The facts were all there on the desk. The BMW Alpina left abandoned at the scene was a company car registered to Hope’s former business in Normandy, reported stolen the night before. Which meant, the Director realised, that Hope must have figured out about the tracking device planted on the vehicle. In turn, that also meant something almost unprecedented in the Director’s experience: that the target was successfully staying a step ahead, for now.
How Hope and Ryder had effected their seemingly impossible escape from the chapel was anyone’s guess, as was their current location. They could be anywhere, and the Director didn’t like uncertainties. It would seem, he thought grimly, that McGrath had made a mistake this time. That couldn’t happen again.
It was time to alert everybody. Hope was dangerous and he had to be taken down as a matter of top-level priority before he did more damage.
The Director’s thoughts were interrupted by the beep of his intercom. He pressed a button and heard the voice of his closest aide, an efficient if slightly nervy fifteen-year veteran of his team named Isaac Friedkin.
‘Sir, there’s been a development. We have security camera images of Hope and Ryder walking into the Boulevard Jourdan branch of the Banque Nationale in Paris twenty minutes ago. The facial recognition software confirms their identities beyond any doubt.’
‘Where are they now?’
‘They haven’t come out yet,’ Friedkin said. ‘We presume they’re still inside.’
‘Put it on my screen,’ the Director snapped. He flicked the remote again, and the news report vanished as the video playback covered his wall. His wrinkled eyes scanned the milling crowds of pedestrians in the street outside the Banque Nationale. He saw a grey Mercedes taxi pull up at the kerbside and its passengers get out and walk quickly across the pavement to the bank’s entrance. The blond-haired man in the leather jacket and his female companion were definitely his targets.
‘What about inside? Don’t we have access to the bank’s interior video system?’
‘Working on it as we speak,’ Friedkin’s voice said from the speaker. ‘Should be hooked up any time now.’
‘Not good enough. Work faster. Where’s McGrath?’
‘Already mobilised and on his way, ETA four minutes.’
The Director nodded. ‘I want every exit covered on the ground and eyes in the air. Don’t let them get away this time. Am I clear?’
The Director leaned back in the plush chair and shut his tired eyes. He wasn’t happy with the way this was heading. The time for discretion in this matter might very well just have ended.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
By the time Ben and Roberta had left the bank and returned to the waiting Mercedes, the taxi driver had finished up his packet of snacks and was crumpling the empty wrapper into his map compartment with a hundred others. He gave a belch and asked laconically, ‘Where to now, folks?’
Ben told him an address near the Gare d’Austerlitz railway station. The driver nodded, took the wheel in his chubby fists and pulled unhurriedly away into the traffic.
‘Of all the speed-freak psychopathic taxi racers in Paris, we had to pick the Incredible Human Sloth,’ Roberta said, loudly enough for the driver to have heard if he’d understood any English. ‘So where are we going?’ she asked Ben.
‘You’ve been there before,’ Ben replied. ‘Fred’s garage. He’s a guy I go to if I need quick transport with no questions asked.’
‘I remember. The place we bought that little Peugeot that time? The one that ended up shot full of holes in a field.’
‘That wasn’t my fault,’ Ben said.
The driver chugged his way eastwards up Boulevard Kellerman and then took a left onto Avenue d’Italie, aiming for the river. Ben glanced at his watch, contained his impatience and gazed up at the blue sky over Paris.
‘What is it?’ Roberta asked when he’d been craning his neck at the window for almost a full minute.
‘Maybe nothing,’ he said. Was it his imagination playing tricks on him, or was that helicopter up there deliberately keeping pace with their taxi? He lost it for a few moments behind some tall buildings, then saw it again, hovering slowly a couple of hundred feet above the rooftops. Without binoculars, he could just about make out that it wasn’t a police chopper. It was either black or very dark green, with no markings that he could see.
‘Take a right here,’ he ordered the driver.
‘That’s not the way.’
‘Just do it, okay?’
The Mercedes turned off the main street, cutting down between tight rows of parked cars. ‘Now take that left,’ Ben said, pointing.
‘That’s a one-way street,’ the driver complained.
‘Twenty euros.’
‘You got it, pal.’ They made the illegal turn, frightening a cyclist.
‘What’s happening? Are we being followed?’ Roberta asked anxiously.
‘We’ll know for sure one way or the other in a minute,’ Ben said. He kept glancing up out of the windows and the sunroof as they cut through the maze of backstreets. With luck, he was just being paranoid; if he wasn’t, grey Mercedes taxis were everywhere in Paris and it shouldn’t be too hard to blend in.
But when they rejoined the main street a few minutes later, Ben saw that he’d been wrong on both counts. The chopper was still there, hovering lower over the rooftops, very obviously tracking them and showing no sign of losing them in the traffic.
‘Change of plan,’ Ben told the driver. ‘We need to head southwest back towards the Boulevard Périphérique.’
The driver shrugged. What did he care? It was their ride. They could take him all over Paris if they wanted.
‘And step on it a bit,’ Ben said. ‘I’ll make it worth your while.’
‘Why the ring road?’ Roberta asked him.
‘When you’re being watched from the air, the thing to do is go underground,’ he said. Paris’ circular dual carriageway was dotted with road tunnels. Just a few minutes’ drive and a quarter circuit to the west from their nearest access route, Porte de Gentilly, the boulevard passed through two that were each more than half a kilometre long. Stopping in the fast-moving flow of traffic wasn’t exactly permitted, but Ben reckoned than an extra fifty euros might persuade the driver to fake a breakdown, giving his passengers time to slip away on foot and disappear through one of the service exits that led off from the inside of the tunnel. When the taxi reappeared in the chopper’s sights, it would be an empty grey Mercedes that would be leading its pursuers on a merry dance around the city, its driver supplied with a fistful of cash and instructions to keep dawdling about in circles all day long.
Ben soon saw that it wasn’t going to happen that way, though. As the taxi changed course, cutting southwards towards Porte de Gentilly, he realised with a sinking feeling that his plan was already thwarted before it had even begun. ‘Shit,’ he muttered.
Roberta looked at him with wide eyes. ‘What now?’
‘Behind us. Three cars back. The black Audi Q7. They must be in radio contact with the chopper.’
Roberta turned to look through the rear window. The Audi SUV was weaving quickly through the traffic to catch up. Its occupants were hidden behind tinted glass. ‘How could they have picked us up?’ she asked breathlessly. ‘Are you sure?’
Ben could read the vehicle’s body language like a person’s. He was certain it was deliberately tailing them. There was one way to find out.
‘Slow down,’ he ordered the driver. ‘Do it now. Right down to a crawl.’
The driver gave him an irritable look in the mirror, then reluctantly nudged the brakes and brought his speed down enough to elicit a chorus of enraged honking from the Parisian drivers behind them. Cars shot past on either side. A hand poked out of the window of a red Renault and gave them the finger as it sped by.
‘This slow enough for you?’ the driver said resentfully.
Ben looked back. The Audi had slowed down with them and was keeping pace, making no attempt to overtak
e. That was good enough for him. ‘It’s too slow,’ he ordered the driver. ‘Put your foot down.’
‘Go slower, go faster,’ the driver muttered under his breath, picking up speed again. ‘Doesn’t know what he wants, this fucking guy.’
As they began to catch up with the rest of the traffic, the Audi surged forward as if it wanted to draw level with them. ‘Faster,’ Ben said to the driver. The Mercedes edged ahead.
‘Oh, shit, Ben, there’s another behind us,’ Roberta said. A second identical black car had appeared in their wake, gaining rapidly on them. ‘What are they going to do?’
‘They want to box us in,’ Ben told her. Outwardly he seemed calm, but he was thinking furiously fast. ‘Any minute now a third will appear and try to head us off, force us to stop. After that, it could go two ways. Kill or capture.’
‘We need to do something, Ben,’ she muttered anxiously, eyes fixed on the two Audis. The second Q7 was now close up behind them. The thudding beat of the helicopter was clearly audible above the engine and traffic noise. They were being systematically hemmed in.
Ben slipped the Browning out of his belt. He dropped the mag, checked it, snicked it back into place. Eased back the slide far enough to verify the round in the chamber. It was the pre-battle check he’d done so many times that he did it without thinking. He kept the gun out of sight behind the seat backrest in front of him. ‘Are your brakes sticking or something?’ he said harshly to the driver.
The fat neck twisted back towards them. ‘Hey, you want me to lose my license? I’m already doing over the limit, pal.’
‘This meathead’s going to get us both killed,’ Roberta said.
A pedestrian crossing was coming up ahead. At the side of the road, waiting for the lights to change, was a young woman with a pushchair and an additional toddler in tow. ‘Don’t slow down,’ Ben told the driver as he prepared to brake. ‘Another twenty if you burn the red light.’
Thankfully, the driver was as greedy for cash as he was for sugary snacks. As the lights changed he took his foot off the brake and went straight on through. The young woman shot the Mercedes a hostile look and then stepped out into the road, yanking her elder child along behind her.
Ben looked back. The two Audis had come to a sharp halt behind the crossing and were waiting impatiently to get through. He saw his moment. ‘Pull over. Quickly. Just there.’
The driver shrugged carelessly and swerved the Mercedes to the kerbside. Ben thrust his Browning back in his belt and got out. He marched up to the driver’s door and wrenched it open. Grabbing the driver’s beefy arm, he hauled his bulk roughly from the driver’s seat before the fat man could utter a sound in astonished protest. The driver staggered unbalanced across the pavement, eyes popping with fury.
‘Thanks for the ride,’ Ben said. He jumped in behind the wheel and flicked three twenty-euro notes out of the window. ‘Don’t eat it all at once.’
Behind them, the woman with the pushchair had reached the far side and the lights were changing again. The Audis shot forward with a squeal of tyres.
‘They’re coming,’ Roberta said anxiously.
‘All right,’ Ben said, watching them loom up fast in the rear-view mirror. ‘They want to play, so let’s play. Buckle up.’ He floored the pedal and the Mercedes took off with a revving roar, leaving the irate driver standing there shaking his fist.
Roberta was pressed back in her seat as Ben accelerated up the road. Parked cars and buildings flashed past in a blur.
The Audis weren’t about to be left behind. The chase was on for real now.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
‘Get us the hell out of this, Ben!’ Roberta yelled from the back seat.
Ben’s foot was hard down on the floor and the Mercedes’ revs were pushing the red line as he accelerated up the street with the two black Audi Q7s in pursuit. Lines of traffic swerved desperately out of their path. Horns honked furiously. Glass shattered and tyres screeched left and right.
Ben pressed on aggressively through the melee. Another set of traffic signals came flashing up, and this time neither the Mercedes nor the Audis slowed down for the red lights but went racing over the crossing, scattering pedestrians and flying across a busy intersection and straight out into the dense counter-flow of traffic.
A juddering impact almost snatched the wheel out of Ben’s hands as a Fiat, its driver’s mouth open in a soundless scream behind the windscreen, cannoned into the side of the taxi with a crunch. Ben felt the Mercedes go into a slide, controlled it and accelerated determinedly on through the chaotic ocean of swerving, skidding, honking cars. Out of the corner of his eye in the rear-view mirror he saw one of the Audis collide heavily with another vehicle, slamming it aside in an explosion of shattering plastic and glass.
A motorcyclist locked up his front wheel, and parted company with his machine, both sliding across the tarmac. Ben had to swerve violently to avoid running over him; the Mercedes veered towards the kerb and almost ploughed into a line of parked cars. Ben steered to the right of them, just clipping the wing mirror of the nearest before mounting the high kerb with a sound that made him worry deeply about the front suspension. But so far, German engineering seemed to be holding up to the job. The Mercedes went racing through the narrow gap between the shop fronts and buildings and the row of trees that lined the pavement. Shoppers scattered like pigeons.
Ben saw an opening in the line of parked cars and sent the Mercedes hurtling back out onto the road, the squeal of his tyres drowned out by the blare of horns from motorists skidding out of his path.
Both Audis were still in chase. Ben threw the car round a right turn, pushing it to the limits of traction and almost going up on two wheels. The first Audi followed his line around the bend. The second went wide and hit the opposite kerb, heading straight for the terrace of a corner café.
The breakfast crowd fled in panic at the car’s approach. Plastic chairs and tables and people’s morning coffee and croissants sailed up over its bonnet and into the air. The Audi ground to a halt and was quickly surrounded by a screaming mob, all beating on its windows.
Ben lost sight of the stalled Audi as he flew around another bend. The Mercedes blasted down the street with the other still right behind. A direction sign for the Périphérique shot past. Ben brutally hammered his way through the lines of slow-moving cars and followed it. The Audi came roaring after them.
The chopper was still directly overhead.
Tearing through the streets at such high speed, it was only a few moments before they were weaving through the flow of traffic on the Paris ring road heading west. The Mercedes was going as fast as Ben dared let it, overtaking everything in sight and swinging all over the road like a pendulum. The chasing Audi collided from behind with a small hatchback that got in its way, and sent it spinning mercilessly into the roadside verge as it powered on by.
Ben couldn’t see any sign of the second Q7, until Roberta’s hoarse cry of ‘There he is!’ alerted him that it was back, certainly guided via radio communication from the chopper, and rapidly regaining ground on them. Whoever these people were, they were determined, and they took advanced pursuit courses.
The entrance to one of the shorter tunnels came flashing up. Moments later they were speeding though the underpass, concrete pillars zipping past, swerving from side to side to get around the slower traffic. The Audis were back in formation now, hunting constantly for an opening to draw level with the taxi.
‘Ben, look out!’ Roberta yelled as one of them suddenly charged up and began to creep up alongside to their left. The dark-tinted glass on the passenger side wound down and Ben was able to steal a glance at the men inside. The hard-faced, heavily-built driver was in his thirties or forties but had the silvery-white hair of a much older man.
The face of the front seat passenger wasn’t something Ben gave much thought to. He was much more concerned about the pistol in his hand that was about to be aimed at the Mercedes.
Ben instinctively t
wisted the steering wheel and slammed the taxi sideways into the Audi, forcing it to the left. The Audi’s left flank scraped the concrete centre embankment in a storm of sparks. Another pillar was coming up fast and Ben meant to keep his pursuers pinned against the side and guide them right into it. At the last possible moment, he swerved violently away to the right so as not to get caught up in the devastating impact he expected to happen half a second later – but the Audi’s driver reacted just in time, expertly managing only to shear off his left wing mirror and wheel arches with a screech of rending steel. The heavy vehicle slewed into a weave and the second Audi had to brake hard to avoid ramming it from behind.
The Mercedes exited the tunnel and burst back out into the bright sunlight at over 120 kilometres per hour. The two Audis had fallen back a good distance and now Ben saw his first real chance of losing them.
He sliced past a dawdling Vauxhall Corsa and then swore under his breath as he saw the two big trucks that filled the lanes ahead, blocking his way and moving at about half his speed. There was no way round or between them.
In short seconds, he’d lost his advantage and the Audis were coming up fast again. The passenger appeared at the window of the lead vehicle and aimed his pistol. The shot was no more than a muted pop over the roar of the engines. The taxi’s rear window shattered, showering Roberta with glass.
‘Fuck it,’ Ben said. He twisted the wheel hard to the left and sent the Mercedes bucking and crashing over the central reservation into the opposite two lanes.
Suddenly they were in a sea of oncoming traffic hurtling towards them at combined speeds of over two hundred kilometres an hour. Roberta’s shout of ‘Are you nuts?’ dissolved into a scream as an oncoming Range Rover swerved out of their path and they only very narrowly missed a head-on collision that would have fused the two cars into one and annihilated everyone inside.
Ben was far too busy weaving his way at high speed through the mayhem to answer her. He needed every ounce of his concentration, as focused as a fighter pilot as he fought to keep them alive. Blaring horns wailed past on both sides and his vision was filled with headlights flashing furiously at him from everywhere.