Escher drove the little Peugeot over an old stone bridge, past a millrace, and thought, This is just the kind of picturesque crap tourists love. Give him a city anytime. Up ahead, he saw the lights of a town square, with a white cross in its center. There was an inn on one side, with a couple of muddy trucks parked in front, but no Maserati. He pulled in next to the gas pump and got out.
There were a bunch of locals inside, in woolen shirts and work boots, and a TV was mounted on brackets over the bar. The evening news was on, but no one was watching. Escher went straight to the bar and asked the bartender about the car, and whether or not two men and a woman had recently stopped in together. The bartender said, “I just came on, but the owner’s been here all day.” He called back into the kitchen, and a harried woman, wiping her hands on an apron, popped out.
Escher repeated his question, and she said, “Oh yes, your friends were here, oh, maybe an hour or two ago. They had the rabbit stew—it’s very good tonight,” she added, cleaning a spot on the bar where she could serve him and setting up a wineglass with the other hand.
“Thank you,” he said, “but I need to catch up with them. They forgot something important. Do you have any idea where they were going from here?”
She shrugged, fast losing interest. “They had a map. Maybe the chateau, though God knows why.”
Escher had seen no signs for a chateau, nor any tour buses.
“Of course,” he said, nodding. “How would I get there?”
She was already halfway back to the kitchen. “Keep going. A few more kilometers. Pierre!” she hollered at someone inside. “What’s burning?”
Escher charged out to his car, sorry to hear that they had such a lead on him, but relieved to know that they had so little idea they were being tracked that they’d actually dawdled over bowls of stew. He steered his car around the monument and onto the road leading out of town, which he discovered was even worse here than it was coming in.
Night had fallen, and the moon was going in and out of the clouds racing in from the west. He followed the road, but wondered why there were no signs for the chateau that the innkeeper had mentioned. There were no signs for anything, in fact—just reflectors, popping up like red eyes in the darkness every so often. But at least there were no other turnoffs or intersecting roads they might have taken, and before long he spotted a gatehouse, where he stopped and got out of the car. There was no one in the house, no chateau as far as he could see, and a massive padlock on the gates. Getting back in the car, he continued on, hoping he might come across another entrance, but all he saw was a long stone wall that didn’t look easily breached. Just when he had decided to go back and take one more look at that gate—how hard would it be to shatter that padlock?—he noticed that the wall had given out, and in a space between two trees, a broken chain was lying on the ground. When he stopped and got out, he could see bits of a broken headlight, too. His own headlights didn’t penetrate very far into the woods, but he could see that there was some kind of old driveway here. Is that where they went?
But why?
He drove his car far enough into the trees to be unseen from the road, turned it around, and left the key in the ignition for a quick getaway if he needed one. Then he got out with a flashlight in one hand and his Glock 9mm in the other. It was easy enough to follow the worn old trail, but he was careful to make as little noise as possible and to keep his beam close to the damp leaves and soil. Eventually, he could hear the sound of the river, and he could see something gleaming in the intermittent moonlight.
And damned if it wasn’t a silver Maserati. He hadn’t lost his touch, after all.
Crouching low, he crept up on the car and peered inside. There was no one in it.
But when he looked down toward the river, he saw a platform of some kind, like an old loading dock, and a wooden pier—at the end of which someone was smoking a glowing cigarette.
As he moved closer, he could see that it was the girl, Olivia, huddled in her dark coat, her hair tucked up under a knitted cap. This was too good to be true. Looking all around, he saw that she was alone. A sitting duck. If he’d had a reason to eliminate her, he couldn’t have asked for a better chance. But he had no such reason—not yet, anyway—and something told him that she might wind up being a valuable bargaining chip before the night was over.
Stepping softly onto the dock, he called out, “Catch any fish?”
She whirled around, the cigarette flying from her fingers.
He raised the Glock just enough for her to see it, and said, “Keep your hands out of your pockets and walk toward me.”
She hesitated.
“Now.” He raised the gun higher.
With her arms held away from her body, she walked toward him, and when she got close enough, he said, “Where are your friends?”
“What friends?”
“Please don’t spoil things. We’ve been getting along so well.”
“They’re … gone.”
“And they left you here, alone, in the woods?”
He was considering his options, and they were all good. She was completely at his mercy, and if he played his cards right, he might even be driving back to Paris in a new Maserati.