She nodded quickly, her face pale against the rich brown of her hair.
Pope looked to the front and sucked his peppermint.
The driver of the tag car was a Dutch freelancer. His talents – the result of six years on the Amsterdam Police Force’s armed offenders reaction team – were for hire and had been since he was thrown out of the police for consistently using unnecessary force. He was not a brutal man. He simply saw violence as an effective means to an end, and these days he was paid handsomely for his skills. The man beside him was German, as was one of the two in the back seat. They were brothers who had cut their teeth in the red-light district of Hamburg, protecting their stable of prostitutes against intruders. Both had been recruited by the Dutchman when they needed to leave Hamburg in a hurry after a multiple shotgun killing of five drug dealers who fancied themselves as pimps as well. The killings had been a gross misjudgement, but emotions had been strong. The brothers’ little sister had died after injecting heroin cut with a caustic drain cleaner. They hated drug dealers.
The last man was a Corsican mute. His tongue had been cut from his mouth during an interrogation – when, as a Legionnaire, he had been captured by Algerian nationalists. At fifty-two he was the oldest in the group and a superb marksman.
Until now, the day had been largely wasted. They were not paid to attend, but to act – and, so far, the whole exercise in doing the job on the Englishman had been fruitless. Hanging around the park waiting for a man who was never going to come had left them all frustrated. The attitude of the other Englishman in Geneva was also an irritation. He seemed sickened by the whole thing.
The Dutchman had no respect for that sort of unproductive hypocrisy. After all, Quayle was their problem. He drove at a steady pace, keeping three or four cars between his and the target vehicle. God, that had been a stroke of luck, the sighting at the lake. They might just redeem something from the day yet. The other two people in the car were an easily dealt with problem. Guilt by association, and then who would associate with a madman anyway? The girl would not be a problem – but he did wonder briefly who the other older man was.
He eased forward as a big Audi moved up to overtake and, as it pulled back to the right, he saw the target Mercedes take a right turn up a side road. He swore loudly. This was not in his scenario. He wanted to follow them all the way to wherever they were going and do the job after dark. Now, with this turning, he would not have the cover of other vehicles – and it was still broad daylight. The consolation was that the road looked very quiet. They might be able to do it undisturbed. Turning fast without indicating, he didn’t slow his pace at all. He was committed now.
The sharp bend came up quickly and, as he braked to go round the Corsican – possibly with some old Foreign Legion ambush experience flashing back into his memory, possibly with instincts honed over the years, possibly with a sixth sense, or possibly all three – he made an urgent animal moan and bashed on the front seat with his fist, reaching for a gun on the seat beside him. The car took the bend, the Dutchman trying for control on the narrow road, the mute banging on the seat, the two German youngsters trying to make out what he was saying – and there in front of them was a car stopped in the middle of the road.
He hit the brakes hard, instinctively trying to correct the slide at the same second as he realised it was the target car. This was an ambush, and this was what the Corsican was trying to say.
He snatched up his gun, a Heckler and Koch, and pulled the door handle. “Out!” he shouted – and died as a hard-nosed nine millimetre took him in the temple.
His body was knocked across to the passenger seat by the second round, and the third took the German beside him high in the neck, a bright fountain of crimson blood arcing out onto the dashboard as he tried to scrabble away from the killing ground of the car.
Pope stood, then and fired four rounds into the back seat through the still-closed back door, the mute screaming soundlessly as his fingers scrabbled for the lock. Then Pope dropped back behind the rock from which he had fired the first shots. Hidden there, he counted to sixty – time for the terrible shock to have worn off and for anyone still with fight left to try to get clear. All was silent except for the ticking of the hot engine.
Carefully, he moved forward. Quayle was already back in the Mercedes, revving the engine and beginning to turn their car on the narrow road. Pope checked the tag car quickly, looked carefully at the Dutchman, pulled papers from his pocket – and, seeing no further threat, ran to the Mercedes as Quayle finished the last of his manoeuvres.
With spinning wheels, they headed back for the lake. They never saw the man who managed to pull his motorbike off the road before they passed – or the fact that he remounted and began to follow at a safe distance.
“It’s finished,” Pope said, looking over his shoulder into the back. “You can sit up now.”
Holly was still on the floor, her hands over her ears. As she pulled herself up, she fought the waves of fear, her hands
