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18
“How much did they pay you?” Bellasar demanded.
The overweight man in coveralls looked baffled.“Me? They didn’t pay me anything. I don’t know what’s going on! They gave Pierre an expensive watch for doing what he was going to do anyhow – take off and fly to Marseilles!”
“Where are they?”
The man pointed toward a path that went through trees on the opposite side of the airfield. “They stole two bicycles.”
Right, Bellasar thought. Or maybe you sold the bicycles for one of Sie
“It won’t do any good.”
“What are you talking about?”
The man pointed toward the front right tire.
It was flat. So was a tire on the pickup truck and the Renault. “Before the man left, he did that.”
“Fix them!” Furious about the waste of time, Bellasar didn’t wait for Potter to return. He ran toward the path. Potter will scan the countryside from above, he promised himself. A man and a woman on bicycles won’t be hard to see. We’ll keep going. We’ll catch them. I’ll never stop.
19
Pedaling as hard as he could, Malone steered around a wooded bend. The trees opened up. Facing a paved road, he squeezed the brake levers on the handlebars. To his right, from beyond a curve, he heard a truck approaching.
Sie
“Quickly,” Malone said. “We have to get to the other side.”
He dismounted and hurried with the bicycle, laying it on the pavement in front of the yet-unseen truck. After wiping his hand across his face, smearing the blood over a wider area, he lay on the road and pulled the bicycle over him.
“Look panicked,” he told Sie
The truck sped into view. Sprawled on the ground, gripping his leg, allowing himself to show pain, Malone suddenly worried that the truck was approaching too fast for it to be able to stop in time. Tangled with the bicycle, he wouldn’t be able to crawl free and roll to the side of the road fast enough.
“Jesus” – Sie
As she lunged to pull Malone’s bicycle off him, brakes squealed. But they didn’t seem to do any good. The truck kept hurtling toward them. She threw the bicycle to the side and dragged Malone off the road as the truck’s brakes squealed louder and smoke came from the tires. On an angle, the truck skidded to a stop twenty yards beyond where Malone had been lying.
The truck, larger than a pickup, had wooden sides, across which a tarpaulin was stretched. The inside was filled with ladders, sawhorses, and lumber. The driver’s door banged open. A sunburned man wearing sawdust-spotted clothes ran around the back and shouted angrily. The man’s French was far too rapid for Malone to understand, but Sie
The man’s anger turned to surprise and then shock. Paralyzed for a moment, he broke into motion, rushing to help Malone toward the truck.
“I told him you were hit by a car! He’s taking you to a doctor!” Sie
“Ask him if there’s room in the back for the bicycles.”
As the man helped Sie
“He says the nearest hospital is ten minutes away,” Sie
“That might not be soon enough.” Malone tried to sound in agony. Despite the rattle of the truck, he heard the helicopter in the distance. Hoping the driver would go faster, he made himself wince and moan.
The man came out with another torrent of French.
Malone barely listened, too busy concentrating on the approaching sound of the helicopter. He assumed that the truck would soon attract its attention. After all, he hadn’t seen any other vehicles on this road. How long would it take Bellasar to conclude that they had reached the road and caught a ride?
Isolated houses appeared. As the truck sped around another curve, Malone saw cars, trucks, bicycles, and people walking. The driver had reached a town, its speed-zone sign forcing him to slow. Imagining the view from the chopper, Malone had a mental overhead image of the speck of a truck blending with other specks. At a four-way stop, he noticed vehicles heading away in each direction and finally relaxed, deciding that for now there was no way Bellasar could track them.
For now, but Bellasar wouldn’t stop searching, and plenty of other problems remained, Malone knew. He needed to convince the truck driver not to go into the hospital with him. He needed to find a place where he could clean himself up. A men’s room near the emergency ward perhaps. Then he had to find a way out of town before Bellasar’s men converged on it. The first chance he got, he would use the emergency phone number Jeb had given him. But that was another problem. Why hadn’t Jeb followed through on the rescue plan they’d arranged? And that question, in turn, made Malone dread an even more immediate problem, the hard look in Sie
SEVEN
1
“Who’s Harry Lockhart?” Sie
“I don’t know. I’ve never laid eyes on him. A pilot with that name was supposed to meet us.”
They were in the backseat. The ticket seller at the depot had taken so long agreeing to accept some of the dollars Malone had brought with him from the United States that they had barely gotten to the bus before it moved out. As they left the outskirts of town, dusk thickened, lights coming on in houses. Malone glanced out the rear window to see if any cars seemed to be following them.
Sie
“A friend of mine.”
“Except he didn’t. Is he the same friend who told you about what happened to Derek’s other wives?” Her voice was sharper.
“Yes.”
“You pla
“Yes.”
“Which means you intended to use me against Derek from the start.”
“No,” Malone said. “It wasn’t like that.”
The bus’s motor was beneath them, its raucous vibration muffling their voices.
“Who do you work for?”
“Nobody.”
The back of the bus was cast in shadows.
“You just admitted that you have people providing you with information. You have a group that was supposed to give you backup.”
“It isn’t what you… I’m working with some people, yes, but I don’t work for them.”
“The CIA?”
“Yes,” he said reluctantly.
“Jesus.” Sie
“I’m not a spy.”
“Damn it, what do you call it, then?”
Their voices had become louder, causing people in the seats ahead of them to look back.
“Calm down. If you’ll let me explain…” Malone said softly.
“That’s what I’ve been waiting for.” The strain of lowering her emotion-laden voice tightened the sinews in Sie
“All right.” Malone took a deep breath, then told her what had happened on Cozumel. “Your husband destroyed most of what was important to me. When my friend turned up and offered me a way to get even, I took it.”