by Mark Dawson
Isabella darted ahead and plunged the screw between the man’s shoulder blades.
In and out, in and out, in and out.
Quick strikes: one, two, three.
His body arched back and stiffened.
Blood speckled each time she pulled the point out of his flesh.
She released her hold on the handle after the third impact. It stayed there, buried up to the shank.
He reached both hands up to his back, showing the pistol.
She reached down and yanked it out of the holster.
He yelled out.
The noise of the rotors and the engine drowned it out.
Isabella centred the handgun in the web of her hand. Her thumb started up high, bumped the safety forward with the first joint, and finished in a down and forward motion. It was ready to fire.
The guard fumbled for the corkscrew that was still stuck in his back.
She drew a bead on the second guard.
Her finger tightened on the trigger.
Something crashed into the side of her head.
Isabella fell to the side, the gun falling from her grip.
Blackness fell over her, a moment’s worth, and when consciousness returned, she was facing the house again. The lights were blurred, spinning kaleidoscopically, and she couldn’t remember where she was or why she was lying on the ground. She felt hands beneath her shoulders and the ground fell away from her as she was hoisted up. She remembered – the helicopter – and bucked against the grip of the person who was trying to shove her inside the open door.
Arms wrapped around her torso, and she was manhandled inside. Salim and Khalil took an arm each and dragged. She was too dazed to resist.
The cabin had two facing rows of three leather seats. The al-Khawaris were next to each other in the row that faced aft. The second row of seats was empty. A third guard jumped up. Isabella hadn’t seen him. It must have been him who had cold-cocked her. He pushed her into the seat farthest from the door, sat down next to her, and buckled her into her harness. He was big, and the seats had only a little space between them. She felt the bunched muscles in his arms and legs, the shoulder mass of his torso. She was woozy, but it wouldn’t matter. There would be no getting across him to reach the door.
The first guard came in next. He slid the door shut, fastened his belt, put on a pair of headphones and spoke into a microphone that would connect him to the pilot. Isabella couldn’t hear what he said, but almost instantly afterwards, the engines shrieked and the helicopter began to ascend.
She saw the man she had stabbed with the corkscrew. He was walking slowly back to the house.
They cleared the line of the buildings, and then the trees, and then the nose dipped down, and the helicopter began to speed ahead.
Isabella felt weak and nauseous. She blinked and, remembering what her mother had taught her, reached for the soft flesh beneath her arm and tweaked it as hard as she could. The pain flared and she focused on it, using it as an anchor until the disorientation had passed.
She looked through the window to her left. There was a blaze of flashing blue and red as a convoy of police vehicles raced down the drive to the house. She counted eight of them. Two came to a sudden stop in the courtyard next to the showroom where the sports cars were garaged, and eight men spilled out. The helicopter was gaining height all the time now, but even this high up, she could see that the men were armed. The other cars stopped, and more uniformed policemen, similarly armed, disembarked. She watched as they funnelled to the main door. The helicopter began to bank. One of the men was hefting a heavy battering ram, and the last thing she was able to see as they slid over the lawns to the east was the ram crashing into the door.
She looked at Salim. He was gazing out of the window, his jaw clenching and unclenching angrily. Jasmin was staring at her, contempt in her eyes. Khalil was looking out of the other window. Dried blood had crusted around his mouth, and he wouldn’t look at her. The guard next to her was checking his weapon, and the other was talking to the pilot.
She turned to the window and watched as the glassy surface of Lake Geneva slipped beneath them.
Chapter Fifty-Three
The helicopter started ahead quickly and, as soon as it was clear of the line of the roof, rushed overhead and then out onto the water, heading back to the east.
Pope toggled the pressel on his radio. ‘Control, Nine, Twelve. Report.’
‘Twelve, copy.’
‘Nine, copy. Orders, Control?’
‘Pick me up on the road half a mile east of the house.’
Snow reported, ‘On my way.’
They picked him up five minutes later.
Kelleher swivelled around in her seat. ‘Follow the chopper?’
‘Yes.’
There was a road atlas in the back pocket of the driver’s seat. Pope opened it and looked for the nearest airport.
‘They’re going to Sion,’ he said. ‘Commercial airport. Eighty, ninety kilometres east.’
‘You worried about Isabella?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Probably not. It’s just . . . I don’t know, I just want to be sure.’
‘I can live with that,’ Snow said.
‘They’ll get there a long time before we will. You think he has a private plane there?’
‘I have no idea. But we have to find out.’
‘You know what this is all about?’
‘No.’
‘The FBI?’
‘London doesn’t know. It could be a jurisdictional fuck-up. Wouldn’t be the first time.’
The lake stood between them and the airport. The fastest route was to follow the E25 around the water in a clockwise direction, passing through or around Lausanne, Montreux, Aigle and Martigny. The satnav reported that it was a distance of 156 km and that it would take them ninety minutes. But it was late, the roads were clear, and Snow was a fast driver. Pope thought they might be able to make it in seventy-five.
Pope thought about Isabella. The girl had done well, as he had suspected she would. She was resourceful and confident. Her mother had trained her well. He would be much happier when she was safely back in Marrakech, though. She bore herself well, and she had had the kind of difficult childhood that would lead to an accelerated maturity, but she was still just a child. An unusual child, certainly – a prodigy – but a child nonetheless.
He was still thinking about her when Snow hit the brakes.
‘Roadblock.’
Pope looked through the windshield. There was a car parked across the road two hundred yards away, a flashing blue light fixed to the roof.
‘Police?’
Pope tried to think. It might have been fallout from the FBI raid on al-Khawari’s estate. The Swiss police were involved. It was possible that they were stopping traffic to and from the area. The helicopter suggested that they had already missed their main target. Perhaps they were being cautious to make sure they rounded everyone else up.
‘Do I stop?’
‘Yes. There’s nothing to worry about. If they ask, we’re driving to Lausanne.’
Snow braked harder and slowed the car to ten miles an hour.
Pope counted three men. One stayed by the car. The other walked toward them down the middle of the road, his hand held up, palm out, ordering them to stop. The other approached from the verge to their left.
‘I don’t like this,’ Kelleher said in a tight, nervous voice.
It was dark, and visibility was limited, but something was off. The two men approaching them wore black fatigues with ‘POLIZEI’ stencilled over their breasts. Pistols in holsters were clipped to their belts. They wore balaclavas, but that wasn’t unusual for armed police. The third man, the one by the car, was standing in a ready position. The rear door was open.
They all looked authentic, but there was something amiss that Pope couldn’t quite define.
Snow slowed the car to a dead stop.
‘Keep the engine running,’ Pope murmured.
The cop indicated that Snow should wind down the window.
He did.
The two men drew nearer.
Oh shit.
He knew what it was.
The Swiss police were usually armed with Sig P225s, Glock 19s or H&K USPs, but these men were toting something very different. Now they were close, Pope recognised the weapons immediately. They were armed with FN Five-sevens, handguns that were infamous for their ability to penetrate certain types of body armour when they were equipped with the right load. The gun was controversial in the United States, and could only be used by civilian shooters with sporting ammunition.
Whatever they were, these men weren’t Swiss police.
The man at the car idled across and stooped at the open rear door. When he emerged, he was cradling a C8 SFW Carbine.
The man on the road reached down to his holster, his hand resting on the butt of his pistol.
‘Drive!’
Snow floored the accelerator.
The car leapt ahead, the engine screaming.
He drove at the man in the road, but he had seen them coming and was able to roll out of the way.
The second man pulled his pistol and fired three times in rapid succession.
The windscreen shattered.
Pope felt a splash of something warm and viscous on his face. He looked up and saw Snow lolling at the wheel, his head hanging at an unnatural angle. His foot must still have been on the gas because the car raced ahead, slammed into the rear wing of the blocking car, and careened off the road and down the slope that led to the water.
He heard the rapid crack-crack-crack of the C8 and the rear windshield detonated into the cabin. The car bounced over the uneven ground, a copse of trees fast approaching. Kelleher reached over for the wheel and yanked it, swerving the car to the right. They crashed through a patch of heavy brush, the front wheels launching off a slab of rock and the car twisting through the air. It landed on its left-hand side, throwing Pope against the window, the shattered glass flying all around him. It skidded for what seemed like an age, eventually slaloming through more trees and coming to a halt in a depression.
The engine was still running, screaming as the upturned wheels span impotently.
Pope was on his side, pressed up against the chassis, grass and small ferns poking into the cabin. He tested his arms and legs. He was uninjured. He reached for the seat-belt mechanism, released himself, and clambered out of the shattered rear window.
He looked up the slope. He could see the lip of the road. They had travelled three hundred yards, with parts of the descent steeper than forty-five degrees.
The lights of two torches bounced down the slope, coming closer.
Two hundred and fifty yards.
The terrain would slow them a little, but he didn’t have long.
The car was ten feet from the water’s edge. It was wedged against an outcrop of rock, on its flank, the passenger side highest. He clambered onto the rocks and then slid across the dented and scratched bodywork until he was over the window of the passenger door. It was still intact. He looked down and saw Kelleher’s body slumped toward the ground. Snow was dead; he knew that. But she was unmoving, too.
He looked back up the slope.
The torches were closer.
Two hundred yards.
He pulled himself to a crouching position where he could stomp down against the window. He put the glass through with his second blow, knelt at the window and reached down for Kelleher.
‘Kelleher!’
His fingers snagged the lapel of her jacket and he pulled. Her body was limp and fell back as soon as he released the tension.
‘Hannah!’
Her head drooped, turning enough so that the moonlight fell on it and exposed the exit wound in her forehead. One of the rounds fired into the back of the car had found its mark. A lucky shot, but it didn’t make her any less dead.
Pope felt a white-hot flash of anger, but he was professional enough to extinguish it almost as soon as it flared. He needed to make a quick assessment. He turned and looked back up the slope. The two men with the flashlights had negotiated the steepest part of the descent. They would be able to move more quickly now.
Pope wished he was armed.
He slid down from the car.
A bullet thrummed through the air.
He crouched as a second streaked at him, sparking into the underside of the car. The fuel tank was ruptured. A jet of diesel gushed out.
Pope ran. He had a good start on the two men, and he had to take advantage of it. He manoeuvred around the car, putting it between himself and his pursuers so that he might buy himself a moment of cover. The terrain was gently inclined now, a lazy slope that led down to the water. He saw the Dents du Midi Mountains on the other side of the lake and steeply terraced vineyards down to the lakeside. There was the dark water of the lake itself, and rising up from the north, the mountains of the Chablais Alps.
There was a fringe of aspen and fir between him and the water, and he sprinted for it, vaulting over an exposed shoulder of granite and crashing through knee-high undergrowth.
Another volley of gunfire passed overhead. They were too far behind him to do anything other than spray and pray. As long as he kept moving, he had a good chance.
Thoughts rushed through his mind in a headlong blur. Who were they? Why had they attacked them? They were masquerading as police – that much was obvious – but it was impossible to know anything more than that. Were they with al-Khawari? Someone else?
Pope reached the trees and turned to the north-east, following the shoreline. He stopped for a moment and checked. A large bank of cloud had rolled in and obscured the moon. There was some light pollution from the habitations on the other side of the lake and the lights of the second car up above, but that aside, the dark was deep and welcoming. It might have been Pope’s only break. The torches had been put out, but he could see the dim shape of one man standing by the wrecked car. He heard the report of two gunshots. The man was making sure that Kelleher and Snow were dead. His eye was drawn to the lip of the incline. He saw the lights of another stationary car, this one turned towards the lake so that the beams cast out a golden arc fifty feet above him. Reinforcements?
He tried to assess what his pursuers would do. He assumed that they were professional, so the best way was to work from what he would have done. He would have sent one man into the tree line to follow him and kept the other one up high, boxing him in. The man in the trees would have to move more carefully in case he was lying in wait for him, but not too slowly; his lack of return fire would have been a good indication that he was unarmed.
He set off at a steady jog. It was bitterly cold, and the wind blasting in off the lake iced the chill into his bones. He moved in a north-easterly direction, keeping to the tree line. There were the occasional cleared spaces. He approached these with caution, waiting in cover before sprinting through them with his head down. The men were quiet. He didn’t hear the sound of pursuit. There were no calls or shouts. It was too dark for hand signals, so he guessed they were operating with radios or phones.
He had been on the move for fifty minutes and had covered four kilometres when he saw a jetty with a boat tied to it. There was a boathouse at the start of the jetty. His path around the lake had taken him above several boathouses, but none of those had a boat on the water, and he didn’t have time to break in and put one afloat. This was different.
He approached the boathouse. The jetty was made of wood and was a little the worse for wear. There was a boat tethered at the far end. It was a rowing boat with a small outboard motor. He knew that he would be taking a chance if he tried to use it. The jetty was exposed, and he had to assume that they would have seen the boat, too. It was an obvious means of escape. If he couldn’t start the engine, he would be trapped and would, most likely, have to swim. The water looked icy. He doubted that he would get very far if it came to that.
The alternative was not
much more appealing. Was it possible that there were more than just the three who were pursuing him? Could they call on reinforcements? Dogs? He was confident that he would be able to stay ahead of the men he knew about, but if they could summon more to cut him off to the north-east, he could very easily find himself boxed in. And then he would have to try to swim.
He had to try the boat.
He descended the last few feet to the shore, vaulted a wire-mesh fence and crept toward the jetty. The door to the boathouse was ajar, and light spilled out through the gap. He guessed that the owner of the boat was a fisherman who had been out on the lake for a spot of late night sport. Now he was making preparations to secure his boat for the night.
The jetty extended into the lake for twenty feet. He hurried along it. The boat and the motor both looked old, but he had made his choice now. He climbed aboard and unknotted the mooring rope from the cleat on the gunwale. He made sure the shift lever was straight up in the neutral position then pulled out the choke. He turned the handgrip until the arrow aligned with the start position, pulled the starter rope until he felt resistance from the starter gear and then pulled more forcefully. The engine started. He pushed the choke back in until the engine was running smoothly, turned the throttle control arm until the arrow lined up with the shift mark, and steered away from the jetty.
The first shots rang out almost as soon as he was clear of the structure. A series of crisp, sudden reports, and then little geysers of water thrown up just short of the boat. Pope flattened himself against the thwart, beneath the line of the gunwale, one hand keeping the tiller straight. He prayed the motor held up. If it stopped, or they shot it . . . More shots fired and two rounds found their mark, crashing into the transom and sending out two little showers of splinters. Another fusillade rang across the water, but the reports were more distant, and none of the rounds struck the boat.
He risked a glance.
He was five hundred feet away from the shore. He could see six figures by the jetty. Four of them had handguns, and the other two had carbines. The C8 had an effective range of one hundred and fifty yards, but it could reach three hundred or four hundred with a degree of accuracy if the shooter was any good. Five hundred yards meant he should be safe here. The figures were too distant to make out any details. As he watched, he saw one of them turn to the door of the boathouse and raise his arm. Pope saw another figure silhouetted in the light of the doorway, saw the flash of the gun and watched the figure fall back inside.