by John Gubert
They huddled together under a couple of coarse grey blankets. Gradually they got warmer. Claire dozed off in his arms. He was conscious of the contours of her body. In the half-light in the cabin, he watched her face relax. She looked softer. She felt gentler as her body relaxed too. Her thighs pressed against his. Her breasts nestled against his chest. Her head fell onto his shoulder. He tightened his arm around her, wanting to protect her as she slept.
Charles also must have slept for a bit for, suddenly, he realised that the boat was shuddering. It was slowing down. They must be approaching the harbour. Claire woke at the same time and glanced at her watch. It was almost eight, or nine in France.
“We better get on deck. We want to avoid them and get off quickly.”
They dressed in moments. Their clothes were nearly dry. Claire had pulled on some thick tights, but they were still ridiculously lightly dressed for that time of the year. It was crazy that they had not taken thicker sweaters or a jacket at the house. In a rush, it was easy to forget the obvious.
They made their way carefully up to the deck area. The suspects were nowhere to be seen. Charles phoned the house and Douglas’ wife answered, “Have you news from Jacqui?”
“They’ll be here in about an hour. They were going to leave the cottage about now. Jacqui’s fine but they felt she should rest a bit. There was no point in rushing back up. And Maria thought it safer in the daytime.”
He called the cottage. There was no answer. He dialled Jacqui’s mobile number. Again there was no answer. He dialled Maria’s mobile number. It rang. No answer and he felt a surge of panic. Then Maria’s voice came over.
“How’s Jacqui?”
“Why don’t you talk to her? She’s feeling better.”
Jacqui’s voice came over. Anxious and weaker than usual. “Where are you? Have you got Juliet?”
“We’re tracking Juliet. We know where she is. We’re on the ferry from Newhaven and just approaching Dieppe. It’s too dangerous to attack. We’ll have to wait for a chance. Douglas is waiting in Dieppe with a fast car. We’ll find them. The important thing is to snatch Juliet without a gunfight. We still can’t tell who they are. But they’d prefer not to kill. The danger is that they may have to in a fight.”
Jacqui didn’t argue. “We mustn’t tell the police. If pictures are flashed all over the place, we’d have the same risks. What about my father? “
“He’s a suspect.”
“Maria and I thought that.”
“If he’s behind it, he could be having us watched. I doubt he was doing that at the cottage. They thought it would be a quiet snatch as it was an inside job. But the London house may be under surveillance. Claire and I will need a cover story. Think of one before you ring him. But he mustn’t know that we are tracking the kidnappers. Tell him we will need his help all the same. Do anything to stop him from getting suspicious.”
“The cover story will be easy,” replied Jacqui. “They actually left a note. They told you specifically to wait for a meeting. They have your mobile number. They’ll call you. They said it hadn’t to be me. That could be a ruse to keep me out of the way. They may want to meet and are afraid I would recognise them, if they work for my father.”
“Let’s be wary what we say to your father, until we know who’s behind this. Tell him I’m with Claire and am using her as a driver and body guard. Also say she’s here as I need someone to help if we get Juliet back. I couldn’t just get her to sit in the car on her own as I drove home. Make it sound we expect it’s a blackmail attempt. We better go to zero communication except in an emergency.”
“Charles, I’ll call in at the office. It’ll not be possible to trace a call there through the switchboard. I’ll call you through Claire. The switchboard won’t recognise her.”
“Jacqui, you’re sure you’re all right?”
“Yes. The doctor removed the bullet. It touched a bone in the shoulder and chipped it. He’s cleaned it all up. He says the arm will be stiff for a bit. Otherwise, there’s no problem. And he told me something else.”
This was said in a softer voice. It was a bit tearful. Charles hesitated, “What else?”
She seemed even closer to tears now; “I’m pregnant again. That’s why I keep getting all emotional. Do be careful. I want the baby. And I must have Juliet back.”
“There’s no danger from the shock?”
“No, the doctor’s here. He says that I’m fine. He’s given me nothing as he says that would be bad for the baby as he had to give a local to clean up my shoulder.”
“I’m pleased. It’s great. We’ll be together soon. I promise. All three will be, or rather all four of us.”
They talked for a minute or so more, but they were now fast approaching the harbour.
“I have to go, as we want to get off as soon as this boat docks. Be doubly careful.”
Charles joined Claire who was sheltering away from the wind in an area of the deck that was half enclosed.
“They’re all fine. They’re on their way to the house in London. Jacqui’s been seen to and there’s no serious damage.”
Claire said, “I asked someone where we got off and it appears it’s through a door just below here. That means we’ll have to wait. We need to stay here as there are hardly any foot passengers. The first class cabin passengers have to pass by the doorway on their way down to the car deck. There are only a few cars and trucks and they’ll all be parked forward. So we need to be careful. We’ll dart down at the last minute.”
They docked in that slow and ponderous way of ferries, easing backwards and forwards and then edging against the dock. The Dieppe morning greeted them with mournful indifference. It exhibited all the joy of a cold, wet, windy and grey day on an off season morning during an off peak time. Nothing looked open and everyone seemed sullen. Men huddled in dark thick clothes with the only glow coming from the odd Gauloise stuck to an upper lip. Charles shivered. This felt like a bad omen. The town looked dead. The town even felt dead.
But as the boat docked, Claire jerked him from this gloom, “Time to go.”
They headed downstairs into the boat’s stale but warm air. The slightly overpowering smell of English cooked breakfasts came to greet them from the nearby cafeteria. A few tired looking people with battered cases waited at the door. Young couples with rucksacks were the only cheerful ones around. They pushed into the middle of this small group and crouched down for fear that the people they were hunting would appear.
The gangplank swung over and everyone shuffled down it. Nobody, other than them, was in a hurry. They got to the front immediately, but Charles warned Claire to slow down. If they were too rushed, Customs could be suspicious. They already looked a bit strange without coats. But officialdom was as indifferent to their presence or their welfare as the town’s unwelcoming aspect had suggested. Soon, they were outside, and ahead were the station and the gateway to the ferry terminal.
They hurried over to where a large saloon car parked by the gate. Douglas greeted them. Charles jumped into the driving seat and Claire got in the other side. Douglas got into the back. He talked to them quickly, “The cars are just coming out, so I didn’t have to trail them. There’s a large bag on the back seat here. It has some things for you. I took anything that was dark and warm. I thought you may need some clothes. I bought Miss Claire a couple of Miss Jacqui’s sweaters. I’ve added two more powerful guns and some ammunition in case you need it. And there is a couple of thousand dollars from the safe, as well as about a thousand euros. That’s all we had. Anything else you need?”
“Douglas, you’re wonderful. Go back to Newhaven and pick up the estate car. It’s parked near the port. Here’s the name of the street. Claire jotted it down. Look after Jacqui while I’m away and avoid contact except for emergencies.”
He nodded and ducked away, picking up a motor bike from the verge near the car. He was a tall figure, but he seemed much smaller as he crouched over the bike. He ble
nded well into the background in his dark outfit. He knew how to do that from his Special Forces days. Those were the days before he’d had to disappear. Jacqui and Charles knew why. His wife knew why. But nobody else did. In fact they didn’t even know he was alive. And he wouldn’t have been if it hadn’t been for Charles. That was the root cause of his loyalty.
The blue Mercedes drove slowly from the port and followed the signs to the motorway. They pulled in behind it, following a couple of the other cars that had come off the boat. There was nothing suspicious in a line of cars heading that way.
“They seem to be heading for Paris. Why don’t you try to get some rest and then we can change over drivers later? I’d get a sweater and keep warm. See also if you can get the heating going in the car. I don’t know BMW’s that well.”
She did as asked. She turned round and pulled the bag left by Douglas towards her., picking out a sweater and putting it on. The warm air was comforting as Charles was still in shirt sleeves. He tracked the Mercedes, as did several of the other cars as they all headed in the direction of Paris.
“We’re going to have to guess where they are heading. And we may need to change cars en route. I hope we have a chance. We can dump this one anywhere, it’ll have been rented in a false name. We have more false identities in the bag. I asked Douglas to bring some. We always keep a few. You never know when they’ll come in useful. We chopped and changed in the old days but then we were on the run. These days we’re much more like good citizens.”
Claire smiled and put her seat back. She was soon sleeping again. He let her. The road was boring and he concentrated on the Mercedes ahead as they moved towards the French capital. The dark gloomy dawn made way for an equally depressing day. Occasionally, the wipers cleaned off the mixture of drizzle, surface water and dirt from the road. For a few fleeting moments, it looked as if the cloud would break and allow them to see a bit of sky. But it obviously decided that was not appropriate and so, as they drove on, the gloom persisted.
The Mercedes eventually arrived at the outskirts of Paris. They kept a keen eye on the blue car, they could easily lose it here. By now, Claire had woken again. Charles was glancing at the petrol indicator. They were only a quarter full. The Mercedes would need to stop soon, it had not been refuelled since the cottage. He didn’t want them to do that on the inner motorway. It would be difficult for them to do likewise in the same garage. They needed them to stop off on a motorway in one of those gargantuan filling stations, which afford anonymity.
He realised that he had one big advantage. They knew their car but the kidnappers didn’t know theirs. And that was the way it had to be.
CHAPTER TEN
The Mercedes went round the inner motorway. It was hard to keep up with it. The driver didn’t know the road well and kept getting into the wrong lanes. Then, suddenly, he would swerve out again. He would rejoin the road to a tumultuous crescendo of hooting from the irritated Parisians who were making their way round the diabolical concrete halo that encircled their capital city.
Charles kept in the centre lanes. If necessary he could dart off the road. But it would have looked too suspicious to keep on weaving in and out of the inside lane every time the car in front did. And he couldn’t be sure that they weren’t doing it to check whether they were being followed.
The road bent round Paris and indicated the West and then the South. As the sign said Lyon, the car appeared to keep in the right lane. They looked and nodded to each other. Sure enough, as they approached the Lyon turnoff, it indicated and took the approach road for the motorway South.
“Claire, have the Russians still got that place near Uzes in the South. You know their compound in the hills just outside Avignon?”
“The one you and Di Maglio razed to the ground a few years back?”
“That’s right.”
“The last time I heard they still had it. It was rebuilt after the attack. It is apparently totally different now. There’s a modern compound and much more high tech security. Do you think that’s where they’re heading?
“If they go towards Lyon and then on beyond Valence, that’s the likely destination. It would also prove that we’re dealing with the Russian Mafia.”
He thought for a moment. “Claire. There really are only two options. Firstly, these are Russians and there is some truth in the bizarre stories of Di Maglio. The whole truth is unlikely to be as he says. He always will twist a story to eke that bit extra advantage out of it for himself. The second option is that Di Maglio engineered this. Then the car is heading to Geneva to his place in the hills behind it. But we’ll only know if that’s the case as we go further south.”
“Don’t forget it may be a wild card. It could be a breakaway group from your father-in-law’s people or the Russians for that matter. Don’t you remember Boris the Bear in Barbados?”
Charles nodded grimly. Boris had been part of a breakaway group sent to assassinate Jacqui and him. He had caught up with Charles and had nearly succeeded in killing him. Charles had been lucky that they met in a confined space where Boris’ incredible bulk had slowed him down. Charles remembered the knife Boris threw. It missed his head by a hairbreadth and had stuck four or five inches into a doorframe. And he had had to shoot Boris several times to stop him, even when fatally wounded, from coming forward to try to kill him with his bare hands. But Claire was right; one must always be alert.
“They’re pulling into the motorway complex there,” called Claire. They were about a hundred yards behind them and Charles immediately slowed down. That allowed the kidnappers to get further away and disappear round the bend in the road before they in turn swerved onto the slip road themselves. They saw them again immediately. They had stopped at one of the first pumps. Charles recognised the man who had changed the wheel. He was walking to the pump.
They stopped at a far pump, out of sight. It was the type you activate with a credit card. Claire had put on a top with a hood and she had covered her blond hair with it. She jumped out and operated the pump. Once they had filled up, the machine whirred away and regurgitated the card and a voucher. Claire grabbed them and Charles started the engine again. She took a sheet of paper roll and appeared to be working at removing dead flies from the windscreen. Her face was well hidden and Charles carefully looked away also towards the complex behind the pumps. He realised she wanted to get a view of the Mercedes as it passed in front of them.
He couldn’t see when it would and so he simply looked away. The last thing he wanted was for Juliet to see him. She would give them away immediately. Claire jumped in and Charles saw the Mercedes was rejoining the carriageway. He pulled away. “What did you see?”
“They’re all in there. Juliet is sitting in the back with the nanny. I think she’s OK. The two men we saw are in the front. I got a good view of them again. I don’t recognise them as Di Maglio people. But it came back to me who the girl is. Her name’s Claudia Palomi. Her father is Giorgio. He’s a Di Maglio hit man. That means that Di Maglio is most likely double-crossing us. I cannot believe she would betray him. She knows the rules and all these Mafia girls have strong family ties. There’d be blood money on her head from the moment she acted against his instructions; her family would try to kill her as a matter of honour. That is, if they got to her before Di Maglio killed them as a matter of course.”
Charles knew she was right. “I can’t believe she’d act against Di Maglio. She’d know the consequences.”
Claire shrugged her shoulders. “It’s unlikely. But it has happened before. The families are very protective about the daughters. She may have a lover. He may have persuaded her. She may think she can get away with it. But it’s unlikely.”
They were driving fast. Charles had been at the wheel for over five hours and was getting tired. They pulled in and quickly swapped places. Then Claire roared away until they could see the Mercedes again in the distance. The road to Lyon offered little distraction. The Mercedes didn’t stop. Luckily, Dou
glas had left some chocolate and water in the car. The kidnappers, or quarry as Claire ominously insisted on calling them, must have had some food as well, for they never stopped.
Towards Lyon they pulled into another petrol station and Claire followed suit. They parked the car. They watched from the distance. The two men went into the restaurant.
“This could be our chance. The nanny’s alone with Juliet,” said Charles. Claire nodded. They left the car about two hundred yards away. Charles would have preferred to leave the engine running and the doors open, but that would have been asking for trouble. It would, though, have made for an easier getaway. Using the other parked cars as cover, they carefully approached the Mercedes.
Once they were about fifty yards away, the door opened and the nanny got out. She was carrying Juliet. They could see she was asleep or drugged in her arms. Charles was about to jump out and run to the woman. Claire pulled him down.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s a hand-over. The kidnappers are in the diner but there’s a man with them and I think he comes from the car parked next to the Mercedes. He’ll be paying them off. The nanny will leave with the new guys. That way, the kidnappers don’t know where Juliet is being taken.
“Look carefully and you’ll see a black Citroen. And I recognise the driver. He’s the one in the car now. He drives and enforces for your father-in-law. I can’t see the other very clearly but this is not the time to do anything. Otherwise, there would be a shoot out. I’ll keep watch. You go back to the car. Bring it closer when I signal. We’ll need to know who to follow.”
Charles did as she said. He was sweating. He’d thought they would be able to grab Juliet. Now everything was unclear. And more importantly, it seemed Di Maglio was their opponent. The man he feared most was the man they would have to beat.