His eyes followed the sequence of pictures of the shooter’s progress downhill to the marksman range, until finally the same competitor, cheek nestled against the target rifle’s stock, was in close-up.
This skier’s Lycra race suit was the same scattered white-on-black design as the murderer’s, but the face was clearly in focus.
Max’s breath was trapped in his chest; his heart tried to hammer it free.
He knew the clear-eyed girl with her finger on the trigger.
The killer whose name he couldn’t pronounce-Potyncza Jozsa.
Peaches.
22
That was what was so wrong.
Peaches had run back to the van with Sharkface’s men. Sayid gulped. Something invisible gripped his throat and stabbed him in the heart with an icicle. The look she gave him didn’t need words.
The vans burned rubber, found the nearest exit from the motorway, took it easy along country roads for the next fifty kilometers and slipped back on to the silky-smooth blacktopped autoroute.
Sayid’s mind was in turmoil. Bobby was probably dead, another man injured, and Bobby’s girlfriend was part of this whole terrifying mess. Desperately alone, he began to shake with fear. The shock was going to shut him down and he couldn’t help but let out a gulping sob.
“Shut up, you sniveling brat!” one of the bikers yelled from the front seat.
The tone in the boy’s voice had an unusual effect on Sayid. In that brief moment of temper, he realized they were rattled. Things hadn’t gone to plan, had they? No, they hadn’t. These evil, violent people had been as shaken by events as had Sayid, but for a different reason-the fear of being caught in an unexpected situation far from home. There was still time for other things to go wrong. For someone to stumble on them.
He brought his scattered thoughts back under control. The magic square numbers burned even more brightly in his mind: perhaps they held essential information that might stop these killers.
Sayid concentrated-the heat-seeking missile was back on target.
Max had to fight the obvious: Sophie was in league with Peaches, involved in killing Zabala and a member of Sharkface’s gang. Bobby Morrell hadn’t abandoned him and Sayid at Hendaye, he had been betrayed, maybe even killed by Peaches. These thugs worked for someone so powerful his reach could stretch across the world to get what he wanted by any means possible. Zabala’s cry, Trust no one-they will kill you, had even more resonance now. Had the whole thing been a charade? Sharkface’s gang attacking Sophie, Max riding like an idiot to the rescue, drawn in and seduced by her vulnerability, only to be used as a means to an end-to find Zabala’s secret?
Obvious? So it seemed, and he wished it weren’t. Distrust eats away at you like a terrible disease.
“Why did she take it?” Fauvre demanded once they were back in his office, his hands sifting through the old monk’s papers. “She must have known its importance. There can be no denying that! Damn her! She’s selling it for money, isn’t she? She’s found a buyer for something invaluable. Selling a man’s life!”
The distraught man’s anger was at a destructive level.
Whatever Sophie had done, Max convinced himself she was not a killer. She could have cut his throat when she took the stone. That gave him some hope, a glimmer of understanding.
Max needed this man on his side, because he had to get out of the Tears of the Angels and back to Europe.
“She’s caught up in something that she doesn’t understand,” Max said. He had pulled Peaches’s photograph from the wall in Sophie’s room. “Do you know this girl?”
Fauvre shook his head. “She is someone Sophie knows?”
“She’s the girl who killed Zabala,” Max said quietly.
The man’s shock was genuine. The flush of anger drained from his face. His shoulders slumped and he suddenly looked old and beaten. He held the photograph in a trembling hand. “What has my girl done? Why is she with these people? May God forgive me for not loving her enough.”
He poured a drink and gulped it down like medicine, wincing at the whisky’s sharpness. He sat shaking his head. After a moment Max saw a resolve creep back into his body. His broken spine straightened; his voice became more convincing.
“She is in danger. I must help her.”
“Then you need to help me,” Max told him. “Do you see that pattern on the girl’s race suit? I’ve seen it a couple of times, and each time violence has been attached to it. Look at the other competitors. Some of them have sponsorship logos. Do you think that design could mean anything? If it did and Sophie has gone to this girl, it might help us find where she is.”
Fauvre nodded. Now there was something he could do, something positive. He banged on the window. Abdullah was outside, making sure enough water was being poured on the burning embers of the feed store so no sparks got caught on the wind and started another blaze.
The riad owner came inside; rivulets of sweat scarred his soot- and dirt-caked face. Fauvre handed the photograph to the big man.
“Abdullah, take this to the computer room, scan it in and see if that design means anything.”
Abdullah nodded, asked no questions and turned away towards the next building.
“We have a good scanning system here. We use it to compare animals’ faces with those photographed in the wild. It’s a recognition package. Abdullah can do these things much quicker than I can.”
“I have a friend who’s the same,” Max said grimly, thinking of Sayid, who was who-knew-where.
“And that is all we can do? Hope to find an obscure link?”
Max knew he had to play his final card. “No, we can do more than that. We can see what your friend Zabala hid on the pendant’s stone.”
Max reached for the short-bladed knife that served as a letter opener. Sitting quickly, he pulled off one of his trainers, dug the knife into the heel and gouged out the cushioning gel.
He held the stone between his fingers.
“Sooner or later someone would have snatched that pendant. I replaced Zabala’s stone when I was in Abdullah’s riad.”
“Then Sophie-?”
“Has a piece of stone cut from a coaster. She has nothing,” Max said.
Angelo Farentino had enjoyed the first half of his cigar. Max Gordon’s father really had no idea at all who he was, and the hulking bodyguard-cum-nurse was out of earshot, so none of this conversation would be remembered by anyone. Except Farentino. But what Tom Gordon had told him dried the moisture in his mouth. The cigar had gone out, and the cloying, stale tobacco coated his tongue with a bitterness that had more to do with the bile of fear than the life-threatening habit of smoking.
Tom Gordon had made a casual remark, a meandering explanation of how he and other explorer-scientists had gone to Switzerland many years ago. Farentino immediately became more attentive. Gordon’s memory was like a jigsaw puzzle, and not all the pieces fitted, but the scraps and recollections began to form a complete picture for Farentino.
Environmental groups had investigated the huge nuclear particle accelerator establishment in Switzerland and had been invited to see for themselves the safety measures in place. Farentino remembered those days, could almost recall the article someone had written, and that he had published, about the melting glaciers in the Alps and the danger of causing any electromagnetic energy that could contribute towards climate change in that area. Quietly, so as not to cause alarm, safeguards were initiated for the underground research work-like a firewall on a computer. A barrier. But no one knew if it was sufficient should a major catastrophe strike the area.