by Alex Dryden
Willy put his foot down and slammed the car to the right, into the village square, past the barn with the weighbridge, onto the road down the hill. He began to throw the car into the corners in a screamingly low gear until, finally, they flattened out onto the straight road with the plane trees that led to the town.
She dialled the phone. It was answered immediately.
“They’ve taken my son,” she said with icy calm now. The reversal was complete. “They’ve taken my son, where were you? Where was our protection?”
She listened.
“It’s too late. You’re too late.”
There was silence again.
“That’s where we’re going now. We’ll be there in a few minutes. But it’s too late, isn’t it.”
Another silence.
“Ten minutes, then,” she said, and clipped the phone shut.
It was Wednesday. The dusty car park that was full on Saturday market day was empty but for two unmarked cars. Four men seemed to be on four phones, but she saw that only two of them had phones in their hands as she and Willy drew up in a billow of dust.
Willy was out of the car first, shouting at them in Hungarian, then French, berating them with every obscenity he could come up with. Now it was she who put her hand on his shoulder.
“We have to think, Willy,” she said, and he quietened under her hand as if he’d been given a dose of morphine.
On their way into the town, they’d looked in every car along the road, but there was nothing, nobody, who alerted any suspicions.
At one point as they sped from the flashes of light to shade, light to shade, under the spreading branches of the plane trees, Willy said: “It was the women at the bed and breakfast. The so-called Danish lesbians.”
“Yes,” she replied. “They sent women. Of course they sent women.”
And now they were standing in the dusty car park with four French intelligence officers and no plan.
The elder of the four men broke away.
“We’re putting up roadblocks on every road from the town, twenty miles out,” he said. “We’re checking any private air movements in the area this morning. Alerts are going out to air and sea ports. We’ll find your son.”
“Will you?” she said.
The officer didn’t reply to the question.
“There’ll be two men stationed at the house. You mustn’t stay there, but we need to have a presence. They’ll contact you via there.”
She could see he was keeping himself under control. He understood. He had children of his own, perhaps. He knew what was happening to her. For the first time, she felt like weeping. There was someone else in the world, someone she didn’t even know, who understood.
“One of us will come with you. In your car. The rest will go, one ahead, one behind, in these two cars. We’ll be joined by others. Helicopters are being scrambled at Nîmes. We’ll take you to a safe place.”
A lot, a little too late, she thought. Anna’s mind flitted across the possibilities like the eyes of a gambler at a roulette table. But they were all losing numbers. The banker always won.
The Foreign Legion headquarters was at Nîmes, she realised. There’d be men, equipment. But whoever had taken Little Finn would know the alert would be almost immediate. They would have a route out, roadblocks or no roadblocks. And nobody could begin to attempt a search of the summer traffic that sped bumper to bumper down the autoroute to the beaches.
Willy took her arm and pulled her aside.
“There’s one place we can go that you know.”
“I’d thought the same thing,” she said.
They turned back to the officer.
“We’ll have a house for you . . . ,” he began.
“We know where we’re going,” Willy said. “We’ll need all the backup you say you have. I have a place near Marseille. It’s completely private. Believe me. Between you and me, even the immigration authorities know nothing about it.”
The officer had his orders, but Anna and Willy were climbing into their car. He had no time to persuade them one way or the other, only to order his men into the two cars and follow.
“Head for the intersection of the autoroute, the first one south of Avignon,” Willy shouted.
He started the car, and Anna saw men running to the two other cars. One pulled out ahead of them, one tucked in behind. She heard the sound of one of the men fitting a magazine into what was unmistakably a bolt-action rifle.
They drove with unreasoning speed, as if they were going to meet someone, rather than running away. At the intersection south of Avignon, a French electricity truck with an engine several grades above its usual requirements joined them to one side on the three-lane motorway, and a black Audi took the inside lane. They were boxed in neatly by their protectors.
At the next intersection beyond the meeting place, three police cars pulled onto the road, ensuring that the massed traffic slowed, giving the watchers more eyes and more time to search the flow.
There were tourists on their way to the sea this side of Marseille, all of Marseille’s own commercial traffic, and yet another stream of commercial and tourist vehicles heading for Ventimiglia and the Italian border. There was no chance of finding anyone in this exodus.
“We’ll find him,” Willy said at one point. “We’ll find him, Anna.”
But Anna was already sitting on a hard chair in a bare interrogation room at the Forest east of Moscow, with Little Finn crying in a corner. It was her they wanted, and they would have her. All that remained to be decided now was how they would contact her, and when. The sooner the better, she thought.
From time to time, glancing in the mirrors, Willy would say, “Check the green Peugeot three cars behind our tail.” Or “Watch that truck on the outside. I don’t like it.”
“Just drive, please, Willy. You can’t do more than that.”
“All eyes now are important,” he’d say. “You cannot watch too much.”
She let him do what he wanted. She knew she couldn’t argue anymore. In her mind, they had won. They would put Little Finn in some filthy orphanage in Krasnoyarsk, or bring him up in an unkind KGB family for indoctrination.
All she had to defend him with was Mikhail. Would she sentence Mikhail to death to get her son back? Of course—of course she would.
The police cars dampened the lawless holiday elation of the tourists, and they crawled at a sedate pace within the speed limit like a presidential procession, three lanes wide.
She saw their exit looming ahead, three kilometres, two, there it was, the lane to the exit on the right and then up to the roundabout and onto the country roads.
Willy pulled into the exit lane and the electricity truck gave way and hung behind them. The Audi stayed out to the left and swung in at the last minute, to block anyone else with the same idea. The two cars of the intelligence team that had started out with them were in front and behind.
“Watch that truck. I tell you, watch that truck,” Willy urged.
She looked behind them and saw a truck that had been with them for an hour now. It was pulling onto the exit road.
The sky was darkening in readiness for the night. A huge swath of pinks and purples fired the horizon to the west behind them. Ahead, the smokestacks of Marseille’s industrial zone pumped white smoke up from half a dozen stacks, the smoke turning pink in the reflected night sky.
They reached the top of the exit lane. They had their protection car in front and one behind, but it and the black Audi had fallen back. The lights of the truck Willy had asked her to watch were right behind them.
It suddenly slowed as she watched in the mirror and Willy pulled up behind the car in front, at the roundabout. She saw the truck’s bed tip up to the sky, and it squealed to a halt, sliding slightly on the hot tarmac. It had stopped. She didn’t see what came out of the back of it, the thousands of watermelons that tipped and rolled down the slight incline of the exit road. But she saw that, now, nothing was following. There was only t
he car in front and the electricity truck that was with them. Their protection had been reduced to just these two.
Neither of them uttered a word. It was clear the game was in play. Was it a French game or a Russian game? She didn’t know. She noted that the helicopters that had accompanied them and were going about their own tasks in the search had turned for home with the onset of darkness.
Night had fallen.
She saw Willy’s tight face in the reflection of lights. She knew he was concerned only to save her. But either he didn’t dare say, or he just refused to admit it. Her safety was irrelevant now, with Little Finn gone. She was as good as theirs. It was all over.
Willy talked on the phone to the car in front of them and gave instructions. They weaved through country roads, turning right and left with little logic. It was Willy’s own devised maze, the way he’d always approached the salt pans when she and Finn had stayed there. Confuse and lose. But there was nothing behind them. It would take twenty minutes, probably, to clear the road by the exit.
Ahead, the night shadows of the smokestacks lightly bleached the darkness with their white smoke, as the Mercedes, the point car, and the electricity truck approached an old gravel pit to the right. They turned in and descended into the pit, along sand-covered tracks.
The car in front pulled up, and the elder officer stepped out. Willy swung round and halted behind them. The electricity truck followed suit. They were at the start of the hidden road across the salt pans, and completely concealed from view.
The officer stepped forward and indicated the electricity truck.
“They’ll stay here and close the entrance, just in case,” he said. Then he looked at Willy. “It seems a good place,” he said. “What’s down there?” He waved his head in the direction of the sea.
“There’s a half-hour ride across a broken salt road,” Willy said. “There’s nothing on the way, just the pans running out to either side, for as far as you can see in daylight. At the end are just dunes. And beyond that, my hut. I came here in ’fifty-six,” he said. “From Hungary.”
“I know when you came,” the officer said.
“There are a few hippies who’ll be there,” Willy said. “They pay me for campsites in the summer, go to India in the winter. Like the birds. But it’s all concealed from the land side, and mostly from the sea. I make them keep their tents down in the dunes. No one else comes here. To the left along the beach, there’s nothing until you reach the industrial zone; to the right, there’s three miles to the first tourist beach. Too far for anyone to bother to walk. No roads lead to the beach on either side of the camp for three miles. It’s a beautiful beach,” he added. “With a fine view of Marseille’s factories and occasionally a filthy smell that comes from them too, when the wind’s in the wrong direction. It’s no tourist trap. It’s a place of exiles.”
The officer walked across the dusty track to where the electricity truck was waiting. He gave some instructions, and Anna watched as the truck reversed and then drove back up the track to the top. The men opened the rear doors and began to put out cones, and an excavation vehicle was wheeled off a ramp.
The officer had returned.
“We’ll come with you until we know you’re okay,” he said.
“Have they found him?” Anna said, knowing it would have been the first thing she was told.
“Not yet,” he replied. He looked at her with compassion. “Do not give up hope,” he said. “There is still hope, until long after we hear from whoever took him.”
Anna and Willy decided they would prefer that their protection be concentrated at this end of the road. There was nothing and nobody at the far end in the dunes, except the hippies. Reluctantly, the officer agreed; he would come there personally at dawn unless there were developments, he said, in which case he would come immediately.
It was a fine night as they drove across the slightly raised causeway, with only the stars visible, more prominent without the moon. The stars were so bright in this dead place, Willy had once said, they made shadows.
In less than half an hour, they were approaching the dunes. There were no lights.
Anna felt her heart constricting as they approached. It was the last place she’d seen Finn, before his disappearance and death. From here, against all operational necessity, he had gone to tie up one loose end, as he’d put it. The next time she’d seen him was in the back of a car in Germany, dying, while Mikhail drove them through another night as dark as this one.
Willy pulled up the Mercedes behind a high dune, parking where they were invisible from both land and sea. He took her arm outside the car. They stared up at the stars, no words to say what they both were feeling.
And then they tramped over the dune and saw the little driftwood hut. Other similar cabins and tents dotted the sand, until they reached the sea. There was a fire burning, a guitar was playing somewhere inside the hippie encampment, and the smell of good hashish wafted across the beach.
Chapter 12
BURT STOPPED AT THE sea’s edge, a hundred yards from the hut. He could just make out the dull glow of a fire from this angle, flickering between the dunes. Taking a long pull on his cigar, he exhaled into the night sky, and walked on as if this were a postprandial stroll.
He saw the two figures before they saw him. They were standing back from the edge of the water, perhaps looking out to sea, perhaps staring into space. He began to approach until he judged he was both within earshot and far enough away not to threaten them. It was quiet; he could make out the distant chords of a guitar now, but otherwise there was no noise. The almost nonexistent waves made hardly any sound. When he was satisfied, he stopped again.
“Anna?” he called, just loudly enough without shouting. “Anna?”
He saw them both whip round and take a step away. Willy seemed to reach for something, but he evidently didn’t have anything to reach for. Anna had a weapon in her hand, but he couldn’t see what it was at this distance.
“Anna,” Burt repeated. “I’m a friend. Take it easy.”
“Who are you?” she said, and he saw her lift a long-barrelled pistol into the aiming position.
“Remember Burt?” he said. He hadn’t moved. But once again, he took a long draw on the cigar.
She said nothing. The pistol remained pointed at his head.
“You, me, and Finn had dinner at my house in London,” he said simply. “January twenty-eighth, 2004. I’m Burt. Burt from London. Burt from America. Burt, Finn’s friend.”
He still didn’t move.
“What are you doing here? How did you get here?”
Burt watched her standing quite still and staring hard at him, but she didn’t lower the gun. He saw Willy withdraw a little behind her. Maybe he was going to have a go at getting up the beach. Would he have a gun too? Probably. Knowing Willy, it would likely be something old-fashioned, a Browning 9mm, something like that, he guessed.
“May I approach?” he said.
She was silent.
“I’m not armed.” Burt held his hands in the air.
“Keep your hands like that, then,” she said at last. “Come up to ten yards, no more.”
He didn’t move immediately. “And ask your friend, please, to stay where he is,” he asked politely. “And be visible.”
He saw her turn and say something to Willy, who now moved into his vision again from behind her.
He began to walk on again at his own leisurely pace, his yellow slacks now glowing like a smallpox distress flag and his cigar waving in his hand above his head.
Anna and Willy stayed absolutely still. He walked until he was standing ten yards away, and then he stopped again.
“May I lower them?” he asked.
“Keep them in sight,” she said.
When he was up this close in the darkness, he saw from her face that Anna recognised him. But she still kept the barrel of the pistol aimed steadily at his head.
“Why are you here?” Willy spoke at last.
&
nbsp; Burt addressed her. “Anna, we’ve found your son. He’s safe,” he said.
A silent beat seemed to envelop them. And then she burst out, “Where? Where have you got him?” Fear, anger, and relief were mingled in her voice. “What have you done with him?”
“We’ve found him,” Burt repeated. “Saved him at the last minute, as it happens. We were lucky, Anna. They almost had him back to Moscow.”
She walked up to him now, taller than he was by a few inches. She held the gun loosely by her side.
“Where is he?”
“He’s safe on a boat. Come with me. You too, Willy.” He nodded. “He’s close by, just out there.” Burt waved his cigar in the general direction of the sea. “There’s a yacht a mile or so out. You can’t see it, it’s blacked out. It was two women who abducted him,” he said, keen now to keep the talk flowing. “They took him almost at the same moment as we found you. They beat us to it—just. But we found them. There’s an old grass airstrip up in the Cévennes forest, just by a little ski area up there. That’s where we got to them.”
“How is he?” Anna said at last, daring for a moment to believe that she was listening to the truth.
“We’ve probably given him too much pizza and ice cream.” Burt allowed himself to grin. “But otherwise he’s fine. Well, I don’t think he’s aware of very much. But I think he’s had enough of our company now. He’s waiting for you.”
“How?” she said.
“There’s a boat to reach the yacht. Back up the beach a way. Keep the gun, by all means, but don’t point it at me too much. I have some excitable young men in the dunes.” He turned and whistled through two fingers. Larry came over from behind the dunes to the right.
“It’s all right. He looks mean,” Burt said. “But he’s a real pussycat.”
“If this is true . . . ,” Anna began.
“Come and see for yourself,” Burt said. “We shouldn’t wait too long. There are others out there in the darkness tonight. Everyone wants you. But you have my protection, if you wish, from now on. American protection.”