I turned and walked swiftly to the far corner of the hotel, past the rear of the section housing the plunge pools. On this level all I could see through the windows to my left was cool lighting and empty massage tables.

To my right sleek yachts were hitched to a series of floating pontoons. A grass bank sloped up from the hard standing that bordered the water. Clumps of evergreens had been planted along the top of it, to provide shelter from the wind or maybe to hide the moorings from people who didn’t like boats.

There was a shout as I reached the bank. I ignored it, climbed into the treeline and went left, towards where Hesco had left his wagon.

On the far side of the trees a row of hard tennis courts, surrounded by a high chain-link fence, stretched down towards the lake. A string of blue flashing lights bounced off the night sky beyond them.

As I reached the front of the hotel, two dark blue Land Cruisers screeched to a halt four hundred short of the resort entrance, and eight lads in combats leapt out. They split up almost immediately, and spread themselves across the southern flank of the complex, advancing towards the marina in pairs, weapons in the shoulder.

The Maserati had disappeared, but I kept walking until I got to the Polo. Like Hesco and his shiny-headed mate, I needed to get the fuck out of there before the GIGN established a cordon.

Two more Land Cruisers and an ambulance filled my rear-view as I headed left on the main. As they turned into the entrance behind me, I took the second right and looped back towards Albertville.

22

An hour later I passed the Buffalo Grill. Not a hint of neon. The place was deserted. That was fine by me. I’d rehydrated and got an energy bar down my neck en route, and food was so far down my list of priorities it hardly featured. My head was already filled with the events of the night.

‘Ly … u … bo … va …’

Four syllables.

I let them echo through the darkness as I drove.

Four syllables meaning ‘love’.

At first I’d thought he was telling me that he’d been thrown off the balcony because he had saved the boy.

Now I remembered that Lyubova was also the name of Frank’s ex-wife. The one Laffont couldn’t bring himself to trust.

Was Mr Lover Man saying that she was responsible for Frank’s death?

And what the fuck did ‘You … ran’ mean? Is that what I had done on the mountain? Or had he said, ‘You … run’? Had he been warning me to get away from Aix? To get away from this whole gangfuck?

My head was starting to spin again, just like it had when I was chucking my guts up at 1,987 feet. I opened both front windows, breathed deeply and steadied myself.

I was sorted by the time I reached the motel. I slid the Sphinx back into my waistband and swung myself out of the wagon. A motion sensor triggered the light beside our door. All three hairs had gone missing.

I carried on through the arch and checked the bathroom window from the outside. It was firmly shut.

I went back and pushed gently on the door, but it didn’t give. I went through the knocking routine, then murmured, ‘Raskolnikov…’

Nothing.

I repeated the sequence a little more loudly.

Still no sign of life from inside.

I fired up the Polo and made for the recycling point. A goods train rattled past as I parked up. I did the whole knocking thing all over again, pulled open the door and whispered our code word. This time I got a response.

‘Nick …’

There was a bump and a squeak and Stefan poked his head out from between the wheelie-bins. He rushed over and grabbed me, like I was some kind of lifebelt.

‘Stefan … no …’ I managed to prise myself loose and steered him straight into the boot of the wagon, stopping only to slide his rucksack off his shoulders.

Before I closed the hatch he handed me the room key. The big chunk of metal hung down from it, with the motel’s address stamped on one side. Fuck that. I threw it into the bottle bank and drove north towards Ugine.

I didn’t stop until I got to a truckers’ café off the main. I pulled into a parking space alongside a white van as the first hint of dawn crept into the sky. I went inside and grabbed a salami baguette for both of us, a big frothy coffee for me and a Coke for him, then hauled him out of his hiding place and on to the passenger seat.

He immediately kicked into overdrive, in a completely impregnable combo of Russian and English.

I told him to take a deep breath, get the food and drink down his neck, then start again. Slowly.

He opened and closed his mouth a couple of times, then nodded. After three mouthfuls and one gulp of the fizz he rattled out the story of his last few hours.

I gripped his shoulder. ‘Wait. Stop. First things first. Did someone try to get into the room?’

He shook his head. ‘No. But I knew someone would, very soon …’

Either this boy had gone telepathic on me, or he’d seen something. ‘The TV?’

He nodded. ‘They’re saying that the man who crashed didn’t die. That’s you, isn’t it? And they’re saying he stole a boy …’

‘Any pictures?’

‘Some …’ His expression clouded. ‘Of my father. And the chalet.’

‘And you?’

‘Not so far. But …’

My turn to nod. ‘You’re right. It’s your picture next.’

If it was, I’d have to give the boy a very quick makeover. But I wasn’t going to worry about that until I had to. If I tried to second-guess every possible action in theatre and out, I’d spend my whole life frozen to the spot. And right now I needed to get us into Switzerland.

I fished around in my day sack and took out the two matching UK passports in the names of Nick and Steven Saunders, each of which IDed the other as next of kin. They were both renewed recently, but someone had done a good job of making them look as though they hadn’t come straight out of the printer. They even had some Eastern European stamps for places we’d both been.

I ran through them with Stefan, and asked him to rethink his memories of places he’d visited with his real dad as places he’d visited with me. We practised our names a bit. I told him he was Steven now, and I was going to call him Steve. Then I shoved them in the glovebox and pocketed another Nokia, a battery and one of the SIM cards.

I wrapped the new Sphinx, spare mag and rounds in Frank’s face flannel, opened the boot and put it under the spare tyre. I slung the day sack in on top. Stefan was about to follow it on to the dog blanket but I shook my head. ‘If we get stopped, that would be quite difficult to explain. Steve, mate, it’s time for you to ride up front again.’

I assembled the Nokia, texted Pasha and stepped away from the wagon as his call came through.

He kicked straight off. ‘I don’t know for sure about Frank and the Kremlin. But the knives are out.’

‘And the other thing?’

He hesitated. ‘She wasn’t happy, my friend. But she took your advice immediately.’

Trying not to picture the expression on Anna’s face, I punched the red button and chucked the phone into the back of a random cement mixer. I didn’t know where it was going and I didn’t much care, as long as it was somewhere else. The Swiss federal authorities tracked every mobile signal, twenty-four/seven, from the moment you found your first relay mast, and I didn’t want to be on anybody’s radar while I paid Lyubova a visit in Lake Konstanz.

As we headed for the border, Stefan and I continued to build a cover story we could share.

‘If anyone asks you what I do, tell them I’m a collector.’

‘What do you collect, Nick?’

‘I think maybe you should get used to calling me Dad.’ I kept my eyes on the road. ‘Safer that way.’