Charlie cooked then, while Dan did a quick tour of the property, not entirely trusting the technology. He walked out past the utility room onto the wide verandah that surrounded the main floor. He stopped once he was outside, taking in the dark and the crisp mountain air, such a shock after the warmth of Madrid that it gave him an instant hit, clearing his head.
Slowly, he walked around the house, listening, looking out at the darkness of the woods. And when he reached the front, he looked down at the steps which led up from the meadow below. True, any assailant would have to cross the open ground of the meadow, but it was all too inviting for an attack.
He turned and leaned against the rail, looking in through the full-length windows, beyond the open sitting area to where Charlie was busying himself in the kitchen. It was all about the technology because, without it, Dan wasn’t sure he would have chosen this as a defensive stronghold.
They took their time over dinner, and it was already getting late by the time they’d finished eating. They stayed at the table and Charlie opened a second bottle of wine, both of them now suspecting that Hugo had been wrong on one point, that it wouldn’t be tonight after all.
No longer thinking of its security, Dan leaned back in his chair and said, “It’s a nice place you’ve got here.”
“It’s not bad, is it?” Charlie looked around as if taking it in himself, then said, “Of course, I kind of hoped when I bought it that I might find someone to share it with.”
Dan said, “Charlie, I’m flattered, but . . .”
Charlie laughed, and said, “I’m serious. I think of Benoit and I’m kind of glad I haven’t found anyone, but if we get out from under this I wanna make some changes, settle down, maybe even get married.”
For all their years living on the edge, often reckless and carefree in the ways that mattered, he’d always known Charlie had this side to him, the desire for the simple domestic life. Maybe they all had it, but Charlie, in his core, was meant to be sitting at this table with a large and chaotic family around him. Perhaps he’d be that person one day, but not just yet, and not for a while to come.
“We’ve done okay, Charlie. We’ve had fun being single. You’ve got this place, I’ve got my place in Italy, the apartment in Paris.”
“But we’re not living, not the way we should.” He sipped his wine and said, “You remember Darija?”
Dan nodded. The previous summer they’d spent a couple of months on the Dalmatian Coast, between jobs. Charlie had picked up with a Croatian, a dark-haired beauty, but he’d never mentioned her since.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about her lately. We were really good together, you know?”
“So why didn’t you stay in touch?”
He shrugged.
“I don’t know. But once this is done I might see if I can track her down.” He waited a second and said, “What about you?”
There was no equivalent of Darija waiting in the wings for Dan, nobody he would want to reconnect with. Even if there had been, he wasn’t certain he would want to inflict the baggage of his life on another person. Besides, he didn’t have much confidence that this would ever be done—even if they found a way out now, there were no guarantees it wouldn’t happen all over again in the future.
“I’m okay—I don’t mind being single. But if you don’t find Darija, I know someone who can track her down for you.”
Charlie smiled and said, “I wanna find her, not kidnap her.”
He poured more wine into their glasses, and they talked on for another hour before a short alarm beeped on the other side of the room.
Charlie stopped mid-sentence, then looked pleased with himself as he said, “That alarm’s attached to one of the motion sensors I’ve got out in the woods around the house.”
“Could it be a deer?”
“Not unless it’s a mutant. That alarm doesn’t sound if it picks up movement—it sounds if someone deactivates it or cuts the wires.”
He pushed himself up and Dan followed him across to a laptop he’d set up. Charlie played with the keyboard, then studied the screen closely as almost identically indistinct pictures appeared one after the other.
“Thermographic cameras. You have these at your place in Italy?”
Dan shook his head slowly and said, “I never thought anyone was trying to kill me before.”
“Dan, you of all people should know, in our line of work someone always wants to kill you.” He stopped and pointed at the screen, which now had two illuminated shapes in the middle of it. “There they are, two of them, probably scoping the place out, deciding how to play it.”
“Sure there are just two?”
Charlie flicked through the other images again before landing once more on the two intruders. If there were just two of them it probably wouldn’t be a problem. Trouble was, just as Dan had mistrusted the technology earlier, so he now mistrusted what he could see in front of him. It looked too easy and, in his experience, that meant they were missing something.
Chapter Five