During the climb to the Col, the driver’s hands had begun to sweat on the wheel as he wrenched the Citroën round the steep blind bends between dense pines, with a shriek of tyres and an almost continuous blast on the horn, his eyes flitting every few seconds from the road to the mirror; but this time there was no car behind. He found himself growing angry, slamming his fist against the gear lever, causing the smooth cushioned car to shudder at each turn. He was not frightened of danger, but he hated disorder — and above all, he hated and feared things that made no sense. And that Maserati made no sense — no sense at all! His two companions, sensing his anger, did not disturb him.
They reached the Col, and began the corkscrew descent, still in silence. Again, as they rounded each bend, the driver glanced in his mirror, but there was still no sign of the Maserati. They now came to a particularly treacherous corner, where the outside shoulder of the road had partially subsided, the surface cracked and buckled like charred wood, sloping down to the edge of a gully. The remains of a triangular ‘Danger’ sign, symbolically bent and dented, with the black painted exclamation mark half erased by rust, leaned crookedly backwards out of a pile of grit.
The driver swung the Citroën into the centre of the road, keeping his thumb down on the horn, while his right hand changed violently down into second gear. The car bucked and the engine gave a shrill whine that carried above the sound of the horn. It slewed sideways, the rear wheels stopping less than a foot from the edge, while the front driving wheels shrieked in a dry skid, scrabbling for a grip on the steep camber.
The driver uttered a long imaginative obscenity, as the wheels caught and the car swerved back into the centre of the road. He had slowed to 30 kmph, but completed the turn and was confronted by another bend, less than twenty yards ahead, where the road doubled back almost beneath them.
Here there was a second danger signal: this time a portable reflector triangle that had been set up a few feet from the edge. But it was not this that had warned the driver. A man was standing on the bank opposite, half hidden in the shadow of the trees; and a few yards beyond and below him, in a shallow layby scooped out of the bend, stood a white BMW 30 SI, with Paris plates.
The Citroën had jerked to a halt, and for the first time the driver took his thumb off the horn. He opened his mouth to shout, but the words were shattered by a sound like a paper bag bursting, and the windshield turned a frosty white. A shower of crystals hit his face, and something harder struck his jaw and chest. The force smacked his head back against the seat, and the air was sealed in his lungs. When he tried to breathe, the lower part of his face felt loose and odd, like a bagful of pebbles. In those last seconds he heard the staccato bop! bop! bop! — and this time the whole windshield crumbled into the car, like a sheet of crushed ice. The driver experienced a blinding light, then nothing.
The man beside him was wedged under the dashboard, shot between the eyes. His shoulders and hair were spattered with glass and splinters of bone from the pulpy grey hole which the soft-nosed bullet had torn out of the back of his head. He had managed to lift the mat off the floor, and his hands had locked round the plastic stock of an automatic carbine, when the bullet struck.
In the back scat the third man had reacted first by lunging at the offside door, away from the gunman, then had apparently thought better of it and flung himself on the floor. He was unarmed, and knew that he had no chance of reaching the carbine under the front seat. His only hope was to feign death, waiting until the gunman arrived to study his results, then to attack him hand-to-hand, and to try and disarm him.
The man under the trees now slithered down the stony bank and reached the road. He was holding another, stubbier carbine with a curved magazine that jogged against his thigh as he came forward. He paused, listening. Silence. He made a brief signal to the BMW below, and drew from his raincoat what looked like a pale green beer can. He walked forward until he was a dozen paces from the Citroën.
There was no movement from the car. Using the thumb of his left hand, which still held the carbine, he raised the can, ripped a length of wire out of it, and lobbed it uphill where it bounced neatly between the Citroën’s front wheels.
It exploded a second later, lifting the car a couple of inches off the road where it seemed to hang suspended above a glaring bubble of light, as though a gigantic flash bulb had gone off, throwing the surrounding pines into unnatural relief.
The man had turned and begun running as soon as he had thrown the bomb. He was halfway to the BMW, when there was a second explosion, as the Citroën’s fuel tank ignited. For several seconds the glowing white light all around turned a warmer orange. He reached the car below, where the driver already had the engine running. The BMW began to move before the man had time to close the door.
Above them a
