by Chris Ewan
Whatever he was searching for, he didn’t see it. He didn’t linger. He stuffed both hands inside his shiny blue windbreaker, lowered his chin against his chest and walked away in a diagonal trajectory across the square.
The young man made a note in his pad. He recorded the time and the relevant information. Then he angled his camera on the window ledge and captured an image of the man’s back as he hurried off the way he’d come.
A minute went by. Two.
Nothing moved. Nothing altered.
Then the BMW’s lights came on, front and rear. They dimmed momentarily as the engine fired up. The chassis shook. The exhaust vibrated. The car edged out into the street and glided away at a perfectly normal, perfectly respectable rate of acceleration.
The young man made another note. Then he raised his pencil to his mouth. There was an eraser on the end. He sucked on it. Knocked it against his teeth.
He was looking at the blue front door to Trent’s apartment. He was contemplating the way it was hanging slightly open. Not by much, perhaps, but by enough to be noticeable, at least to a guy who’d spent countless long hours staring at the fit and finish of the very same door for several gruelling consecutive weeks.
He was asking himself a simple question but one that was potentially complex. It was a conundrum that could be loaded with rewards or laid with traps. A riddle that might give him all the answers he craved or destroy everything he’d achieved so far.
He was trying to decide if he should go and take a look inside.
Chapter Forty-one
It was around a forty-minute journey to the drop point, out through the city and the suburbs and along the winding corniches, the coastal roads. Trent stopped half way. He pulled into a petrol station linked to a hypermarket on the fringes of the trading estates that sprawled out from east Marseilles. He didn’t need fuel but he was curious to see if he was being followed. He waited inside the BMW, its interior artificially chilled by the raging air conditioning he was using to stay alert, and he studied his mirrors. Two minutes went by. Three. He couldn’t spot anyone on his tail, so he entered the filling station for a bottle of water and a takeaway coffee, and then he drove slowly the rest of the way, sipping the scalding, bitter brew, stringing the trip out for an extra quarter of an hour.
He had plenty of time. Xavier’s instructions had told him to leave the money by 10 a.m. and it wasn’t half past nine yet. Besides, he wanted to allow Girard to get into position. To give him the opportunity to find the perfect viewing spot.
From the city outskirts, the road snaked upwards into a barren, hilly terrain, part desert, part forested moonscape. There was a lot of jagged, exposed limestone rock. A lot of sparsely wooded areas, stunted Aleppo pines and arid shrubland.
The road climbed a steep gradient, the BMW sweeping around looping curves that teetered above sheer drops. The sun was a piercing white disc in a vast blue sky. Azure waters glimmered way below. Trent could see the chain of tiny offshore islands, flecked with colonies of grey seabirds. He could see sailing boats and fishing vessels and a bulbous passenger ferry. Nearer still were the sprawling concrete grounds of the university campus.
The holdall of cash bulged on the bench seat behind him. Three million euros. A staggering amount of money. Enough to buy a luxury yacht. Enough to change someone’s life for ever. Enough, certainly, to kidnap and kill for.
He chewed the side of his cheek. There was a painful twisting in his guts that had nothing to do with the terrible coffee. Truth was, he’d never functioned as a bagman before. It wasn’t his role. He was the negotiator. The schemer. Usually, a family member dropped the ransom money. Sometimes a co-worker or a trusted friend handled it.
It was a dangerous job. It took a great deal of composure. Plenty of courage. And normally, Trent couldn’t afford to get involved in case something went wrong and his advice was required urgently.
Not today.
Today he was at the centre of things. He was exposed. The gang had addressed him directly. They’d insisted that he handle the cash. They’d drawn him out to a desolate, barren place, where he was expected to set out on the loneliest, scariest walk of his life.
It was a daunting prospect. Enough to make anyone sweat. And Trent had gone and added to the danger. He’d involved Girard. If it was an error, then it was likely to be costly. The gang had killed before. They wouldn’t hesitate to do so again.
After the curves and coils of the climb, the road straightened out, slicing through the rear of the massif towards Cassis. Trent consulted the map. He passed a series of rest stops before he neared the lay-by the gang had selected.
He waited for a gap in the string of cars hurtling towards him before pulling over and trundling to a halt beside a lone waste bin with a pitted concrete exterior. He engaged the handbrake. Left the engine idling. Gripped and re-gripped the steering wheel.
A dozen pine trees shaded the pull-in, all of them rangy, limbs sparse. The sandy ground was coated in a bed of dried needles and fallen cones and a wash of sun-bleached litter.
A swollen hillock loomed above him, bare rock poking through straggly undergrowth and stiff wild grass. Off to his right, the land fell away into a shallow bowl before sloping up towards a gnarly ridge. On the other side of the ridge would be the steep descent to the sea.
An emergency breakdown telephone lay dead ahead. It was bright orange in colour, the letters SOS branded on the side. Beyond it Trent could see the neat terraced vineyards that overlooked Cassis.
He drummed the steering wheel some more. Scanned the terrain. Felt the BMW rock on its suspension as cars and trucks and coaches thundered by at his side.
He couldn’t see anyone. Not a guy in a ski mask. Not a glimpse of Girard.
He cut the engine and gathered Alain’s Ruger from the passenger seat. Preferable to his Beretta, he’d decided. More powerful, certainly. And accuracy was no big concern out here. If he was shooting from a distance, no handgun in the world would be much use to him. But if someone came close, he knew for a fact that the Ruger was more than capable of stopping a man.
His palms were wet against the stainless-steel finish as he released the cylinder and plugged the spaces he found there with two .44 cartridges from the cardboard box filled with spare rounds that he’d retrieved from Alain’s jacket. He shifted forwards, peeled his shirt away from his back and eased the long barrel down into the waistband of his jeans. The hard outline of the gun pressed into his damp skin as if it were branding him.
The dry morning heat wafted in at him when he kicked open his door and stepped out into the glare. Pale, cracked boulders lined the side of the pull-in. They looked like they’d split in the sun. Trent could feel lazy thermals wafting up from the ground towards his hands. He could sense many thousands of bugs and insects scrambling through the drifts of pine needles under his feet.
He felt more than just the gun against his back now. Felt more than the tug of the spare Magnum rounds that were weighing down his jeans and the mobile that was nestled in his shirt pocket.
There were unseen eyes on him. Some friendly. Others not.
He had no idea where they lurked.
Slowly, methodically, he shut the driver’s door and cracked the door at the rear. He lifted out the holdall using both hands, grunting, and nudged the door closed with his knee. He turned once, a complete 360, his boots kicking up a haze of dust and debris, eyes squinted against the dazzling glare, teeth clenched in anticipation of the rifle round that might come from anywhere, at any moment.
He licked his salty lips and paced stiffly towards the waste bin.
The holdall was very heavy. He had to thrust with his legs and heave with his back to get it up and inside the bin. There were flies there. And wasps. They buzzed madly as he disturbed the hot, putrid waste.
The holdall fitted snugly but it poked out at the top. It was easy to see. Noticeable enough to intrigue a passing motorist, certainly.
The gang wouldn’t leave it here long, Trent
thought. They’d have to make their move soon. They had to be close.
And he had to leave. He had to step away from the wasps and wipe his hands on the back of his jeans and lock the BMW and wait for a gap in the traffic. Then he had to cross the softly melting tarmac, the Ruger gnawing at the base of his spine, his jeans sagging low around his hips, all the while fighting the desperate urge to glance behind him and see who might emerge from among the hot white rocks.
* * *
The young man edged out from the foul-smelling vestibule at the front of the building where his apartment was located and blinked in the hard morning light.
He’d waited a long time before making his move. Long enough for the square to spring to life around him. Long enough for lights to come on behind windows and for people to stumble out of buildings and shuffle along pavements on their way to work. Long enough for parents to drop their children at the nursery amid raucous yelps and pounding feet; for two old men in cloth caps to gather on an ironwork bench beside the empty fountain in companionable silence; for housewives to drape laundry over the pulley lines set up outside their balconies.
Long enough for the young man to curse himself for his cowardice and the opportunity he’d surely missed.
Long enough for the man in the grey jacket to leave Trent’s apartment.
Long enough for Trent to return.
Except neither of them had.
And none of the hundreds of people who’d passed by or lingered in the square had seemed to notice that Trent’s door was hanging very slightly open. Their curiosity hadn’t been aroused at all. Not by the lapse in security. Nor by the dull claps or the fractured shout of a few hours before.
Now, life on the square had fallen into a familiar morning lull. There was nobody about. The young man couldn’t be certain how long it might last but he’d finally made up his mind. He was going to act. He was going to take a chance.
He staggered out into the square, leaning forwards from the hip, like he was battling against a gale-force wind. His face was down and his right hand shielded his eyes, as if from the sun’s glare. His left hand was stuffed in the pocket of the hooded sweatshirt he had on.
Thirty fast paces and he was at the other side of the square. Two more and he was outside the blue door. The locking unit was loose. Looked like it might topple out at any moment.
The young man clenched his hand in his pocket. He muttered a few words of encouragement to himself. Then he jabbed the door with the heel of his palm and tried to ignore the watery sensation in his stomach as he took the hardest, heaviest step of his life.
Chapter Forty-two
There was a drainage trough on the other side of the road. Trent stumbled down it, then stepped over a low log barrier and set off across the dusty scrubland that lay ahead. There was no defined path. He would come to one eventually – could see it running diagonally up towards the far ridge like a scar in the chalky white rock – but for now he had to walk through untamed land.
The ground fell away at an acute angle, forming a giant, shallow depression that jacked up towards the ridge. The going was rough and uneven. There was a lot of sandy earth and loose rock underfoot. It would be easy to turn an ankle. Low bushes and parched Mediterranean brush snagged the cuffs of his jeans and tangled with his boot-laces. He stomped through rosemary, thyme and myrtle. He trampled wild flowers, laurel and juniper. He moved on relentlessly, his skin crawling with the sensation of being watched. He pounded the ground and swung his arms, and all the while the droning traffic faded gradually from behind until the low hum started to blend with the throb of the blood in his ears.
There was no shade. The tallest trees came only as high as his shoulders. He passed contorted pines and miniature green oaks, a weedy ash or two, and olive trees with knotted trunks. He squinted hard against the blinding light coming up off the baked white rock. He searched for movement. For the glint of a rifle scope. His eyes streamed in the glare.
Not even mid-morning and his brow and neck and back were filmed with sweat. He clasped a palm to his skull and felt a warmth like he’d picked up a noontime boulder.
The brush was dry as tinder. This time of summer, the Calanques were closed to the public because of the risk of wild fires. There’d be warning signs up on the official trails. There’d be red metal chains slung across them to deter hikers from coming through. So it was easy enough to believe he was alone out here. Just him and the hostile men who were watching. And as he got further away, beyond the ridge, he’d be out of sight of the road. He’d be even more vulnerable.
Strange to think that he’d often been here before, and how different the barren environment had felt then. There’d been times when he’d set out on his own for a challenging hike to cleanse his mind of a tortuous negotiation. And there’d been other times, too. Occasions when he’d strolled along these trails with Aimée. When they’d marvelled at the stark beauty of this place, squeezing one another’s hands, the straps of a rucksack loaded with picnic things biting into Trent’s shoulders. Times when they’d spent whole days on the lonely beaches of Port Pin or Sormiou or, yes, En Vau. Afternoons when they’d lounged in the sun and bathed in the cooling green waters and he’d talked about one day teaching her to sail.
Like the day she’d told him she was expecting his baby. He’d hired a small yacht and they’d sailed into the Calanque de Sugiton, laying anchor a short distance from the beach. They’d lazed in the sun. Swum just a little, canoodling in the tides. Then Trent had returned to the boat for his mask and snorkel and underwater camera, and Aimée had stumbled out of the shallows in her black bikini onto the scalding hot sand. She’d wrung the sea from her hair. Waved to him and settled cross-legged on the beach.
And that was when he’d surged up from the cool waters, planted his feet in the clinging, liquid seabed, and taken her picture. The one he kept in his wallet. The only shot he had of the woman he loved carrying his unborn child.
Trent growled and shook his head. He was getting distracted. Losing focus.
Right now, the terrain ahead of him looked like something out of the Wild West. A lone bird circled the sky way above, its wingspan huge, feathers splayed like probing fingers. It wouldn’t be hard to picture a cowboy on a horse traversing the hard rocky slope up ahead. And many hundreds of metres away, in a wide compression near another sheltered parking spot, he saw an old swaybacked pine cabin that might have been a frontier shack or a drinking saloon.
Water would have been good. He should have brought the bottle from the car. He’d have liked nothing more than to pour it over his head. To feel it drain down through his hair, dousing his sizzling scalp.
He checked his watch. He’d been going for just over ten minutes. A long time, considering how exposed he was. He wondered if the hold-all had already been claimed. He wondered what Girard might have seen. He wondered what lay in wait for him beyond the abrupt stone ridge, its jagged summit looming as sharp and unyielding as a blade.
* * *
The young man hadn’t known what to expect. But whatever he’d anticipated, it wasn’t this.
The hallway was long and narrow and featureless, like a corridor from an anxious dream, but it led him to a compact living area that was flooded with light. The walls were pale, the furniture modern. There was a kitchen area on his right. A telephone on the counter. Some kind of answering machine wired up to it.
There was no sign of the guy in the grey jacket.
The temperature was neither cool nor hot. The air smelled of nothing perceptible. The only noise was the low murmur of a fridge. He could close his eyes and be anywhere. Nowhere. He could pretend he was in a space entirely his own.
He edged his way to a bathroom. It was basic and clean and tidy. There was a deep tub with a shower curtain drawn across it. A toilet with the seat up.
Next door was a bedroom, brighter still than the lounge. Light streamed in through a set of Venetian blinds, throwing zebra patterns across the duvet. It shone on a silver photo fr
ame on a bedside cabinet – a black-and-white picture of a stunning woman in a floppy summer hat. She was smiling with her mouth and eyes. Her complexion was freckled. Sun-kissed.
The woman was beautiful but the young man felt uncomfortable staring at her. It seemed improper, somehow. He lowered his eyes to the floor, as if in apology, and backed out of the room, swivelling to face a closed door. A closet, maybe?
The young man reached for the handle and a tiny charge buzzed his flesh. Static. His heart tripped and his bladder weakened. Stupid. He shook his head at his foolishness and pushed open the door and right then his stomach dropped and the room began to spin.
Chapter Forty-three
Trent came around the side of the ridge to find the ocean spread out before him. Light winked and shimmered on its undulating surface as if thousands of wine bottles were floating out to sea. Below him, the thin azure slash of En Vau cut into the raking, dun-coloured cliffs on either side. The water was very clear. In the shallows, Trent could see the sandy seabed and patches of dark green algae and weed. The pale golden beach appeared deserted. A single yacht passed the distant mouth of the cove. There was no sign of any of the sightseeing vessels that sometimes journeyed here from Cassis.
Trent picked up his pace. He jogged down the treacherous cliff path, grasping the limbs of wiry green pines that seemed to grow out of the rocks themselves, the resin warm and aromatic on his hands. His face burned and puckered in the gathering heat. The funnels of tan stone he was descending through reflected the sun’s rays like a cauldron.
There were craggy rock spurs all along the length of the inlet and two defined peaks marked the entrance to the calanque. Trent had seen climbers here in the past. They’d come armed with harnesses and colourful ropes and little bags of chalk dust, and sunbathers would watch them risk their lives as they reclined on the sand. But there appeared to be nobody here today. There was no one to witness the dangers Trent was exposing himself to. There was no sign of Jérôme, nor any indication of what might lead Trent to him.