“He’s down at the front,” Greg said. He took hold of Justine’s arm, gently this time. “You’d better not be a nut.”
“I’m not,” she replied, and he released her and followed as she started down the steps.
She saw Eli Carver in the very first row, glancing around excitedly. The next car was approaching the bend and Justine felt the phenomenal vibration of its engine as it neared. There was a roar as the car changed gears, and a magnificent Formula One car entered the Louis Chiron chicane in front of the grandstand. For a moment, the rest of the world ceased to exist as the sound and presence of the supercar cast everything else into shadow and silence. Reality returned only when it growled by, shifting gears as it sped out of the turn.
Justine’s eyes flicked from the fast-disappearing car to Eli Carver, but she caught someone else looking directly at her: Henry Wilson, sitting two seats away from his boss.
“What’s she doing here?” he yelled. “Get her away from the Secretary.”
The sound of the cheering crowd died away and Henry’s voice seemed loud in the lull that followed.
“I said get her out of here!”
Carver turned and was initially puzzled to see Henry shouting at Justine. He looked from one to the other, bemused. “What’s going on?”
“Mr. Secretary, this person is a threat to your—” Henry began, but Justine cut him off.
“Eli,” she said, making a conscious decision to use familiarity to remind him of their friendship, “we have reason to believe there is an imminent threat on your life. Jack is—”
Justine didn’t get the chance to complete her sentence.
There were two loud cracks as a pair of bullets struck the grandstand directly below where Carver was sitting. Justine only recognized them as gunshots because she was expecting violence, but most of the nearby spectators looked around in confusion, and people a few rows away from Carver didn’t even register what had happened because of the general noise and commotion.
Carver’s Secret Service detail knew exactly what had happened. The agent nearest the Defense Secretary leaped to protect him and yelled, “Shots fired! Shots fired!”
Another agent shouted, “We gotta get Apollo to the secondary location.”
Justine felt Greg’s hands on her arms. He steered her toward the guard that had suddenly formed around Carver. She felt herself being swept away, following the phalanx out of the stand through a side exit at the end of the front row.
Events had moved beyond her control, but at least Carver was safe for now. She hoped the same was true of Jack.
Chapter 83
“You missed,” Michel said bitterly, and his face reddened with fury as he watched the commotion on the grandstand.
I couldn’t make out the details, but I was pretty sure the press of bodies was Carver’s close protection detail taking him to safety.
Kendrick Stamp unclipped the rifle from the gyroscopic platform and turned it on Michel.
“I missed that target,” he agreed. “But I won’t miss this one.”
He pulled the trigger and shot Michel in the chest. The force of the high-caliber slug delivered at deafeningly close range drove Michel across the deck, and he collapsed against the other side, pawing weakly at the hole in his chest.
Stamp put the rifle down and helped me to my feet.
“Thank you,” I said.
His eyes shimmered with tears. “I didn’t do it for you. I did it for my wife.”
“I appreciate it nonetheless,” I told him.
“I missed on purpose. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t shoot him. I swore an oath.” He hesitated. “Help me find her. Please.”
“Do you have any leads?”
He nodded. “They let me speak to her this morning. I was hooded, but she was there with me, in person, in a house or warehouse. It was definitely inside. I felt the breeze when they took me out afterwards.”
“Any ideas on the locality?” I asked, wiping blood from my eye.
“After the shooting at the hotel, they came and took me. Put a hood on me and moved me somewhere about twenty minutes’ drive away. They turned and doubled back so much, I can’t tell you the direction of travel. I spoke to Angie inside and then they led me away and brought me here by boat. I was still hooded, but the boat was waiting right outside the location. There were steps down and sand, so wherever she is it has to be on the waterfront. Angie is somewhere over there.”
I walked over to Michel, who was taking rapid shallow breaths. He groaned as I approached, and I ignored his pathetic attempts to fight me off as I reached into his pocket for the phone he’d threatened Stamp with earlier.
I stepped away and used it to call Justine. She answered almost immediately.
“Hello?”
“Jus, it’s me.”
“Jack, thank God! When Carver was shot at, I feared the worst.”
“I’m okay,” I assured her. “Where are you?”
“In some sort of equipment store with Secretary Carver and his people,” she replied. “They’re preparing to evacuate him.”
“The threat here is over. I don’t know if there are others, but Kendrick Stamp did the right thing and missed on purpose,” I said, looking at Stamp, whose eyes shone with fear and uncertainty about his decision.
I knew exactly how he felt, having lost Justine to these men a few days earlier.
“I need you to ask Carver to run a trace on the last five numbers into and out of this phone. And I need it now. Angie Stamp is being held hostage somewhere in Monaco, and I’ve promised we’ll find her, so I need the location of any device that’s had contact with this phone.”
“I’m on it,” Justine said, before hanging up.
I turned to Stamp, who signaled to Michel. His eyes were glassy and his bloody chest was still. He was dead. I felt no pity for a person who’d been part of such evil.
“We need to be ready to move,” I told Stamp as I crouched to pick up Michel’s fallen pistol, a Dan Wesson DWX, which was an excellent close-range weapon.
Stamp grabbed the sniper rifle, and took an ammunition box from beneath the gyroscopic platform.
“I’m ready,” he said.
“Good. Let’s go,” I replied, and we headed for the RIB.
Chapter 84
Justine stood beside Greg Campbell in a corrugated-steel equipment store built beneath the grandstand. She’d been bustled into the room by the big Secret Service agent who had followed his colleagues. They’d done a magnificent job of clustering to shield Carver and had got him to this secondary location in under a minute.
The atmosphere in the equipment store was tense. The ranking agent in charge coordinated with the extraction team via radio, urging them to make ready. Justine heard an announcement on the public address system in French and English, saying qualifying had stopped pending the resolution of certain technical issues. She wondered how many people who’d been sitting near Carver would know the true meaning of the phrase “technical issues” and whether news of the shooting would spread. Even if it did, members of the public who reported an unconfirmed assassination attempt on social media would likely be dismissed as conspiracy cranks. There would undoubtedly be race footage of Carver being hurried from the stand, but TV companies might not release it, and even if they did, the Secretary’s media team could say the two events were unrelated. The public would only know about the assassination attempt if Carver or the US government wanted them to.
The sour note in the room was the presence of Henry Wilson, who stood in the opposite corner near the door. He didn’t take his eyes off Justine and Greg, and prior to Jack’s call, Justine had been wondering what to do about this man who probably wanted her dead.