He feared she was about to tell him to get out of the car, but once they were stationary, she looked across at him.
“I used the wrong word. I haven’t been speaking English much lately. I meant, I don’t know black people.”
“Oh. Good. That’s easier to fix.”
“It’s important to be accurate.”
“Sure, particularly around subjects like that.” Wes was struggling to keep up. She was clearly on some kind of spectrum, but he wasn’t sure which one or if he was fully equipped for dealing with it. He looked around. “Can we . . . drive on now?”
“Yes.” It still seemed to take her a moment to register that he meant right now, but once they were moving again, she said, “You want to go to the railway station.”
“That’s right.”
“Will you be late for your train, because of the accident and killing the three men?”
He smiled to himself, at the way she mentioned the killing of people almost in passing, the kind of everyday incident that might result in anyone missing a train.
“I don’t have a ticket for a particular train. I’ll see about that when I get there.”
“That’s good. It means we can’t be late.”
She fell into silence and he followed suit, staring out at the forested northern edge of the national park that had been his home for the last three years, and the home of Mia’s father, too. Patrice would have seen a paradise here, where there was none.
He noticed she drove with a relaxed confidence, and that was how it was all the way into Bordeaux, suggesting maybe she’d been staying there during her father’s imprisonment and that this journey was a familiar one to her.
As they approached the main concourse at Saint-Jean, she seemed unsure of herself for the first time, but Wes pointed and said, “Pull into that side street over there.” She turned into the narrow street, driving halfway along it before finding a space to park. “Okay, well, thanks again, Mia. I really don’t know what I’d have done if you hadn’t shown up when you did.”
“Which train will you take?”
“I don’t know yet, I’m . . . I’m headed to Madrid.”
She looked delighted by his answer. “Oh! Spain is very beautiful at this time of year. I went there two times, but never to Madrid. It’s a nice city, I think.”
“I’m sure it is. I’m not going on vacation or anything, but . . .”
He wasn’t sure how to end the conversation, but then, as if she’d hit on something obvious, she said, “I could drive you.”
He laughed, then immediately regretted it because she’d been serious and looked confused by his response.
“To Madrid? Mia, I can’t let you do that. I just met you, for one thing, and it’s got to be five hundred miles.”
“It’s more than that to Croatia.”
“That’s where you’re headed?” She nodded. “But then, Madrid’s in the wrong direction.”
“I have . . .” She ground to a halt and looked despondent, and he didn’t want to hear what words he guessed had dried in her throat—probably that she had no one waiting for her, that in some way Wes might be as much of a lifeline to her as she had been briefly to him. He felt for her, but it was a complication he could do without. “I could drive you. People tried to kill you, but if I drive you, no one will know where you are. That would be good, I think.”
She had a point, but not enough of one.
“Okay.” She smiled, but it faltered as he said, “I have to go into the station anyway. I need to take as much money as I can out of an ATM—if they trace it, they might think I took the train. But I’ll be back.”
His explanation was superficially logical enough, and that seemed to satisfy her.
“I’ll wait.”
“Yeah, sure.” He got out, then opened the back door and pulled his bag out. “I’m taking this so I don’t look suspicious. They might spot me on CCTV.”
She nodded, once again accepting his logic without any apparent suspicion that he might be lying. He thought about saying something else, but instead he closed the door and made his way to the station.
And it was only as he started walking that he realized he’d left his bible on the back seat. He felt bad about that, a sense that he owed it to Patrice to read a little of it, even as he hoped he wouldn’t need to use it again as a weapon.
He had guns now, but even that thought jarred and unsettled him, reminding him of the real dilemma he faced. He had to find Ethan, but at the same time he had to stay ahead of Sam and somehow go above Sam to whoever it was at Langley who could remove the target from Wes’s back. In the face of that challenge, killing three CIA officers in a French forest probably hadn’t been the best start.
Ten
He found an ATM and took as much money out on the cards as the machine would allow. He looked up at the boards then, spotting a train to Hendaye on the border. That would be the easiest thing, but he had to think about the way his countrymen and former colleagues would anticipate his every move.
He’d just killed the three men they’d sent to kill him, so they knew he’d go on the run, they knew he’d take all the cash he could and then ditch the cards. Maybe they’d expect him to show up in Switzerland at some point, though he didn’t think anyone knew exactly where he kept his account. Maybe they’d expect him to head to Paris, a big enough city to disappear in, and with plenty of transport links to leave by when the time came.
But they also knew what he’d learned in the last two weeks, so above all they would expect him to go to Spain, and that was tough, because it was what he had to do. And he feared his senses would have been dulled by the last three years, that they might predict his next moves better than he could himself.
There were a few trains showing up on the boards for Paris, plus the one for Hendaye and a few others for cities from which he could make for Barcelona and head south that way. He’d never been on the run before, but he’d been party to a pursuit often enough and he knew the array of journeys in front of him would be all too easy to read.
The only option that would buy him the vital time he needed was the one he’d instinctively ruled out. They’d be expecting him to turn up in Madrid, so he wouldn’t be surprising anyone by going there. But he could at least add uncertainty to the details by keeping them guessing about the means and timing of his arrival.
He made his way to a ticket booth and bought a ticket to Narbonne, once again using the credit card Pine had given him. Then he went to another booth and used cash to buy a ticket for the TGV to Paris in just over an hour. It probably wouldn’t fool them for long, but it would make their job more complicated and encourage them to search for him on other trains besides the two he’d already booked.
He left then, and as much as his ankle was still stabbing with pain and his breathing was labored with the bruising, he took a different street and walked around a full block before approaching Mia’s SUV from the opposite direction.
He felt a touch of concern when he saw her sitting perfectly relaxed in the driver’s seat. He wondered how long she would have sat there if he’d stuck to his initial plan of boarding the first train out. It also made him wish he’d taken the time to get to know the General, because he was sure Pavić would have worried about her and how she’d cope in the world.
Mia tracked him with her big dark eyes as he approached the car, her expression fathomless. He thought again of Patrice calling her the demon girl. He smiled and she smiled uncertainly back.
After putting his bag on the back seat he got in the front and said, “Okay, that should confuse them for a while. And I have some money, enough to pay for gas and . . .” Eight hundred euros in total—he wasn’t sure how long that would last.
“I’m rich.”
“That’s good, but, you know . . . Okay, that’s good, but I have money, in Switzerland. I’ll be able to pay back anything you spend on the trip south.”
“I don’t need it.” There was a hint of sadness in her voice
that made him uneasy, suggesting that she really did need to help Wes for her own wellbeing as much as for his.
“Do you have a phone I could use, or something linked to the internet?”
“In there, a tablet.” She pointed to the glove compartment in front of him.
“Great. I’ll look at it once we’re on our way.”
“And you can read your bible.”
He turned and looked at the back seat, then reached over for it, his ribs tightening with pain in response to the movement. Being reunited with it felt like another good reason for his change of plan—after all, the book had saved his life.
“I’m not religious. Patrice gave it to me.”
“Patrice is the black man.”
“Yeah, the same guy. He gave it to me, so maybe I will read it.”
“It’s good. Shall we go?”
“Sure.” He pointed at the console. “Do you need to program in where we’re going?”
She laughed, and it was disconcerting for her to be amused by him, then she pointed. “It’s that way. There will be signs.” She started the car, still laughing a little, and drove along to the end of the street.
Wes put the bible aside and reached forward to get the tablet from the glove compartment. He opened Gmail, then entered the account details Raphael had given him, and saw the lone email sitting in his inbox.
And as Wes scrolled through the lists within—names and addresses, cellphone numbers, email addresses—he wondered why French intelligence hadn’t recruited Raphael instead of leaving him locked up with the threat of extradition hanging over him.
Then his eyes snagged on the name Grace Burns. So Grace was in Madrid now, and she and Rachel had been good friends—she had to be the one she’d been visiting. Would Rachel have left her two-and-a-half-year-old son with Grace while she went traveling around southern Spain? Wes was less sure about that.
But Grace would have the answers he needed. She’d know what Rachel’s plan had been. She might even have some idea about what had happened to Ethan. Yet even as he contemplated wrapping up the mystery of the boy’s whereabouts, he could feel a reluctance creeping in.
If Grace had known, then why had there been no more information about Ethan in the two weeks since the news broke? Were they covering something up? Were the conspiracy sites right—had he been killed in Granada and they didn’t want the world to know it for some reason? And in those circumstances, even aside from the fact that Wes was now an active Agency target, would Grace be forthcoming with information?
Would she be forthcoming with Wes anyway? The handful of times they’d met, they hadn’t exactly warmed to each other. Grace had always seemed too buttoned-up for Wes’s liking, the kind of person whose smile looked more like a wince, who gave off a constant air of aloof disapproval. She’d probably never thought Wes much of a catch for Rachel, and in turn, Wes had never understood how the two women had been friends.
And now Rachel was dead, removing any last reason Grace might have for wanting to help him. So if he went there at all, it couldn’t be empty-handed; he had to gather as much information as he could for himself first, information he might use to draw her out.
He spoke aloud as the thought developed, saying, “Actually, I need to go to Granada, not to Madrid.”
“Granada, in Andalucía.”
“That’s correct.”
He needed to know if Ethan had been there with her—and if he hadn’t, Wes needed to trace Rachel’s movements backward to Madrid, to find out where she’d left him.
“It’s the same direction.”
“You don’t mind?” he said. She shook her head. “Thanks. There was an explosion there two weeks ago, a terrorist attack. My ex-wife was killed, and her little boy is missing. I only just found out about him. He’s my little boy, too.”
She glanced across at him, then back to the road, little more than a mild curiosity as she said, “You’re divorced?”
It was strange that she’d fixed on that one small detail, rather than the fact that Rachel was dead and his son was missing.
“Yeah, she divorced me when I got sent to prison.”
They were on to busier streets now but she drove with an ease and confidence that seemed at odds with her otherworldly conversational skills.
“Did you get sent to prison for being a soldier?”
“Kind of.”
She threw an uneasy glance in his direction, and he got the impression she was thinking she should have asked about this sooner. He’d come bleeding out of the forest after killing three men and he’d been in prison—probably exactly the kind of man a father would warn his daughter about. At least Wes could go some way to reassuring her on that front.
“I worked for the US government, mainly in Turkey, but also Iraq and Syria.”
“Against ISIL.”
“Mainly. But something went wrong, a helicopter got shot down, with two French aid workers and three civilians on board. It was kind of an accident, but I was in charge, so I took the blame, and that’s why I was in prison.”
“Why did people try to kill you today?”
Once again, considering she came across as so guileless, she’d homed in immediately on the crucial fact.
“It’s complicated. I think there are people working for my government who no longer trust me to stay quiet. Maybe they think I’ll talk about what we were really doing out there, or talk about things they were doing that they shouldn’t have been doing.”
“You’re talking to me about it.”
“Not the details. And anyway, they tried to kill me—I don’t owe them anything anymore.”
“You kill people for the US government and now they want to kill you.”
“No. I mean, yes, about them wanting to kill me, but killing other people, that wasn’t my job.”
“It’s why you were in prison. Like a soldier.”
“Okay, yeah, kind of. Sometimes I had to kill people, but that wasn’t my job. My job was about making the world a safer place.”
“My father used to say, sometimes there is no easy way, only the hard way.”
“That’s true.” And to some degree, both Wes and General Pavić had paid for that absence of easy options.
They were out of the city now, driving down the A63 through a mixture of open countryside and villages shielded from the road by high fences. And she was driving fast—not recklessly, but fast all the same.
“Do you have any other family, back in Croatia?”
“No.” He thought she might leave it at that, but after thinking about it, she said, “It was just me and my father. Now, just me. I’m taking him back to scatter his ashes. But not yet.”
“Of course.”
“And what about you, Wes? Do you have any other family?”
Her tone reminded him of someone learning a new language, repeating back the same simple questions they’ve just been asked, and yet he could tell that her English was pretty much fluent.
“My parents are still alive, and I have two older sisters, some nephews and nieces, but I haven’t heard from any of them in three years.”
“How do you know they’re still alive?”
“I think I’d have heard if they weren’t.” But now that he’d said it, he wasn’t so sure of that. “Truth is, we weren’t in touch a lot before—my work made it difficult—but being sent to prison was the final straw. They’re respectable people.”
“My father was respectable.”
Wes nodded, wary of the traps. “I don’t doubt it, but I guess I mean a different kind of respectable. My folks were both lawyers, one of my sisters too. The other’s a high school principal. I tried to call them after being sentenced, but they’d all changed their numbers.”
“They didn’t want to hear from you.”
He struggled not to laugh—she certainly didn’t believe in sugarcoating anything.
“Maybe. Or maybe they were getting calls from the press, stuff like that. I wrote them a letter, telling them it
wasn’t as bad as it seemed, but I never heard back.”
“It’s rude if you don’t reply to a letter.”
“I guess so.”
They drove on in silence. For a while, Wes looked out at the countryside, trying to appreciate that this was freedom, after three years of looking at that fence, but he couldn’t quite take it in somehow. Everything had the air of a waking dream, and being rescued by Mia only added to the unreality of it all.
He picked up the bible and opened it at the beginning, reading the first page of the creation, familiar even to him. And he read on for a few pages then before seeing something he really hadn’t been familiar with.
“How about that? Adam and Eve had more than two children. I never knew that.”
“It’s an allegory.”
“Yeah, I know none of it’s true, I just meant—”
“But it’s all true. An allegory can still be true. You should read more. The truth is inside the words.”
He nodded, wishing Patrice were here, because he and Mia would have found a lot to talk about. But he read on anyway, through pages where the story lost its grip on him. Then he fell asleep, stirring into semi-consciousness now and then, and lulled back into the depths by the comforting noise of the engine and the smooth motion of the car.
Eleven
When he finally woke properly, the bible was in his lap with his hand resting on top as if he were about to swear an oath. He looked out at the road and the landscape around them, figuring he’d slept as they crossed the border, because this looked like Spain.
He turned and looked at Mia then, relaxed behind the wheel, no less unsettling in appearance, even as he became more used to it.
“Where are we?”
She glanced at him, then back to the road as she pulled out to overtake a truck.
“Close to Segovia.”
“Segovia?”
“It’s near Madrid. But you don’t want to go to Madrid. We’ll stay in Segovia tonight. I want to visit the cathedral there.”
“Okay, er . . .” He shook himself, stretched in the seat and immediately regretted it, a brutal reminder running through his body of what had happened earlier in the day. “Near Madrid? How long was I asleep?”
The Names of the Dead Page 5
