Marcus started to fall into step with her but I moved in front of the pair of them.
“No,” I said. “Nobody’s going anywhere until I get some answers.”
The two exchanged a glance and I didn’t miss the way Marcus edged sideways a little to widen the gap between them, making two targets harder to watch.
“Is this about the Frenchman?” Dr Bertrand asked.
“What Frenchman?”
I’d opened my mouth to ask the same question only to find Marcus had beaten me to it.
Dr Bertrand looked irritated by our lack of understanding. “The man in the wheelchair of course.”
“Rojas? But he’s South American — from Brazil.”
She shook her head, utterly devoid of doubt. “But when I spoke to ’im in Spanish and ’e answered, ’e speaks Spanish with a French accent. Couldn’t you ’ear it?”
Marcus saw the wheelchair where I’d left it just inside the doors.
“Where is he?”
Where you sent him. “On his way to see Hope and Lemon.”
“You left her alone with him?”
“No, I didn’t,” I said. “Parker called and I never got that far. If she’s at the Bell, Riley will be with them.”
I saw by the way Marcus’s jaw tightened that he was regretting directing Rojas to Hope as I much as I was for not ignoring that phone call from Parker and accompanying Rojas all the way.
We started to run, out of the lobby of the hospital and through the maze of temporary structures and tents toward the open area where there were half a dozen helicopters from various aid agencies and rescue organisations were parked up.
I stopped, let Marcus come past me. He’d been in the helo when it landed so he surely knew where they’d left it. But when he stopped too, staring about him, I realised we were in serious shit.
“Where are they?” Dr Bertrand demanded, catching us up without appearing significantly out of breath.
“Gone. Dammit!”
“Gone?” For the first time the doctor’s voice cracked with stress. “’Ow can they ’ave gone? And where?”
“It’s a helo, Alex. They could have gone just about anywhere.” He pulled out his radio and tried hailing Riley. There was no response.
“Tell him you’ve got a pickup for him,” I said. “Make it casual.”
Marcus gave me a dubious look but did as ordered.
“Sorry mate, I’m a bit held up at the moment.” Riley’s voice over the background noise of the Bell’s engines sounded as laidback as ever. Only his choice of words gave anything away. “I’ll get back to you when I’m free.”
“Soon as you can then,” Marcus said and clicked off. “‘Held up’? Oh yeah, they’re being held up all right.”
“By Señor Rojas? What does ’e want with them?”
I shook my head. “It’s not Rojas.” That got their attention, although Joe Marcus was halfway to the same conclusion anyway. “I think the man we’ve accepted as Santiago Rojas is actually the French jewel thief, Enzo Lefévre.”
“But Commander Peck, ’e identified the body in the morgue as Lefévre.” She sounded outraged at the inferred slight to her professional reputation, as if someone had deliberately set out to blot her near-perfect record.
“The guy had no face, so maybe Peck assumed,” Marcus corrected her, “based on his proximity to the body of the woman, Dubois. Without other means of ID — like the personal items that were stolen — we had no reason to think otherwise.”
“And now?”
“You said yourself that he speaks Spanish with a French accent—”
“Circumstantial,” she dismissed. “’E could ’ave ’ad a French nanny as a child.”
“Rojas came over from Brazil because his religious family were putting pressure on him over his homosexuality,” I said. “Yet he told us he’d had an affair with Peck’s wife.”
Marcus nodded. “And Peck backed him up.” His eyes met mine. “Now why would he do that, hmm?”
I hit redial on my phone without breaking his gaze. When the call was answered I said briefly, “Parker, how quickly can you send me over a picture of Santiago Rojas?”
There were no superfluous questions, just the sound of computer keys in the background. “OK, it’s on its way to your cell. Need anything else?”
“No — thanks. I’ll call you.”
A few moments later my phone bleeped to signal an incoming picture message. The jpeg image unfurled down the screen with agonising slowness. When it had finished downloading I handed the phone to Marcus.
“Not the same guy,” he said flatly.
Dr Bertrand said nothing, but her lips had tightened into a compressed line and her face was white.
“’Ow do we find them?”
“We call the police,” I said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Wilson asked no questions when I told him simply that someone had grabbed the R&R’s helo and taken hostages. We caught up with him, newly stitched and with his left arm in a sling, already aboard the police Eurocopter on the pad near the hospital entrance, with the engines fired up.
As the three of us ducked under the main rotor and would have run toward it, Joe Marcus grabbed Dr Bertrand’s arm.
“Alex, you should stay here.”
“No!” she said. “She is as much my responsibility as yours, Joe.”
He shrugged and let go without further argument. We reached the Eurocopter and scrambled into the rear.
The pilot finessed the Eurocopter into the air and asked, “Which way?” over his shoulder.
Wilson twisted toward us carefully from the co-pilot’s seat. “Any ideas where they’re headed?”
“If he’s any sense then I’d guess the nearest border,” Joe Marcus said.
“And if he’s no sense, eh?”
“For the moment, let’s just get up there and see what we can see.”
The pilot shrugged and powered upwards. The Eurocopter was newer than the Bell and faster by probably forty-five knots, but unless we knew where to chase that advantage was negated.
I checked my watch. Riley could have been in the air and travelling flat out at a hundred and twenty knots for fifteen minutes now. The diameter of the search zone was increasing all the time.
“Do we know who’s taken your people hostage?” Wilson asked. “And what do they want?”
Marcus explained briefly about Santiago Rojas, our theory that he was Enzo Lefévre, and about Riley’s cryptic radio message.
“If this Lefévre is a pro that’s good,” he said. “Means he’s less likely to do something stupid with them.”
“We know he’s killed once already,” I said. That earned me a sharp glance from Dr Bertrand. “If he swapped identities, who do you think shot the real Santiago Rojas in the chest — this mysterious third man nobody can find?”
“Sounds like your pilot can take the pressure, though,” Wilson said. “What’s his call sign? I’ll get my guy to give him a shout and pretend to be Air Traffic Control, something like that. Worth a try, eh?”
“But there isn’t any ATC operating over the city, is there?” I asked.
“No.” Marcus gave me a grim smile. “We’ll just have to hope Lefévre doesn’t know that.”
Wilson spoke to the pilot. A minute or so later he handed back to us a folded aviation chart with a heading scribbled onto it, wincing as he bumped his injured arm.
“Damn, I think he was wise to us. That bearing makes no sense unless he wants to end up on top of a mountain.”
“I’ve worked with Riley for a long time,” Marcus said. “He would have given us something even if he had a gun to his head.”
I peered at the chart. From the hospital which had been ringed in pencil, the heading the Aussie had given took them out of the city to the northeast, which wasn’t a logical route to anywhere. I opened the chart out and scanned it. Almost at once I recognised one of the areas Hope and I had been given to search.