The Purple Contract (25 page)

The lights in his mirror dimmed suddenly, causing Hollis to smile to himself. He gunned the Range Rover and went all the way up through the gears, flicking the headlights to full beam and pushing it to nearly 90 mph on the straights. No lights in the mirror as yet, but they wouldn't be long.

The night seemed even darker now that the moon had gone in again: the clouds were gathering from the west––not going to be much of a night, well that was all right. Not much further surely. Hollis had picked out the place and it was the only one suitable for miles and he needed to hit it exactly at the right time and the right speed or it was curtains.
Finis
.

One chance: that was all he'd get, all he could expect. The vicious Z-bend had been the marker. Use it to open the gap between the cars long enough for him to get clear and leave the Germans having to push hard to make up. When the time came they would already be at the edge of the safety envelope and ripe for picking.

Mirror: lights.

Coming now all right, but the glow was fainter than it had been. Hit something back there possibly, maybe lost a headlight? All the better.

You can do it best by clearing a critical amount of distance between your own car and theirs, relying on technique and the acceleration/distance factor to slow them up enough to let you get clear ahead. The Z-bend thing had chopped the time factor and brought the twin spectres of frustration and fear into play. They must have come close to disaster right there, and now the adrenaline surge would be seeking an outlet.

'Kick it, Klaus, we're losing him!' Helga shouted. The headlights ahead disappeared yet again as the road twisted along the lochside.

'Come on, come on,' Klaus muttered. The gas pedal was pressed into the carpet but the Volvo was a heavy machine and the speed seemed to build appallingly slowly. Part of it was certainly that his time-sense was distorted. Thrown out of sync by the enveloping darkness and the disorientation brought on by the constantly shifting points of reference outside.

The power was full on now, and Hollis left it there while he tried to think calmly about what he had to do next.

Russian Roulette
. But how many chambers were loaded?

The forebrain was busy attempting to work out the odds. Crisis evaluation, yes, you could say that. The thing
was
he didn't know what kind of person was driving the Volvo, or whatever-it-may-be. Might even be the girl, although that was less likely. What would his reaction time be under stress? How much driving experience did he have and was he properly trained? Most important of all, what was his breaking point? The point where the fear of death overcame reason––and training.

Unsighted now because of the last two bends and Hollis began to pump the brakes, taking care not to lock them up, watching the needle on the clock fall back. The final point of reference was a leaning road sign, half-hidden by ferns growing around the base of the rock wall.

Seventy, sixty, fifty––and there it was! The parking bay came into the dipped headlights––
and it was empty
. Thank Christ! One of the unknowns had been the possibility of a tourist caravan spending the night there illegally.
Finis
.

Forty.

Hollis steered into the bay, hearing the wheels scrunch on the gravel surface. He hauled the steering wheel hard over and jerked up the handbrake lever. The Range Rover skidded into a perfect handbrake turn, spraying gravel in a surge onto and over the grass verge. A piece pinged off the metal mesh waste paper bin and cracked on the window beside Hollis' face.

Forward traction again, increasing as the tyres cleared the gravel bed and bit into the road surface. Thirty, forty, fifty and into the first of the two bends leading to the straight section. Sixty, sixty five. Check the tail swing at the second bend,
don’t over-compensate
. Safely on the straight Hollis switched off all the lights, relying on the flitting moonlight for vision. Foot on the floor now, passing seventy on the clock and nothing to do but wait for the speed to build.

Well then, had he judged the turnround correctly?

A flickering headlight became visible ahead––lost one for sure. Darkening as they took the last turn. Everything was shaping up well enough. Just the lingering resonance along the nerves: twanging a lot––ignore.

A big plus factor was that the Germans had no reason to suspect anything. They had lost his rear lights, but that must have been happening regularly at every bend. Hollis watched the needle rising in the moonlight, eighty now. Estimate their speed coming the other way about the same. Impact speed therefore about 160 if anything went wrong. Chances of survival:
nil
.

Light getting brighter now, just a few seconds left and there was no point in worrying about the risk. You were dead before you were born and it didn't worry you then. The thing was to judge it for maximum shock value.

It was quite a narrow road, designed to take a single lane in each direction, limited by the terrain and the close proximity of Loch Ness. This meant that if you were driving something as big as a Range Rover and kept to the middle of the road there wouldn't be room for anyone else.

Eighty five.

Hollis switched on full beam, plus the fogs and spots, and then hit the horn for additional scare-effect.

The uneven pool of light from the undamaged headlamp was barely enough to illuminate the way through these damned corners: the black water alongside seemed to absorb the light effortlessly. Klaus was not given to letting his imagination run away with him, but it seemed at times as if they were racing into a black hole: from which nothing, not even light itself, could escape. At the most basic level of his psyche, he was terrified.

Now that they were no longer sliding through sharp turns, Helga found the time to glance round at Uwe in the back seat. He was grinning with excitement, totally involved in the chase.
Stupid
, she thought, he's just a child: too inexperienced to understand the danger inherent in this wild plunge through the darkness. She was aware of the painfully powerful grip she was maintaining on the bulkhead in front of her, as if the strength of muscle and bone would be enough to save her if––  'What's that?' she asked, squinting into the night. Something was there: in the darkness beyond the dim pool of light.

The world exploded into screaming, shattering brightness.

Helga shrieked, unnerving Klaus Ditmar even more. He was utterly blinded. The organism promptly panicked because it was no longer in control of its own destiny. No longer sure, indeed, whether it was still alive.

Appalling levels of light and sound coming in terribly fast now from the empty void outside: time itself telescoping into instants. Deep in his mind, Klaus knew this had to be a vehicle coming at them out of the night. Out of nowhere.

And it had to be Hollis.

In the last seconds, Hollis saw the gray Volvo. It was well over towards the grass verge bordering the loch, already off line and wandering; the driver blinded, disoriented. Hollis applied very slight pressure to the wheel.
Careful
. At this speed it wouldn't take much to put him into the cliff and there wouldn't be much left to scrape together afterwards. The Range Rover blasted past the other car, the pressure wave from the slipstream applying an extra few pounds of lateral thrust just when it mattered most. The Volvo's nearside front wheel sliced into the shrub-covered embankment ...

Brakes
. Hollis cut the fog- and spotlights, their purpose served.
Slowing
. He was aware that his hands were damp and shaking a little on the wheel, heart pumping: normal stress reaction––ignore.

Mirror: darkness.

Helga screamed again as she felt the solid
thump
and the car slewed violently sideways, almost somersaulting before hitting the embankment a second time and becoming airborne. There was another crash beside her and something impacted her head. Consciousness flared and faded. Uwe, not wearing a seat-belt in the rear, had been thrown forward through the windscreen, one of his feet catching his sister on the way past.

The Volvo crashed through the flimsy undergrowth, tumbling upright again, bouncing over the ploughed-up embankment into the cold, black waters of Loch Ness. Uwe Wrasse, his neck broken, fell forward over the front of the wrecked car. He felt nothing of the chill water that closed over his head. His last sensations were jumbled, confused. He was dimly conscious only of an expanding tunnel of light, before that, too, melted away into silent darkness.

And then all thought stopped.

 
 
 
 
14

 
Saturday 17 August, 2013

Greenside hated telephones.

He looked again at the portly man wearing an expensive pinstripe suit speaking into a cellphone about the size of a cigarette packet. It was all there: nodding head, exaggerated arm movements, hand gestures: the whole thing. Couldn't these people understand just how moronic they appeared? Jabbering away and giving every impression to the world at large that they were talking to themselves? Ought to be locked up.

And anyway, the damned things were so bloody
insecure!

Email, voicemail etc were only as secure as your password, as many a ‘celebrity’ had discovered. Hacking mobile phones had become an industry in its own right––even the Royal Family had found that out the hard way more than once. And of course Her Majesty’s Government could “request” whatever information they desired from the networks. There were no secrets on telephones––
any
kind of telephone.

Which was why he was walking through the streets of London on this overcast, humid day in mid-August. Wedderman was becoming a little tiresome with this single-minded pursuit of the intangible. It wasn't that Greenside particularly disliked the Special Branch officer, but he considered him unimaginative and easily fixated––a typical policeman in other words. Harmless for the most part, but inclined to become a nuisance when they got a bee in their bonnet about something.

Like this Hollis thing.

It was an unfortunate fact of life, Greenside reflected, that Wedderman couldn't have picked a more devious and wraith-like adversary if he had spent a year trying. Special Branch hadn’t achieved a single positive step forward since that first meeting several weeks ago, despite their calling in every marker they owned. Greenside wasn't surprised: they simply didn't have the larger picture necessary to deal with an international player like Hollis. But like it or not, the ball was in their park and it was Special Branch heads that would roll if Hollis pulled the trigger.

Greenside winced. An unfortunate analogy, but true nonetheless.

However, there was no need to panic just yet. SIS maintained good relations with many of the world's top security agencies
. You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours.
Several of them had found it necessary to cope with the aftermath of Hollis' business dealings, and there was a surprising amount of information tucked away in filing cabinets and computers around the world. Most of it circumstantial, little more than suspicions really, although once his staff had collated it all some interesting trends showed up. But still nothing that would pin their man down to a place or an identity.

Until yesterday.

It was the wind rocking the Range Rover that finally woke Mike Hollis. Not so much the movement of the car as the knife-like blast that entered through the slightly open window above his head. Shivering, he reached over and closed it before throwing off the green tartan rug covering him on the reclining seat. It wasn't the first time he had spent the night huddled in a car parked in the middle of nowhere: at least this one offered more room than some of the others in his experience.

Still trembling slightly from the lingering effects of extreme stress, Hollis had carried on driving back to Inverness. His original plan had been to find a hotel in Thurso area, near to the Orkney ferry terminal at Scrabster. But it was far too late for that after the encounter with the Germans.

He drove northwards across the Kessock Bridge, empty now of its usual daytime traffic. Only a few headlights disturbed his passage across the Black Isle to rejoin the A9 north of Dingwall. By this time he had decided his only option was to find somewhere out of the way and sleep in the car. Although with his system still drenched in adrenaline he doubted if he would get much of that.

After an hour with no hint of fatigue setting in, he had decided he might as well make use of the opportunity to complete his journey in the quiet of the night. Inevitably lack of sleep would catch up with him in due course and he would probably crash out early the following night. But by then he would be in Orkney and the pressure would be off. For a while anyway.

Meantime the opportunity had been presented to get things back on schedule and that was an unexpected bonus.

The dashboard digital clock read 08.15, at least he had managed a few hours sleep after all. Outside the sky and sea were a uniform shade of gray and it was difficult to discern one from the other. The buffeting wind was flattening and tugging at the grass beside the small car park near to a glistening white lighthouse. Hollis watched a Black-backed Gull hovering in the air nearby, rocking slowly from side to side as it used wings and body weight together to balance the air currents sweeping across it. As he watched, the bird tilted one wing over and allowed the wind to carry it effortlessly round in a wide, graceful turn, disappearing from view below the cliff edge as if it had never existed.

Dunnet Head, between John O'Groats and Thurso, is Scotland's true northern-most point. Not Cape Wrath as popularly believed. A wild, wind-swept promontory stretching out into the hazardous Pentland Firth, it provides awesome views along the coast, and across the sea to the southernmost of the Orkney Islands.

Hollis rummaged in the glove box for his set of screwdrivers and picked up the new number-plate from the seat-well on the passenger side, where it had ended up in last night’s excitement. Muttering, he slipped out into the wind and spent a chilly few minutes replacing the broken one. Back inside, he folded and packed away the tartan rug, pulled the seats back into their proper position and started the engine. The first priority was a wash and some breakfast.