‘God knows what this service station food is doing to my complexion,’ Angela muttered as she swallowed the last of her chicken sandwich. ‘I’d kill for a nice crisp salad. I’ll be really glad to get home, I can tell you that. How are we going to get across the Channel?’
‘Probably a ferry. The danger with the Tunnel is that it’s an entirely closed environment. If we’re spotted when we drive onto the train, or even when we’re waiting to embark in the car park, there’s nowhere for us to go. At least on a ferry I’ll have room to manoeuvre. The problem is that the Channel is a choke point, just like the Pyrenees, but even more restricted. And we have to cross it and get back to Britain, somehow.’
‘I did have one idea that I thought might work,’ Angela said.
‘Let’s hear it.’
‘As I see it, the trick really is to convince anybody who’s following us that we’ll be in one particular place at a certain time, while we’re actually somewhere else.’
She glanced at Bronson, who nodded slowly, lifting an eyebrow.
‘So here’s an idea. Later on today, when we’re north of Rouen, say, why don’t you ring up the ferry company on your mobile and use one of your credit cards to book a particular crossing for this evening. If you’re right and these people are able to track our credit card transactions, that will tell them precisely when we’ll be arriving at Calais, and so that’s where they’ll turn up to intercept us. In the meantime, suppose we don’t go to Calais or Dunkirk or any other port, but instead head for Le Touquet.’
‘And what’s there?’
‘An airfield,’ she continued, ‘and it’s a popular destination for private flyers taking day trips from Kent. A friend of a friend of mine — his accountant, actually — quite often flies down there for lunch in his own aircraft. If we turn up there this afternoon with some sob story about needing to get back to Britain as quickly as possible, I think we might find somebody with a couple of spare seats in his Cessna or whatever. And if we can’t talk our way onto a private aircraft, there’s a regular daily service to Le Touquet, operated from Lydd Airport in Britain, so we could buy seats on one of those aircraft as our last resort. Anyway, that’s what I thought.’
Bronson was silent for a moment, looking for flaws in her proposal. Then he glanced across at her.
‘That’s a bloody good idea,’ he said.
By five o’clock that afternoon they were on a back road near Abbeville, and the satnav was steadily counting off the kilometres to go to the Côte d’Opale Airport at Le Touquet.
Bronson hadn’t been quite sure what to expect. Some small airfields he’d visited in the past had been little more than rights of way in a ploughed field, but Le Touquet had a proper tarmac runway, taxiways, hard-standings and even a control tower. And there were a lot of light aircraft parked on those hard-standings, most with registration numbers beginning with ‘F’ — meaning they were of French registry — but quite a lot with a ‘G’ for Great Britain. The terminal building wasn’t all that big, but it was certainly busy, and Bronson and Angela heard a mix of accents and languages as they moved around inside.
Bronson had suggested that Angela waited in the car outside while he tried to thumb a lift from some home-going Brit, but she’d pointed out very sweetly that most private pilots were men and she was far more likely to be able to persuade one of them to accept a couple of passengers than he was, as a bulky, menacing and hairy-arsed middle-aged man — a description he wasn’t entirely happy with — so they had both gone inside the building, Bronson weighed down with their bags. Angela quickly homed in on a couple of likely men, standing talking together on one side of the lounge. They were unmistakably English, casually but expensively dressed and probably in their late thirties.
‘I’ll try them first,’ she said. ‘Try not to get into any trouble while I’m away.’
‘Trouble? Me?’
Bronson watched as Angela made her way over to the two men and held a brief conversation with them. After a minute or so, she turned and walked back to him.
‘They can’t help,’ she said, ‘because they only arrived a short while ago and they’re staying in the area overnight. But they did suggest that another friend might be able to do something. He should be landing any time now with a couple of passengers who are also overnighting in Le Touquet, and they’re pretty certain he’ll be going back empty. They gave me the registration number of his aircraft — I think they said it was a four-seat Piper PA28 Cherokee — and his name, Gary Burnside.’
‘That sounds ideal,’ Bronson said. ‘I’ll get you a drink while we wait. Non-alcoholic, just in case.’
‘Just in case what?’ Angela’s normally cheerful disposition was almost restored, probably because nobody had shot at her so far that day.
103
François was beside his desk in his house in Saint-Cyrl’École, just west of Versailles, looking down at a map of northern France. As he stood there trying to anticipate every possible move his targets might make, he received a telephone call that was entirely unexpected.
‘It’s me,’ the voice said, and François immediately recognized the man as a contact he had in the banking system.
‘You have something for me?’
‘I thought you might like to know that a short time ago a person named C. Bronson bought a ticket on the 19.55 Calais-to-Dover ferry using a credit card in that name. I checked the transaction, and the booking was made by phone, from a British-registered mobile. The registered address of the cardholder is in Tunbridge Wells in Kent, and that ties in with the information you gave me earlier. It’s almost certainly him.’
François was surprised by the news, to say the least.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Let me know if you hear anything else.’
He put the mobile down on his desk and stared again at the map. The more he thought about the information he’d just been given, the more suspicious he was about what it meant. As far as he could tell, there was no good reason why the fugitives would need to pre-book a ferry ticket.
He shook his head. The only reason why the man he was looking for should have purchased a ticket in advance was because he had devised some other means of crossing the Channel, and the one place he wouldn’t be was at the Calais ferry port at five minutes to eight that evening.
He would have to look very carefully at all the other possible routes over to England. The Eurostar terminal in Paris was covered by his men. His eyes roamed down the ports, all of which he knew were already under surveillance. Another possibility, he supposed, was that they might try going to a fishing port or marina and hire a boat and captain to take them across the Channel. But that seemed unlikely, unless they offered a huge sum for such an illegal smuggling operation, or were really persuasive, the kind of persuasion, in short, likely to be backed up by a couple of firearms. That was just about possible, perhaps, but the Channel had blanket radar coverage, and he was quite sure that if any unauthorized vessel made the journey between the French and the British coastlines it would probably be intercepted long before it reached port on the English side.
The more he looked, the more certain François became that the purchase of the ferry ticket was simply a ruse, something to distract him and his men from working out what was actually going on. He ran his eyes down the almost straight coastline shown on the map from Outreau down to Le Crotoy, where the coast of the country bent gently around to the west. And as he scanned the names and symbols on the map, one tiny mark almost leapt out at him, and he suddenly realized what he’d been missing. He’d covered the ports, and the railway stations and the airports, but there was another way that the two fugitives could leave France that had not until that moment occurred to him.