They went over the top without warning. Swinging round a particularly suicidal bend, the road suddenly levelled out. They started to descend. Lights appeared in the distance. `Le Pont,' Newman said.
A cluster of houses, steep-roofed, spilling down a hillside. The roofs heavy with snow. Wooden balconies at first-floor level. Hardly more than a hamlet. Newman nudged the car past a hotel ablaze with lights. Hotel de la Truite.
`Look!'
Newman pointed up at the hotel. Under the eaves shards of ice a foot long projected downwards. A palisade of icicles. Inverted. The station was little more than a one-storey hut, an isolated building with no one about. The dashboard clock registered 19.26 hours. Newman parked the car beside the building, out of sight of the exit. First, he had swung it through one hundred and eighty degrees – involving a major rear-wheel skid which made Nancy clench her hands. Ready for a swift departure. He left the engine ticking over.
`I want you to take over the wheel,' he told Nancy. 'I'm going to stand near the exit when the train comes in. This could be a trap. If I come running move like a bird when I dive inside – back the way we came. I'm leaving you now – look, the train is coming…'
The train, three small coaches, an abbreviated caterpillar of lights, stopped behind the station – no more than a wayside halt. Newman heard the distinctive sound of a door slamming. A gaunt-faced man, hatless, carrying two suitcases, appeared under the pallid light over the exit. He had a haunted look, calling out in German.
`Newman! Where is the car… I am being followed…'
Two men appeared behind him in the exit. A car driven at high speed came up the road from the direction of Neuchatel- and Berne. Its headlamps swept like searchlights over the station exit. Newman caught a flash of red – red like the Porsche he had seen on the Thun motorway. There was a scream of brakes applied savagely. The barrel of a rifle projected from the driver's window. At the same moment Nancy drove the Citroen round from the side of the station, pulled up, threw open the doors.
`Inside the car, Seidler!' Newman yelled.
He grabbed one suitcase, hurled it on the rear seat, shoved Seidler after it, shut the door and dived into the front passenger seat. The other car was still moving, slithering in a skid on ice as the rifle barrel moved further out of the window. One of the two men following Seidler was pulling something out from inside his coat.
`Move!' Newman shouted at Nancy. 'Back the way we came…'
The rifle was fired, a detonating report above the sounds of both cars' engines. The man hauling something out from inside his coat pocket was thrown backwards as though kicked by an elephant. The rifle spoke a second time. The other man performed a weird pirouette, clutching his chest, then sagging into the snow.
It was incredible marksmanship. Two bullets fired by a man who had to be driving with one hand, operating the rifle with the other, all while his car was recovering from a skid. Two men died. Newman had no doubt that neither had survived the impact of what had sounded like a high-velocity rifle.
Nancy was driving the Citroen across the beam of the other vehicle's headlights, speeding beyond them as she pressed her foot down regardless of the treachery of the ground beneath their wheels. Then the station was behind them and they were going back over their previous route.
`That man behind him pulled out a gun,' Seidler croaked hoarsely.
`I saw it,' Newman replied tersely.
They were approaching the Hotel de la Truite when a black Mercedes swung out from the drive straight across the path of the Citroen. Nancy jammed on the brakes, the car slithered, then stopped. The Mercedes drove on past towards the station.
`Bastard!' Nancy snapped between clenched teeth. `Maybe he's on his way to meet two bodies,' Newman speculated.
Nancy glared at him and started the car moving again. Outside the hotel a pair of skis had been rammed vertically into the ground. During their brief stop Newman had heard singing with a drunken cadence coming from inside the hotel. Death at the station, revelry at the inn. Apres-ski in full swing.
Seidler leaned forward, grasping the backs of their seats.
He stared through the windscreen as though getting his bearings. He spoke suddenly, this time in English for Nancy's benefit.
`Not the left turn to Rolle! Bear right. Take the lakeside road…'
`Do as he says,' Newman said quietly. 'Why, Seidler? I'd have thought this was a good place to leave fast…'
`There is a house on the left-hand side of this road at the foot of the mountain. We talk there… Mein Gott, what was that?'
`It's that helicopter again,' Nancy said, glancing out of her side window. 'If it is the same one. I first heard it when we turned off at Rolle…'
`So did I,' agreed Newman. 'It followed us up the mountain. There are a lot of military choppers floating around…'
`Military?' Seidler sounded alarmed. 'You were followed?'
`Shut up!' Newman told him. 'Just warn us before we reach this house…'
`Keep to the road round the lake before I tell you to stop. Keep the very fast speed…'
`I need directions as to the route, not how to drive,' Nancy replied coldly.
At about three thousand feet the Vallee de Joux nestles inside folds of the Jura Mountains. To their right the lake was a bed of solid ice covered with a counterpane of snow. To the left the mountain slopes were scarred with the graffiti of daytime skiers propelling themselves across the snow. Here and there loomed the silhouettes of two-storey houses constructed of shiny new wood. As a winter ski resort Le Pont was prospering.
`This is it,' Seidler called out, 'just before we arrive in the L'Abbaye village…' He leaned forward again. `Place the car in the garage…'
`Don't,' Newman interjected. 'Drive it under that copse of firs. Back it in if you can – facing the way we're going now.'
`You know something? I might just manage that, Robert…'
Newman's mind was galloping. He had just seen his opportunity. L'Abbaye. Beyond the far end of the lake was Le Brassus. Only a few kilometres beyond Le Brassus was a tiny Douane, a Customs post, thinly manned. And beyond that the road passed into France. The road continued over French soil for another twenty kilometres or so to La Cure. He could even remember the Hotel Franco-Suisse where he had once stayed the night – the strange hotel where you went through the front door still in France and out of the back door into Switzerland! At La Cure they could turn north, continuing into France. That was how he was going to get Nancy out of Switzerland – to safety – tonight.
`Why not the garage?' Seidler complained.
`With the car left outside we can escape quickly – or have you not noticed that chopper is still with us?'
`You have brought the two thousand Swiss francs?' demanded Seidler.
`No. You just put that in because people don't value something they can get for nothing.' Newman turned to face Seidler. 'If you don't want to talk we'll drop you here and drive away. Make up your mind…'
`We go into the house…'
Seidler looked to be near the end of his tether. Haunted eyes, deep in their sockets, stared back at Newman as Nancy skilfully backed the Citroen off the road a short distance up the slope under the firs. She switched off the engine and Newman got out of the car, standing for a moment to stretch his aching limbs.
The two-storey house stood a few yards back from the road on the lower slope. It was old, decrepit and a verandah ran the full length of the ground floor. A short flight of wooden steps led up to the front door and there were balconies in front of the shuttered windows on the first floor. The downstairs windows were also shuttered. Nancy thought it was a grim, eerie-looking place.