“Go back to the airfield. Set down,” Potter said.
“You don’t have a right.”
“Your passengers give me the right.”
“What passengers are you talking about?”
A suspicion struck Potter so hard that he felt punched. “In the seat behind you!”
“Those are duffel bags!”
“Get closer!” Potter ordered his pilot. When the pilot started to object that it was too dangerous, Potter shouted, “Do it!” Staring as the plane seemed to enlarge next to him, he strained to see past the dusty rear Plexiglas and decipher the dark forms that he had taken for granted were Malone and Sienna. No! he thought, distinguishing the torso-shaped outlines of what were indeed duffel bags.
“Go back!” he yelled to his pilot.
18
“How much did they pay you?” Bellasar demanded.
The overweight man in coveralls looked baffled.“Me? They didn’t pay me anything. I don’t know what’s going on! They gave Pierre an expensive watch for doing what he was going to do anyhow — take off and fly to Marseilles!”
“Where are they?”
The man pointed toward a path that went through trees on the opposite side of the airfield. “They stole two bicycles.”
Right, Bellasar thought. Or maybe you sold the bicycles for one of Sienna’s bracelets. “Then it isn’t too late. They can’t go far.” He pulled out a money clip and peeled off several large-domination bills. “Give me the key to the station wagon.”
“It won’t do any good.”
“What are you talking about?”
The man pointed toward the front right tire.
It was flat. So was a tire on the pickup truck and the Renault. “Before the man left, he did that.”
“Fix them!” Furious about the waste of time, Bellasar didn’t wait for Potter to return. He ran toward the path. Potter will scan the countryside from above, he promised himself. A man and a woman on bicycles won’t be hard to see. We’ll keep going. We’ll catch them. I’ll never stop.
19
Pedaling as hard as he could, Malone steered around a wooded bend. The trees opened up. Facing a paved road, he squeezed the brake levers on the handlebars. To his right, from beyond a curve, he heard a truck approaching.
Sienna stopped beside him.
“Quickly,” Malone said. “We have to get to the other side.”
He dismounted and hurried with the bicycle, laying it on the pavement in front of the yet-unseen truck. After wiping his hand across his face, smearing the blood over a wider area, he lay on the road and pulled the bicycle over him.
“Look panicked,” he told Sienna. “Wave for the driver to stop.”
The truck sped into view. Sprawled on the ground, gripping his leg, allowing himself to show pain, Malone suddenly worried that the truck was approaching too fast for it to be able to stop in time. Tangled with the bicycle, he wouldn’t be able to crawl free and roll to the side of the road fast enough.
“Jesus” — Sienna waved frantically — “he’s going to hit us!”
As she lunged to pull Malone’s bicycle off him, brakes squealed. But they didn’t seem to do any good. The truck kept hurtling toward them. She threw the bicycle to the side and dragged Malone off the road as the truck’s brakes squealed louder and smoke came from the tires. On an angle, the truck skidded to a stop twenty yards beyond where Malone had been lying.
The truck, larger than a pickup, had wooden sides, across which a tarpaulin was stretched. The inside was filled with ladders, sawhorses, and lumber. The driver’s door banged open. A sunburned man wearing sawdust-spotted clothes ran around the back and shouted angrily. The man’s French was far too rapid for Malone to understand, but Sienna answered him as rapidly, gesturing toward the blood on Malone’s face.
The man’s anger turned to surprise and then shock. Paralyzed for a moment, he broke into motion, rushing to help Malone toward the truck.
“I told him you were hit by a car! He’s taking you to a doctor!” Sienna said.
“Ask him if there’s room in the back for the bicycles.”
As the man helped Sienna set the bikes out of sight under the tarpaulin, Malone climbed into the front and leaned his head back as if in pain. The next moment, the driver hurried behind the steering wheel, Sienna getting in the other side. Putting the truck into gear, the driver sped along the road.
“He says the nearest hospital is ten minutes away,” Sienna explained.
“That might not be soon enough.” Malone tried to sound in agony. Despite the rattle of the truck, he heard the helicopter in the distance. Hoping the driver would go faster, he made himself wince and moan.
The man came out with another torrent of French.
Malone barely listened, too busy concentrating on the approaching sound of the helicopter. He assumed that the truck would soon attract its attention. After all, he hadn’t seen any other vehicles on this road. How long would it take Bellasar to conclude that they had reached the road and caught a ride?
Isolated houses appeared. As the truck sped around another curve, Malone saw cars, trucks, bicycles, and people walking. The driver had reached a town, its speed-zone sign forcing him to slow. Imagining the view from the chopper, Malone had a mental overhead image of the speck of a truck blending with other specks. At a four-way stop, he noticed vehicles heading away in each direction and finally relaxed, deciding that for now there was no way Bellasar could track them.
For now, but Bellasar wouldn’t stop searching, and plenty of other problems remained, Malone knew. He needed to convince the truck driver not to go into the hospital with him. He needed to find a place where he could clean himself up. A men’s room near the emergency ward perhaps. Then he had to find a way out of town before Bellasar’s men converged on it. The first chance he got, he would use the emergency phone number Jeb had given him. But that was another problem. Why hadn’t Jeb followed through on the rescue plan they’d arranged? And that question, in turn, made Malone dread an even more immediate problem, the hard look in Sienna’s eyes as she studied him, impatient to ask how he’d known about the airfield and what the hell this was all about.
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SEVEN
1
“Who’s Harry Lockhart?” Sienna’s tone was subdued, presumably to avoid alarming passengers near them on the bus, but her question was obviously a demand.
“I don’t know. I’ve never laid eyes on him. A pilot with that name was supposed to meet us.”
They were in the backseat. The ticket seller at the depot had taken so long agreeing to accept some of the dollars Malone had brought with him from the United States that they had barely gotten to the bus before it moved out. As they left the outskirts of town, dusk thickened, lights coming on in houses. Malone glanced out the rear window to see if any cars seemed to be following them.
Sienna continued to press him. “Who was supposed to arrange for Lockhart to be there?”
“A friend of mine.”
“Except he didn’t. Is he the same friend who told you about what happened to Derek’s other wives?” Her voice was sharper.
“Yes.”
“You planned to get me out of there from the first day you arrived?”
“Yes.”
“Which means you intended to use me against Derek from the start.”
“No,” Malone said. “It wasn’t like that.”
The bus’s motor was beneath them, its raucous vibration muffling their voices.
“Who do you work for?”
“Nobody.”
The back of the bus was cast in shadows.
“You just admitted that you have people providing you with information. You have a group that was supposed to give you backup.”
“It isn’t what you … I’m working with some people, yes, but I don’t work for them.”
“The CIA?”
“Yes,” he said reluctantly.
“Jesus.” Sienna threw up her hand
s. “If Derek finds out, if he thinks I’m cooperating with —”
“I’m not a spy.”
“Damn it, what do you call it, then?”
Their voices had become louder, causing people in the seats ahead of them to look back.
“Calm down. If you’ll let me explain …” Malone said softly.
“That’s what I’ve been waiting for.” The strain of lowering her emotion-laden voice tightened the sinews in Sienna’s neck.
“All right.” Malone took a deep breath, then told her what had happened on Cozumel. “Your husband destroyed most of what was important to me. When my friend turned up and offered me a way to get even, I took it.”
“And used me to pay Derek back.”
“That isn’t why —”
“I trusted you! I thought you were my friend. But all this time, you’ve been lying to me, playing up to me to —”
“I never lied.”
“You sure as hell never told me the truth.”
“Not all of it. But what would you have done if I had told you?”
She opened her mouth but seemed not to know what to say.
“Your husband really was planning to kill you. But if I’d told you how I knew, would you have believed me? Would you have gone with me, or would you have suspected I was trying to trick you?”
She still didn’t know what to say.
“I am your friend.” Malone held out his hand. She didn’t take it.
“I never used you,” Malone said. “I don’t care if you never tell the Agency a thing. All that matters to me is that I got you out of there.”
Sienna was so motionless, she didn’t seem to be breathing. “I don’t know what to believe.”
She looked at him for the longest time. When she finally gripped his hand, it was as if she were on the brink of a cliff, depending upon him to keep her from falling.
2
The bus pulled into Nice around midnight. Given the combination of darkness and glaring lights, Malone wasn’t able to get an impression of the city. Even the salt smell from the sea didn’t register on him, so desensitized were his nostrils by the diesel smell of the bus.
To guard against the risk that Bellasar’s men might be waiting at the bus depot, Malone chose a busy intersection at random and asked the driver to stop. The instant they stepped off, Malone led Sienna into a crowd. “I don’t know what went wrong at the airfield,” he said, “but Jeb and I had a backup plan.”
They went into a late-night convenience store, where Malone used nearly all of his few remaining dollars to buy sandwiches, fruit, bottled water, and a telephone card.
“Now let’s find a pay phone.”
There was one around the corner, and as Sienna anxiously watched, Malone inserted the phone card, then pressed the numbers Jeb had given him to memorize. It won’t be long now, he thought. We’ll soon be out of here.
On the other end, the phone rang twice before it was answered. Pulse rushing, Malone started to use the identification phrase he’d been given — “the painter” — when a computerized voice cut him off. Its French was too hurried for him to understand. The connection was broken. “What the …”
Sienna stepped closer. “Is something wrong?”
“I must have pressed the wrong numbers.”
He tried again, but the same computerized voice cut him off.
“I don’t understand what it’s saying. You try.” He told her the numbers and watched her press them.
Nervous, she listened. Seconds later, she frowned and lowered the phone. “That number’s been disconnected.”
“What?”
“Maybe the CIA doesn’t pay its phone bills,” she said bitterly. “The line’s no longer in service.”
Jeb, you son of a bitch, Malone thought. What are you doing to me? What’s gone wrong?
3
It was almost 1:00 A.M. as they walked wearily at random along narrow, shadowy side streets.
“That hotel up ahead looks good,” Sienna said.
“It sure does.”
But they passed the welcoming entrance, knowing that they didn’t dare check in. Without enough cash to rent a room, Malone would need to use a credit card, but by now, Bellasar would have ordered his computer experts to access the databases of every credit-card company, looking for any transactions in Malone’s name. If Malone used a credit card, Bellasar and his men would storm into the hotel room before morning.
“I brought some jewelry,” Sienna said, “but we won’t be able to sell it until the secondhand stores open tomorrow morning.”
“We might have to wait longer.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your husband will check to see if any of your jewelry is missing. He’ll anticipate that you’ll try to sell it. We might walk into a trap.”
“Everything seems a trap.”
The fear on her face made him touch it. “Keep remembering you’re not alone.”
“Not alone.”
Around the next corner, they discovered that their aimless path had brought them to a park overlooking the harbor. Between palm trees, a bench invited them. In the distance, yachts gleamed. Faint music drifted from one, a piano playing “I Concentrate on You”; men and women in evening clothes were chatting and drinking.
“Cocktail?” Malone opened one of the bottles of water and handed it to her.
“I could use one.”
“Hors d’oeuvres?” Malone set out the choices of sandwiches: egg salad, tuna salad, and chicken salad.
“That’s quite a selection.”
“The best in town.”
“The service is awfully good. We’ll have to recommend it to all our friends.”
“And leave a generous tip.”
“Absolutely. A generous tip.”
Sienna’s willingness to go along with his attempt at humor encouraged him. As long as their spirit persisted, they weren’t defeated. But as a breeze scraped palm leaves above them, he noticed that she hugged her arms, shivering.
“Take my sport coat.”
“Then you’ll be the one who’s cold.”
“I’ll sit close to you.” He stood and put the coat around her, his hands lingering on her shoulders. Then he realized how tired he was and eased back onto the bench. He was so thirsty, it took him only a few deep swallows to drink a quarter of a liter of water. The egg salad tasted like the waxed paper it had been wrapped in. The bread was stale. He didn’t care. Under the circumstances, it was the most delicious meal he had ever eaten. On the yacht below them, the piano player shifted to “The Days of Wine and Roses.”
“Care to dance?” he asked.
Sienna looked at him, bewildered.
“I couldn’t help thinking about the lyrics to that song,” he said. “About regret and time passing. If we were another couple sitting here, this would be a beautiful night. A moment’s what we make of it, I guess.”
“… Yes, I’d like to dance.”
As they stood and faced each other, Malone felt pressure in his chest. He tried to keep his right hand steady when he put it around her waist. Her left hand trembled a little when she put it on his shoulder. They turned slowly to the distant mournful music that evoked children running through a meadow, never to reach a door to infinite possibilities. Barely able to breathe, Malone drew her closer to him, certain he was going to pass out if he didn’t get more air into his lungs. He felt her breasts rising and falling as she, too, tried to get enough air. Pivoting tenderly with her, he saw the shadowy path behind them, where an elderly man and woman were walking their poodle through the park and had stopped to watch them dancing. The couple looked at each other, then back at Malone and Sienna. Smiling, the man took the woman’s hand and continued walking through the park. Then Malone was aware of nothing around him, only of Sienna in his arms. As the piano brought the haunting melody to a close, Malone recalled the lonely nights of the lyrics. When he and Sienna kissed, he felt as if he were a youngster, light-headed: his first time. r />
4
They spent the night sitting on the bench. She slept with her head on his shoulder. He kept an arm around her, not sleeping as much as dozing, his troubled thoughts often waking him. Below, the lights on the various yachts gradually went out. The traffic sounds from the city lessened. In a while, he was able to pretend that he and Sienna were in a private universe. But the real world would intrude all too soon, he knew. Bellasar would relentlessly hunt them, and the moment they sold Sienna’s jewelry or Malone was forced to use his credit card, the focus of the hunt would narrow. We have to get out of Nice, he thought. Hell, we have to get out of the country. Out of Europe. But even if they had money, they still couldn’t leave — Bellasar had their passports. Without Jeb’s help, Malone reluctantly confessed to himself, we don’t have a chance.
5
In misty morning sunlight, the thin-faced waiter narrowed his disapproving eyes as Malone and Sienna made their way among the sidewalk tables toward him. Early customers peered up from their coffee and frowned. Malone imagined what he looked like, his clothes rumpled, his cheeks unshaven, his lips and upper left cheek scabbed and swollen. Some homeless people look better than I do, he thought. I bet that’s what the waiter thinks I am. He probably figures I want a handout. Although Malone’s nostrils were too accustomed to the smell for him to notice it, he was also sure that he reeked of smoke from the helicopter crash, and sweat, and fear.
Thank God, Sienna looks better, he thought. In fact, even though her clothes, too, were rumpled and her makeup had worn off, she looked terrific. A few strokes from a comb she’d borrowed from him had given her hair a sheen. Her tan skin glowed. No matter how bad she felt, Malone sensed it was impossible for her to look bad.
“Monsieur.” The waiter raised his hands to keep Malone at a distance. Although his French was too quick for Malone to understand it, the gist was clear. The café had standards. It would be better if Malone went somewhere else.