Rain lashed his face, the white lines on the road were barely visible and when the front wheel touched them the whole machine seemed to twitch and skate.
Accelerate into the bends. Find speed.
The main road. North to Okehampton, south to Tavistock.
Roulette: 50-50; red or black.
South. His fists tight on the domino grips, his body ice-cold in the sodden clothing, the black sutures biting into the knife-cuts.
Ignore the pain.
He saw nothing for two miles and then, far ahead of him, a tiny worm of light travelling not south, but east. If it was Meehan, he had turned off the main road at right angles. He was heading for the centre of Dartmoor and taking the narrow road at well over 70.
Shit. Bastard still had at least four miles on him. Once he made it to a road with a bit of traffic on it he'd just vanish.
Taking a deep breath, Alex swung the KTM left-handed off the road and into the wild darkness of the open moor. His only chance of staying with Meehan was to cut across country. As the crow flew Meehan was only a couple of miles away, but by road he was more than twice that.
Alex accelerated aggressively, felt the near sublime sensation as the tyres bit hard into the rough moorland. Doing the job it was designed for, the bike seemed to gather Alex up, to bind him furiously to itself. The super cross suspension had been set at a very harsh level with a minimum of compression and rebound, but Alex was soon glad of this when the front wheels hit a rock. For a moment man and machine were flying through the darkness, then the wheels came down with a testicle-crunching double smash that would have consigned a non-performance bike to the scrap heap and a less blindly determined driver to an Intensive Care ward.
But with body and brain screaming vengeance, Alex didn't give a fuck. The pain and fatigue were distant things now all that mattered was that he dominate this leaping, howling beast of a motorcycle. He could see nothing. He was aware of a track of sorts beneath him and the glow-worm thread of the vehicle ahead and to his right, and that was all. The rest the whipping cold, the shotgun volleys of rain and mud, the desperate grip of his hands and heels barely registered.
In a rational state of mind he would never have been able to do it. In the event, instinct grabbed the controls from fear and good judgement. Instinct looked ahead, instinct held its line, instinct squared the front wheel into the rain-slicked rocks and hummocks, and as the four-stroke engine screamed beneath him Alex knew a crazy, weightless release. What the fuck, he thought. If I smash myself to pieces, then so be it.
Gradually, he closed the gap between them. Did the Watchman have a plan, he wondered, or was he just distancing himself from Black Down with all speed.
Almost there. Almost within safe range of him. The road across the moor was about twenty miles long, and Alex needed to be well locked on to Meehan before they encountered any more traffic. As things stood he didn't even know what sort of vehicle the other man was driving.
But he could at least see his lights now, all the time. Assuming that it was the man he was after. If it wasn't, well, that was the end of it.
Shit. Another vehicle had joined the car that he hoped was Meehan's. Swinging hard right-handed, Alex made for the road. Within the minute the front wheel of the KTM had dived into a cut and Alex found himself flying over the handlebars to land in an awkward heap in the marshy heather. He was not badly hurt, but his confidence in his bike-handling abilities took a dent. And by the time he had got himself up and righted, and restarted the KTM, neither car was in sight. More carefully now, Alex steered the bike to the road.
After the thrill of flying over moorland, it was back to the murderous vibration of the road. Speed helped a little, but only a little. Throttling back, Alex pushed the KTM up to 85 mph, and after five minutes, to his vast relief, tail-lights appeared in front of him.
The rear of the two cars was a nwish red Toyota driven, as far as Alex could see through the rainswept rear window, by a man in a hat. A Countryside Alliance sticker showed in the back window.
Swinging outside the Toyota, Alex peered through the rear window of the front car, a battered-looking dark-blue BMW. This driver seemed to be bareheaded. The car was much muddier than the Toyota.
It could be either of them. Alex stayed hard on the tail of the rear car, his eyes locked to the driver. The hat looked like a tweed one, the sort habitually worn by Inspector Frost on TV.
Both cars slowed down and Alex fell back fifty yards. They were approaching a village a sign read Two Bridges. The Toyota driver seemed to be waving his right hand about inside the car what the fuck was he up to?
And then something about the patterns he was inscribing suddenly made sense to Alex. He was conducting! He was listening to a classical music station and conducting it with his finger.
Nothing anyone had said about Meehan had suggested that he was a music fan.
Nor was it credible that, at a moment potentially fraught with danger, he would be allowing his concentration to be dispersed in this way. Joseph Meehan was, as Frank Wisbeach had said, a 'true believer'. He had just survived an expert assassination attempt. Under the circumstances he was hardly going to be singing along to Classic FM.
Meehan had to be the guy in the BMW.
Alex was glad he had reached a decision because the two cars separated on the eastern side of the village. The Toyota swung right towards Ashburton, the BMW forked left to Mortenhampstead.
The first fingers of light were now visible at the horizon, and Alex braked and waited at the roadside as the BMW pulled away from the village. He had no intention of being spotted in Meehan's rear-view mirror. As long as he kept his lights off, he told himself... As soon as the BMW was out of sight Alex restarted, gritting his teeth against the pulverising vibrations and dropping back the moment the red tail-lights came into view again. The signpost indicated that it was ten miles to Moretonhampstead and he very much doubted that Meehan was going to turn off the main road.
More worrying was the petrol issue. Meehan, it was logical to suppose, had just returned from London when he appeared at Black Down House. He must have had some nearby place to park the car. Would he have a full tank of petrol? Was he carrying any with him?
The KTM's tank probably held about nine lit res. Four-stroke engine, thirty miles to the gallon.. . say a hundred miles, max, before he needed to fill up again. If Meehan needed a refill before then, fine. Alex could ride in and shoot him with the silenced Glock at the petrol station. Ride away before anyone realised what had happened.
If Meehan didn't need petrol before Alex did, then Alex was in trouble. Meehan would simply outrun him.
He came to a decision. He would follow Meehan until his own petrol gage indicated half-full. Then he would call Dawn Harding on his mobile, give her Meehan's position and let her Service's people take over. This was their speciality, after all.
The arrangement was professionally responsible, but also gave him a reasonable chance of sorting the whole thing out himself, which he very much wanted to do. He needed closure, as he suspected did Meehan. Their destinies had intertwined. One of them had to kill the other.
TWENTY- SEVEN.
From Moretonhampstead the dark-blue BMW took the Exeter road and then turned sharply northwards up the valley of the river Exe towards Tiverton. Hanging well back in the half-dark, Alex was still fairly certain that he had not been seen.
At Tiverton the BMW turned eastwards again. He was making for Taunton, but it seemed that caution was leading him to avoid motor ways in favour of much smaller roads. From Taunton, Alex guessed, he would work his way across country to Salisbury.