Clean Break (21 page)

“We both filled up with petrol,” he reported. “I waited till he'd cleared the shop before I went in to pay, then I followed him through the border. Where are you?”

“In the service area you're about to pass,” I told him. “You can let Turner get away from you now. If you drive into the services, you can fall in behind me again.” I couldn't believe it was all going so well. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.

We carried on past Basel and on to Zürich. By now, we were
properly into the Alps, mountains towering above us on all sides. If I hadn't been concentrating so hard on staying in touch with Turner and the buckle, I'd have been enjoying the drive. As it was, I felt as stressed as if I'd been sitting in city rush-hour traffic for the five and a half hours it had taken us to get this far.

We skirted the outskirts of the city and drove on down the side of Lake Zürich. About halfway down the lake, the blip on the screen suddenly swung off to the right. “Oh shit,” I muttered. I stepped on the accelerator, checking in my mirror that Richard was still with me. The motorway exit was only seconds away, and I swung off on a road that led into the mountains. I grabbed the phone, punched the memory redial that linked me to Richard and said, “Wait here. Turn round to face the motorway so you can pick him up if he heads back.”

“Roger wilco,” Richard said. “Call me if you need back-up.”

I carried on, checking the blip on the screen against the road map. Cursing the fact that I didn't have a more detailed map of Switzerland, I swung the car through the bends of what was rapidly becoming a mountain road. A couple of miles further on, I realized that staying on the main road had been the wrong decision, as the buckle was moving further away from me at an angle. Swearing so fluently my mother would have disowned me, I nearly caused a small pile-up with a U-turn that took a thousand miles off the tires and hammered back down the road and on to a narrow, twisting side road. About a kilometer away from the main drag, the screen suddenly went blank.

I panicked. My first thought was that Turner had met someone or picked someone up who had taken one look at the buckle, spotted the bug and disabled it. Then logic kicked in and told me that was impossible in so short a time. As I swung round yet another bend with a sheer rock wall on one side and a vertiginous drop on the other, I twigged. The mountains were so high and so dense that the radio signal was blocked.

I raced the car round the bends as fast as I could, tires screaming on every one, wrists starting to feel it in spite of the power steering. I was concentrating so hard on not ending up as a sheet of scrap metal on the valley floor that I nearly missed Turner.
With the suddenness of daylight at the end of a tunnel, the road emerged on to a wide plateau about halfway up the mountain. In the middle of an Alpine meadow complete with cows that tinkled like bass wind chimes stood an inn, as pretty as a picture postcard, as Swiss as a Chalet School novel. On the edge of the crowded car park, Turner's pale green Mercedes was parked. And the screen flashed back into life.

Heaving a huge sigh of relief, I drove to the far end of the car park and tried to ring Richard and let him know everything was OK. No joy. I supposed the mountain was in the way again. I got out of the car, took a black beret and a pair of granny glasses with clear lenses out of my stakeout-disguises holdall and walked into the inn. Inside, it was the traditional Swiss chalet, wood everywhere, walls decorated with huge posters of Alpine scenery, a blazing fire in a central stone fireplace. The room was crammed with tables, most of them occupied. A quick scan showed me Turner sitting alone at a table for two, studying the menu. A waitress dressed in traditional costume bustled up to me and said something in German. I shrugged and tried out my school French, saying I wanted to eat, one alone, and did they have a telephone?

She smiled and showed me to a table near the fire and pointed out the phone. I got change from the cashier and gave Richard a quick call. For some reason, he was less than thrilled that I was sitting down to some Tyrolean specialty while he was stuck on the verge of the road with nothing in sight but the motorway and a field of the inevitable cows. “Go and get some sandwiches or something,” I instructed him. “I'll let you know when we set off.”

I went back to my table. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Turner tucking into a steaming bowl of soup, a stein of beer beside him, so I figured I'd have time to eat something. I ordered Tiroler gröstl, a mixture of potatoes, onions and ham with a fried egg on top. It looked like the nearest thing to fast food on the menu. I was right. My meal was in front of me in under five minutes. I was halfway through it before Turner's main course arrived. Judging by the pile of chips that was all I could identify, he was eating for two. Frankly, I could see why he'd made the detour. The food was more than worth it, if my plateful was anything to go by. Definitely
one to cut out and keep for next time we were passing Zürich.

By the time I'd finished and lingered over a cup of coffee, Turner had also demolished a huge wedge of lemon meringue pie. If I'd scoffed that much in the middle of the day, I'd have been asleep at the wheel ten miles down the road. I hoped he had a more lively metabolism. When he called for the bill, I took mine to the cashier, rang Richard to warn him we were on the move, and headed back to the car. Minutes later, Turner was heading back down the road, with me a couple of bends behind him.

As we hit the motorway, I had another panic. Where I'd expected to see Richard in his Mercedes, there was a black BMW. As I sailed past, I glanced across and saw the familiar grin behind the thumbs-up sign. Moments later, as he swung in behind me, the phone rang. “Sierra 49 to Sierra Oscar,” he said. “Surprise, surprise. I nipped back to Zürich and swapped the cars. I thought it was about time for a change.”

“Nice one,” I conceded. Maybe he wasn't the liability I'd feared he'd be after all. And there was me thinking that he was as subtle as Jean Paul Gaultier. This wasn't the time to reassess the capabilities of the man in my life, but I filed the thought away for future scrutiny.

I figured we must be heading for Liechtenstein, haven for tax dodgers, fraudsters and stamp-collecting anoraks. No such luck. We carried on south, deep into the Alps. Richard was in front of me again, keeping tabs on Turner. The bug kept cutting out because of the mountains, and I was determined that we weren't going to lose him after coming this far. Now Richard was in another car, I felt happy about him staying in fairly close touch.

A few miles down the road, my bottle started twitching. There was no getting away from it. We were heading for the San Bernardino tunnel. Ten kilometers in that dark tube, aware of the millions of tons of rock just sitting above my head, waiting to crush me thin as a postage stamp. Just the thought of it forced a groan from my lips. I'm terrified of tunnels. Not a lot of people know that. It doesn't sit well with the fearless, feisty image. I've even been known to drive thirty miles out of my way to avoid going through the tunnels under the Mersey.

With every minute that passed, that gaping hole in the hillside was getting closer and my heart was pounding faster. Desperately, I rattled through the handful of cassettes I'd grabbed when I'd picked up Bill's car. Not a soothing one among them. No Enya, no Mary Coughlan, not even Everything But The Girl. Plenty of Pet Shop Boys, Eurythmics and REM. I settled for Crowded House turned up loud to keep the eerie boom of the tunnel traffic at bay and tried to concentrate on their harmonies.

Two minutes into the tunnel and the sweat was clammy on my back. Three minutes in and my upper lip was damp. Four minutes in and my forehead was slimy as a sewer wall. Six minutes in and my knuckles were white on the steering wheel. The walls looked as if they were closing in. I tried telling myself it was only imagination, and Crowded House promised they could ease my pain. They were lying. Ten minutes and I could feel a scream bubbling in my throat. I was on the point of tears when a doughnut of light appeared around the cars in front of me.

As soon as I burst out again into daylight, my phone started ringing. “Yeah?” I gasped.

“You OK?” Richard asked. He knows all about me and tunnels.

“I'll live.” I swallowed hard. “Thanks for asking.”

“You're a hero, Brannigan,” he said.

“Never mind that,” I said gruffly. “You still with Turner?”

“Tight as Jagger's jeans. He's got his foot down. Looks like we're heading for
la bella Italia
.”

At least I'd be somewhere I could speak the language, I thought with relief. I'd been worried all the way down Germany and Switzerland that Turner was going to end up in a close encounter that I couldn't understand a word of. But my Italian was fluent, a hangover from the summer before university, when I'd worked in the kitchens of Oxford's most select trattoria. It was learn the language or take a vow of silence. I'd prevented it from getting too rusty by holidaying in Italy whenever I could.

I drove cheerfully down the mountain, glad to be out in the open air again, relieved that we were gradually leaving the mountains behind us. We worked our way round Milan just after five, Richard back behind me, and by seven we were skirting Genoa. This was
turning into one hell of a drive. My shoulders were locked, my backside numb, my hips stiff in spite of regular squirming. If they ever start making private eyes work with tachographs, I'm going to be as much use to my clients as a cardboard chip pan. I shuddered to think what this overtime was going to look like on Henry's bill. He'd run out of buckshee hours a while back.

At Genoa we turned east again on the A12, another one of those autostradas carved out of the side of a mountain. I kept telling myself the little tunnels were just like driving under big bridges, but it didn't help a lot, especially since the receiver kept cutting out, giving me panic attacks every time.

Three quarters of an hour past Genoa, the screen told me Turner was moving off to one side. First, he went right, then crossed back left. I nearly missed the exit, I was concentrating so hard on the screen, but I managed to get off with Richard on my tail. We were on the outskirts of some town called Sestri Levante, but according to my screen, Turner was heading away from it. Praying I was going the right way, I swung left and found myself driving along a river valley, the road lined with shops and houses. Sestri Levante shaded into Casarza Ligure, then we were out into open country, wooded hills on either side of the valley. We hit a small village called Bargonasco just as the direction changed on the receiver. A couple of kilometers further up, there was a turning on the left. It was a narrow, asphalt road, with a sign saying Villa San Pietro. The blip on the screen stayed steady. A kilometer away, straight up the Villa San Pietro's drive.

Journey's end.

“What now, Sam Spade?” Richard asked as we both bent and stretched in vain attempts to restore our bodies to something like their normal configuration.

“You go back to the village and find us somewhere to stay for the night, then you sit outside in the car in case Turner comes back down the valley,” I told him.

“And what are you doing while I'm doing that?” Richard asked.

“I'm going to take a look at the Villa San Pietro,” I told him.

He looked at me as if I'd gone stark staring mad. “You can't just drive up there like the milkman,” he said.

“Correct. I'm going to walk up, like a tourist. And you're going to take the receiver with you, just in case the buckle's going anywhere Turner isn't.”

“You're not going up there on your own,” Richard said firmly.

“Of course I am,” I stated even more firmly. “You are waiting down here with a car, a phone and a bug receiver. If we both go and Turner comes driving back down with the buckle while we're ten minutes away from the cars, he could be outside the range of the receiver in any direction before we get mobile. I'm not trekking all the way across Europe only to lose the guy because you want to play macho man.”

Richard shook his head in exasperation. “I hate it when you find a logical explanation for what you intend to do regardless,” he muttered, throwing himself back into the driver's seat of the BMW. “See you later.”

I waved him off, then moved the Merc up the road a few hundred yards. I scuffed some dust over my trainers, put on a pair of sunglasses even though dusk was already gathering,
hung my camera round my neck and trudged off up the drive.

There was a three-foot ditch on one side of the twisting road, which appeared to have been carved out of the rough scrub and stunted trees of the hillside. Ten minutes' brisk climbing brought me to the edge of a clearing. I hung back in the shelter of a couple of gnarled olive trees and took a good look. The ground had been cleared for about a hundred meters up to a wall. Painted pinkish brown, it was a good six feet high and extended for about thirty meters either side of a wrought-iron gate. Above the wall, I could see an extensive roof in the traditional terracotta pantiles. Through the gates, I could just about make out the villa itself, a two-story white stucco building with shutters over the upper-story windows. It looked like serious money to me.

I would have been tempted to go in for a closer look, except that a closed-circuit video camera was mounted by the gate, doing a continuous 180-degree sweep of the road and the clearing. Not just serious money, but serious paranoia too.

Staying inside the cover of the trees and the scrub, I circled the villa. By the time I got back to the drive, I had more scratches than Richard's record collection, and the certainty that Nicholas Turner was playing with the big boys. There were video cameras mounted on each corner of the compound, all programmed to carry out regular sweeps. If I'd had enough time and a computer, I could probably have worked out where and when the blind spots would occur, but anyone who's that serious about their perimeter security probably hasn't left the back door on the latch. This was one burglary that was well out of my league.