Secretly, Macron had already begun to think that his boss was losing it. First, the mess-up at Rocamadour, which had resulted in the unnecessary death of the nightwatchman – Macron had long since convinced himself that were he to have been running the investigation, such a thing would never have happened. Then the criminal stupidity of Calque abandoning his post back at Montserrat, which had resulted in Macron taking the rap – it was he, after all and not Calque, whom the eye-man had beaten up. And now this.
Macron was convinced that they could take the eye-man themselves. Follow him at a safe distance. Isolate and identify his vehicle. Position unmarked vehicles front and back of him. Then sweep him up. There was no earthly need for static roadblocks – they were always more trouble than they were worth. If you weren’t careful, you’d end up on a high-speed chase though a rock-strewn field of sunflowers. Then three weeks filling in forms explaining the damage to police vehicles. The sort of bureaucracy, he, Macron, excoriated.
‘He’s driving a white Volvo SUV. It has to be him. I’m approaching a little closer. I need to make sure. Call in the number-plate.’
‘Don’t go any closer. He’ll pick us up.’
‘He’s not a superman, Sir. He’s got no idea we know he’s tracking Sabir.’
Calque sighed. It had been deeply stupid of him to grant the single favour to Macron. But that’s what guilt did for you. It made you soft. The man was clearly a bigot. With every day they remained on the road together, his bigotry became more pronounced. First it was the gypsies. Then it was the Jews. Now it was his fiancee’s family. They were metis. Mixed race. Macron accepted that in his girlfriend, apparently, but couldn’t abide it in her family.
Calque privately supposed the man must vote for the Front National – but he, personally, was of a generation which considered it impolite to question another man about his political affiliations. So he would never know. Or perhaps Macron was a communist? In Calque’s, opinion the Communist Party were even worse racists than the Front National. Both of the parties switched their votes back and forth to each other when they found it expedient. ‘That’s close enough, I tell you. You forget how he outsmarted us all on the Sierra de Montserrat. Villada thought it impossible for a single man to make it off the hill before he was surrounded and swept up by the police cordon. The bastard must be able to move like a cat. He must have been outside the line before the Spanish even began their operation.’
‘He’s speeding up.’
‘Let him. We have thirty more kilometres to go before we can slip the noose around his neck. I have a helicopter on standby at Rodez airport. CRS at Montpellier. He can’t escape.’
Calque looked as though he were competent, thought Macron – sounded as though he were competent – but it was all bullshit. The man was a dilettante. Why pass up an opportunity to nail the eye-man now in favour of a pie-in-the-sky plan that would probably cover the lot of them in even further ignominy? One more mistake and he, Paul Eric Macron, might as well write off any chances he ever had of further promotion and vote himself straight back on to the beat as a sort of eternal pandore.
Macron eased his foot down on the throttle. They were on winding country lanes. The eye-man would be concentrating all his attention ahead. It wouldn’t occur to him to check the road half a kilometre behind. Macron inconspicuously popped the button on the holster he had slid in under his seat that morning.
‘I said slow down.’
‘Yes, Sir.’
Calque brought the binoculars back-up to his eyes. The road was so winding that looking through them for more than a few seconds at a time made him feel nauseous. Yes. Macron was right. The Volvo SUV had to be the car. For twenty kilometres now it had been the only vehicle between them and Sabir. He felt a dryness in his mouth – a fl uttering in the pit of his stomach – that he usually felt only in the presence of his ruinous-to-maintain ex- wife.
When they breasted the next corner, Bale was standing eighty metres away in the centre of the road. He was holding the Star Z-84 sub-machine that he had liberated from the Catalan paramilitary at porte armes position: 600 rounds a minute; 9mm Luger Parabellum in the canteen; 200-metre effective range.
Bale smiled, braced the Z-84 against his right shoulder and squeezed the trigger.
4
Macron threw the wheel violently to the left – it was an instinctive reaction, without any basis whatsoever in driver training or in ambush coordination. The unmarked police car began to tip. He threw the wheel in the opposite direction to counterbalance it. The police car continued on its original path, but this time in a series of violent somersaults.
Bale glanced down at the weapon in his hand. Incredible. It worked even better than he had hoped.
The police car settled on its side, accompanied by a tinkling and a groaning of metal. Glass, plastic and strips of aluminium littered a fifty-metre swathe of the road. A thick oil slick was forming beneath and beyond the car, like a blood haemorrhage.
Bale glanced quickly up and down the road. Then he crouched down and swept up the discarded shell cases and put them in his pocket. He had aimed the gun high on purpose, with its trajectory towards an open field. It amused him to think that the two policemen – if they had survived the crash – would have no way of proving that he had actually been there at all.
With one further, almost idle, glance behind him, he climbed back into the Volvo and continued on his way.
5
‘What’s to stop the eye-man from simply attacking us and making us tell him where the verses are?’
‘Because we don’t know where the verses are. At least not as far as he’s concerned.’
Alexi made a puzzled face. He glanced questioningly at Yola, but she was sound asleep on the back seat.
‘Think about it, Alexi. He only knows what Yola told him. No more. And she wasn’t able to tell him about the Three Maries because she didn’t know about them herself.’
‘But…’
‘In addition, he’s only got the quatrain from the base of the Black Virgin of Rocamadour to go on. Which sent him to Montserrat. But in Montserrat he failed to get hold of the quatrain hidden at La Morenita’s feet – the quatrain which cements the gypsy connection. And neither does he know about my meeting with Calque, or that Calque gave me the text of the Montserrat quatrain as a token of good faith. So he’s got to stick with us. He’s got to assume we are on our way to somewhere specific in order to pick up another part of the message. Why should he mess with us, then? He doesn’t know we know we’re being followed. And he’s probably so bloody cocksure after eluding the Spanish police at Montserrat that he thinks he’ll be able to take on the whole of the Police Nationale single-handed if they should be dumb enough, or angry enough, to mess with him again.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Simple psychology. And the single look I got at his face in the Rocamadour Sanctuary. This is a guy who’s used to getting what he wants. And why does he get it? Because he acts. Instinctively. And with not one iota of conscience. Look at his record. He goes straight for the jugular every time.’
‘Why don’t we ambush him then? Use his own tactics against him? Why wait for him to come to us?’
Sabir sat back in his seat.
‘The police will fuck it up, Damo. They always do. It was my cousin he killed. And Yola’s brother. We swore to avenge him. You agreed to that. We have this man on a string – he follows wherever we go. Why not tug at the string a little? Draw him in? We’d be doing Calque a favour.’
‘You think that, do you?’
‘Yes. I think it.’ Alexi grinned, sarcasm oozing from every pore. ‘I like the police. You know I do. They’ve
