The Mayan Codex (15 page)

Calque followed Lamia out onto the street. The early morning rush hour had started, and the buzz and swish of passing traffic merely added to his sense of frustration. ‘What are you going to do, Mademoiselle? Where are you going to go?’

‘What possible concern can that be of yours?’

Calque was briefly tempted to come clean and admit that his tape recording was useless. To follow his hunch that the woman was genuine. Perhaps she really had rebelled against her mother and all that she stood for? But thirty years of ingrained caution, in which Calque had lived by the rule that you never, ever, offer information to your opponent that he might one day use against you, overrode his better instincts. ‘Please let me drop you off somewhere. It’s the least I can do in the circumstances.’

Lamia shook her head distractedly. She was on the look-out for a taxi, and already seemed to have blanked Calque out from her consciousness.

Calque’s cell phone rang. He received a call so rarely that at first he only looked around vacantly, as if the call belonged to someone else. Then he slapped his jacket, and began to rummage in his pockets.

Lamia had seen a taxi, and was beckoning it towards her.

Calque pressed the receive button and raised the cell phone gingerly to his ear, as if he feared that it might be about to explode. ‘Yes? Calque here.’

‘It’s Picaro.’

Calque flinched. What the hell was Picaro doing, calling him up in a public place? Their business was over. The whole sorry fiasco had cost him 3,000 Euros that he could ill afford, and had provided him with precisely zero information, and a resentful woman eager to wipe his dust off her shoes as fast as humanly possible.

‘Listen, Captain. Don’t ask me why I’m doing this. But I can’t let you walk into a shit storm with a leaking umbrella.’

Calque was concentrating all his attention on Lamia. A taxi had stopped directly in front of her. She caught Calque’s eye and made a money movement with her fingers. ‘What? What are you talking about, Picaro? What shit storm?’ Calque raised a placatory hand and started across the road towards Lamia, the phone still clamped to his ear.

‘You’ve heard of a
shamal
, Captain? That’s what the desert Arabs call a five-day, three-thousand-foot-deep sandstorm. The type that’s so fucking powerful it can strip the skin right off your face. Well this is a
shamal
of a shit storm.’

‘Picaro …’

‘Listen. On the way out to the main road. After I’d delivered the woman and the tape recorder. A man was waiting for me. An armed man.’

‘A what?’

‘You heard me, Captain. I’m not going to repeat myself. This man I’m speaking about. He must have gone to check on the woman, realized she was gone, and followed me from the house. He came at me with a pump-action shotgun. So I had to kill him.’

‘You killed him?’ Without realizing it, Calque had switched back into police mode. He patted at his jacket in a vain search for his notebook.

‘Look, Captain. I don’t want this coming back at me in any way. I’ve a wife and son to think of. I’ve thought about it, and I think you owe me that much.’

‘How did you kill him, Picaro?’ Calque had abandoned the search for his notebook. What was the point?

‘I smashed into him with my car. He was going to put out my lights. I had no choice in the matter.’

‘And the shotgun?’

‘Already disposed of.’

‘Where did you leave him?’ The taxi driver was shrugging his shoulders at Lamia, and pointing to his meter.

‘In the brush. By the side of the road. Did you see a parked Land Rover when you drove away from the beach?’

‘Yes. Yes, I did. And another car. An empty blue Renault. Parked close up nearby.’

Picaro froze. ‘Captain. There was no blue Renault parked when I left there. The area was clean. I’m getting off the phone right now. And you. You’d better look to your own arse.’

Calque reached Lamia in three strides. He held up a placatory hand to the taxi driver, and drew her to one side.

‘We have a problem. The man who got you out of the house has just telephoned me. He ran into one of your mother’s people on the way back from the beach. The man came at him with a shotgun, and he was forced to kill him. As a result, we were almost certainly followed here.’

‘But that’s impossible …’

‘We don’t have time for this, Lamia. I’ll explain later. You know your mother better than I do. You know what she and her people are capable of. Will you do as I ask?’

Lamia allowed her eyes to search across Calque’s face. She nodded.

‘Get into the taxi. Now. I’m going to give the driver the address of my hotel in Cogolin. You must go there. I shall follow along behind in my car. At some point you’ll see me turn off the road. Don’t change the driver’s instructions. I must know where to find you. My hunch is that we are dealing with only one man. He will follow me, because I present the greatest threat to him. And if he doesn’t follow me and follows you instead, I will know where to come to find him. Do you understand what I am saying?’

‘Yes.’

Calque leaned across and gave the driver his instructions. He handed Lamia some Euros.

‘I’ll catch you up. Don’t worry. Take a room at my hotel under the name of Mercier. Then lock your door until I come. Have you got that?’

He backed off before she could change her mind. Without looking around, Calque made for his car. He got in, started the engine, and pulled into the traffic fifty metres or so behind the taxi. There were three cars between him and Lamia. None of them was a blue Renault. Calque glanced into his rear-view mirror.

The Renault was five cars behind him.

Calque’s belly tightened with fear. He wasn’t an action man. Never had been. He had always left that to the young – to people like Paul Macron. Which is why Macron was dead, and he was still alive. The thought ate into him like acid.

Now his only priority was to protect the woman. It was clearly his fault that she was in this situation, and he must do his very best to extricate her. He mustn’t fail her the way he’d failed his assistant.

Five kilometres down the road, at the Cogolin Plage roundabout, Calque veered off to the left, onto the La Croix Valmer road. The blue Renault followed him.

Calque made the sign of the cross. He knew that his only chance now was to use his intelligence. Outflank his opponent. Think laterally. If he couldn’t achieve that, the man would simply force him off the road at a suitable spot and do away with him.

He must keep the man guessing. Force him to hold back.

Calque hung a left towards Gassin. That would make the man think. Was Calque heading back towards Pampelonne? Or to the Countess’s house?

Calque accelerated up the steep hill towards the village. The road beyond Gassin was a winding one, and little used at this time of year. If the man was to make his move, he would doubtless make it there.

Calque was counting on the man’s innate curiosity to stay his hand. It was a thin edge to trust your life to, and Calque could feel the anxiety eating away at him. He had no weapon in the car. No possible means of self-defence. His heart was weak, and a lifetime of heavy smoking had ensured that his lungs would be of little use in a crisis.

The blue Renault closed in on him. They were well out of Gassin, now, and heading into the hills towards Ramatuelle. They couldn’t be more than five or six
kilometres from the Countess’s house. Surely the man would hold his fire for a little longer?

Calque saw a car ahead of him, and speeded up. There was safety in numbers. People instinctively tried not to shit on their own doorsteps if they could possibly avoid it. And certainly not with witnesses present. The man behind him had already had one body to deal with – two would prove something of a crowd, surely?

The extra company appeared to have put the blue Renault man off his stride. Calque saw the car behind him drop back again. Perhaps he still thought that Calque was unaware of his presence?

Now they were approaching Ramatuelle. Calque sent up a brief prayer that the motorist in front of him was not intending to stop off for a newspaper or for his morning cup of coffee. He felt an overwhelming affection for the anonymous little man he was following – curious how it was possible to love a complete stranger.

The man continued on out through the village with Calque clinging to his tail like a pilot fish. They were barely three kilometres from the Countess’s house now, and Calque began to feel an upwelling of confidence in his own judgement. He had called the thing correctly. The man driving the blue Renault had obviously been in touch with the Countess, and she had told him to hold off and see what Calque intended.

Now it only remained for Calque to keep his head – before inserting it directly inside the tiger’s mouth.

With one hand still on the wheel, Calque felt inside his jacket pocket and retrieved the tape recorder. He flipped open the lid of the tape compartment and extricated the cassette. He wedged the tape recorder behind the passenger seat cushion, and placed the cassette on his lap. Then he felt around for his cell phone and placed that beside it. He owed that much to Picaro. It wouldn’t do to have the Corpus scrolling back through his recent calls and identifying who it really was who had snatched Lamia.

The blue Renault was still pulling flotilla duty fifty metres behind him.

Two kilometres to go until they reached the Countess’s house – had he left it too late? Had fear eaten into his brain and frozen his intelligence?

Calque saw an S-bend three hundred metres ahead. That was it. This would be his last chance. The man in the blue Renault would almost certainly close up on him as they neared the Countess’s house.

As he approached the bend, Calque triggered the offside electric window and stepped on the gas. It would take the blue Renault a split second to respond to the move and match his speed. That would be enough to carry Calque into the blind part of the corner, temporarily out of sight of both the car in front and the blue Renault behind him.

As Calque rounded the crest of the corner, he tossed the cassette and the cell phone through the open window, his eyes searching feverishly for landmarks in the underbrush at the side of the road. Then he punched
the window button, and used his engine braking, and a rapid downshift through the gears, to slow the car back down – he wanted no tell-tale flashing of red lights to mark what he had done.