“Lock him up again!” Curdon bellowed. “We’ll get the truth out of him soon enough, however we have to do it. Let’s talk again privately, Lebeau.”
At a sign from Lebeau, the two escorting agents stepped forward, and the Saint stood up.
“I must let you into a state secret, Inspector,” he said. “Where British Intelligence ought to be, there is apparently a boiled potato.”
He tapped his head. Lebeau stared at him stonily. Simon smiled into Curdon’s face.
“See you later, Willie.”
The policeman held the Saint’s arms as they walked back down the stairs towards the cells. The Saint offered no resistance until they reached the ground floor and were nearing the junction of two corridors. Ahead of them, a window ran from the floor almost to the ceiling. He had had a good look at it on his way up to the interview with Curdon and Lebeau and knew exactly what he had to do.
The Saint started to run, his arms closing around the waist of his escort and forcing them to do the same. Taken off their guard, the men had no alternative but to comply. The Saint charged towards the window with the force of a wounded bull, throwing himself forward at the last moment and shaking off their grip. Arms crossed over his face, shoulder turned to take the brunt of the impact, he launched himself at the glass.
The window dissolved into a thousand tiny knives that could have torn him to shreds, but he had learned in a hard school that the trick of passing through windows in that unorthodox fashion was to hit them with exactly the speed that would deflect the fragments before they could claw at the passing body.
He landed unscathed on the gravel-coated car park in a rolling somersault, his knees pulled high into his chest, arms still shielding his face and head. The sharp stones bit through the thin cotton of bis shirt, grazing the skin beneath, but the Saint had no time to worry about a few trivial abrasions. He scarcely felt them, in the surge of excitement that came with his return to freedom.
He rolled over once before springing upright and racing towards the line of cars parked on the far side of the courtyard. A prowl car was backing into the centre of the quadrangle, and the Saint sprinted to head it off. Behind him, he could hear a chorus of confused shouts merging into the pounding of running feet. A flung baton hit him behind the knees and almost felled him, but the Saint split his stride like a hurdler and increased his speed.
The police car braked as its occupants, a plainclothes detective and his uniformed driver, became aware of the commotion. The offside door was flung open and the detective jumped out, running around the car towards the Saint, his hand grabbing for the holster inside his jacket. Simon jumped high, straightening in the air, his body becoming as rigid as an arrow. His heels landed squarely in the center of the man’s chest, hurling him off his feet. The detective’s mouth opened, but no sound emerged. With an expression of surprise still frozen on his face, he pitched backwards and lay still.
The Saint landed a yard from the car. The driver was halfway out of the door, a revolver in his hand. The Saint sprang forward, throwing every ounce of his weight against the door. The driver screamed as the metal sliced into him: his arm jerked upwards, and his gun barked harmlessly at the sky. Simon grasped his wrist and smashed his hand against the car, sending the revolver clattering away across the roof.
Still keeping his hold, the Saint stepped back, taking the driver with him, as his fist whipped around in a right cross to the chin. The man crumpled, and Simon slid in behind the wheel, flicking the gears into reverse and stamping on the accelerator to send the car bucking backwards. Then he skidded the car around and out of the quadrangle.
The scream of the engine drowned the sound of a shot, and the glass of the rear window seemed to shiver for an instant before exploding. Simon kept his foot pressed to the floor, holding the car on course as if such interventions were merely to be expected.
A pair of heavy wrought-iron gates hung at the arched entrance. Two guards were valiantly trying to pull them together, and they were already partly closed when the Saint reached them. He snaked between them, scraping one as he heeled over in a two-wheeled skid onto the road outside.
9
One hand searched the switches on the dashboard until he found the one which controlled the siren, and its insistent two-toned hooting split the air. The whole operation, from the time he had charged for the window to the moment he hit the road, had taken less than a minute but already another police car was swinging out of the station less than a hundred yards behind, and in the rear-view mirror he saw it overtaken by a powerful motorcycle that slipped through the traffic on the wrong side of the road.
Simon switched on the radio and listened to the unemotional voice of the central despatcher relaying the news of his escape and ordering road blocks to be set up on the major routes out of town. But the Saint had already decided that his best chance lay in drawing the chase through the narrow back streets until he could shake it off.
The traffic ahead stopped or swung to the side as soon as the drivers caught sight of the flashing lights or heard the blaring sirens, and the Saint zigzagged through them.
He threw the car around another corner of the maze, heading roughly towards the sea. His siren claiming priority over any law of the road, he threatened coronaries to oncoming drivers and forced those on his own side into the kerb.
A lorry attempted to dispute his right of way at a crossing and he skimmed the Citroen under its nose with inches to spare. The driver swung frantically away from the maniac who seemed to be doomed to extinction under his wheels and crashed into another van parked on the corner. As he made the next turn, Simon saw that the log jam he had left behind would effectively halt the police posse for several minutes, except perhaps for the motorcycle cop.
Now to make his passage less conspicuous, he switched off the siren as he came to the food market. A man pushed a barrow out from between two parked trucks and there was neither time nor room to avoid him.
The car ploughed into the side of the cart, tossing it into the air. Simon saw the bonnet buckle on impact and heard the crash of glass and rending metal. He swerved the car steeply to one side, just grazing a lamppost, and for twenty yards actually drove along the sidewalk before regaining the road. The front wheels should have been ripped from the axle, the twisted metal should have pushed the radiator and fan back into the engine block, the steering should have been shot to hell, but somehow the car kept on going.
The Saint looked in the mirror again and thought he saw the motorcycle far behind, momentarily blocked by the new obstacle, but unlike a car, it would not be detained for long.
As he came to a wider road nearer the Boulevard Jean Hibert, his eyes were searching for a possible hiding place. The entrance to the underground garage of a new apartment building caught them, and he wrenched the wheel to catapult the car into the opening. The move was so fast that he could dare to hope that he had finally eluded his pursuers, as he threw the car down the ramp into the dimly lit basement below.
He berthed the battered car in the handiest vacant space, and carefully started back towards the entrance on foot, edging his way between the rows of parked vehicles.
He had almost reached the ramp when the roar of a motorbike told him that his optimism had been premature and sent him ducking behind the nearest car.
The rider zoomed around the crypt and braked as soon as he saw the prowl car. He jerked the heavy bike onto its stand, and undipped the holster at his side. Holding the pistol in front of him, he cautiously approached the car, his eyes sweeping from side to side as he walked. But the Saint was already behind him.