so far Burt was fully confident that he was ahead of the game.
The four men climbed down a wooden ladder into the twenty-six-foot rib, which set off with silenced engines on the mile and a quarter to the beach. The yacht, in total blackout on this moonless night, had disappeared altogether by the time they were less than fifty yards away.
One of Burt’s dictums, which he had taught repeatedly at the Farm, was that if you were after someone, rather than chase them up hill and down dale, it was better to know where they were going in the first place. Burt knew where Anna and Willy were going. It was the only place they could go.
His entire plan for the night ahead was based on this—that Anna and Willy would head for Willy’s beach hut at the end of a three-mile track across the inhospitable salt pans close to Marseille’s industrial area. It was where Willy had hidden Finn and Anna. Neither the British nor the Russians knew of it. But Burt did. In a moment of revelation between them, Finn had told Burt that Willy’s beach hut was where they had stayed for a night or two when Anna had fled from Russia. And back then, Burt saw that Finn was being only partially open. It was Finn’s and Anna’s hole-in-the-wall. Burt could tell that. Willy’s beach hut was the perfect hiding place—if you didn’t know about it.
The rib crunched gently onto the beach. Larry was on the phone again.
“They’re going for exit seventeen,” he said.
“What did I tell you, boys?” Burt said. “They’re making for a spot eleven miles inland from this very beach. All the tails, all the vanloads of gun-toting CIA hoodlums like yourselves, all the watchers and all the satellites that clog up the pleasant skies above us, couldn’t tell you where they were heading. It’s Burt’s line to God that counts. Give me that phone.”
Burt placed the cell phone delicately in his large hand and spoke in clear, unmistakably authoritative tones.
“You don’t follow them, right? You stay on the tramlines. All the way down to Marseille. No more tails. Lose them.”
There was a brief pause as this settled in.
“The truck goes behind them,” Burt said. “Then it drops its load right at the foot of the slip road. Let me hear it.”
There was a lengthy pause.
Burt put his hand over the speaker and looked at the three jocks who stood on the sand as if they were about to set off on a hundred-metre dash. Burt was chuckling to himself, to them, to the universe.
“This is better than the bouncing bomb,” he said. “Not that you’d know about that.”
Finally, and with no more words from his end, Burt clipped the phone shut.
“It’s an old French farmer’s trick,” he explained. “When they go on strike for greater subsidies in this beautiful country, they clog the main intersections with watermelons. Thousands and thousands of watermelons. Beautiful. Believe me, boys, this is God’s own country,” he said, and watched with amusement the shock of the youthful muscle that surrounded him, who thought that God was born and raised in the US of A.
But Burt was laughing. “Anyone following that blue Merc is fruit salad,” he said.
He handed back the phone and took a long, slow piss in the dunes. When he returned, he spoke carefully, serious now.
“I want the two of you”—he indicated Joe and Christoff—“to walk with me down the beach. You will wait at intervals that I will show you. Anyone approaching from the west—in other words towards the beach hut—you politely stop. Though God knows how you can be polite in black spandex pants,” he added. “Just try. If they aren’t polite in return, you take them down, as silently as possible. We don’t expect anyone, but just suppose the Russians or the British, or maybe some extraterrestrial group that’s also interested in the woman, do know about this place, be prepared. Larry, you go over the back of the beach. Approach from the land side. Stay down in the dunes. Do not be visible at any time. When they’re out of the car—the both of them—when they’re out of sight, disable their vehicle. Okay. Me? When I drop you two off at your posts, I will go alone right along this beach to meet them.”
Burt lit a cigar, against general blackout procedures, and waved Larry off into the darkness with its glowing tip.
Chapter 11
ANNA SENSED HER MIND sliding with increasing speed down a black crevice. Its departure was taking her sanity with it. She was no longer aware that she was standing in a courtyard, her own garden; she no longer felt the clothes against her skin or the sun on her face.
She felt something violent at her shoulders, something that shook her so hard the fragments of thought that had scattered with her mind were jumbled up in twos and threes until some of them were thrown together in the violence and began to process signals in some kind of informational order. Something began to make a vague sort of sense.
It was Willy that was shaking her, that was her first clear impression. Her vision began to function dimly. She saw his face. Felt his big hands on her. He was staring at her intensely, but his eyes seemed pulled out sideways in a panic, as if they were on elastic bands. She felt his physical power. She had feeling. It was getting more real. His mouth was open. She began to hear the sounds, but not the words. Then her name. Anna! Anna!
She was suddenly overwhelmed by the aftershock from the trauma that had struck a single second before. Little Finn. Not in the garden. Not in the house. Disappeared.
A bolt of adrenaline-induced heat rose up through her core, and she broke away, rushing straight ahead at a closed shed door. She began to pull it frantically, but the catch was on, and it wouldn’t budge. She didn’t notice the catch that prevented her opening the dilapidated door. Only he must be inside. That was the answer. That was all there was, nothing else. The shed was the only place he could be.
Willy caught up with her and grabbed her firmly by the shoulders.
“Anna! Anna!”
He was clearer. Her dissolved senses began to coalesce into recognisable forms. The disappearance of her mind went into rapid reverse and her consciousness shot through her in one clear shattering image, like random streams of iron filings flying across the smooth surface of a table towards the point of a magnet.
They’d taken him. They’d taken her son.
“Get your phone! Be quick! I’ll start the car.” She heard him this time. She looked dully at the shed door. It was padlocked, she now saw. There was nobody inside.
Without thinking now, she ran into the house, picked her phone up off the table by the door, snatched up the gun, and heard the metal gates clanking open and the engine start. She ran out. They didn’t close the house or the metal gates. Willy behind the wheel turned the blue Mercedes out onto the lane down the hill.
“We may catch them,” he said. “They must be close.”
“Stop!” she screamed at him. Her mind was now blinding white, absolutely clear. She was functioning like a machine, with a relentless, automated attention to detail.
Willy slammed on the brakes. They were by the wrought iron fence where the palm tree reached up past the roof of the house. She ran out of the car and picked up something off the road, a small green plastic object that was part of the ant house.
She ran into the car.
“Now we know,” she said with unnatural loudness. “They took him through the railings. He was small enough to fit through the railings.”
She cried out with an animal anguish and wrapped her hands around the top of her head.
“They took him through the fucking railings, Willy,” she moaned through the blur of her arms. “Why didn’t we think of that? He’s so small, they could pull him through.”
Willy put his foot down and slammed the car to the right, into the village square, past the barn with the weighbridge, onto the road down the hill. He began to throw the car into the corners in a screamingly low gear until, finally, they flattened out onto the straight road with the plane trees that led to the town.
She dialled the phone. It was answered immediately.
“They’ve taken my son,” she said with icy calm now. The reversal was complete. “They’ve taken my son,
