“You’ve made a big mistake,” said the woman sitting next to him. She had a thick accent.

“It probably won’t be my last.”

“Don’t be so sure. You’ve stolen something very valuable.”

Harvath gripped the steering wheel and turned hard onto the street at the end of the drive. “At $400,000, you’d think this car would corner a bit better.”

“I’m not talking about the car,” said the attractive blonde as she buckled her seatbelt. “I’m talking about me.”

“And who are you?”

“My name is Eva, but it’s my husband’s name you should be concerned with.”

Downshifting, Harvath took another tight turn and accelerated. Knowing the Russians, they wouldn’t call the police. Just like the thieves infamously dropped from the helicopter out in the ocean, they’d want to handle him personally. The thing was, Harvath was in no mood to go swimming.

The security men were going to come after him hard. But fast was going to be a little tough for them. They were creatures of habit, trained to follow orders. It wouldn’t occur to them to grab several of the guests’ sports cars. Instead, they’d pile into their heavily armored SUVs and wend through the narrow streets of Antibes as fast as their enormous tanks would allow.

Hitting the Boulevard du Littoral south toward Cannes, Harvath tried to focus on the traffic and not the tanned, toned legs projecting from the woman’s exceptionally short skirt next to him. “I don’t even want to know your husband’s name,” he said as he overtook the car in front of them. “As soon as we’ve put enough distance between us and the men from the hotel, I’ll let you out.”

“That’s going to be difficult,” said Eva as she produced what looked like an iPod Nano.

“Your husband monitors you with a tracking device?”

“He’s very jealous,” she said. “And very insecure.”

“Okay, I’ve changed my mind. Who’s your husband?”

“Nikolai Nekrasov.”

“Never heard of him.”

“The Russian billionaire? Owner of the Hotel du Cap.”

Now he knew why the guards had been so quick to lower their weapons. “Sorry,” he replied. “Doesn’t ring a bell, but in all fairness to your husband, I’ve fallen behind on my Forbes lately.”

Eva smiled. “So this isn’t a kidnapping?”

“No.”

“That’s too bad.” Rolling down the window, she tossed out the device. “That should buy us a little time. If you’re hungry, I have a friend who runs a wonderful restaurant in Cavalaire-sur-Mer.”

Either this woman was extremely unhappy with her husband or this was the world’s quickest case of Stockholm Syndrome on record. “Maybe I can take a rain check,” he said, looking into his rearview mirror. He could see the Russian security team weaving in and out of traffic behind him. They had to be insane to be driving like that in those kinds of trucks. They were going to get people killed.

“That’s too bad,” the woman said. “Nikolai hates Cavalaire-sur-Mer, but I think it’s very romantic. Something tells me you would enjoy it.”

Harvath didn’t doubt it. “Maybe another time,” he said as he pulled into the oncoming lane and accelerated. The closer they got to Cannes, the heavier the Saturday-evening traffic became.

Drivers honked and flashed their brights, but he kept going before a truck forced him back onto his side.

He glanced in the rearview mirror again and couldn’t see the security men. Not yet, at least. The momentary satisfaction he felt evaporated when his passenger said, “It looks like Nikolai is taking you very seriously.”

Harvath looked to his left and saw a red EC135 Eurocopter tracking parallel with them over the water.

“Your husband is very persistent, isn’t he?”

“He doesn’t like sharing his things,” she said, placing her hand on the inside of his thigh.

She quickly pulled it back and gripped the edges of her seat as Harvath slid between two cars with just inches to spare.

Now that there was a helicopter involved, there was only one way he could disappear and to do it, he’d need cover.

Turning to Eva, he said, “I need a favor.”

“That depends,” she replied.

When Nikolai Nekrasov’s armored Denalis thundered into Cannes, they came to a screeching halt at a café on the Avenue du Petit Juas. As the hotel helicopter hovered above, Mrs. Nekrasov recovered from her ordeal over a glass of Montrachet. The American who had tortured the hotel’s concierge and shot three of its security staff was nowhere to be seen.

CHAPTER 22

CHICAGO

Javed Miraj, the Pakistani mechanic from the Crescent Garage, turned out to be an excellent source of information.

He explained in detail how Ali Masud, the shop’s bookkeeper, had been instructed to create a new logbook and to leave out the vehicle the police were searching for.

When asked why, the mechanic’s response was very simple. Not only were Fahad Bashir, the Crescent’s owner, and Ali Masud from the same village in Pakistan, but so was the driver who had run down Alison Taylor.

In Pakistan, loyalty followed a very strict hierarchy: family first, then village, and then tribe. The rules were even stricter abroad. It was a firmly held us against them mind-set.

Davidson asked the mechanic if he knew where the original logbook was. Miraj had no idea, but strongly suspected it had been disposed of. Fahad Bashir and his son, Jamal, were smart. Once they were committed to doctoring the logbook, he was certain they wouldn’t leave behind any information that could incriminate them.

Vaughan was more concerned with nailing the driver than the men of the Crescent Garage, but this was where Javed Miraj’s usefulness as an informant started to break down.

Yes, he had worked on the cab in question. He even ID’d the piece of black plastic that had been recovered at the scene which turned out to be part of the plastic header from above the radiator. He described how he had replaced the hood and a side mirror and had pulled a new windshield, complete with a Chicago City sticker, from one of the damaged cabs in the lot behind the garage.

The driver had been nervous and upset. He had offered to pay double to get the work done right away. The mechanic had been pulled off another taxi to work on the Yellow Cab. It was a small shop and he couldn’t help but hear how the man had sustained the damage. At that point, though, the information flow from the mechanic practically dried up.

Understandably, he couldn’t remember the cab number. He saw lots of cabs every day. Cataloging the numbers was Ali Masud’s job. All he could remember was that it was a four-digit number with a three in it.

He was able to provide a description of the driver and even coughed up a first name, but a dark-skinned Pakistani named Mohammed in a city like Chicago probably wouldn’t do much to winnow down the haystack.

As the mechanic had no Chicago family that would be looking for him, Vaughan and Davidson decided to let his coworkers think he’d been arrested. After cleaning up his road rash they drove him down to the Department of Revenue and searched every four-digit cab license with a three in it until their eyes were bleeding and they had come up with their man, Mohammed Nasiri.

With Nasiri’s full name and cab number, they approached the owner of his cab, Yellow Cab Company.

Because of his position with Public Vehicles, Paul Davidson was fairly well known by the cab operators. He was also, because of his no-BS, take-no-prisoners style, fairly disliked.

He wasted no time in going straight to the top at Yellow, calling the director of operations at his home and waking him up. After Davidson threatened to enact a crackdown of epic proportions on Yellow Cabs across the city, the director agreed to meet him the next morning at their corporate offices.