatched away from her.
Ben was thinking fast. She was alive, and they wouldn’t kill her until they had what they wanted. That meant he could buy time.
‘I need forty-eight hours,’ he said.
There was a long pause. ‘Why? the voice demanded.
‘Because I don’t have the manuscript any more,’ Ben lied. ‘It’s hidden in the hotel.’
‘You will go there and retrieve it,’ the voice said. ‘You have twenty
-four hours, or the woman dies’
Twenty-four hours. Ben thought about it for a moment. Whatever plan he might be able to come up with to get her out of there, he was going to need longer than that to put it into place. He’d negotiated many times with kidnappers and he knew how their minds worked. Sometimes they were inflexible in their demands and would execute a victim at the drop of a hat. But that was mostly when they knew they didn’t have much to gain, when the bargaining was breaking down or when it looked as though nobody was going to pay. If these guys wanted the manuscript badly enough and thought he was going to deliver it to them, it was a card he could play for all it was worth. He’d already got the guy backing down. He could push him a little more.
‘Hold on,’ he said calmly. ‘Let’s be reasonable. We have a problem. Thanks to you people, the hotel is crawling with armed police right now. I’m confident I can get the manuscript back, but I’ll need that extra time.’
Another long pause, muffled conversation in the background. Then the man’s voice was back. ‘You have thirty-six hours. Until eleven o’clock tomorrow night.’
‘I’ll be there.’
‘You had better be there, Mr Hope.’
49
Police HQ, Montpellier
The vending-machine swallowed Luc Simon’s coins and spurted a jet of thin brown liquid into a plastic cup. The cup was so flimsy he could hardly pick the damn thing up without squeezing all the coffee out of it. He took a sip as he walked back down the corridor towards Cellier’s office, and screwed up his face.
On the wall of the corridor was another one of those Missing Person posters he’d been seeing everywhere, about the teenager who had disappeared a few days before. There’d even been one pinned up in the dingy bar in the village where that old priest lived.
He looked at his watch. Cellier was more than ten minutes late now. He needed to share notes with him about the Ben Hope case, and show him the new information he’d just got through from Interpol. Why was everyone always so fucking slow?. As he paced up and down, he kept looking at the poster.