I leaned against the side of the van and finished their coffee.
No one felt the urge to communicate.
Samir’s light began to ascend. I waited, torch turned towards the top of the path, for the two muddy figures to emerge. Coyle had one arm across Samir’s back, the other curled into his own shoulder where the blood still burned between his fingers. He looked, in the unforgiving beam of my torch, pale and grey, a blueish tinge to his lips. Samir’s face was bursting red, teeth locked together with effort, lips peeled back like a horse ready to bolt.
“Put him inside,” I said, gesturing to the back of the truck.
“What did you do?” Coyle breathed, his gaze skimming over the two fallen figures.
“Their boss shot you. I wasn’t about to to ask for company policy.”
Coyle didn’t cry out as Samir eased him on to the vehicle floor, which I took for a bad sign. “You’re a nurse–do something.”
“Are you going to kill me?”
When I’d asked the same question, I’d done so in shaking Arabic, but now I heard Samir speak, his voice was clear confident French with a thick southern accent. In a way I felt the performance of Samir I’d given suited his features more than the reality he now presented. “I give you my word that if you patch this man up I will let you live. And if you run I’ll kill you and everyone here. Do you understand?”
“I don’t know you.” I felt a flicker of admiration. Shaking, frozen Samir Chayet, who’d woken in the dark with his hands tied, was standing his ground in the middle of the night.
“Nor do you understand what happened, how you came to be here. Yet the simple fact is you can take a risk and run, or you can take a risk and stay, and with only the bare minimum of information available you must decide which is the greater.”
He weighed up his options and chose the wiser.
Five minutes later, he said, “This man needs blood.”
“Know your type?” I asked Coyle.
“Sure,” he growled from the floor of the van. “You know yours?”
“My friend is such a wag,” I confided to Samir. “He tries to cultivate this dry manly wit.”
“Nonetheless,” said the nurse, “he needs blood, or I can’t promise what will happen.”
“I’ll get right on that. Keep the first-aid kit; the two folk bleeding outside the van are probably going to want it. One of them might have a mobile phone. I suggest you call the police–only the police–just as soon as we’re gone.”
Chapter 73
Samir Chayet was a black silhouette in the rear-view mirror as I drove away. For less than eight hours I’d worn him, and his life would never be the same.
Coyle lay on the floor of the van behind me, one hand pressed to the dressing against his shoulder, his breath ragged, his skin grey. I’d put his jacket back around his shoulders, a blanket round his legs, and still he shivered, teeth clattering as he said, “What now?”
“Ditch the van. Get you to a doctor.”
“Am I your hostage?”
“That sounds like more trouble than it’s worth.”
“Why would you help me?”
“Help myself. Always. You going to stay awake?”
“You going to sedate me?”
“No.”
“Then I’m staying awake.”
I drove north, following the largest signs to the biggest roads. Judging from the water-carved crevices and black pines of the hills, I guessed I was heading deeper into the Massif Central, hunting out the lone motorway that had been forged across dry plateaux and sodden valleys of volcanic black. A phone rang on the passenger seat beside me; I ignored it. A few minutes later it rang again.
“You going to answer that?”
Coyle’s voice, a bare shimmer from the back.
“Nope.”
Sodium lighting announced the advent of the motorway. The signage promised turnings to ancient castles and towns of skilled artisans. The towns of skilled artisans offered medieval walls, Cathar monuments, Templar secrets, Hospitaller coats of arms, tourist shops in whose darkened windows hung swords, shields and ancient sigils, and perhaps drugs.
The phone rang again.
I ignored it.
Rang again.
Ignored it.
On the edge of a town I pulled into an empty supermarket car park.
The phone rang, a fourth time, bouncing insistent on the seat beside me.
I put it on speaker and answered.
A sharp intake of breath at the end of the line.
Then silence.
I sat back, eyes half-closed against the orange light of the car park, and waited.
Somewhere, someone else quite possibly did the same.
And silence.
The great roaring silence of the open line. If I strained I thought I could hear the gentle in and out of expectant breathing, steady and deliberate.
Behind me Coyle stirred, waiting for the conversation to begin.
I said not a word.
Breath on the line, and it seemed to me that, as our silence stretched–thirty seconds, forty, a minute–the breathing grew faster, brighter, and the word that came to mind was excited.
A child, gasping with delight, playing hide and seek somewhere in the dark.
I waited.
I was fine with waiting.
No code words were called, no response requested.
And there it was–the rising breath broke, burst out into a single bubble of sound.
A giggle.
“Hello,” I said.
The sound stopped as suddenly as it had begun.
“I see you,” I murmured. “I see you. You’ve come too late–step back, stretch out, try again. But I’ll always see you, whoever you are.”
Silence on the line.
“You shouldn’t have ordered them to kill my host. I know why, I understand. But when the moment comes, that’s the thing I want you to remember.”
I hung up.
Pulled the battery out of the phone, tossed it under the seat.
Turned the engine back on, pulled out of the car park.
The wet swoosh of wheels over tarmac.
The slap-slap-slap of the windscreen wipers.
Then Coyle said, though perhaps he already knew, “Who was that?”
“I think you know.”
“Why didn’t he speak?” Coyle was levering himself up on his good arm, straining to see me in the driver’s mirror.
“Nothing to say.”
“Tell me who.”
“Who do you think?”
“I want you to say.”
I shrugged. “Galileo Galilei was a brilliant man. I find it offensive you’d use his name for that creature.”
“All that we have ever done is try to stop it.”
I tried to smile, though he couldn’t see the expression; tried to shape my voice into something halfway reassuring. “Tell me–do you feel like you’re losing time?”
He didn’t answer.
“Sure you do,” I sighed. “Everyone does. At two o’clock you sit down to read a book and then, what do you know, it’s five in the afternoon and you’re only two pages further in. Perhaps, as you walk home through familiar streets, you grow distracted, and when next you wrench your concentration back to where you’re going you find you’re already there but the hour is late–so much later than you think. A call logged on your phone you don’t remember making; perhaps your pocket dialled it as you leaned against the table. A waiting room where the magazines are three years old and you can’t be bothered but, oh my! The time has flown and you don’t quite know why. All we need are a few seconds. To give my wallet to a woman I do not know. To kiss a stranger, make a telephone call, spit in the face of the man I love, punch a policeman, push a traveller in front of a train. To give an order in a voice known for its authority–Nathan Coyle must die. I can change your life in less than ten seconds. And when it’s done, all you will be able to say as you stand before a jury of your peers is… you don’t know what came over you. So tell me, Mr Nathan Coyle. Have you been losing time?”