Within four minutes, Lars was off the roof, rifle and parachute silk packed away, the cord rewound, the pebble kicked from under the trapdoor. He took the service elevator back down. It seemed the lucky way. And as he descended, he thought of the shock, the incomprehension, followed by the mayhem and panic that would start in the director’s box and slowly spread through the stadium as it sank in.
The Russian was dead, of that he was certain. And tied up with him were $30 billion worth of assets, as well as his tight, close relations with the Kremlin, and with a business empire that stretched across the world. But that was the aftermath, he thought. That was nothing to do with him. That was effect; he was cause.
He locked the steel door at the foot of the tower block, checked the entrance to the concrete corridor, and stepped out across the playground, slowly, until he reached a white van parked in a street around the corner. The wind puffed suddenly. A front was coming in, and the wind would precede it.
Chapter 3
LOGAN RENTED A CAR at the Nîmes airport, 350 miles south of Paris. It was seven and a half hours after he’d put Plismy in a taxi. He hadn’t slept.
It was a Saturday; the air was clear and blue in the south, and the country as he drove north of the city was parched. When he crossed the bridge at Sainte-Maxime, he saw that the river was reduced to a trickle.
He wanted to be at Alès before lunchtime to set the first stage of his plan, and he drove the Peugeot into the old coal-mining town at the edge of the Cévennes just before midday. Removing all signs of the rental company, he threw them in a municipal dump at the edge of town and drove into a small mechanic’s shop situated up a dusty side street, which the Michelin guide said was open on a Saturday.
The shifty-eyed owner in this one-man operation had just withdrawn on a wheeled trolley from beneath a car and was cleaning his hands on a rag before returning home to lunch. He waved Logan away, but the American persisted.
The clutch was giving him trouble, he said, and he couldn’t go any farther. Without examining anything, the man shook his head, telling him he was shut, and nothing was possible until Monday. Logan asked whether he could leave the Peugeot there until Monday, then, and whether the man had another car he could hire for the weekend. He had money, he explained. It was urgent; he was desperate. This arrangement finally suited the man, and Logan headed eastwards in an old red Renault van with the side panel advertising a local baker’s shop in chipped and fading cream lettering.
He parked at the edge of the market town of Uzès, on a piece of waste ground that doubled as a car park on Saturday market day, and walked into the medieval square for a beer and a ham and cheese baguette. He watched the stalls being dismantled and the crowds of shoppers thinning away. After lunch, he strolled around the outside of the square and found a digital electronic announcement board near the main entrance to the square, which had no announcements written in its dotted yellow writing, other than “Samedi, 16 août 2008.”
He bought a local map and found Fougieres a little to the north of town, up on the high plateau of the garrigue.
When he felt relaxed and ready, he walked back to the van and checked his camera and film for the second or third time that morning. Then he headed out of town along a plane-tree-lined road that climbed up onto the plateau in a series of curves and switchbacks. He smelled the wild rosemary growing along the side of the road and saw the scrawny vines of the region that produced much of France’s undrinkable—and heavily subsidized—wine.
The little village was very ancient and partly walled—where the stones hadn’t been dismantled for building houses. A small square at the centre contained the mayor’s office, with a tricolour above the entrance, hanging flatly in the windless air. A manor house that had seen better days and was now a bed and breakfast stood opposite the mayor’s office, and various other less seigneurial habitations with wrought iron gates, with views that stretched for fifty miles to the high mountains of the Cévennes, randomly dotted the open space.
Logan parked behind a stone barn, which housed the office and weighbridge used for the grape harvest. It was after three o’clock in the afternoon, and there was a sleepiness about the village that perhaps, he thought, never left it.
He walked back up into the square. He caught the sound of splashing and noticed the unnatural blue of a swimming pool behind the hedge of the bed-and-breakfast manor house. He would ask there.
There were two men sunbathing beside the pool, and the door to the house was wide open. He walked up the path between shocking pink bougainvilleas and called down a dark, flagstoned corridor until a man wearing an unconvincing wig appeared.
He was a visitor, Logan explained, come to see the new resident in the village, the foreign lady.
“Avec l’enfant?” the man enquired.
Yes, the one with a child, he agreed, though Plismy hadn’t mentioned that.
The man with the wig gestured generally up a small lane and mentioned a house with a palm tree in the garden, before dismissing Logan by turning his back and walking away. He was busy with something. That was good. It might mean he would forget their encounter.
Logan didn’t walk straight up the lane, however, but took a more circuitous route, through a horse’s meadow and past a tumbledown wood barn with a portable sawmill outside. The palm tree was visible, higher than the surrounding houses.
He crossed the lane. Heavy iron gates barred the entrance to the house—electrically operated, he noticed. That kind of security was nowhere else to be seen in the village. Through a crack in the join of the gates, he saw a light blue Mercedes parked in a dusty yard. That was what he needed.
Turning swiftly away, he walked round the other end of the village, away from the horse’s field and away from the bed and breakfast where the man had given him the directions. Behind the barn the red van was cooking in the sun where he had left it.
Now was the time to wait. He turned the van around, still concealed behind the barn, and pointed it towards the route down the winding hill to Uzès.
At six thirty, after nearly three hours in the sweltering car, with brief walks down into the vineyards to cool himself a little, he saw the blue Mercedes begin its descent to the flatter ground below the plateau and onto the straight road with the plane trees. Switching on the engine of the van, he began to follow it from a distance of about half a mile.
It was twenty-four hours since he’d met Plismy in Paris, and he felt the eagerness of the chase, the excitement of new momentum.
When they reached Uzès, he drove slowly around the road that circled and concealed the square behind old, high stone buildings. He finally caught sight of the blue Mercedes, parked at the side of the street. Its two occupants, he now saw, were a woman in a baseball cap and a small boy. They were going through the process of preparing to get out, the boy strapped in, the woman forgetting it, then the boy urgently needing some small toy from the floor of the car.
When they finally climbed out, the woman pressed the key fob for the car alarm as Logan passed without looking at them. He glimpsed through the corner of his eye the woman taking the boy’s hand on the pavement.
Logan kept going in the direction the two were walking until he was out of sight. He pulled the van into a parking space on the same side of the road, jumped out, and made for a café whose pavement tables led into a darker interior. He hoped they wouldn’t turn off before the café. They didn’t.
A few minutes later, he watched from the interior of the café as they drew level. The boy had stopped and was tugging the woman’s arm. He had dropped his plastic toy, and she turned back to pick it up. Logan saw them illuminated in the sunlight from the darkness of the bar.