commands and clung to the oh-so-welcome pavement. He had made it onto solid ground. He could drive hard and fast down a proper road.
But the helicopter was waiting for him.
It was hanging in the air, perhaps fifty yards from the mountainside. And to judge from the blazing guns, the men inside it still had plenty of ammunition.
Once again, however, the trees came to Carver’s rescue. They ran along both sides of the road, uphill and down, giving him cover. And this time, the chopper could not come in close enough to cut off his path. If it did, the rotors would hit the rock face. For about half a minute, the two machines were locked in a stalemate, as Carver negotiated four more dizzying turns. But both sides knew that it would soon end. For the mountain was flattening out and soon Carver would be spat out into more open country, where the pursuit would begin in earnest again.
He knew now that whoever was in the helicopter, they had nothing to do with Kurt Vermulen. They did not want to retrieve a stolen document. They wanted to destroy it, and him, too.
Carver asked himself who had an interest in destroying valuable papers originally stolen from the Russian government. He thought about the only known traitor in Vermulen’s organization, and the agency she had worked for-was most likely working for now. Then he gave a wry smile at the irony of it all. Here he was, risking his neck to get to Alix, and she was, unknowingly, helping to kill him.
72
In the cockpit of the Dauphin helicopter, Platon was beating his left hand against the top of the control panel as he vented his anger and frustration. This whole mission had been a screwup from start to finish. It had all been done in too much of a hurry, with too little information. No one, including him, had thought anything through, and now it was turning to shit in front of his eyes.
Whoever was driving that car was a maniac, whose appetite for taking risks was equaled only by his will to live. By now he should have been blasted to pieces by bullets, pulverized by a tree, or obliterated by a two-hundred-yard fall, yet there he was, racing between the villas and farmhouses dotting the lower slopes of the mountainside like a man possessed. But where was he racing to? Surely he must know that he could not hope to outpace a helicopter.
As the road down from the mountain hit the main route from Vence to Grasse, the Audi had turned right, westward. Now there was plenty of other traffic on the road, passing in both directions. Platon was tempted to blast away regardless, reckoning the loss of the other drivers’ lives would be worthwhile if he could take out the target vehicle as well. In Russia, he might have acted on that logic. Gang warfare was so much a part of life there, the police so hamstrung by lack of resources, and his clan’s connections with the state so powerful that he could probably have got away with it. But this was France, where the forces of law and order were strong and his political influence weak. Up on the mountain, with no one around, he and his men had been able to blaze away. Down here it was different. He could not afford collateral damage.
And the man they were after was being canny, too. Instead of racing flat out along the road, risking an accident and exposing himself to fire, he was using other vehicles as shields. He would hide behind a car or truck going in the same direction until a line of traffic approached, coming the other way. Then he would dash ahead at top speed, using the oncoming vehicles as his shield.
Sooner or later, however, he would find himself out in the open. For Platon, it was just a matter of holding his patience until the moment came, and the road builders of Provence had conspired to make his life easier. For now the road formed a massive hairpin. It swung north along one side of a valley before crossing the river that ran along the valley floor and then turning back on itself and proceeding south along the far side of the valley. If the helicopter hovered in the middle of the hairpin, it could cover the car all the way around.
Half a dozen times, Platon’s men opened fire as the Audi bobbed and weaved along the road. Each time, the car kept going, hit but not mortally wounded. And then, just as Platon’s frustration was mounting again, a miracle happened.
The road was approaching another absurdly picturesque little town, crowded onto a cliffside promontory. Platon looked at his map. The place was called Le Bar-sur-Loup. Just outside the village, there was a viaduct that cut across a spur of the river valley in a rhythmic, marching line of stone arches. There were no cars on the viaduct, but a handful were scattered about a parking lot at one end. Platon could see a few people strolling out over the valley to admire the view.
He also saw the Audi pull into the parking lot. He saw the driver get out, carrying something close to his chest, something bulky. His head looked misshapen, covered in some way. The man started running, turning his shoulders, so that the package in his arms was half hidden and impossible to identify from the helicopter. Platon reckoned it must be the missing case.
For a few seconds the running man was masked by a clump of trees, but then he reappeared, right out in the open, racing toward the very middle of the viaduct.
The man stood right by the stone parapet. Now it was evident that he was wearing a gas mask. Platon assumed he did not want to be identified by the people around him. The Russian smiled: Well, they’d leave identification to the pathologist.
The man placed whatever he had been carrying on the ground, behind the parapet, then raised a gun in the air. Platon could not hear any shots over the sound of the helicopter, but he assumed some must have been fired, because the other people out there on the viaduct started running away to either side.
Platon tried to work out what the man thought he was doing. Did he think he could bring down a helicopter full of armed men with a mere pistol? Or was he hoping to cut some kind of deal? If he really did have the case that had been attached to Bagrat Baladze, maybe he’d threaten to throw it off the side of the viaduct, hoping that might save him.
Either way, he could go screw himself. Platon was sick of playing games. He intended to wipe this infuriating thief off the face of the earth.
“Go down,” he said to the pilot. “Get us as close as you can.”
