means of subterfuge, or was an acquaintance.
Anna found an old Electrolux vacuum cleaner in a closet and removed the
bag. It was full, which meant it probably hadn’t been changed since
Mailhot died. Good. She’d have the crime-scene people do a fresh-bag
vacuum when they arrived. Maybe there would be some trace evidence
after all.
Maybe they’d even turn up footprints, tire tracks. She would order
elimination prints from the widow and anyone else who visited regularly,
and have all the usual surfaces printed.
When they returned to the front parlor, Anna waited for the widow to sit
and then chose a chair near her. “Mrs. Mailhot,” she began delicately,
“did your husband ever tell you why he thought Charles Highsmith might
have been the victim of foul play?”
The widow looked at her a long time, as if deciding what to reveal. “Les
grands hommes ont leurs ennemis,” she said at last, ominously. “Great
men have great enemies.”
“What do you mean by that?”
Mrs. Mailhot did not meet her gaze. “It’s just something my husband
used to say,” she replied.
Switzerland
Ben took the first exit he came to.
The road went straight for a while, cutting through flat farmland, and
then, after crossing over a set of train tracks, it began to twist
through hilly terrain. Every twenty minutes or so, he’d pull over to
consult his road map.
He was approaching Chur on the A3 highway, south of Bad Ragaz, when he
began to focus on the dark blue Saab behind him. He didn’t have the
road to himself and he didn’t expect to. Perhaps the Saab was carrying
another lot of ski-happy vacationers. But there was something about the
car, something about the way its pace seemed to synchronize with his.
Ben pulled over to the side of the road, and the Saab drove right past
him. There–he had been imagining things.
Now he resumed his drive. He was being paranoid, and after what he’d
been through, who could blame him? He thought once more about Jimmy
Cavanaugh, and then abruptly reeled his thoughts in: it filled him with
vertigo, like staring into an abyss–a mystery piled upon a mystery. For
his own sanity, he could not allow himself to dwell on it. There would
be time to sort things out later. Right now, he needed motion.
Ten minutes later, images of carnage in the Shopville started to crowd
his mind once more, and he reached for the radio dial to distract
himself. Speed would help, too, he figured, and he stepped on the
accelerator hard, felt the gears mesh smoothly and the car push faster
up the sloping highway. He glanced at his rearview mirror and saw a
blue Saab–the same blue Saab, he was certain. And as he accelerated,
the Saab accelerated, too.
A knot formed in his stomach. At higher speeds, drivers intuitively
leave greater distances between themselves and the next car, but the
Saab had maintained precisely the same distance behind him as before. If
it had wanted to pass him, it would have turned into the passing lane,
which meant that its passengers had something else in mind. Ben peered
in the rearview again, tried to see through the other car’s windshield, but
it was hard to make out anything more than shadows. He could see only
that there were two people in the front. What the hell were they up to?
Now Ben fixed his attention on this road ahead of him. He wasn’t going
to let on that he was even aware of them.
But he had to lose them.
There would be plenty of opportunities in the tangle of roads around
Chur; God knows he’d gotten lost there himself the last time he’d
visited. Now he made a last-minute hairpin turn, veered onto the exit
to the narrower Highway Number 3 going south toward St. Moritz. A few
minutes later, the familiar blue Saab returned, perfectly centered in
his rearview mirror. Driving too fast, Ben hurtled past Malix and
Churwalden, making sharp ascents and sudden descents that made his
stomach plunge. He turned onto poorly paved byways, taking them at
speeds they weren’t meant for, and the combination of the rough surfaces
and the Opel’s over strained suspension system caused the car to shudder
and jolt. Once, he could hear the car’s chassis scrape loudly against a
bulge in the pavement, and he saw sparks in the rearview mirror.
Had he shaken his pursuers? The Saab would disappear for long
intervals, but never long enough. Time and again, it reappeared, as if
linked to him by a strong invisible coil. Ben sped through a series of
tunnels cut into gorge faces, past limestone cliffs and old stone
bridges spanning deep ravines. He was driving recklessly, his mounting
terror overcoming anything like caution; he had to count on his
pursuer’s prudence and sense of self-preservation. That was his only
chance.
As he headed toward the narrow mouth of a tunnel, the Saab suddenly shot
ahead of him and into the tunnel. Ben was puzzled: Had it been
following another car all along? Only when Ben tried to emerge from the
short tunnel did he see, in the yellowish mercury lights, what was
happening.
Fifty feet ahead, the Saab was now parked laterally across the narrow
road, blocking the egress.
Its driver, in a dark overcoat and hat, was holding up a hand, signaling
him to halt. It was a barricade, a roadblock.
Then Ben became aware that another car was following from the rear. A
gray Renault sedan. A car he’d caught glimpses of before without
focusing on. One of them, whoever they were.
Think, dammit! They were trying to wedge him in, trap him inside the
tunnel. Oh, Christ! He couldn’t allow that to happen! Ordinary
caution told him to slam on the brakes before hitting the barrier ahead,
but these weren’t ordinary circumstances. Instead, following some mad
impulse, Ben barreled ahead, flooring the gas pedal, his Opel sedan
ramming into the left side of the stationary two-door Saab. The Saab
was a sports car, built for speed, he knew, but it was probably eight
hundred pounds lighter, too. He saw the driver jump out of the way just
before the collision propelled the Saab to one side. The sudden
deceleration caused Ben to lurch forward against his straining seat belt
and shoulder strap, the taut fabric cutting into his flesh like bands of
steel, but the impact had cleared just enough room for him to scrape
through, with a horrifying scrape of metal against metal. The car he
was driving its front end partly crumpled, viciously banged up no longer
resembled the gleaming model he’d rented, but the wheels still turned,
and he roared ahead down the road, not daring to look back.
From behind him, he heard an explosion of gunfire. Oh, dear Christ! It
wasn’t over. It would never be over!
Galvanized by a fresh surge of adrenaline, Ben found his every sense
gaining laser-like focus. The old gray Renault, the one that had come
up from behind him in the tunnel, had somehow made its way through the
wreckage, too. In his rearview, Ben could see a weapon thrust through
the passenger’s side window, aiming at him. It was a submachine gun,
and, seconds later, it began firing off a nonstop fusillade of automatic
fire.
Move!
Ben sped down an old stone bridge spanning a gorge so narrow there was
barely room for traffic in either direction. Suddenly there came a
hollow pop, an explosion of glass a few feet away. His rearview mirror
had been shot out; bullets spider webbed the rear windshield. They knew
exactly what they were doing, and soon he would be dead.
There was a muted explosion, like a dull popping noise, and the car
suddenly lurched to the left: one of his tires had blown out.
They were firing at his tires. Trying to disable him. Ben remembered
the security expert who’d lectured the senior executives at Hartman
Capital Management about kidnapping risks in third-world countries,
drilling them on a list of recommended countermeasures. They seemed
laughably inadequate to the reality, then as now. Don’t get out of the
car was one of the pointers, he remembered. It wasn’t clear he was
going to have much of a choice.
Just then, he heard the unmistakable wail of a police siren. Through a
jagged hole in the opaque rear windshield, he saw that a third vehicle
was coming up fast from behind the gray sedan, this one a civilian
unmarked car with a flashing blue light on its roof. That was all he
could see: it was too far away to make out the model. Confusion filled
Ben’s mind again, but abruptly the gunfire ceased.
He watched as the gray sedan made a sudden 180-degree turn over the
shoulder of the road, zooming back on the narrow embankment and taking
off past the police car. The Renault, his pursuers inside, had gotten