by Rob Grant
Something significant registered itself on the periphery of my vision. I looked over at a TV screen in the corner of the room. A news report was playing. The lead item appeared to feature my uninvited hitchhiker.
I knocked the coffee jug over.
I mopped up most of the spillage and walked up to the screen, but the news had moved on. I had to wait till the end of the bulletin for the recap. Sure enough, his image appeared behind the newsreader's shoulder again. And my problem suddenly got a whole lot worse.
The corpse in my car belonged to the French Minister of the Interior.
TWENTY-THREE
The way I saw it, I had three choices. I could call the authorities, and explain to them that the French Minister of the Interior was not in fact missing, as they thought, but was currently occupying a considerable proportion of the cubic capacity of my boot space in a dead manner, and would they like to come and collect him, because I had a schedule to keep to?
That option seemed to require more in the way of explanations than I could reasonably come up with. Let's face it: they'd probably want to know how the French Minister of the Interior got himself into my boot, and, like as not, they'd want to know how he got himself all dead, too, and I had the distinct feeling that an affable shrug and 'Beats me' on both counts would not adequately satisfy their curiosities, so I put that one on the back boiler.
I could try and deposit him somewhere in the service station forecourt, but it was broad daylight, the car park was starting to pack out, and even if I managed to pull it off without anyone noticing, there were video security cameras all over the place, and I'd be unlikely to avoid a starring role in the News at Noon, or I'd achieve my fifteen minutes of fame later in the year on the TV show Europe's Dumbest Criminals. No thank you.
No, the best plan seemed to be to fill up and drive away, then find somewhere en route to drop off my stowaway that was a little more discreet. Like a bustling shopping mall. I bought a couple of car rugs, a picnic blanket and some heavy-duty bin liners and headed back for the car. I opened the boot as if there were absolutely no dead politicians in there at all, took out the fascia and arranged my purchases over the corpse.
I felt I was handling a difficult situation with admirable composure. I even smiled at a couple of pretty girls passing by, while the boot with the body in it was still gawping wide open. I congratulated myself that I was thinking pretty damned clearly. I was not.
It wasn't until I was back in the autodrive lane that the shock began to wear off, and I got round to asking myself the vital question: how likely was it that the corpse of the French Minister of the Interior had found its way into my car accidentally? That out of all the vehicles that could have been used to accommodate a dead politician, all the hatchbacks and trucks and station wagons that might have happily lodged a deceased French Interior Minister, my little Fiat Affordable had been chosen at random? It was unlikely, was it not? Was it not, in fact, much more likely that somebody had planted him there, at the very least to cause me some discomfiture, if not to out and out frame me for the crime? And were there not, furthermore, some alarming ramifications to be extrapolated from that fact?
The only possible someone who might have even a slightly credible motive to do such a thing would be Johnny Appleseed himself.
Which meant that Klingferm's killer definitely knew more or less who and what I was. And what's more, he knew where I was going to be, and when.
On top of which, the bastard was clearly toying with me. He could have put a bomb in the car, or hooked the exhaust pipe up to poison me with carbon monoxide fumes while I slept in the autodrive lane. He could, presumably, have done to me whatever he'd done to the French Minister of the Interior, and left my staring corpse as a neat little gift in the boot of some other poor swine's Fiat Affordable, with that wide-eyed expression of understandable surprise contorting my features from now until the Day of Judgement.
So, clearly, my cover was blown. I'd made the transition from hunter to hunted in the space of one excruciatingly uncomfortable catnap.
There is a theoretically inviolable procedure for such a circumstance. Basically, I'm supposed to contact my link-man, and find a way to leave a trail for him to follow in the extremely likely event my warranty gets voided. But somewhere at the back of my head, my little voice was telling me not to do that. After all, that's what Klingferm had done, and look where it had gotten him. Look where it had gotten me. I had to face the possibility that my tormentor wanted me to call in back-up. Why else would he have given me the opportunity? He could wipe out the entire network that way. He could pick us all off, one at a time like clay pipes at a fairground, without breaking sweat.
So I decided to violate the inviolable procedure. The chances were that would be my best shot at short-term survival. And I had to start being unpredictable.
The first thing I had to do was to get out of the autodrive lane. Much as I needed to think, I couldn't afford to leave the car under the control of the motorway computer system. One malicious phone call and I'd be pulled over onto the hard shoulder, immobilised and locked in.
The autodrive system didn't want to let me go, of course. It kept asking me if I was sure, and though, yes, I told it, I was sure, it felt perhaps I really wasn't sure I was sure, and I was only saying I was sure because I was, perhaps, confused, so under the circumstances it felt obliged to make sure I was definitely sure, so it asked me again if I was sure, and when I assured it I was really pretty damned sure I was sure, it forced me to run through a humungous checklist to prepare me for the gritty horrors that awaited the unwary innocent who was foolhardy enough to take control of his vehicle into his own hands. The entire procedure was designed to minimise refunds, I think. And in other circumstances, it would probably have worn me down enough to surrender. In fact, when it came to question fifty-seven: 'Are you awake?' I damn near did give up.
But I persevered. I persevered through a hundred and twenty-one checks and questions. I persevered through a protracted negotiation over the precise amount and method of refund. I didn't even scream when it asked me one final, final time if I was absolutely sure that I was sure I wanted to go ahead and do this crazy thing.
And my perseverance was rewarded.
A countdown reluctantly appeared on the screen, announcing that I had 'THIRTY SECONDS TO SELF DRIVE' with all the calm understatement you'd expect from a nuclear alert.
I felt like a schoolboy at the end of summer term final assembly. If I'd had a cap, I'd have thrown it in the air. I followed all the onscreen instructions like a dog follows pheromones. Even though I was pretty certain the computer couldn't possibly check if I was complying, I wasn't about to risk failure this close to victory. Like the nice computer said, I checked the rear-view mirror. Most of it was obscured by the legend: 'Objects appearing in this mirror are closer than they seem.' Obediently, I likewise checked the wing mirror, which was almost as useless thanks to the marvellously helpful inscription: 'Objects appearing in this mirror are actually behind you.'
Ten seconds to release. I identified a suitable gap in the traffic and flicked on the appropriate indicator. I placed my hands on the steering wheel in the ten to two position. I placed my right foot gently on the accelerator.
The countdown reached zero, the car filled with an impressive array of ominous warning sirens and whoops and the words 'SELF DRIVE' flashed in violent red on the screen. The door locks released themselves. I flicked one final check over my left shoulder and gently eased the wheel clockwise.
You know, I am such a cock-eyed optimist, I actually expected the car to respond. I really did. What a lunk. What a palooka. What a putz.
The car, it goes without saying, did not respond. Of course it didn't. The car just carried on pootling along in the autodrive lane as if the last twenty minutes hadn't happened at all.
I tried pressing my foot down on the accelerator. I tried stamping hard on the brake. I tried wrenching the steering wheel left and right with demented enthusi
asm. I might as well have been in a Noddy car on a toddler's merry-go-round. I had no more control over my trajectory than a limbless skydiver without a parachute.
I tapped away at the computer screen, for all the good that was going to do me. Naturally, the system couldn't release me from autodrive, because it already had done so. 'SELF DRIVE' was still flashing its mocking crimson on the display, was it not?
I kept my hands on the wheel, still harbouring some kind of vague, unlikely hope that the computer would eventually tire of baiting me and suddenly relinquish control, but the computer showed no such inclination. Gradually, I released my grip.
I had no idea how far away the next services were, but I tapped out instructions for the computer to pull into them anyway. The computer had a problem with that, of course, since I was theoretically driving the car myself.
It wasn't hard to see where this was going. The car would carry on pootling until its fuel ran out, leaving me stranded in full public glare, no doubt blocking traffic in an immobile vehicle, with the mortal remains of a stiff kidnapped politician in my boot.
There's a heart-warming school of positive thought that urges us to perceive problems not as obstacles, but as opportunities. When you find yourself bang up against an insurmountable obstacle, and you recall that particular gem of wisdom, you may feel a strong compulsion to seek out the progenitors of that theory, grab them by their throats and bang the backs of their heads against your obstacle until their brains start squirting out of their ears like a raspberry and banana smoothie fountain. That was certainly the uppermost fantasy in my mind at this particular juncture.
But as I ran through my list of options -- which seemed, as far as I could tell to consist only of a) stay in the vehicle until it stops then make a doomed attempt to bolt for freedom, and b) there is no b -- it occurred to me that I might turn the situation to my advantage, after all.
Since the car was under the illusion it was being driven by a real human being, I was now clearly surplus to its requirements. Theoretically, the car shouldn't mind if I left it to its own devices.
Hopefully it wouldn't even notice.
If I could somehow contrive to depart its vicinity, there was no reason to believe it wouldn't carry on pootling along with its stiff ministerial cargo until its fuel ran out.
The plan had a couple of downsides, in that it involved my vacating a moving vehicle, and in the middle of nowhere, to boot, and you know how I feel about the whole falling thing. Still, it seemed marginally more appealing than trying to convince a couple of black helicopters full of trigger-happy Europol anti-terrorist armed response units of the absolute totality of my innocence in the entire affair.
I hit the privacy button and punched up the speedometer. A steady 56 kph. Is that a respectable speed at which to pitch yourself out of a racing automobile? I couldn't be sure, but my guess was that it was probably a smidgen on the overly rapid side of safe.
I started to ease myself onto the passenger seat. This action provoked a warning sound from the dashboard. A computer voice counselled me that it was a serious breech of traffic regulations to attempt to drive a vehicle from anywhere but the driver's seat, and unless I repositioned myself immediately, the appropriate authorities would be alerted. Well, I couldn't have that, now, could I? So I complied.
So, the car would rat me up if the driving seat were vacated. Well, as luck would have it, I just happened to have a spare driver in my boot. He didn't have to do anything except sit behind the steering wheel, and even a dead interior minister can pull that off.
It was a complicated manoeuvre. I had to jack the driver's seat back as far as it would go, then pull the backs of the rear seats forward in order to get at the boot, and every time my centre of gravity left its optimum driving position, the siren went off and the stool pigeon of a computer threatened to grass me up. Then there was the considerable problem of extracting the extremely heavy and extraordinarily stiff stiff from the boot and dragging him up to the front.
It was painful, sweaty and intimately unpleasant work, and by the time the extremely ex French Minister of the Interior was safely ensconced behind the wheel, the very last thing I felt like doing was hurling myself out of a hurtling vehicle.
I had to pick the right moment to do it: somewhere poorly lit and between security cameras, when traffic was reasonably light, and on a bend as the car was slowing down.
I held open the passenger door, watching the road and the speedo, and trying to ignore the computer's incessant and wholly unnecessary observation that the passenger door was open, for a good twenty minutes.
I began to despair.
I appeared to have decided to make my move at the start of the longest stretch of perfectly straight road in the whole history of human construction. There was probably a plaque somewhere along here proudly testifying to that very fact.
Finally, I saw a bend approaching. Under normal circumstances, I would have classified it more as a slight kink, but it would have to do. Otherwise I might find myself travelling all the way to Vienna with my backside dangling out of the passenger door. At least I'd have a tiny window of cover from the car behind.
I watched the speedometer. It slowed from a potentially lethal 56 kph to a stately 52 kph. Marvellous.
I jumped.
TWENTY-FOUR
I jumped. As I did so, I tried to swing the passenger door shut and simultaneously brace myself for the impact. I am living testimony to the fact that you cannot achieve both of those goals at fifty-two kilometres per hour.
I managed to get the door shut.
I expected the impact to hurt, and let me tell you I was not disappointed. I did, however, expect it to stop hurting at some point, but it didn't. I bowled along the aptly named hard shoulder for some considerable distance like a giant tumbleweed, only with nerves for hurting and blood for bleeding and skin for bruising, without appearing to decelerate in any appreciable way, each point of impact finding a brand new part of me to inflict with pain.
I finally came to rest in a shallow ditch just off the highway.
I lay there a while. I would like to think I wasn't whimpering like a lovesick schoolgirl, but I find that unlikely. I analysed the feedback from my body, hoping some small part of me would report in undamaged, but none did. I felt no particular urge to move again, ever. The ditch seemed as fine a place as any to settle on as my grave. If someone had come up and offered to shovel me over with dirt, I'd probably have thanked them. I'd probably have offered them money.
But I didn't have time for such luxuries as losing my desire to go on existing. The Fiat might carry on undiscovered for hours, but there was no guarantee of that. It might just as well pull over at the next services, leaving the dead French politician with more explaining to do than he could likely handle. I had to be out of here and as far away as I could get, as quickly as I could humanly get there.
I rolled over onto my front. My ribs didn't like that, but screw them, right? I placed my palms on the ground either side of my shoulders, and they complained too, but frankly they could just shut the hell up and get in line. With an effort of will I would class as way beyond superhuman, I hoisted myself to my knees. None of me liked that. My arms were complaining, my shoulders were whining, my knees were seriously considering industrial action and my back was threatening to take me to court and sue me for every penny I'd ever even thought of. I told them all to take a ticket and get in the God-damned queue.
I hauled myself to my feet, and swayed until I was as close to upright as I was ever likely to get. I felt like Tony Montana just before the final gunshot from behind.
What now? I had to make ground, and lots of it. Not to escape the authorities. That was pretty much a done deal already. They'd find my fingerprints all over the car, of course, and all over the body as well, but then they'd discover those fingerprints were registered to fourteen different dead servicemen in various jurisdictions around Europe.
Of course, they'd trace the vehicle back to the
Rent-Ur-Car hire place in Paris, and they might even get around to eliciting a description from Mussolini the mechanic, and even the rental clerk, but I wasn't too worried about that. I've been identikitted once before, and even I didn't recognise me. Only about one in fifteen witnesses is any use at all at remembering faces, and even if the police artists were geniuses, they'd be working with a composite from two people's memories. On top of which, I probably looked considerably different now. I probably looked like one of the more radically decomposed zombies from Return of the Living Dead.
Even if they did somehow come up with an accurate description, it's easy enough to change your face these days. A hypodermic full of bee venom here, a jab of Botox there, and you'd need a map just to shave your own beard. Worst-case scenario, I could track down Dr Rutter and get him to swap my face with my arse. True, I'd probably wind up looking a lot like Captain Zuccho's handsomer twin, but like I say, we are talking worst case.
I'd rented the car as Harry Tequila and I'd have to abandon that particular identity, which was a shame, not only because I had a peculiar schizophrenic fondness for old Harry Tequila, but also I was rapidly running out of people to be.
Truth be told, I was dropping like flies.
What I did have to worry about was Johnny Appleseed. Was I right to be thinking of him as a single perp? There could, I suppose, have been several Johnnies. He certainly seemed to be all over the place. But I had to make certain assumptions or die, and to me, the whole set-up had the efficient feel of a lone-wolf operation. I also chose to assume that it was a man. Probabilities.
There was no way of knowing for certain precisely when he'd picked up my trail, or exactly how intimate he was with the progress of my investigations, but it was safest to take the position he had been on to me from the start and knew everything. Which meant I'd be very foolish indeed to try and keep Klingferm's appointment in Vienna.