It was nonsense, of course—a touch of paranoia to go with all the other reminders of his old life. Louisa Whitman had wanted to eliminate Perry for a long time. And perhaps she’d been moved by Jonas Frost’s death, but she wasn’t doing this because Finn had proved the moral case, but because it was expedient, an easy way of erasing one of their own without getting their hands dirty. No wonder Forrester had wanted no knowledge of what was in that case.
He saw a jeep pull up outside and a valet jump out of it. He walked forward, took the keys, and got in. He was about to arrange the maps on the passenger seat when he noticed the satnav on the dash. He turned it on and saw that there was only one route programmed into it: the Hotel K?mp to Perry’s place on the lake. And he smiled—even if they were setting him up, at least they were doing it in style.
Chapter Thirty-Six
The farther he got from Helsinki, the more fiercely winter seemed to be still holding on. For the first three-quarters of an hour, he’d made such good time that he thought he’d been overcautious in judging how long it would take him. But then he turned onto back roads, and his progress almost came to a halt.
The snow looked like a solid crust over the earth, particularly where the trees opened out into sweeping meadows that stretched flat and white to isolated farmhouses. The sun was falling away to the south and west behind him, but now that he was away from the city, it seemed harder to believe that a few glorious days would be enough to allow a thaw to set in.
By the time he reached a turn off the road, finding a gate in the deer fence and a track beyond it, he reckoned he only had half an hour of daylight left. In among the trees, the snow was already taking on its own shadowy darkness.
He closed the gate behind him and drove on, slowly, keeping the jeep as quiet as possible on the final approach, relieved that they’d chosen petrol for him rather than diesel. He drove for ten minutes more, then saw what at first he thought to be a clearing up in front and the house off to the right-hand side.
The clearing was the lake, and out here the ice had not melted. The house was bigger than he’d imagined, wooden and brightly painted in yellow and green. There was a single light showing in one of the rooms.
Finn stopped the car, sat for a moment with the engine idling, then turned it off. And all the time he watched the window with the light on, glancing now and then at the other windows, too, looking for movement and seeing none.
With the engine off, the silence was overpowering, and he realized his attempt to drive slowly along the track had been pointless. Perry would have heard him even before he’d reached the gate, and he certainly would have heard him in the thirty seconds he’d sat with the engine idling.
Yet he hadn’t looked out. That meant one of two things, either that Perry wasn’t curious because he knew who his visitor was, or that he wasn’t in the house. Finn checked his mirrors, the forest behind him now looking as if evening had already arrived. He turned casually from side to side too, but if Perry was outside, he wasn’t anywhere close.
Finn stepped out, leaving the door open, the jeep itself between him and the house. He strolled to the back as if checking for something, looking out into the woods behind the house. Then he turned and walked the other way, finally stepping to the front of the car, giving up his partial cover.
As had always been the case in the past, his senses tricked him with what followed. Did he hear the distant hammer crack first, or the whistling firework sound that told him the bullet had missed? The whistle of the bullet had been close, creating the illusion that he’d felt the air moving, and then it had splintered into one of the trees beyond, snow falling in a hushed shower from the branches.
Finn dropped to the floor and scuttled behind the jeep, placing himself behind the front tire. A little snow was still toppling down from the tree that had been hit, and he drew an imaginary line from the contact site, through where he’d been standing, projecting onward to give an idea of Perry’s direction. It had been a rifle shot, but with so much tree cover he guessed Perry could only be a couple of hundred yards away.
Another shot rang out through the still winter air, the round hitting the side of the jeep, but not at the front, where Perry knew Finn was taking cover. The shot had hit near the back, then another. Finn knew what Perry was up to, and now he regretted that they’d given him petrol instead of diesel.
A fourth shot came as Finn sprang away from the jeep toward the trees. He heard and felt the dull roar of the petrol tank going up before he’d come to a stop. He didn’t hesitate now, scrambling quickly to his feet and darting away from the burning vehicle, back along the track he’d driven down, cutting into the trees, putting on speed even in the snow.