The passenger had unfolded a map of France on which a number of exits from the autoroute were ringed in red. There were altogether eighteen on this stretch; though the most likely ones for the Citroën to take were in the wine-rich Côte d’Or, between Auxerre and Beaune.
Neither he nor the driver had spoken since leaving the Péripherique. Their manner was calm, methodical, bored: they reacted as though this were a routine run that they made every day of the week.
Fifteen kilometres beyond the toll gate, the BMW closed in on the Citroën, but for several seconds the car ahead held obstinately to the outside lane. The BMW flashed its lights again and its horn howled above the slipstream as it drew dangerously close. The sloping rear window of the Citroën was shaded green, but the two men in the car behind it could just make out the shape of a man’s head.
The Citroën finally pulled over, and the BMW slid effortlessly past, neither its passenger nor driver glancing at the other car.
From now on the two men in the BMW followed the rule book. The next exit, to Nemours, was twenty-nine kilometres ahead. When they were five kilometres from it, the BMW slowed until the low silhouette of the Citroën showed in its mirror. If the men in the Citroën were expecting to be followed, they would normally be looking for a car behind, not in front; but even if the Citroën’s driver were anticipating this technique, it was virtually impossible — on a long stretch of road where most cars would be travelling several hundred kilometres — for him to be ever certain of his pursuer. The real problems for the men in the BMW would arise when their quarry left the autoroute.
As they approached the Nemours exit, the Citroën was again in the outside lane, overtaking everything except the BMW, which had now pulled out of sight. A few minutes later they hit the rain.
The BMW driver switched on his side lights. Four seconds later a pair of yellow fish-eyed headlamps flared in his mirror. He pulled over, momentarily blinded by a fog of spray. A glowing red bar of light swept past and shrank into the blurred twilight of the storm.
The BMW had slowed to under 100 kmph and was now keeping to the centre lane. The Citroën passed them a few minutes later, ten kilometres before the exit to Courtenay. The radio under the BMW dashboard crackled to life. The passenger pressed the switch of the hand microphone and spoke back slowly and deliberately: the target was past Courtenay — next exit, Auxerre.
The autoroute was beginning to curve and climb through an ugly rock-strewn landscape where convoys of juggernauts were bunched together, wheezing at walking pace along the inside lane. The BMW passed a sign marked Diversion; then a diagonal row of orange beacons, and a bulldozer parked on the soft shoulder which had been churned up into a yellow swamp blistered by rain.
The traffic was now crowded into single file, crawling uphill with the belching juggernauts. The Citroën was only three cars in front of the BMW; and directly in front of the Citroën was the car that had raced past them several minutes ago, with its glowing bar of red rear lights. The men in the BMW recognized the long, low sledge shape of the Maserati.
At the same moment the radio crackled again, its instructions brief and precise. The passenger acknowledged them, then flicked a switch under the dashboard that sent out a deep, steady whine. He sat back and lit two cigarettes, passing one to the driver. ‘They might have warned us,’ he said.
‘They never warn us,’ the driver said, with a slight shrug of his big square shoulders.
There were about a dozen elderly men in the café, hunched over pine tables, drinking thimbles of framboise, poire, and other white spirits popular in the Jura. They scarcely seemed to notice as the three strangers entered, bringing with them a blast of cold air.
The proprietor took them for foreign businessmen on their way to Switzerland. For although the café was in a desolate spot on a minor road through the mountains east of Besançon, strangers were not unusual. Tourists often used the narrow cross-country road as a shortcut from Dijon down to Berne or up to Basel.
The three men sat at a corner table and ordered coffee. They talked quietly, urgently, emphasizing every word with quick didactic gestures; then one of them got up and asked the proprietor, in thickly accented French, if he could use the telephone for a long-distance call. He was shown into a corner under the stairs where he stayed a full five minutes. As the proprietor went through to the kitchen, he heard the man talking in a language which he had never heard before.
When the stranger returned to his table, he had a pinched, tight-mouthed expression. He said something without sitting down and the other two got up, leaving their coffees half drunk. The man left a 100-franc note, without waiting for the bill or the telephone charge, and the three of them marched out.
On the sloping gravel parking lot were two cars that stood out instantly from the other, local vehicles. One was the silver-grey Citroën CX; the other, the long, low, elegant shape of a maroon Maserati with wire wheels and four exhaust pipes as wide as trumpets. There was just one person inside, the driver — a dark man in a sports jacket who was leaning back in the bucket seat, smoking a cigarette and reading a map.
The man who had made the telephone call hesitated. He already had the Citroën keys in his hand, and now clenched his fist so that the sharp metal edges jutted out between his knuckles. One of his
