wondering what the hell he was doing here. He and Claude had found a spot where they could just see the bridge and the road leading over it, but where they were hidden from view by a clump of bushes. It wasn’t great but it was the best they could do at short notice.
He shivered and took a turn back and forth, trying to work some warmth back into his feet and lower legs. The air was bitingly cold and, just for the moment, clear, the earlier snow having turned by degrees to a miserable, grey sleet before dying out. But there was more on the way. The clouds looming overhead were heavy, grey and dough-like, waiting to dump their contents on the land below, and he wondered if a change in the weather might interrupt any attack plans. If there were any.
‘Where does that track lead?’ he said, stepping back alongside the passenger window. ‘The map doesn’t say.’
‘Nowhere. It’s just a track through the fields.’ Claude held up a hand, giving it some thought. ‘Actually, that’s not strictly true. If they drive carefully, they could reach a road at the other end — but that’s ten kilometres over rough ground. And after this weather?’ He pulled a face. ‘Unlikely. Hardly a quick getaway.’
‘So they’d be trapped.’ Rocco tensed as a dark shape approached the bridge, wobbling slightly on the road, bouncing on soft suspension. It was a dark-blue saloon with something strapped on the roof. A cupboard or a box — it was difficult to tell from here. The car trundled across the bridge and continued on down the road towards them, passing the proposed site of the new war monument and rattling past them without stopping.
‘Unless things went right and nobody saw them.’ Claude pursed his lips and eyed the car out of sight. ‘If they were cool-headed enough and had the right vehicle, I suppose they could do it.’ He grinned. ‘Unlikely now, though, huh? With us here.’
Rocco lifted a pair of binoculars off the back seat, focusing on the track beyond the shed. Nothing. No waiting truck, no motorbikes — another favoured form of transport for an attack — and no men. Just the shed, run-down and ready to fall over.
‘There aren’t many of those left,’ Claude told him, following his line of sight. ‘I’m amazed it’s lasted this long.’
‘It was locked tight by rust when I saw it, and full of farm rubbish. I thought it might be something they’d use, but I was wrong.’ Yet he felt sure he’d got the location right. The circumstances, the pointers, the confluence of the ramming idea, de Gaulle’s visit and the similarities of the sites… it had all been so clear. So obvious.
He swung the glasses back to the shed and stared hard, the rubber eyepieces pressed into his skin. It looked the same as it had the other day, so what was he worried about? The roof still stained with bird droppings, the wooden walls peppered with holes and the planking warped by the elements, the whole thing surrounded by a hovering grey mist, like a scene from a ghost film. Yet something was tugging at his mind, gently insistent. Something… different. What the hell was it? Or was he just desperate for something to show up that would prove he’d been right about this?
‘It’s an old cart shed,’ Claude continued chattily, showing his mastery of all things rural. ‘They were just big enough to take a hay cart. Take it in one end, unhitch the horse, fold up the shafts and close the door, take the horse out the other. Saved trying to reverse it in. The logic was impeccable.’
Rocco took his eyes off the road. Tried to follow through what Claude had said. ‘What are you saying?’ Then it hit him. ‘That shed has a back door?’ He hadn’t looked. It hadn’t occurred to him.
‘Yes. Same as the front. In one end, out the other. Why?’
Then Rocco realised what had been bothering him.
The pigeons on the roof. There were none. Why was that? And that mist around the base of the structure: it was moving, billowing gently outwards. Yet there was none anywhere else.
And it was growing.
As he opened his mouth to speak, to voice what he was seeing, the shed moved. It trembled, then seemed to shake itself like a living beast, and lifted, before exploding in a great shower of wood fragments and smoke, the latter billowing out in a great cloud to join the mist around the base.
Not mist. Exhaust smoke.
‘My God! Lucas!’ Claude grabbed his arm and pointed beyond the shed to the road leading to the bridge. Another car had appeared in the distance. Only this one was shiny and sleek, and rode the tarmac with undoubted elegance, at sharp odds with the sleety brown of the surrounding fields and the grubby snow clouds gathered overhead.
A gleaming black Citroen DS.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Jack Fletcher stared hard at a point in the front left corner of the shed, his foot poised on the accelerator, keeping the engine of the Renault at a smooth pitch. He’d judged the distances carefully with the help of the man who’d brought him here. He had spoken passable English, and between them they had worked out at what point Fletcher had to hit the gas in order to hit the car broadside on. From the three test runs he’d made, he knew precisely what the timing was and how fast the truck had to be going. And that was Fletcher’s speciality. There would be no messing this time, no holding back, even just a little. He’d had his orders. This one was for real.
He felt his heart tripping fast, reverberating through his chest even above the roar of the truck engine in the confined space of the shed. For the first time in years, he felt proud of what he was about to do. ‘Ruby’ Ketch, passing on orders from a higher authority, had selected him for this job, and him alone. No George bloody Tasker sticking his oar in this time, telling him how he’d screwed up and gone in too heavy. This time, Tasker was going to see and feel what heavy was all about. And Calloway. They wouldn’t know what had hit them.
He laughed out loud at the absurd beauty of it. Because they bloody would know, of course they would; in the few seconds it would take them to suss it out, by which time it would be too late, they’d go mental as the realisation of what Ketch had planned for them actually sank in.
‘We got a big job for you, Jack.’ Ketch had said two days ago. He’d treated Fletcher to a few drinks before telling him what he’d wanted. ‘Seems we’ve got a couple of bleedin’ twicers in the camp.’
‘What?’ Fletcher wasn’t sure he’d heard right. Twicers. Cheats. Traitors. ‘Who?’
Ketch had told him, lighting up a big cigar while Fletcher absorbed the information.
Tasker and Calloway? He could hardly believe it. On the other hand, he’d never liked Tasker, and Calloway was too smooth for his own bleedin’ good. Smarmy young git. He found he’d been ready to believe anything of them.
‘We need someone we can rely on, Jack, to sort this out,’ Ketch had continued, flicking away the match. ‘Someone with the balls to do it right.’ He’d looked Fletcher in the eye from close up, the smell of the cigar mixing with cologne and filling Fletcher’s nose. ‘We need ’em to go away, Jack. Gone for good — know what I mean?’
He’d accompanied the words by taking out his trademark pen and writing a number on a paper napkin. It was a big number, so big it had almost made Fletcher’s eyes water. And preceded by a pound sign. It was more than Fletcher had earned in years, and he swore the number sat there looking up at him with a devilish grin on its face, calling out to him to pick it up.
Ketch had leant closer, a reassuring hand on Fletcher’s shoulder. ‘Money like this, you could retire, Jack.’
‘Eh?’ That had come as a surprise. But not an unwelcome one.
‘Call it your signing-off fee, eh? Bloody good sign-off, too. You’d be in clover. And the job you’d be doing, you’d be a legend.’ The final four words were said in a hushed whisper, and Jack Fletcher felt his chest would explode.
He’d picked up the napkin and thought, a job like this, I’d do it for bloody nothing.
Now, watching through the gap he’d made between the planks in the wall, he waited for the black Citroen to appear. They’d be driving at a steady pace, he’d been assured, unsuspecting because Tasker and Calloway had been told the crash would take place a good mile further down the road, on a bend. They’d probably be gassing, telling themselves how clever they were to be cheating on Ketch and the rest, and wouldn’t even give the shed a passing glance. To them, it would be a shitty structure in the middle of a vast brown rolling sea of muddy
