by T. M. Parris
“What do you care? I’ll tell you where it is. Once Pippin and I are clear of the house and grounds I’ll tell you. I don’t care about the painting. I just want out.”
“So go and get the guy!” Grom was shouting at Clem again, straining at his ties. The air was filling with smoke. Shouts were coming from the kitchen. The roaring got louder. Rose turned and ran.
“Untie me! Untie me for Christ’s sake!” Grom’s scream stopped Clem coming after her as he turned to free Grom instead. Rose ran to where she’d stashed the backpack. The alarms were everywhere; the piercing sound vibrated through her head. Was this smoke getting down to the cellar? No time to find out now. She ran out of the front door into the driveway.
Grom and Clem were only seconds behind her, but that was all she needed. She hurled the backpack as far as she could into the darkness of the garden.
“Go get it!” she shouted. “You’re welcome to the thing!”
Grom and Clem both made off after the backpack. Rose ran inside, hitting a hallway full of smoke. She could hear sirens now, fire engines approaching. She made straight for the cellar. No one tried to stop her; the Russians were trying to tackle the blaze but it was pushing them out. Smoke was snaking down the cellar steps and pooling at the bottom. She couldn’t breathe without coughing. Her eyes were gritty.
The key was in the lock of the cellar door. She turned it. The door flew open, almost knocking her over. Grom’s surviving bodyguard sprinted up the steps past her, holding his shirt over his face.
The cellar was full of smoke.
“Pippin!”
No answer. She got to her hands and knees and crawled inside.
“Alastair!” she shouted.
She heard nothing, but upstairs was pandemonium. The sirens were very close now. The Russians were shouting at each other. When her hands found Alastair he was warm but he didn’t respond. She turned him on his back and dragged him by the armpits to the door. She looked up the smoke-filled stairs. She couldn’t see the top. She lifted Alastair under his shoulders and pulled him, going backwards one step at a time. After the second step she had to stop. This was taking too long. She forced herself to move more quickly despite her aching muscles. Nearly half way up she looked round.
Grom was standing at the top.
“Where is it?” he said. “Where’s the painting, Rose?”
He was too quick for her. Or else he’d realised the backpack was a bluff.
“Help me and I’ll tell you.”
“If you don’t tell me, I’ll kick you both down the stairs.”
“Go to hell, Sutherland.” She was pulling Alastair up another step.
Sirens squealed to a halt outside the front of the house. Running feet, shouts into radios. The authorities were here.
“You won’t get him out of there unless you tell me,” said Grom. He took a step down. From where he stood he could send them both tumbling with a kick of his boot.
“Okay, I’ll tell you then,” said Rose. “It was in the kitchen. I put it in the oven. It’s gone already. Ashes. Cinders. Burned.”
She looked straight at him, her face serious, letting it sink in.
“No!” His face showed genuine shock.
“And the French authorities are here. Fire service, police, I’m sure. You want them to find you? How are you going to explain all of this to your creditors? The painting’s destroyed. You’re finished, Grom. Get the hell out of here. Run away and hide. While you still can.”
She turned back to Alastair. He was her priority right now. Grom was her target, but he was finished anyway. She had to get Alastair out, and if letting Grom escape was the only way to do it, she’d do it.
She struggled up two more steps. When she looked up again, Grom had disappeared.
Firefighters were coming into the house now. They would find them both in a matter of seconds. But Rose didn’t want to be found. Some things were too difficult to explain. She’d done all she could for Alastair now.
She left him, his head on the top step, and made for a window at the back of the house. Glancing behind before she climbed out, something on the wall of the room caught her eye. Even through the smoke and the sirens and the people shouting, it made her stare for a few moments. But there was no time. She jumped out of the window and ran for cover into the grounds. Filthy and suppressing a cough that wouldn’t stop, she lay in the undergrowth and waited until she could slip past the flashing lights and uniforms, into the darkness of the hillside.
Chapter 59
Rose worked her way down onto the coastal road and found a small restaurant still open. Her car caught fire, she said. Mobile not working. Can I phone for help? She made a call using pre-agreed emergency codes, resulting in an arrangement to rendezvous in a hotel room near Cannes in three hours. She wanted it quicker but the protocols didn’t allow for much negotiation. She cleaned herself up as best she could, accepted a diner’s offer of a ride to Cannes, and killed time trying not to think of either Alastair lying on those steps, or Grom’s expression when he talked about his stolen yacht.
Three hours later she wasn’t all that surprised when the hotel room door was opened by none other than Walter himself.
“I thought you might show up,” she said as she walked in. “As soon as we found out Grom was in the area.”
“I’ve clearly become very predictable.”
Rose sat on a satin-upholstered chair. The room was grand but shabby. The window looked out over the ocean, large and black. With a spy’s caution, Walter pulled the curtains closed. He sat, quiet and alert. It was the next day by now, the early hours.
“What do you know already?” Rose asked.
“When you went missing, your team tracked your phone to somewhere out on the coast road before it stopped transmitting. Then, reports of a fire at Sutherland’s villa. Police in attendance. It’s being described as a confrontation between two rival Russian mafia gangs.”
“Casualties?”
“One death. One injury. Taken to hospital.”
“Alastair?”
“Yes, though he’s still going by his French identity.”
“Will he be all right?”
“He’s stable, apparently.”
That was good news at least. Rose retrieved the listening device from her pocket and passed it to Walter.
“Promise me you’ll do the right thing with this. Alastair’s handler was working with the Russians. He risked everything, went back in knowing he might be blown, just to get the proof. It’s on there.”
Walter examined the tiny item on his palm.
“Well, that certainly explains a thing or two. Why he didn’t remove himself from the situation much sooner, for one. Some people ought to be very grateful for this.”
Rose felt a surge of anger. “What was he doing under cover here anyway? Don’t the French have their own people they can use?”
“Someone owed someone else a favour, apparently. His art expertise gave him the right credentials. They furnished him with a stock of stolen pieces to use as bait. Pieces that had secretly been recovered but were part of ongoing investigations. And he was enthusiastic about doing it. Felt he had something to prove.”
“Prove? Prove what? To whom?”
“You can ask him yourself in due course.”
She would certainly be doing that. “There was only one body? One of Grom’s Russian bodyguards died in the cellar from a gunshot wound. That’s all?”
“Yes, my dear.”
“So Grom got away. That was my doing, I’m afraid.” She recounted what happened on the cellar steps. “It was more important to get Alastair out. Grom would have stopped us. You know how vindictive he is. Besides, he’d lost the painting by then.”
“And the painting is where, exactly?”
“Destroyed, I’m afraid. Burned.”
“Destroyed?”
“Yes.” She told him how she started the fire. Walter frowned.
“You burned it deliberately?”
She told Walter what happened in Arles. “And not much better if it ended up with the Russians. Or Clem.”
“Clem?”
“The fourth member of the heist team. Some local gangster. He was working with the Russians, but Grom was trying to turn him against them.”
“And you’re sure about the Van Gogh? It’s definitely – gone?”
“Yes, like I said. I threw it in the oven. It’ll be ashes now. I wonder if Alastair will ever forgive me.”
There’d been a moment when she stood in the kitchen with the roll, so carefully packaged, in her hands. Could she bring herself to throw such a unique and precious object into what would become a fireball? A Van Gogh! Five hundred million dollars, irreplaceable. But what did these sums of money really mean? It was oil on canvas at the end of the day, and lives were at stake.
Walter was still struggling with it, though.
“Could anyone have got into the kitchen after you stuffed the oven and before the explosion?”
“No, Walter. It was only a couple of minutes and nobody knew I’d been in there. It’s gone. A painting nobody even knew about until a few months ago doesn’t exist any more. What’s the big deal?”
There was something guarded about Walter’s expression when he looked at her. Then he seemed to shake himself out of it and move on.
“Your team didn’t seem to know why you were in Arles.”
“When I realised Pippin was Alastair I thought again about where he might have hidden the painting. There was a copy of Van Gogh’s letters in his room.”
“A clue?”
“I don’t know about that. I’m not at all sure he wanted it discovered, to be honest. Maybe he was trying to bury it by putting it somewhere obscure, but also where it ought to be safe. If that was his plan, I scuppered it.”
“You certainly did, my dear.”
That look again. But he returned to his main point.
“Keeping your team in the loop would be helpful next time, Rose. Some of this might have been avoided.”
“What difference would it have made? We were already too short-handed to cover what we were trying to do. And besides, the objective was to rid Grom of his resources, and we did, didn’t we?”
It was undeniable, though Walter seemed to have a problem with exactly how she’d done it. But never mind that now. Something else was more important.
“Walter, Grom will go after the yacht. It sounds like our rogue informant stole it from him.” She told Walter what Grom had said. “Now the painting’s gone he’s got nothing. He’ll go after Zoe, even though the Russians had already commandeered his yacht. He’s blaming us for the theft. He’s not going to spare her when he catches up with her, and she’ll have no defences. We’ve got to find her first.”
Walter shifted in his seat.
“You want to track down a sailing boat that probably left port yesterday and could have gone anywhere? And then do what?”
“Bring her in, Walter. Make her safe.”
“Didn’t you try that before? She didn’t show up, as I recall.”
“She’s got no idea what she’s up against. We have a duty to her.”
“Well, I think I know what Salisbury would say about that, my dear. If our agents reject our help then it’s really very difficult to protect them.”
“It’s not as simple as that. We’re the ones who put them in that situation.”
“Really? This woman? We made her steal a yacht, did we? It sounds like her own actions have put her in that position, as well as jeopardising the entire operation.”
“She wouldn’t be out there if it weren’t for us. I can’t just let her go knowing who’s after her and what he’s like. You understand that, don’t you? The things this man has done! And the way he’s done them. He’s messed up, Walter, and he messes other people up.”
Walter was gazing at the curtains as if imagining the sea on the other side of them.
“Do you know where she’s gone? The identity of the boat, even?”
“We’ll find out. Where’s my team?”
“Standing by.”
“We don’t have long. Grom has people in the area. They’ll have been working on this already. Can you get me connected? Can I work from here?”
Walter looked sad, baggy around the eyes.
“I can’t say I fancy your chances, I’m afraid. Where’s Fairchild?”
“Oh, no idea.” He frowned at her breezy tone. “I sent him away. As I expected, Walter, he was just acting in his own interests all along. He tracked down the heist gang in Marseille but all he did was recover his own property and then leave. He could have incapacitated them or freed Alastair. He could have prevented Alastair from going through all of that.”
“Well, to be fair, Rose, he couldn’t have known who Alastair was.”
“It’s the kind of thing he does know, though, isn’t it?”
“Not always. Alastair decided to stay under cover to gather evidence against his handler. So he may not have gone anyway. And your team weren’t available when all this was happening, were they?”
“We were trying to locate Zoe. Fairchild was also aware that Zoe was getting too involved, and he didn’t tell me.”
“Really? How did Fairchild even know about our informant?”
“He shouldn’t have done. But they became acquainted somehow. This is what he’s like.”
Walter was still frowning. Rose didn’t want to think about how useful an extra pair of hands would be right now, particularly Fairchild’s. But she didn’t regret her decision. You can’t work with people you don’t trust.
“Let me do this, Walter. I have to try.”
He raised his hands. “I can see you want to, my dear. Very well, then. But I fear it may already be too late. You can’t blame yourself.”
Rose didn’t want to waste any more time philosophising.
“Right. I need a mobile phone. And wheels.”
She was already working through what she needed to do. Walter may be right. But she couldn’t give up on Zoe, not yet.
Chapter 60
The two representatives of the Ajaccio harbour police were moored along the sea wall keeping an eye on a classic sailing yacht anchored out at a distance in the bay. They’d been tipped off that there might be some trouble there. Hard to believe on such a calm peaceful night, everything quiet and the boats bobbing in the mildest of breezes, particularly as they’d been waiting there for some time already. But this source was generally accurate, and nothing else was going on, so they held their ground. And then, just as the sky was starting to show a slight hint of dawn, they heard the sound of a motorboat.
A beam of light crossed the waves as the craft rounded the headland. The boat slowed, chugging quietly, nosing its way between the anchored boats, torchlight playing out onto their hulls. They were looking for one boat in particular. But they knew where to look, that was the interesting thing. And sure enough, when the light picked out the elegant tapered woodwork of the Ocean Joy, the launch turned in the water to go alongside.
Through the binoculars they watched two figures climb up, one of them big, the other smaller. Older, but agile enough. A third guy, a beefcake with a shaved head, stayed in the launch. The sailboat was dark and quiet. They only had the torchlight and the beam of the launch to go by, but it was enough to see that one of the men at least was carrying a gun.
On to the radio, then. The two of them weren’t equipped for firearms, but backup was only minutes away. Quick enough for whoever was in the boat? They’d have to hope so.
The call made, they waited. The boat remained dark. No shouts or movement. One figure appeared on the deck. Then the other. They were talking, gesturing. Not going very well, by the look of it.
Then, the sound of another approaching boat. This one was loud and fast. They all heard it, the guys on the deck looked round too. This wa
sn’t the backup. It was something else.
Another launch came round the headland. Bigger, and fast, too fast, making a huge wake that set all the boats rocking. A more powerful searchlight, which also found the Ocean Joy. Seemed a lot of people were interested in this boat.
It slowed and circled a distance away. A figure stood up, holding something long and large. Then, unbelievable what happened next.
A massive bang and a flash, and the scene exploded with light. They’d launched some great missile at the boat! It was on fire, properly burning, with a huge hole in the side, listing already. Whatever did that was proper military grade. No markings on the boat that they could see. Well, there wouldn’t be, would there? It wasted no time, anyway. A sharp circle in the water and it tore off the way it came.
The police were on the radio, screaming all this but still no backup. It was in a bad way, the sailboat. Lights were going on everywhere now, on all the anchored craft and those in the harbour behind them. Who was on that boat? Their source hadn’t told them that. They were in trouble, whoever they were.
Through the binoculars they saw a guy on the deck, the older one, holding on as the boat tipped even more. It was sinking, no doubt about it. But now what? The first launch was already speeding off. The beefcake was making a getaway, not even waiting for the two on the yacht.
Now, finally, backup was arriving. Vehicles driving into the port, and more speedboats. Now they could go in. They pushed away from the jetty and set off. But when they looked ahead again, the guy on the deck was gone. Did he jump? Did he fall? They’d missed it.
Another explosion and flames leaped into the sky. That would be the fuel tanks. Now the police were speeding over there, watched from decks all around by horrified boaters. The worst nightmares all at once, fire and sinking. Yes, Ocean Joy was doomed. She would soon be no more. Their job was to see if she’d taken anybody with her.
Amazing, their source had known all this was going to happen. Who was it again?
Chapter 61
The scene was still being processed when Zoe and Fairchild quietly motored in early the next day. They’d spent the night on the other side of the bay nestled in a small mooring. Fairchild wanted to be further away but Zoe insisted they stayed nearby. Let’s get off the water, Fairchild said. Get rooms on shore. We’ll have more options. But Zoe insisted on staying on the boat, once everything had been carried over from Ocean Joy. She didn’t tell Fairchild why. Didn’t quite trust him enough, yet.
