by James Becker
‘Where are they now?’ Ferrara asked.
‘We don’t know, but presumably they’re already on the move. We haven’t obtained the information we need’ – that meant the cryptology experts at the CDF still hadn’t cracked the sheet of encrypted text – ‘so we don’t know where they could be going. Make sure you initiate the changed priority as soon as possible.’
‘Why the change of sequence?’
‘We cannot risk the competition getting there first. David is the weak link.’
‘Understood,’ Ferrara said again, and ended the call. Caravaggio had obviously decided that Angela Lewis’s ability to find hidden relics posed so much danger that she had to die immediately to prevent Zeru following her and seizing the Ark.
He shrugged, glanced at the third number on his sheet of paper and dialled it.
‘About time,’ a gravelly voice answered. ‘We’ve been expecting you. Where are you now?’
‘Still at least two or three hours away. The traffic’s been heavy. What’s the situation?’
‘No change,’ Luca Rossi replied. ‘They’re still in the hotel.’
‘What do you mean, “they”? I thought it was just one person.’
‘Nope. They’re a couple. It looks like he brought his wife along for the ride. Is that a problem?’
‘It might be, but you’ve got it the wrong way round,’ Ferrara said. ‘It’s not the husband I need to meet, it’s the wife. She’s now my priority. Just make sure you know where they are, because I’d like to get this sorted out tonight.’
‘Got it. Where do you want to meet? And at what time?’
Ferrara had researched Auch before he’d left Rome and already knew the area where his target was staying.
‘By the steps that lead to the statue of the musketeer,’ he said. ‘Be there in two and a half hours, but you might have to wait for me for a few minutes.’
‘No problem.’
He got back in his car, again checked the estimate the satnav was providing and pulled out onto the autoroute. He leaned back in his seat, relaxing his body as he steadily increased speed to exactly ten kilometres an hour below the maximum allowed. He definitely didn’t want to get stopped by the gendarmes for speeding, because of the Glock pistol he was carrying. A traffic stop wouldn’t normally result in either the driver or the car being searched, but there was no point in taking the chance.
Chapter 24
Auch, Gascony, France
Three minutes after she’d left, Angela stepped back into the hotel bedroom. Bronson noticed immediately that she wasn’t carrying coffee or any other kind of refreshments.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘That man you thought was following us back at Montségur? He’s downstairs, sitting at a corner table in the bar. I saw him but I’m pretty sure he didn’t see me.’
Bronson stood up. ‘You’re sure it was him?’
‘Yes. I saw him clearly when we were walking down the path from the castle. He’s even wearing the same clothes.’
‘That’s good enough for me. Okay, get your stuff packed up. We’re out of here.’
Angela glanced at her watch. ‘But it’s almost seven o’clock. Shouldn’t we—’
‘No. We don’t know who these people are or what they want, and I’ve no particular desire to hang around and find out. If he’s mounting surveillance on us, which is pretty obviously what he is doing, there’ll be a whole group of them involved, as I told you before. We’re lucky we spotted him earlier, and doubly lucky you recognised him now. His job will be to tail us if we leave the hotel and alert the other people working with him that we’re on the move. While we’re holed up in here in a controlled location, they’re probably out somewhere taking a break, getting a meal or whatever.’
‘So how will we get out without him seeing us?’
‘We won’t. That’s the point. Which corner of the bar was he sitting in?’
‘The left, so he can see straight through to the lobby.’
‘Right,’ Bronson said, more or less thinking aloud. ‘He knows we’re in the hotel because he must have followed us when we came back after lunch. I didn’t see him, but it was either him or another watcher we haven’t identified yet. Nothing else makes sense. He can’t watch our room, so he’s doing the next best thing: covering the hotel entrance to see us if we leave, and to follow us if we do.’
‘So how can we get out?’
‘I think we turn what he’s doing on its head. He’ll sit there until we walk out of the building, but suppose we don’t leave? Suppose he knows we’re not safely tucked up in our room but somewhere else in the hotel, somewhere out of his sight. What’s he going to do then?’
‘That’s obvious. He’ll want to keep watching us.’
‘Exactly. If I was doing his job, that’s what I’d do. So we use that to take him out of the equation.’
‘How?’ Angela asked.
Bronson told her what they needed to do.
‘It sounds a bit hit and miss,’ she said when he’d finished.
‘That’s because it is a bit hit and miss, but right now I don’t have any better ideas.’
‘And you think that will work?’ she asked, pointing at the external mobile phone battery Bronson was holding in his right hand.
‘It’s all I’ve got, so it’ll have to.’
The battery was about five inches long and circular in cross-section, with a USB port and a charging socket at one end. Bronson slipped it into his jacket pocket and nodded to her.
‘Ready?’
‘What’s the line from that road movie? “I was born ready” or something like that? Well, I’m not ready really, but I know we have to do this, so let’s get on with it.’
They picked up their bags and carried them downstairs to the reception desk at the other end of the lobby, out of sight of the bar. Bronson asked the girl manning it if they could leave them there, which was no problem. He settled the bill at the same time, telling her they were having to leave unexpectedly for family reasons. He was fluent in Italian and spoke very good French.
They walked into the bar together, bought two coffees and sat at a table a few feet from their silent watcher. After a couple of minutes, they started discussing their evening meal, part of the off-the-cuff plan Bronson had put together in the bedroom. They made sure their conversation was audible to the watcher.
‘Do you want to go back to the restaurant in the Place de la Libération?’ he asked. ‘It’s a warm evening, we can sit outside, and the food’s not bad at all.’
Angela shook her head. ‘If you don’t mind, I’d rather not. I’m really worn out tonight. Let’s have a quick bite here in the hotel and then call it a night.’
‘No problem. Finish your drink and we’ll go and find a table.’
A couple of minutes later, they stood up and walked out of the bar.
The dining room was past the reception desk and down a short corridor with male and female lavatories on the right-hand side. As he reached the door of the male facility, Bronson pushed the door open and stepped inside, then waited with the door cracked open just enough for him to see along the corridor towards the lobby.
Angela continued walking towards the dining room and stopped outside, apparently to study the menu displayed there.
About half a minute later, Bronson heard footsteps along the corridor. Through the narrow gap he could see that the approaching man was the watcher from the bar. He took the mobile phone battery out of his pocket and waited for the precise moment to act.
As the footsteps reached the door, he stepped out behind the figure, wrapped his left hand around the man’s mouth, rammed the end of the battery into his spine and dragged him backwards into the lavatory. The whole thing took only a couple of seconds, and the watcher was taken completely by surprise. He hadn’t even begun to react when Bronson spoke to him quietly in French.
‘What you can feel pressing into your back is the muzzle of a Colt Model 1908 pistol in twenty-f
ive ACP calibre. It’s not the biggest handgun in the world, nor is it the biggest calibre. If I pull the trigger, the bullet probably won’t kill you, but I can guarantee that you’ll never walk again, because it’ll go right through your spine. At this range I can’t possibly miss. Do not speak and do not make any sudden movements. Nod if you understand what I’ve said.’
The watcher had virtually frozen in place when Bronson started speaking. Now he nodded, just once.
‘That’s good,’ Bronson said. ‘I’m taking my hand away from your mouth. Do not shout or call out. Now place both your palms on the wall in front of you at head height and move your feet backwards so that your weight is on your hands.’
Moving slightly clumsily, the man did as he was told. In that position he wasn’t helpless, but he wouldn’t be able to react very quickly.
‘Good. Don’t move.’
Bronson slipped the battery back into his pocket and ran his hands down the man’s torso. He found something he hadn’t expected. The watcher was wearing a shoulder holster under his jacket. Bronson reached for the pistol with his left hand, and at that moment the man made his move. But because of his position he telegraphed it well in advance.
Stepping forward with his right foot, he swung his left arm, fist clenched, in a vicious scything arc towards Bronson’s head. If the blow had connected, it would probably have been the end of the matter, but Bronson ducked under it.
The watcher’s right fist followed his left, but he was still unbalanced because of the way Bronson had made him stand, and although the blow landed, it was lacking any real power.
It was at about that moment that the watcher realised the man who’d attacked him didn’t have a gun in his hand, and rather than draw back his right fist for another blow, he obviously decided that the quickest way to end the fight would be to use his weapon. He swung his left fist at Bronson’s face again, and at the same time slid his right hand inside his jacket.
Bronson grunted as the man’s fist missed his jaw and ploughed into his left shoulder, then surged forward, wrapping both arms around the watcher’s torso to prevent him pulling out his pistol. He drove him backwards and to one side, slamming the man’s back into one of the wash basins. The basin acted as a fulcrum and the back of his head crashed into the mirror above the sink. Somewhat surprisingly, the glass didn’t break.
Bronson twisted his body and drove the man over to one side of the sink, using all his strength to propel him backwards and straight into the tiled wall, releasing his grip on his torso the moment before impact. The back of the watcher’s head cracked into the tiles, dazing him. Bronson took a half-step backwards and then rammed his right fist into the man’s solar plexus. A short, hard jab, the way he’d been taught years earlier.
And that was the end of it. The watcher gasped as the air was driven out of his lungs and he slumped backwards against the wall of the lavatory. Bronson hooked his legs out from under him and he sat down with a thump.
Bronson reached into the man’s jacket and removed the pistol, one of the ubiquitous Glock 17s popular with police forces and criminals everywhere. It had a full magazine but there wasn’t a cartridge in the chamber, which he rectified immediately by pulling back the slide. He made sure that the watcher saw him do it as he got his breath back.
‘Time we had a chat,’ Bronson said, taking a couple of paces backwards out of the man’s immediate reach and levelling the Glock at his stomach, ‘but first take off your jacket and toss it over to me.’
The watcher had no choice and he obviously knew it. Sullenly he removed the garment and lobbed it in Bronson’s direction.
‘Now the shoulder holster.’
Again the man complied.
Bronson squatted down, stuffed the holster into his pocket and then, keeping the muzzle of the Glock aimed at the man, searched his jacket using his left hand. He found an almost full box of nine-millimetre Parabellum rounds in one pocket, which he transferred to his own jacket, and did the same with a cheap and basic Nokia mobile phone, a Samsung smartphone and the man’s passport and wallet.
‘How many of you are there? Watching us, I mean.’
‘Siamo in cinque,’ he replied.
The answer wasn’t a surprise but the language the man used was.
‘Five of you?’ Bronson said, immediately switching to Italian. ‘Not really enough for proper surveillance, though, is it? I saw you three times over at Montségur, and here you are again. Who are you working for?’
The man shook his head. ‘You’ll find out soon enough,’ he said. ‘I’m telling you nothing.’
In fact, Bronson wasn’t particularly interested in who had decided to dog their footsteps, only in making sure they could slip away from them. And they needed to get moving.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Stand up and strip.’
‘Cosa?’
‘Strip. You know, take your clothes off. Don’t worry, I’m not interested in your body. Just get on with it.’
With a wary look at Bronson, the watcher clambered to his feet and obeyed, dropping his clothes in a pile in front of him. He paused when he got down to his socks and underpants.
‘Yes, those as well,’ Bronson ordered. ‘Now go into the stall on the end and lock yourself in.’
He watched as the man walked to the end of the short row of stalls, opened the door and stepped inside.
There was a closet right behind the door to the lavatory. Bronson opened it and peered inside, then reached in and took out a wooden-shafted mop. He walked over to the now-occupied stall and slid the end of the mop shaft through the handle of the door, jamming it so that it couldn’t be turned from the inside. It wasn’t particularly secure, but it would keep the Italian busy for a while trying to break out, and then he’d have to decide whether or not to run out into the street naked. It would be some time before he would be able to raise the alarm and tell the rest of his team what had happened, and that was what Bronson was counting on.
He scooped up the Italian’s clothes and shoes and wrapped them in the discarded jacket, slid the Glock into the waistband of his trousers and quietly stepped out into the corridor.
Angela was right outside the door, a worried expression on her face.
‘Okay?’ she asked, conjuring up a smile from somewhere.
‘Okay,’ Bronson confirmed. ‘We’ve got a few minutes.’
‘You didn’t kill him, did you?’
Bronson shook his head. ‘No, he’s just very embarrassed because I got the drop on him, and also because he’s now starkers and locked in a loo. We need to move. Grab the bags and let’s get out of here.’
Bronson and Angela walked out of the hotel together and down the Rue d’Etigny to where he’d left the Peugeot hire car. He opened the boot and put their bags and the Italian’s clothes in it, then he steered the car off down the street, intending to put some distance between themselves and the centre of Auch as quickly as possible.
‘Where are we going?’ Angela asked, fastening her seat belt.
‘Buggered if I know. Let’s just get out of here, lose ourselves in the French countryside and find somewhere else to stay. Then we can decide what to do about these Italian comedians following us around, and about the Ark as well.’
‘Italians?’ Angela asked. ‘I didn’t expect that.’
‘Well, Mister Stark Naked and Locked in a Loo is definitely Italian, so it’s a reasonable guess that the others are as well. If you put a team of watchers together, having a common language is pretty much essential.’
The Rue d’Etigny became the Rue de Metz after a couple of hundred yards. Bronson went straight on, following the street signs for the N21 and Tarbes.
‘Tarbes is quite a big place,’ Angela said, bringing up the town’s information on her smartphone. ‘We could lose ourselves there.’
‘Sounds good,’ Bronson replied. ‘I just need to make a stop somewhere along the road before we get there.’
He found a lay-by a couple of miles outside Auch, sto
pped the car and got out. He pulled the shoulder holster out of his pocket, removed his jacket and donned the holster. Angela watched quizzically. He took the Glock from the waistband of his trousers, removed the magazine, racked the slide to eject the cartridge he’d chambered and replaced it in the magazine. Then he slid the magazine back into the butt of the pistol and holstered it.
‘So he was armed?’ Angela said, stating the obvious.
‘He was, which does add an extra dimension to the degree of trouble we’re in. You can bet that the others – he told me there were five of them – are carrying pistols too. But now I’ve got this Glock, we’re not completely helpless.’
Bronson checked the man’s wallet and removed about a hundred euros in cash, then took out the two mobile phones he’d found in his jacket. The Nokia looked like a burner, a cheap disposable phone with a pre-paid SIM card in it, but the Samsung was reasonably new.
‘There’s no way of telling if this has a tracking app installed,’ he said, holding the smartphone up. ‘If they’re using something like Spyic or Cocospy, it’s almost impossible to detect, because the tracking app is tiny, only about two megabytes, and it stays hidden unless you know the code to access it. So we’ll have to dump it. In fact, we’ll dump both of them.’
He pointed ahead.
‘There’s a rubbish bin over there. That’ll do nicely.’
Chapter 25
Marco Ferrara followed the satnav’s instructions and stopped his Alfa Romeo at the base of a monumental stone staircase on the Boulevard Sadi Carnot, part of French national route N21, which ran through Auch alongside the river. He pulled into a loading zone outside a small closed shop, got out and looked around him.
The evening was still quite light, and some distance away, up four flights of steps and in the centre of the huge staircase, he could see the dark shape of the statue of d’Artagnan. His real name was Charles de Batz de Castelmore, which didn’t roll off the tongue quite as easily, and he had been born near Lupiac, some forty kilometres west of Auch, in about 1611. Seized on as hero by the French writer Alexandre Dumas, the fictional d’Artagnan’s career and exploits bore only the most tenuous possible resemblance to what the man had actually done in real life.
