"Oh, I think Laxton knows, Giles. I think Laxton's allowed a great deal of the money to pass through his hands, across his desk." He hefted himself upright from the chair with audible noises of breath and old joints, but his step was firm and urgent across the carpet.
"Come on, old friend. We must frighten Johnny Laxton as he has never been frightened before!"
He grabbed Pyott's arm with an eager, young man's grip, as if to sweep him, girl like on to some imagined dance floor. Pyott, looking down at Aubrey, grinned.
"To horse," he murmured.
"And towards the sound of the guns."
Aubrey watched Giles' fears for Marian swallowed by his awakened enthusiasm.
His own for her and for Gant alike — remained bubbling like volcanic hot springs.
The track up to the farmhouse and its single barn was deserted. The house itself seemed even more silent and lifeless. From the knoll where he lay, studying it through field glasses, he was certain Strickland had gone. Not merely to the local store in the nearest village but gone, period. The previous evening and night, and the hours of the flight, collapsed behind him like a derelict building, leaving an empty lot. The mission was rubble. He had just the one address, this single lead to Strickland. There wouldn't be any more, not for him, not for a fugitive from justice. The Dordogne noon was heavy with the noises of insects. A small tractor inched across a distant field, and cattle were dotted like specks of soot on sloping meadows. There was the high contrail of an airliner that had taken off from Bordeaux's Merignac airport, where his flight plan had claimed he would land. He was overdue… He could make up the lost time by leaving now, there was nothing down there for him.
He swung the glasses impatiently across the landscape. Dotted farmhouses and barns, scattered villages in folds of the land or on limestone outcrops, the buildings brown as coins in the noon sunlight.
Stretches of dark holm-oak forest, groves of walnut trees, open fields of yellowing cereal crops. Chateaux and hunched, brooding castles like watchtowers marked the Dordogne valley to the south of him. His gaze moved back to Strickland's farmhouse.
Stillness… He waited another half-hour, then slung the rucksack across his shoulders, rose to his feet and began jogging gently down the slope towards the grey-white track leading up to the house. Nothing moving… nothing. He climbed one fence, then another. Butterflies rose from the long grass, he startled a bird but nothing human.
The midday was hot. He slowed to a cautious walk as he reached the track a hundred yards from the house. His shoulders slumped to casualness, his gait suggested he had already walked some distance.
Strickland might have recognised him… but then, Strickland wasn't home.
The shutters, small rectangles of peeling green paint set in the golden limestone block of the farmhouse, were closed on each of the ground-floor windows as well as the first floor. Three smaller windows jutted like snouts from the steeply pitched roof of flat brown tiles.
Beyond the house, the weather-peeled doors of the barn were similarly closed. The place didn't seem out of keeping with Strickland's personality. The Preacherman possessed a diffident, hermit like introversion he was the man who had been the boy who spent day after day in his bedroom, building, dismantling, reading, brooding. Gant halted, studying the house and his reflections on Strickland.
The guy was mad, certifiable… and too much like himself. He shrugged but the recognition would not be dismissed. Another lonely, maybe brutalised kid who had retreated into himself, kept out of sight of parents, neighbours, the whole world. And finally poured everything bottled up and unused into flying. ocn Gant shook his head. It didn't matter, except that this was just the kind of place Strickland would have chosen.
He reached the door of the house and knocked innocently, checking the pistol Aubrey had given him, thrust into his waistband in the small of his back. The sound of his knocking died away somewhere inside the empty house. He tried the handle of the door. The place must be locked up-the door opened slightly. As if the worn, clumsy door handle had burned him, he shut the door, moving away from it towards the nearest window, perspiration breaking out on his forehead.
The door shouldn't be unlocked… It was unlocked deliberately.
Strickland made bombs… Roussillon closed the flap of his mobile phone and turned in the front passenger seat of the big Citroen estate car.
"He's reached the farmhouse. For a moment, they thought he was going in through the front door—"
"But no such luck?" Fraser interrupted, a lack of surprise on his features.
"I told you it wouldn't do our job for us, Strickland's booby-trap device."
"You did indeed, my friend."
Roussillon shrugged. His men had searched the farmhouse early that morning. A minute visual inspection had revealed the front door rigged to explode a small bomb when pushed open. He had ordered the device left in place and the farmhouse put under close surveillance. There had been the chance that Strickland who had obviously disappeared would take care of his fellow-American for them. Now, they would have to do the job themselves.
He flicked a lock of dark hair away from his forehead. Through the rear window, he could see the small town of Beynac huddling at the foot of the hill on which its castle stood. The second car was fifty yards behind the Citroen. They were half an hour, at most, from Strickland's place.
Gant would find no clues as to Strickland's whereabouts. The place looked like a gite awaiting the first tourists of the season rather than a place where someone had lived until very recently.
The main road followed a loop of the Dordogne River.
Limestone cliffs, dark oak and chestnut trees crowded down to the road.
Sunlight gleamed on the river.
Fraser's manner and tone had been lacking in affability. He was imitating, like the good messenger he was, the displeasure of his master that Gant had escaped his hit-team in Oslo. Beyond his irritation with failure and Fraser alike, Roussillon felt a resentment at his increasing collusion with the former SIS agent and Winterborne.
His immediate superiors had instructed him to continue the association.
Balzac-Stendhal, wrapping themselves in the tri colore had borrowed him and certain elements of his service, the DST, until such time as all possibility of scandal had receded. Effectively, he was taking his orders directly from Winterborne rather than from Paris. What had begun as the protection of secret funding to the French plane maker in contradiction of EU principles, had become a manhunt for an American agent, the concealment of two acts of sabotage, the hunt for the bomber. The affaire Winterborne had become distasteful, demeaning. Le diable was always in the world, at one's elbow… The devils with which he was forced to consort because of this operation were not those he would have chosen.
The road dropped once more towards the river as it slid between limestone outcrops like a silver snake slipping into a crevice between boulders. The village of Domme stared down at the car from its crag.
Pour la France did not seem an adequate or satisfying description of what Roussillon was being called upon to perform. It was a bandage around his eyes that was becoming threadbare. The trees lining the road became mesmerising, flickering dappled light on the windscreen.
"How did he get here?" Fraser asked in curiously
"A light aircraft was seen earlier in the area. He may have landed it somewhere close to the farmhouse," Roussillon replied, adding with a certain, relished malice:
"You have no idea how he left England this morning?"
"If it was his plane they saw flying around, get your people to look for it. It'll need putting out of action. How much bloody further is it, anyway?"