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‘That’s why you only robbed places insured by the royal family’s company.’

She nods.

‘So this whole thing has been payback?’

‘Yes, but I never wanted it. Seven years ago, when we found each other, my brothers weren’t like this. I felt like I was finally part of a family. All we wanted was to be acknowledged, but it never happened. He never even spoke to us. Not once. But he did speak to the press to say he had no illegitimate children and anyone who said he was their father was doing it to extort money.’

Billy nods. ‘I remember that.’

‘It was the final straw for my brothers. They decided to take what would never be given to them, rip the heart out of Monaco, even got tattoos to commemorate it. I tried to talk them out of it but I was just the annoying little sister who they barely tolerated.’

‘How’d you all end up in Formula One?’

‘Our mothers were all involved in it in some way, either as fans or through their careers, that’s how they met my father. I guess we all thought that being in motorsport was our best way to get close to him. I hoped that if I was good enough to race at Monaco then he might, somehow, accept me. Pretty silly when I think about it now.’

He sees her eyes are wet with tears. ‘I’m so sorry you had to go through that.’

‘So am I.’ She takes a deep breath to compose herself, then forces a smile. ‘So where’s Thorne?’

He takes a moment, tries to break it gently: ‘I’m sorry. Dieter shot him and he—well, fell off the ramp.’

Her faces creases with pain. ‘He was a prick but he was my brother.’

He puts a comforting hand on her shoulder. ‘I am really sorry. If it’s any consolation he was about to kill me.’

She nods. ‘I warned all of them, over and over.’ She sniffs back the tears. ‘You know what the funny part is?’

‘What?’

She holds up her wrists. They’re handcuffed to the ladder. ‘Thorne has the keys to these.’

Billy studies them unhappily. ‘Christ.’

‘Is Dieter okay?’

He shakes his head. ‘Not really. He came down with a nasty case of propeller poisoning.’

Her eyes close and her heads drops.

‘What?’

‘He was the pilot.’

‘What? Who’s flying the plane?’

‘It must be on autopilot.’

Astonished, Billy looks into the cockpit. Yep. No pilots. At all. ‘This just gets better and better.’ He pulls in a deep breath. ‘We need to get you out of those so we can use
those.’
He points at the handcuffs then the parachutes.

‘How?’

He scans the cabin, clocks a small fire extinguisher attached to the right-side bulkhead. He slides it from its receptacle and turns to Franka. ‘Move back.’

She moves back as far as possible so the chain between the cuffs is exposed and taut against the ladder’s metal rung. He slams the bottom edge of the cylinder down on it.

Clang.
No joy. He hits it again, and then again, and then again. He studies the chain to see if it’s about to break. It is not. It looks fine. It’s both surprising
and
depressing. ‘Christ.’

‘This is just like
Titanic.’

‘Except in the movie Leonardo gets free.’ Billy swings the cylinder again.

Clang.
The chain doesn’t break.

Franka looks at him. ‘Did you pull me out of the burning car in Abu Dhabi?’

He nods. ‘I did. Sorry I lied but nobody could know.’

He swings the cylinder again.
Clang.
The chain doesn’t break.

‘I knew it. That terrible aftershave gave you away.’

He swings the cylinder again.
Clang.
The chain doesn’t break.

‘Gillette is great and did I chase you at any point?’

‘Gillette is terrible and I was in the truck on Collins Street.’

He nods and swings the cylinder again.
Clang.

‘Why the three ex-champion helmets? What did they signify?’

‘Nothing. They’re just our favourite drivers —’

The plane lurches hard right and the shuddering gets worse, then it noses down sharply.

‘Shit.’ Billy looks over the top of the ladder into the cockpit.

‘Why did you just look in there? You don’t know how to fly, do you?’

He pulls an expression that’s half a grin, half a grimace. ‘I’ve had lessons.’

Franka lights up. ‘That’s fantastic.’

‘Three.
Three lessons. My performance was — mediocre.’

‘Mediocre? Mediocre is great. I love mediocre. It’s so much better than “crash and burn”.’

He stares into the cockpit, lost in thought. ‘Yep.’

‘Or you could just take one of the parachutes and go.’

Still staring, he nods. ‘Yep.’ Then he catches himself and looks at her. ‘What did you say?’

‘I’m serious. Take a chute and go.’ She tries to ice it with a grin but doesn’t really pull it off.

He looks at her like she’s crazy, then says it: ‘Are you crazy?’

‘I don’t want you to feel obliged to stick around.’

‘Oh for heaven’s sake. As if I’d leave.’ He watches a smile crease the side of her mouth then climbs the short ladder to the cockpit. ‘Wish me luck.’

‘Luck.’

Billy slides into the captain’s chair. The plane noses down as it makes a lazy right turn. It’s already lower than he imagined. Much lower. Two thousand feet off the ground at most. He can see the Mediterranean laid out before him, then Monaco to the right. It’s not that far away. He takes the aircraft’s stick in hand and his feet find the pedals.

Stick and pedals, my man, stick and pedals.

‘Okay, you can do this. Stick and bloody pedals.’ He works the stick and pedals and pulls the plane level. He scans the gauges in front of him, focuses on speed and altitude: eighteen hundred feet and two hundred knots respectively.

The plane shudders again and then the thrum from the port engine changes pitch.

Franka pipes up. ‘That doesn’t sound good.’

Billy leans across the cockpit and looks out the right-hand window, takes in the sole remaining engine as it coughs, then coughs again—and dies.

‘Really
?’ Not happy, he scans the gauges to see what he can do to fix it, finds the problem and realises the only options are diddley and squat. It’s the fuel pressure, or lack there of. When the port engine exploded it must have destroyed the fuel line or fuel pump, which means the starboard engine has been starved of gas.

‘Wonderful.

This thing is now a very heavy glider. Billy scans the countryside below. They’re too far away to double-back to the airfield they departed from so there are just two options for a landing. Hills covered in dense forest or the ocean. Both blow chunks as a runway. Planes and trees never mix well and if he lands in the ocean, this aircraft, with that giant hole in the side of the fuselage, will sink instantly and take the handcuffed Franka down with it.

Where do I land this thing?

He’d better come up with a better option quick smart because the plane is dropping like a stone, sixteen hundred feet and falling fast. He looks across at Monaco, can see the circuit snake around the principality’s highrise buildings, the casino still pumping black smoke into the sky. He can’t think of anywhere on the track where he could land this thing that wouldn’t endanger a huge number of people.

Except for one spot.

He’s just going to need some help to do it. He draws the iPhone from his back pocket, hopes it still works after being dumped in Monaco Harbour. He works the screen. No joy. The thing is completely stuffed. ‘Farrk.’

‘Why “farrk”?’

‘A phone. I need one.’

‘Ta-da.’

He looks back into the cabin as her cuffed hands pop up holding an iPhone.

‘You’re beautiful.’

‘I am.’

‘Ta.’ He leans back and their hands touch as he takes it. He dials fast and the phone rings. And rings. Billy waits and listens. ‘Come-on-come-on-come-on.’ The phone keeps ringing. It’s not going to happen. This plan will not work unless he can —

The phone is answered.
^‘
Oui
?’

~ * ~

The conversation is short and sweet, maybe fifteen seconds long. There’s no time for Claude to explain how
speciale
Billy’s plan is, even more than the last one, or recommend another course of action. The Frenchman realises there’s no other option in this situation.

Claude thrashes the police motorbike down the thin, twisty ribbon of bitumen that runs along the mountain. Lucky for the Australian, and his Swiss companion, Claude was heading back towards the principality when the phone vibrated in his pocket. He had seen the plane take off, then had quickly lost sight of it. He turned around and headed back towards Monaco, thinking he could lend a hand at the casino if required while he waited for word from Billy. Then the phone rang and he was relieved to learn the Aussie was alive and well, though now he’s heard the plan he’s not sure how long that’s going to last.

Claude’s eyes flick to the sky, search for the aircraft. He can’t see it. To make matters worse he won’t be able to hear it either as it is coming in with dead engines. And, to ice the cake, Billy couldn’t give him an accurate time of arrival, except to say ‘quite soon’.

The Frenchman sees the pyre of black smoke from the burning casino to the left so he’s not that far from where he needs to be, no more than half a kilometre along this roadway. He rounds a sharp corner.

‘
Merde
.’ A police roadblock has been set up just ahead. Claude pulls on the brakes and the bike skids to a halt. There’s no time to talk his way through as the plane will be arriving ‘quite soon’ so using the direct route is impossible. He searches for another way. There are wall-to-wall houses to the left and a tree-lined park to the right.

The choice is easy. He guns the bike, turns right, mounts the footpath and navigates his way through the trees and into the park. He quickly realises the park is not just tree-lined. It’s actually tree-packed. It’s like Mother Nature’s obstacle course.

Zip zip zip.
The greenery whips past as Claude weaves between the obstructions and tries not to kill himself. If he hits one of these trees at fifty kilometres an hour it will end his trip real quick —

Whoosh.
He hears a loud rush of air. He glances left and scans the sky through the trees that whip past.

There it is.

The plane is low and moves fast, trails black smoke from the spot where an engine should be.

‘I’m late.’ Claude realises he’s not yet travelling fast enough to make it in time. He needs to get his skates on. He revs the bike and knocks it up to seventy-five klicks.

He grins. He hasn’t felt this alive in years.

~ * ~

The C-123 swoops along the principality’s coastline, suburban buildup to the right, the glistening Mediterranean to the left, all of it just a thousand feet below.

‘We’re coming in too hot.’ Billy says it to himself as he works the controls, feathers the flaps to slow the aircraft. It’s a heavy thing to steer and reacts slowly to any input, either via stick or pedals. He watches the airspeed drop to two hundred knots, searches the ground below, looks for the spot where he plans to put it down.

There.
His destination, five kilometres and change away. The Tunnel. The irony is not lost on him. A very short while ago he was doing everything in his power to get out of there and now he’s headed back —

‘Oh shit!’

With another fertiliser bomb!

He needs to get that bloody thing off the plane now. If the landing doesn’t go well it could detonate under the hotel and, well, didn’t he just risk his life making sure that didn’t happen? He needs to dump it into the ocean.

He has thirty seconds to get it done. He adjusts the aircraft’s heading minutely so that it’s aimed over the water, leans, flicks a switch to turn on the autopilot, pivots out of his seat, scales the ladder and drops down into the cargo hold.

Franka watches him run towards the bomb, stunned. ‘What are you doing?’

‘We’re landing in the tunnel. I gotta get this thing out.’

‘Oh Christ, okay.’

Billy gets behind the wooden pallet and pushes it towards the ramp five metres away. ‘Jeezus!’ It moves an inch, if that. It’s
extremely
heavy. ‘Come on!’ He puts his back into it, tries again. The pallet slides forward, but only three inches this time. ‘Bloody hell.’ He glances at his watch. He has twenty seconds and the pallet is still
five metres
from where it needs to be.

Frustrated she can’t help, Franka cheers him on: ‘You can do it!’

‘I can do it!’ Billy grits his teeth, drops his shoulder and pushes as hard as he can, uses everything he’s got. ‘Move-you-bastard.’ His boots slip on the slick floor but he keeps at it. The pallet slides forward another inch, and then another—then picks up speed. He drives his legs and capitalises on the momentum. It slides and slides and then all of a sudden it’s moving on its own as it slips out the rear hatch. They watch it tumble away.