As if sensing it, Inger turned and said, “CIA?”
“I’m not sure it matters now, especially out here.” He could hear another motorbike somewhere, then saw it approaching from the distant village to the far right. The lane they were on curved around to the right up ahead, but he could also see a turning into the woods.
He drove on until they reached the turn. The road through the woods was straight for as far as they could see, and he was pretty certain there was another car, just visible, at the very far end of it.
He turned to the left, into the woods, and Inger looked behind again and said, “Don’t you think this is what they want? They have us surrounded.”
He didn’t answer, but said, “There’s a rucksack in the back. Put everything you need in it, including the disk. Then open my bag—you’ll find another rucksack inside—it’s already got everything I need.”
The final comment seemed to throw her, perhaps leaving her wondering if he lived constantly in readiness for flight, but she put the question on hold and clambered into the back seat. He carried on slowly along the track. The car ahead was approaching but at a crawl, and both the car and the bike had appeared in the sunlit opening from the woods behind them. Five guys in total, by his reckoning.
“Okay, I’m done.”
She was about to climb back into the front when he said, “No, don’t bother.” He stopped the car now, turned off the engine. “I loved this car.”
He turned to face her, and she said, “So this is your plan, to make a run through the woods? To where?”
“My plan is to get into the woods, kill five guys if I can, then make a run for it.”
“If we kill all five we could come back for the car.”
“The tracking device isn’t on us, so it must be in the car, and we haven’t got time to find it. We’ll make our way into Auxerre somehow, take the train back up to Paris.”
She thought about it for a second, then said, “Okay, it’s a plan. I still don’t know that it’s a good plan. But let’s do it.”
In the rearview he could see that the two guys had got out of the car behind them, and even from here he could see one had a rifle, so he said, “We’ll head for the right, along that path. Let’s go.”
Inger jumped out of the door on the right-hand side, Dan out of the driver side on the left. He knew if they took a shot they’d go for him first, so that would give her enough cover to get off the track and into the woods. But he was quick, and if there was a shot in the time it took him to catch up with her, he didn’t hear it.
They ran hard, a good fifty yards into the woods, before cutting off on another path, heading towards the car that had been parked ahead of them, roughly parallel to the track. They stopped then and dropped down into a squat, shielded from view by the undergrowth which was thick and almost impenetrable in places.
Dan couldn’t hear anything at first, as both of them fought to slow their breathing. But then, as the silence took hold they began to pick up voices, one ahead of them through the trees, the other more distant and off to the left. He got the feeling they were talking to each other on the phone.
They were still listening when a shot went off, cracking through the branches off to their left. A couple of birds took flight in response.
Whispering, Dan said, “Just shooting for the hell of it, seeing if he can flush us out.” He put his rucksack on the floor, attached the silencer to his gun and said, “You stay here, look out for people approaching from the left. I’ll be back in a minute.”
She looked ready to object, but he was already on his way, moving fast and low through the undergrowth, going out of his way to stay on the straggling natural paths that cut through it, ending up circling behind the two guys who’d originally been ahead of them.
He stood behind the partial cover of a tree then and looked out. He could see the parked car, facing away from him, one guy standing closer to Dan’s hiding place, smoking and kicking his heels. The other guy, the one on the phone, was in front of the car.
He didn’t recognize either of them. The one at the back was solidly built, the one on the phone more sinewy, but he could imagine both of them working the door of a nightclub. They were both dark-haired, the bigger one almost a skinhead, a white scar visible through the hair on his skull. The guy on the phone was speaking in a Slavic language of some sort, and that matched their looks too.