“Who sent you?” Quayle asked, leaning forward.
“Geneve. The man from Geneve.” And then, almost as if he knew he was a dead man for speaking too much already, he snatched at his pocket with his good hand. Quayle stopped it going any further. “They will kill me. They will kill me now.”
“Which man from Geneva?”
“Just a man. French. He had money.”
“What else?”
The man said nothing.
“Speak, you fucker, or I WILL KILL YOU NOW!”
“He was old and he had a ring... he had a square ring…”
Quayle could hear the sound of the ambulance boat, somewhere out on the water. He stood and, picking up the man, carried him bodily into the bathroom, where he dropped him into the bath. He then bound and gagged him, walked through to the kitchen, dragged the body of the second man in and threw it on top of him. He spoke quickly with the still sobbing girl and got a phone number from her.
He waited until the ambulance men had left, Florentina holding Eduardo’s hand, and then called the number. It was the supplier of most of Eduardo’s fakes, a man with connections. Quayle had met him before. He could organise to get rid of the body and decide what to do with the other. Now he had to move. If freelancers were in then Milburn might be close behind, and now Geneva was involved.
Pope and Holly waited in the shadows of a newsstand. As Quayle walked up, skirting a pool of light from a restaurant, Pope called out softly, Holly mouthing a silent prayer of thanks.
They stood in virtual silence until Quayle managed to flag a passing water taxi. He had hidden his relief well. If Pope was going to try and take Holly in, it would have been then, while he was busy with Eduardo.
“Now we get a car,” he said.
After they had left the water taxi behind, he broke into and hot-wired a late model Fiat, and a few minutes later they were back on the autostrada heading for Milan.
Pope waited until Holly was dozing off in the back before he nonchalantly asked how it had gone.
“Freelancers,” Quayle answered with distaste. “Eduardo will be OK.”
“How did they get onto us?”
Quayle noticed the ‘us’. He was feeling fuzzy, the after effect of the adrenaline surge now having left his blood stream. “They were watching the boatman. The forger. They killed him. That means we must assume they have the passport details.”
“Doesn’t sound like London,” Pope replied with venom. “At least they do their own dirty work.”
“Geneva.”
“Pardon?”
“Geneva. This instruction came from there.”
They drove in silence for a short while before Pope spoke again.
“Mr Quayle, have you ever heard of ‘Metro’?”
Quayle looked across in the soft dashboard light. The occasional reflections in Pope’s glasses gave him a sinister appearance. He knew he wasn’t talking about trains.
“Carry on.”
“Chap called Weber in the early ‘60s. Bader Meinhof. Got out of hand and we chopped him. Not only the service, but the Germans, the Dutch, the Frogs got him on the Metro in Paris. It was agreed amongst the players. Weber had to go. Police couldn’t catch him. A trial would have meant hostages, the usual thing. Well, he was just the first. There were others. I worked on two of them. The players taking care of their own dirty laundry if you like. Even the Kilos helped on one. Every time freelancers have been involved. Adds pressure, makes whoever is the lucky bugger make a mistake.”
“Jesus, that’s sick,” Quayle said.
“Think about it, Mr Quayle. Could normal police take you? Not in a month of Sundays. They don’t have the skills. They’re not trained to deal with people like us.”
“What’s your point?” asked Quayle, knowing the answer already.
“I think you have a Metro order on you. Why else is Geneva involved?”
“Then why weren’t these two working on Rome’s orders?”
“A Metro is all stops pulled out. These two were probably on the Swiss payroll.”
“But for what reason? They have dead men, but that’s their own bloody fault.”
“You retired on... medical grounds. I think that would be sufficient to bring in the others.”
Quayle didn’t reply to that but drove onward, thinking hard. Eventually he turned and looked at Pope. “If that’s so, then we’ll have to split up to cross the frontier. Every man and his dog will have our pictures…” He sat, trying to work out how many people were after them now, until at last he gave up. Assume everyone, he told himself.
He was trying to piece together a plan when Pope gave a dry, mirthless chuckle.
“What?” Quayle asked.
“And you were going to go out of your way to throw the scent to the wind! Dear me, Mr Quayle. I think they smelt it in your pocket!”
“It’s not that funny,” he said – but then, in spite of everything, he began to laugh too, the tension broken for the moment.
They ditched the stolen car in a seedy neighbourhood of Milan.
After a solid breakfast of cappuccino bread rolls and cold meat, they picked up a new hire car as soon as the Avis office opened, and were ready to cross the border into France by lunchtime. The crossing point would take them into the French town of Modan. It would be fast and busy but Quayle didn’t want to take chances.
“Holly, you drive. Mr Pope will be your father.” He handed them passports. “You are called Scott. I will meet you in Modan. In the old town there’s a cafe called Noire Magic. Meet me there.”
“How are you going to cross?” Holly asked.
“Hitch a lift on one of the juggernauts…” And he pointed out of the windscreen at the huge lumbering giants that were passing.
Watching her drive away, he rooted around on the side of the road until he found an old cardboard carton. Breaking it open, he scrawled the words: “My truck is in Modan”. After that, he barely had to hold it up. In the camaraderie of the
