The funeral had been Mark’s last farewell to Jackie and, now it was over, he was going to have to make decisions about his life. Bronson guessed that the house—the property the Hamptons had intended to retire to—would go on the market. The memories of their time together in the old place would probably be too painful for Mark to relive for very long.
As he neared the house, Bronson noticed a Fiat sedan coming up fast behind them.
“Bloody Italian drivers,” he muttered, as the car showed no signs of overtaking, just maintained position about ten yards behind the Alfa.
He braked gently as he approached the gateway, turned on his blinker and turned in. But the other car did the same, stopping actually in the gateway and completely blocking it. In that instant, as Bronson glanced toward the old house, he realized they were trapped, and just how high the stakes really were.
Outside the house, a Lancia sedan was parked, and beside the front door—which looked as if it was slightly ajar—was an oblong gray box and a cubical sandy-colored object. Behind the car, two men were standing, staring at the approaching Alfa, one with the unmistakable shape of a pistol in his right hand.
“Who the hell . . . ?” Mark shouted.
“Hang on,” Bronson yelled. He swung the wheel to the left and accelerated hard, powering the car off the gravel drive and across the lawn, aiming straight for the hedge that formed a boundary between the garden and the road.
“Where was it?” Bronson shouted.
Strapped into the passenger seat, Mark immediately guessed what Bronson was asking. When they’d bought the house, the driveway was U-shaped, with two gates, but they’d extended the hedge and lawn across the second entrance. And that was now their only way out. He pointed through the windshield. “A little farther to the right,” he said, braced himself in the seat and closed his eyes.
Bronson twitched the wheel slightly as the Alfa rocketed forward. He heard the cracks of two shots behind them, but he didn’t think either hit the vehicle. Then the nose of the car tore into the hedge, the bushes planted barely a year earlier. Beyond the windshield, their view turned into an impenetrable maelstrom of green and brown as the Alfa smashed the plants under its chassis, branches whipping past the side windows. The front wheels lifted off the ground for a moment when the car hit the low bank that formed the base of the hedge, then crashed down again.
And then they were through. Bronson lifted his foot off the accelerator pedal and hit the brakes for an instant as the car lurched across the grass verge, checking the road in both directions. It was just as well he did.
A truck was lumbering up the hill directly toward them, just a few yards away, a black cloud of diesel belching from its exhaust. The driver’s face wore an almost comical look of shock, having just seen the bright red car materialize from a hedge right in front of him.
Bronson slammed the accelerator pedal down again, and the Alfa shot straight across the road, missing the back of the truck by perhaps three feet. He hit the brakes, swung the wheel hard left and, the moment the car was aiming down the hill, accelerated again. The Alfa fishtailed as he fed in the power, but in moments it was screaming down the road at well more than sixty miles an hour.
“What the hell’s going on?” Mark demanded, turning around in his seat to look back toward his house. “Who were those people?”
“I don’t know who they were,” Bronson said, “but I know what they were. That cubical object was the stone from your dining-room wall, and the gray box was the system unit from your computer. They were the people who broke in to read the first inscription, and who’ve been trying to get back inside ever since to find the second one.”
Bronson glanced in his mirror as he accelerated hard down the hill. About two hundred yards behind them he saw two cars emerge from the gateway one after the other and start chasing them. The first was the Fiat that had blocked the drive behind them, and the second was the Lancia.
“I don’t—” Mark began.
Bronson interrupted. “We’re not clear yet. Both cars are chasing us.”
His eyes were scanning the instruments, checking for any abnormal readings that might have been caused by the harsh treatment he’d given the car, but everything seemed OK. And he hadn’t detected any problems with the handling, though there appeared to be various bits of greenery attached to the front of the car.
“What do they want?”
“The inscription, obviously. They know we erased it, so now we’re their only lead, simply because we saw it. Whatever it means, it must be a hell of a lot more important than I thought.”
Bronson was pushing the Alfa as hard as he dared, but the roads were fairly narrow, twisting and not that well surfaced and, though he couldn’t see the other cars behind him, he knew they had to be close. He was a very competent police-trained driver, but he wasn’t familiar with the car or the area, and he was driving on the “wrong”
side of the road, so the odds were stacked against him.
“You’ll have to help me, Mark. We’ve got to get the hell away from here, as quickly as possible.” He pointed ahead to a road sign indicating a crossroads. “Which way?”
Mark stared through the windshield, but for a moment he didn’t respond.
“I need to know,” Bronson said urgently. “Which way?”
Mark seemed to rouse himself. “Left,” he said. “Go left. That’s the quickest route to the autostrada.”
But as Bronson paused in the center of the road, waiting for a group of three cars coming in the opposite direction to pass, the Fiat appeared in his rearview mirror about a hundred yards behind.
“Shit,” Bronson muttered, and accelerated as quickly as he could the instant the road was clear.
“A quick check, Mark,” he said. “My laptop and camera are in the car, and my passport’s in my pocket. Is there anything you have to collect from the house?”
Mark felt in his jacket pocket and pulled out his wallet and passport. “Only my clothes and stuff,” he said. “I hadn’t finished packing.”
“You have now,” Bronson said grimly, alternating his gaze between the road in front and his mirrors.
“We need to take the next road on the right,” Mark instructed. “Then the autostrada’s only a couple of miles away.”
“Got it.”
But though Bronson slowed as the Alfa neared the junction, he didn’t take the turn.
“Chris, I said turn right.”
“I know, but we need to lose this guy first. Hang on.”
The Fiat had closed to less than fifty yards behind the Alfa when Bronson acted. He slammed on the brakes, waited until the car’s speed had dropped to about twenty miles an hour, then released the brakes, spun the wheel to the left and simultaneously pulled on the handbrake. The car lurched sideways, tires screaming in protest as it slid across to the other side of the road. The moment it was facing the opposite way, Bronson dropped the handbrake and pressed on the accelerator. The Alfa shot past the Fiat, whose driver was still braking hard, and moments later they passed the Lancia as well, which had just caught up.
“What the hell was that?” Mark asked.
“Technically it’s called a J-turn, because that’s the shape of the skid mark the tires leave on the road. It’s amazing what you can learn in the police force. The important thing is that it should have given us a couple of minutes’ breathing space.”
Bronson was checking his mirrors constantly and when they reached the turning for the autostrada there was still no sign of either the Fiat or the Lancia behind them. For a second or two he debated ignoring the junction and taking a side road up into the hills, where they might be able to find somewhere to hide for a few minutes. But he decided that speed was more important, and hauled the Alfa across the road, barely slowing, and within three minutes they were taking a ticket at the barrier.