The Lost Relic (33 page)

Lister let out a high-pitched cry. He fell forward against the steering wheel. His foot pressed down on the gas.

They were right down by the river now, just metres from the water’s edge. The car began to veer towards it. Buitoni yelled something in Italian that Darcey didn’t try to catch as she tossed down her pistol and wrestled with the steering wheel, fighting the weight of Lister’s body to keep the car on the road and trying desperately to kick his foot away from the accelerator.

They flashed under a bridge, almost colliding with a slow-moving three-wheel delivery vehicle. The motorcycle came at them again, its pillion passenger letting off another stream of bullets from his Uzi. Buitoni cracked off three shots, but they all went wide as the Laguna veered wildly from side to side.

The road curved away to the left, and suddenly there were trees flashing by between them and the river’s edge. Lister’s body slumped hard to the right as Darcey took the corner, pushing her back and tearing the wheel out of her hand. The Laguna was doing a hundred kilometres an hour as it hit a grassy verge, went into a violent skid, crashed into the trees, flipped and rolled. It came to a rest on its caved-in roof and lay still by the water’s edge.

Darcey opened her eyes. She was suspended by her seatbelt in the upside-down car and covered in blood. The shock of it numbed her for an instant, until she realised the blood was all Lister’s. He was dangling from the driver’s seat, blood bubbling from his lips as he gasped and tried to speak. The inside of the car was littered with spilled debris. Fragments of glass lay everywhere. Lister’s phone charger dangled from its wire, and loose change had showered from his pocket.

‘Paolo,’ Darcey coughed, trying to twist round towards the back seat to face Buitoni. ‘You OK?’ She released the clasp of her seatbelt, fell onto the padding of the car’s ceiling, and crawled across to him. ‘Paolo!’

Buitoni didn’t reply.

He couldn’t. His neck had been broken in the crash. Through the shattered car window, Darcey saw the motorcycle pull over at the side of the road just thirty metres away. The pillion stepped off first, still holding the Uzi. Then the rider dismounted, let the bike down onto its side-stand and they both calmly started walking across the road towards the river’s edge.

Darcey remembered her Beretta. After a few frantic seconds of searching, she realised with an icy jolt that it must have fallen out of the smashed window as the car rolled. She tried to get to get to Buitoni’s, but it was trapped under the weight of his body and she couldn’t budge him.

‘We need to get out of here,’ she said to Lister. ‘
Now.
’

Lister tumbled from the tangle of his seatbelt and sprawled beside her on the upturned ceiling of the car. He tried to speak, but all that came out of his mouth was a gout of blood. She could see it was too late for him. He’d be dead in minutes, and that knowledge was in his eyes. He reached out with a trembling hand. Extended his bloody index finger.

Darcey realised he was pointing at one of the spilled coins, a mixture of UK currency and euros, that littered the upside-down ceiling of the car. His fingertip prodded weakly at a pound coin. He was fading fast. As his hand fell away, she stared at the bloody fingerprint he’d left on the Queen’s head on the back of the coin. Lister raised his hand again, holding up his index finger. His eyes implored her.
Understand. Please understand what I’m trying to tell you.

Lister splayed out his hand, thumb and fingers together. Then folded the little finger and ring finger in.

He was making a number.

One. Five. Three.

‘What’s one-five-three?’ she asked him urgently. She glanced back at the bloodied pound coin. Did he mean money? A hundred and fifty-three what? Million? ‘I don’t understand!’

The motorcyclists were now just twenty metres away. The rider had opened his jacket to reveal a shoulder holster. As he walked, he nonchalantly drew a pistol. The pillion passenger held his Uzi at the hip and let off a rasping blast of gunfire. Darcey ducked as bullets punched through the bodywork and ricocheted around the inside of the car.

When she looked up again, Lister was dead. A round had blown out his temple.

She scrambled out of the car. Gunfire ripped up the ground around her as she sprinted away through the trees at the river’s edge.

There was only one place to go.

She ran straight for the concrete bank and dived into the waters of the Seine. In mid-air, she filled her lungs and prepared herself for the imminent shock of the cold water. She gasped as her body knifed into the surface, then began swimming ferociously, driving deep underwater with strong strokes. The water roared in her ears. Bullets stabbed past her, leaving little spiralling trails. She swam harder, thrashing through the water until her heart was pounding and her lungs felt ready to burst.

When Darcey surfaced with a gasp, she was a hundred metres downriver, hidden by the arched support of a bridge. She huddled against the side and watched as the two motor-cyclists returned to the crashed Laguna. One of them tossed a small black object in through its broken window.

Almost instantly, flames engulfed the car. The motor-cyclists turned and started running back towards the bike. A police siren began to wail in the distance. Then a second.

As the motorcycle roared off, the burning Laguna blew apart.

Northeastern Portugal

A few kilometres from the Spanish border

A couple of hours’ rest around dawn had done little to make Ben feel refreshed or any stronger, but the fear of being discovered curled up asleep in the old Daihatsu by a farmer or one of the hands had been all the incentive he’d needed to move on early.

Some horses in a nearby paddock had stopped munching and stared at him warily as he took a drink from a rainwater barrel that was fed from their stable-roof guttering. Then the strange, furtive creature seemed to vanish as suddenly as it had appeared, and the horses relaxed and went back to their grazing.

Through the morning and the early afternoon, Ben had kept moving on foot. Public transport was less risky in the city, where people tended to ignore each other and individuals could lose themselves in the crowd. In country areas folks took much more interest, especially in strangers, and a sleepy railway station or half-deserted bus stop could spell disaster out here. All it took was one curious local to recognise his face from the TV news, and he’d have Darcey Kane and her troops back after him like greyhounds running down a hare. Hitching a lift was too risky for the same reason, and trying to steal a vehicle from one of the villages or farms he passed by was just asking for trouble – and maybe a couple of barrels of bird-shot from someone’s twelve-gauge into the bargain.

He kept shy of main roads, keeping to the rural lanes as much as he could and avoiding built-up areas. The effort of the long walk quickly tired him again. His arm was burning in agony under the clean dressing he’d wrapped over the stitches. There were still some codeine tablets left, but the narcotic drug could affect judgement and reaction time; he needed to keep his wits about him as best he could.

Just after four in the afternoon, near the town of Castelo Branco, he heard the chug of an old diesel coming up the road and ducked into the trees as it came by. The pickup truck had seen better days. Its motor sounded like a bag of nails and a hazy blue mist of burnt oil smoke hung in its wake. Behind the pickup was a large trailer heaped with loose straw. Ben saw his chance to gain some ground. It was better than hitch-hiking. The driver, an old man with a face like leather and one deeply tanned arm dangling out of his window, looked too half-asleep to notice an uninvited passenger joining him en route. Ben waited until the pickup had lumbered past, then ran after it, grabbed hold of the tailgate of the trailer and jumped aboard. The straw was prickly as he dug in, concealing himself from any vehicles that might come up behind.

After a bumpy, rattling, twenty-five or so kilometres westwards, the pickup lurched off the road and headed up a sun-cracked earth track towards a farm in the distance. Ben parted ways with it, picking bits of straw out of his hair as he carried on walking. By his reckoning, Brooke’s place wasn’t more than about another nine or ten kilometres away.

The closer he got, the more he kept thinking about her. The thoughts helped him to forget the pain that lanced through him with every step – but brought a different, deeper kind of pain, a sense of desolation and terrible loneliness. He wished he could call her, just to hear the sound of her voice. He wondered where she was, what she was doing. He trudged on.

Another hour passed. His step was getting heavy, as if he were wading through desert sand, and having to skirt around the edge of a village slowed his progress even more. The heat was stifling and oppressive. Ben wiped sweat from his face and looked up at the dark clouds that were rolling in from the distant hills, gradually amassing to blot out the clear blue sky. His lips were dry and his throat was parched, but he had a feeling that before too long he’d have all the water he needed, and more. A storm was brewing.

Vila Flor, Portugal

After spending most of the day curled up on the sofa with her laptop and a pile of notes to work on her research paper, Brooke had changed into shorts and training shoes and gone for an early evening run through the forested countryside that surrounded her cottage for miles around. She was on her way back, still a couple of kilometres from home, when the sky turned ominously dark and she smelled the electric burning smell of an imminent storm. As the first rumble of thunder rolled across the hills, she felt the first heavy raindrop spatter on her arm. Moments later, the heavens opened. By the time she came running back to the shelter of the cottage, she was soaked to the skin and shivering.

Feeling invigorated after a long, hot shower, she lightly towelled her hair and pulled on a sleeveless T-shirt, a pair of loose jogging pants she used as pyjama bottoms and for general lounging-around duties, and her cosy old dressing gown. She trotted downstairs, put on some Django Reinhardt and idled away some time with a magazine while her hair dried before going into the little kitchen to start putting together a simple evening meal.

As she padded around the kitchen in her bare feet, the rain was lashing the windows and the darkening sky was lit up every few seconds by the lightning flashes. These late summer storms could go on for hours. After dinner, she planned to read a hundred pages of the paperback she was deep into, before getting an early night and listening to the wind howling and the rain on the roof. She loved storms. They comforted her, somehow.

Dinner was going to be a rice salad with mixed beans and some freshly sliced tomatoes from the garden. Brooke made a dressing with olive oil, garlic and just a little wine vinegar. She was grinding a sprinkle of black pepper onto it when the music paused momentarily between tracks.

That was when she heard the sound from outside. Brooke looked up from her pepper grinder.
What was that?

It had sounded like footsteps outside, on the gravel path next to the house. She strained to listen, but then the thunder growled loudly again across the hills.

Maybe it was Fatima, she thought. The farmer’s wife could be coming by with some eggs or wine, the way she often did.

During a storm?

Brooke went to the front door, opened it and peered outside into the sheeting rain. ‘Fatima?’

No reply. There seemed to be nobody there. Brooke shut the door, then bolted it as an afterthought. She was just about to head into the kitchen when she heard it again – the same sound of shoes crunching on wet gravel, footsteps moving quickly round the side of the house.

A fleeting movement past the kitchen window caught her eye. It could have been anything in the falling darkness – leaves blowing from a tree, or a bird wrestling against the wind. But she could have sworn she’d seen the figure of a man hurrying past.

She caught her breath, stepped quickly across the kitchen and drew the largest of the carving knives out of the block on the worktop. She walked back to the front door. Her heart beat fast and her hand was trembling a little as she slid back the bolt and turned the handle.

‘Luis? Is that you?’

Still nothing.

Had she imagined it? It wasn’t like her to get jumpy in a storm.

Brooke strode back to the kitchen and replaced the knife in the block.

And looked up to see the face squashed up against the window pane.

She let out a gasp.

The man outside was staring at her. His hair and clothes running with rainwater. His face was wild, plastered with mud down one side.

It was Marshall.

‘Brooke – let me in,’ he implored. The aggression that had burned in his eyes last time she’d seen him in London had fizzled out. He looked utterly forlorn.

Brooke stared at him through the window for a second, then marched to the door and tore it open.

‘What the hell are
you
doing here?’ she managed to say through her shock.

‘I came to see you,’ he replied lamely. The rain was still pelting down around him, bouncing off the ground. The small case at his feet looked soaked through.

‘You scared the life out of me, Marshall,’ she said angrily. ‘Sneaking around like a bloody rapist or something.’

‘I’m sorry. I thought you wouldn’t want to see me.’

‘Damn right I didn’t want to see you. How did you know I was here, anyway?’

‘Your neighbour told me where you’d gone to.’

‘You’re lying, Marshall. Amal is someone I can trust, unlike you.’

Marshall hung his head. ‘OK, OK, I tricked him into letting me inside your flat, and I went into your computer.’

‘You really are a piece of shit, aren’t you?’

‘Yes. I know. I am. You’re right. But I had to see you.’

‘I don’t want you here,’ she yelled. ‘I came here to get
away
from you!’ She was about to slam the door in his face, then something made her hesitate. The wetness on his face was more than rainwater. He was weeping openly. She’d never seen a man so empty, so defeated.