The man by the van turned as I approached, called out, “Herodotus?”

“Aurelius,” I replied, brisk and businesslike, then, “I think we’re going to need a hammer.”

Curiosity flickered on the face of the woman, but my words had been enough to carry me from the lip of the road to the back door of the van, an arm’s reach from the nearest man, and so, without further ado, I pulled my hands from my pockets, and before he could even register my bare flesh, pressed them against his exposed face and jumped.

An aluminium coffee mug fell to the ground, bouncing along the road and into the overflowing gutter; Samir Chayet staggered and blinked, hands rising to the unfamiliar balaclava against his skin, and I drew the gun off my hip and put one bullet in the thigh of the woman and another into the belly of the man who stood beside her. As they fell, I stepped forward, pulled their guns from their respective holsters and, having nothing better to do with them, tossed them down the ravine, listening to them clatter away in the dark. My weapon still raised, I shuffled round to the driver’s side of the van, and seeing no one inside, turned again to find Samir frozen in place, the balaclava limp in his hands.

“Hi,” I said. “You’re a nurse, yes? There’s a man down by the stream in a Lycra suit. I’d like you to get him for me. He’s been shot. These two have also been shot, though only time will tell if fatally. I’ll kill you, them and anyone else who passes by if you don’t do as I say, understand?”

He understood perfectly.

“Terrific,” I exclaimed with forced brightness. “I think I saw a torch in the driver’s compartment. I’ll watch for your light.”

Time moves more slowly in the dark.

A cheap plastic watch on my wrist glowed green, declaring the hour unsanitary for any reasonable thing. The sky’s enthusiasm for the night’s rain was fading to a thick sleepy mist that obscured the line where black cliff met starlight. I stood away from the headlights of the van, gun in pocket, torch in hand, and watched the tiny bubble of Samir’s light moving by the stream far below.

Of the two individuals I’d shot, the man with the belly wound had lost consciousness, a mercy, I felt, for all concerned. The woman was awake, her hands pressed over her thigh, her breath fast and ragged, eyes full of pain. The blood through her fingers and the blood on the tarmac was bright and thin where torchlight touched it, black and endless when the light turned away. I’d missed her femoral artery, as her continued ability to breathe demonstrated, though she seemed unwilling to thank me for this.

I leaned against the side of the van and finished their coffee.

No one felt the urge to communicate.

Samir’s light began to ascend. I waited, torch turned towards the top of the path, for the two muddy figures to emerge. Coyle had one arm across Samir’s back, the other curled into his own shoulder where the blood still burned between his fingers. He looked, in the unforgiving beam of my torch, pale and grey, a blueish tinge to his lips. Samir’s face was bursting red, teeth locked together with effort, lips peeled back like a horse ready to bolt.

“Put him inside,” I said, gesturing to the back of the truck.

“What did you do?” Coyle breathed, his gaze skimming over the two fallen figures.

“Their boss shot you. I wasn’t about to to ask for company policy.”

Coyle didn’t cry out as Samir eased him on to the vehicle floor, which I took for a bad sign. “You’re a nurse–do something.”

“Are you going to kill me?”

When I’d asked the same question, I’d done so in shaking Arabic, but now I heard Samir speak, his voice was clear confident French with a thick southern accent. In a way I felt the performance of Samir I’d given suited his features more than the reality he now presented. “I give you my word that if you patch this man up I will let you live. And if you run I’ll kill you and everyone here. Do you understand?”

“I don’t know you.” I felt a flicker of admiration. Shaking, frozen Samir Chayet, who’d woken in the dark with his hands tied, was standing his ground in the middle of the night.

“Nor do you understand what happened, how you came to be here. Yet the simple fact is you can take a risk and run, or you can take a risk and stay, and with only the bare minimum of information available you must decide which is the greater.”

He weighed up his options and chose the wiser.

Five minutes later, he said, “This man needs blood.”

“Know your type?” I asked Coyle.

“Sure,” he growled from the floor of the van. “You know yours?”

“My friend is such a wag,” I confided to Samir. “He tries to cultivate this dry manly wit.”

“Nonetheless,” said the nurse, “he needs blood, or I can’t promise what will happen.”

“I’ll get right on that. Keep the first-aid kit; the two folk bleeding outside the van are probably going to want it. One of them might have a mobile phone. I suggest you call the police–only the police–just as soon as we’re gone.”

Chapter 73

Samir Chayet was a black silhouette in the rear-view mirror as I drove away. For less than eight hours I’d worn him, and his life would never be the same.

Coyle lay on the floor of the van behind me, one hand pressed to the dressing against his shoulder, his breath ragged, his skin grey. I’d put his jacket back around his shoulders, a blanket round his legs, and still he shivered, teeth clattering as he said, “What now?”

“Ditch the van. Get you to a doctor.”

“Am I your hostage?”

“That sounds like more trouble than it’s worth.”

“Why would you help me?”

“Help myself. Always. You going to stay awake?”

“You going to sedate me?”

“No.”

“Then I’m staying awake.”

I drove north, following the largest signs to the biggest roads. Judging from the water-carved crevices and black pines of the hills, I guessed I was heading deeper into the Massif Central, hunting out the lone motorway that had been forged across dry plateaux and sodden valleys of volcanic black. A phone rang on the passenger seat beside me; I ignored it. A few minutes later it rang again.

“You going to answer that?”

Coyle’s voice, a bare shimmer from the back.

“Nope.”

Sodium lighting announced the advent of the motorway. The signage promised turnings to ancient castles and towns of skilled artisans. The towns of skilled artisans offered medieval walls, Cathar monuments, Templar secrets, Hospitaller coats of arms, tourist shops in whose darkened windows hung swords, shields and ancient sigils, and perhaps drugs.

The phone rang again.

I ignored it.

Rang again.

Ignored it.

On the edge of a town I pulled into an empty supermarket car park.

The phone rang, a fourth time, bouncing insistent on the seat beside me.

I put it on speaker and answered.

A sharp intake of breath at the end of the line.

Then silence.

I sat back, eyes half-closed against the orange light of the car park, and waited.

Somewhere, someone else quite possibly did the same.

And silence.

The great roaring silence of the open line. If I strained I thought I could hear the gentle in and out of expectant breathing, steady and deliberate.

Behind me Coyle stirred, waiting for the conversation to begin.

I said not a word.

Breath on the line, and it seemed to me that, as our silence stretched–thirty seconds, forty, a minute–the breathing grew faster, brighter, and the word that came to mind was excited.

A child, gasping with delight, playing hide and seek somewhere in the dark.