and CDs another. Candles, trapped in their own spilled wax, were dotted around the room, many of them barely puddles of color from being burned so low. A faint scent clung to the airless room. Max realized it was Sophie’s fragrance.
A makeshift desk was used mostly as a dressing table, its top cluttered with makeup, a glass pot full of an assortment of combs and brushes, while a mixture of dust and body powder showed where essential oil bottles- lavender, marjoram, thyme-had left sticky ring marks.
Fauvre had edged his wheelchair into the room. He gazed as mesmerized as Max at the unfolding world of his daughter. Photographs, posters, the girl’s drawings and sketches-slashes of color on squares of canvas, muted pages of charcoal anger scribbled by a furious hand-a world of pain and despair.
Max looked at family pictures from when Sophie was obviously a child. The strongly muscled Fauvre before his accident, the beautiful, dark-haired woman without a face. Every picture showing parents and child, right up to what were obviously recent years, had the mother’s face burned out or scratched away.
But Max’s attention was fixed on the wall above Sophie’s bed. Clustered together were pictures taken far from Morocco’s sun-baked harshness. They were of startling white landscapes, prickly green fir trees dusted with snow and brightly dressed skiers in competition. But this was no downhill racing; these skiers stretched their limbs across differing terrain. Some of them knelt in a firing position, a rifle to their shoulder, others stood and aimed at targets, while in the same picture skiers pushed away into the background.
“This is a cross-country skiing competition,” Max muttered to himself.
“That’s right,” Fauvre said. “A biathlon. Last year in Norway. Sophie was a junior competitor in the fifteen- kilometer ski and shoot. She didn’t get placed. She had the stamina, but her target shooting was not good.”
Max looked closer. A figure had been captured in one of the photographic sequences. Flurried snow indicated the skier had had to stop and shoot at a target. It was a standing pose, rifle to shoulder. Max’s stomach fluttered. It was almost a mirror image of when the killer shot Zabala.
His eyes followed the sequence of pictures of the shooter’s progress downhill to the marksman range, until finally the same competitor, cheek nestled against the target rifle’s stock, was in close-up.
This skier’s Lycra race suit was the same scattered white-on-black design as the murderer’s, but the face was clearly in focus.
Max’s breath was trapped in his chest; his heart tried to hammer it free.
He knew the clear-eyed girl with her finger on the trigger.
The killer whose name he couldn’t pronounce-Potyncza Jozsa.
Peaches.
22
That was what was so wrong.
Peaches had run back to the van with Sharkface’s men. Sayid gulped. Something invisible gripped his throat and stabbed him in the heart with an icicle. The look she gave him didn’t need words.
The vans burned rubber, found the nearest exit from the motorway, took it easy along country roads for the next fifty kilometers and slipped back on to the silky-smooth blacktopped autoroute.
Sayid’s mind was in turmoil. Bobby was probably dead, another man injured, and Bobby’s girlfriend was part of this whole terrifying mess. Desperately alone, he began to shake with fear. The shock was going to shut him down and he couldn’t help but let out a gulping sob.
“Shut up, you sniveling brat!” one of the bikers yelled from the front seat.
The tone in the boy’s voice had an unusual effect on Sayid. In that brief moment of temper, he realized they were rattled. Things hadn’t gone to plan, had they? No, they hadn’t. These evil, violent people had been as shaken by events as had Sayid, but for a different reason-the fear of being caught in an unexpected situation far from home. There was still time for other things to go wrong. For someone to stumble on them.
He brought his scattered thoughts back under control. The magic square numbers burned even more brightly in his mind: perhaps they held essential information that might stop these killers.
Sayid concentrated-the heat-seeking missile was back on target.
Max had to fight the obvious: Sophie was in league with Peaches, involved in killing Zabala and a member of Sharkface’s gang. Bobby Morrell hadn’t abandoned him and Sayid at Hendaye, he had been betrayed, maybe even killed by Peaches. These thugs worked for someone so powerful his reach could stretch across the world to get what he wanted by any means possible. Zabala’s cry,
Obvious? So it seemed, and he wished it weren’t. Distrust eats away at you like a terrible disease.
“Why did she take it?” Fauvre demanded once they were back in his office, his hands sifting through the old monk’s papers. “She must have known its importance. There can be no denying that! Damn her! She’s selling it for money, isn’t she? She’s found a buyer for something invaluable. Selling a man’s life!”
The distraught man’s anger was at a destructive level.
Whatever Sophie had done, Max convinced himself she was not a killer. She could have cut his throat when she took the stone. That gave him some hope, a glimmer of understanding.
Max needed this man on his side, because he had to get out of the Tears of the Angels and back to Europe.
“She’s caught up in something that she doesn’t understand,” Max said. He had pulled Peaches’s photograph from the wall in Sophie’s room. “Do you know this girl?”
Fauvre shook his head. “She is someone Sophie knows?”
“She’s the girl who killed Zabala,” Max said quietly.
The man’s shock was genuine. The flush of anger drained from his face. His shoulders slumped and he suddenly looked old and beaten. He held the photograph in a trembling hand. “What has my girl done? Why is she with these people? May God forgive me for not loving her enough.”
He poured a drink and gulped it down like medicine, wincing at the whisky’s sharpness. He sat shaking his head. After a moment Max saw a resolve creep back into his body. His broken spine straightened; his voice became more convincing.
“She is in danger. I must help her.”
“Then you need to help me,” Max told him. “Do you see that pattern on the girl’s race suit? I’ve seen it a couple of times, and each time violence has been attached to it. Look at the other competitors. Some of them have sponsorship logos. Do you think that design could mean anything? If it did and Sophie has gone to this girl, it might help us find where she is.”
Fauvre nodded. Now there was something he could do, something positive. He banged on the window. Abdullah was outside, making sure enough water was being poured on the burning embers of the feed store so no sparks got caught on the wind and started another blaze.
The
“Abdullah, take this to the computer room, scan it in and see if that design means anything.”
Abdullah nodded, asked no questions and turned away towards the next building.
“We have a good scanning system here. We use it to compare animals’ faces with those photographed in the wild. It’s a recognition package. Abdullah can do these things much quicker than I can.”
“I have a friend who’s the same,” Max said grimly, thinking of Sayid, who was who-knew-where.
“And that is all we can do? Hope to find an obscure link?”
Max knew he had to play his final card. “No, we can do more than that. We can see what your friend Zabala hid on the pendant’s stone.”
Max reached for the short-bladed knife that served as a letter opener. Sitting quickly, he pulled off one of his trainers, dug the knife into the heel and gouged out the cushioning gel.
