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“Not yet, but getting there.”
“Okay, running is out. We need to get transportation tonight, though, because we’ll be a lot easier to spot on foot during the day. I wanted to get farther away before I liberated a car, but that can’t be helped.”
“What difference does it make?”
“If a car is stolen practically in Ronsard’s backyard, do you think he won’t hear about it and figure we’re the ones who stole it? Then he’ll know what kind of car we’re in and can have people watching for us.”
She sighed. “Then we walk.”
His hand closed gently over her foot. “I don’t think that’s an option, either. We’ll come across a farm soon, or a village, and I’ll get whatever’s there, even if it’s a tow truck.”
“Until then,” she said as she got to her feet, “we walk.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
Ronsard was more coldly furious than he’d ever been in his life, but more at himself than anyone else. After all, in his business one could expect treachery. What he hadn’t expected was that he would have been so completely fooled. Nor had he expected that as many security personnel as were on the estate wouldn’t be able to stop one car from leaving. They were supposedly professionals, but they hadn’t performed as such.
He had one man dead, and another, Hossam, suffering from a concussion. Hossam had been found lying on the garage floor, only half-dressed and unconscious. Having correctly guessed that Temple would try for one of the estate vehicles, he had evidently been taken from behind. Why Hossam had been wearing only his pants when he was supposed to have been working was a puzzle, until he noticed that Cara was nowhere to be found and sent someone to investigate. She was found tied to her bed, naked and furious. He had been wondering if he would have to kill Hossam for assaulting her until her concern, when she found he had been injured, reassured him that whatever had been going on in her bedroom had been consensual.
Ronsard’s guests were shocked and uneasy. The violence of the night’s events had forcibly brought home to many of them exactly what sort of world their host lived in. It was all very well to flirt with danger, to boast to their friends that they had been guests at the notorious Louis Ronsard’s luxurious estate, to give him information that made them feel wicked and notorious too, but the reality of it was more brutal than they could have guessed.
He imagined none of them had ever seen a man who had been shot in the head. Then all hell had broken loose outside as Temple made his escape, with a hail of automatic fire that sounded as if a small war was being waged on his front lawn, the car crashing through his front gates, his guards scattering as small-arms fire was returned at them. It wasn’t just his security that had been breached, but theirs. They no longer had the illusion of safety. Most of them were leaving come the morning.
As a host, his night had been a fiasco. As a businessman, it was worse than that.
Temple and Niema had been in his office. What Niema was doing there, he couldn’t imagine. Perhaps she was Temple’s partner, perhaps not. Witnesses to the shooting in the hallway had agreed he was manhandling her, shoving her around, dragging her outside. On the other hand, Temple had been driving the car; who other than Niema had been shooting at his guards? It was possible Temple had been both driving and shooting; difficult, but not impossible, and Temple was a trained assassin.
What had they been doing in his office?
The lock wasn’t working. It had been, however, when he left the office the last time, because he automatically, from ingrained habit, tried the handle every time he left.
He stood in his office looking around, trying to see what Temple could have seen. What would he have been interested in? The computers, of course. But there was nothing on Cara’s that would have been of interest to him, and the information in Ronsard’s computer was password protected.
The password. He walked to his desk and surveyed the items on top of it. Nothing looked disturbed; his copy of A Tale of Two Cities was exactly where he had left it.
And yet—
And yet, the instinct for survival that had stood him in such good stead told him that Temple had somehow breached the security in his computer as surely as he had breached the estate’s security. Ronsard couldn’t afford to assume otherwise. Nor could he afford to underestimate his opponent, a man who evidently appeared and disappeared at will, and who had access to government documents before they were made public. Such a man was a man with power either behind him, or in his own hands.
They had to be found. With one phone call to the authorities in Lyon he had immediately thrown a net over the airport, then, when one of his more observant men saw where a car had been driven off the road and found the Mercedes abandoned, extended that net to the car rental services also.
They were on foot, unless Temple stole another car. Ronsard arranged that he be told immediately if any thefts were reported.
He sat down at his desk, drumming his fingers on the wood. Lyon was the most logical immediate destination—but perhaps Temple would go in the opposite direction, for that reason. Do the unexpected. Keep your opponent off balance, guessing.
This would be like a game of chess, with moves and countermoves. The key to victory was planning ahead, anticipating every move his opponent could make.
Marseilles was to the south—a larger city than Lyon, with a huge, busy port. It was farther away, but once there, the chances of escaping went up dramatically.
The port. That was the key. Temple would escape by water.
* * *
The village was a small one, no more than fifteen houses loosely grouped on each side of the road. John selected an older model Renault that was parked in front of a cottage, as the older cars were easier to hotwire. Niema stood watch while he eased the car door open and felt under the dash for the wiring harness. The interior light was burning, but he didn’t have a flashlight and had to take the chance of someone seeing the light. With his knife, he stripped the wires of their plastic sheath.
Three cottages away, a dog roused from its doggy dreams and barked once, then fell silent. No light came on in any of the cottage’s windows.
